Girl Runner Read online

  I follow my usual route, along the fields at the edges where dried weeds stand through the snow and wave their pale golden seed heads.

  Today, I cross the land that belonged to my sister Edith and her husband. I don’t know who farms the fields now, but the house stands boarded and empty in its barren yard. I check its perimeter for signs of breach by wild animals, or teenagers: it has stood empty now for nearly ten years. After Edith died, her daughter did not stay, and who’s to blame her for wanting to take her girl and leave? Cora passed the rumours on to me, as she would—that Edith’s daughter’s girl had no father. Perhaps, wondered Cora, such qualities run in the blood? Perhaps, I wondered in return, it was sour old gossips such as herself who chased the young away?

  I circle the house once, then cut toward the path through the backwoods.

  My route shifts subtly with the season, or my mood, or my energy, sometimes aiming longer, sometimes shorter, sometimes looping over and over a favourite section. Much has changed. Seventy years gone by, and the woods through which I ran as a child are shrunken, though not disappeared. The town has eaten into the far side, so I rarely follow that path, or if I do, I turn back before the trees thin out to reveal houses situated on cul-de-sacs, monstrosities with gleaming backyard pools shrouded in black plastic now that it is winter. The houses and their yards look tidy, trim, and silent, as if emptied of their people.

  But I prefer not to see anyone.

  If I meet a dog walker on the path, or in the winter a couple on skiis or snowshoes, I do not expect to recognize them. It is likely that they know who I am, in a general way. People in town do. Cora and I are known in the way that eccentrics are known, as curiosities to be avoided or peered at from a distance. One outgrows fame. Ancient fame carries a whiff of notoriety. People forget, or no longer care. One grows into another version of loneliness.

  Even in summer, I rarely see anyone swim in the glistening, silent pools.

  I would enjoy diving in myself, in fine weather, and I am reminded of Glad every time I run past and resist the temptation, as if I can hear her urging me to jump—and I miss her. I miss her with an ache, not with tears. It’s the ache you feel when you leave a place you know you can never return to. Oh how I ache today. I can’t run from it, I know that. I run with it. It sits inside me, at my throat, expanding across my chest. Before today, I did not know. I think of how the reporter has come to my door and told me, quite without guessing its significance, that Glad has died—though I don’t know when, nor how, nor can I ask for details. Her obituary will go unwritten, at least by me. How have I missed the news? Its absence on our radio waves suggests that when I die, that news too will go unreported, and with it all that we accomplished, Glad and I.

  I’ve missed Glad for so many years that it surprises me to discover that I can miss her differently, knowing she no longer walks the earth; the finality of it. I will never see her again, as she was. Perhaps I’ve lived until today thinking I might.

  And what of Johnny? Is he gone too?

  I am lost, I am running, lost in the running. My feet in my sneakers are damp with snow and sweat, not cold, though my hands are so chilled and stiff that I have to press them into my armpits, which makes my stride awkward. I pick my way carefully, reminding myself to take caution: roots, stones, invisible patches of ice. Hands thawed, or thawed enough, I swing my arms for balance and pick up pace, finding a rhythm that is familiar, two strides per breath, in and out, tap tap tap like a metronome.

  The world is dim in winter’s half-light, a heavy sky, the trees shake their boughs as I pass under their watch and care, and into the woods I creak, my bones not so different from the branches, absorbing light, greying and careful. We are old.

  But we go on.

  6

  Going Home

  “MRS. SMART? What do you think? Won’t you say something?”

  They haven’t heard me.

  I peer into her face and I see an ordinary girl, perhaps no more than a teenager, fighting nerves; she is hiding something, some great desire. I am familiar with the scene. It loosens sympathy in me, and I reach for her hand. There, I’ve got it.

  “Oh!” she says, misunderstanding my intent, wrapping me in an impulsive hug. “Wonderful! Thank you, Mrs. Smart! Hey, we’re making a movie!”

  “Terrific,” the young man says, digging around in his black bag. “Let’s get moving. We need a few anchoring shots on the farm with the two of you.”

  The girl launches herself like a small child would, over the seats and into the front, settling behind the steering wheel. “Gimme the keys.”

