How to Get Along with Women (11 page)

That year I lived in a small town called Winsome's View. There was no good reason for me to live there. It wasn't a place where I had any family or friends. I had a Master's degree in philology. My parents were convinced this had something to do with speaking a lot of languages and wanting to help people. At graduation my mother gripped my shoulders and whispered, Your whole life's in front of you!

This alarmed me. I looked up, possibility whipping out from my body like an endless bolt of cloth.

They handed me a gas card loaded with two hundred dollars and my name, Lydia Strunk, stamped on it. I drove. It was the end of springtime. Everything made my eyes hurt. When the money was gone, and the gas was gone, there was the mountain and the house at the bottom of it. I tried to coast the car toward the driveway, but the road levelled out and I lost momentum. I ended up on the soft shoulder. The landlord handed me the house keys and an open bucket of road salt. He had a patched-up hole in his neck and had to speak through a microphone device that he held to the hole. He always carried extra batteries in his breast pocket, and he yelled instructions as I unpacked. No pets, he said. No babies!

In Winsome's View, you either worked at the automotive factory in the next town or you stayed home all day wearing track pants. There was a tire fire on the edge of town that had been burning for over two years solid. Two guys were employed by the township to try to control the tire fire. They wore brown overalls and pitched shovelfuls of loose dirt against the smoky places. The first time I walked by, they called out to me. Hey you slut! they yelled. They yelled out to anyone passing by. It didn't matter if you were a woman or a man. Everyone was a slut to them.

Almost the whole rest of the town drove the fifteen clicks to the factory. It was the kind of factory that made little parts for other factories to turn into real cars. The first morning, I opened my curtains and watched a chain of fenders stretching down the two lane road that led from Winsome's View to the factory town: those were the day shift workers. All that was left in the houses were fat women and babies. The highway cut straight through the centre of town with all the grubby front lawns sidling up to it. Out my front window I could see a row of round faces looking back at me from inside their own windows across the street. Out my back window was the mountain.

There was a downtown with a few stores but I never went there. I only went downtown if I had to buy supplies: macaroni, canned spinach, that soup with the tiny meatballs in it. I had an entire house to myself. I measured the rooms by stretching out on the floor and multiplying by the length of my body. Like this: Bedroom = Me x Me-and-a-Half. Kitchen = Two-Me x Three-Me-and-a-Quarter. I didn't have a radio or a record player. I wished I could dance and practiced kicking into handstands against the empty dining room wall. There were bits of leftover plastic wrap around the windows where the last tenant had tried to keep the drafts out. For a week I lay in bed at night, peeling strips of it off the window frame. It flaked into my fingers like rough pastry.

I found an old pair of running shoes in the road. I was the one in the road; the running shoes were hanging from the telephone wire above me. I'd been leaning on the car as though it might go somewhere. There was the roar of an airplane overhead. I squinted up, but everything was washed out. All you could see was the sun-white sky. Ceiling unlimited. Below the sky was the mountain, jagged and bushy and dimensional. I stood on top of the car with my feet wide against the roof racks and untied the shoes and they fit. I didn't have a job, just the gas card with nothing on it. I jumped down off the roof and set my hands on the hatch of the car and rocked it until it rolled off the shoulder. Then I started pushing. I had to run a few steps up the driver's side, so I could push with one hand and stick the other hand through the window to steer. I thought I'd push the car all the way into town, or into a pond if I could find one. On my way down the road a man named Frank Rooster came along in a yellow tow truck. Frank Rooster owned the gas station. I only know this because the tow truck said Frank Rooster, Gas & Autobody on the side of it. We didn't talk to each other at all. He slowed down and looked at me from inside his truck window and then he stopped and got out. I stopped pushing and took my hands off the hood. I looked down at my feet with my new running shoes on them. Then I turned my body back toward the mountain.

Sorry, car, I said. Shoes = running.

