The Peerless Four Read online

  She kept on staring, cold and remote.

  “You said that?” Danny asked her.

  Ginger was quiet and we waited and then she said, “Hugh says it’s all hogwash. Winning for flag and country.” She was talking about Hugh Williams. He’d won both the 100- and the 200-metres, and now Canada and the world loved him. But he did not love them. He didn’t love to run. He didn’t even like it. His father left when he was a baby, his coach was a dictator, and his mother was also a dictator, and he won, because that’s the way it works sometimes. But he didn’t like it.

  Ginger turned her eyes from me and stared out the window, where globs of rain trickled down the glass. I decided not to press her further, but it bothered me that she was denigrating her team.

  Danny walked me out and we stood in the dark hallway with the door closed. We could hear Ginger plucking at her ukulele, a nonsense song.

  “She doesn’t mean it,” Danny said, and we were both afraid, so we let the words hang there, and neither of us said anything more about it.

  Later that night came the fight between Bonnie and Ginger, and I didn’t get there until the end. Danny came down the hall to my room. I heard her feet on the floor and then she knocked at my door. I opened the door, started to say hello, but she had my arm and was tugging me before anything came out of my mouth.

  “Hurry,” she said. “They’re gonna kill each other.” Her black hair was wild and her face chalk-white. She wore her blue and pink nightgown and her feet were bare, and she ran and held my arm, and I ran but Bonnie and Ginger had already finished their fight by the time we got there, and they were still alive.

  What I remember most about that night is the way Ginger looked. In the corner, knees hugged at her chest, a scratch across her cheek. Her eyes weren’t flat anymore and I was glad. She seemed alive with anger and hurt, and I must admit that it made me glad.

  Across from her stood Bonnie, stunned and flushed and still breathing hard, nose bloodied and a red splotch blooming at her arm.

  I stood and looked from Bonnie to Ginger and back again, and then I felt a presence come over the room, as if a large bird were flying over us, darkening the room with its wingspan, and then it was gone.

  We like to believe that our lives are in our control. Yet sometimes a jolt knocks us off balance and changes us, determining the course we take for the rest of our lives.

  “I told her,” Bonnie was saying, “I told her that she’s selfish. That she’s selfish and that it isn’t right. I never liked her. Never. That it isn’t right that the one who’s selfish gets to win. I told her that she didn’t even try her hardest. I could tell. She didn’t even try her hardest. The one who doesn’t need the luck gets the luck, and why does that happen? It’s not right. Then she grabbed my wrist and said that I didn’t know what I was talking about. That I don’t know what’s inside her. I said that I do. That there’s nothing but ugliness inside her, and that she has everyone fooled because she’s pretty but she hasn’t fooled me”—she stopped, took a long breath—“Then she shook me. She shook me and said that she could have any man that she wanted”—she paused again, took another breath—“she said that when we got back to Canada, that she would find Coach Frank, my Coach Frank, and have him. She would have him and think about me and laugh, and that’s when I hit her.”

  “Oh, Ginger,” I said, and we all looked at Ginger. “You don’t mean that.” But she sat there looking back at us like she meant it.

  “She . . . ,” Bonnie said, and her face contorted with rage, grief, and despair, “she’s evil. She’s mean and she’s evil and she’s selfish.”

  “You don’t know me,” Ginger said, her voice low. She lifted her chin, turned her eyes on Bonnie. “You don’t know anything. Leave me alone.”

  Bonnie said, “I know something’s wrong with you.”

  Ginger’s head went down. We all knew that there was something wrong with Ginger, and our awareness filled the room, and her head just continued to hang down as the saddest kind of proof. She kept it like that for a long while, and then finally Bonnie spoke.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and we were all surprised. I wasn’t sure if she was apologizing for her part in the fight or for telling Ginger that there was something wrong with her and making it fill up the room, or for both.

