The Peerless Four Read online

  “Where are the sisters?” he asked, tapping a cigarette against his palm. He set the cigarette in his mouth.

  I wanted to tell him that he was an awful example, but I was just angry because I couldn’t smoke in front of the girls.

  “They went for a walk,” I said, letting him know by my voice how I felt about the inequality. But he ignored me.

  He was on his way to lighting the cigarette when he looked at Bonnie, looked at me, and said, “So you told her.”

  “Oh, Jack,” I said.

  He shook out his match.

  “Told me what?” said Bonnie.

  “Nothing, honey,” said Jack, realizing his mistake.

  “Told me what?” Bonnie said, looking at me. I, in turn, looked back at Jack. He’d been relying on me to tell her, but now it had become his job. I made sure to make that clear with my facial expression.

  “Ah, Jesus, Mel,” he said, by way of acknowledgement.

  Flo was taking everything in with her big-eyed stare but I gave her a nod. “Can’t I stay?” she asked, and she got her answer with Jack’s grim face. She stood up and left the kitchen.

  Jack took his place in her chair. He pulled off his hat and set it on the table. Smoke came from the side of his mouth.

  “What?” said Bonnie. “Told me what?”

  Jack didn’t answer, his head hanging. Then he stubbed his cigarette in our tin ashtray and gave her a long and sorry look. “Coach Frank,” he said, “will not be joining us in Amsterdam.”

  He watched her. She was staring back at him, but then she looked down.

  “I’m sorry, honey. It’s not in the cards.”

  Her face came up with a startling angry intensity. Her eyes glittered and she leaned toward him. “I won’t go,” she said. “I won’t go without him.”

  Jack said nothing and she waited. She waited and she kept staring at him and he stared back at her without a word.

  Then he said, “You’re a quitter.”

  “What?” she said. “Are you kidding?” Her mouth twisted and she mimicked him in a nasty voice—“You’re a quitter.” She laughed mean and artificial. “Is that all you can say? This is all about money. It’s always about money. I’m not going if he doesn’t.”

  Jack looked at me, shook his head sadly, and then said, “A familiar story. Quits because of a man. I’ve heard it a million times before, Mel.”

  He sighed, still looking at me. “Coach Frank,” he said, “and his wife have a baby coming. His wife’s not so keen on him traveling. Seems understandable, wouldn’t you agree, Mel?”

  I said that I would.

  “Have you met his wife?” he asked.

  I said that I hadn’t but that I’d heard that she was delightful.

  “She feels very strongly,” he said, “that Coach Frank stay home.”

  I said that I had heard about this development and that it made sense.

  “Did you know,” he said to me, “that there’s been some nasty rumors?”

  I said that I did my best to ignore malicious gossip.

  “Good girl,” he said, solemn. He paused, asked, “You know a thing or two about running the hundred metres, Mel?”

  I said that I did.

  “You’d be willing to impart this information?”

  I said that I’d coach to the best of my ability along with Coach Sacks. That as I saw it, my duty was to the girls: to chaperone them, dispense advice and sympathy, and buffer them from Jack’s ego and domineering behavior.

  “You’re a peach, Mel,” he said, ignoring my insults. He gave me a full-on Jack smile. “Has anyone told you that?”

  I said that he had.

  Bonnie had been watching us with a blank amazement, but now her face looked as though she might scream or cry or both at once. But she remained silent, her hands splayed on the table, and her breathing thickened.

  I placed my hand on her forearm. She shook it off, setting her palms to her eyes, fingers at her forehead, as if to hold in her brain. “I can’t run,” she said. “I need him. I can’t win without him.” She shook her head, and her hands stayed at her face.

  “You think you need him but you don’t,” I said, and I believed this. “He’s your coach. He’s not you.”

  “That’s right, honey,” Jack murmured. “That’s right. You don’t need Coach Frank. You’ve got everything you need inside of you.”

  She released her hands, the skin around her eyes flushed. There was a long and heavy silence where we all went back and forth looking at each other.

  Then Jack stood, took his hat from the table. He said, “I’m no good at this.” He had his hat in front of his stomach in both hands as if he were at church, and the sweat showed on his face.

