Girl Runner

by Carrie Snyder

  “But don’t. Don’t you see? I agree with Miss Gibb.”

  Glad turns away, flushed, and goes to stand by one of the tall windows that overlook Yonge Street. I don’t understand her anger—are we playacting, or is this real? Have I hurt her in some way? When I put my hand on her arm, she pulls away harshly, crossing one arm over her chest, the other flying out, finger raised and pointed.

  “Out, out, out of my studio!” She is back to being the director, acting again. It must be said that Glad is a much more natural actress than I will ever be, even if the newspapers haven’t promised her a Hollywood career.

  “Glad!”

  Her look is hard, appraising. “You’re too sweet, Aggie,” she says, repeating her words from earlier. “You should never trust what a person says to you. Would you really take your clothes off for a man with a camera?”

  My face burns with shame.

  Glad is laughing again, brushing my bare shoulder with her cool fingertips. “It’s just that I love you so, Aggie. Don’t do the advertisement.”

  “Zip me up.” I flick her hand off my shoulder. “I suppose you’re right. You’re always right.”

  But her fingers on the zipper light a mutual shock, a spark of electricity that stings for a second. “Never mind. I’ll do it myself.” I walk away from her, my hands behind my neck, struggling with the zipper.

  “What are you doing?” Olive asks when I come into the kitchen. “I thought Johnny left ages ago.”

  “This zipper is broken,” I say, dropping into a chair without further explanation.

  “I’ll mend it for you.” My big sister brushes aside my hair and takes a look. “It’s not broken, it’s jammed. Just hold still . . .”

  I sit at the kitchen table after Olive’s gone, under the blazing bulb, listening to the sound of mice scrabbling through the walls, and I compose a letter in return to Miss Gibb.

  Please, on my behalf, explain that I am not the right girl for an undergarment advertisement, even if it is in a magazine, and ever so tasteful. (Would it be tasteful, do you think?) No, I must not. I think it’s best to say no.

  I HAVE NOT yet sent the letter. I can’t say why, exactly, but it waits on my vanity in an envelope, addressed and stamped, and unsent.

  “You’re writing to Miss Gibb?” Johnny picks up the envelope and looks at it.

  “She’s a friend,” I say.

  “I don’t like that woman.”

  I’ve heard other men say it, boys on the team, even Mr. Tristan, who resented her authority over “his” girls, as he called us, but never have I heard this opinion from Johnny. I can’t say that I like it.

  “Why ever not?” I frown.

  We are about to launch into our first fight.

  “She thinks she knows everything.”

  “She knows more than you.”

  “She isn’t a real woman.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You know what it means.”

  I know he’s talking about sex, and I’m familiar too with the slur of “mannish woman” that gets attached to sporting girls, and suddenly I’m furious, rent up inside with rage. The right words don’t come to me—well, this is no surprise. I’m not made for pithy speeches pouring from some deep well. In their weakness, I hear my own lack, and failure: “I thought you were nice, Johnny. I don’t like you right now, not at all.”

  “Then I’ll go.”

  “Yes. Go.”

  A little while later there is a knock on my door. Glad pokes her head in, even though I’ve chosen not to answer. I’m lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. “Everything okay?” she asks.

  I’m not made for this. Conversing about my feelings? Parsing my emotions? Being in love? I’d sooner jump out the window. “I need to run,” I tell Glad, and instantly I feel better. Just the idea of it. “Or swim.”

  “We’ll swim in the morning,” says Glad.

  “I miss training,” I say.

  “We’ll get back to it in the spring.”

  “I have to run.”

  “So run, who’s stopping you?” She comes into the room, and stands over me with her arms crossed. “People fight,” she says. “And then they say I’m sorry. You should know these things.”

  “I’m sorry?” I say, looking up at her. Maybe I’ll see her forever, as she is, looking down at me, compact, impatient, shaking me free, if only she can, from my own special form of blindness.

  She laughs, almost sadly. “Not to me, dummy. To him.”

  Oh.

  “You don’t want to, but you have to. Now get up and come downstairs and have dessert. Olive’s made some kind of lemon cake thing and it smells like heaven.”

