Girl Runner

by Carrie Snyder

  SMART, CORA. Suddenly, in her ninety-eighth year, at the home of her birth, New Arran, Ontario. Respected daughter of Robert and Jessica Smart. Affectionate sister of Olive and Aganetha, and half-sister to eight. Predeceased by all but Aganetha. A faithful nurse to many, she will be remembered. Think not of the coming night, but of the days we shared.

  12

  Homecoming

  VOICES DRIFT AROUND ME. This is how memory works. I could be looking intently at the tiniest detail and not realize it, losing sense of the larger landscape in which the detail rests.

  “Remember when we tried to build a fort out of these scraps? We were always building forts.” The young man digs around in the debris. “Remember when I was babysitting you, and you cut your hand on a nail and it was bleeding, and I wrapped it up in my shirt. I paid you two dollars not to tell Mom, and I threw out the shirt because I couldn’t figure how to get out the blood. Like it was a crime. We worked on that fort the whole summer. Bet it’s still here.”

  “Two dollars!” The girl laughs. “I kind of remember that. Not really.”

  “We came over here all the time. Looking for treasure.”

  “Did we find any?”

  Rustling noises. “I think the fort was over here.”

  “What do you think she remembers—Mrs. Smart?”

  “She’s clear, sometimes.”

  “Don’t you feel sorry for her, Max?”

  “Why should I?”

  “She was this amazing runner, amazing—and look at her now. I can’t even imagine.”

  Slowly I open myself to her, to him, I let them leak through my skin, her pity and her need, his camera lens, their youth.

  I’ve known my body well enough to recognize its limits, and this chair is only the most recent diminishment in a long descending line. You never run again like you run as a child: without pain. Later, you reach a point at which you’ve run the fastest you will ever run—the pinnacle that goes unrecognized at the time. I remember whispering the word indestructible as I ran or as I approached a great grief, but I only chanted it because I knew I wasn’t. I never ran because I was strong, if you see what I’m saying. It wasn’t strength that made me a runner, it was the desire to be strong.

  I ran for courage. Still do, if only in my mind.

  Why do you run?

  “Did she say something? Mrs. Smart?”

  “Why do you run?” I pronounce each word as if it were standing by itself.

  “She’s talking to you, Kaley.”

  The sunlight is particularly piercing and cold.

  “Why do I run?”

  “Excellent question, Mrs. Smart!” The young man and his camera approve. “Why do you run, Kaley?”

  The girl is struck silent.

  “I don’t know,” she says slowly.

  “Are you trying to run away from something?” her brother asks, genuinely curious.

  “I don’t think so.” Very slowly.

  “Then you’re running toward something?”

  “Well, obviously, I’ve got goals. I want to break the Canadian women’s marathon record. I want to make the Olympic team. Obviously. But—” She stops altogether. She looks at the camera, then at me. “I think I would run even if I knew I would never win another race again. It’s weird. I can’t explain it. It’s like something I can’t turn off.”

  “Good girl,” I say. I reach for her hand—there, I’ve got it—and I squeeze until she squeezes back. I would like to think she is not afraid of me right now. I would like to think, also, that she does not pity me.

  The girl feels me shivering: “She’s cold.”

  Well, so much for that.

  “This is a nice frame,” says Max, the stubby lens between his face and ours. “Let’s get one quick shot. Follow your script, Kales—the opening.”

  The girl inhales deeply, sighs it out, and launches into her lines. “My name is Kaley”—her voice gone declarative and unnatural—“and this is my story. Let me introduce you to my inspiration, Aganetha Smart.”

  Max gives her a silent thumbs-up.

  “You might not guess it from looking at her,” she continues stiffly, doggedly, “but Aganetha Smart was once the most famous woman runner in Canada. Weren’t you, Mrs. Smart?”

  The burying past tense. I’ve never liked it. My teeth are clamped and I won’t reply.

  “How did it feel to win gold, Mrs. Smart? I want to know.” Her voice goes breathy and anxious—genuine—greedy, almost. This is not an idle question, and perhaps, I think, off-script.

