Sneak peek of Issue 22: "Track and Field" by Anna Shearer

Luke had been acting different. At first Jenny thought he was planning a surprise like the time he brought her to the bed and breakfast in Marietta instead of to the Kroger, or the time he secretly made a hammock beneath the pine trees in the yard. Secrets made him act skittish and distracted, and he’d get a half smile at the corner of his mouth trying to talk about something simple like the weather or how good the iced tea was. By the time Jenny found out what was happening, she realized Luke had actually been doing pretty well, considering what he was up to was illegal. 

What Jenny heard was: “She sucked him off.” 

This was at the first outdoor track meet, in April. She was outside the bathrooms behind the bleachers, and a little pack of high school girls was standing where they didn’t think anyone could hear them. 

“For real?” one of them said. 

“For real,” the other said. 

“Her coach?” 

“Her fucking coach.” 

Luke was the track and cross-country coach at Athens High School. On the weekends during the season, he and the team had meets. In the off-season he led a running group of adults in the mornings and three times a week he led a running group for kids. Jenny did not run anymore. She had run in college, on the same team as Luke at Ohio State, and this was what brought them together. Their love had bloomed among the shared experience of laps and repeats, PRs, ice baths, what it felt like to be burned out or peaking. But now it’d been years, and the common ground they had with sport seemed embarrassing, like something only children cared about. 

But Luke, he still cared. Coming back from long runs, he looked at her with the same enthusiasm he always had, but she looked at his running outfit and his lean calves and the dopamine surging in his ruddy cheeks, and she felt sorry for him, like he was trapped in a different time. He was so happy after a long run. The happiness was making a wall between them, and Jenny found herself stomping when doing the dishes or cooking, punching rather than kneading the dough to make bread. She would tap the crust and listen to the hollow sound when it was done. When she went to slice the first piece, beneath the dull blade, the bread smashed down. Married five years, she thought, and I still don’t have sharp knives. She pulled at the loaf, tearing it apart. 

Luke, meanwhile, spent the winter getting the team ready for spring, meeting them an hour after school let out. With special permission from the principal, they ran inside the high school, doing slow laps down the hallways where they could stay warm. This was an important time. The team was forming. The new captain would be decided. Luke came home and reported to Jenny the runners who showed up, who was returning, who was new. He knew exactly how long it was to start and end outside the math room—a 0.6-mile loop. Jenny thought of the cold outside and the snow and her husband running circles inside a high school. 

Through February and into March, he mentioned Tess only once. He said, “She’s never run before. She’s a soccer player.” She seemed to come out of nowhere. She seemed to just one day appear.

Jenny had always been supportive of Luke and his team. She looked forward to the first home meet in April. She liked going to the meets. She liked for everyone to know she was the head coach’s wife. What a community! Thirty kids, sixty or so team parents, Luke and his two assistant coaches, both calling her ma’am, one who looked up to Luke with such admiration it made Jenny feel ashamed, as if she were taking him for granted. She sat near the most supportive parents (they admired her—she’d received a full-ride scholarship, after all) and watched intently with them on the splintery bleachers with the megaphone staticking in and out, above the little concession stand with the freshmen and their moms working, the crowd from the other schools across the track. 