  This is the night our brother George turns up. Maybe he smelled the lemon cake from across town—I wouldn’t put it past him. He bangs on the door at the bottom of the staircase. Olive doesn’t want to unlock it, but Glad marches down with me close behind, and hauls open the door, stands there with her arms crossed.

  “Are you trying to scare us to death?”

  George stumbles across the threshold, rubbing his bare hands. He doesn’t know how to say he’s sorry either—a family trait? I’m thankful for the fight if only because it means that Johnny has left early this evening. I do not want George and Johnny to cross paths, not like this, maybe not ever. George gazes at me owlishly before beginning to climb the stairs.

  I glance at Glad, ashamed of my brother, and she shrugs. Not your fault.

  We have nothing to drink in the house, which is for the best, with George.

  “Nothing at all?”

  “I’ll make you a cup of tea,” offers Olive. The three of us, Smarts, stand awkwardly clumped at the entry to the kitchen, neither in nor out.

  Glad observes us from where she’s gone and curled into the comfortable chair beside the fireplace, like our half-grown kitten.

  “Tea is it?” George’s tone is sneering. “Mother’s special tea?”

  And Olive takes one step backward in order to have room to hit him with a bright shocking slap. The sound of it seems to hold.

  Nobody moves.

  The tea on offer is, in fact, mailed to us by our mother, tea she has prepared with herbs grown in her garden, and dried, and carefully blended. She supplies us with several different boxes, each marked with its special purpose. After-Dinner Tea to soothe the troubled stomach. Woman’s Tea to ease the pains of a difficult cycle. Every Day Tea, with a mild laxative. And the tea I assume Olive has intended to serve George, which is our favourite, a mixture of mints and lemon balm, called Tea for All Occasions. Now this is an occasion—I almost want to laugh, thinking of serving it now.

  Glad rises in slow motion out of the chair. I catch her eye and shake my head, one short no.

  “What’s that for?” George rubs his jaw.

  “Leave Mother be,” says Olive in a low voice.

  “I’ve no interest in your mother.”

  “What did you come for, George?” I ask quickly. I can hardly bear to hear him say “your mother,” as if she hasn’t raised him as her own, from infancy. As if she isn’t the only mother he’s ever known. As if her love is not worthy, somehow. But it is my own pity of my mother that haunts me most, and I know that George is not to blame for that—it is only that his dismissal makes me feel doubly traitorous. I’ve given up on George. I can hardly remember the brother who believed I could fly.

  “I’m short,” he says bluntly, to me. “I thought of you.”

  I stare at the floor and chew the inside of my mouth.

  “I’ll pay you back,” he says. “You know I will.”

  “You never have yet,” counters Olive.

  “Not just for me, Aggie. Please.” George tries to catch my eye.

  “Not for you,” Olive says, disbelieving. “If not for you, George, than for who?”

  For whom, I think, knowing perfectly well of whom my brother speaks, but George has sworn me to secrecy on the subject, and I see no reason to break my silence
now, to pull the complication of Tattie, the woman who is not his wife, and her children, who are also his if not by law, into this room, into our lives.

  “Business is tight,” says George softly. “You win some, you lose some. I’ve got a chance to invest in this horse. Finest filly I ever seen. I always bet on the fillies, Aggie, you know that.”

  “How much?” I say.

  In my head, I’m tearing up the letter to Miss Gibb and writing a different one.

  I will say, If it’s not too much trouble, could you explain that I’m a modest girl. I hate to turn them down. Perhaps they will understand. Perhaps they would like a modest girl, anyway. What do you think? I will come for a visit on Friday, after my acting class, if you are available. Please write and tell me where we shall meet.

  JOHNNY SAYS HE’S SORRY. Therefore, I don’t have to. This is probably bad for me, but good for us.

