ISN’T THIS WHAT YOU WANTED?
I’ve never been fast. Not physically, that is. Someone, for who knows what reason, commissioned a videographer to film my preschool class for a full year and edit the footage into a three hour VHS of children just beyond infancy wandering through a scraggly churchyard in puffy winter coats and playing with their velcro shoes at story-time and eating crackers with deliberation, crumbs tumbling onto collars and corduroy laps. And there I am in my own puffy violet coat on an outing to a farm, the camera wobbling between the goats and the children, all bleating and sniffing one another. The group rushes ahead toward the hen house and I lag behind, rounding a red barn corner, dreamy and solemn. The teacher prompts me to run and I stumble forward a few feet, then stop. Why compete, I imagine my smaller self thinking, where I will never excel? Why suffer defeat where I won’t taste victory? I found my strength in story-time, where word by word, I read aloud, a white knit blanket tied around my shoulders as a cape. I learned quickly, I read quickly, my vocabulary sped forward. But I ran, I continue to run, slowly.
I think of this now as I begin my morning jog around the neighborhood. Because I despise every second of this exercise. Every ragged, pink-faced breath, every rhythmic pound of my sneaker against pavement. I hate running in place at stoplights while men stream by in their cars, heads twisted to watch my breasts bounce. I hate the sweat that crawls in dark stains over my belly and back.
I am slogging past the bagel shop with its yeasty odors. I am crossing the bridge that arches over the highway, where cars arrested in traffic shift and shimmer, a metallic tapestry, a single huffing, glinting beast.
I’ve begun these morning runs because of Rick. Not so much because of him, but because of his new girlfriend, whom I met while they held hands in the bar last week. Why is it still so strange to to see his hand around another woman’s? I secretly think he was drawn up and breathed into life for me, so he could offer me love, then heartbreak, then a mellow, tapering friendship that will slowly fade him from reality. He once called me a solipsist and I said, But isn’t everyone really? Deep down? and he said, No, Lexi, they’re not, and looked at me with big, pretty martyr eyes. As a kid, I used to get a shivery sensation that there was someone behind me, someone dangerous. I used to imagine it was another me that was following me, but a bad version, an ugly, twisted version with wild hair and a bludgeoned look to her eyes. It made me afraid then, but no longer. I think maybe she still lives there, trailing my shadow. Maybe we’ve become friends, and at night, we rock each other to sleep.
I am running up the hill between two avenues. No, I’m doing a lunging walk up the hill because actual running is too hard and my calves burn and I’m panting so loud people turn around to watch me struggle. I’m passing this grand, cheesy hall of 1970’s glamour, white brocade and chandeliers, gold spires on the iron gate. I want to lie on a bear skin rug in that hall, my gasping body flush with the dead one below.
The girlfriend is cute. She smiled at me like I might devour her. She is short and slim and has little doll features. She’s the kind of girl guys like to hoist over their shoulders. The kind of girl who memorized rap lyrics in college because she thought it would be funny to repeat them in her little white girl voice.
She is new in his life, and I could tell her things. He got drunk sometimes and woke up in bad places– the bathtub in a shallow of vomit, the stairway mysteriously missing his shoes, a bus station bench with a dog lapping vigorously at the crotch of his jeans. Once, he threw a quarter at our bathroom window and the whole thing shattered. Once, on a bus between Philadelphia and New York, he had food poisoning and shit himself, and since the bus bathroom was out-of-order and locked, he had to sit in his own shit for an hour.
These aren’t stories to dissuade her from dating Rick. I just want to scrub the shine off a little. Is that really so wrong? To ask her to see things honestly?
The sidewalk evens out and trees flap their leaves above me. The concrete is dappled with light and I try only to step in the shadowed bits, as if I could stamp out the sun by accident. Someone driving past shouts, “Hey lady! Wanna fuck?” then laughs and zips away. I could chase down the car. I could shimmy in through the open window, sprawl onto the driver’s lap, peel off my shorts, and when he stares with surprise, I could ask, “Isn’t this what you wanted?”
The new girlfriend made me feel oversized and clumsy. She had a quick, hiccupy laugh. She made me feel slow. So I decided to run, to make my body a machine, fight pain for glory, and so on, like a sports drink commercial. The truth is, I haven’t felt well lately. The truth is, I’ve been churning through life underwater, and all I see is the deep, soundless black of the ocean. The truth is, I wouldn’t want him back, but oh, how I want a hand in a bar to fold over mine.
Hadley Franklin’s work has appeared in Narrative, Palimpsest, Runaway Parade, and Hanging Loose. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and earned an MFA in fiction from NYU’s Creative Writing Program. She teaches literature and writing at a special education school in New York and lives in Brooklyn.
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