The teams in Southeast Ohio were sometimes haphazardly put together. Meigs County and Trimble were so small they only had runners in half the events, and the events they did compete in were poor in show—a girl with one ear moved along like a power walker, and a kid with half an arm pumped it around the track like a gun. When Jenny saw these runners limping around, it made her feel mad and mean. She’d grown up in a suburb of Columbus, called Worthington, where the kids were fast since birth. Her school had an outdoor fountain. Inside, there were live trees growing up through the ceiling. Jenny had loved high school. She’d loved running and her friends and her kind, virgin boyfriends. She remembered the pale lip gloss she put on at 5:30 in the morning and the taste of vanilla Carnation instant breakfast and the sound of the spoon hitting the inside of the glass when she stirred, and she remembered how pulling a pale pink sweater over her lacey bra, wearing nothing else underneath, gave her a feeling of pride about her breasts and her flat, strong stomach. She would stand in the kitchen drinking her breakfast, thinking about how her body made her feel so accomplished. She felt giddy and strangely filled with kindness. She felt charitable. She wanted to help the boys. It wasn’t that hard for her to let them touch her breasts, in a tent, say, at her friend Nicole’s outdoor party. They nearly shuddered with anticipation and—what was it?—bliss when she first unhooked her bra and let her breasts go out in the open. It was her favorite feeling, and it was important to her. She didn’t know why it was so important, but gradually it became something so powerful that if someone had taken it away from her, like, say, if she’d gotten married to her college boyfriend and then moved to Nelsonville with him and worked as a teller at a bank so he could coach at the same school where he had gone to high school, it might have sort of killed her. A part of her might have died. 

The weather warmed and the track team gradually made their way outside. Tess switched from “appearing” to “becoming,” and one night Luke came home saying, “She’s a star. She’s going to be a star.” He had black hair that lately he’d been growing long. He tucked it behind his ears and parted it in the middle. He had dark, handsome eyes, but also the nervous nerdiness of most long-distance runners. He looked young for his age. He was thirty-one. It was March, Jenny’s favorite month, when the dumb little daffodils poked up too early and died, and the feral cats beneath the pine trees started mating. Whereas in the past she might have spent the month listening as Luke bemoaned the slow runners on the team and his plans to milk one half-good star out of the bunch, he now sat with his knees hopping beneath the kitchen table. With more and more frequency, he spoke of Tess. 

“It’s so rare to see talent like hers,” he would say. 

Jenny would sit eating her vegetables and watching him. His optimism irritated her. He’d gaze off, envisioning the girl. 

“She’s faster even than Anne Elliott?” Jenny asked.

“Yes! At least twice as good. At least. She ran her first full-out 400 today. Guess what her time was. Go on. Guess.” 

Jenny said, “I don’t know.” 

“Guess!” Luke said. 

“Sixty-nine,” Jenny said. 

“Lower,” Luke said. 

“Sixty-five.”

“Lower.” 

“Well, what then?” 

“63.5. One second away from the school record. In practice. And”—this time he stood up, knocking his chair back—“guess how old she is.” 

“Oh,” Jenny said. “I don’t know. Eighteen.”

“Lower,” Luke said. 

“Seventeen,” Jenny said. 

“Lower.” 

At work, Jenny was distracted. She felt trapped inside while everyone else was outside, running. Her legs ached, and she pictured them turning gray and atrophied. She gave people their money. She collected their deposits. One day, home alone, she lay on the floor and then rolled over, doing twenty push-ups. She thought, I could. But as soon as the thought came to her, it vanished. She rolled over onto her back. Did talent leave some, she wondered, and take off to be absorbed by others?

Jenny noticed that Luke was starting to run more than ever. Some days, he did two-a-days, which infuriated Jenny. Five, six miles at practice with the team, then five, six more miles after, out and back toward the Hocking River. He seemed to be moving into another dimension, or a past dimension, running himself backwards into his youth. 

“Why are you training when you have nothing to train for?” she snapped one night over pizza. 

But she didn’t want to be a downer. Was it simply inspiration? To Jenny, that seemed unlikely. Still, she had never seen Tess run. Runners inspired each other all the time. In fact, Jenny used to inspire Luke. 

After the first meet of the season, away at Alexander, Luke said, “She won. I don’t even know why I am acting surprised. But she won.” 

Jenny sat at the little chair by the window watching the cars go by on 33. She watched and watched the cars. 

Luke said, “She’ll be the first one in six years to go to state. I predict she’ll have four school records. The 800 record is from 1983. She’ll break it. I know it. It’s 2:23. Just wait,” he said. “Just wait.”

“I’ll wait,” Jenny said.

“Come on now. You remember how it felt. To realize you had something. That you have something no one else has. You remember.” He clasped his hands together. He still had his stopwatch around his neck.

