The Peerless Four

by Victoria Patterson

  We run because we choose to run. The 800-metres, the 1600-metres, a marathon, and you can choose, and that makes the difference. But they’re saying no, it’s not our choice. As if they know what’s best.

  It reminds me of a person bringing a treat right up close to a doggie’s mouth—the doggie smelling, jumping, and opening its jaws—and the person pulling the treat away, saying, no, no, that’s enough, you’ve had enough, you’re just a doggie.

  That afternoon, the girls collapsed and cried, and it was used against us, and when Flo was done, she asked me to walk with her from the stadium to our pension and pretend that we were in conversation. She didn’t want to have to talk to anyone or hear anyone say how great her race was or how she deserved a medal and almost got the bronze. So we walked, but no one spoke to us, and the sun was down, the sky a silvery mist that faded from pale blue to steel gray. It turned out that when we entered the lobby, everyone scattered, pretending that they didn’t see us or know us, because they didn’t want to discuss what had happened either.

  Before we started back, Flo sat in a chair and Coach Sacks stood with his head bent over her. The tears were coming from Flo, and Coach Sacks said, “You broke your record. You’ve got no reason to cry. I’m proud of you. You’ve got nothing to be ashamed about,” and I loved him for it. But she couldn’t see, hear, or feel—disappointment and regret all over her—reducing her accomplishments to what she could have done, would have done, might have done, should have done.

  I had a flashing premonition, understanding that Flo would distance herself from Farmer, because Farmer’s generosity in those seconds was a reminder. Coach Sacks would ask Flo to marry him, but she would say no. She wanted to win more than she knew, even more than she wanted to win for Coach Sacks, and now he was a reminder. She would marry eventually, and that man would be the opposite of Coach Sacks, who would never marry.

  I thought of Virginia Woolf and her vision of generations interlinked and minds “threaded together . . . this common mind that binds the whole world together; and all the world is mind.” And I saw Flo as an old woman after a quiet life, no more competitions, not talking about the Olympics, her grandchildren asking questions, getting little from her.

  IV

  I walked the streets near the pension that night, turning the day over in my mind until it lost some of its heaviness, moving through cobbled routes with bars and restaurants, and passing a dark alley where two couples embraced along the wall. Why so many lovers in Amsterdam? In public, waiting for passersby. In Toronto, the lovers tend toward privacy. Maybe I was noticing them more and it was the same everywhere. Nevertheless, no one could stop me or tell me that it was unsafe, so I walked.

  I thought about the 400-metre relay race to come and Ginger’s high jump, and there was nothing to do but to stop and look up at the stars and the tilted glowing smile of a moon and pray. Yes, I reached that stage, composing a prayer-letter:

  Dear God, I know You’ve got more important matters but it would mean a great deal to the girls, and to me . . .

  I believe in the nebulous, indefinable, and preferable I-Don’t-Know, connected to the void and easily mistaken as failure or losing. Yet there I was, staring up into the night, where the preachers had told me that God lived, pining for the unambiguous ego-boost assurance of victory.

  When I was done talking to God or myself or to the sky or all three, I didn’t know, and listening, for that time I waited for God to say something back, though I knew from childhood experience that God didn’t believe in talking direct, I continued on walking.

  The shutters were closed on the houses, here and there a clink of light and the sound of voices, and when I reached the canal, a lamppost reflected and glimmered its rays on the water. I thought about Ginger. The photographers surrounded her all the time now. How strange to have strangers think that they know you, love you, and desire you, without ever meeting you, all the while being so young and not even knowing yourself.

  Back at the pension, I settled at the hotel bar for a nightcap, something I’d never done before, for I was still very restless, and the gentleman next to me said, “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “Not at all,” I said. He proffered his cigarette case my direction and I said, “No thanks.”

  We took each other in, the dim light conducive to a more favorable opinion. He was all face with a large caterpillar-like mustache and a gleam of teeth. I don’t know what he saw in me, except that my cloche hat was pulled low and I tried for a smile with questionable success.