  “It’s about a half-hour drive—that okay, Mrs. Smart?” Max asks, his body angled away from mine. I see he’s got in his hand a small black-bodied camera with a stubby lens that reflects my own face, long and soft, like something coming undone. I am not afraid, because it isn’t in me to be afraid. The truth is that I cannot feel tragedy’s weight, though this is not a characteristic to be blamed on extreme age. It seems always to have belonged to me, carved into my bones at birth. It has cast me forward all of my life: a yearning for trial and test, an envy of extremity, an inability to understand in advance the consequences. Does this make me callous or courageous?

  I hear my voice, frail but composed, asking politely, “Perhaps you could tell me where you’re taking me?”

  “Home!” calls the girl, over her shoulder.

  I’m silent. Home. I can see mine spread out before me, a patchwork quilt of cleared fields, stones picked and piled at the edges, the woods beyond. The house of stone. She must be very young indeed if she imagines it possible to go home.

  WHEN I LEAVE my mother and father’s house, I do not know that I am leaving.

  I’ve never ridden the train before. Black coal smoke, the stench of acrid burning through open windows. I perch on the edge of a cloth-covered bench that feels like velvet against the palms of my hands, and I eat a sandwich that Mother has made for me. The juice of peaches fresh from the orchard drips down my chin. Am I being watched, my actions observed? If so, I am oblivious. I feel quite invisible, transparent, loose in the world, as if I could move entirely without consequence.

  I am now sixteen, grown to my full height, slender and strong. My hair is tidy. I wear a straw hat with a blue ribbon. I would be giddy were there anyone here with me. I keep opening and reading the letters from Olive and from George. I’m not thinking of home. What I’ve left behind is like dust, but what is to come is impossible to imagine, and so I keep composing and recomposing myself, taking deep breaths—“Be good, be very very good,” I whisper as the farmland rolls past.

  The city is dirty, all grit and smoke and heat. But the noise. I step out of the metallic grinding noise of the train into the noise of the city, rich and miraculous to my ears. I suppose I stand gaping, overwhelmed: automobile engines, horns, the cries of children selling newspapers and shoe shines, the hum of voices, and something I can feel in my bones, a rumble rising from the city itself, its paved roads and concrete trembling.

  The city is as restless as I am.

  “Aggie! Kiddo! Over here!”

  It’s George, come as promised to take me to Olive’s room on a street called Bathurst. We will ride on the streetcar, but first he buys me a paper cone filled with shaved ice, red syrup drizzled over top, poured out of a tin jug by a man missing a finger. It looks like a childish treat, and though I eat it, I do not thank George for it—thinking, I am not a child. It has been five years since I’ve seen George, and a year since Olive left home. Olive couldn’t meet me at the station. “She’s at work,” says George, and the phrase strikes me as strange. At work. At home we are never exactly at work, or at play, on or off, we simply go about our business, doing what needs doing. I’m not sure I like the thought of a split life, either bound or temporarily freed.

  We jostle onto the streetcar. George steers me, holding my elbow. We ride west and then north and jostle off again. It is an unsettling and vaguely thrilling sensation, bumpin
g up against strangers.

  “Here we are!”

  We’ve only just alighted. A small boy comes running toward us, chasing a slow-moving junk wagon. The child jumps to catch a ride on the wooden back bumper, but his legs are too short, his leap too late, and he falls to the paved road and strikes his chin hard. Behind him, coming fast, roars a motorized grocer’s truck. The horn sounds like a pig’s squeal. I am making a quick run to grab for the boy, but George catches me roughly and holds fast to my arm, and we watch as the child rolls out of the way—safe, but just—and slams against the curb.

  “See here, he’s fine,” George says, as if such incidents happen every day before his very eyes.

  I yank free, and run to the boy and wipe his mouth with my handkerchief. “Keep it,” I urge him. I’m reminded of my nephew, Little Robbie. Such defiance, no tears. His darting eyes. He scrambles to standing and flickers a bloody grin before shooting away, terrifically free, it seems to me.

  “You’re too nice, Aggie. You need to let people be,” says George.

  “I let him be!” I argue back.