  I looked at Ginger. She didn’t move or speak. She just looked back at me, and I saw that her eyes had tears in them and that she wasn’t evil or mean or selfish. But that she was endless. You could open one door to try to find her, only to find another door, and another, and another, endlessly opening the doors inside her and never finding her, even if she wanted to be found. Her psychological inheritance. No matter how she fought, it would capture her.

  I felt so sorry for her that I wanted to cry.

  Chapter Eight

  Good Wife

  “Christ,” Jack said, sinking onto the couch next to me. We were in his room at the pension. He shoved the newspaper aside, reached up and unbuttoned his collar, fumbled with his tie. He loosened it, pulled it over his head, and flung it across the room where it spun and landed in a snakelike coil beside the desk. “Christ,” he said again, peevish, “can’t Wallace talk to you in another way?”

  The IAAF delegates had met to decide the future of the women’s track and field events. Our esteemed Canadian representative—my very own Wallace—had voted against women’s future participation, citing previous concerns: that women weren’t allowed in the ancient Greek Olympics and that competitive sports were injurious to our health.

  “It’s a disgrace,” Jack said, “a humiliation. A slap in our face. A slap in your face.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know.” I drew my legs beneath me. “We’re okay,” I reminded him, for only six of the sixteen had voted to ban us.

  “That’s not the point.”

  “I know.”

  “He agrees with the Vatican,” he said. “The goddamn Vatican is against us.”

  “He doesn’t mean it.”

  Jack got up and walked across the room. He stopped in front of the window, thought for a moment. Then he turned to face me.

  “Why are you defending him?”

  “I’m not,” I said, and I was surprised and a little bit awed because I was lying. My feet came to the floor. I feigned casualness, bent toward the table, lit a cigarette, but my fingers trembled.

  I leaned back into the couch, tried for relaxation. But it was like Wallace was right there, breathing on me. Sending his message across the ocean, letting me know that he was desperate, crazy, and our situation dire. A public declaration and bid to control me through his position, and instead of anger, there was a ball of tenderness rolling around inside me, shot through with sorrow, and it made no sense.

  “You’re defending him,” Jack said, and he paced across the carpet, swung past me, and paced again.

  I stubbed the cigarette around in the ashtray, watching it die.

  “Making excuses,” he said. There was a bowl of ice, soda water, and a bottle of Scotch and he made me a drink, and then a much bigger one for himself. “How do you think it makes the girls feel? Winning for Canada, and then Canada votes against them.”

  “Lousy,” I said.

  “Disappointed,” he added. “Angry. Betrayed.” He held the glass out to me. “Take it,” he said, and I did.

  “If you were a good wife,” he said, “he would have voted for us.”

  “You have a wonderful sense of humor,” I said.

  “It’s your fault,” he said. He paused, thinking. “I don’t understand,” he said, shaking his head, and then he gave me a big heap of silence. He floundered in the quiet for a while and then he said, “I don’t understand women. At all.” Another pause. “Let’s take you, for instance.”

  “Let’s not,” I offered.

  “You make him your authority.”

  “How about,” I suggested, “you don’t talk about things that you know nothing about.”

  But he was on a roll. �
�Oh, please,” he said in a baby voice, pressing his palms together in prayer position, “approve of me. You’re the boss. You make the rules.”

  There was nothing to say to that absurdity.

  “I’m trying to make a point,” he said.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Suppose so,” he said. “It’s a goddamn wonder, is what it is.”

  He sank down next to me and drank from his glass, one leg drawn up on the knee of the other, all the time staring at me. He kept on looking and not talking. Thinking and accusing in his stare, and I met his gaze back for a while but it tired me out, and I decided to investigate the carpet pattern.

  I drank the last of my drink and handed my empty to him. He reached and took it, not taking his eyes off me, and set it on the table.

  He said very solemn and quiet: “You still love him.”

  “No,” I said, even though I didn’t know, and even more I didn’t know how to tell Jack that I didn’t know, so I settled for what came easy.

  “You do,” he said, and he took me by my arms and drew me toward him. His eyes glittered with need and hurt, and he drew me even closer so that his breathing was on my cheek.

