Running

by Jen A. Miller

  The sidewalk here was older concrete, pockmarked in places where stones had popped out. Halfway down Creek Road was a convent: the three-story yellow brick residence of the nuns who had taught me up through sixth grade, where I took piano lessons with a scary nun named Sister Anna who had tiny gray teeth and no patience for children (perfect qualities in a piano teacher), where I’d lost countless soccer balls and softballs and baseballs to the yard, some retrieved by climbing onto the roof of our woodshed and jumping over the fence that separated our property from theirs.

  By the time I passed the nuns’ driveway, the forehead sweat dripped into my eyes, and my bra felt like a bathing suit top after I had jumped into the pool. Maybe if I collapsed on their lawn, one of the nuns—preferably not Sister Anna—would find me while walking their order’s poodle and hose me down. I didn’t understand pacing. I always started the lap like I was trying to run out a throw to first base, but this was much longer than those 60-foot sprints.

  Please, God, just let it be over, I prayed to the statue of Jesus on their front lawn, and put one foot in front of the other, a deep cramp jabbing into my side.

  The motion of running itself never hurt. I spent too much time during the summer alternating between body surfing and riding my bike in endless loops to be out of shape. I was strong, and my legs and arms swung along with my intentions, but my lungs could not keep up with the oxygen demand pressed upon them. I short-circuited, gulping for breaths of stuffy air. At least when I biked or swam, I could count on a breeze or the ocean to cool me down. At least when I cut the lawn, I could listen to my Walkman, and move no faster than the mower allowed.

  By the time I made the last turn toward home, dragging my feet and wheezing, I was bent over, both sides cramped, sweat running freely down my spine and crack of my butt. My bra and underwear were soaked, shorts and shirt sticking to both.

  “Never again!” I yelled when I stomped into the house and slammed the door behind me, then stomped upstairs to strip naked and lie under the ceiling fan until its breeze evaporated the sweat from my skin.

  This scene replayed every August before high school soccer season, except my senior year when my parents had separated and my father lived in an apartment near his office. But in those years when he still lived at home, and he’d tell me to do a second lap, I’d strap on my Rollerblades instead and zip out. I didn’t care if he’d get mad—I let my mom deal with him. They fought enough. What was one more argument? It was still hot, but at least I was moving fast enough to stay just ahead of that washcloth.

  I skated to Barrington, one town over. They had just covered over their old concrete roads with flat black asphalt. I glided over their freshly paved streets, making patterns and shapes on roads with almost no traffic. Just as when I rode my bike, or swam in the ocean, there was something else there to cool me down. The wheels of my skates gave me freedom to move without putting a vise on my lungs. I could cover so much more ground, all with a gentle breeze lapping over my face. This is so much better, I thought. Why would anyone want to run and go so slow?

  The first real runner I knew was Dan, my high school boyfriend. I left Catholic school after sixth grade when my parents paid for me to go to the public high school of Haddonfield, which had better classes, no uniforms, and no girls pointing out that I had fat thighs when I sat down. That’s where Dan lived. We met in math class freshman year, and after months of furtive glances thrown at each other during geometry lectures, he professed his love for me in a card he bought for $1 as part of a student government Valentine’s Day fund-raiser.

  When I met him, he was fluffy. His cheeks looked like those of Chip and/or Dale when they shoved a bunch of nuts in their mouths before running away from Donald Duck. Not that this was a deal breaker—I was thrilled to be one of the girls who had a real, live boyfriend to hold hands with in the hallway. I didn’t care what was under his clothes because he kept them on. We were shy, guilty Catholic teenagers, and there wasn’t much groping that first year. When I finally saw his penis, the event was more like an unveiling than a lust-inspired display. It was done in the unfinished portion of my basement under fluorescent lights. I didn’t touch it, not then. It wasn’t very attractive. It looked like a piece of debarked kindling.

  I had soccer and softball, but Dan was a golf wunderkind. He went on to be an All-American golfer and a golf management major in college. As a sophomore in high school, he tried out for the cross-country team because he thought running would get him in better shape for swinging and walking and carrying clubs through eighteen holes of golf. I was doubtful. Dan was too short and round to be one of those willowy, antisocial cross-country guys, I thought.