  But I can’t answer the girl’s question, much as I’d like to. The details I remember most clearly stand apart from my own emotions, as if severed from feeling altogether: the sounds of voices ricocheting, and suddenly a quick clear cast of words in my ear, in Glad’s laughing tones: You won! You did it! I knew that you could! And then her voice is gone, and I can’t reproduce it nor hear what comes next, or came before, and the truth is I can’t set straight whether that happened, or whether it’s a story I’ve told myself until it might well have happened—but I hear it happening. I hear and almost see a buzz of sound and the quick focus in, the clarity of her joy. But not my own.

  I shake my head and reverse back inside myself.

  “She’s really shivering, Max.”

  “Good enough. Let’s go.”

  Reports have it that Miss Aganetha Smart, age twenty, of New Arran, Ontario, is the most photographed girl at these Olympic Games. With her golden hair and flawless skin, she cannot help but attract notice wherever she goes. As the Canadian team prepared to board ship for the journey home, Miss Smart seemed almost to be blinded by a series of flashbulbs, and her name was shouted repeatedly by members of the foreign press. Accompanied by the team’s manager, Miss Alexandrine Gibb, Miss Smart never faltered. She smiled and posed naturally for photographs.

  Could a future in film be far off?

  We only wonder: will Miss Smart prove too tall for Hollywood’s leading men?

  THE MOST INTERESTING STORY of my life it is not. It is quite ordinary, really. And yet it is the story that makes me swoon, forever after. I fall into it in dreams—no, I fall into him. In dreams, he is unchanged, as am I. Or, we are older, but not aged. We remain ourselves. We find each other and we grin, Oh, it’s you, you’ve come again. How happy we are. We meet clean and unformed, at the beginning of our story, without pasts, our lives as they happened to us vanished. Dreams are lovely for this.

  But in dreams we never quite manage to come together. If we do, if our lips meet or we find ourselves climbing with ravenous hunger into some makeshift bed, we are interrupted, parted by a silly detail that intrudes, a task that must be completed, another woman walking into the room, or, occasionally, by shame. We are caught and found out by our futures, our original intentions, our desire, dissipating into nothingness.

  I wake and insist on returning to the best part. To before.

  But a dream will not be commanded, no more than life will.

  I think I must want to keep us here, forever in a state of meeting. I want to preserve the surprise of being desired, and not knowing why, the mystery of being wanted and of wanting, the tangle of possibility—suspended on the verge of being fulfilled. I don’t want to fall through to the other side. I don’t want the mystery to collapse. I want not to know anything.

  I want us to meet, forever, as we were, and never after that.

  I am twenty years old and Johnny is twenty-two. He makes his living as an automobile mechanic. He would like to become a doctor, like his father was before dying an early and unlucky death—blood poisoning. And Johnny is an athlete. If he’d have won, he says, he would have found a way to use his fame to pay for school. As it is, he’ll have to work his way there by old-fashioned means: hard labour and careful saving. His father is dead, and his mother lives on the Prairies with his younger brothers and sisters. There are grandparents too. Johnny sends money home.

  We meet on board the ship from Europe to Canada, or ra
ther, the ship is where we find each other; we are not then meeting for the first time. I know who he is—the hurdler who stumbled over the final jump and fell out of the medals—and he knows who I am—everyone does. We belong to a select group: Canada’s 1928 Olympic team, with its large contingent of young men, and much smaller, special group of girls.

  “We can have our pick,” one of the girls says—the young swimmer who failed to get through to the finals.

  “Aw, who needs ’em,” says Glad.

  I quietly agree with Glad. I am thinking myself quite sophisticated. I don’t need a boy, and besides, we girls are chaperoned up to our ears. Picture this: nearly seventy young people in top physical form confined on board a ship for a little more than a week. Some of us have won and many more have lost. Our fitness is a useless energy we can’t help but trail around. We are firecrackers crying for a match. We run morning laps around the decks in good weather, and a large room has been set aside for calisthenics and stretching and, in the evenings after supper, a whole lot of foolishness that comes awfully close to dancing.