  “You still love him,” he whispered, and his words traveled through my ear and piled up in my throat like I’d said them, and I didn’t pull back.

  But he did. Then he shifted and turned, lying on his back with his head in my lap and his legs and feet hanging over the edge of the couch. He put my hand on his chest, and I played at a button of his shirt, my other hand on his forehead. He moved my fingers from his forehead so that they covered his eyes. For a long time we didn’t talk. I kept my hand over his eyes, and the heat came from him and moved through me, and I didn’t know what to do.

  So I closed my eyes and kept my hands on Jack. But it was Wallace whom I saw, sitting in his chair before his desk, his arms laid out. Something pathetic about him, a mini-god with his fragile arrogance and audacity. I wasn’t sure if what I felt was love or sympathy for his weaknesses. It seemed to me then that a lot of men shared these traits, and that I loved them, too.

  Despite Jack’s heavy head in my lap, I had a sense of dissolving, as if I’d been blown by the wind and was now suspended in the air without shape. So I opened my eyes, came back into my body.

  Jack removed my hand from his face.

  “I know that you don’t feel the same way about me,” he said. He looked serious, staring up at me.

  “What?”

  “That’s fine,” he said. “I’m fine with that. Really. I’m actually okay with the way things are.”

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  “I deserve it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m saying,” he said, “that I can live with it.”

  I felt hot as though I was in front of a fire. “Okay,” I said.

  “I just want to tell you one time the way that I feel about you.”

  “You want to tell me?”

  “Yes, and I won’t have to tell you again.”

  I didn’t say anything but I nodded.

  “I’ll tell you this one time,” he said, and he shifted from my lap to a sit, facing me. “I won’t press you for anything. I promise.”

  “You’re going to tell me?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  “Okay.”

  “Mel, I’m in love with you.”

  “Oh God,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “It’s bad.”

  “Oh no,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I know.”

  “Stop.”

  His eyes stayed on mine, unwavering. “You’re so beautiful to me, Mel,” he said.

  “Stop.”

  “No, Mel. Let me tell you. Let me. Just once.” He paused, took a breath. “I look at you and it’s too much. I can’t take it. I look at you and then when you’re not with me I miss you. The way you are with me. You’re funny and you make me laugh. You’re smart. You’re different and I always want to be with you. When I’m not with you, I’m remembering what it’s like to be with you. I just sit around and remember you when I’m not with you.”

  “Oh God,” I said.

  “I don’t want to be with anyone else.”

  “Jack”—there was disbelief in my voice.

  “I don’t,” he said. “I really don’t. I don’t want other women. I know what you think. But I don’t. I don’t think about other women.”

  “Jack—”

  “I think about you.”

  “Oh no,” I said.

  “Shut up,” he said. “I’m not done.”

  I said nothing.

  “Good,” he said. “The other night I had a dream that we were on the ship and I went to your room, but this time you let me hold your hand. That was the dream. Nothing more. I just held your hand on the ship and I felt you holding my hand back. I woke up, and it didn’t seem like a dream. It felt real to me. I’m in love with you, Mel. I am.”

  “Oh no,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “It’s bad. I feel like I’m going to die.”

  “You’re not going to die.”

  “The idea that you would love me back”—he closed his eyes—“It’s too much. It’s greedy.” He paused, opened his eyes. He stared and I met his stare and he said, “I didn’t explain.”

  “No,” I said. “No. You did.”

  “Really?”

  “You explained,” I said. “You did.”

  “Is there a chance?” he said.

  He was looking at me as if digging inside me.

  “Yes,” I said, and then, “No. I mean, yes and no.”

  “Yes, or do you mean no?”

  But he kept his word and didn’t press me beyond that.

  So there was nothing to do but go back to my room and drink whiskey alone. I took a bath and then lay in my bed with the lights off, watching the stars flickering like a live painting in the frame of the window, feeling the clock-tick of my heartbeat in my temple against the pillow and tucking my flask under my hip between sips.

