Stronger Than Your Strongest Excuse

[Winter Rowley]

Winter Rowley felt stupid—and he didn’t look much better.

He was completely alone, surrounded by weights and weight accessories. Indeed, the sheer amount of weight paraphernalia in the room perturbed him; it was a mess of black leather and heavy link chain and tall machines and round hunks of metal on sticks, and the visual clutter made him feel claustrophobic. He kicked the soles of his worn black sneakers against the tight gray carpet, wondering where he was meant to start.

When he’d mentioned getting a gym membership to his mother in passing a couple of weeks ago, he hadn’t actually been serious. The idea had been put forward by his therapist, and like most good advice, he’d pretended to give it some serious thought before letting it fall by the wayside. He certainly hadn’t expected his mother to follow through on adding him to the family membership plan… and he’d anticipated her enthusiasm even less.

I told your father, and he thinks it’s a great idea, she’d said. Maybe it will give you two something to talk about.

He should have said no—he didn’t want to go, and he definitely didn’t want to talk to his father about things like weightlifting and exercise. They’d had more than enough arguments about that when he was a kid. Still, he had a reputation to uphold: he hardly ever did what he should. So there he stood, clad in a plain black t-shirt with a quarter-sized hole in the stitching under the neckband and slick black basketball shorts that he’d worn approximately twice in his life. There he stood, in all his pale, scrawny glory, staring emptily at a room full of weights and cheesy motivational posters and bright-colored flyers for athletic classes with names like Beach, Body, Booty! and Move ‘n Groove.

He was well out of his depth, and he knew it. He might well have been alone in knowing it, too, but the sound of footsteps moving in his direction indicated that he was going to have company soon. A flutter of anxiety rose in his chest; he’d come late to avoid other people, but the idea of being in the room with one person seemed somehow far more embarrassing than being in the room with several. There was nowhere to disappear to. In a moment of panic, he picked up the nearest dumbbell, a 40-pound weight with fat hexagonal ends.

As it turned out, forty pounds was a lot of pounds. His wrist bent under the weight, and he dropped the dumbbell instinctively… onto the fingers of his other hand.

“Ahhhhhhhh,” he said, eloquently. There was a desperate metal-on-metal rattling sound as he fought to free his hand again. He did, and then he flexed his fingers gingerly, just to make sure they were all still there. “Jeezus!”

[Rhea Hartman]

“She's just a girl...who says I am the one...! Mmm-mm...not my son... In the dance, on the floor, with her eyes...”

Rhea took a half-step in rhythm with the King of Pop, singing under her breath as she left the locker room. She'd had a late shift and didn't expect to see anyone else around. “Billie Jean...is not my luh-vuh...” She tossed her water bottle in the air, pulled a slide step down the hall, and caught it behind her back with the other hand. "Just a girl...mmm-mm.."

“Jeezus!”

Pilot Ridge had not invested heavily in sound proofing its gym. When the football team did weight training you could hear the grunting and clanging from the other side of the building. Rhea's next hum died on her lips, and she paused to listen for a moment before closing the remaining distance down the hallway and pushing open the steel-gray gym door.

On the other side, she saw a chicken-boned young man bent in the classical 'I have just hurt myself with weights' position. He looked vaguely familiar, but Rhea was sure she hadn't seen him at the gym before.

This was easy to believe.

Rhea dropped her towel by the lat pulldown machine and crossed to the free weights. The young man was tall, dark-haired, probably her height when he wasn't curled in pain, and appallingly scrawny. His limbs had the narrow softness that, with work, might upgrade to 'wiry.'

By contrast, the woman who followed the footsteps into Winter's gym looked like she could have juggled the 40-pound weights. She was in her thirties, and her general size and build brought major landforms to mind. She had a boxing tattoo on one shoulder and a blurry butterfly on the other.

The woman stopped by the squat cage and gestured to the discarded dumbbell with her water bottle. “Doing all right there?” she asked with a sparkle in her eyes. 

[Winter Rowley]

The unfortunate thing about the pain, Winter thought, was that it wasn’t nearly enough to distract him from the humiliation that had flushed his neck and cheeks and even the pale skin of his chest under his ratty t-shirt. For a moment, he was completely whelmed in his own anxiety; by the time he managed to rise to his full height, though, the knot of tension under his ribcage had given way to the swift anger of a man’s wounded pride.

He turned his body toward the voice, but he was still glowering at the weight rack, vigorously massaging his right ring finger with the thumb of his other hand. Several beats of silence passed before he managed to look the stranger in the eye. The sharp retort he’d been preparing stuck in his throat; he wasn’t accustomed to seeing a woman at his own eye level.

He forced a sigh through his nose.

“No,” he said. He looked down at his hand again with a furrowed brow. Then, he looked back up at the unknown woman, partly to make sure that she wasn’t laughing at his misery and partly to marvel at her size. She was his height, at least, although the enormity of her presence made her seem taller. Her arms were probably the size of his thighs. He might have darted from the room then and there, but the look in her eyes and the age-blurred butterfly tattoo on her shoulder made her somehow more approachable.

Some of his tension faded, causing his shoulders to sag.

“I have no idea what I’m doing,” he said, flatly. “Which is probably obvious.”

[Rhea Hartman]

Rhea breathed in the scent of wounded male pride, which she had left frequently in her wake since she was eight years old. She flashed a smile at his glower. "You're not bleeding. That's a good start."