  We were both at the age where the outward fortunes of flesh were overtaken with character. When I noticed a mole on his neck the size of a thimble, repulsion and attraction came over me, both wanting to look away and investigate the dark protrusion further with my fingertips—or my tongue!

  “You don’t smoke?” he said.

  “Not in public,” I said, and he laughed.

  Without further eye contact, I drank the final dregs of bourbon from my glass, and then set my hand at the bar so that my modest wedding ring was on prominent display.

  But it didn’t dissuade him.

  “Can I buy you another?”

  “No.”

  His caterpillar lip rose in a smile. “Can’t I get you anything?”

  I played with that suggestion, and then all at once I got hot and angry.

  He repeated his query: “Isn’t there anything I can get you?”

  I looked at him very hard and said, “Nothing that I can have.”

  The environment didn’t encourage nuance, or I must not have conveyed sufficient severity, because he laughed, complimented my wit, raised his hand for the bartender, and ordered us both another round.

  I made for my purse to leave and he said, “What’s wrong?”

  A peal of laughter came from the end of the bar.

  “I’m not looking for romance.”

  “What?” he asked, because I’d surprised him.

  So I said it again.

  He looked at me for a long moment before saying, “Then you won’t find it.”

  The bartender brought our drinks, and an awkward silence hung in the air.

  “Nothing wrong,” the man muttered defensively into his glass, “with wanting a little company.”

  He had a valid point and I sipped at my bourbon, for it seemed wrong to waste it. “Sorry,” I said, but he ignored me, keeping his gaze at his glass. His cigarette case was between us, so I slid it toward me, my hand passing his downward vision.

  He looked up and I leaned from my bar stool toward him, cigarette propped in my mouth. After a brief, indecisive pause, he lit the cigarette for me.

  He was Tom, an assistant coach for the New Westminster Salmon Bellies, the Canadian lacrosse team, and after three more bourbons each, we were close, close friends. So close, in fact, that my hand was on his hard muscular arm, leaning into him to whisper my appreciation after he had whispered his, when I caught in a large smoked mirror behind his head the spectacle of Jack coming through the door of the bar.

  My heart leapfrogged to my throat, and I tucked my hand into Tom’s armpit, watching from his shoulder. Jack’s image hung in the mirror, along with the reflection of lights and bottles.

  Jack looked around the bar—kept looking—looking for what? Looking for me?

  Sparks of light surrounded him. I swear it. He stood surveying, his eyes going from one side of the bar to the other, haloed in light, and I hid like a coward. Smelling the woodsy smoke of Tom’s sleeve while watching Jack, a sweet terror blazed inside me. All magic and love. But I sat with the feeling longer, and it tangled in hate. I hadn’t been with a man besides Wallace. Hiding within another man’s pectoral, my belly full of booze and my heart opened, I knew undeniably that it was Jack whom I wanted, and this made me angry. So I continued to look across the bar at Jack looking, and I didn’t want it to be true. With all my heart, I didn’t want it to be true. But it didn’t matter what I wanted. My feelings for Jack were as real to me in that mome
nt as the mole on Tom’s neck, which happened to be brushing against my forehead.

  I caught a flash of Jack’s eyes possibly recognizing me, and I gripped Tom’s arm to steady myself at his chest. Tom didn’t mind me burrowing into him, and his hands went to my back to prove it, encouraging further nestling.

  I did not move or look around or meet Jack’s eyes, and then he was beside us. Tom’s hands released me, and Jack said, “Mel.” I didn’t look. “Mel,” he said, “come on, it’s time to go.”

  I decided there was no recourse but to meet reality, pulling away from Tom. Jack’s face was very serious and worried and it sobered me considerably.

  Tom’s head went to the side and he said, “Mel?” I’d told him that my name was Mary, probably because of Onata Green’s Mary, and that was the last thing Tom said to me, a great big questioning “Mel?” and I never saw his mole, caterpillar mustache, or woodsy-smelling pectorals again.

