Girl Runner

by Carrie Snyder

  As if she hears me, the girl leans onto her heels, gone separate and apart. She no longer touches me. I can hear the two of us breathing, or it could be the wind is picking up. It’s gone cool.

  The sky behind her head is a wall of grey. It looks like rain is blowing in: April showers bring May flowers, if this indeed is April. Might be May. Must be spring. I think I am quite all right, in fact. Whatever her motives, I would like to thank her for bringing me here, girl whose name I can’t remember. Girl, who seems so familiar, though I can’t place why.

  She’s got red hair, yellow at the roots, a long face, dark eyes. Clues, all clues. She moves gracefully, yet she’s prone to clumsiness, if this fall is proof of anything.

  “I’m really really sorry, Mrs. Smart,” the girl cries. “After all you’ve done. You don’t deserve this.”

  I turn my eyes to Max, hovering indistinct on the other side of me.

  What need have I for men bearing cameras? What need have you, young lady?

  I move my hand by inches until I find hers, and I pat it gently.

  “What should I do?” the girl asks me—I’d like to think it’s me she’s asking. She’s calm enough now, I can read it on her skin. She’ll carry me across the line.

  ON THE GRASS TRACK out behind Rosebud Confectionary our coach, Mr. Tristan, winds us up like toys and sets us loose, again and again. I fall inside a perfectly relaxed state for the few moments we have before he’ll wind us up again. We are the lucky ones, recruited to train and race for Mr. P. T. Pallister’s team. Everyone knows: P. T. has the best girls and the best coach; he has oceans of money, and he likes girl athletes.

  Mr. P. T. Pallister announces in the Toronto Daily Star that he will personally guarantee girl athletes will win gold for Canada in Amsterdam at the 1928 Olympic Games. Personally guarantee it! He will personally spare no expense to see that it is so.

  He finds Lillianna out in the Prairies and brings her by train to Toronto; Lillianna can jump like a gazelle. He discovers Ernestine at her high school near the lake. Glad is his own niece, but she earns her spot fair and square. Lucy comes from New Brunswick, but she will get homesick and drop out before the Canadian championships.

  As for me, all I know is that a man comes knocking on the door at 445 Bathurst Street and leaves a message with the landlady, Mrs. Smythe, who informs me at dinner in front of everyone before serving up the gut-filling starter: a watery rice pudding, no raisins.

  Olive and I slump at the table, aching and famished after the day’s shift at Packer’s Meats. Our hands and arms are rubbed raw and red, and our feet hurt, and we carry the scent of animal fat in our hair and on our clothes. I work as a “runner,” which means filling in wherever I’m told to, while Olive works on a line, chopping pork into a fine mince. We wear tidy white aprons that are stained by day’s end, and which we are obliged to launder ourselves. We tie our hair off our faces with kerchiefs.

  We come to our landlady’s table like ghosts of girls, too weary to speak, and we eat passively of her coarse black bread and cabbage borschts.

  “This came for you today.” A letter at my plate.

  “Oh?”

  “A fellow in a suit asking for you.”

  “What is it?” Olive wonders. She is busy saving her money for when she gets married. She will spend it on china and silver and linens, she says. She has not met a prospective husband, but I can imagine what he will look like. He will look like a fellow in a suit.

  I rip open the letter and scan its typed-out contents.

  “What is it? What is it?”

  We share a table with three other girls, none of them older than twenty-two, also factory workers, and with the landlady’s husband, Mr. Smythe, who irritably ignores us and reads the evening paper while eating. But everyone else is curious, even Mrs. Smythe.

  “Has she got a beau?” “Oo! Aggie’s got a beau!”

  “I have not,” I say across the table. Closer acquaintance has not brought me friendship. I don’t like the other girls particularly, and they don’t particularly like me. I think them silly and obvious, and they think me standoffish and peculiar. Perhaps we are right about each other, as much as we are wrong. We are all of us young, independent, hoping for more, but at different volumes. They are loud and declarative and crudely funny, cruel in a tribal sense, bonding against rather than with, and I am shy and bold and uncompromising.

  Examine our hair for comparison.

