Track and Field
- Dec 12, 2019
- 4 min read
by Mike Lee
The morning was the last day before fall, and at midnight the last summer shower would segue into the first autumn rain.
The high school was built on the site of the old speedway. It closed years ago. Diana’s father remembered it. He talked about it some, telling Diana how it inspired him to work on cars, eventually going into business for himself with partners, repairing delivery trucks at his shop across the bridge from Woodfin.
From above, the sprawling school campus resembled the dregs of soggy cereal in the bowl-like valley of Barnardsville, the small town surrounded by the heights of the northern ridge of the Swannanoa Mountains.
Diana stretched on the football field while waiting to be called for the final heat that morning. She loved the touch of the grass on her hands as she pulled closer to the earth.
She loved the scent of the grass. She always found a certain thrill when she smelled it; the freshly-cut blades evoked excitement with an expectation she would run a good time and make the team.
Even as an alternate, the varsity track team would better Diana’s outside chance at getting into a good university.
The sports bra under her practice jersey dug deep into her flesh. Her mother bought three of them at K-Mart last Saturday. She hated her mother for going out and buying clothes for her without bringing her along. A bargain is one thing. Knowing her daughter’s size quite another.
Diana had begun her morning ritual by leaning over the dresser, kissing the girl in the mirror before struggling to pull on that sports bra. Diana wondered if this would bode ill, but finished dressing and moved into the kitchen to get breakfast.
Mom was at the counter, frying up slabs of organic pork on the griddle. She had a sleeve tattoo in a floral arrangement on her left arm. When she was young, Diane asked mom about it. She told her that she had it done to cover the scars from cutting herself when she was a teenager. Diana never asked her more, but sometimes Diana would look to see the cuts. Her arm from shoulder to wrist blanketed in purple, green and red, a bouquet that obscured the scars resembling the plains of Nazca, scrapes and scratches forming a foundational layer of a hidden life under the fine art of the tattooist’s needle.
Mom told her, “This is not something I want to talk about right now. I am not ready. But one day I will. When the time is right, you will know why this was.”
Diana waited for the proper time to ask her about it, but other things came up.
But sometimes Diana imagined her mother huddled in a closet late at night, marking the lines up and down her arms with an X-Acto knife until blood true seeped out, cleansing out the bad unnameable.
Diana could never understand that because she did not like pain. Assiduously avoided it.
Diana’s mom worked as a hairdresser at a high-end shop in the Grove Arcade shopping gallery. She began at the shop shortly after Diana was born; she occasionally used to have to bring her daughter to work and kept her in a bassinet.
Mom colored her hair orange, but kept the bangs long. Diana kept her raven hair in the same style, but pulled it back for the tryouts.
Diana sat at the table across from Daddy. He had a thin face, the unknown past lying deep in the wrinkles of his cheeks and forehead. Like Mom, he looked a little older than 38, and he worked long hours fixing up trucks on Old Leicester Highway.
Some parents are able to redirect their lives, Mom said. That makes us better parents because you will take us seriously when we tell you no.
“That doesn’t mean that we are capable of guiding your direction. The best we can do is point the way out,” she added.
Daddy nodded in agreement. He talked a lot, but always deferred to Mom in these discussions.
“I pick my spots,” he’d say.
When almost at the finish line, Diane stumbled. Her foot landed awkwardly on pebbles loosened from the hard-packed track.
She lay sprawled on the ground. Diana wanted to get up and finish the last few yards, just for the sake of completing the circuit. She realized she was not going to make the team.
Instead, she rose to sit cross-legged as people came over, surrounding her, putting their hands on her, expressing sympathy, saying sorry this had happened.
Even though this wasn’t anyone’s fault but mine, Diana thought, I think maybe God put that pebble on that one particular place.
There are no more tryouts, no varsity track team next year because she will have graduated and likely gone on to college. And as Diana sat with the hands of others stroking her shoulders, her hair, she realized that this is the last race, run.
Her parents took her to Chiesa, the Italian restaurant on Montford Avenue. The restaurant was in an old church, and the dinner good: stuffed tenderloin, with hickory nuts and pasta.
Daddy went into the rain to get the car. The drive home was quiet except for The Cure on the car stereo.
Later, Diana lay on the bed, holding her left arm above her head.
She slid her fingers lightly above the wrist, wondering what it was that had happened to make her mom do all that.
Diana thought about pain. The kind you have to hide.
She’ll ask her about it.
Tomorrow.
Mike Lee is an editor, photographer and reporter for a trade union newspaper in New York City. His fiction is published in Ghost Parachute, Reservoir, The Opiate and others. Website: www.mleephotoart.com. He also blogs for the photography website Focus on the Story.