  Running unstuffed his cheeks, and by the time I was actually seeing parts of his body unclothed when we were not in his pool, he was compact and lean with a hint of muscles. He was often the sixth man on the cross-country team, which meant that his score rarely counted toward the team’s total, but his coach made him co-captain his junior year, then captain his senior year because his teammates said he was so upbeat about running, even when finishing last.

  I could not wrap my mind around his running schedule. I saw no problem with hitting hundreds of softballs off a batting tee, but running six, seven, eight miles in one clip? Especially when most of his cross-country races were under five miles? Lunacy. His junior year co-captain would go on to run for a Division I school and then briefly as a pro—he was running 60 miles a week. One day Dan and a few teammates ran 10 miles. Ten miles! For fun! I’d have rather run right over a rusty nail.

  “What do you DO for 10 miles next to the same guys you run with all the time?” I asked him one warm afternoon in June while floating in his pool and waiting for his parents to go to dinner so we could make out.

  “Talk shit,” he said.

  “What does he do for 60 miles?”

  “I don’t know. Think of things to say while talking shit?”

  That seemed like too little of a distraction for what I assumed was 60 miles of agony, but I let it go because his parents left soon after, and we threw ourselves at each other. Our time was running out. In a few days, we would graduate high school and he’d be off to start college early, while I was to toil away at my dad’s office before shipping off to the University of Tampa.

  Dan was a constant that made high school a flat and smooth experience for me, like floating on the bay instead of getting smacked in the face by ocean waves. Haddonfield could be an isolating place if you didn’t start there right in kindergarten with your classmates. It was and is the richest town in the county, but while my classmates drove Eddie Bauer Limited Edition Ford Explorers and diesel Mercedes to school, I parked next to them in my mom’s Dodge Caravan, beaten down with 180,000 miles. Bellmawr is a town of intersecting highways and a twenty-four-hour post office that at the time was best known as the site of one of the 2001 anthrax attacks. It was a town my classmates were aware of only because they drove through it on the way to their shore houses (except for one classmate whose family’s “shore” house was in the Caribbean). We had a shore place, too, but it was a trailer, inland. I had felt so lucky that we had that place, but when I realized that my friends’ homes were actual houses on the island, I stopped talking about it, and always told them I was busy if they asked me to meet up with them down the shore.

  I was not quite a member of the friend group when I first came to school, but as Dan’s girlfriend, I was soon let inside their circle. Dan hadn’t grown up in Haddonfield either—his parents moved there from Connecticut when he was in middle school—but he was part of that crowd more than I was simply by living there, and I became one of the group by proxy.

  Being with Dan throughout high school meant that I never dealt with boy angst because I’d had Dan and hand-holding and penis grabbing and tying up the phone line with a conversation that stretched nearly four years. I didn’t know how to date and I didn’t really want to learn. Dan was perfect: smart, polite, respectful. My parents adored him and v
ice versa. His parents, two former Woodstock hippies, showed me that grown-ups could be married and not throw things out the back door. I didn’t want to let him, or them, go. Of course I wanted to go to college. I had worked through high school to get there, and my mother was adamant that all her children would go, but I was envious of Emily Webb, one of the protagonists in Our Town, because she locked down George Gibbs soon after they earned their high school diplomas (though I could have done without the dying young part).

  The night after graduation, Dan gave me a pair of diamond stud earrings, said he’d love me forever, then broke up with me, because . . . college, following dreams, girls, or something. We were both still virgins, at my insistence, which may have had something to do with his decision. Dan was polite, but he was still an eighteen-year-old virgin going into college where a platter of new, non-Catholic women lay ahead.

