Goldengirl

Goldine smiled wanly and shook her head. ‘She slipped me a chocolate bar sometimes. She wasn’t a dominant personality. If I was ill, she took over. That was nice. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not bitching about my childhood. I couldn’t be a champion if they hadn’t taken care of my body. I have a very good cardiovascular system.’ She picked up a piece of driftwood and made as if to fling it far out to sea, then let it fall in the sand. ‘Did you know that Jean Serafin left him? That really surprised me. I never dreamed she had anything going with another man. She took off to the West Indies the fall before last.’

‘You didn’t think of going with her?’

‘Mr. Dryden—’

‘Jack.’

‘Jack, you’ll find this hard to credit, but I never really got to know Jean. She was younger than Doc, and maybe that made it hard for me to relate to her as a mother figure. I didn’t make it easy for her. If you put together all the stereotypes you’ve ever seen of adopted kids rejecting their surrogate parents, I was it. Doc I could accept: I had no father, so he wasn’t ousting anyone. But Jean I hated. In time, I tolerated her, but we never grew close. It’s only since she left that I realize she had a part in my life.’

‘What was that?’

‘I figure she was a moderating influence on Doc so far as my upbringing was concerned. I never heard them discuss it. I just see how things have gone through the past year and a half since Jean took off. Doc focused totally on me, and he’s a determined man. He found some backers and had the training camp built. Since we’ve been up there, everything is stepped up. That’s okay — I expect it, to be sure of winning the Olympics. Jack, I know I can win in Moscow. It would be a betrayal not to make sure I do, by training hard. A betrayal of myself, I mean. You see, winning is my way of making sense of my life so far. If I gave up, walked off right now to join a commune somewhere — I’ve thought about it — that’s as good as saying all these years were wasted. I don’t want that. I want to get my golds and give some meaning to my life so far. Then I can draw a line underneath’ — she stopped and made a mark in the wet sand with her toe, and stepped over it — ‘and begin to find out who I really am.’

‘That makes sense, up to a point,’ said Dryden.

‘I know what you’re going to say. I’ve thought about that, too. I can’t really draw that line, can I?’ She turned. ‘Look, it’s disappeared already. After Moscow, I shall really be Goldengirl. It’s too late then to search for an identity.’

‘Do you want to be Goldengirl?’

She walked on in silence, looking at the waves.

‘It’s important,’ he gently insisted.

She stopped and looked earnestly at him, pulling a strand of gold hair between her teeth. ‘Jack, I have to admit that I do.’

‘You don’t need to be ashamed. Almost any girl would answer yes to that.’

‘But almost any girl starts from a consciousness of her own identity. It’s a reference point. I don’t feel that I have that.’

‘Have you discussed this with Dr. Lee?’

‘Sammy? His answer is that Goldengirl is me. When I accept it, all my anxieties will go. He’s helping me to realize this through the simulation sessions. And it’s true. When I attend stadium simulations and I see the crowd around me in their thousands, and hear the cheering and the announcements in Russian with my own name, I’m happy, Jack. In the press-conference sessions I come alive. It makes up for all the pain.’

‘Physical pain, you mean?’

‘Sure. Pete Klugman is a great coach, and he’s improved my track technique beyond belief. He doesn’t do it with sugar cubes. I was raised to work hard at my sport, but nothing resembling the sessions with him. I don’t like to talk too much about it. He can be very sweet at times, and he’s doing all this for my benefit. For instance, my starting is immeasurably better with the practice I’ve had on the shock-start mechanism. It speeds your gun reaction. If you don’t move your hands within fifteen hundredths of a second, you get volts up your arm. It hurts, but I go faster. You saw me today?’

‘You went off so fast in the hundred that they called you back.’

‘That’s the problem with quick starting. Starters will assume that if you leave the blocks before the others, you must have jumped. It isn’t so. In Moscow, they plan to have automatic fault lights that can’t operate after the gun has fired, so I should be safe from human error there.’ She dangled a piece of seaweed in the water like a child. ‘I can take the electric shocks. They’re sharp, but they don’t damage me. What I can’t stand is being humiliated.’

‘How does that happen?’