  Jack took my arm and guided me from the bar. When we were a distance away, he said, “That’s not like you, Mel. You don’t even know that man.”

  I was sick, as though he’d socked me in the stomach, feeling that I’d betrayed him or me or Wallace or all three of us. Then my sickness changed to anger and I said, “So what?” Further angered by my inelegant rejoinder, I said, “Who cares,” and decided to leave it there, as each time I opened my mouth, I was disappointed.

  Jack led me toward the hallway. “What about your reputation?” he said, alluding to our conversation on the ship. He stopped and stared heavily into my face, and I put my hand out to touch him.

  “Oh, Jack,” I said, grasping him by the arm. “My reputation?” Then I lowered my head and released the bourbon from my stomach onto his pants and shoes.

  I woke in the morning and sat at the side of my bed, my feet on the cold floor and the taste of cigarettes, bourbon, and vomit at the back of my tongue, wearing the same dress as the night before, and my cloche hat. My dream was still with me, a twisting uphill race, a pack of women and men, and me running behind them. I watched the increasing nearness of their bloomers—for some reason, that was all I could see, and both the men and the women wore red bloomers—until I came upon them. They were bouncing up and down, and then I was bouncing with them and gradually moving beyond them. But then there were more in front of me, and I approached them individually and went past, and then another, and I went past, and they kept springing up like trees. I kept passing them easily, every one—as if they were standing still—but they kept on coming. Then everything grew dark because we were running in a forest. All of us sliding downward, winding around, faster and faster. I tried to break from the pack but I couldn’t. It was impossible. The runners pounded on all sides of me and I couldn’t move.

  I was in a great downhill stride, my feet smashing, and then the elbow of the person next to me struck my side, and for an instant I continued to run wildly, arms waving for balance, and I went down running. I rolled down a hill, hitting things as I went, striking against Ginger’s ukulele and her rag doll, and I was falling more and more, and then I finally landed beneath a small wooden footbridge. I lay on my side listening to the thunder of legs passing overhead, the rustle and muffled reverberations of their feet on the wood, and they galloped past me and then were gone. But I waited for the stragglers, and two more came, their feet clumping over me, and then they were gone. I looked and saw the spine of earth showing through the grass where their feet had tread, the soil printed with thousands of shoes, and then I woke.

  I sat there and waited for the dream to leave me, and then I was remembering Jack helping me to bed, a growing searching look in his eyes mixed with a deep concern, and that was enough to confuse and embarrass me. I didn’t want to remember more, so I roped off everything that had transpired into a remote section of my brain. It would have to sit and wait to be thought about further, when I could manage better.

  Later while I bathed, the cordoned section of Jack helping me to bed and what had happened reared forth, and I thought about all the things I might have said, and of those things I might have said, what among them that I most wanted to say, and then the impossibility of ever saying any of them.

  My hands trembled when I got dressed, and every now and then I had to steady myself with a long breath. I drank two cups of coffee and ate a poached egg with a slice of toast, and then I was back to being me.

  V

  The girls won the gold for the 400-metre relay. Bonnie crossed the yarn neck-high, clutching the baton at her side, and the force drew a slim scratch of blood across her neck. The girls hopping and hugging and the flashbulbs couldn’t make them be still, and that’s how I like to remember them. Reporters and photographers yelling hold still stay still, and they have their arms around each other, and one looks at the next with unbridled contagious joy, and then they’re hopping and hugging again, uncontained.

  The following afternoon, it took Ginger ten jumps to win the gold in the high jump, and it wasn’t until later that I understood that this was part of the problem. It was all too easy. It was easy and natural and it was the natural act of jumping, and how could a silly thing like jumping that came natural mean so much? Coaches, family, newspapers, the audience wanting to take credit and make it something more, so that she came to distrust.

