Sarah Court (12 page)

Sole tonic to my misery was I didn’t have to endure
it alone. Frank Saberhagen—whose ex-wife levied
charges he was pushing Nick too hard to become a
third-tier pugilist—was pressured into attendance.
And Clara Russell was there, even though her “boys”
weren’t hers by blood.

Our meetings were otherwise populated by
decaying alpha males. Gym teachers in sweat suits
with teeth marks dug into the plastic whistles
dangling round their necks. Business suits with men
inside whose skin was so tight-flexed you feared
their scalps would tear open to reveal the twitching
nests of their id. That breed of intellectually and/or
emotionally impoverished male whose pickup truck
hitches sport oversized, rubberized novelty scrotal
sacks. We were overseen by Dr. Dave, a “Behaviour
Coach.” Six-five, one-seventy: his body resembled
wet bedsheets hung from a flagpole. Add to this the
overeager demeanour of a drivetime DJ. Like he’d
signed a contract mandating he be inoffensively
funny.

“Welcome to Over and Out,” he began each
meeting. “Let’s help each other get ‘over’ the hump,
so you can get ‘out’ of your boxes of destructive
habitual behaviour.”

We stood at a plywood lectern parading our
parental sins in hopes of exculpation. Quincy—
who insisted on being called Doctor Frank—was a
hambone.

“Why should I,
we
, be pilloried for promoting
our offspring’s betterment through a regimen of
physical discipline and structure?” went his typical
monologue. “The same structure promoted by my
father and his father, which made me the man I am
today. A healer of men.”

“Times change,” said Dr. Dave. “Society and, haha, expectations also, Mr. Saberhagen.”

“Doctor Frank, please.”

“You cannot rob a child of choice. Autonomy.”

“Let
them
choose
to
be
what:
carnival
roustabouts? Years ago my son wanted to be a tap
dancer. What was my option?”

“My boys can be whatever they want.”

This from Clara Russell. She sat with one of
her charges, Jeffrey, a little turd who stole eggs
out of the robin’s nest in my oak tree. Unwed and
technically childless, Russell shared her home with
a rotating herd of youthful fruitcakes and some poor
old bastard she made a habit of kicking out, quite
publicly, every year or so.

“Dancers,” she persisted, “or bricklayers—”

“Or little arsonists or kleptomaniacs, obviously,”
Saberhagen said.

“You’ll let that stand, Dr. Dave?” said Clara. “Isn’t
this a supportive haven?”

“Everyone, ha-ha, let’s take a step back. . . .”

“My
boys
have
behavioural
anomalies
and
unnatural fixations, sir.” Russell was an imposing
woman. Paul Bunyan in a smock. “Can’t wave a magic
wand and fix them.”

“Listen, Dave,” Frank went on, ignoring her. “I
love my son.”

“Unconditional, Dr. Saberhagen—can you say
your love is that?”

“Whose ever is?”

After meetings, most of us loafed about smoking,
gnashing wads of gum, or grinding the weave of
our sweaters against nicotine patches. Always a
mobile party kit in somebody’s trunk. We drank and
decompressed. It mainly took the form of jibes at Dr.
Dave, who we all agreed was about as useful as a set
of tonsils.

The usual post-group clan: three fathers and
one mother, Nadia, whose gymnast daughters tore
ACL ligaments in separate pommel horse calamities.
Saberhagen and I nicknamed her “Nadia CommenNazi.” The third father was Dale Mulligan: a slab of
free-range masonry with the primeval face of the
Piltdown Man. That, or a block of clay punched into
a rude semblance of humanity by a mildly artistic
gorilla. He taught Phys Ed at Laura Secord, an “arts”
school where students interpretive-danced their
way to course credit. His son was the football team’s
running back. You’d think the sun shone directly out
the kid’s ass.

“My boy, Danny,” Dale prattled on one night,
“racked up a hundred-twenty yards on the ground in
scrimmage. Took a few tackler’s arms as trophies.”

I was uninspired at the boy’s ability to tear
through a defensive line of landscape painters.
Shortly afterwards the aforementioned apple of
Mulligan’s eye arrived to pick his father up.

“My daughter’s stronger than him,” I heard
myself say.

“You out of your sonofabitchin’ mind, Fletcher?”

