Except when I am running.
When I am running I inhabit and exit my body in the same moment. I bear witness to the harshest of physical sensations, even while I feel myself flying free and away. I do not want to remember what has happened to me. I do not want to reflect on the past. I can’t, in a way. I’m not made for regret.
I run alone, out behind Rosebud Confectionary. I run evenings, after my shift, even after the snow falls, even after it piles deep, I run with extra socks inside my black boots, slipping and sliding around and around, knocking a path flat where my feet land.
I suppose I look a sight. I suppose I don’t care a hoot.
I run until the lights on the top floor of the factory go dark. That means the floor has been cleaned for the night, and the women are moving their heavy buckets down to one below, wrung mops slung over shoulders. Then I run the four streets over to the narrow row house where Olive and I share a room. Soaked through, I change out of my wet woollen clothes in a hurry, shivering, chilled to the core. There isn’t enough hot water to draw a bath, but Olive fetches a boiling kettle from the landlady’s kitchen and fills a basin, and I damn near scald myself sluicing my arms and face and neck with a hot cloth, wringing it out and washing until the water has lost its heat. And then I wrap in blankets and huddle in our shared bed until the shivering stops.
The landlady saves me supper.
IT’S MARCH. It must be just March. The light has changed. Evenings are brighter, the snow is a dirty skiff on the track. I am loosening into my warm-up rounds when I see Glad coming around the side of the squat flat-roofed red brick factory building. She must have slipped through the fencing. I am too startled to stop, though I feel like I’ve been thrown sideways. Yet I hardly pause in my stride.
I haven’t glimpsed sight of her since our parting last summer, the memory of which I’ve shredded and burnt and buried.
She falls in beside me as I pass by her. We don’t say a word as we pace each other stride for stride around the track. I’m on the inside, so she has to work a little harder on the turns, like another race we ran together.
I consider saying to her “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to beat you, I only meant to win.” But I can’t say what isn’t true—I’m not sorry and never will be, because gold was what I wanted. I would have given anything to win, yes; wouldn’t she have too?
We go twice around like this, in silence, winding ourselves up, until we’re giddy from the absurdity, almost, giggling at our own speechless awkwardness. I can’t be the first to speak—it’s what I feel strongly when I first see her coming around the building, that it is up to Glad to say whatever she’s come to say. But as we run stride for stride, step for step, an easiness enters my bones and muscles, a lightness I haven’t experienced in all the months of hard solitary work, and it is all I can do to stop myself from lifting her into a whirling hug. That’s how much I’ve missed her.
“Sprints?” she says to me.
I nod.
We run Coach Tristan’s favourite drill, jogging the turns, sprinting the straightaways, around and around until I’m quite certain I’ll be sick. We’re gasping on the turns, slowing to a crawl as we prepare ourselves for the burn of another go.
I don’t want to be the first to quit. From her silence, I know Glad doesn’t either.
We’ve stopped looking at each other. We can’t speak. We’re too far gone. Without a coach to give us the signal, I fight through the fog of depletion to wonder what will happen. Will we go until one of us drops? Or will we go forever? It seems a possibility.
Glad stumbles—how many laps in? It is growing dark. She stumbles and I grab her hand to prevent her falling into the hard gravel and icy chunks on the track. I feel it before I see it—a ring, a band of cold metal. I pull away.
She says nothing, but her smile is sad. Maybe I’m just projecting.
“You’re married?” The words slam out of me. I can’t stop them, surprised by the anger in my voice.
“Just,” Glad confesses. “I wanted to tell you before it came out in the papers.”
“I never read the papers,” I say.
“Well,” she says. “Well. We’re married.”
“That’s nice.” What else am I to say? Not that, I think furiously—saying nothing would have been better.
“Isn’t it?” Glad leaps on my conventional reply. Her sweet face opens to my pinched envy. “Oh, isn’t it?” As if I might be a friend like any other, but I am not, and she is not. We are not just friends, and never have been, right from the very start. From the very start we’ve been rivals too, opponents, competitors. Perhaps Glad has always known this; perhaps I did not want to.
