Girl Runner (15 page)

On the train, we eat green grapes and drink tea with milk, dipping crumbling cookies into the lukewarm liquid in the fancy dining car with the red swag curtains.

We are greeted at the station by a small crowd of cheering schoolchildren. The local newspaper has announced my visit in advance. Upon stepping off at the small station in New Arran, I am surrounded. I lead the troupe off the platform and around to the front of the station where more curious onlookers have gathered. I can sense my parents and sisters standing apart from me, watching me move among the children, signing autograph books. I can sense my hair keeping its sharp shape around my face, held in place by a waxy substance which I’ve carefully worked into the strands before combing it to perfection. But I haven’t changed so very much: I wear no makeup, no adornment save for the medal around my neck.

People like to pick up the medal and hold it in their hands, to feel the weight. It seems a strangely intimate gesture. It ties me to a stranger for a brief moment, as if I belong to them, as if I am their pet, their possession.

I do not know what to do with the love and admiration of strangers. I mistake it for something personal. I believe that it is I who am loved and admired, rather than the girl in the newspaper photos. I don’t understand, yet, that I’m not really that Aganetha. That no one is. That she is a simple and finished idea to whom everyone can relate. She has no edges, no catches.

The children for whom I sign autographs mistake me for being her, and no blame to them—I am her, I guess, just for now, smiling and waving, expectant of welcome, sweet as a lily, polished as glass.

“You’re wearing that well, Aganetha,” my mother says, offering me a cup of tea as we stand in the kitchen at the farm. She reaches out to touch the medal, and I flinch, which surprises us both.

“Of course, you must,” I say quickly, and pull the medal over my head, holding it out to her by the ribbon.

She sets the teacup on the counter top, which has been painted white. All the cupboards in the kitchen are now painted white, clean as bone.

I open a cupboard door and see on the wide double-decker lazy Susan the covered butter dish, the salt and pepper shakers, and several cut glass dishes for serving jams or pickles or relishes. A loaf of bread wrapped in cloth looks less attractive. I spin the Susan slowly. Through the glass doors on the far side, the dining room can be seen, wavy behind the warped panes.

My mother tries to hand me the medal and the cup of tea at the same time.

I accept the cup, but not the medal. She inspects it more closely, and I watch her as I lift the china to my lips and sip. I am as tall as she is. I think of everything my mother does not know about me. Everything she never will. Yet I fail to consider everything I do not know of her. Everything I never will.

My mother holds out the medal, flat in the palm of her hand, the ribbon dangling down. I swallow the last of the tea. “Thank you,” I say, and gather the weight into my own hand, hesitating. What to do with it? It seems wrong to wear it around the house.

“You’ll be staying in the guest room with Olive?” My mother’s voice lifts into a question.

“The guest room?”

“Your old room. Yours and Olive’s. Cora repainted it and sewed new curtains.”

“Do you have guests often?”

“You and Olive are our guests, of course,” says Mother.

“Oh,” I say. An ache in my throat, the hollow where sadness fits. I don’t really like this, not at all. We are not guests, we are daughters. But I understand that my mother is giving me something that she finds painful to offer and that she thinks I desire—she is giving me space, freedom, the ability to walk away from this place and take no responsibility for it, or for the people who live here. As if she could do such a thing. As if I could take such a thing.

I lift my small suitcase, which has been sitting inside the door, to carry it upstairs.

“Let your father do that!”

But I just keep walking, carrying the valise through the empty main room, piled with boards and nails and the detritus of Father’s latest project—what could it be now? Something involving coils of wire. I skip upstairs, taking every other step at a leap. My mother follows to the bottom of the staircase, protesting. Here is where she lets me go. It’s the golden light I’m giving off. I can feel it, sending people away from me. I make people a little bit afraid, as if I weren’t quite human.

“I’m a parasite,” I tell Olive, who is napping atop the clean pressed quilt in the so-called guest room, lying on a patch of sunshine.

She only half-wakes, like a cat, stretches, rolls onto her side. “You mean, a cockroach,” she mumbles.

