The Girl of His Dreams

by Harry Mazer

  He didn’t even ask if she would or she could, just took it for granted she would say yes. Yes. Yes, Floyd. Sure, I’ll come back. Sure, I’ll help out. The yes was on the tip of her tongue. All her life, she’d been saying yes to her family, yes to her father, yes to her mother (but that was different), yes to her brother. Yes, yes, yes.

  The one time she didn’t say yes, did what she wanted to do, was when her father was dead and Floyd was gone. Then she said yes to Sophie, took her money and started flying lessons.

  “You didn’t even ask me about my job,” she said. “Aren’t you the least bit curious?”

  “Okay, what’s this great job of yours?”

  “Forget it. And I can’t get ready that fast, either.” Then she thought, Willis. What was she going to tell him?

  Her brother put down his cup. “You don’t come now, you’re going to have to take the bus then, because I’m not coming down twice. You have any jelly?”

  She got the jar from the cupboard.

  “What kind of jelly is this?”

  “Pizza jelly.” It was her joke with Willis. There was pizza jelly and pizza milk and pizza toothpaste.

  “When’ll you be home? Tomorrow?”

  “No. Not tomorrow. I’ve got to tell my boss.”

  “Give him a couple of days. But no more, Soph.”

  She sat down. Pizza jelly, her job, her boss—he didn’t care what she said. It was like he was in the barn, brushing the mosquitoes away. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to go, but her brother needed her. “Can’t you get anybody to help Pat?” she said.

  “She wants you, Soph.”

  “What if I don’t come home, Floyd?”

  “What’s the matter? Are you mad about something?” He got that little-boy look on his face. The what-did-I-do-wrong look.

  “I’m here now. I’m not on the farm anymore. I’m going to come up for a few days when the baby comes. But I’m going to have to come back.”

  Floyd squinted at her, really looked at her, a cold look, pale around the eyes. All the warmth had gone out of his face. “So that’s the way things are,” he said. “I thought you’d be glad to come. Well … suit yourself.” He put on his jacket and left.

  Twenty-nine

  On the way over to the Winter Sports Dome, Willis showed Sophie a story he’d clipped out of the newspaper. Aaron Hill was coming back home in June to run in the Eastern College Regionals. “Look at him,” Willis said. The picture showed Hill standing with his hands on his hips. “You see how relaxed he is, Soph? He’s got the opposition all psyched out. Those other runners look at that picture and they know they’re going to lose.”

  He could have quoted the article to her, word for word, he’d read it so many times. “I’m a runner,” Hill had said. “I was born to be a runner and so I run.”

  Ever since Sophie had said that maybe Willis was a great runner and didn’t even know it, he’d been toying around with the idea of competing, maybe, someday—even running against Aaron Hill. It was April now. Hill was coming here in less than two months. Here to the Winter Sports Dome.

  They hurried along the Dome’s high concrete walls. Sophie was telling him about her brother’s visit. “And, Willis, he expected me to pack up and leave with him, just like that.”

  “You told him no, didn’t you?” He kept his arm tight through hers. Sophie leaned her head against his shoulder. The wind gusted down the long bare walkways, and he zipped up the jacket of his new red nylon warmup suit. It was his birthday present from Sophie.

  A troop of athletes came toward them, flying along with the wind behind them. The high hurdlers carried their long poles like furled flags. Men and women. They started down a flight of stairs to the team gate.

  “They’re so light on their feet,” Sophie said.

  “Let’s go in with them.” It was something he suddenly wanted to do. They hurried after the team and were almost the last ones past the guard. As soon as they were through the gate, Willis said jubilantly, “He thought we were part of the team. Did you see that, Soph? Did you see how easy it was?”

  “What if he’d stopped us, Willis? What would we have done then?”

  Willis laughed. “We would have paid.” It wasn’t the money he was thinking about. He didn’t care about the money. It was how easily he’d melted into the team. If he’d stayed with them, he could have gone into the locker room and out onto the field, maybe even run as part of the team. “I fit right in,” he said.

