When you run, you aspire to an economy of motion that has only one goaclass="underline" to optimize the intake of oxygen so that you can keep running. Anything that impedes this one goal must fall away.
I don’t remember the woman’s face anymore. All I remember is the way she moved, the way everything about her was contained and effortless and perfect. Sometimes I imagine her alongside me when I run, and I try to match my every movement to hers. Our shoulders jostled each other when we rounded the turns that day. Her hair was in a single braid, a thick rope of hair that swayed across her back. You could hear it swish against her windbreaker. The rhythm of it paced us both.
When I told Dot about this woman, I remember her sighing and shaking her head, telling me to just let it go. If more people did that, she said, if they just left each other alone, there’d be less disappointment in this world. I’ve realized that everything Dot ever told me, all of her advice for me, came from somebody I didn’t know much about. I knew her husband was dead and that she had other kids besides Phil. They came up in passing when we talked. She never said anything bad about them, but she never said anything good about them, either. I didn’t know if she had any grandkids. I didn’t know what she did outside of work. I didn’t even know where she lived. Dot never smiled. “Bad teeth,” she told me once. But I remember her smiling when she told me this — the only time I’d seen her do that — and her teeth were fine. She didn’t sleep well, so she was always tired, and she moved around the office carefully, hanging on to the edges of desks and cabinets. She was a small woman, but she moved with this weight in her, like her gravity was different from everybody else’s, as if it took everything she had just to get across the room or to get through the day.
When I told Dot about the woman at the lake, she said as long as I was happy, why chance it with anybody else? Why risk what you’ve got for something you may never have?
* * *
So we went on a date. April caught me after work and asked if I wanted to buy her a drink. She gave me directions to a place she knew. “Turn right here,” she said. “Left up there.” She used her unlit cigarette as a pointer. She said she liked my car. It’s a ’69 Olds that belonged to my father, and he took good care of it. Change the oil every three months, he’d told me, wash it every other week, catch all the rust spots before they spread — do that and a car will last forever. That’s what my father taught me. April said that’s a good tradition to have, keeping the family car in shape.
The bar we went to was on a frontage road that looped north of the airport. It reminded me of every other bar I’d ever been in, with carved-up tables and wobbly chairs and ratty love seats against the wall. There were TVs mounted in the ceiling corners, all of them on, and a jukebox going, and people hooting around the pool tables in the back. And there was the smell of the place. I read somewhere that smell is the most primitive of the senses, that it can trigger memory more strongly and deeply than any other sense. This bar had that smell, and it all came back to me. Just because you change your life doesn’t mean you don’t miss things.
We sat at the bar, and the guy behind it knew April by name and gave her the usual, a vodka gimlet. I had orange juice. I wanted a beer. I admit that. But I didn’t have any beer that night. Beer had nothing to do with it.
She handed her cigarettes to me and told me to ration her. “I’m cutting down,” she said. And then she just started telling me things — where she was born, where her folks were born, what they did for a living. She had three sisters and two brothers, and she told me what they all did for a living. Some of what she said I never would have guessed. She was married once. She called her ex-husband The Mistake. And she had a kid somewhere, who she never saw because The Mistake was such a dick. But she thought about the kid all the time. She was learning how to crotchet, taking a class in it at the extension college. And she was a big reader, mysteries and true crime. “You know, crap,” she said. Then she ordered us another round and said, “Okay, your turn.” So I told her where I was born, where I went to high school. I told her about my folks being dead and what I’ve done to the house, fixing it up. I didn’t have much else to say after that. But again, she didn’t seem to mind. She asked me a few questions — what did I do in high school, what did I do for fun. When I couldn’t answer, she just asked me for a cigarette instead, and held it out for me to light, and thanked me.
The bar was getting busy. Everybody was coming up and saying hello to her. Her life seemed filled with people, crowded with them. Somebody shouted her name from the back, where the pool tables were. “Come on,” she said, “let’s play.” I told her to go ahead. “Come on,” she said again. “One game.” She put her hand on top of mine and said she’d teach me. But I told her to go play pool, and I guess she got the way I said it, because she held her hands up. “Okay, Okay,” she said.
There was a baseball game on the TV. Two guys next to me were watching it, and whenever anything happened, they hollered and banged their fists on the bar. One of them kept elbowing me accidentally and apologizing for it. Sure enough, he knocked my orange juice over. He apologized again and bought a round. He sent April’s drink to her. He told me that April was a great gal. I looked over at where she was, and when she got her drink, she bowed to us, and me and the guy next to me waved back. I watched her back there. She was having a good time, getting drunk. They all were. I turned back to the TV.
After a while I felt something on my leg, and when I looked down, I saw April’s hand, sitting there on my knee. She leaned on it and slid into her barstool. “I won,” she said. She leaned into me and laughed. Her hair was against my face. She was asking how we were doing, how things were going with us. I told her: “Fine, things are fine.” She was saying that she liked me, that she liked the shy ones. She was telling me this with her mouth next to my ear. I could feel her breath. I looked over at the drink she had put down on the bar. The glass was smeared with her lipstick all around the rim and halfway down the side.
So I told her about the guys making fun of her behind her back. She stiffened up, then pulled away to look at me. It was like she’d sobered up immediately, as if I’d just come into focus in front of her. “Tell me something I don’t know,” she said. I didn’t expect that — that she knew. I asked her how she could let them degrade her like that, how she could think so little of herself. “Why do you put up with it?” I asked her. And she smiled her little smile and said, “Same reason you do.” Then she grabbed her cigarettes and her drink and went back to play pool with her friends.
We didn’t talk anymore after that. I sat at the bar and waited for her to finish her game so we could get out of there. I watched TV. The baseball game was over. I don’t remember what was on after that. But I remember watching something, and drinking my orange juice, and eating the ice.
* * *
It was raining outside. The streetlights had just come on, and you could see the drizzle swirling down around them. The weather was strange that summer. There’d been a funnel cloud a few weeks before. I remember reading about it bouncing around the downtown area, blowing out windows and tipping over newspaper racks, trying to touch ground, they said, trying to become a tornado.