The first trip up the mountain was slow going. Any paths were rough-worn and full of switchbacks. It was like you had to climb the mountain twice to climb it once. I had a little running experience from my high school track team. I knew you had to land lightly on your feet. I knew you couldn't make a fist. If you make a fist, all your energy rushes down your arms and out your fingers like electric eels. Everything about running is about care. You can't just hurtle yourself through the bush. You have to pretend you are holding onto a potato chip in each hand and you can't break them. You have to run as if you believe that everything under your feet is something alive and living and if you're not careful you will be a murderer. I pretended that under my feet was a colony of snails that was actually one of the world's great civilizations.

I listened to my own breath. When the slope got steep, I sighed to slow my heart down. There were roots and burrs and sap and sharp things everywhere: it was a forest. I got used to running with my hands up, to protect my eyes. At the top of the mountain, there was an oak tree that had been hit by lightning when it was very young. It was split in two down close to the bottom. Instead of dying, the trunk had scarred in a round way and then kept growing as two limbs that were stuck together. Do you remember all those pictures of Siamese twins joined at the waist? The tree was like that. The branches were two heads that weren't joined.

I circled the tree. I didn't like to let myself rest. The path down was lighter and easier. My body had already swept away the scrub. Gravity lengthened my stride. I closed my eyes. I wasn't afraid of falling.

People asked questions. You know: neighbourhood people. I heard them on the sidewalk when I passed by, or talking loud in their gardens on Saturday mornings as I laced up my shoes. How does she live? they said. Is this some way to make money? They never asked what was at the top of the mountain. They never asked me anything. They assumed I was in training.

I was in training. My legs got brown and thin and bramble-scarred. The mountain was my province. I liked the places where thorns and branches had scratched me. The scabs were proof. I was doing something hard. I had a pink Timex stopwatch that I fastened to my shoelace. On the days I ran a little faster, I put ten extra macaronis in my meatball soup. This was like a reward. It was bonus pay. I was the only person in town working the mountain shift. I drew a picture of myself with stick arms and stick legs in front of a big green triangle. I glued it to my kitchen wall. Underneath the picture I wrote “Employee of the Month” in blue magic marker.

Every day, I stepped out of bed and the mountain was still there. The whole summer went by. Across the street, the women in their soft pants watched me from their living room windows. They'd never seen a runner in real life. I caught glimpses of them inside their houses, drinking coffee and vacuuming. I hadn't really talked to another person since I arrived—even the blonde cashier at the grocery store only nodded at my silent purchases. One evening I watched a man push a lawnmower over a pile of raked-up leaves. He was wearing greasy blue work pants and steel-toed boots. Every time he turned the lawnmower around, his wrist flexed and for a moment I could see all the purple veins in the back of his hand. There was a wind and the shredded leaves blew around like loose garbage. I crossed my arms and my fingers were cold against the insides of my elbows. I thought about the cold steel handle of the lawnmower. The man didn't look uncomfortable. His grip never changed.

By the end of October, I had been running up the mountain for almost six months. Cars slowed down whenever they passed my house. Instead of just watching me through the window, families lined the path by my back gate on Sunday mornings. When I came out, some of the children jumped up and down. You'd think the attention would make me feel really important, but it just embarrassed me. It made me want to be the kind of person who doesn't run up a mountain.

What can we do? the people shouted. What do you need?

Some of them had water in Dixie cups that they had brought from their bathroom cup dispensers. They held out the cups as I ran by. If they got too excited, the cups shook and I got wet.

No, no! I said. No, thank you! I don't need any help!

I was really good at running up a mountain.

When I went downtown to buy macaroni or canned spinach, people nodded at me on the street. If I stopped at the corner, waiting for cars to pass, the guys who worked at Frank Rooster's gas station yelled out Hey! Hellooo! and then started jogging on the spot.

Look! they yelled, pointing at their own feet.

Sometimes I tried to smile and sometimes I just looked up at the clouds. I didn't want to seem unpleasant. I didn't want to look like I thought I was hot stuff. My old car was always sitting on the lot and whenever I passed by I whispered to it. Whoa, girl, I'd say. Easy now.