  They are constantly worrying over theirs. Washing it, drying it, tying it in rags and sleeping on it overnight, wrapping it around wooden curlers, brushing it, pinning it up, taking it down, trimming it, shaping it, asking each other to comment on the results, or to help. Help! What should I do with my hair? What is my hair doing?

  I wear mine in a braid down my back for work. I can wind it and tie it into a knot at the nape of my neck if further tidiness is required. Otherwise, I brush it at night, as my mother taught me to do, and I keep it long. Olive trims the dead ends. I can sit on my hair if I tilt my head back. I wouldn’t say that hair matters nothing to me, because I like mine, the colour, the texture, the weight of it, but I would say that the maintenance and care of my hair matters nothing to me. I can’t be bothered, even knowing that not bothering sets me apart from the other girls.

  “Well, what is it?” Olive asks again, of the letter, and I take a deep involuntary breath, almost like a sigh, startling everyone, even myself.

  “Not bad news?” says Mrs. Smythe.

  “Not bad news,” I say, disappointing her. “Good news, I think. It’s just, I don’t understand . . .”

  Olive takes the letter from my hand. “Well,” she says several times, reading it over. I can see she doesn’t know what to think either. “It’s private,” she says finally. “I shouldn’t think it’s something to be discussed over dinner.”

  Well, that gets the girls interested. Even Mr. Smythe rustles his newspaper in a way that suggests he’s been listening in on the conversation.

  “I don’t think you should go,” Olive tells me in our shared room, in a whisper. “You don’t even know if the offer is real. What if it’s a trick?”

  “Why would it be a trick?” I move away from her and set my palm flat on the cool, warped pane of our window.

  “To get girls, or, I don’t know, honestly. That’s beside the point. The point is, do you know this man personally?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then you should not meet with him. It wouldn’t look right.”

  “I wouldn’t be meeting with him. I’d be meeting with the coach of his team, and it’s at the factory, and it’s in the middle of the day.”

  “And you’d have to ask for a half-day off.”

  I’m silent.

  “I suppose you’ll do what you please.”

  I lift my cold fingers to my lips, and then stretch my arms over my head.

  “I suppose you always have,” says Olive.

  “Have I?” I say slowly.

  I stare out the window at the dark evening sky, pricked with windows like ours lit by oil lamps, or, others, by blazing electric lights. I keep my back to my sister.

  When it comes to hair, that measure of a girl, Olive is on the other side. She takes joy from scented hair creams and satin ribbons that I think make her look juvenile. Only recently, and somewhat alarmingly, Olive has gotten her hair cut to her chin in a newfangled bob that has been cause for many squeals and much discussion from the girls we work with and the girls we live with. I wonder: Is it out of Olive’s character to be in fashion? I decide it is not. Olive wants to be like everyone else. If you are like everyone else, no one will pay special attention to you. No one will notice that you aren’t. That is Olive.

  She is tolerant of me, loving, and we do not hope for the same things, but I trust her opinion.

  “Oh, well, what would be the harm?” she says suddenly, coming to me and hugging me around the shoulders, so hard it hurts. “You want to go, so go, and run. You’re so fast th
ey’ll surely want you for their team, and you’ll be wonderful. I know it.”

  I kiss her cheek.

  “And just think of making chocolates instead of canned hams,” she says.

  Soon, that is just what we are doing, both of us: making chocolates instead of canned hams. The girls at Mrs. Smythe’s are jealous and my popularity improves, ever so slightly, around the dinner table, especially when we pass around a box of broken candies to share.

  “Ooo, what’s this pink stuff?”

  “Tastes like strawberries.”

  “It’s strawberry with coconut. Do you like it?”

  “Not so much as the caramel. Is there a caramel anywhere?”

  “I’ll eat it if you don’t want it.”

  “You’ll all get fat,” says the landlady grimly, and quite seriously, prompting a tableful of girls to stare at her midchew, and her husband, newspaper at half-mast, hand hovering over the proffered box, to wave it away. Dessert has never been on her menu.

  “Oh, won’t you try one, Mrs. Smythe? So delicious!”

  “Not me, no I will not, no thank you.”

