Running

Published in “Oasis” 1995

            Most mornings Denise gets up in the dark, and puts on shorts and a T-shirt.  Sitting at her small kitchen table, with all apartment windows open, she listens to the hum of traffic from Highway 59.  She drinks a glass of water and wipes the sweat from her forehead.  Summer is just starting, but Houston has been hot for months.  When the sky begins to change from black to violet blue, she puts on socks and sneakers and goes out and runs.  While running, she knows where she is and who she is.  She thinks about her life, and about Tony. 

            Denise met Tony Levanti last spring in Johnson’s hydrology course.  In a rare burst of friendliness and goodwill (Tony looked dismal, burdened by the mountainous reading list) Denise showed him where Johnson kept the reading material, and where the secretary hid the duplicating machine counter.  Then she took him to her office, in the basement, where the walls are shelves of dusty rocks, and where half-hearted theses projects–ideas at one time destined to augment the eminent theories–sit abandoned and neglected, like toys a week after Christmas.  “Neat,” Tony said, looking around enviously.  “In the midst so much important activity.”

            “You think so?” Denise said with surprise.  “You really think so?”

            Denise admires Tony’s new car and his superbly pressed jeans, and when they went to happy hour, in his part of town, he treated.  The free tacos and fried potato skins rated as one of her better meals of the year. 

            But the basis of their relationship, Denise believes, is competition.  At Secal Geophysical, where they work for the summer, Denise and Tony compete to see who can process the most seismic lines without dropping any traces.  At the university, they compete for grades, and in private, they compete for who can be cruelest.  A love-hate relationship, Denise admits, but a relationship nevertheless.  Still, she misses her old boyfriend, Louis.  She wonders what he’s up to.

            Having been brought up on fairy tales: “The Three Bears,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Dumbo,” Denise has undying faith that people ultimately do good, although their may procedures vary.  Thus she believes that if she gets to know Tony better, his more elusive and nobler qualities will emerge.  It’s like cutting a rock, knowing how to angle the rock to enhance mineral presentation. 

            Later that summer Tony has Denise over for dinner.  No sooner does Tony fling open his apartment door, than an odor of garlic wafts out into the hallway.  The table is craftily set for two: china plates, real silver, red candles.  A premeditated effort to bestow an aura of intimacy and romance, despite the neighbor’s booming stereo.  The apartments may be new, but the walls are still cardboard.  Tony’s apartment is in the swinging singles part of town, Southwest Houston where the complexes are massive behemoths of two or three hundred units.  They come with blue pools, central air-conditioners, and wrought-iron bannisters that guard each private balcony.  The trees were demolished en masse in favor of expedient construction.  Every few blocks stands a bar with blinking neon lights that advertises dancing and two-for-one drinks.  The sweet alcoholic drinks give Denise terrible hangovers.  Tony has wisely reserved judgment on her part of town.

            Tony pulls out her chair, and pours the wine.  With both  hands, he lifts a heavy Corelleware dish out of the oven. 

            “It’s good, Tony,” Denise tells him as she flips another meat and cheese filled shell smothered in tomato sauce onto her plate.  She doesn’t know its name, although she’s aware the food has a name, and that it required substantial work: all those shells to stuff.  He watches her closely, as if each jaw movement contains a hidden message for him, as if her pupils expand for some reason other than food.  Denise eats and eats, more than she should, as if she has been fasting, which is partially true: for the past year, except for the happy hour and a professor’s re­tirement party, she’s been living on tuna, peanut butter and apples.   

            “You look so thin, so pale, Denise.  I figured I’d make something hearty.”

            Denise stops her full fork midair.  “I haven’t been eating meat because of the heat.”  The fork completes its journey, and Denise chews and swallows.  “It’s impossible to eat meat in Houston in July, especially if you’re running.  May I?”  She indicates across the table with her fork.

            “I know you hunger for me.”

            Tony’s had two glasses of wine, which Denise decides is his excuse for silliness.

            “Another shell, Tony.  Do you mind if I take another shell?”   

            After dinner they sit on his couch, which matches his plaid chairs.  It’s modest, but solid.  It’s been a long time since Denise had sat on anything that smelled so fresh. 

            “You know Sally?” Tony says.  “She wears the peasant dresses?  I used to go out with her.”  He slyly moves his arm, so she can feel the heat of it on the back of her neck.  He has the longest arms and the longest legs of anyone she’s ever known.

