The Race

For the third year in a row I have dragged my body out of bed at the crack of dawn, dressed in the dark, and trotted out the door to begin a long Saturday morning run, preparation for a fall marathon. Today my steps were feeling particularly heavy, weighted by a general gloominess and a hacking cough, remnants of my nasty little battle with the flu. The sun pushed above the horizon as I chugged slowly up the hill, determined not to give up what little motivation I'd managed to scrape together. I imagined the internal dialogue of the lone driver coming up the road behind me. "Hey, get a load of the tree sloth. I thought they only lived in South America."

I hadn't felt so unathletic in years, but today, dreading the 18 miles I had committed myself to, the recent conversation I had had with my grade school classmate popped into my head.

I had spotted him out in the front yard, a month back, mowing his parents' lawn. I had been driving through the old neighborhood, inflicting a tour on my kids. I pulled the car over and leaned out the window to chat. "Whatever happened to the other two?" Richard had asked, after a few minutes of discourse.

"What other two?" I inquired, searching my memory banks for the possibilities, still distracted by the surprise and pleasure of seeing my old crush.

"You know, Arlene Warner and Joanne Jordan. Do you ever hear from them?"

I was at a complete loss. I couldn't recall speaking to them on the playground much less after college. Fruitlessly I searched for some connecting thread: a forgotten car accident in which Joanne, Arlene, and I had miraculously survived together; a hostage crisis in which Arlene had managed to distract the psychotic gunman long enough for Joanne and I to hurl ourselves out a window, but nothing came.

"Didn't we used to call you guys the Three Stooges?" he asked, looking at me with that sparkle of camaraderie, eager for my participation in this little foot race down memory lane. The kids perked up in the backseat, electrified by the notion that their mother had once been a total loser. My nickname, no, our nickname, was news to me and I marveled at what else I could have possibly missed. It had never occurred to me that I was put in the same category as the two most embarrassingly uncoordinated girls in school. I wavered for a moment, torn between my two options: laughing it off or inventing a new nickname for Rich, right there and then. I opted for the latter, contrary to my better judgment.

Arlene Warner's greatest disadvantage, overshadowing any absence of athletic prowess, was her mother. Years of therapy were in order there, and I could envision Arlene sucking cigarettes to the filter while describing this woman to an empathetic shrink. It wasn't that Mrs. Warner was demonic, beating Arlene with jagged coat hangers for milk spills; it was that she drew negative attention to Arlene like flies to shit.

"If you children don't stop throwing rocks at us, I am not going to invite you to our marshmallow roast," she would whine, shaking a limp fist in the general direction of the future serial killers who had smelled the opportunity, on the way home from school, to remind Arlene of her glaring defects, flinging pebbles for added emphasis. Arlene peeked out from under her mother's arm, every bit the wounded wildebeest. Even I had felt that sickening urge, inbred in all social animals, to dispatch the weakest member of our herd.

"You stop following us, boys, or I'm going to call your mothers," Mrs. Warner added, inviting another shower of pebbles. Arlene had seen those movies too, the ones where some cowboy, hidden behind a pile of rocks, pulls the trigger to spare his buddy certain torture at the hands of some descending swarm of Indians. Her eyes locked on mine that day, and I wished I'd thought to pack a rifle.

Arlene wasn't really so bad. In fact, she was quite pretty. She had soft brown eyes, her hair was thick and curly, swirling softly around delicate shoulders. She suffered from neither stupidity, nor a discernible handicap: the chick just couldn't run. I had never seen anything quite like it before, unless you counted the slow motion replays broadcast during football games. In gym she was inevitably the last to be picked for a team because, as if ordained by God, she would always be tagged out in the first six seconds of any game. She had long ago given up on the idea that things would be different, so with each new inning, Arlene would all but kneel down and expose her neck for the kill.

Joanne Jordan, on the other hand, was an extremely unpleasant person. I was fated to play shortstop to Joanne's second base, annually, on every losing softball team ever formed. I could always hear Mrs. Jordan on the sidelines, bellowing words of encouragement, oblivious to the fact that no amount of rooting was going to help matters much as long as Joanne persisted in picking her nose. No amount of encouragement, let alone dynamite, could move Joanne from her spot. Balls whizzed past her, pleading to land in her glove, but she dismissed all notions of reaching for them.

After these games I would invariably find my mother, seated in one of those folding webbed arm chairs, chatting up a storm with Mrs. Jordan. She would wave me away long enough to finish hearing out Mrs. Jordan's trials and tribulations of raising Joanne, Jeffrey, and little Johnny. Fat Mrs. Jordan had stuck to the "J's" the way her daughter clung to second base. "That Mrs. Jordan is so friendly! Why don't you think about having Joanne over one day after school?" my mother queried. I gawked at her in horror. "Oh, you're being silly. Joanne is a lovely girl . . . Stop that, stop that this instant," she commanded, worried that the other parents would catch me hanging myself with my imaginary noose and take me for an idiot.