  “You gave him your handkerchief.”

  “I’ll hem another, if I need one, which I don’t.”

  George doesn’t show me where he lives, but this doesn’t strike me as strange at the time. I suppose it doesn’t strike me at all. Have we ever got along? I can’t quite believe that we have. I dislike his porkpie hat and his thinly rolled cigarette. His jacket is made of a shiny fabric, and his hair is slick with oil, like he’s trying to make himself impermeable. He seems to be pretending to be someone other than I know him to be.

  We stand on the paved walk outside a row house covered in dark red-and-black tar paper made to look like bricks. The houses are attached one to the next, three stories tall, with peaked roofs and tiny windows. Behind us, a streetcar rattles by.

  “I found this charming little rathole for Olive. The landlady came highly recommended for her rates if not for her soup—Mrs. Smythe. She won’t mind an extra for a week or two. How long are you staying, Aggie? Want a real job? Real money?”

  “Why would I want money?” I’m holding my bag myself. George hasn’t offered to carry it, not that I’d want him to. I swing it lightly against my legs, tapping it on my knees.

  “Everyone wants money, Aggie. Even the best of us.”

  “Not me.”

  “Hi-ho. In we go. Who do you think’s paying for your room, kiddo?”

  Yes, I kind of hate him. My own brother.

  Mrs. Smythe shows me to Olive’s room. It is clean: white walls, white board floors, and a tidy summer quilt atop a double bed. I like it instantly. I drop my bag on the floor and come downstairs to say good-bye to George. I flush when Mrs. Smythe tells me he’s already gone. Am I to chase my brother down the street? I won’t. It is hot in the entryway, dark even at mid-afternoon. I’m afraid to ask Mrs. Smythe if George has given her any money. I do not know what I owe, nor to whom, but I have money, a bit of it, entrusted to me by my mother. I know that it has come from Olive, who sends it home.

  I excuse myself, deciding rather confusedly that I should give the money back to Olive. Olive will know what to do with it.

  Despite all of this, I have a very odd sensation as I hurry up the steps and return to the clean white room: I feel at home. I spread myself across the bed like a long-limbed starfish and drift into a peaceful dreamy half-sleep.

  The other girls in the rooming house are factory girls, like Olive. I wake to the sound of their voices in the hall. And then to Olive herself, coming in, crowing with a delight that seems out of character at home, but perfectly in character here in the city. She jumps onto the bed and onto me, kissing my cheeks.

  “Um, hello,” I say, feeling shy.

  “I can’t believe you came! You really came!” Olive sits back on her haunches and folds her legs under her bottom. A girl stops in the doorway, leans in. “Look! It’s my little sister.”

  “She looks enormously tall,” the girl drawls. “Pleased to meet you, little sister. I haven’t got any sisters myself.”

  “That explains a lot,” says Olive. I understand, but barely, that Olive is joking, and that the girl appreciates it. Another girl leans in, and a third, and then they retreat. I need the bathroom, so Olive goes into the hall and bangs on the door.

  “It’s Mary Alice, crying over a boy,” says one of the girls walking by. “She’ll be forever.”

  “Don’t dirty your drawers,” says a second girl.

  “Yes, don’t poop your panties,” says the first.

  “Don’t dribble on the floor.”

  “That doesn’t rhyme.”

  “Yours didn’t rhyme. Are we rhyming now?”

  This is all very hilarious. I am not doing it proper justice. I can understand, in my head, that it is funny, but I can’t join in the laughter. Even Olive is whooping it up: “Don’t sprinkle your shoes.”

  More banging on the door. The smell of boiled cabbage calling us to dinner.

  I’m taller than the other girls in the house, taller even than Mr. Smythe, whose silent presence at supper is of a man removing himself, but reluctantly, from a distasteful, vaguely sordid scene.

  One of the girls—not Mary Alice—is on her factory’s softball team, and is playing in a game this evening. Mrs. Smythe has prepared supper early, and we eat quickly, shovelling our food, “wolfing it,” says Mrs. Smythe, who also informs us that this mode of eating will harm our digestion and make us puff up like pastries. The girl, whose name is Joannie, dashes upstairs to change into her uniform: baggy pants and shirt, and white socks inside canvas shoes. Her hair is pushed under a cap. Of course we are going along, Olive and I.