  The New York Times called her the prettiest girl at the Games. Did that make her skills incidental? She wanted it to be about the jumping, but it was more about what she looked like. Secretly, the attention and praise must have made her feel superior, even when she knew that wasn’t right. Her beauty, athletic ability, and jumping style undeserving of so much praise and attention, and she never liked or wanted attention, but it also made her superior, and so she hated the results and herself, and she came to distrust.

  “Jesus,” the boy watching next to me said, in pure admiration, “Jesus, she’s gorgeous,” and he swallowed hard, having said it all.

  Wet, drizzly, and cold, and she didn’t remove her warm-up clothes, scaring her twenty-three opponents, not even needing to remove her warm-ups, because it all came so easy to her and she was making sure to let them know. They thought the crowd was cheering for them, and then Ginger waved and the cheers tripled, swelled and heaved in the air, and I felt it inside me, too. Between jumps, wrapped in a big red Hudson Bay blanket, composed and steely.

  Her competitors gradually eliminated, and then there was one jump left to win and three chances, the high jump the paradox event that you win by losing. You jump until you lose or forfeit, but then you’ve won.

  When her foot clipped the standard, knocking down the bar, the warm-ups were removed for her second jump.

  Running in a J toward the bar, making her approach, planting her foot, and then she was suspended in the air, a perfect position—not going up, not going down—just hanging there, legs scissored, bloomers and shirt ballooning, and she wasn’t just jumping, she was flying.

  We all saw her fly. Don’t come down, we thought. Don’t come down just yet. Hold it. A split second of experiencing perfection. The flashbulbs blazing, and then it was done.

  An opportunity to attempt a new world’s record of five feet three inches, what she’d already done in her backyard, and her third jump was successful, but there was a sag in the bar. That was happening all the time. They’d say a record was broken, then somebody would make a mistake and then they’d change their minds, saying, Whoops, sorry, maybe next time.

  Another opportunity but she was tired and cold and decided that was that.

  From obscurity to the most photographed female Olympian in less than two years, with her faraway sadness that came across as poise, all because she was a girl who loved to jump in her backyard.

  I’ve always had a nagging suspicion that sports are ridiculous. Meaningful and meaningless and all the while ridiculous, that equation of which outweighs the other dependent on temperament and perspective. I’d like to believe that sports have meaning more than meaninglessness, and I cherish that hope. But that does
n’t mean sports aren’t ridiculous.

  While in the midst of her own flattering golden realm of being the Dream Girl, Ginger shared my suspicion and lived it.

  That night the reporters surrounded the girls in the pension lobby, asking questions, and Ginger stood there blinking, lonely and lost. A crowd of spectators gathered, chanting Dream Girl, Dream Girl, Dream Girl, and she just stood there, blinking. Then she turned to me and I caught a glimpse of confusion—anger—and I knew that she wanted to jam their cheers and questions back down their throats. They loved her but she did not love them, and I could see it. The more they would love her, the more she would hate them. They would love her and she would not love them, and then they would hate her.

  Then she turned and made her way down the hallway leaving us, and Danny followed her, and they disappeared. Jack and I hadn’t spoken since he’d cleaned my vomit from his shoes, and he was staring at me from across the room, letting me know that I should follow.

  I started down the hallway, and Farmer stopped me and asked, “Does she mean it?”

  “Mean what?”

  “That she doesn’t care about winning, or our team, or any of it.”

  “Did she say that to the reporters?”

  “No. Just to me.”

  “She doesn’t mean it.”

  Farmer nodded thoughtfully. “She’s tired,” she said. “I don’t understand her,” she added, and I told her that it wasn’t her job.

  “But I’m team captain,” she said.

  I told her that I had to leave, which was true, and I worked my way through the crowd and reporters and down the hallway to the sisters’ room.

  I knocked and let them know it was just me, so Danny opened the door.

  Propped on her bed with her rag doll, Ginger stared at me.

  “What you said,” I said, “to Farmer. Tonight. You said that you didn’t care about the team. Did you mean it?”