Six Strokes Under

by Roberta Isleib

  Mom had used the yellow highlighter every time Max Harding's name appeared in the article. Shit.

  A chorus of Mom's cuckoo clocks reminded me that I had promised Odell I'd open the shop at 6:30 a.m. Almost late already, I dropped the paper and hurried off to shower and dress.

  While the hot shower water beat the knots in my back loose, I thought about Max Harding. I hoped I wouldn't run into him while he was in town. If I did run into him, I hoped he'd developed a receding hairline and a belly that lopped over the waist of his Sansabelt slacks. If he wasn't bald and fat, I hoped he would notice that I weighed the same as I did in high school, only now it was 110 pounds of toned muscle.

  Then I wondered about Coach Rupert. Mom used to say he wrote the manual for living life on the edge. And the town never quite decided whether to canonize or crucify him, even the year he took the football team to the state championships. He wasn't objectively a handsome man, with a craggy face, piercing blue eyes, and a red mustache. The individual pieces worked okay, but taken together, his face resembled a Picasso more than a Rembrandt. He made up for it with the sheer volume of his muscles and the easy, warm way he had with girls of all ages.

  After our Nighthawks won the state championship, Coach had a replica of the team mascot tattooed just above his left bicep. The ladies loved to roll his sleeve up, touching more of his skin than was absolutely necessary, then watch the bird's wings flap when he flexed that muscle. There were always rumors—Coach Rupert and somebody's mother or sister or daughter. None of it ever proven to be more than the fantasy of the women or the sour grapes of the men in the town, but enough material to keep the coffee shop chatter electrified for weeks at a time. And all the while, he'd been abusing his little golden daughter? Hard to believe. Really hard to believe.

  My brother, Charlie, played running back that year we won the trophy. It wasn't long before Dad bailed out; I must have been thirteen. Every night at the dinner table, we'd hear words of wisdom from Charlie's god.

  "Could you make me a couple of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Ma? Coach says too much red meat and salt will slow me down." That was after Mom served the pot roast with Lipton Soup gravy she had cooked every Sunday for every week we'd been alive.

  "Coach says it's all in my vision. I just have to try to see the holes in the defense." That would be after Dad offered what he considered constructive observations on Charlie's performance during a game.

  "I don't have time to fool around. Coach says football has to come first if we want the championship that badly." And that came after Dad asked him if he wanted to play handball, or hit a bucket of range balls, or join him in just about any activity you could name.

  I think Dad recognized by then that his life's work consisted of giving lessons to tourists who weren't going to listen to him anyway, and that nothing would ever change as long as he stayed in South Carolina. Hearing Coach lifted up as the archangel of wisdom for teenage boys was finally more than he could stand.

  "Go eat your fucking dinner at his house, then!" he exploded one night. "Maybe he'll pay your goddamned college tuition, too."

  Charlie tossed his napkin on the table and pushed in his chair. "He's two times the man you'll ever be," he said as he left.

  I offered to go beat balls at the range with Dad, but he turned me down. I wanted to kill Charlie. Mom just cried.

  I turned off the water and toweled off roughly, wishing I could rub out those old memories. I searched through my closet and found a pair of chinos with a faint press line, and a pink golf shirt. A white-and-tan-striped vest covered the coffee stain on the shirt. Then I clipped on a pair of gold earrings in the shape of golf balls and looked in the mirror. Professional, but just feminine enough, I hoped. I knew nothing in my wardrobe was going to raise me into Kaitlin's league. Charlie would have said I sold myself short. Not hard to do when the entire advertising world tells you you're dirt unless you're tall and blond, two attributes which did not apply to me.

  I arrived at the club at 7:15, damp-haired and remorseful. Odell had already opened up the register.

  "Never mind helping here," said Odell. "You need to get out to the range and get to work."

