Lucy Jane Bledsoe

Nick stood on the side of the track while his girls, an unlikely herd of horsey, shy, raucous, and flirtatious teenagers, ran their first 1500 meters of the season. The head coach, George Winston, who had kept the boys’ team for himself, lectured his athletes in the middle of the muddy field. Miraculously, the first day of sunshine in weeks coincided with the first day of track and field practice in Nick’s first year of teaching at Kennedy High School in Portland, Oregon. The sky was a wet blue, deep and oxygen-rich, and the cold air sparkled. Nick just couldn’t believe his good fortune: only twenty-one years old and already coaching. How many years would it take to make head coach at U of O? He laughed out loud, knowing it was possible, even inevitable, and swept his gaze around the track, taking in the whole beautiful world and looking for his runners.

Most of the girls were on the far side of the field, running in a pack, their sneakers splashing in the big puddles on the graveled track. But there were two girls coming around the bend, well in the lead. In fact, they were nearly three-quarters of a lap ahead of the pack. The girl in front, though by just a couple of paces, was beautiful with her long legs and thick, honey blond hair dusting her shoulder blades. Her running style was even more beautiful than she was, damn near prophetic, as if she had been trained by some oracle from the ancient Greeks themselves. Her arms made right angles close to her sides, swinging loosely back and forth, hanging from her perfectly relaxed neck and shoulders. Her slim hips moved forward in a straight line, no energy lost to wobble or sway. And her legs! Long golden winged legs. A shaft of sunlight, as if coming from a window high in the room of the world, lit her, singled her out, as if she were the only sight his eyes would ever need. Nick’s appraisal of his life, which a moment before had seemed perfect, leapt to an even higher level, hope made manifest. He had an athlete he could polish, a star runner, a winner. Just this moment itself would be enough, the golden joy of it.

As Nick marveled, the other girl, the one with fierce elbows and a mop of sandy curls, who was running as if her life depended upon it, as if crossing that finish line first were the only thing that mattered, sprinted past the golden girl. As she did so, she reached out a hand and tapped the small of her competitor’s back, a gesture both tender and challenging, and then did cross the finish line first.

Nick checked his sign-up sheet and matched the numbers on the girls’ backs with their names. The golden girl: Marianne Wade. Mop-head: Joan Ehrhart.

Years later, he’d remember the hitch in his stomach, the briefest moment of unease, as he overlooked Joan and allowed his attention to be wholly absorbed by the graceful Marianne. He would tell himself that crossing the finish line first wasn’t nearly as important, not at this early stage in the game, as style, coachability, potential. Joan’s face was planted on the grass as she convulsed with exhaustion, but Marianne was hardly winded as she turned to him and smiled. At twenty-one, Nick Capelli believed in destiny and the golden girl was his.

* * *

Joan noticed Marianne the minute she saw the new girl at school. Everyone did. At first kids said she was stuck up, but that was only because she was so beautiful. Then people said that she’d changed high schools mid-year because she’d gotten pregnant and had an abortion. Some had seen her dad on her first day and said that he was a gypsy, which made her long blond hair difficult to explain, but allowed for lots of speculation. Someone even told Joan that Marianne was some sort of descendent of Scandinavian royalty, sent to Portland, Oregon to retain anonymity while she finished her education. Something about Marianne Wade required myths. But there wasn’t any hard evidence for any of these stories, since she rarely talked to anyone, and so eventually, the student body at Kennedy High School returned to its first assessment that she was just stuck up. Even so, the boys kept looking. And the girls wished with all their hearts that they could be her. In the desert of high school, her cool was a sea breeze.

Marianne was seated next to Joan in Mrs. Fisher’s Advanced Placement English class. It was Joan’s habit to slouch at her desk and make frequent wisecracks to anyone who listened. She got away with it because of her high academic test scores. Mrs. Fisher had told her that she “wrote like a dream.” Joan was amazed when Marianne started laughing at her classroom commentary. One day, Marianne sat next to her in the Social Studies lab during study hall, and for two weeks after that, the girls met every day.

The friendship was a near crisis for Joan who wore faded Levis and big black T-shirts every day. Suddenly she was looking at herself in the mirror before leaving for school in the morning, but felt incapable of figuring out what changes she should make to accommodate this new effervescence in her life. That’s how she thought of it, a great bubbling, brought on by someone who laughed at the same things she did. The girls talked about absolutely nothing every day, but they laughed so hard they cried.

When they got kicked out of the Social Studies lab one afternoon, Joan took Marianne to her favorite place under the bleachers and was amazed that the perfect girl accepted a cigarette. Joan began to get the feeling that Marianne would do anything. It was as if she had some source of knowledge that Joan hadn’t yet discovered. At night Joan wrote a lot of poems trying to understand Marianne. Finally, she just had to taste her.

Joan would spend decades trying to remember Marianne’s reaction to the kiss. Not only had she accepted it without reserve, she’d followed Joan home to her bedroom that afternoon where for what felt like an eternity, Joan basked in the glow of Marianne. For Joan, the afternoon had been not just a revelation, but a first understanding of miracle. She wouldn’t remember touching her friend so much as the sensation of flying, literally flying.

The next day in Mrs. Fisher’s Advanced Placement English class, Marianne was her usual cool spring self, laughing at Joan’s jokes, lounging in those hideous desk-chair contraptions like a jaguar in a crate, that look in her eye that placed her on another continent.

But she didn’t show up in the Social Studies lab.

The next day in English, Joan didn’t dare ask her why not. She wasn’t there that day, either.

