Free Girl Runner by Carrie Snyder Page A

understand, in my head, that it is funny, but I can’t join in the laughter. Even Olive is whooping it up: “Don’t sprinkle your shoes.”
    More banging on the door. The smell of boiled cabbage calling us to dinner.
    I’m taller than the other girls in the house, taller even than Mr. Smythe, whose silent presence at supper is of a man removing himself, but reluctantly, from a distasteful, vaguely sordid scene.
    One of the girls—not Mary Alice—is on her factory’s softball team, and is playing in a game this evening. Mrs. Smythe has prepared supper early, and we eat quickly, shovelling our food, “wolfing it,” says Mrs. Smythe, who also informs us that this mode of eating will harm our digestion and make us puff up like pastries. The girl, whose name is Joannie, dashes upstairs to change into her uniform: baggy pants and shirt, and white socks inside canvas shoes. Her hair is pushed under a cap. Of course we are going along, Olive and I.
    We ride the streetcar to the field, a mess of noisy girls (though I’m quiet, hopeless at witticism and innuendo).
    The light falls slowly through the thick air, humid, cooling as it blows off the lake, and there is the lull of constant noise that matches my own buzzing heart. The game is only a piece of it. What enchants me are the crowds who have gathered to watch and cheer on the factory girls, little boys peddling peanuts and popcorn, men pushing dripping ice carts, selling fizzy soda water that Olive buys to share.
    I feel at ease in a brand-new way. There are so many people—no one will see me, especially, unless I decide to be seen. Unless I choose, like Joannie, to put on a uniform and stand at bat and hammer that fat round ball over the fence, or, in the infield, spring to scoop up a slapped ball and fire it into the glove of another, just ahead of the runner, to the cheers of the crowd. It’s up to me. I can be invisible, as I am right now, or I can put myself forward to play the game and be judged.
    That night, in Olive’s room, I whisper, “I love it here.”
    But she’s already asleep. I lie on top of the quilt, listening to the street sounds hush. The room remains hot despite the open window, as if the city’s layers of pavement and concrete and steel and tin have drunk in the sun to hold for keeps, as if I have too.
    I don’t know yet that I’ll stay. This is a holiday, a rare occasion. I believe myself content because I am content—immersed without thought of what will come next, without thought of return.
    On Sunday, Olive and I ride the streetcar west to High Park. A huge white tent has been erected on the grass in a clearing that would remind only a city person of a field. Factory girls are dressed in their Sunday best, and a big canvas banner flaps in the breeze: PACKER ’ S MEATS . We load our plates with buttered buns and canned ham, and a sweet salad of potatoes and eggs, and we fill our cups with sugary iced tea. There is a giant sheet cake for dessert and it’s someone’s job to fan the flies away with a wide unfurled napkin.
    Olive and I eat on one of the checked blankets that are spread on the grass, where we are joined by other girls who work on Olive’s line. Life in the city seems captured by this moment—free food, free grass, free air to breathe, free roaming, free sunshine, free fun. Mine to splash around in, as I wish. Take it or leave it.
    “It isn’t always like this,” Olive says, like she’s reading my mind.
    I know what she means, but I erase it. I go and help myself to a slab of sheet cake.
    “Aggie!” Olive finds me licking green frosting off the palm of my hand. She’s excited about something. “The girls are having a running race. You should join!”
    “A running race?”
    “They’re doing egg-and-spoon, and three-legged, but I mean a real running race. Girls under twenty. Come on!”
    Heaven, I tell you. Heaven will have a running race staged across a rolling plain of tended grass with start and finish lines