“Dale, please. He’s got the build of a snow pear.”
By the time Abby arrived to pick me up, Dale and I
were nipple-to-nipple, bumping chests as men do
when each feels he’s been affronted yet neither is
ready to plant a fist in his antagonist’s nose. Not
quite
. At Abby’s arrival I strode to the bike rack.
Rusted bars, solid steel, welded at right angles.

“Okay, Mulligan. Dead lift. Your boy, my girl.”

“I’m not lifting anything,” said Abby.

“Just a few lifts. Look at him.”

“Go fall in a hole, Dad. I’m picking you up. That’s
it.”

“Abs. This guy thinks he can beat you.”

“You think you can beat me?” she asked Dale’s
son, Danny Mulligan.

“I don’t even know what we’re talking about,”
Danny said, mystified.

“How about,” said Quincy, “the two dads lift?
Hey, Abby—your old man puts his shoulder to the
millstone?”

“What does that prove, Frank?”

“Tell you what it proves if you don’t, Fletch: you’re
a grade-A chickenshit.” Quincy tucked his hands
under his armpits and flapped. “Bro-bro-broooock.”

Dale Mulligan had already installed himself at
the bike rack. No heroic way to extricate myself, so
after deep-knee bends and some isometric stretching
I spat on my palms. Gripped the rack. I could
do
this,
baby! Feet set, hammies flexed, I straightened my
spine and loosed a convulsive grunt—
YE GODS!
A
firecracker exploded between my fifth and sixth
vertebrae. I came to on my back. The motherloving
pain! Spine ripped out, soaked in jellied gasoline, lit,
the white-hot knobs sewn back inside. A paraplegic.
I’d be blowing into a straw to move the hubs of my
wheelchair. My droppings evacuated into sterile
plastic bags. Crippled . . . by a bike rack!

“Oh, fuck my life!”

Quincy knelt. Ran a finger up my spine. “You
tweaked a disc. Nothing earth-shattering.”

“Can’t believe you did that,” Abby said.

Was it wrong to cherish the fear in her voice?

The
post-therapy
group
swiftly
disbanded.
Quincy offered to help drive me home.

“You viper. I’d as soon take a lift from the Malibu
Strangler.”

Abby drove slow: partially because she was
freshly licensed and partially because any jolt would
cause me great ache. Once home I sent her inside for
a beer. She returned with tallboys. We popped the
tabs and drank.

“What?” she said. “I’ve had beer.”

“You damnwell have not around me.”

We clinked cans.

“Hungry? Energizer Bowls in the freezer.”
“Pass. Group’s working wonders, by the way.”

Our eyes met in the rearview mirror. I don’t
know when, exactly, I hit the understanding that my
mother and father had been responsible for rearing
me and were thus somewhat reliable but still, they
were only human and entitled to their own screwups.
I’m reasonably sure Abby hit it right that instant.

“Who was that boy?”

“Who, Danny Mulligan?”

“Danny. Daniel.”

“He goes to Laura Secord. That place is an
incubator for fairies.”

“You don’t have to be a jerk every day of your life.
Take a day off. He’s cute.”

“Danny Mulligan. Cute. These two absolutes fail
to sit comfortably within my universe.”

“He looked at me. My boobs.”

“The scumbag. Did he, really?”

“Better than the horndogs at the gym going on
about my pectoral definition.”

“Please, Abs.”

A vein throbbed down her neck. Beautiful, my
daughter, but physically solid. Workhorse legs. All
those veins. “What do you feed her,” Saberhagen
once joked, “cotton candy spun out of Dianabol?”
The culture of her sport was one where female
powerlifters were met derisively: my daughter was
a stunt, like a foxy boxer. It bothered Abby her
thighs rubbed together walking. That her abdominal
muscles were so prominent they resembled a turtle’s
belly. That the dress she wore to commencement
made her look, in her own self-appraisal, like “a
linebacker in drag.” But each sculpted protuberance
was evidence of our training regimen. The tensile
integrity muscle attains amongst the very best
athletes gives it this pocked look. When there’s
only enough fat separating flesh from tendon that
you won’t die of hypothermia on a mild spring day.
Individual fibres present themselves as defined
waves. Tendons rumble like gathering thunder over
a body.

You’re rumbling
, I’ll say when she’s in top form.
Rumbling and raging
.