            Denise nods.  The peasant dresses are long and dark and  they make Sally flatter than she really is.  But what is most striking about Sally is her persistent smile: even if Secal Geophysical’s computer crashes and she has lost a day’s worth of data, she smiles: a huge, so-what smile.  She draws smilely faces or she plasters yellow smilely stickers on her keypunch sheets and seismic sections.  A message to the geophysicists, Denise initially thought, to enable them to better find oil in Prudhoe, and therefore justify their salaries, which is triple of the technicians’.      

            “I was going out with her when I met you.”

            “Great.”  Denise scans the neat and orderly apartment for evidence of smilely faces.  Maybe they are hidden beneath the coffee table.  Surreptitiously her hand investigates.  Nothing,  not even any gum, but that’s because Tony is such a meticulous housekeeper.  Feeling none, and seeing none, she doubts any significant amour between Tony and Sally.  She imagines that for her romantic dinner for two, Tony made thin noodles; spinach noodles in a delicate sauce that they washed down with Kool-aid.

            “When I told her it was all over, she grabbed my arm, and pleaded: ‘Don’t leave me!'”

            Tony demonstrates with Denise’s arm, squeezing hard, as if he’s getting back at her for her earlier lack of enthusiasm.  Denise shows no alarm, refusing to be hostage to this.  She realizes this may absolve her from something more strenuous later on.  And this may be his only chance: the arm-wrenching is about as intimate as they’ve gotten in the past month.  Denise isn’t complaining.

            “But you did,” Denise says, grimacing in pain.  “You left her.  Sally.  Poor Sally.”  Denise attempts one of the Sally smiles, but it doesn’t come out because her teeth are clenched together. 

            “She wanted to marry me!”  Tony suddenly releases her arm.  He shrugs as if to say Sally were one of many, a discard, reject, relegated to the accumulating pile of scrap girlfriends.  He is Tony Levanti: Mr. Stud of the Gulf Coast.  He closes his dark eyes, perhaps, Denise thinks, savoring the memory of smilely Sally.  Denise imagines the furtive gropings as the strings on Sally’s dark peasant dress are unlaced, or perhaps, in a fit of uncontrollable fervor, broken, and her airy voice repeating: “I’m okay; You’re okay.”  She imagines the smile Sally willing gives as they Become One. 

            Denise rubs her injured arm and is about to grill him about the smilely faces when he says: “I went out with a divorcee once.”

            Denise nods and inches away from Tony.  Her arm still hurts.  She’s not sure why he’s confessing, or if the confessions will get more interesting as he drinks more wine, or if he will indeed say what he really wants to say.  Usually he does most of the talking, and she does most of the drinking.  Then he sulks.  Denise never went out with a divorced man, at least not that she’s aware of.  Denise can count her romantic liaisons on one hand. 

            “Divorcees know what men like.”

            “Is that supposed to make me feel insecure?” Denise says contemptuously.

            He gives her a sardonic smile.

            “Okay, what do men like?”  Denise decides the wine is too sweet.  She wishes she had a cold beer, like a Lone Star.  She wonders briefly, what Louis is up to.  It is her fault, she decides; she told Louis he needed to get a job.

            “Come on, Hoffman.”

            She looks at Tony as if he is an adolescent on his first date.  Even through his glasses, which are a little thick, his eyes protrude.

            “They have experience.  You don’t have to tell them every move.”

            “I guess it must get pretty exhausting,” Denise says, “giving instructions all the time.  Do this, don’t do that.  A little more here.”

            Tony gives her some room and says: “Aren’t you drunk yet?”

            “No,” Denise says with perfect sanguinity.  Apparently he’s watched her at the department parties.

            Tony sighs with defeat, goes into the kitchen to uncork another bottle.  Denise appraises his few books: undergrad geology texts and “The One-Hour Orgasm.”  On the back cover of “The One Hour Orgasm” is a color photograph of the authors, a middle aged couple.  Denise imagines Tony and she as middle-aged couple: unkept hair, flowing clothes to hide the bodies bloated by ex­travagant pasta and sweet wine.  The woman, wearing something black and lacy and see-through says: “It’s a matter of good communication.”  Denise fans the pages looking for smilely faces or other inviolable signs (like yellow magic marker in his hy­drology text) that the book has been thoroughly studied.  Only the pages with diagrams are worn, but this gives Denise the evidence she needs: “The One Hour Orgasm” is his Bible.  She slips the book back before Tony returns.