  But if ever a girl gets too intimate with a boy, here is Miss Alexandrine Gibb shouldering in between, ticktocking her forefinger.

  Glad earns the most ticktocks, but it is only because the boys like her so—like one of their own. She could have any boy she wants, I think, and it’s because she seems not to want or need any of them. She is in no danger of being discovered in a broom closet kissing a discus thrower, as happens to the young swimmer. That isn’t Glad, not at all. If she throws her arm around a boy, it’s to say, Hey, pal. That’s all. Hey. And the boy knows it too.

  I wish, in this way, to be like Glad.

  But I’m not like her. It isn’t just owing to my height, or my long golden hair, my angularity, my lips that look to have been stained red though I never paint them. It is the way I hold myself apart. I watch, I observe. When approached by an interested party, I stiffen as if offended or, worse, threatened: “What do you want?”

  Johnny doesn’t approach. His manners are not like the other boys’. Like me, he stands stiffly, holding himself apart. He is focused on maintaining his strength and speed, as if he hasn’t already raced and lost. He does not enter into the frothy atmosphere in which we sail across the ocean blue.

  We find each other on deck.

  I am running slow laps in the early afternoon, breathing the sea air, feeling the chilly spray on my face. I have a terror of falling overboard, and yet I can’t bear to lie in my bunk paging through magazines, any more than I can bear to laze around gossiping with the girls. Johnny falls in beside me. He doesn’t say a word. I suppose I appreciate that. For a few rounds we keep our thoughts to ourselves, and it is only the sound of breath that speaks. I am running beside a boy very nearly my own age, something I have not done since my school years.

  But when I was near those boys, it was not the same.

  Up until this moment, I’ve imagined that I understood romance, a state to be scorned. I understood love, a curse, of sorts, that binds women to men, weakens them. But as we run together, Johnny and me, I forget all of that. My imagination has failed me: it never took into account the flesh and blood awakening of desire.

  Johnny is as tall as me, slender but sleekly muscled. I can feel myself appraising him as we jog, and not coolly—with rising tension. It is as if we’re protected inside a bubble that contains only the two us, with room for nothing else. I am suddenly and acutely attuned to the smallest particulars of his person: his dark blue eyes, dark curling hair, his long jaw. Still, we haven’t spoken a word. As if we are of one mind, we slow in tandem, come to a stop. We do not look around to see whether or not we are alone. We know we are alone. Our hands graze each other’s, gravely. Behind him, a red door, shut. I see his eyes, their kindness, their surprise.

  I like you, he says.

  No boy has ever said this to me. The only words I can think to describe what I’m feeling are ridiculous as a trembling swoon, but swoon it is, and trembling, flushing, quickening.

  The roar of the engines. His hand on my cheek, over my ear, our mouths in silence meeting. My hands covering his eyes, as if I can’t bear to have him see my desire.

  We kiss and pull away, kiss and break apart, and kiss again, the sounds of the ocean and the engines roaring around us. He doesn’t need to ask me to be his girl, because it’s all settled there against the red door. I’m his girl. (Aren’t I? I’m too shy and too proud to ask, too uncalculating, too satisfied on evidence alone. The way he kisses me is proof enough. The way he came looking for me, in particular. The way he holds my hand, later, when we walk in the parade down Yonge Street, the air over our heads thick with ticker tape. The way he brushes the bits of shredded paper from my hair, his hands on my temples as gently as my father’s on my mother’s. I remember. And I think I know enough to be sure.)

  It is an ordinary story. A very ordinary story. But I don’t care. It’s mine.

  It’s all I’ve got.

  A crowd of one hundred thousand cheered as our Canadian Olympic girls were welcomed back to Toronto with a ticker tape parade. Marching and smiling and waving to their fellow citizens, the girls looked shy and sweet, clutching bouquets of flowers given them by adoring admirers.