  I decide not to tell him—or anyone, including Glad—about the undergarment advertisement until after the photographs have been taken. I am photographed as modestly as one can imagine, fully clothed—demurely clothed, even. I tell myself that this is fun. I pretend that I am having fun. But I am discovering that modelling is tedious work. The lighting is hot, the greasy paint on my face is thick and sticky and looks unnatural, I perspire and my feet ache, my back aches, my shoulders crunch, the clothes are ill fitting and pinned all over. I throw every effort into not looking or feeling anything like myself. I do understand that part of the job: it isn’t me the photographer wants, sweating and irked and dull, it’s a girl stripped of her visceral qualities who is willing to suspend herself in amber.

  “Smile, Miss Smart, there’s a good girl. Less teeth, there’s a lass. Just a natural smile, like you’re catching the eye of a boy you like. That’s better, Miss Smart. We’ll get it yet.”

  “It” is a version of me gazing airily into space, a vapid expression upon my features, chin on folded hands. This girl, who is not really me, can be found widely in newspapers, flyers, and magazines, lost in happy reverie. I suppose I’m meant to be thinking about my underthings, dreamily, “as one does,” as Glad remarks, sending me and Olive into fits of giggles around the kitchen table. I pose, “as one does,” while Glad narrates an imagined inner monologue on the cascading charms of undergarments. “Oh, lacy loveliness, my heart doth flutter to think of you, folded into colourful stacks, one upon the other, in my secret drawers.” Her voice drops low on secret drawers. “What wouldn’t I give to have an armful of your satiny softness pressed against my pillowy bosom?”

  “Glad.” Olive clicks her tongue in warning and indicates with a shake of her head Johnny’s presence at our otherwise feminine table. His lips twitch, and he gazes at the ceiling and blinks hard.

  “I’ve gone too far.”

  “You have,” agrees Olive.

  Glad wonders: “What were you thinking of, Aggie, when the photo was being taken, for real?”

  “Nothing,” I say.

  I’m mildly troubled by the emptiness of my expression in the photograph, even while I recognize its appeal. Its blankness makes me restless, makes me want to run.

  Atop my neatly made quilt, upstairs, Johnny repeats Glad’s question: what was I thinking about—really—when the photograph was taken.

  “They told me to think about you,” I say honestly.

  He seems to find this arousing, and it occurs to me, for the first time, that perhaps he doesn’t know me at all. That he thinks I’m someone quite different from who I am. Why should he want a girl with eyes so empty to be thinking of him?

  AFTER THE UNDERGARMENTS, I am offered a job modelling a fur coat for a department store. In this photograph, my gaze is distant but somewhat sterner, as if I am dreaming of icy mountaintops, my hands clutching the collar around my neck. The advertisement is a success, and I am invited to continue the promotion by wearing the coat at the department store while signing autographs, and as the department store has locations in several cities across the country, an early winter tour is arranged by train, although I only travel so far west as Winnipeg. The train struggles along its iron tracks through a stark, naked, snowy landscape. I am billeted in the home of the department store’s manager, chaperoned by his wife. I am not unhappy. It is as though I’m living a life that belongs to someone else, a borrowed life.

  Yet I tell myself it is mine to keep. There are things I like about this life, things I want to keep. The fur coat, for example.

  Home again, I describe to Johnny the sky I’ve seen, the one that belongs to his past, and how it has not frightened me, not at all, in its endlessness.

  He tells me he’s imagined me wearing nothing but fur.

  The department store wonders whether I might model their new swimsuit for women, for their summer campaign. It is sleeveless, cut in a curve on the upper thigh, and made of a new fabric that promises not to trap and hold water like wool does.

  The photographs are taken inside a studio in early spring but are made to look like I’m posing on a beach with a child’s sand bucket and shovel—playthings—nearby. I have perfected the dreamy gaze, I think, oddly pleased with the effect, when the newspaper falls open to reveal this latest campaign. My eyes appear to address something exquisitely attractive just behind the camera. It makes a person want to turn around to see what could be there. I don’t really notice the rest of me, exposed on cheap newsprint.

  “Ooo,” says Glad, leaning down for a closer inspection. “You look . . .”

  But she doesn’t finish the sentence.

  “I look what?”

  “Bosomy,” she says. “Or something like that. Your legs look very long, even for you.”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “You’ve got lovely legs. Which everyone will now know.”