  “It’s your running suit,” she said. “But how about me?”

  “You’re my trainer.” It was half true, more than half true. Sophie had gone from just pacing him in the car out at the air base to recording his time and discussing what he had to do to make his time better. It didn’t escape him that since Sophie had started coming out with him, his time had improved steadily. Just her being there had a lot to do with it.

  He was no longer running for himself alone. He wanted to look good in Sophie’s eyes and he wanted to look at those records and see them improving. It was satisfying. And then he thought that if he could improve this much with Sophie, how much more he would be capable of with some real competition.

  In the stands, they found a place above the starting line. A seated row of judges was opposite them at a long table. “I’ve never been to a track meet before,” Sophie said. “I’ve never been in a place like this before.” She was looking up and around at everything. “It’s like a giant bird cage.”

  Willis was excited, too. There was something about being here, with all these people, a sense of possibilities—maybe it was the size of everything, the scale, the height of the dome, the colors of all the different teams, the hawkers, the music, the banners. Maybe it was the noise and enthusiasm of the crowd, and the way the air vibrated and everything was brighter, larger and anything seemed possible. Even racing against Aaron Hill.

  Aaron Hill. Was he actually thinking that? Him? In a race against Aaron Hill? That was competition. The real, the ultimate test. Crazy. Even if he was good enough, which he half doubted and half believed, how could he? He belonged to no team, was part of no organization, had no standing anywhere. Who would let him on the same track with Hill? Who was he that Hill would even want to or agree to race against him? It was simple out-and-out craziness. But it didn’t stop Willis from thinking about it.

  “Who do I watch?” Sophie said.

  “Watch green number twelve.” The runners were lining up below them.

  “Why him?”

  “I like his looks.”

  The starter’s gun popped. The race began. “Come on,” Willis called to his runner. “Get on the inside.”

  “Come on, Twelve!” Sophie yelled.

  Their man ended up fifth in a field of eight. “That bum,” Willis said.

  The women’s events really interested Sophie, the vaulters and high jumpers especially. “They’re flying,” she kept saying to Willis. “I’m so glad I came.”

  Halfway through the meet, they went behind the stands to get something to eat. Sophie put a thin line of mustard on her hot dog. “Willis, I keep thinking you should be out there.”

  All the old remarks were ready to fall from his lips: He was a loner. He hated people watching him, knowing about him, asking questions. He ran because he loved to run, not to compete, not to get trophies. All true. But right now, his reasons sounded like excuses to him.

  Why didn’t he run in competition? Why didn’t he race? He’d been scared in junior high, but he wasn’t fourteen years old anymore. What did he have to be afraid of? All he could do was make a fool of himself. So what if people laughed? At least he’d know, once and for all, how good he was.

  “You want me to go up against Hill when he comes here in June?” he said to Sophie. There! That was the idea he’d been sniffing around, poking at, circling around as if it were some large, unpredictable animal that he’d better not come too close to.

  “Sure I do,” she said, “and I’ll come watch y
ou.”

  “Will you?”

  “You know I would.”

  “Well, maybe you’ll be there, but you won’t see me. You have to be in college to be eligible to run, which I’m not.”

  “What about people like you, people who are working and are so good and want to run?”

  “There’s always the running clubs, but I don’t belong to them, either. I don’t belong to anything, except me.” That was what he always said. Then something happened that was a little eerie. Sophie reached right into his head and plucked out what he’d been thinking but didn’t dare say.

  “Never mind college. What if you just came here and ran? Who’s going to stop you?”

  “How about forty security guards and every runner in the Northeast?”

  “They won’t catch you. You’re so fast you won’t let them.”

  That animal, that other animal, the one inside him, that hungry one—Ambition—was on its hind legs now. It had reared up, eager and ready. Yes. Who could stop him? He’d come in running and never stop till he crossed the finish line.