She’s a goddamn beautiful lifter. I’ll load the
bar with six forty-five pound plates plus the bar:
a 315 squat. She chalks her hands—calloused as
a dockworker’s—grips the crosshatched bar and
swings herself beneath that weight. Legs flared
wide: a pair of baby spruces. Jerking the bar off its
pegs she’ll go down, thighs perpendicular to the
floor. Veins spiderwebbing from the rounds of her
shoulders. A serious case of the butterflies as her
quadriceps jump and dance. Eyes rotating to the
ceiling she
explodes
with a lung-shattering scream.
Primal. A lioness. One time she blew a blood vessel
in her eye. Powering out of her crouch, bar bowed
over her shoulders with all that weight. Blood surged
into her eyeball. The pressure on the vein wall was so
fierce it tore. Abby didn’t even feel it. Alarmed, I took
her face in my hands. I was so terrified. She said: “I’m
okay, Dad. Calm down.”

“Abs, if you never lift another weight . . . that’d
be okay.”

“Right. You’d be busted up.”

“It makes me happy we’re doing something
together. That’s all. We could go fishing. You like
fishing? I hate it. But anything else. Okay?”

“Yup. Okay.”

“I want to know you’re happy.”

“I know.”

“So. Tell me.”

“I’m happy.”

Did any kid comprehend the love of a parent?
Frightening in its rawness. An excised kidney:
naked, unprotected and lewd. It sprang from failure
and regret which only sharpened the edge. Fanatical,
protective, rooted in an understanding the world’s a
broken place filled with broken individuals. The fact
your child was a part of that ruined tapestry was a
kind of miracle.

The parasite Saberhagen pulled into his driveway.
He and Nick trotted across the yard. Nick had a black
eye but Frank’s poor son always sported a blackened
eye, busted nose, facial sutures, or the like.
“You go to hell,” I told Frank.

Saberhagen appealed to Abby. “Did we handcuff
him to that rack?”

“You did the chicken thing,” she reminded him.
“Chicken-chicken brock-brock.”

Saberhagen opened the rear door and sat behind
me. “Nick, you and Abby grab more barley pops.”

“Why don’t you?” said Nick.

“Someone’s fixing to chow down on the brown
bag special, son o’ mine.”

They went. Frank tapped my shoulder. Pinched
between his fingers: a pill. I swallowed it. Adjusted
the rearview to frame his face.

“We’ve known each other years. Broken bread
together. Why do that to me?”

“Sort of do it to ourselves, wouldn’t you say?
Don’t be a drama queen.”

“Go fuck your hat.”

“Not wearing one. As you can plainly see.”

The kids came back with more icy tallboys. Cool
wind blew through the windows. Saberhagen’s pill—
fabulous! My body may slide into the footwell, my
bones soft as poached eggs. Bryan Adams’s “Summer
of ’69” played on 97.7 Htz FM.

“Love this tune, Fletch. Pump it.”

“Oh, go home.”

Saberhagen shouldered the door open, swooned
onto the driveway, nearly fell, steadied himself then
strode before the hood. Abby snapped on the high
beams.

“Rock out, Mr. S!”

“You bet your bippy!”

Saberhagen
squinted
weevil-eyed
into
the
headlamps
before
embarking
on
an
energetic
and
truly
abysmal
faux-rock
performance.
He
brandished an air guitar that to judge by his hand
spacing was the size of a classical base: fret-fingers
above his head, strumming fingers down at his
thighs. Hips gyrating, fingers spasming: he could
have been experiencing an epileptic attack.

“
Those were the best days of my laaay-fe!
” Frank
sang. “
Baw-baw-baw-ba-ba-baw! Yeah!
”

He reeled off the classic cock-rock staples. The
Pigeon Neck. The High-leg Kick. The Lewd Crotchthrust. The Pursed-lips-chest-out Rocker Strut. The
Angry Schoolmarm. He then threw in moves in no
way appropriate to the song: The Water Sprinkler,
The Running Man and The Robot.

“
I guess nothing can last forever, forever—naaaaaw!
”

“You’re not cool!” I shouted, though I had to admit
the man did a damned fine Robot.

Abby and Nick joined Frank. Abby gave him one
of
those
mock-tortured-slash-ecstatic
your-axeplaying-is-rocking-me-so
hard
faces. Frank launched
into a face-melter guitar riff. He went down on one
knee like James Brown. Nick peeled off his shirt and
draped it over his father’s shoulders. Frank threw
it off with a flourish and kicked out one leg as his
performance reached its crescendo.