She’s won. She’s beat me. I may have bested her in a running race—gently fading victory—but this time, when it really matters, I’ve lost, and she wants, sweetly and hopefully—do you see what I am saying?—to be certain that I know.
She wants to hurt me, just a little bit; only now do I understand.
I’m not angry anymore.
“It is nice,” I say, of her marriage, but also of all that I can now leave unspoken between us. I need not apologize for what’s gone before. I need only give her leave to be who she is, and love her as she goes, which is all that has ever been asked of me—isn’t it?—by the ones that I love. “It’s very very nice,” I say again, flushing as I repeat myself.
“I’m glad,” she speaks confidingly.
“Of course you are, you’ll always be,” I say, attempting a joke.
After a pause: “You’re working here again?”
I nod. I don’t mention that my job is in the scullery, cleaning moulds. The long metal trays with their inverted rosebuds must be scoured and sterilized in a three-step process that cracks and reddens the skin on my hands and arms, and steams open the pores of my face. My hands look like they belong to an old woman, but my face is clear as a child’s.
Glad and I cross the dirty slush that is freezing into hard ridges as night approaches. I offer her a drink from the glass jar I keep by the door. The water is sharp with shards.
When we’ve drunk, I open the back door of the factory with a key, and we walk along the quiet hall, past the darkened windows, over the parquet flooring, dripping wet, aching, flushed and silent, quite as if nothing has ever changed, as if inside these walls we’ve stepped into our former selves: teammates, friends.
“Miss Smart,” nods the night watchman. He opens the front door for us, and we pass through and out into the darkening night. The doors are locked behind us.
We stand in the street at the bottom of the factory’s wide polished concrete steps.
I need to go home to the room I share with Olive. I need the kettle of hot water, and the scalding cloth, and the blankets, and my bed. I need the landlady’s plate of mash with carrots and boiled salt pork. I need what I need.
Glad needs what she needs.
“I can’t retire yet,” Glad is telling me. “I want to see Los Angeles! I hear the weather’s beautiful. What about you, Aggie? Won’t you race this summer? You can’t keep training all by yourself.”
I’ve not been thinking of these sessions as preparation for anything at all. This isn’t training, it’s survival.
“Johnny’s studying medicine—and I’ve been running with the university’s team. You’d like the coach. He’s just as mean as Mr. Tristan, not that you’d know about that. You were always Tristan’s favouri—”
“Please, Glad. I don’t need a coach.” Harsher than I mean it to be. I begin to walk, Glad falling in beside me.
“I’m not a student, I’m just training with them—I’m the only girl—it’s really fun, you’d love it, Aggie, and you’re just as good as any of us. You could keep up.”
I shake my head.
“But I miss you, Aggie.”
My stomach plunges. You do?
“I’m sorry,” I hear myself saying. I see that it is my turn to walk away, to step into the corn and vanish.
“It’s for
the best.” I quicken my pace. I’m shivering in my damp clothes, and she must be chilled too. We need to get out of the cold.
“You’re not saying good-bye?” Glad may be entirely sincere but she sounds like a breathless actress in a movie, a Jean Harlow type. I laugh. I actually laugh. It could be taken as cruel, but Glad laughs in return. “Of course not,” she says, to reassure herself. “Of course it’s not good-bye, it never is, not really.”
I let her think so.
We part ways on the corner of Queen and Spadina. I run all the way home and resist the urge—this time—to glance over my shoulder, to look back.
I’VE LOOKED BACK BEFORE. I’ve looked back enough.
That photo at the finish line, taken August 10, 1928—it does not show what it seems to show. It does not show the victorious stride of a golden girl runner. It shows the finish of a girl who couldn’t have won if she hadn’t stolen victory from a friend.
In the photo, I am looking over my shoulder, but not at the German girl, whom I’m besting at the line, no—I am looking for Glad. Where are you? Where have you gone?
The race does not go as planned.