  We ride the streetcar to the field, a mess of noisy girls (though I’m quiet, hopeless at witticism and innuendo).

  The light falls slowly through the thick air, humid, cooling as it blows off the lake, and there is the lull of constant noise that matches my own buzzing heart. The game is only a piece of it. What enchants me are the crowds who have gathered to watch and cheer on the factory girls, little boys peddling peanuts and popcorn, men pushing dripping ice carts, selling fizzy soda water that Olive buys to share.

  I feel at ease in a brand-new way. There are so many people—no one will see me, especially, unless I decide to be seen. Unless I choose, like Joannie, to put on a uniform and stand at bat and hammer that fat round ball over the fence, or, in the infield, spring to scoop up a slapped ball and fire it into the glove of another, just ahead of the runner, to the cheers of the crowd. It’s up to me. I can be invisible, as I am right now, or I can put myself forward to play the game and be judged.

  That night, in Olive’s room, I whisper, “I love it here.”

  But she’s already asleep. I lie on top of the quilt, listening to the street sounds hush. The room remains hot despite the open window, as if the city’s layers of pavement and concrete and steel and tin have drunk in the sun to hold for keeps, as if I have too.

  I don’t know yet that I’ll stay. This is a holiday, a rare occasion. I believe myself content because I am content—immersed without thought of what will come next, without thought of return.

  On Sunday, Olive and I ride the streetcar west to High Park. A huge white tent has been erected on the grass in a clearing that would remind only a city person of a field. Factory girls are dressed in their Sunday best, and a big canvas banner flaps in the breeze: PACKER’S MEATS. We load our plates with buttered buns and canned ham, and a sweet salad of potatoes and eggs, and we fill our cups with sugary iced tea. There is a giant sheet cake for dessert and it’s someone’s job to fan the flies away with a wide unfurled napkin.

  Olive and I eat on one of the checked blankets that are spread on the grass, where we are joined by other girls who work on Olive’s line. Life in the city seems captured by this moment—free food, free grass, free air to breathe, free roaming, free sunshine, free fun. Mine to splash around in, as I wish. Take it or leave it.

  “It isn’t
always like this,” Olive says, like she’s reading my mind.

  I know what she means, but I erase it. I go and help myself to a slab of sheet cake.

  “Aggie!” Olive finds me licking green frosting off the palm of my hand. She’s excited about something. “The girls are having a running race. You should join!”

  “A running race?”

  “They’re doing egg-and-spoon, and three-legged, but I mean a real running race. Girls under twenty. Come on!”

  Heaven, I tell you. Heaven will have a running race staged across a rolling plain of tended grass with start and finish lines marked out in white ribbons. Heaven will gather a crowd of girls standing at the start with one leg out, skirts lifted, ready for “On your marks, steady, go!” Heaven will be lined on either side with little kids cheering and older folks too, but I won’t be old in heaven. I’ll be sixteen, the tallest girl in the field, and cheered by how easy it is to pull ahead, how I’m running almost alone across the spiky summer grass, how I catch, with a crashing burst of speed, this one last girl who fleets before me. How the white ribbon breaks free against my soaring and flutters to the ground, tangling my feet.

  I’m hardly started when it’s already over.

  Who was that?

  Olive is hugging me, saying she knew I would win as she lifts me right off the ground: “Can you guess who that girl was, the one you beat? She’s won the city championship two years in a row!”

  The tone in the stranger’s voice is admiring: Who was that girl with the golden hair?

  I know right then. I’m not going home.

  I compose a letter to my mother and father. I can’t tell you what it says, exactly. I can tell you that Olive helps me to write it. She wrote one herself a year ago, but that was different. She was writing to say she had found a job, and here was some money to help at home.

  I was there when Mother opened Olive’s letter, and she flushed and pushed the money back inside the envelope. “We don’t need this,” she said.

  I do not write, in my letter home, I love you. I may sign myself, Yours sincerely, or Yours devotedly, Your loving daughter, any of those. They know, I tell myself. They know I love them. Don’t they?