One of the guys had stringy brown hair and a tattoo of a mosquito on his shoulder. The other one wore a name tag that said Rooster's Autobody—Jeremy Nazdhenko. I hadn't lived in Winsome's View for very long, so no one knew my name. The gas station guys called me Marathon Girl. It's Marathon Girl! They yelled. Pretty soon other people were yelling out to me too.

My real name seemed very poor in comparison. I didn't correct anyone. Who wants to have a poor name?

One night Jeremy Nazdhenko knocked on the door of my house. He was with his girlfriend. She was wearing tight pink pants and black boots and carrying a picnic basket. They wanted to see me when I wasn't running. I could tell that they wanted to take me out for dinner and drinks and ask me questions and write down all my answers. I didn't open the door, I just called through the keyhole.

I have to get a good night's sleep! I said. Sorry! Some other time!

I had to run up the mountain again in the morning.

Outside it got so cold that I shoved tube socks over my hands to keep them from freezing. While I was running I thought about things you could eat, things other women in Winsome's View ate. I thought about chocolate cake, bruised bananas, stewed raisins. Soft things, sweet things. I rolled the imaginary food around in my mouth with my real tongue. My legs never stopped. Inside me was this raw furnace. It snowed and I sucked the snow in with big, deep gasps until my lungs burned with cold. I remembered being small and seeing pictures of a horse my father had owned before I was born. He let the horse run races in the cold air and its lung froze and it fell down dead. He had a picture of the horse, Jasper, wearing all his racing gear, and another one of Jasper flat out on the ground.

I hadn't knocked more than a minute off my time since the beginning of the fall. On my way to the grocery store, I stopped at Rooster's car lot and sat on my old car's hood. What if I can't get any faster? I asked. I showed the car the insides of my shoes, the places where my feet had worn away the lining, the places that were stained with popped blisters. The car's paint job was stained with kicked-up salt from test drives. Its price was slashed.

Some days I ran sprints up and down the road in front of my house: one hundred metres of long strides, then a loose walk back over the same ground. Children on the sidewalk tried to keep pace, the way Superman runs next to the train.

The burning began to fill my whole body. I was running for six or eight hours every day and timing every trial. Grinding myself down. My face got smaller and smaller. I looked in the mirror and thought, My skull is the size of a child's skull. That night I fell into bed. There was nothing to be done. I didn't work at the factory and I didn't have a baby. I was the Marathon Girl.

One morning in the spring my feet sank into the mud and wouldn't come out. I lost an entire shoe that way. I had to go downtown and buy a new pair of shoes, because no matter what I said the lady wouldn't sell me just one. I even thought she might give me a free shoe. Business had really increased since the town had taken an interest in my running. The window was full of blue t-shirts with the word Marathon! written across the front in yellow script. It was Saturday and the store was packed with women buying kids' shirts and matching yellow shoelaces.

You're making me have three shoes! I yelled. Who needs three shoes? I threw my muddy leftover shoe into the window display. It knocked down a child-sized mannequin. The child's face was slashed with mud from my shoe. Her wig fell off. This demonstration of power surprised even me. Before I started running up a mountain, I would never have thrown a tantrum in an athletics store. I only watched people like that. Now the bald child mannequin watched me, lying there in her Marathon! t-shirt with her face all dirty.

I'm sorry, I whispered to the mannequin. But you were asking for it.

The store lady made a soft fist with her hand at her side. She probably thought I didn't notice. She couldn't kick me out of the store because I was the Marathon Girl.

One day a man was standing at the top of the mountain. Just standing there. He had something cold and black pressed up against his eyes. When I got closer I saw that it was a pair of fold-up binoculars. He was aiming down the trail. There was a copper thermos hanging off a carabiner attached to his belt. He was a red-head and so clean-shaven that his face shone like it was wet. I thought he looked wind-burned from standing there under the sky. He was taller than me by at least a foot. That was the thing that made me step back.

I never stopped when I got to the top. I always just circled the tree and started back down. But the man was standing there and he put the binoculars down on the ground and unscrewed the top of the thermos. He held something out to me. It wasn't a Dixie cup, or even a sports bottle. It was a regular glass made of glass.