  They went back and watched the fifteen-hundred-meter race. Willis sat forward. “That’s my event,” he said. He watched intently, as if he were on the track himself. In his mind, he was there, running, in the pack, then moving up, taking the lead, breaking out. No one could stop him.

  Nothing could stop him—not if he wanted to run. Not his not being in college, his not belonging—none of that would matter. And if he ran against Hill, nobody could deny him his place. Then they’d all know him.

  At the end of the meet, after the awards ceremony, he and Sophie joined the crowds on the track. Only a few of the athletes remained. The judges were gone, their chairs kicked over. A kid ran across the top of the officials’ table. Willis stood on the track, scuffed the surface, then went to the starting line and knelt down in the runner’s position.

  Thirty

  Almost without admitting it to himself, Willis started serious training, as if he had made up his mind to enter the June Invitational, the one in which Aaron Hill was going to run. He had six weeks to get ready. “Enough time?” Sophie asked.

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t want to think about that. If he thought about it, he would know there wasn’t enough time, but six weeks was all he had.

  He and Sophie worked out his training program. She bought a new notebook and wrote out the schedule. He had forty-two days. She gave a page to each day. Every day there had to be a mixture of long conditioning runs, speed training, wind sprints and uphill dashes. She checked off each routine as he completed it and entered the times. His goal was to work up to sixty miles of long-distance running every week.

  At first he was a little anxious about his leg. It still got occasional twinges. But his leg was strong. He was feeling fine. Every day the running got better. Mornings, he ran his old route in the neighborhood, and after work, he went up to the college track. On the weekends, he and Sophie went to the air base, where they had laid out a quarter-mile straightaway. It wasn’t your standard quarter-mile running track, but it gave him something to work against.

  Sophie stood at the finish, holding the new stopwatch. When she raised a white handkerchief, he got ready. When it fell, he was off. At first his time was fair, not good, not good enough. He still needed a lot of work.

  How could he enter a real race? He was deficient in so many ways. He’d never had coaching. He’d never had competition. Never run against a clock, didn’t know how to start, how to conduct himself on the track. There were strategies to running; there were tactics, things to do that made a difference in a race. All he could do was get in the best condition possible and then go in there and run his heart out.

  Sophie coached him and he coached himself. As he ran, he tried to visualize a real race, the other runners. What lane was he in? Who was in front of him? Who was behind him? Who was holding back? Who was gaining on him? When should he move to the inside track? When should he kick?

  One night, he woke up in a sweat. He’d dreamed he was on the track with Aaron Hill. Willis was on the ground and Hill was looking down at him, his hands on his hips. The next day Willis went to the Y and added Nautilus training to his schedule. He’d fooled with it on and off before, but never consistently. Now he started working with the weight machines in earnest, an hour three times a week.

  Each day, in between the running, there was the other reality. Work. The factory. Indoors. The closeness. The heat. The blue oily fog over the machines, the foul air that was clogging his lungs. The pressure. Miholic yelling for him.

  “Pierce! Clear the platform.… Pierce! get that unit outside.… Where’s that special order you crated?” Pierce! Pierce! Pierce! Like the fans he’d dreamed of, on their feet and calling his name. Only it was Miholic.

  “Do you think you’ll be doing this for the rest of your life?” Willis asked Benny.

  “Not me,” Benny said.

  “Maybe you’ll go to college.”

  “Me? No way.”

  “What if you got a sports scholarship?”

  “I don’t think they give it in my sport,” Benny said with a smirk.

  “I might go to college someday,” Willis said.

  “You? What for? They’re not going to make you any smarter. Only poorer.”

  After work, Willis began hanging around the university track. It was a busy place: Clumps of athletes—men and women jumpers, vaulters, shot-putters—working out, getting coached. Willis moved from one group to another, watching and listening. Nobody paid any attention to him. Some of the athletes wore the school’s gold-and-black track outfits, but most of them were wearing the same kind of ragtag outfit he had on.