  He went to her, leaned in and whispered in her ear. He kept on whispering, and her head lowered. After he left, she still wouldn’t let the tears come. I sat with her because she asked me to stay. I wanted to know what Jack had told her but I didn’t ask.

  Chapter Four

  Farmer

  I woke one morning with a hangover, no one in the house, my head buzzing. The girls were at practice. Drinking a glass of water, I saw Ginger’s bloomers hanging at the back of a chair, her running shoes beneath. They fit. Then I found myself running out of the house’s shadow into the warm sunlight, over hilly ground with grass into a flat field, and onto a packed dirt road toward the woods. The buzzing diminished and I remembered the painful, rhythmic, achy, tremendous feel of running. My stride was ungainly but I enjoyed eating up the ground with my feet. Breathing hard, I endured and my lungs pounded. The smell was clean and healthy, the air sweet. Overhead, the tree branches canopied and cut the sun. I lengthened my stride to get a pain out of my side, and it worked all right. I was conscious of the heat and my sweat, and a curious giddiness came over me, as though I were charged with electricity. I’m not sure how long I was out there, but I ran to a steady jog-trot rhythm, and then it was so smooth I forgot I was running. I was hardly able to know that my legs were lifting and falling and my arms going in and out. My heart had gone from thumping in my temples to a steady thrum. I didn’t know I was walking until the noise of a squirrel rustling inside a bush brought me back, and I had a coughing fit.

  Walking home, I saw the girls to my left some distance away, tiny and bright colored, practicing with more girls. There was Coach Sacks hobbling, and I heard his whistle. Some girls lying on their backs sprang up in sit-ups; some rotated their torsos, hands at their hips; and some stretched forward, touching their toes. A pack ran around the track in one giant dot.

  That evening, for the first time in months, I didn’t pine for the taste of whiskey and the accompanying pleasure of nicotine. My body hurt in the best way. Instead of my usual strained appetite, I ate a generous dinner, savoring the meal. My mind was too tired to grapple with my usual insomnia, and I fell asleep quickly, without the aid of alcohol or sedatives, into a prolonged deep slumber.

  After that, in the mornings when the girls practiced, I went for my secret runs. Ginger had plenty of bloomers and shoes and she let me have hers without question, not because she was polite but because she didn’t care. She wasn’t interested in my idiosyncrasies. No one would have supposed that a thirty-eight-year-old woman sidelined from exercising by doctors’ orders had taken up a running habit. I’d thought and written a lot about running since I’d stopped, but the thinking and writing was nothing compared with the doing. The feeling of solace was worth the risk of being caught. There was something quietly spiritual for me, listening to the hih-huh of my breath coupled with the tap-teck of my feet. I was not as likely to worry about headaches, digestive troubles, insomnia, and backaches, and the discomfort (and pain) of the exertion was worth the feeling of pleasure produced at its termination. The stopping was even better than the starting.

  Two mornings before we were to leave by train to Montreal, I went for a long run while the girls practiced. Muriel Ziegler, our javelin girl, had arrived at the house late the night before fr
om Alberta and Jack had agreed that she needed her rest, excusing her from practice. She was a small-town girl, a Russian Jew, and a sports veteran at twenty-two. Quick-witted and quick-tongued, with black bobbed hair and a muscular wiry body, she was popular. The girls voted her team captain unanimously.

  As a girl, whenever anyone saw her, she was running, and always very fast. “Why walk when you can run,” she told a newspaper reporter later. A club-shaped scar extended from the corner of her eyelid down and across her jawline. She got it at seven from jumping off a barn roof with a crowd of children watching. She landed with a flourish, kicking up dust. Kids laughed and clapped but then silenced when she shrieked in pain, her bloody face looking up. She’d hit her head on a piece of wood, barely missing an eye. The next day, her face bruised and stitched, she performed the same stunt in front of an even larger audience, determined to get it right. She crashed just as hard, cracking two ribs.