  "I'm so sorry," I began. A shrill screaming interrupted my apology. We stepped out of the pro shop and saw two figures arguing at the end of the range. I picked up my bag and followed Odell down to where Kaitlin Rupert was screaming at an older woman. The woman was paper-doll thin and blond—the same silky-gold hair as Kaitlin's, but swept back neatly with a pair of expensive-looking tor-toiseshell combs.

  "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," said Odell. "It's Margaret Rupert. What the hell is she doing here?"

  Just as we arrived, Kaitlin gave her mother a quick shove. She stumbled back into the leather bag leaning against the adjoining bag stand, where she bobbled precariously until Odell grabbed her waist.

  "Now, now, Margaret, Kaitlin," said Odell. "I'm sure we can work this out." Odell and two golfers who'd been hitting balls on the range fussed over Mrs. Rupert while she regained her balance and her composure.

  "Go home and take a Valium, Mother," Kaitlin told her in a cold voice. "This is none of your affair. It's far too late for you to be worrying about this now." She brushed an imaginary wrinkle out of her yellow microfiber short shorts, pulled those golden curls into a loose ponytail, and turned toward the small crowd that had gathered around her.

  "Show's over," she told us. "Mother's returning to her cage now."

  I set my bag down on the wire stand twenty feet away from Kaitlin. As the bystanders dispersed, I glanced back over at her. My better judgment said KEEP OUT. But maybe Odell was right. We did have a lot in common, and both could use a friend. I flashed her a tentative smile.

  "I suppose you read the paper this morning," she said. "Everyone else did."

  "Only the headline," I lied. "I'm sorry for your troubles."

  "Full of pompous quotes from the famous defense attorney Max Harding," she said. "I heard you and he were an item."

  "That was over ten years ago," I said, squirming. "I wouldn't know him now if I tripped over him."

  "He's a horse's ass," she said. "Even if my father had a decent case, which he doesn't, Attorney Harding would screw it up."

  I shrugged. Max was real smart back when I knew him, but I sure wasn't going out on any limb defending him now, particularly not to her. I broke eye contact with her and peered into her golf bag. "Damn, that's some pretty fancy gear you have."

  Kaitlin pulled her bag back out of my line of vision. "Deikon is sponsoring me this year. I'm trying some new stuff out for them, top of the line. Not out in the market yet."

  "Like that golf ball Tiger was using," I said, laughing. "Now there was a public relations nightmare. All the hackers in America rushing in to buy a ball that only existed in Tiger's bag. Hey, those new clubs don't have the trampoline-effect faces, do they? You'd hate to be disqualified before you even got going."

  The average golfer was always looking for the technical advantage that would increase the length of his drives— preferably something that wouldn't involve practice. Just lately, the United States Golf Association had decided that the newest technology, allowing golf balls to spring off the club face like a trampoline, was taking the whole trend too far.

  'The clubs I use conform completely with every specification in the book," Kaitlin said, extracting a copy of the USGA "Rules of Golf out of her pocket and shaking it in my face.

  "Sorry. No offense intended." I backed away.

  "Let me give you a little piece of advice. If you think you're good enough to compete professionally, I'd suggest you butt out of other people's business and spend that free time learning the rules." Then she glanced at my bag. "Still using Big Berthas? Well, I don't suppose the extra thirty yards I get off the tee amounts to much in the long run. Don't they say it's all in your short game, anyway?"

  I was grateful to be leaving town soon. I could only pray our Q-school pairings would overlap as little as possible. Th
ere were other things I could pray for if I let my dark side take over. But even lapsed Presbyterians worry about going to Hell.

  Chapter 3

  When I got home that afternoon, I called my friend Joe Lancaster. Joe was a psychologist who'd given up his practice with ordinary people to work with athletically talented, but equally nutty, professional golfers. He told me their problems might be different—like "my three-foot putts won't drop" instead of "my husband and I aren't communicating"—but the pain was all the same.

  I described the snit Kaitlin had pitched at the range. "I don't get it," I said. "How can an adult behave that way in public with her own mother? She's not thirteen, for God's sake."