  One day he slipped into a pack of runners. The black guy running next to him said, “I don’t know what I’m doing here.” He wore a green T-shirt and red cutoffs. “I’ve got a programming exam this week.”

  Willis nodded, as if he understood. When he saw the guy again a few days later, he said, “How’d the exam go?”

  The guy gave him the thumbs-up sign.

  In the same half-chancy way, Willis started participating in some of the field practices. It was riskier, because the coaches were here. One day he was near a group doing wind sprints. A coach called the runners up, six at a time. “One more,” the coach said. There was an empty slot. “You.” He pointed to Willis.

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you. Get in here.”

  The other guys looked at Willis, but nobody said anything. He stood up and got into position. “Go!” the coach yelled, and they were off. Sixty meters. Willis finished in the middle. Maybe if he hadn’t been so nervous he could have done better.

  The coach beckoned him. “Keep your head up. You’re running with your head down.”

  Running the next sprint he kept his head up, and he did better. The coach gave him a nod and called him over. “You always wear that hat?”

  Willis took it off and put it into his pocket.

  “Why haven’t I seen you before? You’re good. Are you on the team?”

  Willis shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “I work. I don’t have a lot of time.”

  The coach looked annoyed. “I don’t have time, either. I don’t have time to waste on men who aren’t serious.” He was young, but when he took off his cap, his head was completely bald. He looked like an egg with eyes.

  “I’m serious,” Willis said.

  “You must be a freshman. What’s your name?”

  “Willis Pierce.”

  “Spell that for me.” He wrote it down. “You’ve got potential, Pierce. I like the way you run. You want to let it go to waste, that’s your business, but if you get out here every day, I can make a runner out of you.”

  This was the way it always happened in the stories: the coach picking the natural athlete out of the pack, the kid nobody knew or liked, or the kid who had this great natural talent but who never tried or didn’t care, or maybe the kid who was too poo
r, and the coach telling him it was a sin to throw talent away. And at the end of the story the kid came through at the crucial moment, winning for the team and for the coach and for himself.

  And for a moment, standing there, Willis was that kid.

  And then he looked at the coach, at his fair, almost invisible eyebrows, at his smooth, eggshell face, and he heard the shouts and the coaches’ birdlike whistles, and he heard the soft thud of feet on the track, and his heart dropped, because it wasn’t a story, after all.

  Thirty-one

  That weekend was the first really hot day of spring. He and Zola and Sophie went to the beach. It looked like everybody in the city had had the same idea. There was a long line of cars waiting to get into the park, and the parking lot was packed. There wasn’t a spot on the beach, either, and they had to settle for the grass farther back.

  “Swim first?” Sophie said. She wore a pair of shorts over her swimsuit.

  He put the leash on Zola and they went over to the shallow water. It was so crowded that people were just standing in the water.

  He watched Sophie dunking herself in the water. “What’d I give you all those swimming lessons for, Sophie?” he yelled. She waved, pinched her nose and went under again.

  When she came out, she said, “Why don’t you go take your swim? I’ll watch Zola.”

  Willis went to the end of the beach, to the diving platform. He dove off the diving board, then swam out beyond the ropes. A lifeguard patrolled nearby. Willis thought of what the track coach had said the other day. You’ve got potential, Pierce. He’d walked away, because what else could he do? But he’d been tasting the idea ever since, and he still hadn’t gotten all the flavor out of it.

  After he swam, he went looking for Sophie. She’d moved their stuff farther back, where there was a little shade. Sophie got the food out. She’d brought potato salad, soda and chips. He’d brought a couple of bagels and cream cheese. “This potato salad is good. Did you make it?” he said.

  “Just like I made the gingerbread cookies. Thank Brenda.”

  “Does she know I’m eating it?”