We last two days before escaping back to the city.

“
LET
’
S GO.
”

The girl is wheeling me down the lane, away from the burnt house, past the tree line that separates the yard from the front field. My mother planted the pines herself when automobiles became popular and our dusty side road transformed into a byway for people from town driving out to the lake for picnics. The house was hidden from view, perfectly private. Later still, a new highway diverted traffic away from our road, and our privacy was assured, pines or no pines, but the pines stayed. They’ve grown enormous, thick and foreboding, their untrimmed branches sweeping the ground.

Our secrets are so old now. What have we to hide? I don’t want to go. But the girl keeps rolling me down the lane. The boy opens the back door of the plain blue car, and together they load me in, like a parcel of dry goods.

“Mom’s waiting,” the girl explains. “She’ll make you a cup of tea, warm you up.”

It isn’t far, I see, as we drive. One field’s length, no more. The same field. The field of pale green winter wheat, freshly broken through the dirt, a haze of brightness across a drab landscape.

This lane is bare and stony. We’ve come to a stop outside a framed house weathered grey with age. A dog circles and circles, barking wildly.

The girl leaps out to greet the dog. Without a backward glance, she slams the car door and runs for the house, calling, “Mom! Mom! We’re here!” The dog follows and disappears. Max climbs out of the car and I see him stretching. I’m alone with my dread. I can’t hang it onto anything particular, so I look around for Fannie, who isn’t here. I hear thumping from behind. A slam, the car rocks down and up, once, and Max comes around to my side, awkwardly pushing the wheeled chair only partially snapped into position. He opens my door.

I say again, “I won’t go,” but he misunderstands, trying to fix the chair.

“Hang on a minute,” he says. “Mom’s a nurse. She’s better at this than me.”

A tall broad-backed woman in sensible beige clothing strides through the mud, hair cropped short, like she doesn’t care. I smell the scent of her as she leans in to say hello, how are you, her arms cradling me as she pulls me nearer. She smells of soap. I think of my sisters, Olive and Cora, who were not so very alike in most ways, but who both smelled of soap, and nothing more, and I am briefly lulled. I forget myself and do not fight.

“There, we’re settled.”

I clamp my teeth down hard against the dread that twists inside me, squawking like a hen about to lose its head for our dinner. It’s this yard, its bareness. I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be, a place that wants me gone.

We bump up the porch steps backward, and I am pulled in reverse into a cramped entryway, then swung around to view the room. My eyes strain to adapt to the dimness. Papers sloping off surfaces, peeling linoleum, dinged plaster, the smell of cat. Funny how houses hold to their character, just as much as people do. Here I am. Where I’m not meant to be.

“I’m sorry, Edith,” I say with stern regret, because surely she can see I didn’t choose to intrude like this; and everyone in the room stares at me.

I TELL OLIVE
I intend to look for better rooms for us. Olive says she’s perfectly content in the room we’ve been sharing ever since I moved to Toronto.

“Well, I’m not—Mrs. Smythe doesn’t like me, never has, and there’s never enough food. And besides, I can afford to pay for better now!”

“Well, I can’t,” says Olive.

“Olive,” I say, “I’ll pay your share too. We’re sisters! After all you’ve done for me!”

And so it is agreed. Glad will be our third. We are three young women living freely in the great city of Toronto without the scent of a chaperone on the premises. Don’t believe it when you hear that Toronto is a staid old maid of a city, that she’s stuck-up and cautious and dull. She has us. She is quite the going thing.

We rent a double-storied apartment over Yonge Street with windows almost as tall as the ceilings, and a grand fireplace that fills the rooms with choking black smoke. On the bottom floor, at street level, is a butcher shop, which draws mice and rats. Johnny brings us a kitten, a male tabby that grows fluffy and fat, feeding off the premises.

We take turns cooking. Glad is the worst, a rich girl born and raised.

“What’s this supposed to be?” Johnny teases her.

“Chops,” she says. “Fresh from the butcher.”

