Girl Runner Read online

  I don’t look down.

  George leads the mare in wide circles up and down the field and I stand straight as a knife, and roll with her gentle stride. It’s the next thing to magic. There’s no reason for doing it, other than to do it. But it’s too easy.

  “Faster,” I say.

  George stares up at me.

  “Faster!” I command.

  He is older, but he obeys. He urges the mare into a trot, but his lungs aren’t fit for running, and in an instant he’s behind us. I don’t glance to see what’s happened to him. I just want what I want, and now: “Faster!” I gather myself into a firmer crouch and yell to the mare, “Faster! Giddup!”

  She breaks into a lumbering canter, her heavy hooves powerfully cutting the uneven turf. I won’t fall. I won’t fall. I won’t fall. I am inside my body, and outside of it, watching us tear for the fence, our approach head-on and heedless. I’m certain the mare will leap. She will clear the top rail. I believe this with my entire being, and I prepare for it, my knees loosening to absorb the vault, the arc, the descent.

  But the mare thinks otherwise. The mare is bound by the fence.

  She shudders to a halt in three short strides. I cannot do the same. I sail on. My arms spread wide and I fly over the mare’s lowered ears, over the fence where the grass grows thickest, like a thrown stone tumbling downward where I land almost gracefully—toes and hands, followed by knees and chin—in the soft manure pile behind the barn.

  Ugh.

  I can’t believe I fell. I won’t believe I fell. Already I don’t believe it.

  I’m on my feet, certain nothing hurts. I rub my chin, brush my knees. My dress is manure stained, that’s all, though it will bring me some small grief when Olive sees it. No amount of scrubbing can lift a manure stain.

  George wheezes toward us. Even at a distance, I hear air squeezing in and out of his chest. The mare is planted calmly, lowering her head to rip a mouthful of rich green grass. Her filly shoves its pretty nose under her mother’s belly to feed. I climb the fence and stand on the top rail.

  I watch George struggle. He makes it look like the field is a thousand miles wide, or an ocean through which he cannot swim. He slows to a shuffle, clutching his side.

  I bow.

  George laughs.

  I bow again, deeply, to left, to right. I bow to the manure pile, to the house, to the wheat field, to the birds in the trees, to the chickens in their run, which needs mucking and which I have neglected to attend to. I bow to the garden. I bow to the linens flapping on the line. I bow to Cora, coming out of the house in a disagreeable way, and slamming the screened door behind herself. She doesn’t see me, which is just as well, occupied by whatever task she is managing all on her own.

  The old mare lifts her head and eyeballs me. Now, then, she says, enough with your bragging.

  Here comes Fannie returning up the lane. She shades her eyes with one hand—she is at some distance—and I think she might call out to me with a gentle admonition, but she walks on, swinging her sun hat by its ribbons, patient and slow as the day is long. I turn to George, as easily as that. George, who appreciates my efforts, who is taken by my tricks, impressed, says, “I thought you were a goner! You just about flew.”

  “That’s right,” I say, fists to hips, like flight was my intention all along.

  Well, wasn’t it?

  4

  Speed

  “THIS IS HER!” the girl is saying. “Aganetha Smart! This is really her!”

  This is she, I think.

  “I knew we could do this,” says Max. I catch him gazing anxiously at me, and I pretend that I’m deafer than deaf and paying no attention.

  “Do you think she’ll say yes?”

  “I’m not sure she’ll say anything.”

  “You’re worried. Don’t be worried, please, I can’t stand it.”

  “I’m not worried, Kaley. One step at a time.”

  The girl pauses. Thinking. Trying to decide whatever it is she is trying to decide. It would be courteous of her to hurry up. I remember: I’m thirsty.

  I open my mouth and I say, “I’m thirsty.”

  I see him peering at me, bent down, staring into my face in wonder.

  “Did you hear that?” he says.

  “Didn’t you?”

  Staggered by my production of a coherent sentence, she and the young man seem to be missing the point.

  “I’m thirsty!” I roar.

  “Give her a drink!” The girl panics, looking all around as if for possible witnesses.

