“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.