  There are other girls who run with the Rosebud Ladies’ Athletics Club, but only a handful of us are believed to be Olympic prospects—only me, Glad, Lillianna, Ernestine, and Lucy, and we are expected at every practice, and exempted from work on the factory floor. I’m offered, instead, a secretarial job despite never having learned to type. That is my first assignment: learn how to type. Mr. P. T. Pallister arranges for me to attend secretarial school. It is Olive who brings home the boxes of broken chocolates, Olive who does, as Mrs. Smythe warns, grow plumper and plumper during our time at Rosebud Confectionary.

  Me, I learn how to type and I learn shorthand and transcription and bookkeeping. My muscles grow leaner, my spine even straighter.

  And I meet Glad.

  BEFORE I MEET GLAD, I’m the girl who doesn’t bother with her hair, who runs along city streets chased by jeering boys on bicycles. Before I meet Glad, I’m the girl who perversely and in anger, in defiant defensiveness, does not care. I don’t see the point of friendship, somehow, if it makes you pretend to be someone you aren’t. Friendship looks calculating to me: a shallow alliance designed around exclusion.

  After I meet Glad, I begin to care, and to take more care. I change in small ways to please her, even though she does not ask it of me.

  Before I meet Glad, I do not know how to be a friend.

  I LIKE HER almost instantly, but there is nothing amazing in that—everyone likes Glad. What is amazing is that Glad likes me in return.

  On my second evening with the team, she comes looking for me after practice. I am hiding in the change room, sitting slumped against the wall, legs pulled to my chest, staring at my bared feet, blistered and red. The room is tiny, furnished with a wooden bench and a line of cabinets, and I have tucked myself into a small space between the cabinets and the wall. Directly across from me is a toilet perched oddly on a high concrete pedestal, and beside that a cold-water shower spout over a drain in the floor, blocked off from the rest of the room by a single floor-to-ceiling thin board wall. It is a dismal space, and I’m a dismal mess of dismal emotions: I thought I was fast?

  “There you are!” Glad marches right over, addresses me with arms crossed, head cocked. “You need new shoes. Those boots are tearing your feet apart.”

  I nod dumbly.

  “You know what I do?” Glad puts out an arm and leans against the wall, tapping it thoughtfully. “I swim. It helps with the aches. I like to go in the morning. Why don’t you come with me.” But she doesn’t ask it like a question. She offers it like an answer.

  “I can’t swim,” I say. “I don’t know how.”

  “I’ll teach you! It’s easy. Everyone should know how to swim.”

  In the YWCA on McGill Street the water is cold as ice, filling a tank sunk into a concrete floor. It’s a dark echoing space, claustrophobic, slippery, spare. Water sloshes the sides of the tank. Girls churn back and forth, and it feels like there’s not enough room to breathe. I panic. Glad’s dark hair is tucked under a swim cap, mine is exposed and plastered to my head. Our black jersey suits are heavy, straight-cut across the thighs, scooped necks, no sleeves, and mine is borrowed from Glad and therefore too short, tight at the shoulders—“Don’t worry, I’ve got lots, I’m always trying out the new styles!”

  No men are allowed.

  My hair tangles in my mouth. I flail. I’ll sink.

  Glad’s legs spin like an eggbeater and she bobs some small distance clear of me. “Keep hold of the side.”

  Shivering. “You’re turning blue, Aggie! You should see your lips!”

  “This is not fun,” I mutter.

  She laughs, yet somehow I don’t hate her. “You need to get moving. Here, I’ll hold you.”

  Glad’s hands are under me, on my stomach, holding me in a float. She directs me as we edge slowly down the length of the pool. Face in, and turn, in and turn. Blow bubbles, and turn, blow bubbles, and turn. Float, relax, relax. Pull, pull, pull under the water. Kick with straight legs. Cup your hands. Don’t crane your neck.

  So much to remember!

  Me: “I can’t do this!”

  Glad: “You’ll be swimming laps within the week, I promise.”

  When I float, when her hands come off me and I am briefly suspended, my face down in the dank greenish water, eyes wide open, I see little drowned James hanging atop the water in exactly the same posture.

  I gasp and rear up.