The problem with Joanne was multifold. To start with, her overbearing mother dressed her like a Russian immigrant by placing little colored kerchiefs on her head. Her pudgy upper arms were encased in elasticized sleeves that only could have been designed by a sadist. It hurt just looking at her. Her hair was (it was the style back then) cut in a Mrs. Brady shag that hung at her neck like a bad rap. I had threatened an embarrassing public display if my mother insisted on reproducing the same mistake. I figured Joanne would be destined to look like a fat Florence Henderson until the day she died.

The worst of Joanne was not the bad hair, the painful outfits, or her inability to run the bases in under a millennium; it was her stubborn insistence that she was a good athlete. She met the indignity of being picked second to last for a team (Arlene of course quite happily occupied last place) with tantrums and paranoid delusions. We were all accused of being jealous. I was dumbfounded by her tenuous grip on reality. She stomped her feet and paused only long enough in her diatribe to readjust the rubber bands that held up her graying knee socks. Finally, as if on cue, she would fling her convulsing body across the sporting equipment, in a vain attempt to fully register her protest. At least Arlene had dignity.

Then, supposedly, there was me. I glanced at the kids in the rearview mirror who were elbowing each other in the ribs, enthusiastically chanting Richard's new nickname.

"Good one, Mom," they squealed, hoping to encourage another string of blue language.

The fact remained that I could not recollect any event that would have earned me a place in the Hall of Athletic Infamy next to Arlene and Joanne. "My God," I said, "what the hell happened in gym?" We made our way past the bowling alley, still frequented by a healthy assortment of beer connoisseurs, and up past Freeman's farm. I remembered. I stopped the car and got out to look at Freeman's horse.

I had just finished reading Black Beauty, that month before the close of second grade, and I had been mesmerized. I daydreamed about him constantly, tail streaming in the wind as he flowed across the beach, a magnificent torrent of animal with nothing to slow him down. For days I galloped across the playground, oblivious even to everyone. I was free and I was fast, and so, when it was time to take my place on the second grade relay team during field day, I was ready.

We had a fierce rivalry, we second graders, with the haughtiest third grade class ever to strut the halls of Vernon Elementary. Sedition stirred the air as we sharpened our skills and fine tuned our strategy. Mr. Dewitt, our mighty gym teacher, reviewed the troops, clipboard in hand, and announced, much to my surprise, that I would run anchor. Not a single word of dissent was uttered, buttressing my normally shaky confidence, so on race day I took my mark in anticipation of the final hand-off. And this is where it starts to get painful. I am feeling the heft of the baton in the palm of my hand, and the wind is rustling through my hair. I look up from my gloriously strained effort in order to bask in the admiration reflected in the faces of my adoring team mates but I am distracted by a low keening sound coming from somewhere inside Mr. Dewitt.

"For the love of God, Ann, stop galloping. What's wrong with you? Don't you know how to run?"

I don't recall crossing the finish line, yet I certainly must have, more than likely a good minute or two after that third grader. Somewhere in my misery, so crushing in its enormity, I must have looked up to meet Arlene's eyes. Perhaps she was regretting not having slipped that revolver in her backpack; perhaps she was grateful that, just for once, she wasn't the one who had let the team down. Joanne, without a single doubt, would have been describing, to anyone who would have listened, the triumphant outcome that would naturally have unfolded had Mr. Dewitt chosen her, instead of that galloping moron, for the abused anchor position.

Maybe it is a coincidence, my becoming a marathon runner, having nothing to do with my flash-in-the-pan failure, an event overshadowed by far more significant growing pains. After that race I had decided that I would never be much of an athlete and, rather than agonizing over it, I had moved on to try my hand at painting and music. Lucy Grealy had said, in her essay "Mirrorings," that truths are inherently unretainable. I had somehow forgotten my truth; that I was a lousy athlete just like Arlene and Joanne. Just as Lucy had accidentally discovered that people could see her as a warm, smart woman (as opposed to the ugly freak she had believed herself to be), I had tripped over the fact that I was really a pretty good runner. Maybe it is also a coincidence that, when I cross that finish line after 26.2 grueling miles, my pony tail streaming in the breeze, I proclaim, to no one in particular, "Yes, Mr. Dewitt, I know how to run."

Copyright © 2003 The President and Fellows of Harvard College.
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