Still, when the three of us meet at the bottom of the steps, we appear to go on as before, as if nothing has changed. Pretence erects a stiff structure around me, dictating what I can and cannot say or do, lest I crumble—or the world beyond me crumbles. There are rules. I must hold fast.
Glad is quick to throw her arms around me and reach up to kiss me on both cheeks, and I receive her offering warmly, my heart beating wildly. She does not seem a stranger, and I want to weep with relief.
“Are you all better then? Are you quite well?”
I bite my lip and nod yes. I cling to Glad. I’ve missed her.
I don’t dare look at Johnny to guess his thoughts. Did we ever really know each other? It seems unfathomable. It is as if he is that much greater than me, and I am that much smaller. If she notices, Glad doesn’t let on. She holds me at arm’s length, a whirlwind of information, reporting on our apartment, and on the irritating habits of the roommate who has replaced me, and on how I am not to worry, because I can stay in her room—Glad’s—for now.
I don’t want to stay in Glad’s room.
We are following a script we can’t step away from.
I’m a wretched actress, never worse, but Glad and Johnny read their lines naturally, believably, and I can only look on and admire their fluency in dissemblance, quite out of my reach.
Johnny does not kiss me, of course. I am surprised when he squeezes my hand. The hope that leaps in my heart at his touch is dreadful. I think, Couldn’t we continue like this, the three of us? Couldn’t we, just? I think how happy we could be, the three of us. I don’t need him all to myself, I think. I could let her have as much of him as she liked. I wouldn’t be jealous, if only I could keep them both, like this.
Johnny is squeezing my hand, and my heart soars, but just as abruptly, he lets go my fingers from his. I struggle to find a reason to keep breathing. Jealousy attacks me like a coward, leaping from behind, and I know that I can’t share, after all—either of them.
“I’ll stay with Olive,” I say. I don’t make an excuse for turning down Glad’s offer to share her own room.
“Oh!” says Glad, as if I’ve hurt her, but I don’t care.
THE ROOMMATE with the alleged irritating habits who has taken my former quarters is not a runner. She works days, dawn to dusk, piecing gloves in a factory, and passes her spare hours at the pictures. She seems genuinely excited to meet me—a girl whose picture she’s seen in a magazine—but she does not take to me. In real life, in the flesh, I disappoint. All the qualities projected onto a girl photographed in a fur coat pale when the girl herself steps into one’s kitchen, wearing gloves and a hat and a blue serge coat with plain black buttons. Especially when the girl is me. Girl of projection: beautiful, self-possessed, elegant, bold. Girl of reality: in need of a hairbrush, distracted, scattered, cool.
The roommate is the sort of girl who takes care of her clothes and hair. She keeps the door to her room closed and spends plenty of leisurely time before the bathroom mirror, or so I assume. When we pass each other in the hallway or the kitchen, the silence is awkward, broken by mistimed statements about the weather that cross each other in the air.
The ginger tom has forgotten me, and hisses whenever I come near. I try not to take offence, but it seems a judgement. My spirits are that low. I am not prepared to be the person I have become.
This is the thick of summer. I practice exercises in Olive’s room, between the bed and the wall of windows. I place my hands flat on the floorboards to stretch my aching legs. I jog in place and perform jumping jacks that shake the rafters. The windows are open and the air off the lake is humid. It is far too late in the season to qualify for the Canadian championships, even if I wanted to.
“Come join us at the track,” Glad offers, but I decline.
“I’m still mending,” I say, and cough lightly, touching my chest with my fingers to prove it—Olive and I agreed last winter it would be best if she returned to the city and spread the word that I’d taken ill, and that my mother was caring for me. Even the suggestion of tuberculosis would be better than the whisper of unwanted pregnancy. As I cough, I realize that I almost believe the lie myself. It’s so plausible: of course I cannot run with Glad and Johnny. My cough is to blame. My cough has made me weak.
And it is true that I am weak, or weakened. I’ve pushed myself down too far inside, sanded off my edges, narrowed my hopes. I’ve got a secret now. It dare not be spoken, lest it ruin me.