  "I haven't met her, so it's not fair to guess," Joe said.

  "When has that ever held you back?" I asked. "Go ahead. Start talking."

  He laughed. "If you insist... sounds like borderline features."

  "And in plain English that means ..."

  He laughed again. "She doesn't understand how to maintain a normal human connection that takes the other person into account. Could be she suffered some kind of psychological damage as a child. That's how you develop those borderline traits in the first place."

  "You mean like incest?" I asked. "She's filing a suit against her own father. An article in this morning's paper said she's just now remembering that he abused her."

  "Jesus," said Joe. "You have me taking wild guesses and you leave that tidbit out?"

  "Yeah, but your wild guesses are always so juicy," I said, ignoring his outrage. "What do you know about repressed memories coming up in therapy?"

  "Short version?" said Joe. "Controversy galore. A hornet's nest."

  "What about the long version?" I usually didn't like to invite him down that path; it could turn into a tedious detour. He spent so much time listening to people, you could hardly get him to shut up when it was finally his turn to talk. But now I was really curious about Kaitlin.

  "In actual practice, recovered memories of abuse are rare," he said. "Most people who suffered abuse remember some or all of it. I guess the official stand is that digging up forgotten memories is possible, but it's also possible to develop pseudo memories of events that did not occur."

  "So you think you remember something, but it didn't really happen."

  "Yes," said Joe. "And some shrinks who get involved in this area wish they hadn't—we're talking harassment, court cases, public protests." He paused to take a breath. "So what's this girl's story?"

  "She hasn't told me much directly," I said, thinking back over the interactions we'd had so far. "She was just short of vicious about my chances in Q-school. And my antiquated equipment. Then there was the scene with her mother. Still, I feel kind of sorry for her. And Odell thinks I could help."

  "You want my free advice?" said Joe. "Stick to golf. Forget about the peer counseling. Patients who have this kind of history and are willing to get involved in that kind of controversy scream personality disorder. You could sink into a bog you'd never climb back out of."

  Frankly, for a psychologist who made his living helping people, even people as difficult as Kaitlin, I thought his assessment was a little mean-spirited.

  "I bet you're thinking I should be more compassionate," said Joe. "What's the girl like?"

  "She's a looker," I said. "Blond hair, big boobs, the whole nine yards. You'd be drooling all over yourself." My turn to be mean-spirited.

  "Give me a little credit here," he said.

  "Credit for what? Have you forgotten Georgia so soon?" I hadn't forgotten Georgia—a blowsy, oversexed, lavishly perfumed, bleached-blond bombshell that he'd taken up with last summer to ease the transition away from his failing marriage. A little too much human frailty for a shrink to display, in my humble opinion. Especially since we'd had electricity crackling between us from the moment we met. Until Georgia showed up and blew the fuse in that circuit. Now, as far as I was concerned, Joe and me-—we were just plain pals.

  Joe interrupted my thoughts with a groan. "Okay, after I wiped the drool off my chin, what else would I notice about her?"

  "Focus," I said. "She had the entire male population of the driving range sporting woodies and all she saw was her own swing path."

  "Sporting woodies?"

  "Sorry, I didn't mean to shock you," I said, laughing. "Let me put it another way. She seems to have the concentration it takes to make it big time. And her shots were nothing to sneeze about either. The swing path isn't what I'd call classic, but she hits the ball square and it goes a long ways. A lot longer than anything I could hit. To make things worse, she already has a sponsor and they've filled her bag with space-age technology. It's going to be hard to compete with that."

  "Remember what I told you. You're not competing against one person in Q-school. Keep your focus on each shot and—"

  "I know, I know," I said. "Play your own game."

  Joe laughed. "I've gotten predictable."

  "Gotta go, Doc," I said. "I'm off to see the wizard."