“Chops and what?”

“Chops and chops! You don’t have to eat with us, don’t forget.”

“I like when Aggie cooks,” says Johnny. I’ve just come into the kitchen.

“So marry Aggie,” says Glad, who knows as well as I do that the newspaper reports are mistaken—Johnny and I are not officially betrothed.

“Maybe I will,” says Johnny.

“Well, why don’t you, then?” says Glad, and I almost hold my breath. She says it so lightly that surely he will think it a joke, rather than a question I dare not ask for myself, though it twinges occasionally, pinging like a pulled muscle.

“Might be I’m not good enough,” says Johnny, as if I weren’t right there in the room with them.

“Not good enough for Aggie, you mean? Or not good enough to marry a girl whose reputation is yours to ruin?”

“Well, what do you figure, Gladdie?” he dares her. “Aren’t I a good boy?”

“Aren’t you? You tell us.” She turns on him with a wooden spoon, points it directly at his chest.

“Come, now,” says Johnny. “Who says Aggie wants to get married?”

“She’s standing right here. Ask her,” says Glad, her eyes sparkling. Is she enjoying this? She doesn’t stop but turns the spoon on me. “Do you want to marry him or what?”

If I were to imagine our proposal—and truth be told, I have—it would not be like this, not at all, with the pair of us badgered into an engagement by means of a greasy wooden spoon.

“I don’t see what’s the rush,” I say, surprised to hear my voice sound so calm against their heated ones.

“She doesn’t see what’s the rush,” Johnny reports to Glad, as if Glad might not have heard. “She doesn’t see what’s the rush and nor do I.”

“Doesn’t she?”

“No. She doesn’t.”

“Sit down all of you,” says Olive, who has been pretending not to listen. “I’ve laid the table and your chops are set to burn any second now, Glad, so I’d say it’s past time to eat them.”

But Glad won’t be shut down cold. “Don’t you dare break our Aggie’s heart.” She frowns at Johnny, but prettily. She
is
enjoying this, I think. I glimpse the whisker of a smile cross her lips, and something hurts inside of me, a new hurt, like I’ve got a body part I never knew about before, invented especially for the purpose of feeling this pain.

WE ARE FORTUNATE
to have a back entrance. No one sees Johnny coming or going. I’ve shocked myself with my own casual ease given our situation, which is, I tell myself in serious talks before the mirror that hangs behind my door, a dangerous business, though we’ve not yet, it must be added, gotten ourselves into any kind of serious trouble.

Tonight, we’re playing dominoes, legs crossed, facing each other on my neatly made bed. His fingers stretch to stroke lightly down my arms and I shiver. “Don’t make me go, back to my cold dark room,” he says.

I laugh, but uneasily. Has he already forgotten the conversation before supper, and the uncomfortable silence that followed, as we tore through Glad’s offering of gristly chops?

“Maybe you should find yourself a warmer room,” I say.

“I like this one,” he says, looking around, and I blush because that wasn’t what I meant to imply—I’d been speaking literally, thinking of his cramped space over the garage where he works. “Well. It’s already mine,” I say.

“Don’t you care to share?”

“No,” I say, and it’s the truth. “I don’t.”

Now he laughs.

“You’re a funny girl, Aganetha Smart.”

“I wouldn’t know, I guess,” I say, because it’s hurting again, the part inside of me I’ve only just discovered.

“You’re right, you know,” he continues, seriously. “What’s the rush? I’ve got nothing.”

“Don’t say that.” I frown. “I’ve got nothing either.”

We play another game of dominoes sitting across from each other on my bed. But the dominoes fall to kissing, and we are lying atop the quilt, now rumpled, and he is heavy on me, kissing my face all over.

“Tell me something, anything,” I say, pulling his hands from where they are exploring the zipper on the back of my dress. “And then go home.”

“I’ll spend all night thinking of you,” he says.

“That’s not something.”

“I miss the prairie,” he says agreeably, distractedly. Johnny is not from here. He comes from out west, from flat fields I can’t imagine, though he’s tried to describe the huge prairie sky.