  “Of course, a drink!” Max fumbles inside the large bag that he carries over one shoulder and removes a metal bottle with a black plastic spout. He thinks I can hold and lift it, which is flattering, but unhelpful. I paw his arm. He understands, sets the spout to my lips, and pours until I’m nearly drowned, but I appreciate the effort, I do.

  I appreciate being heard, at last.

  “Thank you.” My voice sounds hoarse, but clear, elated; there, I’ve thought thank you, and I’ve said it! I push my luck and try to make a joke, something along the lines of: I haven’t put together a sentence in years, must be something in the water, but I hear myself wandering, and know I’ve already lost the way: “My word, but isn’t this . . .”

  The girl leans over my shoulder to pat my hand. “Mrs. Smart?” Her voice angling upward at the end of every sentence, giving her an innocence, her loose hair brushing my cheek. “We have something important to ask you? A favour?”

  “Not yet, Kaley.” He’s talking over my head. “Don’t jump the gun.”

  She snaps upright, away from me. Her tone is offended: “Don’t talk to me like that. I’m not a kid.”

  I grab for her hand, and pull her back down. “I know you,” I say, though I can’t think why I’ve said it. I don’t even remember the girl’s name.

  “Well, you do, in a way,” she says rather breathlessly. “I mean, we do know you. We just never thought you would . . .”

  I slump in my chair and hold tight to her hand. I see my big sister Fannie walking past us on the sidewalk and I open my eyes wide to take her in. Look at me Fannie, look! But she doesn’t turn her face.

  There is an electronic beep, a woop-woop, and lights flash on a dark blue car down the street. Reminds me of flashbulbs popping in a wall of cameras, lenses pointed at me.

  “C’mon, Kaley. We don’t have all day.”

  “That’s our car, Mrs. Smart. Let’s go!” The girl tries to remove her hand from mine, and I struggle not to let her. But she is just like the rest of them. She pulls herself free.

  “I don’t think I know you after all,” I say, suddenly tired to the bone. This is harder than it seems.

  “GOOD WORK, Miss Smart.” The coach’s encouragement matches his appearance, brisk and casual. He is smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.

  Hands on thighs, bent over at the waist, I’m too winded to reply.

  “One minute’s rest, and then around again. You’ve thirty seconds left, twenty-nine, twenty-eight.”

  Around again? I can’t speak it, but the coach reads the disbelief in my eyes.

  “You think you’re fast now? Just wait and see how fast you’ll be when I’m through with you, sweetheart.”

  Sweetheart.

  “That’s it, sunshine, do your job and burn a path around the track. Three, two, one—you’re off.”

  Sunshine.

  I almost hate him. How can I hate someone I’ve only just met? I haven’t learned to recognize the subtleties of his trade, the way a good coach directs onto himself his athlete’s frustration with her own limitations, distracts her from doubt, and gives her that extra flare of necessary rage, that compulsion to continue. He is good, this coach. He is good, but I don’t appreciate his talent, not at this moment, gasping for breath, tucking my chin and leaning into my orders: around again.

  The opening strides feel effortless, but by the first turn my breath has already caught up to my pace. My balance is off and I stumble, rec
over, aim myself at the back straightaway. Breath is now outstripping pace; pace has been lapped. My lungs rattle like a freight train—it’s all I can hear, an alarming noise, ragged and out of control.

  I force my feet to keep time on the ground like a drumbeat.

  I run on my toes, digging into the strip of hard dirt at the tapered centre of the grass track, the strip that marks the most efficient route around and around. The skin at the back of my left ankle is rubbed raw—why only the left one? I wonder in a haze as I take the last turn.

  “Not sure I can turn you into a sprinter,” the coach said after watching my first go around, which seems hours ago, a faraway memory fading against the glare of repetition, “but let’s see if you’ve got the guts for middle distance. Not many girls have.”

  “Middle distance?” I imagine it might be like running down to the lake and back to the rooming house where Olive and I live in Toronto, which I do sometimes, despite Olive’s concern: “What will people think—a girl running the streets in broad daylight?” Olive is funny that way. She doesn’t mind what anyone does, so long as it doesn’t get people thinking. Do not attract attention, that sums up my sister Olive.

