Trip Through Your Wires by Sarah Layden

Author:Sarah Layden
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781938126192
Publisher: Engine Books
Published: 2015-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

After Ben cancelled yet another date, Carey went running.

Her legs pumped, muscles lengthening and contracting, as she circled La Plaza de Las Ranas on the edge of town. The stone frog statues squatted and stared, silently observing La Americana, with her ponytail and blue track T-shirt and black mesh shorts, the only woman running, the only white woman. The thick-soled running shoes that the teenage silver vendor tried to buy off her feet sprang upward with every step.

She ran to give herself time to think. All else disappeared. For months she’d jogged up and down crowded, uneven sidewalks, alongside the white-and-green taxis in the narrow bricked streets, dodging shopkeepers hustling to open their tiendas. She’d been gawked at, cat-called, spoken to in English by a few men who called her guera. “Hello,” they would say, one of the few English words they knew. “Hello.” She pretended not to hear. Harder to ignore were the women, who said nothing. Watched her with suspicion and curiosity. Stared openly at her finely muscled legs, the sweat trickling down her face and ringing her shirt. These women wore their shiny black hair in ponytails, pulled tight and smooth and sleek, stretching their eyebrows into elegant arches. They wore form-fitting jeans or skirts, and stretchy, bright-colored tops, high heels that wobbled on cobblestone, trailing scents of hairspray, Givenchy perfume. Carey smelled like salt, sweat. Running felt pure.

But running in the city, even in the mornings before the streets teemed with people, dirtied her inside and out. The staring. The distraction. The mingling diesel exhaust and pan dulce from the bakery, clogging her nose and lungs. On a busy street corner one day, an old woman told Carey about the park. She mimed running, wiping her dry brow comically with her forearm, dislodging the scarf covering her gray hair.

The park’s loop soothed her—she could put her body on autopilot. Medium-fast pace, about a seven-minute mile, shaving off seconds as her mind reeled. She was supposed to be with Ben today. The warm October wind stung her eyes.

She passed two women out for a walk. Track suits, baseball caps pulled low, gold and diamond rings on both hands. The woman on the left raised a hand in greeting, and Carey waved back. Buenos días, they said to each other, quick smiles and nods. Their husbands, Carey imagined, did not break dates.

On the other side of the loop, a bicyclist rang his bell, the kind attached to the handlebars and depressed with one thumb. Cling-cling. She could follow the sound, be led around the path by the ringing.

She and Ben were almost never alone. In public, crowds of students and strangers surrounded them, swallowed them whole. They carried dripping cones of buttery pine nut ice cream in the Centro Historico, amid hordes of Mexican tourists marveling at the Basilica and Teatro Juárez. They sat on benches beneath Indian laurels in the Jardín Unión, scribbling answers to history and culture homework in spiral notebooks, or more likely avoiding

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