On the fourth day, Joan stopped her in the hall after English class and Marianne scowled slightly as if she didn’t understand why Joan would be detaining her. Marianne shook her head at Joan’s question, as if she’d spoken in a language Marianne didn’t understand, and walked away. Joan’s poems that weekend described medicine balls swinging into her gut, a world devoid of color, the death of God. On Monday morning she wrote inside her notebook, “A kiss impregnated a girl with a monster/the monster grows in her womb.”

When Marianne had told her the previous week that she was going to try out for track, Joan had chided her for even thinking of hanging out with jocks. She hadn’t believed Marianne would actually do it. But on the first day of track practice, when Joan checked the sign-up sheet outside the new teacher’s room, Marianne’s name was there. Joan wrote her own name at the bottom of the list. For the rest of that afternoon, she tried to talk herself out of it. She knew she would only humiliate herself by trailing Marianne, but that monster grew bigger in her womb, shot monster legs down the insides of her own legs, and at 3:30 she walked to the track. Mr. Capelli pinned a number to the back of her T-shirt and told her to run a couple of warm-up laps.

Joan balked. She couldn’t quite believe she was trying out for a team. What if someone on the literary magazine saw her down there with the jocks? She was about to leave when the monster thrashed. Marianne of the fairytale hair and jaguar grace was coming around the bend toward her. Joan wanted to roar and abduct her. Monster girl carrying off princess to her lair. She was afraid she was about to do something utterly wrong, and so was relieved when Mr. Capelli blew his whistle.

“Everyone warmed up?”

Joan wasn’t, but she didn’t care.

“Line up on the start line. Fifteen hundred meters at full speed. On your marks.”

Joan stepped up to the line, on the far side of it from Marianne, and let her arms dangle at her side. Maybe running wouldn’t be so horrendous after all.

Mr. Capelli blew the whistle.

In the course of those 1500 meters, Joan got the idea that if she could catch Marianne, or even better, run faster, she would win back her attention. Her legs were on fire after the first 500 meters. After 1000 meters, her heart and lungs felt as if they would heave up her throat and out her mouth. Still, she didn’t let up. The monster pumped fuel into her and she gained ground on Marianne who turned out to be the fastest girl on the track. Sheer desire drove Joan. The moment of passing Marianne just before the finish line, beating her, was unbearably sweet. It proved everything.

She turned off the track and fell to her knees on the field. Her head dropped to the grass, and she was impatient for the heaving in her stomach to stop so she could find Marianne. Joan struggled to her feet, still gasping for breath.

It had worked. Marianne was walking toward her. Smiling.

“Now look what I’ve done,” Joan cracked. “He’s gonna make me be on the team.”

If Marianne had been about to answer, she didn’t get a chance because Mr. Capelli jogged up with an enormous grin on his face. Joan was glad that Marianne was present to witness the congratulations he was about to give her. She put her hands on her hips, tried to look like a jock, prayed again that no one from the literary magazine was anywhere nearby.

Mr. Capelli got down on one knee in front of Marianne. “I want you to stretch, like this. Your hamstrings.” He tapped the back of his own thigh and then demonstrated the stretch. “I can tell already they’re tight.”

Mr. Capelli didn’t even look at Joan.

Already proud, he gestured for Marianne to come with him. He shouted for the other girls to run a couple of cool-down laps. Joan watched him unfurl a mat on the wet grass so that Marianne could stretch in comfort. Mr. Capelli stood over her, arms folded on his chest, talking nonstop, like he owned her.

Joan’s monster put an arm around her shoulders and led her off the track. Out of the arena. Up the hill to the school. Her monster talked soothingly to her. As hard as she tried, she couldn’t shake it off.

* * *

Marianne knew from an early age that she had a gift. It was quite apparent to her, an actual transcendent light that she felt glowing inside her. As if when making her, God had gotten distracted and left His hand on her a few moments longer than He left it on other people. But Marianne’s gift was never nurtured and it grew wild and free. People noticed it, oh yes, and they used it. Everyone wanted a piece of Marianne. By the time she arrived on that track in Portland, Oregon in the spring of 1973, she had way too much experience for a girl of sixteen. People projected their dreams onto her, and tried to extract what they perceived to be her secrets.

At sixteen, Marianne didn’t have a clue what her own secrets were. Sure, Joan frightened her. Who wouldn’t be frightened? The girl was intense. But more to the point, Marianne didn’t have the luxury to indulge her own feelings. She’d learned to accept the best offer. To look only for opportunity. The coach looked like a good bet. The kindness on his face. His need to develop – rather than to use – her. That felt, at the time, like salvation.

Later, she would say that this moment in the spring of 1973 was the beginning of her life. She would say that her first sixteen years, constantly moving around with her itinerant preacher father and string of stepmoms, didn’t matter. She would credit Nick and Joan and Alissa for delivering her back to herself, a process that started with Joan tapping her back before crossing the finish line ahead of her. A process that took twenty-five years.

* * *

A couple thousand miles away, in St. Louis, Missouri, an eleven-year-old girl played Vivaldi on her violin while her teacher watched with dismay. Talent like that almost frightened the public school teacher, as if she had opened a trunk in her attic and found a lost Rembrandt. The teacher wracked her brain trying to figure out how to best preserve and nurture Alissa Smith’s extraordinary endowment. She needn’t have worried so much. The girl would soon give up the violin. She would grow up to be a very successful marketing and publicity director.

And she would be the barreling train that eventually cleared the track for Marianne Wade.