Girl Runner (12 page)

“Stop,” I say.

“I don’t think Glad is who you think she is,” says Mr. Tristan. “Be careful, that’s all.”

I’m breathing like I’ve been through a race.

“She’s quicker over the short run,” says Mr. Tristan, standing and going to the door, holding it open to indicate that our conversation is coming to a close, “but you’ve got endurance. The only way she can beat you is up here”—he leans in close to me and taps his temple—“and don’t think she doesn’t know it.”

I HOLD OUT
my arms, and the girl leans down. I must weigh next to nothing, muscle and fat vanished under loosened skin, even while I remain a long woman, long bones, long spine. My feet drag behind me, a huge breath leaving my lungs, and hers, almost simultaneously,
ah
, as she settles me into the chair. She’s forgotten about the belt, but the complexity of expression necessary seems hardly worth the effort. I can’t remember the word for
belt
, though I can see it like a picture in my mind.

“This isn’t my fault!” She yells at her brother, but she’s angry at herself. She shakes out the blanket, which has fallen into the mud, adjusts my ridiculous knitted hat, tucks me in. “Don’t even talk to me,” she orders him. He hasn’t lowered his camera, nor said a word against her, as far as I’ve heard. She’s rattled.

Well, she’s young. She’s young and she’s ambitious. When you’re young you think you invented the light that shines on you. You think it arrives at your bidding, and you would not claim the shadows that blot this sun of yours. I’m the one who fell, but she’s the one hurt by it.

She’s pushing me out of the graveyard, forcing the wheels of the chair through the muddy ruts and brambles, and back to the lane, which is smooth, bare of gravel, worn shiny and slippery like a pair of old corduroy pants.

“There.” The girl’s breathing comes purposefully, but the
click click
sound of the rubber wheels slows as she pushes me closer to the line of pines planted long ago to hide the house from view. Her brother hurries to get ahead, the shuffle of his shoes scuffing the dirt. He searches for the best angle, a tall figure crouched into a ridiculous position as he crabs himself backward, away from us. We follow.

I can see the scene this will make in their movie: I am a wizened, gnarled, crumbling creature tucked into a wheeled chair being pushed along a bare farm lane toward a place I can’t recall, not perfectly, but I know that I’m coming home. I suspect the boy would frame this as a sad scene, even pathetic, and he would score it accordingly, with tinkling piano music. In the movie they say they’re making, I’m a helpless being, steered by a strong girl, a teenager clad in fitted, gaudily patterned athletic clothing, a girl who is perpetually prepared to take off running. The girl’s muscled calves are the same circumference as her thighs. Her regimen is different than mine was. I’ve heard they bathe in ice these days—the blithering television is occasionally good for something. On foot, she covers a distance of two hundred kilometres every week in intervals, sprints, tempos, and hills. She swings weights. She crunches. She planks. She stretches. She dreams of gold.

But it is I, the muttering, bewildered creature in the chair who does not dream, who has no need to. Gold is already mine.

Once upon a time, I crossed an ocean to catch it and bring it home.

I wonder, would it be a kindness to tell the girl what it weighed, like a warning, or a promise? It was so much heavier than I imagined.

1928,
AMSTERDAM.
The first Olympics at which female athletes are permitted to compete in track and field events.

I don’t know what I’m doing, not really, nor what it means. I’m pleased as punch to pose on the steps of the pension in Amsterdam with the other girls, all of us dressed identically in the team uniform: white jackets and skirts trimmed in red, with a maple leaf over the left breast, and a cloche hat to match that Glad says suits me better than it does her. I’m happy to do as I’m told, to arrive where I’m taken, dress in what I’m given, eat what’s before me, and run without complaint on the spongy track where the Canadian girls have been assigned to practice in the days leading up to our races.

The news is broadcast in occasional static flares sent up from the ground. I won’t see my own photo until I arrive home weeks later: my mother cuts out copies to save. Black-and-white, reproduced on newsprint, hawked by shouting boys in the streets, beneath words three inches tall, wide and black:
GOLDEN GIRL RUNNER!

I wonder, do I remember the photograph itself, or do I remember living inside of it?