            He’s clearly exasperated.  His face puffs out, his eyes are a little mean, and protrude a little more, as if harboring poison darts.  Denise knows he doesn’t know this, about the eyes.  The alleged seduction is costing too much, and taking too much time.  Tony, an orderly and organized person, would be in bed right now if it weren’t for Denise’s antics.  The original idea, as Denise imagined it, was to have dinner then watch “Saturday Night Live.”  As the elaborate Italian shells settle in Denise’s stomach, she feels less right about being here.  The two red candles which Tony has moved to the coffee table, burn with reverence, as if anxious to witness something important.  Denise watches the candle flames lick Tony’s eyes, even through the glasses.  He’s waiting too, unsure how to proceed.  Once he’d told her he’d never met anyone like her before, but he had not meant it as a compliment.  Yet Denise likes “Saturday Night Live.”  It’s a highpoint of her week.  When Louis left, she gave him the TV.  Louis still calls.  He calls when she least expects it and usually when he’s drunk.  She asked him for his number, but he couldn’t give her one: he joined the Marines.  He’s still in town, somewhere.  Denise can sense it, and is waiting for him to sud­denly appear.

            “You like this wine?” Tony says, as he fills her glass.

            “Sure.”

            “Okay, now.”  Tony gulps half the glass down, which Denise recognizes as courage garnering.  “Would you like to go to a wedding?”

            “Keeping things from me, huh?”  Denise feels both relief and disappointment.  “When are you getting married?”

            “Come on, Hoffman.  This woman I used to go out with.”

            “Usually that’s how it works.”

            Tony gives her a disparaging look, empties his wine.  He goes into the kitchen.  Bottles clink erratically for several moments, then Tony returns with a bottle of rum.  “She told me to bring a date.  The reception’s going to be first class.  Champagne fountains, fresh shrimp, live lobster.”  He stands there, holding the liquor and gives her a cocky look.  “She invited me specially, because of this special service I gave her.”

            Denise half believes that Tony, the Gulf Coast Stud, will start rattling off facts, like they’ve been trained to do in hydrology.  “You don’t have to tell me.”  Denise really means it; she doesn’t want to hear about it.

            “Did you ever hear of recreational underwear?”  Tony’s eyes grow.  Denise detects unmistakable malice in his voice, something bred into a person without them even knowing it.  

            “No.”  Denise finds his cuckoo clock.  A half hour to “Saturday Night Live.”   

            Tony’s hand shakes as he brings the rum to his mouth.  He drinks, amazingly, without coughing or gagging.  Then he slithers down into the couch, as if to enhance the rum’s effect.  It puts him closer to Denise.  “Ahh,” he says, exhaling tomato sauce and sweet wine.   

            “Another?”  She pours a shot in the wine glass for him, and one for herself.  She enjoys watching Tony throw down the shots, which he doesn’t do quite gracefully: the rum dribbles down his chin.  While he gazes around in admiration at his apartment, she pours her shots into his palm tree.

            When half the bottle is empty, and Tony is slightly moaning, but not in ecstasy, or even in anticipation of ecstasy, Denise pours him one last shot and says: “I need to go.  Okay?”  Missing “Saturday Night Live” won’t kill her.

            Tony vaguely waves his hand, mumbles something that sounds like “Volvo.”  It’s either take it or don’t take it, but Denise decides to take it because Tony can’t possibly drive her home, not the shape he’s in.  By the time she puts away the food, and clears off the kitchen table, he is snoring.  She blows out the candles, and leaves.

            The next morning Denise gets up in the dark.   Already her face is coated with a veneer of sweat, a fine mist mixed in with the dust and debris from Highway 59. 

            Outside her ramshackle building, she ties a red bandana around her forehead.  Sunday mornings Denise does a 12-mile run, the object being to get from A to B.  When she gets to the bad part of the city it will be light enough, or there will be cars out.  Now the streets are dark and empty, so she runs with a light step, soundlessly, so as to pick up any threatening noises.  Someone once sprung out at her from the shrubbery around Rice University.  She easily broke away from his hold; it only worried her when the man started running after her. 