She remembered. Of course she did. She remembered coming home after races in college with the smell of gunpowder from the starting pistol in her hair. She remembered that she’d been so fast, so gifted, it had made her finally believe in God. She thought of Tess, at home, stretching, smelling her hair, rubbing her leg muscles, imagining herself crossing the finish line. The weight of the medal in her palm, strung on the ribbon, around her neck, against her heart. 

Jenny felt her hand absentmindedly go to her heart. 

“Just wait.” Luke pointed at her. 

“Stop it,” she said. 

He came over and gave her a hug. He kissed her hair. 

“Go shower,” she told him. 

The Saturday of the first home meet it was sunny, and Jenny woke up early to make Luke breakfast before he left to warm up the team. Her usual excitement for the first meet of spring, to be back on the bleachers again, was replaced by a dull ache for what had seemed a lighter past. Today she would finally meet Tess. She told Luke she’d be there early before Tess’s first race. She had remained cheerful, but then getting dressed alone after he left, she became angry with herself. She changed three times. Furious, she grabbed something dirty and baggy. She missed the way her clothes used to fit over her muscles—her hamstrings and glutes tight as a drum. Was this what getting older was? Constantly missing yourself? Who was this ordinary weakling who could barely run three miles? She drove impatiently, stuck behind a slow truck. Move it, she muttered. She parked and went in through the admissions gate, saying hello to some of the parents who let her through with no charge. Luke, over in the stretching area where the runners waited for their heat, waved her over. 

“Jenny,” he said, “meet Tess.”

Tess was stretching her calves, bent as if doing a push-up.

“Hey,” she said, standing.

She had braces, which surprised Jenny. She had small eyes and straight brown hair and was willow-thin and flat-chested. Her arms were thin but strong, and her neck was long and her cheekbones high. She was almost as tall as Jenny, with the attentive face of someone who couldn’t hear very well and was lip-reading to understand the words.

“Nice to meet you,” Jenny said. 

“You too,” Tess said, her voice a whisper. She sounded nervous but didn’t look nervous. She was looking right at Luke, without smiling or nodding, just staring at his face.

“I’ve been telling my wife about how we’ve got a chance of you making it to Regionals. Possibility is real here. Haven’t seen anything like this in years,” Luke said. He paused for what seemed like a long time. “Maybe never,” he said.

Tess smiled, then looked at Jenny, first at her feet and then her pants, then her parka, then her hair, and finally her eyes settled on her mouth. 

“I think it’s such a great story,” Jenny said. “How it’s your first time running, and you’ve almost got school records? It’s really great. How do you feel? Probably a little overwhelmed? I remember when I first went to States…” Jenny heard herself trailing off and saying something grandma-ish and incomprehensible.

Tess looked away towards where her competition was, girls in colored uniforms, warming up. “I’m not overwhelmed,” she said. Her voice grew louder. “It’s sort of embarrassing. I mean, other people have been running for a really long time. They want an explanation why this is happening to me and not them. But I don’t have an explanation. Like, I told Amanda that if she wanted to run faster, she should just run faster. But now I see that’s not really a nice thing to tell someone slow.”

“We’ve got to get you in some spikes,” Luke said. Then to Jenny he said, “These are JCPenney sneakers. She’s done all of this in those!” He pointed.

“I’m getting some from Anne,” she said. “I told you. She’s got an extra pair.”

“Well, you’ll want to start wearing them,” he said.

“I will,” she said.

“We want to milk every inch out of you, go for every tenth, eighth of a second.” Jenny wanted Luke to stop there, but he didn’t. He kept going. “Every tiny thing we can do to get you there.”

The announcer called her heat. 

“Okay,” she said, jogging off. “Bye.” 

“Have a good race,” Luke called.

Jenny said, “Does she ever smile?”