  “You did it!” says Glad, holding my elbows. “Kick,” she reminds me. She thinks I’m trembling from the cold. I nod grimly. I try again. Again, I see James, my half-brother, his very small body, near to mine. This happens each time I put my face into the water, until after days and weeks of being near him, or feeling him nearby, I become accustomed to it, and I think of it differently. I think we are swimming together, in a way, until it is just another version of remembering him, as I promised Fannie long ago I would do.

  I accept the shadow in the water beside me.

  GLAD BESTS ME on the track, in practice, for the months of September, October, and November, 1926. When the snow falls and stays, we train indoors, in a wood-lined gymnasium, our rubber-soled feet squeaking on the floor. We work with dumbbells and ropes, and sprint from end to end, and practice a system of calisthenics devised by our coach, Mr. Tristan, who also urges those of us who are runners to go outside once a day to leap through the snowbanks around where we imagine the track to be.

  I’m faster than Glad on these frigid dashes, but my long legs offer an advantage in the deep snow. I leap like a jackrabbit.

  By April, we are back outside, training on the track. Mr. Tristan runs us in all weathers, and it is a chilly April, streaked with snow.

  Glad bests me in practice for the months of April, May, and June, 1927. She bests me for most of July, but I am closing the gap. By August, it is a toss-up who will edge in front of whom on any given day, any given training run. We both know it, but we never talk about it. Never, not once. We meet to swim together three mornings a week. We meet at the track. We meet in motion, and speak sparingly as we prepare ourselves, and speak in shorthand afterward, spent and quiet.

  “That was a good one,” she might say, and I will agree.

  Or, “Tired today.” “Yes.”

  This is friendship, as I understand it: a series of shared, parallel experiences that do not require elaboration.

  MR. TRISTAN TELLS me at the end of a hard practice: I’ve made the cut for the Canadian track and field championships at the Canadian National Exhibition—the CNE. He doesn’t need to tell me this will be the biggest race of my career so far, my chance to prove, after nearly a year of dedicated training, that I belong. He places one hand on my shoulder and offers the other, to shake mine: “You’ve qualified on time for the eight hundred. I knew you could do it.”

  Holding his hand, I feel my face crumple toward tears. It’s a struggle to hold everyth
ing inside, but I command myself to become stone.

  “Aggie,” he says gently, patting my shoulder, “this is good news. You’re supposed to be happy.”

  I am, if I could reach through the numbness and find it. I nod. My first thought is to tell my mother—for some reason, I see her standing in the treetop in her apron, watching me on the barn roof. I want to tell her the news. I wonder—could she take the train to Toronto?

  But it is August on the farm, the garden overflows, the train costs money.

  I send a letter containing only the barest jots of news, and none of the fear and joy. I can’t ask her to come. She doesn’t think of it herself. She writes back to me in her formal hand, the script in delicate circles across the thin page: “Send us news of your race.”

  I know it’s me who left. But I’m young enough to think that my mother should be there for me. I’m young enough to imagine that she might even surprise me.

  MRS. SMYTHE PREPARES eggs for breakfast—her silent contribution to the excitement. The other girls regret that they are working and can’t come to cheer me on. They talk of skipping out. Merry laughter. Yes, I think it entirely possible that I will win a medal—haven’t I caught up with Glad—so why should they not think so too?

  “Will you be famous, then?” “Won’t she be?” “Will you cut your hair and buy a pretty dress, if they put you in the newspaper?”

  Everything I do not yet know, the hours that are rushing at me, that will crash down on me like a massive wave of salt water: the crowd like an angry buzz, the lean limbs and pointed elbows of my competitors, girls I’ve never seen before, girls who are not like Glad but are more like me, tight and twisted up inside themselves, sharp with nerves. My guts roiling, wishing I’d never seen those eggs like two undercooked yellow eyeballs wobbling as they stared up at me.

  Are you feeling quite all right, Aggie? Glad, noticing. Me, wishing she hadn’t. Fine. I’m fine.

  I search and scan, but my mother’s is not among the faces in the crowd.

  Before I know it, it’s over. Just like that. Quick as a flash, two times round the track. I’ve gone out too fast, I’m passed early, I hang on to second place as the metres stretch desertlike and unending before me until I’m caught on the final curve by two runners.