            What few trees the city has not cut down become silhouetted by the rising sun: black branches, stark and thin against the paling blue.  There are no people, no cars, only a muted highway hum, a backdrop for the quick soft movement of sneakers on as­phalt.  She runs in the streets, beneath street lights avoiding the concrete which has little give.  The city is flat, except where a street arches over Highway 59.  She finds an arching street as the sun rises, and above eight lanes of thruway, of vehicles in constant motion, she calmly, purposefully, runs into the rising sun.

            By the time the sun has become round, she is at the Medical Center.  Once when she was there, a woman in a sari began screaming she’d been robbed.  Denise picked up her pace and pursued the thief.  She was in his shadow, unsure of what to do–grab his leg, pull his hair?–when he jumped a fence and threw the purse.  Denise retrieved it and gave it back to the woman.  The purse was empty. 

            Denise keeps running because running helps her think.  After the first few miles, her body finds a rhythm, and along with achieving a rhythm, her mind begins sliding from consciousness to semi-consciousness.  It’s almost no effort to run.  Her body works independently, taking her mind along for the journey.  She’s aware only that she’s moving forward, and she moves through entire neighborhoods, rich and poor, and back again, criss-cross­ing the city. 

            Denise has several routes: some long, some short;  routes through Rice University and Herman Park, and routes around the zoo.  She prefers the circular routes; they’re sensual, graceful.  Routes signify where a person is, how far they’ve gone, and how much further they need to go.  They stabilize a person and give them clues as to who they are. 

            Still Denise wonders what she would do about Tony.  Maybe she shouldn’t do anything except continue provoking him until he explodes and chucks her on the heap with smilely Sally the bride-to-be with recreational underwear.  She wonders who she will be.  Denise the graduate student, who lives in a slum?  The sky lightens further.  She’s at the zoo, circling.  The lions roar ahead of her, they roar behind her.  

            It occurs to Denise that after the instability of Louis, she’s on the rebound.  Tony’s conventional Volvo and pressed jeans seem not only attractive, but necessary.  She’s been alone too much.  The endless monologues about old girlfriends and Italian food saves her from something potentially more dangerous.

            By seven she finds her reflection in the glass walls of the Art Museum.  The person staring back at her is at first a surprise.  The legs are strong and the arms are pumping furiously, as if they will never stop.  The back is straight.  She stares at the woman and can not believe this is her.   

            Next Saturday they go to an out-of-town party thrown by Tony’s friends.  Tony, who is six-foot-five and slender, has a cadre of basketball friends, more basketball friends, Denise thinks, than anybody in the world.  It doesn’t end there, because after basketball season, there’s softball.  Then there’s football.  In the interim, while the athletes regroup and form their constantly-shifting alliances, there’s girlfriends.  Once Tony invited Denise to a basketball game.  Denise sat on the stands with all the other gushing girlfriends, but rather than obediently admiring the biceps and hamstrings, the jaws clenched in anger, she worked on a paper.  Afterward, when they went out with the gang to a bar, he kept pulling the basket of peanuts out of her reach.  “Why didn’t you talk to any of those girls?” he said, perplexed and annoyed.

            Denise likes traveling away from the hot city, leaving behind the concrete and the crime.  She realizes the necessity to get out of her running routes, with their interlocking circles that curve back upon themselves.  The routes start to repeat, like the compound eyes of insects. 

            Tony’s wearing his red and white basketball shirt and his pressed jeans.  He has a long back, so the shirt’s a little short.  She senses Tony has plans for her, but she doesn’t know what.  Something unpredictable will happen, and this will absolve her of further responsibility, and clarify their relationship once and for all.    

            The lit-up farmhouse is isolated, surrounded by fields of wheat and weeds.  Numerous cars–but none nearly as nice as the Volvo–zig-zag along the dirt road leading up to the old farm­house.  The music blares, pulling at the ear drums, not letting go without acknowledgement.  The atmosphere is holiday-like, even though it is July.  To Denise, it’s promising; maybe she didn’t make a mistake this time. 