  “Eight hundred metres,” says the coach. “At the Amsterdam Olympics, that’s as far as girls can go. And that’s a helluva lot farther than nothing.”

  “Eight hundred metres?”

  “Twice around the track.”

  “But that’s so short!”

  “That’s short until you’ve raced it, Miss Smart. Then you’ll find it long enough.”

  “I could run around that track all day,” I boast. “I could go until the sun goes down.”

  “We’ll see about that, lass. Are those the only shoes you’ve got?”

  I glance down at my feet, heavy in black boots. I’ve got no others. Would it be better to run barefoot, as I did on the farm? Quickly, I bend and begin unlacing a boot, pulling it off.

  “No, no, no! Don’t do that!”

  I freeze, startled. The coach takes an embarrassed stride away from me, toward the factory, three stories of red brick with windows staring straight at us. The rims of his ears flush the same colour as the brick.

  A bared foot seems suddenly grotesque, exposed, naked. There stand between us two blunt facts, which I’ve neglected to acknowledge: He is a man, and I am a girl.

  I feel my face wash with heat too, and hurriedly jam my foot deeper inside the hard leather, tighten the boot’s laces, as if that’s what I’d been meaning to do. “Does it matter what shoes I wear?” I mutter, crouched low, addressing the ground.

  “Not today.” The coach keeps his eyes directed at the factory’s back wall.

  We are positioned at the centre of Rosebud Confectionary’s sports field where the Rosebud Ladies’ Athletics Club trains, sponsored fully by Mr. P. T. Pallister, owner of Rosebud Confectionary. In a flash, I see everything as if I’m suspended above the scene: red brick, chain-link, dying autumn grass, sand pits, wooden benches, a low set of bleachers, and the coach is a man of thirty or forty (I can’t guess) with a pencil-thin black moustache, dressed in a well-cut pale-blue-and-white-striped suit and a white flat cap, and I am me, a girl in loose flannel pants and a man’s cotton shirt, wearing black boots, long golden hair pulled into a tight braid, no hat, breasts flattened by layers of wrapped jersey (unseen, of course).

  The peculiar discomfort of our situation feels suddenly acute, dire, quite beyond me. I’m attuned to a debt already owed to Rosebud Confectionary, which is not my place of employment, and by extension a debt owed to Mr. P. T. Pallister, on whose letter of invitation I’ve come, but my greatest debt seems owed to this man, this stranger, the coach whom it is my duty to impress should I hope to make the Rosebud Ladies’ track team, should I hope to run and run and run.

  Oh, how I hope to run.

  “What do you want me to do? Run at night, after dark, so no one sees?” I can hear myself asking Olive in despair. The two of us, sisters, work at Packer’s Meats, jarring and processing minced pork. Packer’s doesn’t have a track club, but for the past two summers I’ve played for their ladies’ softball team: dutifully knocking balls out of the park, running the bases, and using my crab-apple-trained arm to catch out opposing batters from deep in left field. Nevertheless, our team loses often. I hate losing. My skill, and the intensity of my efforts, has made me no friends among my teammates.

  I’ve made no friends running in the city, either.

  I run back alleys, disturbing chickens and dogs and mothers hanging out the wash. I run paved streets, dodging automobiles and horse-drawn delivery wagons and little boys on bicycles. I am occasionally pelted by handfuls of stones, by rotten fruit, once by a glass bottle that catches me behind the ear. I run along the curving lake going east past the concrete docks and warehouses, until I’m running in swamp and reeds, free from the city. It doesn’t take all that long, really. I breathe in the big sky. But every time, I must turn around and run back into the city again. I can feel it settling all around me on my return like a physical darkness, a weight.

  “You could go home,” Olive reminds me gently, but even if I wanted to—and I don’t—I believe that I can’t. I’ve left home.

  The coach is waiting for me to fix my laces and stand.

