Tuesday Night Miracles (20 page)

The one time she was allowed to go trap shooting, and discovered that she had near-perfect aim and terrific hand-eye coordination that far surpassed her brothers’, was magical for her. She never let the boys forget what a great shot she was, and she was never asked to go along again. Her mother made certain of that.

“It’s not just about lost chances, either,” Bob continues. “Using a weapon is also about control, managing yourself, knowing the correct procedures and the right moment to use what you’re holding in your hands. And here, for many of the men and women who come in, it’s also a great release. And, oh yes, it’s really a blast and that’s not meant as a pun.”

Thankfully, everyone laughs, and Dr. Bayer is more than relieved.

Dr. Bayer looks confident as she walks them toward a shooting range. It’s a long, narrow room with targets at the end of each row. There are marked lines not to cross when shooting and rules and safety glasses and a very long lesson from Bob about respecting weapons, even if they’re going to use simple pellet guns.

Then Dr. Bob excuses himself in what is obviously a prearranged move, and Dr. Bayer walks in front of the women, who have been listening for a record fifteen minutes without interruption.

Olivia wishes she could be honest and say that she has always wanted to bring a group here to work with Bob and she’s never done it because it’s obviously a huge risk. Anger-class students shooting guns? They could turn on her or on each other in a second. But these women need to interact with each other in a less formal setting. They need to let go, pull the trigger, try new things, and feel the damn wind in their hair—even if they’re indoors.

She’d also love to tell them her own story, but that’s one slice of risk Dr. Bayer isn’t ready to take.

Risk.

She looks from one woman to the next and something weird happens. She decides to hell with the lesson on anger triggers. These women know what got them to this place. They really don’t need another lecture. She begins to speak, and she can’t believe what’s coming out of her big mouth.

“Your big challenge today is to have fun,” she explains. “That’s it! Can you imagine such a thing?”

Jane looks at Leah. Kit looks at Grace. Then they all look back at Dr. Bayer.

“Seriously?” Kit asks. “Fun?”

Dr. Bayer knows that if she laughs now these women, and Dr. Bob, will think she has lost her marbles, but she really does want to laugh. Wait until she tells Buffy! Instead, she simply nods, and then Bob comes back in with release forms for them to sign and she steps aside. She is just as eager as they are, but only to watch.

Sometimes Olivia misses the sixties and seventies so much that her eyeteeth feel as if someone is hitting them with a hammer. She knows from her personal and professional experiences that people have indeed become less eager to trust and love one another. There was something magical and innocent and lovely about those years of love and peace and antiwar protests.

Years when women like these would have all moved into a commune and treated each other as equals. Years when they might have worked through their anger issues with equal doses of love and support. Years when they would hold hands on the rise and attack life as a bonded unit and not as separate competitive entities.

Dream on, oh hippie-at-heart counselor! Maybe everyone is right and Livie should have retired last year or the year before that. But maybe, just maybe, if she sticks with it she can put four more notches on her belt. Maybe there will be a miraculous breakthrough tonight, and these damned women will exceed their psychologist’s lofty and obviously experimental expectations.

But right now, as she watches Leah first fumble with and then drop a rifle, and the other three women scream, Dr. Bayer isn’t sure of anything.

“Jesus!” Jane screams.

“The guns aren’t loaded, remember?” Bob tells them. “This is why we start out slow when people have never held or used a rifle before.”

Dr. Bayer wonders what Leah was thinking about when the rifle slipped from her hands. Everyone else wonders what will happen when the weapon is loaded.

Kit is apparently the only woman in the group who not only knows how to fire a rifle but who has more than a basic knowledge of all kinds of weapons. She’s looking at the rifles as if she wants to ask them out. Dr. Bayer can’t help but smile when it’s Kit’s turn to simply hold the weapon and point it at the target. Her demeanor changes from a slumped look of mild boredom to that of proud warrior.

“Wow,” Jane says, admiring the way Kit handles the rifle. “You’re good at this.”

“That makes one thing,” Kit responds.

Leah looks up at her quickly, and then looks away.

“You’ll get the hang of it,” Kit tells Jane. “It’s nothing to mess around with, but the few times I was able to shoot—well, it’s a kick and a half.”

“My ex-husband was into this kind of stuff,” Grace chimes in. “I suppose that’s why I never cared to even try it. I was afraid I might shoot him—on purpose.”

All three of the women laugh, but then Grace realizes that she has just threatened to kill her ex-husband and slaps her hand against her mouth.

Dr. Bob has already gone through safety procedures, loading and unloading, and for a while he launches into a monologue about the art of shooting. He describes it as a precise sport that requires great concentration and steadiness that can come only from a well-balanced psyche. His explanation is so succinct and passionate that Dr. Bayer is almost thinking about asking him to operate on her hip, right in the middle of target practice. He could probably do both at the same time.

Finally, the women are allowed to load their metal rifles one at a time. Bob instructs them to follow his commands without deviation. That means that they can load but they must wait for him to tell them they can fire. They must also stand in place until he gives the command to move, so they can walk down the gallery and check out their targets.

Leah turns toward Dr. Bayer and says, “I think we’re doing really well at the fun part.”

And then it’s time to actually pull the trigger.

Bob lets the women shoot once, one at a time, and then makes certain they’re comfortable before allowing them to fire until the weapons are empty.

Dr. Bayer has no idea if the women are actually thinking about anything but hitting the target. They’re being nice to one another, so nothing else really matters at this point. She has been here many times to shoot with Bob, and she knows how absolutely wonderful it feels to aim, pull the trigger, and then see the result. She has never considered target practice as anything but a release and just like any sport or hobby, she can also see how easily it can become addicting.