The photographer must have placed himself ahead of us on the track, crouched down for the best angle. He snaps me in motion, crossing the line in front of the German girl, though just, her expression stern, mine disbelieving and pained. My head is angled. I am glancing over my shoulder as I lean for the finish, but I’m not looking at the German girl, as it appears. I’m looking behind me for Glad. I can’t understand why she isn’t running beside me. I am sick that she is not here too.

I am also just plain sick.

I wear a short-sleeved white tunic, cut into a V at the neck and emblazoned with a red leaf under which my nation is declared:
CANADA.
Two tight undershirts layered beneath the tunic flatten my breasts to my ribs. Loose black shorts swish around my thighs and are too ample for my waist—I’ve dug an extra notch into the thin leather belt. I’ll have red marks on my stomach afterward from cinching it so tight. Little white ankle socks tucked into inflexible black shoes. My number on paper pinned across my hips: 692. Glad is 689.

Flash. I am front-page news in Canada, tomorrow.

I run out of the moment, unable to slow my stride immediately. I keen sideways, collapse to the ground, holding my head with both hands, flat on my back. Mr. Tristan and Miss Gibb, the manager of the Canadian girls’ team, are with me in the next instant, pulling me to my feet.

“Brilliant finish. World record time,” says Mr. Tristan. “Walk it off, walk it off.”

“Where’s Glad?” I ask as stars explode behind my eyes. Miss Gibb wraps me in a scratchy woollen blanket.

“She’s chilled.” She is talking to Mr. Tristan, not to me. “It’s this rain.”

“Keep them away.”

“Coming through, give us air!”

Glad darts into focus, ahead of me, and she turns. Her grin is a mile wide. I can’t believe it, not after what has happened. She swings her hand for mine, shakes it wildly. “Kiddo!” she yells. “I knew you had it in you!”

I am crying, snot streaming. Glad responds as if she’s decided everything I do is a lark. I love her for not letting me spoil my own moment. She’s pretending to spar with me, her fists up, her feet dancing, her mouth laughing.

Miss Gibb discreetly daubs my face with her handkerchief. “You should be happy,” she says sternly.

“She shouldn’t be anything other than what she is,” says Mr. Tristan.

“She needs to pull herself together. Throw your shoulders back. Now.”

“There’s a girl.”

“I’m sorry, Glad.” I’m blubbering.

“What for?” Glad pushes through the others to hug me tight. “It’s just a race,” she whispers in my ear while I fold my head down onto her shoulder and weep until I’m done.

Here is the medal ceremony: I am handed a bouquet of white and red flowers. I stand on the top step, already the tallest girl in the crowd, so tall they’ll remark on it in the foreign papers. “What are they feeding those long-legged Canadian girls?” as if we’re all the same.
God Save the King.

Mr. Tristan helps me down from the podium. He has a tender expression on his face that makes me sad, though I don’t know why. It’s as if he’s saying good-bye, as if he knows something I don’t about this being the end. We’ve gotten what we came for.

Miss Gibb falls in on my right, holding firm my elbow. I lean away from Mr. Tristan and into Miss Gibb’s trim figure, demure in jacket and long navy skirt. My legs are water and my lungs are underwater, and it is too loud under the drumming stands to speak, and they are walking me out into the Amsterdam morning, into the fine drizzle, and they are delivering me into the backseat of a humming black motorcar.

“Hot broth,” says Miss Gibb, climbing in beside me. She shuts the door on Mr. Tristan. “Hot water bottle. Sweat it out. You’ve caught cold, that’s all.”

IT
’
S JUST A RACE.

Funny Glad would say that. I wonder—could she mean it? I hide in my room at the pension, huddled under the sheets, laid by with fever and chills. If I am honest with myself, I will allow it is not a fever of the body, but a fever of the mind. I am twenty years old and unprepared for the experiences of the past weeks, all except for one, of course, which was the race itself. For that, I was sublimely prepared; not so, Glad.

It is Glad I can’t get out of my mind.