“She gets like that,” Luke said. “Nerves.” Jenny stood watching her taking off her warm-up pants, unzipping her jacket, pulling her ponytail tighter and smoothing her hair back, then bending over, stretching the backs of her legs. “She’s shy on top of it. But out here, it’s different. She really opens up, in her way. By beating all the other girls.”

Tess won the 800 and the 1600 meters, without effort, as if she was gliding. Occasionally she’d turn her head, looking for the other girls behind her. “Head forward!” Luke shouted. Her times were close to Jenny’s personal records from college. When the meet was almost over, Tess anchored the 4 x 400 and caught a girl by nearly 100 meters to win it for the team. The announcer said they had just broken the school record, and the crowd erupted in applause. Jenny watched Luke surrounded by the girls, two of them bent over, catching their breath, the other two leaning against each other. They’d remember this moment the rest of their lives. 

Jenny had to pee. 

She went to the bathroom behind the bleachers, where the cement always seemed wet because it was shady, and groups of kids could form mini mobs together where their parents couldn’t see them.

That’s when she heard: She sucked him off and coach. 

She was right outside the bathroom doors, and the group of girls was around the corner. 

One of the girls said, “She did. She told her friend in the locker room, and she didn’t know her friend is my cousin’s friend.”

“She did not,” another girl said.

“She did.”

“Her own coach? That’s disgusting.”

“Right?” a girl said.

“Did she, like, cut him with her braces?”

“Gross,” a girl said. 

“I just can’t believe it.”

“He’s not that old,” she said.

“But he’s such a nerd.”

“Well, she’s a mute freak.”

“She could be pretty if she tried.”

Jenny found herself opening and closing the bathroom door quietly, as if she were sneaking. Inside, she felt she could still hear the voices of the girls. She looked at the mirrors, low enough so little kids could see themselves. She could see her waist and her shoulders, and she bent forward to look at her face. Her wrinkles sometimes seemed to hurt. She felt she’d just brushed against a ghost. Or a bear. She remembered once in Michigan when a bear had appeared in the woods where she was hiking. She’d never forgotten it. She had been hiking along, not seeing any bears. Then suddenly, she saw one—a dark form against dry, brown trees. After that, she became this person who had seen a bear. She thought of Luke and his recent giddiness, his hopeful delight. She felt momentarily reassured. (She’d been correct! All along, he’d been up to something!) But then her thoughts shifted. This was no B&B. This was no hammock. She peed, crouching over the seat, and a mother of one of the athletes came in, talking on her phone, saying, “She did great, honey!” 

Jenny flushed the toilet. 

“Hold on, I’m peeing,” the woman said into the phone. 

Jenny, washing her hands, felt suddenly nauseated. It was her husband, after all. She thought about how when she went down on Luke, it was always in their bed, with the lights out. It was something she liked to do for him, that she felt other wives might not do. It made her feel she was giving him a gift. Her tenderness—rather—her body was a gift. She treasured this gift. Would now be the time that it was finally over? That she stopped treasuring it? She thought of Tess and her thin lips and her nerves before the race and how tall she was and her flat chest and all that speed that wasn’t really quickness but more like an unstoppable inertia. Luke said her legs were so long the short girls took two steps for every one of hers. Luke said she wasn’t very flexible, and they wanted to work on that. Luke said the night before a race her favorite thing to eat was a meatball sub. 

The weeks passed. Luke was gone longer at practice and was often traveling to away meets. In the evenings Jenny walked the aisles of the grocery store carrying basket loads. She made dinner, and when Luke got home late, she heated up leftovers for him. She watched him happily eating. She felt she was right next to the bear, but she still couldn’t see it. 

She went to Hocking Hills to hike through the cavernous rocks and stand beneath weird, wet caves. One of them was called Old Man’s Cave. She looked up at the smooth rock of the ceiling. She climbed to the top of the cliffs where below an expanse of orange sand opened up to a stream surrounded by trees. She wondered if people knew they were separating when they were separating, or if they had no idea, like they were just two leaves being carried by a current. Below, in the dappled sunlight, travelers oohed and aahed at the amazing formations. Jenny heard them. Their voices carried. 