  When I do, almost hopelessly, he meets my eye. I’m as tall as he is—no, I’m taller. I have not the slightest glimpse of my own power or effect. I’m a girl who looks rarely into the mirror. The coach strokes his thin moustache with the fingers of one hand. He looks unhappy about something—he’s sad, or grieving, or perhaps it is longing I sense in him, need, desire—and I feel a tug under my breastbone, a sensation akin to pity. I want, in this instant, to please him, to make him happy.

  “Ready then?” he says, suddenly cheerful, clapping his hands together once and rubbing the palms in anticipation; perhaps I have read his expression entirely wrong. “Let’s put you through your paces.”

  And here I am, paced so many times around I’ve lost count. Do I regret my boast? I do not. This is a different kind of running, and if I am to master it, I will need to suffer. I understand instinctively, and lean into it. I lean against the pain until I tear right through, coming around the last curve, legs lifting as if of their own will, not mine.

  He waits for me at the finish, and he swings one arm in a wide circle to indicate I am to take a second lap. “Let’s see a full eight hundred, little lady!”

  Little lady! Ha! My brain is deprived of oxygen, cut down to the basics. I will trounce this extra lap.

  You’re too serious, I hear a voice telling me. You’re too tall. You’re no fun. You can’t dance. It isn’t a man’s voice. It’s a woman’s. It might even be my own. You’ve never been kissed.

  Would I like to be kissed? Why should I? I’m not like other girls.

  I pour myself into the last turn. I can’t actually feel my legs, yet they are rising and falling more smoothly than they have all practice. The choice seems to be to keep running or to drop dead on the ground, and I am aware of this man waiting for me at the finish. I think, he’s waiting for me. He is waiting for me. It is possible I mistake his attention for affection. I hear him, feel him, willing me to finish strong.

  Yes, he is a good coach.

  I could cruise into the last few strides, but instead I run it right out.

  He’s gone a bit blurry. My head fills with blood as I stop abruptly.

  “Next time, let’s see you staying more compact through the shoulders. Less swinging, less movement here.” He moves his own elbows. “Do you understand?”

  I bend over, heaving, hands on knees. What I understand is that I might get sick. Don’t get sick, please, Aganetha, don’t get sick.

  And that’s when I see her.

  I glimpse her in motion, in my peripheral vision. She must have come out through the back factory door and she is approaching across the bare field toward us, her step as light and natural as my own. I turn my head and there she is, running toward me. I hav
e never met another girl runner, have never seen another girl running except at picnics and fairs, races that are too easy to win, against girls who are in it just for fun, as a lark, on dares, silly girls, I think them. Girls who pretend not to care, or who care so little that they need not pretend.

  The girl comes right up to me. I am still considering whether or not I will be sick, and I’m afraid to stand up too quickly.

  “What have you done to her, Mr. Tristan?” the girl scolds, but she’s laughing. She pats my shoulder. “I see you’ve met our taskmaster. Don’t let him break you, even if he tries.”

  I reel upright. The girl sticks out her hand. “I’m Glad.”

  Girls don’t shake hands—we ought to curtsy to one another—but, then, neither of us is wearing a skirt. My tightly belted trousers belong to my brother George, who has told me to cut them off, but I haven’t. It is 1926. There are no clothes made particularly for girl runners.

  “Pleased to meet you,” I say, accepting her hand. She pumps it up and down.

  She is dressed as I soon will be: in short black pants cut quite high above the knee, and a dark red shirt with a V-neck and short sleeves—black and red being the colours of the Rosebud Ladies’ Athletics Club. ROSEBUD is written in white fabric letters, embroidered fast with black thread, across the front of the shirt. On her feet are lightweight shoes with rubber soles, and white socks that she wears rolled down to her ankles. Her hair is cut to her chin and she shoves a hank behind one ear.

  “You must be Aganetha Smart. The new girl.”

  “Oh—I haven’t made the team, exactly,” I mumble. I’m soaked in sweat from my sprints around the track, and although the sun remains high overhead the wind has gone chilly.

  “What do you say, Mr. Tristan?” Glad grins. “I know I just met her, but I like her.”

  “You might not like her quite so much when you see her run,” says the coach. I can feel the tension rushing out of me, out of him too. Glad’s doing.