In Cate Kennedy’s “Cross-Country,” Rebecca’s daydreams about her ex-partner offer a form of escapism from her grief. In the wake of the breakup, she is deep in a depressive episode, swaddled in her “spare-room quilt” and eating noodles from a Styrofoam cup while scouring the internet for information about her ex and his new life. After sifting through pages and pages of search results, she finally finds a lead: her ex’s name is now on the roster for a cross-country running club across town. As the story unfolds, the narrator fantasizes about casually joining the same running club as him and impressing him with her extraordinary speed and impeccable poise. By the end of the story, a disappointing discovery shatters the narrator’s happy delusions: she realizes the roster is for kids 14 and younger, and that her ex has not, in fact, joined a running club, making all of her fantasies a waste of time. With this, Kennedy suggests that while Rebecca’s elaborate fantasies about her ex offer temporary relief from her pain, they are ultimately harmful because she is putting her healing on pause in favor of escaping reality.
Part of the elaborate fantasy Rebecca creates includes how she will turn herself into a cross-country runner to win her ex back, or at least impress him. This scenario, which ends in the possibility of the couple getting back together and presents her in a flattering light, dulls the pain of the breakup—but only temporarily. Rebecca imagines, “I’m pounding easily along the hilltop in an interclub event. I’m not even puffing as I overtake him, despite the spurt he puts on. […] I flash him a surprised-yet-calm smile of recognition, a flutter of the fingers, and pull away.” This fantasy allows the narrator to feel self-assured and light as air as she breezily waves hello to her ex and effortlessly glides down the road. When the narrator momentarily snaps out of her fantasy, though, she feels “heavy as a stone.” Her fantasy may have allowed her to feel breezy and light for a minute, but the feeling quickly dissipates. Later, Rebecca resolves to get up, shower, get dressed, and go to the mall to buy running shoes—the first step to having a “torso tight as a rubber band, my number tied and flapping across my chest, my shapely arms working like pistons as I make him eat my dust.” Here, her simple to-do list quickly dissolves into full-out fantasy. She envisions herself, tanned and taut with muscle, easily overtaking her ex in a race, allowing her to momentarily forget that she’s actually lying around with “greasy hair and unwashed pajamas” and doesn’t know the first thing about running.
Even though these daydreams make Rebecca feel better while she’s indulging in them, the story suggests that this kind of escapism prevents her from accepting the breakup and adjusting to life without her ex-partner. At one point in the story, Rebecca’s boss calls to inform her that she’s used up all her sick leave and is expected to be at work on Monday. However, mid-call, Rebecca slips into yet another daydream about her ex. With this, the story suggests that Rebecca has spent so many days Google searching and fantasizing about her ex that it’s taken over her life. This kind of behavior has chained Rebecca to her computer and to her house, preventing her from picking up her life—and her work—and moving forward. Rebecca’s fantasizing also seems unproductive because it completely contradicts what her ex-partner wanted for their breakup. She remembers him saying, “I think it’s pointless considering mediation at this stage. I think it would be best to make a clean break.” In fixating on fantasies of her ex wanting to work things out—when he clearly has no interest in doing so—she is preventing herself from also making the “clean break” that will allow her to move on. Toward the end of the story, when Rebecca suddenly realizes that the running-club roster she’s been looking at is for children, not adults, this new information “go[es] off in a blinding flash like a grenade,” snapping her out of her daydreams and waking her up to real life. As she sits in shock, “dully open-mouthed,” it’s clear that all her fantasizing has been for nothing. Her ex is not part of some cross-country running club across town, the narrator can’t show up at an event and outrun him, and they’re not getting back together.
Throughout the story, Rebecca’s fantasies about her ex are interspersed with unpleasant memories of him: he never could manage to finish his thesis, she had to support him financially, and he could never relax and have fun. Although her fantasies often dredge up these kinds of memories throughout the course of the story, it’s not until the end that these bad memories pile up and she begins to realize that maybe he’s not worth pining over. And while all of her fantasizing did keep her from moving on, it perhaps also helped remind her that the relationship ended for a reason, and that she’s better off on her own: “ready or not, it’s time to roll the credits.”
Related Themes from Other Texts
Fantasy and Self-Delusion ThemeTracker
Fantasy and Self-Delusion Quotes in Cross-Country
It’s not as if I’m going to go over there, drive past his house, lie on his lawn drunk and make a scene, harass him. It’s just a few shreds of information I want. I supported him for a year, after all; surely I have a right to know whether he’s finally submitted that thesis and where, incidentally, the graduation ceremony is going to be held. If he’s joined a church group or a golf club, I need to paste that into my new identikit. I’ll take any crumb, any trail, any vague lead.
I don’t know why they call it surfing. They should call it drowning.
Down through the layers of US family-tree pages and rambling travel blogs of dull strangers, I hit paydirt at last. My heart knocks in my chest. I find he’s attended a conference but not presented a paper there. Thesis still unfinished, then. Too many emotional upheavals. His thoughts too scattered after a traumatic breakup, distracted by guilt and second thoughts. I’m settling into this train of thinking, hungry for its possibilities […]
It’s ten past four. Jittery with caffeine and MSG, I snoop in the desk drawer Google has no qualms about throwing open for me. He’s way down the ladder: coming thirty-fourth. That must be humbling. Thirty-fourth in a field of what—fifty or so? That would make anyone feel like a nameless nobody in a crowd, face blurry in the back of someone else’s photo, reduced to nothing but pixels.
‘See, you can reduce all this to just a system of binaries,’ I remember him explaining […] ‘Just infinite combinations of zero and one.’ I wonder if he understands that better now, struggling home in the middle of the pack. How it feels to be rendered, finally, to those low-resolution dots of shadow and light, a conglomeration made up of nothing and one.