  I thought about Wallace, age sixteen, tall, somewhat gawky, chipped front tooth, open face, solid nose, disheveled red hair, green eyes, ears that stuck out a little, hands that he folded in his lap when he was serious, and feet that were inclined to a duck walk, though he constantly corrected himself, and that habit left him by the time he was twenty. To me, he was good and kind, ambitious, intelligent, curious.

  What was I like to him? Youthful and in love, that was what I was like.

  I remembered sitting in the swing chair on his parents’ porch during that first summer. The big maple leaves scattered at the floor-boards, crunching when we walked over them. Wallace leaning over to smell my hair, and it felt like we were floating, the porch chair creaking in time to our swaying. His lips at my neck and hairline, snapping back to our regular sitting positions with the clap of the porch door, his older sister or his mom come to check on us.

  Or driving in his dad’s buggy after a year or more together, leaning my head against his shoulder, watching the sky darkening to night. Parking near a neighboring farm. Working on logistics, elbows and knees in cahoots with the angles. Long kisses, quick kisses, and everything in between. Pausing to talk or not talk, it didn’t matter. We simply knew that we would be together. The plan: marriage and three children—boy, girl, boy.

  Once, he asked me whether I wanted more from life than marriage and kids. Lying in his arms, I said, “It doesn’t matter. As long as I’m with you, it doesn’t matter.”

  I believed it, too.

  But he didn’t.

  “I know you,” he said.

  I didn’t answer for a minute. Then I said, “I just want to be with you.”

  He was quiet, and then he said, “You won’t be satisfied. I know you.”

  I smiled. “Then you know it’s true.”

  He didn’t smile and he kept looking at me.

  The next day at school he found me between classes and told me,
“I meant what I said last night.” He made sure I was paying attention. I didn’t say anything and then the bell rang and he left for his class. I didn’t think any more about it then, but now I think about it. He knew me, he did, and he was anticipating our future.

  That next year, my dad had a severe heart attack and died. He didn’t like me and I didn’t like him, even though I wanted him to love me. The last time I saw him he was reclined in his chair. His eyes fixed on me and he said, “Marry that boy.”

  “I will,” I said, and I shook his hand like we made a business deal, a chill going through my fingers.

  At his funeral, I found out that he had married and deserted another woman besides my mother. I knocked against his casket and the sound was hollow. At the reception, I overheard two women in the kitchen mixing lemonade, saying that the stress of my landing on his doorstep when I was nine had been the beginning of his decline.

  Two months later, I married Wallace.

  I continued to sip whiskey, thinking of Wallace, and not really caring the way that I should that he’d voted against us, and then I slept like a dead person and didn’t wake until Farmer banged on my door with breakfast.

  The flask was underneath me, and I wedged it under the mattress. She brought me the newspaper, coffee, and two rolls with butter. “No one blames you for his vote,” she said, and I told her that I appreciated that.

  She was sorry for me, and she let me know it. I expressed my appreciation some more. She pretended not to smell the alcohol. She said not to worry, that she had everything under control. The girls were going shopping, and some reporters and photographers were coming. Did I want to come? I told her that I wanted to rest and she left me to my resting.

  I stayed in bed in my Slip Away and Jack came later around dinnertime, with two rolls and a plate of chicken, mashed potatoes, and stringy green beans. He sat down at the chair by the desk, tossing a pack of cigarettes to me.

  I took one and patted my nightgown as if looking for matches. He sighed and came forward, leaned in, struck a match.

  “Thanks,” I said, drawing my head back.

  “You’re welcome,” he replied, and that was the extent of our conversation. He didn’t want to know what was on my mind, and I didn’t want to know what was on his. Neither of us wanted to say what needed to be said, which was that we had something going on between us, and that he had put it in the open and released it by talking, and that it needed to be discussed more, and how were we going to go forward, with our train leaving in two days, and where would I be living, and did we know what was happening, and what could we do about it? We sat, smoked, stared at each other, and said nothing.