Where to start again, after that?
Staring at myself in Olive’s mirror, I think that I look essentially unchanged—slender, tall, pale, my hair long, almost transparent—yet I feel strange within the apartment, my former home, its high white walls and huge open windows somehow confining. This is a place where I’ve been so free, so certain of love. Thinking of it, reminded, I can hardly breathe. But I cannot bear to leave its safety. I hide in Olive’s hushed room, relieved that she works long hours and that I am all alone. Sometimes I lie flat on the wide wood floorboards and bathe in radiant sunshine that streams through the windows, soaking in the warmth, as if it might liven me to wakening.
At night, I share the bed with my sister.
Sometimes I wake and I am holding her by the hand. Sometimes I wake and she is already awake, peering at me with concern. “You were talking in your sleep again. Shouting, more like it.”
I tell her I can’t remember.
“Just a dream,” she says, and I agree. But it is hard to relax. I curl in on myself and draw to the edge of the bed, as far from Olive as I can get, and try not to focus on her breathing, which tells me she’s lying there just as awake as I am, both of us miles from sleep.
I do not leave the apartment for an entire week, and then another, and another, and another, long enough to lose the roommate, who gives her month’s notice at the end of July, which is bad news, as I can ill afford to pay my share of the rent.
The tom cat switches his tail at me in disdain.
I hear Johnny’s voice, occasionally, in the rooms downstairs, and I take care not to go down, and he does not come up. Once I step unguardedly into the kitchen and discover him sitting at the table with a cup of tea, his feet bare and propped up on a chair, his hair slicked down and wet, perhaps with sweat. It is almost as if I’ve been electrocuted, so violent is my reaction. There is no hiding the way I crash against the doorframe, continue like an automaton to the cupboard over the sink, open it, stare inside blankly, leave it open, and stumble out of the room, smashing my shoulder again against the frame, as if my trajectory, once set, cannot be changed. As if I can’t see the opening, only its hard edges.
I AM INSIDE the apartment, alone before Olive’s mirror, brushing my hair one hundred strokes, one thousand, when Glad wins the 100-metre dash for the second year in a row, retaining her reign as Canadian women’s champion. Johnny takes third place in the hurdles, and promptly announces his retirement. He intends to go to medical school instead.
Olive carries home the afternoon paper and knocks on the door. She knows I’m in here, but she doesn’t choose to disturb me, even though it is her room, by rights. I hear the sound of newsprint sliding under the door, paper crinkling and rustling, and of Olive’s soft retreating footsteps. She’s folded the pages in such a way that I am certain to see the two of them the moment I turn to look. Here they are, pictured in black-and-white, Glad and Johnny, the two of them together. Yet they are no more together than they were when I saw them beside the train. They do not touch, they face the camera, they grin in tandem. But I see it clearly: I’ve been forgotten—no, it is as if I don’t exist. I feel clammy, though it’s hot.
I don’t say to Olive “I’m going out.” I overtake her in my rush down the stairs, and I don’t stop running until I’m outside. I feel like a bug whose rock has just been overturned, exposed suddenly to the blaring massive world from which it has been hiding.
I stumble along the crowded summer street: electric trolleys and horse carts and automobiles sou
nding horns and bicycles and dogs and children underfoot or chasing balls and I know that I must look for a job, and soon. No one is going to hire me to pose in a fur coat or a bathing costume. My time has come and gone. So soon. I can hardly believe it. The understanding fills my body from the outside in like cold water is being pumped into my bowels. There is no money anymore, the money has vanished in the crash. This new decade has stumbled before it can get properly started—where will it go?
I begin to run, between people, around them, my feet in their hard-soled black shoes tapping the paved sidewalk. I run even though I know how ridiculous I must look in my long dark skirt and elbow-length sleeves. I run south until everything crowding in on me grows indistinct and loses shape and doesn’t matter, until I meet the lake, and then I stop and hold myself still, and watch the water lap the shore.