  I feel myself go uneasy, slightly unmoored by her comments, though she seems to jest.

  “You’ve got great gams—that’s what the boys will say. You’re a real doll. A babe.”

  “Ugh. Stop. Please.”

  “Isn’t she?” to Johnny who has just come in without knocking—he has a key—taking the steps to our apartment two at a time.

  “Isn’t who what?”

  “Isn’t your girl a doll.”

  Johnny glances at the photograph spread across the table, but quickly averts his eyes. I flush hot. He won’t look at me either, not directly, and leaves the room.

  I stand, leaving the newspaper open on the table, and I follow Johnny out of the kitchen without a word to Glad from either of us. I chase him up the stairs to my bedroom. I am terribly unsteady inside myself and he sits on the bed and looks at me, but I see that he’s not angry or upset. He looks at me like I can suddenly imagine boys looking at the photograph of me in the newspaper, and I don’t like it, it frightens me, like I’m made of paper, like I’m a printed picture, all surface, all skin, no depth, no muscle, no heft.

  “Say something,” I demand of him.

  “You’ve got great gams,” he says, and he breaks into a grin.

  I feel safe, then. “Anything else?”

  “Why do you have to go and be photographed like that,” he says, sincerely.

  “Well.” I feel defensive. “It pays for this apartment for one thing. And I’m saving up.”

  “For what? You’ll just be married someday.”

  “Will I?”

  “Won’t you?”

  “Well maybe I won’t,” I say defiantly. “If this is a proposal, it stinks.”

  “Who says it’s a proposal?”

  My breath catches and I flood with humiliation, like I’ve been slapped. This is our second argument. Neither of us apologizes afterward. We pretend, instead, that it never happened.

  THE NEWFANGLED BATHING COSTUME is indeed more revealing than some decent people would like, and some decent people take time to compose and send letters expressing shock regarding modern levels of decency and morality to the newspapers that run the advertisements, which gives me a brief taste of notoriety before the
newspapers do, indeed, pull them. Almost immediately I am offered another undergarment advertisement, but this time I tell Johnny, and he says simply, I don’t like it.

  JOHNNY AND I have seen our photographs paired in the newspapers again this summer, Johnny as Canadian champion in the 100-metre hurdles. I’m a fading fourth in the women’s 800 metres, a distance now virtually defunct for girls—Glad does not choose to compete, focusing her training on the 100-metre sprint, which she wins cold.

  Mr. Tristan is too merciful to chastise me. He’s gone soft with me, and I don’t respond well to softness. Perhaps, in truth, I don’t respond well to winning. I need to run from behind. I need to tell myself a story in which I’m not the best or the favourite, and no one is watching me too closely—no one believes I can win. The other story doesn’t work for me.

  I should regret my poor showing at the Canadian championships, but I don’t seem to care.

  “Your heart’s not here,” Mr. Tristan tells me, calling me into his office. “If you want to consider retiring, I would understand.”

  “Retiring?” I’m only twenty-one.

  “You’ve got other things on your mind,” he says with a wink.

  I do? I stare at him feeling stupid and dull as his meaning washes over me. Girls become wives—it’s what happens, it is the trajectory of our lives. Am I to be an ordinary girl after all, like Olive intends to be, when the right man asks her, like the girls at the factory, like every girl, everywhere? Am I to wind my fate up with the fortune of a man, and leave it at that?

  “No thank you,” I tell Mr. Tristan stiffly. “I have no intention of retiring.”

  “Then I’ll expect more out of you, as will Mr. P. T. Pallister, your sponsor,” he says, his tone changing fractionally, hardening. “You are not to skip any more practices. You are to work your hardest, as I’ve seen you do and know you can. Do I make myself clear, Miss Smart?”

  I nod and pull myself up to my full height, shoulders back. But secretly, like a slow poisonous drip entering my bloodstream, I begin to know he’s more right than he is wrong in his assessment. I can’t pretend to feel the same urgency, the same desire to fling myself around the track, mile after mile, day after day, nursing aching muscles and blistered feet, chasing something I’ve already got.