  I was devastated. Plunging me further into despair, the University of Tampa had not been my first-choice school. Despite being accepted to brand-name schools, despite Tampa’s reputation as a big fat zero to anyone north of the Mason—Dixon line, and despite the fact that all the girls with WASP names in my high school class wailed if they had to settle for a place like Colgate, the University of Tampa offered me the most financial aid. My parents didn’t have much money to start. They still had to pay Catholic high school tuition for my younger siblings, and the divorce ripped up what college budget my parents had left in a year when my older brother and I would be in college. They told me I was heading south. I was an angry teenager who couldn’t see that I was lucky my parents had pushed me to go to college and had saved some money to fund it, and that I was lucky to have earned scholarships, too. But in that moment, when my family life was upending, that shove to Florida seemed like a death blow.

  I spent my last summer before Tampa filling in at my dad’s office as an accounting clerk for a woman on maternity leave. There, I shuttled from an office with no windows to a file room with no windows. Every night I went home smelling like carbon paper and played witness to my parents unwinding their lives from each other. My only escape would be moving to a swamp. I was, I thought, doomed.

  “Are you sure?” my father asked. He was squinting into the sun outside my dorm, a two-story cinder block box full of smaller boxes that held two people each, and one shower/bathroom area per gender per floor. He had just arrived the night before, and that morning I gave him a tour of my room, which was still a mess of boxes and books—including what I’d brought with me from my stacks of books at home, like Where the Red Fern Grows and Bridge to Terabithia, and what I had picked up at the college bookstore the day before.

  My mother and I had driven my dad’s SUV, crammed with my stuff, to Florida, while Dad flew down to meet us and help me move into that dank dorm by the Hillsborough River (which I’d evacuate within the first month of school during my first Florida hurricane). My parents were hammering out their divorce agreement at the time, and were barely talking to each other.

  At first, I thought that my dad was asking about my college choice: Am I sure about this school? This weather? This state? No! It wasn’t even 9:00 AM and we were already roasting. But what he was really referring to was my not playing softball in college. I had been captain of my high school team, which wasn’t great but wasn’t terrible. I had talked with some college coaches while looking at schools, and my dad had asked me to still consider walking on to the University of Tampa squad.

  But I wasn’t interested. I’d played on two softball teams for most of high school; that combined with the peer pressure at my über-wealthy high school to get the best grades and SAT scores, even though we couldn’t afford the schools that those grades and scores would get me into, meant I was fried. I expected college classes to be hard, too, and I wanted to focus on those without having to read and do homework on buses to and from games played in broiling heat.

  When Dad asked me that one last time, we were about to walk to a welcome event for parents, and sweat stains already showed on the underarms of his shirt.

  A trickle of sweat ran down my back and into my shorts. “Positive.”

  Soon after the semester started, though, I found that almost all my freshman classes were easier than those I had taken in high school. With no need to be anywhere after class, I had a lot of time on my hands. I filled part of that time writing for the student newspaper, and the rest pining for my old life. I’d never spent much time away from Bellmawr. I missed Dan, my family, New Jersey, and those touchstones of home that had filled the first eighteen years of my life, like twenty-four-hour diners, fall allergies, leaves that changed colors, and knowing whose hair was in the bottom of the shower drain. Not to mention a breeze. A breeze! My kingdom for a cool breeze!

  I went a little nuts.

  Some nights I’d lodge myself in front of a computer lab iMac with AOL Instant Messenger open, talking to high school friends and pretending that I was having as much fun as they were, while hoping that Dan would log on too, which he didn’t often do. Other nights, when I couldn’t stand another night in the lab, I jumped into all those vices I had skipped in high school and tried everything at once. I was like Christian the first time he walked into the Moulin Rouge. I wanted it all: boys and booze and cigarettes-with-booze and black stretch pants and tight tube tops worn to dark bars where I could drink at eighteen years old because I was blond and had a nice rack. I drew male attention I didn’t realize would be there until I looked up and saw a dozen possible Dans with a fifth of vodka in hand looking back at me.

  I hit straight As my first year of college (except for two ABs in Introduction to Computers and Precalculus). I made friends with some people in my building and on the newspaper staff—editors who worked hard to keep me from transferring to Rutgers University. They gave me the commentary editor job when I decided to stay. But I also spent a lot of hungover mornings sleeping in a library carrel. I napped in the library because my roommate, a weepy girl from Arizona, refused to leave our room in case her boyfriend from back home called. She spent much of that time doing something with the guy who lived across the hall.

