Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

So much of being considered a good person is decent planning. A steel-trap memory. So much is: “So-and-so’s birthday is coming. Better send a card.” Make these token efforts and everyone says you’re a good person. You’re not necessarily. You may occupy some Outer Sulawesi of the soul, but you keep a well-organized day-timer. Real tests of goodness ignite out of nothingness and stick it to you bluntly: are you the person you think you are? The door swings two ways. Swings a hundred million ways. In those moments you come to know yourself. Can you exist within that reckoning?

Out the starboard window one wing snaps off. Trailing wiring and spitting sparks it falls through the sky, through a sea of puffy cumulus clouds. Anyway, who cares? The freight bay is full of sandbags.

The group: “Over-and-Out.” Called a “group” to imply we were pleased as punch to gather every second Thursday. Our only regret it couldn’t be weekly, or thrice weekly, or daily or two times a day. Parents helping parents. What a crock. Over and out. Get it? Support groups have punny names. Craniofacial Abnormalities: About Face. Sickle Cell Anemia: Reaping Hope. Ours was a catchall for parents “over”-something: overzealous, overbearing, overcompetitive. I had no choice but to attend. I’d slit my own throat with earlier actions at a provincial powerlifting meet.

After discovering Abby’s unusual strength I’d embarked on a systematic plan to make her a champion lifter. I bought Joe Weider dumbbells at Consumer’s Distributors. Set up a gym in my old rumpus room. Enrolled her in the Superior Physique Association: a female weightlifting fraternity founded by Doris Barrilleaux, a hyper-developed hausfrau from Canton, Ohio.

I arranged for muscle-responsiveness tests. Abby possesses some seriously enlarged vascular bundles. The cellular walls of her arteries were elastic. Improved circulation equals increased blood flow. Superior protein absorption. Bigger muscles . Muscle tissue is cellularly complex: the muscle of your biceps, for example, consists of different cellular strata. First the parallel arrays of tubelike muscle fibres bundled together like crayons in a box. Each fibre is made up of smaller sub-units, myofibrils, stacked neatly one atop the other like plates on a shelf. Inside the myofibrils reside the working parts, heavy lifters called sarcomeres, arranged in a lineup like beads on an abacus. Look closely at championship powerlifters: it’s like iodized salt has been sprinkled over every muscle group.

The day her bone density test results arrived I hightailed it to Saberhagen’s house.

“Abby scored a -0.1 on the Bone Mineral Density test. What’s that mean?”

“Means she’s got dense bones,” Frank said. “To match her dad’s skull.”

“I knew it.” As if we Burgers were famous for our bone density and it was only natural this trait should find its pinnacle in my daughter. “ Dense .”

Massive blood-pumping bundles, solid spinal stem, lode-bearing joints, bones dense as titanium. Can I be blamed for thinking she was ideally suited?

Now, get it straight: powerlifting, not bodybuilding. The Olympic sport, not the freakshow. I’m disgusted by those steroid-enlarged gals with patio flagstones where their boobs should be and their HGH-swollen faces so out of whack even the best maxillofacial surgeon couldn’t make them look womanly again, telling you “But I’m still a lady ,” in their Barry White voices. So full of toxins they’d set off a fallout meter. Steroids: an idiotic lifestyle, what with the shrunken nuts and prostatitis. They can turn a gal’s clitoris as big and hard as a baby’s thumb!

I entered Abby in regional meets. She demolished her own sex. The Ontario Power-lifting Association agreed to let her compete in the male 14–18 class. The meet was held in a Hamilton gym inhabited by strapping male bodies.

“Dogs, the lot of them,” I told her. “They got heartworm. You’ll pulverize.”

Truth told, I was taken aback at the proliferation of prepubescent beefcakery. I wanted to run around with plastic cups: “Piss tests. Piss tests for all!” I sauntered up to the biggest kid, all of seventeen yet so prodigiously venous he appeared to be covered in livid spiderwebs.

“My daughter’s kicking your ass. Bet you folding money.”

His father, a buzz-cut bohunk with a Hamilton FD shirt stretched across his chest, pricked up his ears.

“You’re flabby as all get out,” I went on. “Look at her dorsal definition. Like peering into a barrel of snakes, isn’t it?”

“S’matter with you?” his father went.

“This kid’s a bum.” I kept my tone pleasant. “What do you feed him, tubs of Oleo?”

“You’re not helping,” Abby told me.

“I’m simply allowing this man to prepare the collection of overgrown blood platelets he calls a son for an emasculating ass-kicking.”

A judge overheard the commotion. “Back to your competitor, sir.”

“I got every right being here.”

“If you don’t leave this vicinity—”

“This is my job . Don’t you tell me how to do my job. You don’t see me coming down to the public toilets to knock the can of Ajax out of your hands, do you?”

We were eliminated from competition. Abby nailed it as “a real bonehead manoeuvre.” My ex got wind. Rumblings of a revision of custody rights. My lawyer advised a token of penitence would smooth things. So, the group: “Over and Out.”

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.