  At eight, she took up marbles, practiced for hours, until the entire neighborhood of marble-players refused to play and lose to her. At nine, she participated in baseball, hockey, and football with the boys, winning their respect. At eleven, she took on a school bully, and put up a good fight. Some said he’d won but it didn’t matter. That same year, she invented a game called Train Race, but after slipping while running alongside the train, almost getting yanked beneath its wheels, she stopped. Once, she climbed a huge tree in front of her elementary school, balanced at the top. “I wanted to know what it was like,” she said, “to look down on everyone.” She perched there like a hawk until the principal called for her to come down or risk expulsion.

  One forgets that he is watching a girl, wrote a reporter, for there isn’t the slightest semblance of anything feminine about her, or in her actions. The press was in a debate as to whether they loved or hated her. She gave great one-liners. But she didn’t even pretend to care what they thought, not bothering with lipstick or girdles. In posed photos, even when vociferously encouraged to smile, she always gave the camera a dead-on-serious-grim-faced stare. Peterson Chocolates, where she worked in the factory, was her loyal sponsor. The girls called her Farmer and the press picked it up, but she didn’t mind. “It’s better than the Dream Girl,” she said.

  Muriel was still in bed when I left. I decided to run anyway, sneak back without her knowing. The sky was gray with clouds, sun poking through. A mile or so away was the dark-green wall of woods. I ran into the field and onto the dirt road carpeted with leaves. I continued at a comfortable pace, every few steps hearing a leaf or a small branch snap under my shoes.

  Then I was fully in the woods—a first—hurdling fallen logs, twisting through bramble. The earth smelled sweetly clean, the air noticeably cooled beneath the big trees.

  My foot caught on a rock and I fell forward. On the ground, I spat dirt from my mouth. I knew dirt was all over my face, my cheek scraped—blood at my fingers when I touched. One of those stinging scrapes, I decided, that hurt worse than it looked.

  I was up again and heading out of the woods, both angry that I’d lost my footing and invigorated by my daring at going in the woods. My mouth had gone dry and I summoned saliva and spat.

  I imagined I was being followed and if I was caught I’d be killed—a game that I used to play as a girl when I ran, simply for the thrill—and quickened my pace.

  Out of the woods, the gray had burned off. Birds sang and I heard the frenetic scrambling of a small animal nearby. Overhead a great flock of blackbirds rose and fell and streamed past me in a squawking rush.

  Then I saw a figure walking ahead of me—light, brisk, slightly pigeon-toed. I sprang to the side but it was too late. The person waved. Farmer.

  I slowed and walked to her and she walked to me. She wore bloomers, a blouse, running shoes, and a blue cloche hat. The breeze cooled me like silk. When we reached each other, she said, “Your secret’s safe.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Your face is dirty,” she said. Before I responded, she said, “Don’t say I hit you or something.”

  “I’ll say I fell,” I said. “It’s true.”

  “A little powder,” she said, squinting and tilting her head, as though imagining makeup on me. “No one will bother you.” A nerve jumped beside her right eye, under her scar.

  “Doctors,” I said, feeling the need to explain, “told me to stop when I was younger. I took it up again by surprise.”

  “Doctors,” she said, “slap you when you come out your momma. From there on, they want you to curl up like a bug and die.”

  “I’m too old,” I said, “to be running.” Then I corrected myself. “To be seen running.”

  “Once,” she said, “a man saw me running and he called the police.”

  “Why?”

  “He figured that someone was chasing me, or that I was sick. ‘Girls don’t run,’ he said. The cops came and talked to Momma. She said, ‘Oh no, she’s fine. Don’t worry. That’s just what Muriel does.’”

  “A concerned citizen,” I said.

  “A fine man,” she agreed.

  “His duty,” I said.

  “Women,” she said, “have incredible stamina.” She started walking at a quick pace, motioning for me to follow. We jogged in a concentrated silence, our legs in sync. Then she moved ahead in a sprint. I tried to keep pace but gave up and stopped, catching my breath, and watched the blue and white of her shirt, bloomers, and hat. She was so fast and beautiful. My peak was long gone, and I wished then for that wholeness to return.

  It was sometime well after midnight when Farmer knocked on my bedroom door, and I slowly came to from a corpse-like sleep. I found my way to the door, opened it.

