Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [167]
In January my father and Peggy had their second child, his sixth. It was long after midnight at a hospital in Boston, and Pop was well enough to be in the delivery room, but there was no space for his wheelchair where the husband and father usually sat at the head of the operating table so he watched from the foot, and he and Peggy asked me to sit where the young father would. I was twenty-seven years old. Peggy was twenty-eight. I held her hand and watched over a raised blue sheet as the surgeon made an incision in her belly and parted the flesh and in seconds there was my crying infant sister being lifted from her mother’s womb, the umbilical cord purple and wet, and I was crying too, saying, “It’s a girl, you guys. It’s a girl.”
Later, while Peggy was in recovery and my fourth sister, Madeleine, was being cleaned up and examined, Pop and I sat in a dark hallway sharing an illegal cigarette. It was just before dawn. The sky outside the windows was black, and down the street a traffic light turned green for no one. I didn’t smoke, so I drew on the Marlboro as shallowly as I would a cigar. I’d been up all night with my father and his wife, and I should’ve been tired but I wasn’t; I kept seeing my baby sister being pulled from her mother’s womb, this completely formed, healthy human being two other human beings had made. I rarely thought of God or angels or anything otherworldly or good that may be among us, but in that hospital hallway with my father, I was feeling that something other than just us and our daily stumbling and striving may be here after all.
Pop looked beleaguered. In the delivery room he had smiled and there’d been tears in his eyes, but now he looked fatigued and gripped by a fresh pain he could barely tolerate. His torso was still weak with atrophy and both elbows rested heavily on his chair’s armrests. He’d be starting physical therapy soon, and it was time to get him ready for that, time to build his upper-body strength back to where it was just so he could work the crutches, and later, a cane.
MONDAYS, WEDNESDAYS, and Fridays I’d drive to Haverhill and set up his old weight bench in the living room. This was the same bench his second wife, Lorraine, had dumped in our front yard on Columbia Park, and while Cadence played or read or drew, and Peggy breast-fed baby Madeleine or lay her down for a nap or went off to do errands, I’d help transfer Pop from his wheelchair to the weight bench, an act which required him to have the strong triceps and pectoral muscles he no longer had. He’d be pale and sweating before he even lay down on the bench, something he could only do with help. His left leg was no longer in a cast but it did not bend, and his right was a stump so he wasn’t able to plant two feet on the floor on either side of the bench. This made this exercise far more difficult for him to do, but once he was in place and ready, we began anyway and with just the bar.
Before his accident and in the early years married to Peggy, Pop had worked himself up to a 200-pound bench press, but now this 20-pound bar had clearly taxed him by the eighth or tenth rep, and he set it back in its forks and looked up at me standing there behind them, looked up at his son’s upside-down face. “I’m fucking weak.”
“But muscle has memory, Pop.”
I told him what I’d read in one of my muscle magazines years earlier, that once you’ve built muscles and then neglect them, each cell remembers what it once was, and so the lifter starting over is miles ahead of the one beginning for the first time.
“Muscle memory,” Pop said the words slowly and to himself, the way he’d always done whenever he heard a line or phrase or human situation that intrigued him. Usually it would end up in a published story of his months or years later. One night he’d called me down in Austin just to shoot the shit. “Hey, it’s your father who art in Haverhill.” We talked awhile, then I told him about the gym where I was working out, about