  I did not exercise. I had no desire to do so when New Jersey’s August was reality in Florida for nine months out of the year. Even in the state’s weather glory days of December, January, and February, I was too busy relishing things like not sweating and wearing light sweaters to do anything that would reheat my body.

  This, plus an introduction to southern cooking, hot wings, and beer, led to the dreaded freshman fifteen. I didn’t look terrible. (When I tried to sign up for Weight Watchers, they rejected me because I was too light.) But I didn’t feel great about the way I looked either, not when I compared myself to classmates who had picked Tampa because the weather meant they could be as naked as possible as often as possible.

  Having a boyfriend ravenous for my body helped buoy my confidence in high school, as did having friends who were all shapes and sizes. One of my best friends in high school was rail thin with no chest or hips; another was Jessica Rabbit-buxom and used her chest to knock the soccer balls out of the air and drop them at her feet. They both considered their shapes an asset. I was a happy middle ground.

  But they weren’t in my dorm, and Dan wasn’t there to worship at the altar of my body. Even if I hadn’t lost the sharpness in my muscles that year-round sports had chiseled, I still would have felt like the Hulk when I put myself in a lounge chair next to campus pool bunnies who drank Diet Coke with their cigarettes and talked about how they dared not work out too much or else they’d look too mannish or bulky. (Yes, you could smoke by the college pool then. You could also smoke in dorm rooms, but not all dorm rooms—at the time I thought that partial smoking ban was very progressive.)

  It was the fall of 1998. Britney Spears’s “Hit Me Baby One More Time” came out that September. The ideal body shape was transitioning from the heroin chic of the early 1990s to cartoons: uber thin with perfect abs and big boobs, highlighted by fake orange tans and super-lo
w-rise jeans.

  My sophomore year, I joined a sorority. Although I’d been surrounded by girls on sports teams since I was seven years old, our collective focus there had been on smashing our opponents, no matter how dirty and bloody we left the field. Here, though, everyone was dipped in perfume and covered in body glitter, and I jumped feetfirst into the makeup aisle at CVS to try to keep up. My sorority wasn’t the type to shame pledges into losing weight, but we still had a lot of very pretty girls who worried about how they looked all the time. They’d write down everything they ate, pass around diets ripped from exercise magazines, and debate about which one would help them lose the most weight the fastest. They spent hours on the elliptical, flipping through the next issues of those magazines while sweating off the beer binge from the night before. No one shrugged when a sister came back from winter break sporting a new pair of breasts. We didn’t have Greek houses, but many of our sisters lived together in on-campus suites. One room featured pictures of Britney that the girls had cut out of magazines with handwritten captions that said, “Hey fatty. Want to look like me? Shut the fridge.” They discussed how they could use stress as a way to stop eating, and agreed that the perfect lower body shape meant that your calves and knees touched but nothing else (this was before the term “thigh gap” existed).

  Plenty of girls had issues with food and how they looked. I don’t blame the sorority for this, because I saw it happen outside of the Greek system too, especially among athletes. But for someone who has a self-esteem gap—me included—that kind of obsession and groupthink can send the mind down a bad road. One of my younger sorority sisters weighed about ninety pounds: Her elbows pushed up against her skin, her hip bones’ sharp points poked out above her low-rise jeans. Her blond hair, silky when she started school, thinned and faded, and her face became covered in lanugo, a peach-like fuzz that’s a common side effect of anorexia. We all talked about being heavier than we wanted to be, and she did too. But she often obsessed about how no boys would want her at her “heavy weight.” She told me she’d never fit into my clothes because she thought I was so skinny. I was horrified—my roommate and I tried to help her realize she had a problem and go to the school’s counseling center. Secretly, she became my line in the sand. I didn’t feel so bad about my body that I was going to starve it into submission. I might start wearing baggier clothing to class to hide what I thought were my inflating legs and waistline. But as long as I didn’t lose touch with reality like she did, I was fine.