Right at the start, the American jumps out to a strong lead that begins to seem, far too soon, too wide a berth for comfort. I’ve woken this morning feeling not quite myself, my nightdress damp with sweat. Nerves? Illness? I don’t mention it to Miss Gibb, nor to Mr. Tristan. I can’t eat my breakfast; instead sip half a cup of strong coffee, and here I am, tight as a bow, progressing around the track. Here we are. As we complete the first four-hundred-metre lap, I feel depleted, washed with doubt. The emotion is unfamiliar and it is utterly crushing. You won’t catch that girl. You can’t.
There is something wrong.
This happens in races. It happens to excellent athletes: it has happened so very recently to Glad. There are those who shine in practice and training, and who cannot turn their minds to belief, against resistance, when under pressure. I am shocked to find myself in this position as we approach the turn where, I know, I must make my move. But I hurt. It isn’t a physical hurt, it is an enveloping, almost sweet-tasting interior pain—the pain of acceptance. I am going to accept that this is happening. I am going to let it happen. I am not going to make my move after all.
I am going to give up.
That is when Glad arrives, at my shoulder. We move as one into the turn, with Glad on the outside, boxing out a girl who presses from behind. As we straighten onto the back stretch I hear her say—Now, Aggie! Let’s go!—though I can’t put straight whether she’s said the words out loud, or whether her mind has spoken to mine. We are picking up the pace down the stretch, side by side, and at the final curve, again, she boxes out the girl behind us—it’s the German girl—and I see the American falter. Minutely. I see her stride express a stagger of doubt.
Glad makes a move to pull ahead and the space between us stretches like an elastic band, widening. When it matters, you let her win, I hear Mr. Tristan’s prophecy. You let her win. It is astonishing the density of thought that can be compressed into a single moment, into one or two strides on a flat grass course.
The space between us widens, our connection stretched to its limit. But the band does not break. Instead, it is as if I am being flung forward, like a pebble inside a slingshot, as if she is pulling on me, launching me to victory. In a few quick steps, I hurtle past Glad. I feel her giving me something—I feel it like a surge of electrical power, and I open my stride and kick down the homestretch, gaining on the American like she’s standing still.
I will win this race.
I have no thought of Glad until that final step, when I turn to look for her.
And she isn’t there. Not yet, not yet, not yet.
I cross the line alone, the German girl on my heels, the American fading for third, and Glad well back in fourth, out of the record books. Her joy at my victory seems unconditional. I think that scares me more than if she were to slap me.
Because I’ve seen her bent over in wailing agony as the girls run the 100-metre dash without her. I’ve seen her rise up and vanish, helped by Mr. Tristan, under the stands. I’ve seen her composed that very evening at dinnertime, laughing off sympathy, approaching the American girl who won with her hand outstretched.
Because the pictures do not fit together. How can anyone be so jagged, so broken, and so rapidly, smartly healed?
She was ahead of me, and I chased her down and crashed past her, and I am certain, sick with certainty, that in those final heedless, aggressive strides I stole what should have been hers, ruthlessly. I don’t think she gave it to me, for all that it would make the more comforting tale to tell myself. I think I took it, because I’d seen her weak and fallen, and I knew that I could.
And now. And now. What do I owe to Glad? Aren’t we even, after all?
It’s just a race.
Let me leave her here, forever behind me, forever beyond me. I wonder at my love for her. Sometimes I think I must have loved her more than I ever loved Johnny. Sometimes I think she must have loved me too, more than him, in some strange way. I know that sounds delusional—may be delusional—but I can’t think of a better reason to give and take as we gave and took, except for love.
She sends me a Christmas card, two years running, at the newspaper. She’s seen my byline. This is a few years on, after the war has begun. She and Johnny have a boy and a girl—the millionaire’s family, she writes—and a home in Calgary by the river. They can see the mountains while sitting at their dining room table.
The second card, the following year, is less newsy. She signs her name and Johnny’s under the salutation, “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!”
I reply to neither. I’m not the Christmas card type.
THERE IS MORE to the story of this summer: 1931.