The woman sat down on one of the support bars of the squat cage and stretched out her legs. The impression left by the butterfly on her shoulder repeated itself again--she had legs like tree trunks but delicate, feminine features. She had a soft jaw and dainty lips, and a nose broken into slight aquilinity rested between beautiful black eyes. Heavy lids and thick lashes gave her a perpetually lazy expression.

At the young man's sullen admission, Rhea felt the same emotion she had when her eight year-old nephew broke a piece of the model plane he was trying to build. Haden, it says on the box the toy is for 12 and up. Come on, let's try and put it back together.

She smiled again. "Well, yeah, but mostly because you were trying to lift weights without a spotter." She realized he probably didn't know the lingo and explained, "A spotter watches while you're doing free weights in case you need help." She pointed to the bench press two machines over. "That one, for example." It was the one that young men invariably tried first and invariably overloaded. "It's a great way to snap something if you drop it on yourself."

That was how she had learned that particular safety lesson.

[Winter Rowley]

Winter attempted to smile at the woman’s cheerful observation, but all he managed was a lopsided, queasy-looking twitch of his lips.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess.”

She sat down and stretched out her legs, which served to distract him from her height; she had a pretty face, Winter noted, in the objective sense. Her smile accentuated the pleasant shape of her lips. She reminded Winter of someone’s well-meaning and attractive older sister—the kind that you shouldn’t piss off.

He was grateful for her explanations of terminology, because he was embarrassed enough by his mishap that he certainly wouldn’t have asked. He nodded passively. His gaze followed her finger in the direction of the bench press, and he wrinkled his nose at her commentary.

“Sounds delightful,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to wear a full-body cast and drink my meals through a straw.”

The embarrassment was fading now, some. She didn’t seem like the revel-in-misery-of-strangers type.

“So, what do I… wait, let me think about how I want to phrase this.” He paused; his head tilted, ever-so-slightly, like a curious pet. “If I had, say, an overbearing father with an interest in weightlifting, and I wanted to tell him that I had done something appropriate for my abysmal level of athletic skill, what would I be doing right now?”

He gestured vaguely around the room.

[Rhea Hartman]

Rhea tipped her chin up with a satisfied laugh. "That's a good question," she chuckled. She stooped to pick the offending 40-pound weight and placed it back on the rack. Then she straightened and looked around the gym.

"Let's see, dad bonding equipment..." She combed a few springy, flyaway strands of hair from the nape of her neck as she thought. "Well, for your dad's sake, let's start with how not to put you in that full-body cast you mentioned."

Rhea had been born a gifted athlete, and she excelled at almost any sport she set her mind to. That didn't mean she could teach. Rhea had successfully mentored pupils who learned by watching and those who could decrypt statements like, "No, don't move up up, more curvy up." Learners who required more articulate directions had not found her training very helpful. Rhea had come to accept this, but she could handle Winter's concerns. It didn't take much skill to communicate, 'If you feel something snap, put the weight down.'

She pointed out a machine near the ellipticals, one with a long handle hanging from a tall central post, a low bench, and an alarming number of pulleys. "Let's start there. It's the lat pulldown machine; it's a simple movement and it's hard to hurt yourself." She stood and used her water bottle to gesture him towards the contraption. It would be easier to go over the rules on a real machine rather than just pointing them out across the gym.

[Winter Rowley]

Winter took a half-step back, ostensibly to give his cheerful new companion plenty of room in which to pick up the weight he’d dropped. The reality, though, was that he was better off being out of arm’s reach of anything he might accidentally murder himself with.

He’d learned that one the hard way.

“Great,” he said. He took great care to avoid sounding overly sarcastic; it was difficult, because he usually responded to every mention of his father with sarcasm. Every time the urge to snark struck him, though, he found that a good, long look at her incredibly solid biceps did the trick.

He trudged forward in the direction she pointed to with her water bottle and came to stop at the aforementioned lat pulldown machine, which he then proceeded to study in critical silence for no less than thirty seconds.

He furrowed his eyebrows a fraction of an inch. And then…

“‘Lat’ as in ‘latissimus dorsi’?” he asked. He sounded more curious than intimidated, now; he was easily confounded by weights and machinery, but he knew his anatomy, both human and avian.

[Rhea Hartman]

“Yes,” Rhea replied with mild surprise. She'd expected his anatomical knowledge to be on the “head, shoulders knees and toes, knees and toes,” level. She pointed to a diagram at the top of the large instruction sticker on the side of the machine. The picture showed the long triangles of the latissimus dorsi colored in red. “It supports your shoulder joint and your back, which are two of the most common places to get injuries. Oh, you'll want to read these stickers, by the way.”

Much better at showing than telling, Rhea set her water bottle aside and sat down on the small, cracked black seat at the base of the machine, facing the central pulleys. “All these machines work about the same,” she said as she leaned towards the weight stack attached to the base of the cables. The plates were wide and flat, ten pounds each. “You move this little pin around to change the weight,” she explained. She removed a yellow-headed pin from two thirds of the way down the stack and slotted it into a hole at the center of the thirty pound weight. “Just make sure it's in all the way in there before you try to lift anything.”

She sat back, then reached up with one arm and snagged the bottom of the wide handle hanging above her head. Once it was secured in both hands, she pulled the bar down to her chest in an easy motion. The weight stack glided up the central column on its pulleys, paused, then floated back down and landed with a click as Rhea released the handle back at the top of the machine.

“That's how that one works,” she said as she stood up from the machine. Explanations, evidently, were unneeded. “Go ahead and give it a try.”