  When I hadn't sprung right back from the accident last summer, Joe had diagnosed post-traumatic stress syndrome and suggested I get into psychotherapy. "Sure you could probably handle this alone," he'd said. "But you'll come out of it faster with some help. Take care of it early and the symptoms won't keep popping up at inconvenient times." Now he tried to walk the fine line between curiosity about my progress and respecting my privacy.

  "Everything going okay with Dr. Baxter?" he asked.

  "I'm thinking of stopping," I said. "I think I'm cured. Now I only have post-post-traumatic stress syndrome."

  "Did you discuss this with him?" said Joe, his voice full of that I-know-better-than-you-that-you-are-about-to-screw-up tone.

  "I'll be fine," I said. "Case closed. I'll see you next Tuesday."

  "Good luck," said Joe. "Hit 'em straight."

  I parked on the street outside Dr. Baxter's office and turned up the radio. I preferred to skate into Dr. Baxter's waiting room only a minute or so before my appointment. I knew if I got there late, we'd waste half the hour talking about the deep psychological ramifications of my tardiness, but on the other hand, I hated to get there too early and end up having to cool my heels with the losers waiting for his officemate, Dr. Bencher. Bencher looked normal enough—standard-issue close-cropped goatee, white button-down shirt with sleeves rolled up, sometimes a vest, sometimes a tie. All designed, I imagined, to give that professional yet rumpled and warm effect conducive to the spilling of guts.

  But unlike Baxter and his merry band of high-functioning neurotics, Bencher seemed to specialize in the genuine crazies. God knows, maybe they thought I was wacko, too. But at least I didn't sit in the waiting area clanking through the bag of filthy cans I'd collected from the Dumpster outside the back door. Or wear a baseball cap with an Insane Clown Posse logo and rows of carpet tacks glued around the brim, pointy ends out.

  I released the latch on the bucket seat of my Volvo and leaned back with my eyes closed to meditate to the sweet sounds of Patsy Cline. I had five minutes to fantasize about a steamy reunion with Jack Wolfe.

  A siren interrupted Patsy's lament. Then I heard shouts in the parking lot outside Dr. Baxter's building. I got out of the car to investigate. Two men and a woman in business suits marched in front of the door waving placards and yelling. It wasn't the first time I'd had to wend my way through a receiving line of protesters—my shrink's suitemate seemed to gravitate to controversy.

  "It's bad enough coming at all," I'd told Dr. Baxter last time this happened. "But running a gauntlet of crackpots to get here ..." I could only shake my head.

  The businesspeople carried signs that read, "Manufactured Memories: Shattered Lives," "Charlatan Shrinks Stroll Down Pseudo-Memory Lane," and "Stick to Analysis, Skip the Fiction." A fourth protester wore faded jeans, three or four days' worth of whiskery stubble, and a black-and-red-checked hunter's shirt. He looked hot and just this side of losing it. He looked like he never should have left the back hills
of Arkansas or West Virginia or wherever the hell he came from. His sign read, "Leviticus 18:22: You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination." Only God knew why this guy marched outside my shrink's office waving a sign that, by all appearances, hammered homosexuals.

  One of Myrtle Beach's finest black-and-whites (tan-and-chromes, if you wanted to get technical) screeched up to the pickets. Two officers hopped out and began arguing with the protesters about how many paces away from the building they would have to stand. Too bad I had to go. This was obviously going to be a lot more exciting than anything Dr. Baxter and I could drum up.

  "Tough neighborhood you live in," I said, pointing out the window to the police cars, as I took my seat in Dr. Baxter's inner sanctum.

  "Um-hum," he said.

  I could tell We weren't going to have much of a conversation if I stuck to that topic. So I talked about meeting Kaitlin and getting ready for Q-school.

  "The weirdest thing," I told him, "is the way Mom's reacting. You'd think she'd be delirious with happiness that I'm finally going for my dream. Instead, all she can talk about is how could I do this to her, how could I get involved in something that will only remind her every day of how my father left her. Her latest maneuver is pretending I'm not going at all."