Is it possible that I am twenty-two and already at the end of the best part of my story?
GLAD CRIES.
I hear Olive on the stairs, coming in from outside, and I hear her pause, and retreat and go back down and close the door. I hear the click of Olive’s key in the lock, shutting us in. She’s guessed too, what we all know, and she’s been waiting, like all of us, for what must finally be done about it.
Glad and Johnny are in love.
That is not what Glad says.
She says, “We’d like to marry, Johnny and me. Oh, Aggie.” She slumps in one of the hard, velvet-covered chairs I bought with my fur money, and which we arranged in front of the fireplace that has never worked. The sounds that accumulate on a hot city sidewalk rise and spill through our open window and into the long narrow room. We’ll never fill the room with enough furniture. It echoes. Glad wipes her eyes and blows her nose exhaustively into a handkerchief.
“This is awful,” she says, looking up at me.
“No, it’s not,” I say, leaning my tall frame against the plaster wall beside the fireplace, suddenly as languid and easy as a blade of meadow grass moving with the wind. I’m relieved it is up to her to tell me, and not Johnny, although it seems cowardly on his part, fundamentally unfair. I suppose it speaks to their relationship: Glad is happy to spare Johnny the suffering, and Johnny is happy to be spared. I suppose it speaks to my relationship with each of them too. I see that I trust Glad in a way that I never trusted Johnny. I’ve always been sure of Glad.
I come close, kneel before her, and lay my head in her lap, and hold her hands.
“I’m a terrible friend,” says Glad solemnly. “You deserve better.”
“You’re not. You’re the best friend I ever had.” I mean it too, even as I hear the past tense eliding us into once upon a time. I see Glad in that claustrophobic change room in the bowels of Rosebud Confectionary, marching up to me and telling me what to do. I see her sleek bobbed head cresting inexorably past mine on the track, and I remember looking for her as I cross the line and steal gold. What do I care of Johnny? I’ve had many months to foreclose on that loss. I can convince myself that I never really knew him, the distance between us like a long railroad line between the East and the Prairies. What we had seems ordinary, I guess, something anyone else might have too, and I can pretend that ordinary comes easy, goes easy.
It’s Glad I want to keep.
“Where will you live?” I wonder, and stop myself. “No, don’t tell me. I don’t need to know.”
“We won’t get married right away,” Glad says all in a rush. “We’ll wait. Until everyone is ready.”
“Ready?” I cry, pulling away from her. “Everyone?”
I am ashamed, my desolation circling her ankles like a beaten dog.
What went wrong between us? I want to know, as if she’s done this to me deliberately, just to hurt me.
She is distracted and rises, pacing around the room like she’s marking out a track for a race we’ve yet to run.
I want to tell her about being a girl in the Granny Room and have to curl into a ball to stop the truth from flowing out.
Please get up, she says to me. I’ll always be your friend. Please believe me.
16
Alone
THERE. I’VE JUST DENIED my own sister. I’ve said I don’t know her. I’ve said she couldn’t be who they say she is. I’ve told a terrible lie, and the room is rocked by it.
“She’s not making sense anymore.”
“No, it’s that she doesn’t believe us.”
“I’m going to cry!”
“Don’t get dramatic, Kaley,” the woman says. “We’ll take her to the lighthouse, like we planned. It’s this house. She’s not happy here.”
I’ve told a terrible lie, and my heart is rocked by it.
I’m experiencing an old familiar itch. It isn’t good. It’s the urge to confess, to tell all, like a bared and humbled person who wants to scrape herself clean, to cut from herself a balled-up truth that’s so ingrown it will leave an ugly hole in its absence.
I’ve hidden this scrap so long, I thought I’d killed it, but here it is, beating like an extra heart.
I want these people to know. I very particularly want the girl—the runner—to know.