“The prairie.” I’m trying to imagine it, wishing he’d go on and tell me more, but he is busy arguing with my zipper. I roll out from under him. We are the same height, though he is denser in his bones and muscles, and if it came to it, he would win a physical fight. I’m afraid he might try; no, I’m afraid I might want him to try so that I may give in to him, beneath him, one of these times.

“Tell me something else, more, please,” I say. I can hear my own breath, rapid and shallow, and feel his body lying beside mine, wired with desire.

“Too much talk.” His teeth on my collarbone.

I jump to standing, quick as a strike.

“Go home.” I point to the closed door, where the mirror hangs. I glance to see myself, tall, cool, hair a mess. I move to settle the loose strands into place with the flats of my palms.

He has calloused hands and a smooth jawline, dark wavy hair that he lets grow too long down his neck and over his ears. His lips have a humorous tilt that fool me to thinking he’s on the verge of laughter. I do not think he would ever whistle at a woman in the street. He does not use foul language. I sense in him no bitter edge, no rotten pit at his centre eating away at his youth and determination, yet he’s deeply competitive. He will get what he aims for, I’m certain.

He smells of black grease and metal beneath bought bar soap and ironed cloth. His skin tastes of salt. His eyes are ink blue. On a glance, you could mistake them for black.

I almost can’t imagine knowing him better or more. What would I do with the knowledge? I am afraid that I might hurt him. That I might not love him enough. That I am playing a game whose rules I’m inventing, while he is dead serious—kiss and push away, kiss and part. He looks so clear to me, needing me from the bed, the muscles in his arms like twisted cord. He is handsome in the way that men are traditionally considered handsome, ruggedly, toughly good-looking. I am surprised whenever I see us together, passing a storefront window, reflected in the same frame. The kind of man that I’ve observed other women watching, even Glad.

If I send him away, will he come back tomorrow?

Don’t be silly, Aganetha
, I think, and the peculiar pain inside me stops.

And he goes.

GLAD AND I
are taking acting classes together. She is attending for a lark—her father has money enough and the willingness to support her—but I am going because I intend to earn a living. I’ve made the mistake of believing what I read in the papers.

I’ve never met Miss Aria Morrison. Can there really exist the occupation of “beauty specialist”? I imagine Miss Morrison, beauty specialist, contacting me—through what means, exactly, I can’t say—and offering her expertise. That she does not fails to discourage me. It is only October. I have only been Olympic champion for a few months, and already I have posed with a box of gold-covered chocolates; my hopes are keen.

A letter has arrived, though I choose not to show it to Johnny. I sense he will not like it. It is from Miss Alexandrine Gibb, who has been asked to contact me on behalf of a third party interested in hiring me to pose for a magazine advertisement for women’s undergarments.

“I will not advise you, other than to warn you to guard your reputation closely,” she writes, requesting, also, a visit. “How are you? Flourishing, I hope.”

The evenings are growing dark earlier and earlier.

We’ve fallen into a pattern, Johnny and I, of wrestling around on my bed. Tonight, the lingering smell of supper’s already eaten bacon with biscuits and eggs (my turn to cook) rises to my room. His hair smells smoky. I touch his head, pull him against me, imagining his hands coming under my dress, imagining myself—

“You have to go,” I tell him urgently. We are both breathing hard. He fights only briefly to stay. I hear his rapid-fire descent down the stairs and far below, the slam of the door, which opens into a back alleyway. I wonder what he does when he goes. Does he leave me easily, jog directly home to his tiny rented room? Or does he circle the blocks in the harsh city wind, his desire uncoiling like a long rope behind him, still attached to me?

I wonder, if he catalogued his desire, pinned it to me by name, would it make it more real? Would I trust him, as I feel I should, but don’t?

Slowly I rise, dizzy in the head. Slowly, smooth my hair, arrange my dress. I pull the letter from the drawer where I’ve hidden it, but I don’t open it to read it again.