A woman said what seemed to be a secret to someone else. In the stillness Jenny heard her say, “Should we eat our oranges now or later?” 

A little boy said, “Now?” 

As predicted, Tess qualified for Regionals and then beat her own school record to qualify for States. Because she was the only one from the school going, Luke now trained Tess alone. Jenny clenched her teeth, thinking of them, running side by side, thinking of him timing her, stopping the watch the moment she crossed the finish line, writing her splits down in the little notepad. But she couldn’t picture anything else. When she thought of her husband touching Tess, a child, her mind emptied out, like a cup of water overturned. Her disbelief hung around the room. She felt it hiding in the corners, but when she turned to look, there was nothing there. It’d been only one month since she’d overheard the girls, and in that time, she had not let Luke touch her. He seemed not to notice, falling asleep instantly each night, his legs overworked, toned, twitching as he dreamed.

One evening, when Luke was training Tess, a week before States, Jenny left the house. She drove towards the high school. Around each curve, under each low tree or bush, crouched or hidden beings scattered. She was going to see them. There was a hill above the field where the kids went to smoke pot and drink beer and watch the football games or track meets. But when Jenny walked up to see, there was no one on the track to watch. It was completely empty. She wandered down and stood at the finish line. 

All tracks smelled the same. No matter where she was—a meet at the University of Maine, an invitational in Houston—they smelled like this, like tar or tires. When she’d first started winning, it had made her feel famous. She could imagine Tess in ten years, standing on a track like this, smelling it. It’s just that you don’t ever think it’s going to end. When she tried to think about being young and being that good, it was like someone else’s memory, like she knew it was she herself who won a track scholarship—she knew it—but when she tried to picture her own body crossing a finish line, she could only see right now, where she stood in her saggy jeans, out of breath from walking down a hill. 

She walked around the track towards the final curve of the 400, where the runner loses all feeling in her body, but somehow the legs keep moving, training rears, and the muscles push to finish. Right before this curve was the little wooden clubhouse with the bulldog mascot painted on the outside, with the green and gold studded collar. This was where the athletes had lockers, and where the coaches had their meetings with the teams. She headed towards it. Her feet crunched over the gravel. She paused, her hand on the door handle, as if waiting for someone to stop her. 

Then she swung open the door and stepped inside. 

Tess was kneeling on the floor, but Jenny couldn’t see her face, because standing in front of her, leaning over her, with his hands on her shoulders, was the assistant coach, Alex.

“What the fuck!” he said, backing away from Tess as the door slammed. He pulled his shirt down over his waist, hiding himself. His knees were thin and knobby like a little boy’s, and he jerked backwards, pulling his shorts back up. “What are you doing here?” 

The assistant coach! Of course! Jenny wanted to laugh. He was a volunteer, a freshman at the community college, a former high jumper. He was nineteen years old. Tess stood up, embarrassed, her eyes wide.

“Luke isn’t here,” she said.

“I’m not even looking for him,” Jenny said.

They all stood there for a few seconds. Tess said, “Then who are you looking for?”

Tess was wearing a tank top and shorts, barefoot, her uniform and warm-up suit piled up by her bag. Her legs and arms were long and lean, and she was tan from running outside. Her hair was down, and her lips, parted now, revealed a silver flash of braces. Jenny saw her like a mirror image of herself. The image flashed along a translucent line, not connecting woman and girl, but rather, pushing them apart. 

“Are you going to say anything?” Alex said. He put his hand on Tess’s shoulder.

“I won’t say anything,” Jenny said. “But people think it’s my husband. They think it’s Luke.” Jenny’s voice gave. She was wrong. She was so wrong.

“People would never think that,” Tess said. “That’s crazy.”

“No one would think that,” Alex said.

“I thought it!” Jenny said, and she started to cry. Something drained from her being, like energy at the end of the final stretch. Hope left her body. “I thought this whole time it was my husband,” she said. “I thought this was happening to me.”