            Once inside Denise quickly realizes she doesn’t know anyone except Tony, but she recognizes faces.  She looks for Tony’s best friend and his girlfriend, who Denise and Tony sometimes double with.  Tony, the best friend and girlfriend are from the Bronx and have known each other since high school.  They laugh and tease each other in mutually gratifying ways, and compare how many times they or their relatives have been pistol-whipped and mugged.  They make faces and gesticulate as they jab and hit each other on the back of the neck.  The three have told their jokes and stories so many times, and Denise brings something new into the circle, even if most of the time, it is simply being the new observer.  And she completes the second couple.  When she gets drunk she entertains them, which Tony usually appreciates.  But the other couple isn’t here, which means Denise need not talk.  Furthermore, she can be whomever she wants.  She can do whatever she wants, within limits.  So she decides to drink, just enough to find the pleasure of silence in the crowd.  Being silent alone is something altogether different.

            Tony rounds his shoulders.  “Hey Bean Head!” he says, effusively, eager to discuss strategy for the next game.  His legs cover the room’s diagonal in ten steps.  He joins a group of teammates wearing identical red and white shirts.  Only the numbers have changed.  In fact most of the assembled crowd–which includes several shapely women–wear the shirts, along with the bright white socks and white sneakers.

            Denise finds an inconspicuous wall to lean against.  It’s far enough from the speakers so she won’t go deaf.  Someone has put on a tape of The Cars.  The diffuse red lighting makes Denise feel as if she’s seeing everything through watered-down tomato sauce.  The red shirts with their glowing white numbers move in and move out, forming patterns that Denise believes has some meaning, although she isn’t sure what. 

            “What’s the matter?” Tony says, returning to Denise.  He hunkers down and accidentally spills some beer on the wood floor.

            “Nothing,” Denise says, “except that you’re making a mess.” 

            He ignores her comment.  “What are you looking at?”

            “Shirts.”  She wonders what they can talk about for so long.  Another basketball game?  Basketball sneakers?  Basketballs, period?  “I’m just not in a talkative mood.”

            “Why do you always have to be so belligerent?”

            “Big word, Tony.”  She figures he got it from “The One Hour Orgasm.”

            Denise stares at the red and white shirts.  Tony sighs, shifts his size thirteen feet, says, “Say something, Hoffman.”

            “I don’t have anything to say.”

            “Don’t be weird,” he says.  His eyes are starting to pro­trude.  Tony sucks in his thin chest.  He stands up straight, looking around anxiously, trying to figure out what to do so he won’t look like a fool.  Some girlfriends are already hanging on to their boyfriends.

            Denise knows then that whatever she says, he won’t understand.  Maybe he’ll never understand.  Her heart sinks momentarily, but the thought of another beer buoys it.  It shouldn’t be like this: she always working against him, Tony always trying to pull her some place, jam her into a puzzle, as if she is a wooden block.  But the alternative as she sees it, is total isolation. 

            “Don’t you like my friends?” he says.

            “Sure.  I like your friends.”

            “Don’t you think they’re great guys?”  Tony beams in their direction, holds up a hand in one of their secret salutes.  As usual they’re hitting each other on the back of the neck and making faces, although they are not all from the Bronx.  They spit out words at each other and scream over the music.  They haven’t had a game in a week and they need some way to funnel their unfathomable energy.  They pretend they have bats in their hands, or they pretend they’re throwing balls.  Their girlfriends, who wear too much makeup and keep their fingernails honed for a killing, clump together like barnacles on an ocean breakwall, as if they fear the imaginary hardballs and basketballs could actually harm them.  Their blue lidded eyes ineffectively suppress a mixture of longing and despair, although they appear to have accepted their dilemma without significant protest.

            “They’re loads of fun, Tony.  I’ve never had so much fun in my life.” 

            “Don’t be so sarcastic, Hoffman.”

            “You don’t mind if I just stand here and think, do you?”  Denise is sincere, but the words come out sounding mean.

            Tony takes three steps before he’s with some blonde who has a fluid Texan accent.  She’s not wearing one of the red and white shirts.  Tony stands there, talking into her chest.

            Denise gets another beer, nurses it, promises herself that this is the last one.  She goes outside, sits on a fence, and watches a breeze move through flat fields of weeds and wheat. This way, that way, and back again.  She is so far away from the city lights that she can see stars.  On the full moon she sees the marias.  She wishes Louis was here.  She would tell him how the moon’s craters form, and he would say: “Is that so?”  He’d want to know more, always more. 