  There can be no doubt that the prettiest girl of them all is New Arran, Ontario’s own Miss Aganetha Smart, age twenty. But sorry, boys, it may already be too late! Rumour has it that Miss Smart has become engaged to one Johnny Tracy. Yes, the one and the same! Mr. Tracy represented Canada in the hurdles, and although he failed to medal, it appears he may have caught himself another prize.

  I DO THINK, briefly, that I shall never have to work in a factory again. I take a leave of absence from my bookkeeping job at Rosebud Confectionary. Rosebud pays me, instead—oh glory, oh thrill!—to pose with a box of their gold-dusted chocolates. I do think, briefly, that I shall never again have to do work that I do not find amusing. I am in love with being loved. Here is my photograph in the newspaper on the foldout “Society Page.” Here I am arm in arm with Johnny, smiling for the camera.

  Here I am, coming home, again. A visit to the farm seems easy, suddenly. I’ll just leap over the years that separate us. I will go home.

  Olive and I take the train. It seems perfect. Return as I left, complete the circle. Am I even thinking in such terms? Well. I suppose not. I suppose I think it’s perfect because I’m so sweetly satisfied with myself. I suppose I think I’ve become someone quite different, a new and improved Aganetha Smart.

  On the train, we eat green grapes and drink tea with milk, dipping crumbling cookies into the lukewarm liquid in the fancy dining car with the red swag curtains.

  We are greeted at the station by a small crowd of cheering schoolchildren. The local newspaper has announced my visit in advance. Upon stepping off at the small station in New Arran, I am surrounded. I lead the troupe off the platform and around to the front of the station where more curious onlookers have gathered. I can sense my parents and sisters standing apart from me, watching me move among the children, signing autograph books. I can sense my hair keeping its sharp shape around my face, held in place by a waxy substance which I’ve carefully worked into the strands before combing it to perfection. But I haven’t changed so very much: I wear no makeup, no adornment save for the medal around my neck.

  People like to pick up the medal and hold it in their hands, to feel the weight. It seems a strangely intimate gesture. It ties me to a stranger for a brief moment, as if I belong to them, as if I am their pet, their possession.

  I do not know what to do with the love and admiration of strangers. I mistake it for something personal. I believe that it is I who am loved and admired, rather than the girl in the newspaper photos. I don’t understand, yet, that I’m not really that Aganetha. That no one is. That she is a simple and finished idea to whom everyone can relate. She has no edges, no catches.

  The children for whom I sign autographs mistake me for being her, and no blame to them—I am
her, I guess, just for now, smiling and waving, expectant of welcome, sweet as a lily, polished as glass.

  “You’re wearing that well, Aganetha,” my mother says, offering me a cup of tea as we stand in the kitchen at the farm. She reaches out to touch the medal, and I flinch, which surprises us both.

  “Of course, you must,” I say quickly, and pull the medal over my head, holding it out to her by the ribbon.

  She sets the teacup on the counter top, which has been painted white. All the cupboards in the kitchen are now painted white, clean as bone.

  I open a cupboard door and see on the wide double-decker lazy Susan the covered butter dish, the salt and pepper shakers, and several cut glass dishes for serving jams or pickles or relishes. A loaf of bread wrapped in cloth looks less attractive. I spin the Susan slowly. Through the glass doors on the far side, the dining room can be seen, wavy behind the warped panes.

  My mother tries to hand me the medal and the cup of tea at the same time.

  I accept the cup, but not the medal. She inspects it more closely, and I watch her as I lift the china to my lips and sip. I am as tall as she is. I think of everything my mother does not know about me. Everything she never will. Yet I fail to consider everything I do not know of her. Everything I never will.

  My mother holds out the medal, flat in the palm of her hand, the ribbon dangling down. I swallow the last of the tea. “Thank you,” I say, and gather the weight into my own hand, hesitating. What to do with it? It seems wrong to wear it around the house.

  “You’ll be staying in the guest room with Olive?” My mother’s voice lifts into a question.

  “The guest room?”

  “Your old room. Yours and Olive’s. Cora repainted it and sewed new curtains.”