I owe the trajectory of my life to Mr. P. T. Pallister, owner of Rosebud Confectionary and, briefly, patron of the elite Canadian female athlete. I’d saint him if I believed in sainthood. But Mr. P. T. Pallister would never have found me save for my brother George. I was a long shot. Improbable. I was a bet made by my brother—a gambler whom no one would ever saint. And so it is to George that I owe the greater debt.
Tattie sends her eldest, the boy, to my door with a message to visit, please, and I accompany the child home, not wanting him to walk the streets alone. It is a summer Sunday and my legs ache from a long early run, pain in my shins.
Tattie greets me at the door with kisses on both cheeks, reaching up.
I don’t know what I’m expecting. Not this.
George: “Come in, come in, sit, recline in our parlour, said the spider to the fly. Tattie, a cup of brew for my world-famous sister.”
I perch on a wooden chair that teeters on rickety legs, missing several rungs.
George is in a fine mood. Expansive, desperate, wrapped in a greasy knitted blanket. He wants to talk and talk, and not about this—what is happening right now. He wants the past to cram into the room, to transport us all. He conjures up his own pestering letters written these vanished years ago to Mr. P. T. Pallister, singing my praises from on high. (I can only imagine their grammatical flaws and hyperbolic claims.)
“I just went on writing ’em till he had to agree to have you.”
“But, George! I never knew!”
“Didn’t you wonder why the famous P. T. came knocking at your door?” George wheezes between coughs, laughing.
“It wasn’t P. T. himself on the doorstep, you know. Not personally.” I’m near tears, seeing George like this. How could he have got so bad? I wouldn’t have known—I chide myself for being a negligent sister, a reluctant visitor—if Tattie hadn’t sent for me, thinking I might help, and won’t I? I will help however I can.
“So it wasn’t old P. T. himself banging down your door?” George wants a story from me. He hasn’t got breath for his own.
“It was his secretary,” I say, trying not to spy too obviously around the crowded room that is furnished with unrelated
objects, some of them not, strictly speaking, furniture. The curtains are drawn, and I see they aren’t curtains, but blankets too worn and thin to be otherwise useful. “A man in a black suit and proper hat, knocking at the door of 445 Bathurst, sending Mrs. Smythe, our landlady, into fits. I wasn’t even there. Remember? Olive had found me a job at her factory—that was Packer’s Meats, before we went to Rosebud. She’d got me a job as a runner.”
“Good job for you.”
“Wasn’t it? But then P. T. offered me a better one.” I’m embroidering the story, a trick I learned from George himself, because it wasn’t Mr. P. T. Pallister who offered me a job, not directly, and I only ever met the man but once, when he shook my hand after the team arrived home from Amsterdam, hauling our gold and silver. That’s three years ago, now, and Mr. P. T. Pallister locked up and insane, or so the story goes, but what use such details? I purge them from my version.
“You were quite a runner.” George reclines on his side on what looks to be a narrow bed, although the room we are in seems to be one where the family does its living. Tattie and the children hover in the corners like so many fluttering moths.
“Wasn’t I?” I say.
“Still are,” George says.
“Nice of you to say so.” But my words are lost under a spell of coughing that brings Tattie running with a cloth, and I see there is blood. Tattie cradles his face in her hands. I sit stiffly and stare at the wall over George’s head, unpainted plaster that is coming away in chunks, exposing the greying lathe.
I think, I need to tell Mother. It doesn’t matter how old I get, nor how far away I live, I will always turn first to that thought: I need to tell Mother. Maybe she could help. Is he dying before my eyes?
I glance quickly, not wishing to disturb this private moment, and my brother’s eyes catch mine and I can’t look away, his face streaming with tears. He is six years older than me, and I am just twenty-three.
The sound of his thickened lungs lays waste to the room. The spell is coming to an end. He is still alive.
At last it stops. I’ve forgotten what we’ve been talking about, but George hasn’t. He wants to make a joke. “I’m dying. I’ll say anything.”
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