            Back inside the air is again red and diffuse.  The music seems thinner and less profound.  A woman in one of the red shirts is crying in a corner, her arms around her knees.  A couple are arguing at the keg.  Tony, a cigarette stuck between his teeth like some kind of weapon, apprehends Denise.  “Hoffman, you just can’t run off like that.”  He blows smoke in her face, a warning, or remonstrance, but it’s unclear which.

            She’s never seen him smoke before.  He’s lectured to her about how athletes shouldn’t smoke or drink.  It took them a half hour to get here, so Denise doesn’t say anything, instead, she dances with Tony.  She drinks too much.  Like the blue-lidded girlfriends huddled together earlier, she accepts destiny.  Going home, she hangs her head outside the Volvo’s window.  The air, cooling and refreshing, rushes against her, making her forget about the disturbance in her stomach until she vomits.

            When they get to her apartment she sits down, in the parking lot, on the still-warm, broken concrete.  She watches Tony throw bucket after bucket of water on the Volvo’s passenger door. That she tastes vomit in her mouth doesn’t bother her: she made it this far.  It’s her job to guard the Volvo while Tony clambers inside up two flights of rickety stairs to fill the bucket again.  A carload of drunk men with weekend beards pass by slowly, so slowly it seems impossible that the car is moving; it’s powered, Denise decides, by a primitive force, like Fred Flintstone feet.  The men leer at Denise, but she’s used to it.  They say something rude in another language to Tony, but Tony just throws on the water with more vigor. 

            “Good exercise for the basketball arms,” Denise says.

            With the bucket poised, he looks back at her.  But it’s empty: worry supersedes the anger.  The gawking men with the stubble chins look longingly at the new white Volvo.  Maybe they’ll slash its tires, which are not inexpensive.

            “This isn’t the Bronx, Tony,” Denise says, picking up on his concern. 

            “They’re all desperate,” Tony says.  Big sweat marks are on his cherished red and white shirt.  His protruding eyes have receded.  “We’re all desperate.”

            “I didn’t mean to do it.”  Denise looks up at the sky.  It’s a seamy black.  The stars have been milked out and she can’t find the moon.  She puts her head in her lap and crosses her arms over it.  She wants to go to sleep.  “I’m sorry, Tony.  I screwed up again.”  She needs to go to sleep and forget this happened as soon as possible.

            Tony frantically throws another bucket of water on the Volvo.  He runs inside for one last bucket.  Denise uncovers her head and dutifully watches the car.

            Finished, Tony moves the Volvo beneath the only street light on the block.  “I’ll kill anybody who touches my car,” he says.

            Inside her apartment Denise slumps down on the couch.  The couch is second-hand, and greasy along the arms.  It sits directly on the floor, without legs, as if in acceptance of its final resting place.  In spite of his excitement–his face is red, his hands shake–Tony lights a candle and has the presence of mind to station it on a plate.  He turns off the lights that Denise turned on.  He just about has Denise’s shirt off when the phone rings.  

            “No,” he murmurs.  “No.”  His eyes are closed for once.

            The phone keeps ringing.  Instinctively, Denise picks it up, ready to slam it back down when she hears his voice.  It’s rich, and gentle.  Her eyes jerk open.  The voice makes every cell in her body listen.  He says, “Hi, Babe,” and Denise looks at Tony.

            “It’s–” she says, pointing at the phone.

            “You’re cold,” Tony says. 

            He jumps up and grabs his wallet and keys.  “Cold,” he repeats as he does a little hop, then thumps down the stairs, out onto the concrete to the reliable Volvo.  “Cold,” he shouts, as he accelerates the Volvo past the second story window with its stubby, flickering candle.

            Denise’s inclination to defend herself is usurped by a an intense feeling of relief.  When she puts her ear back up to the phone, Louis is gone. 

            The next morning Denise runs.  A hard fast run that puts her in the inner zone, at the twilight of sunsets and sunrises.  Body and mind separate, freeing her.  The city’s glare and harshness have been transcended.  The air becomes still, a primordial still, and it resuscitates something in her core of being.  The way Denise sees it, the city doesn’t exist.  There’s no concrete,  no cars, no noise.  It doesn’t always happen when she runs, but this time it does.  It’s as if someone else is running, and she’s there for the pure experience.  She’s going somewhere, getting from A to B.  For however long she can hold out, she is a person.  She is Denise Hoffman, a person who feels and thinks.  She can do anything, as long as she is running.