Is this why I’m here, in this room where I shouldn’t be, looking out this window at a stand of pines, with no one to reassure me that I am who I believe myself to be? Something has rushed us toward one another, some clarity of purpose that I can’t recognize. But I will. I will get to the bottom of it. It is my job, after all. It is a job I’m very good at, no matter that I’m a woman: I get to the bottom and bring up every piece of it and hang it out clean and simple, without adornment, plain and true and utterly, intractably mysterious.
OUR GRAND APARTMENT over Yonge Street empties out like it’s been lifted and turned upside down, its contents pitched into the trash heap of begone and good riddance. Glad escapes home to her family; that is all I know, and I don’t want to know more. Olive and I move without leaving a forwarding address, together, into a different apartment, a rooming house with a landlady who cooks the meals. We bring with us the hard, velvet-covered chairs, which we stuff into the single shabby respectable room we share, like we did before I’d gone golden.
“You look familiar.” The landlady scrutinizes me, almost accusingly, when Olive and I come to arrange about the room.
“I’m Olive Smart, and this is my sister Aganetha Smart,” says Olive. “Aganetha won gold for Canada at the Olympics.”
The woman gazes blankly between us.
“She beat a German girl in a running race.”
No, the woman shakes her head. That isn’t it. She frowns at me. Even though the weather is merely mild, I am wearing the fur coat from the advertisement that I made for Canada’s most famous department store, and which I kept as part of my payment, and which I have not sold, even though Olive and I could use the money. Olive is the one who tells me not to: “You’re better off keeping something like that, in the long run. Who knows when it will come in handy?”
The fur coat offers courage and disguise. I turn the collar up around my neck and strike a pose. Recognition flickers across the woman’s face. She appears to be any age between thirty and fifty, with skin as waxy and smooth and plain as a clean white potato.
“Aganetha also modelled in advertisements.”
“I knew it! I knew I knew you. Come in, see the room. You’re boarding together, are you? Sisters?”
“Sisters.”
Olive also finds me a job at Rosebud, even though half the girls have been fired and those who remain have taken a pay cut. The Rosebud Ladies’ Athletics Club has vanished as presumptively as it arrived. The track goes unkempt. Mr. P. T. Pallister himself is rumoured to have gone insane or tried to kill himself. It is his wife now in charge of the business, and she is hard as stone, because it is her duty to keep what he couldn’t safe for her children. Mothers can be hard when it comes to their children.
Leave it to Olive to get me hired under such circumstances.
Olive is resourceful like that. By spring, having got me settl
ed, she will find herself a husband in similar fashion, applying sheer determination and persistence, even if he will move her to Australia. She will blend in with her new circumstances. She will farm sheep, her fair skin broiling under a foreign sun. She will do battle with herds of wild rabbits. She will raise a handful of hearty Australian children. Her letters to me, arriving several times a year, seem to drop in from another planet, a world only remotely connected to my own. I can’t read them without being moved to tears. The thought of Olive—sturdy, practical, indispensable—claiming a brand-new life, stomping her own path in rubber wellies and trousers, her dark hair gone to wild grey. I ask for photographs. She’ll travel home for our mother’s funeral, but not our father’s, and after that we will not see each other again.
But for now, we are together. For now, I take us for granted, and our pairing in times of need, the comfort of sharing a bed and sleeping side by side, her shallow nighttime breath warm on my neck.
GUNN, OLIVE. Born June 1904 in Canada, Olive moved to Australia in 1931 and never looked back. Died June 1999 in Middle Park, Australia, shortly after celebrating her ninety-fifth birthday. Predeceased by husband, Herbert (1985), and survived by two sons and two daughters, and by grandchildren and great-grandchildren too numerous to name here. Her declining years were difficult, but Olive never lost her generous spirit. “A life lived well!”
I FEEL HOLLOW. I go about my tasks in a haze, removed from the ordinary sensations of living. “Keep moving,” the girl beside me has to prompt as the greasy moulds pile up at my elbow, and I stand staring blankly into space, thinking of nothing, it seems.
I can’t enter into my body; it is a struggle. I am drifting. I drift toward vanishing.
Girl Runner Page 20