  “Bonnie’s drunk,” she said, not wasting words.

  A jolt of fear went through me, until I realized my stash was well hidden under my bed, safe from blame, and the fear turned to an alert panic.

  “Where’d she get it?”

  Farmer shrugged an I-don’t-know. “She’s hollering,” she said, “about her coach.”

  “Hold on,” I said, going for my robe.

  “Sorry to wake you,” Farmer said. “I’ve been up with her, trying to take care. But it’s getting worse.”

  I looked out my window, confirming that it was a deep-dark-everyone-asleep outside.

  Pretending to need my slippers, I kneeled and looked under my bed, reached my hand and felt my flask and bottle, tested their weight. Secure.

  I followed Farmer toward Flo and Bonnie’s bedroom. There was a sound coming from inside, reminding me of cats mating.

  “I’m not paid enough,” I said to no one.

  The sisters stood in the hallway near their bedroom, wide-eyed, identical nightgowns, hands clutched across their torsos. They even had their heads tilted the same. The only difference was that Ginger had her rag doll.

  “Go on back to sleep,” I said.

  They didn’t move.

  “Go on!” I said.

  “Go on,” Farmer said, far more gentle, “go on, everything’s okay. Don’t worry, everything’s okay.”

  They followed Farmer’s instruction, throwing cautious looks back at us.

  I made to knock at the door of the bedroom but Farmer opened it and we went inside. The light was on, and Bonnie sat on her bed, hands crossed at her chest. She was catching her breath to make more noise. Flo sat next to her and turned her head to us when we entered. Bonnie’s head didn’t turn. Her mouth opened and her tongue came out. She made her cat noise, and Flo shushed her.

  Bonnie shook her head violently. “I love him,” she said, and Flo said, “I know, I know,” and Farmer came to the bed, saying, “Everything’s going to be okay.”

  “Where’d she get it?” I asked Flo, searching the room, and Flo swore up and down and on her mother’s life and her father’s and brothers’ and even her beloved dog’s that she didn’t know a thing.

  “Come here,” I said, and I made Flo breathe into my face. The whole room smelled of gin and I couldn’t tell one way
or the other. I interrogated her more and then lost heart. “Go to the sisters’,” I told her. “Take your pillow and covers, get some sleep. We’ve got a train to catch in the morning.”

  Flo nodded, grabbed her things, and then she was gone, closing the door quiet behind her.

  The shrieking went on for about an hour and then Bonnie’s face started changing colors. I told Farmer to get the bucket from the kitchen. She was fast and came back in time with two, placing one between Bonnie’s feet. She tucked Bonnie’s hair behind her ears and adjusted her head.

  I searched again for a bottle, hoping to get an idea of what we were dealing with, and all the time I was looking, there was a horrible retching noise—silence—retching—silence, and finally a soft moaning. It smelled like an acidic combination of gin, corn, and mashed potatoes, in remembrance of our dinner.

  Farmer went to empty the buckets, and I arranged Bonnie in her bed, tucking her in like a little girl, the cover tight under her chin. She was snoring with her mouth wide open by the time Farmer returned.

  “Better stay,” Farmer said, and I agreed. Farmer turned off the light and tucked in beside Bonnie, and I fell asleep at Flo’s bed.

  Before long, the sun shined through the window, and when I opened my eyes, Farmer was staring from her bed at me, as if she’d just opened her eyes, saying, “Good morning, Mel.”

  “Morning, Farmer.”

  We sat up and conversed a bit, and soon Bonnie sat up, testing her lips and mouth with her tongue. Pale and horrified, her eyes going from me to Farmer then to the wall, she said, “I got drunk.”

  “Sure did,” I said.

  “I never did before,” she said, her eyes making their rounds again. “I never even took a sip before.” Incredulous, and then she seemed to understand that she was in serious trouble because she went into a meditation without further commentary.

  After some time passed, Farmer asked, “You okay?”

  Bonnie shifted, as if testing her insides. She moved her arms and legs, swallowed a few times. “I think I’m all right,” she said. She looked at me with frightful eyes, took another swallow. “I’m all right,” she said, and then, “I’m so thirsty.”