Glad, who goes into the 100-metre dash as the favourite, who breezes through the semifinals with the fastest time, who wears her confidence like a feathered hat. Some brood under the weight of expectation—you see them at meals picking at their food and snapping at any approach—but Glad seems instead to glow. We are dining on cold potatoes, fat slices of ham, and bread with preserves, the day before Glad’s 100-metre final, when Miss Alexandrine Gibb asks to sit with us—although it being Miss Gibb, her request sounds more like a command. “I’d like to write you up in my column, if you’d agree,” she says to Glad. “I think readers would be interested in how you prepare for your race, the little details. What you eat and drink, and what exercises you do to keep strong.”

Glad laughs. “I run with Aggie. That’s all I need to keep me strong.”

I blush and hack at my slice of ham with a dull butter knife. I should say something in reply, demure, make light, offer a compliment in return, but my mind is blank. This is what I mean when I say I’m unprepared for these experiences. I’m empty, I think. Fill me up. All I’ve got are these legs, trained for speed, this mind, trained to conquer a circle of track.

But that is not entirely true. What I lack isn’t knowledge, of which I have more than most girls my age on subjects unmentionable—what I lack are ordinary social graces. I don’t know, yet, how easy these are to learn. They are strategies, nothing more.

On the morning of the 100-metre final, I watch with the other Canadian athletes, crammed into the stands as close to the track as we can manage, leaning over the wooden rails to holler to our girls, as Glad lines up at the start. She looks over at us, and waves, flashing her grin to the newspapermen with their cameras, before settling into position, one foot on the line and the other ready to push, arms cocked, knees bent, spine angled forward yet upright, prepared to leap at the gun.

On your marks, steady,
BANG!

They’re off. But just as suddenly, the pistol fires two shots into the air to call the runners back. There has been a false start. And we all know who it was, flying a half-step ahead of the others like a bird frightened out of a bush. Glad! We are holding our breath.

The change in atmosphere is sudden, like we’ve stepped off a precipice into the unknown, we’re falling.

Glad shakes her head, her arms, her legs. She walks a tight circle back to the line. She isn’t grinning, and she doesn’t look over to us, watching in the stands, calling out her name. I hear my own voice, its pitch frantic even to me:
Glad, Glad, Glad!
There isn’t time for Coach Tristan to speak to her, to try to steady her. The race must go on, and the girls line up a second time. Germany, the United States, France, Canada, Holland, Canada, Japan, Italy.

The pistol fires. And again, almost instantly, fires twice more to stop the race.

No.

The crowd gasps, falls to silence. My hands clap my face.

Surely there has been an error. Surely the judges will recognize that Glad twitched early but held off, that it only looked like she started ahead of the others. It is only that she’s so quick, she got the leap on them. Isn’t it? Give her another chance! Mr. Tristan is running onto the track, protesting, but he is blocked, held up, talked back by other men from the Canadian team.

An official dressed all in white escorts Glad off the track, to the side. She has been disqualified. She will not run.

Glad sinks to the grass in disbelief. She kneels, her hands buried in her hair, and bends her head to the ground. Rises up, only to stagger and sink again. I have never seen Glad in such pain. I have never seen her down. It is like watching a solid building crumble before your eyes. No, it is worse. It is like seeing a horse in a race suddenly snap its leg and tumble, confused, dazed, uncomprehending, trying to stand and stumbling to the ground in pain.

The girls are lining up again. They avoid looking at Glad. But they can’t avoid hearing her animal cries.

The pistol fires. They’re off, and almost just as soon, they’re done. Canada, thanks to Ernestine, has earned a surprise silver behind the American girl, a sixteen-year-old who can’t believe her good fortune. She leaps in the air with a shout. Such a sharp turn of luck; none of us can grasp it. Glad, the favourite going into the final, watching in agonized weeping from the side, and the pretty little American, her hair in two tight schoolgirl braids, lifted to the podium by teammates, biting her gold medal, behaving in a way not fitting of a sportswoman, as Miss Alexandrine Gibb will write in her column telling of Glad’s sad turn.

MISS ALEXANDRINE GIBB
raps on the door of the room I’ve been assigned to share with Lillianna, the high jumper, who is lanky and reserved, keeps to herself. She’s gone out and won’t be back all day. Miss Gibb knows I’m alone and enters without waiting for a reply. She carries with her a newspaper.