Bob has always begged her to bring a group like this and to turn it into something that can show her clients about control, restrained aggressiveness, and obedience. The world, after all, does have rules that need to be followed. But fun is what she’s after. Enough with the rules already!

“Good Lord, this is fun!” Grace shouts the moment she pulls the trigger during the second round of free firing. She has even forgotten how terrified she was that she’d meet someone she knew if the class was being held someplace public. Dr. Bob looks like an upstanding guy. She’s betting he’s not the kind of guy to run and tell the world that a nurse from an anger class stopped by.

Bam. Bam. Bam
.

The other women fire, and Dr. Bayer is equally ecstatic when they finish the first round, because they’re all high-fiving each other, hugging and acting like normal human beings. They are totally lost in what they’re doing, and if they could see themselves they would see that they’re blending, bonding, maybe even having some spontaneous fun.

The women continue to shoot for another thirty minutes. They then run down to their targets, yank them off the stands where they have been taped, and compare them. Then they run all the way back to where Dr. Bayer and Bob are standing and jump up and down like grade-school students.

“Look, look, look!” they shout while they shove their targets in her face.

“Can we stay longer?” Kit begs.

“We are far from done,” Dr. Bayer says, turning to wink at Bob.

“Seriously?” Jane asks, poised to grab Dr. Bayer and hug her. This potential movement actually startles Dr. Bayer, who would rather not be hugged by a woman with a rifle, even if a public display of affection would be a breakthrough for Jane.

“Seriously,” Dr. Bayer tells them. “First, go set down your rifles and then come back here.”

Then, much to her surprise, Jane actually does hug Dr. Bayer. It’s more like a quick grab, but it’s a sign of affection and openness that could herald even more changes.

Dr. Bayer shoos the women in Bob’s direction, and he starts walking them toward a door on the far side of the shooting gallery. He orders them to set their rifles on a table by the door and then stops with his hand on the doorknob.

“There are ways to take care of aggression besides pulling a trigger,” he says. “How many of you had gym class in high school?”

The women look at one another as if Dr. Bob has lost his mind. What in the world is he talking about?

Of course they all had gym class. They tell him just that. In Leah’s case it was blended into health class, too, but there was always a gym involved.

“Did anyone do archery?”

Kit, who grew up in the era of blue, elastic-waisted gym suits, the Girls Athletic Association, and the pre–Title IX years of no organized sports for girls, is the only one who has ever held a bow and arrow.

Bob pushes open the door and invites the women to enter the next room, and one by one they walk into the Home on the Range archery room.

“Archery, too?” Grace asks, stepping around a bale of hay and trying hard to ignore the fake turkeys, deer, and bears that have been placed sporadically throughout this gallery.

Dr. Bayer is right on their heels. “Can you handle one more activity?”

“Yes!” they all scream at once.

Still riding on the adrenaline from the rifle range, the women are beyond eager to try archery. Jane reminds them that actress Geena Davis sparked a renewed interest in this sport when she tried out for a position on the U.S. Olympic Archery Team several years ago. And, of course, Davis looked exceedingly glamorous, wore great spandex, and that’s what piqued Jane’s interest in the bows and arrows.

The archery range looks very similar to the rifle range, and Bob spends the next twenty minutes running through a similar safety drill.

“It’s a fun sport,” he reminds them. “But even these indoor arrows have tips that can kill someone.”

That’s why Bob has a safety system that includes a blinking light for people who are hard of hearing and a buzzer for those who aren’t. When the buzzer and the light go on, it’s safe to retrieve arrows.

Dr. Bayer notices that the women are now actually interacting with one another. Kit has taken it upon herself to help the others with their arrows, and Leah has been laughing and talking freely with all of the women. Maybe she’s a genius!

All four of the women take to archery as if they have been waiting to do it all their lives. There’s something almost magical about pulling the string, taking aim, holding your breath, and then listening to the arrow zing through the air and punch, hopefully, into the target. Olivia wouldn’t be surprised if Jane ended up on an archery team by the end of the week.

Another fifteen minutes pass, and it looks more like a women’s club outing than a court-ordered anger-management class. The women have started a small competition and are racing back to their bow stands. It’s even fun to watch.

Dr. Bayer lets them keep shooting for another half hour, even though it’s past closing time. She raises a querulous eyebrow at Bob. Bob gives her the okay sign, and just as she turns to sit down while the women finish she sees Bob raise his arms and begin frantically waving them in the air as he screams, “No, don’t shoot!”

Dr. Bayer jumps up in time to see Jane let go of an arrow and hear Grace scream, “Oh my God, I’ve been hit!”

24

Tales from the Anger Battlefield

J
ane’s ever-patient husband, Derrick, is sitting at one end of his lovely five-thousand-dollar kitchen table listening to his wife. It is close to 1
A.M.
, and the last place he wants to be on a Wednesday morning is in his own overdone kitchen, tapping his fingers on the fine dark-grained wood while his wife talks about bows and arrows. He’s had a busy week at work and, as much as he loves his wife, this is one of those times when he wishes she would be a bit more considerate.

His wife, of course, is drinking wine, which is another issue he’s been meaning to take up with her. Jane’s issues are growing by the minute. She got home late, stomped around the kitchen, and smiled at Derrick when he tromped down the stairs from their bedroom to join her.

He looks exhausted. Jane is telling him some wild story about the anger-management class and a shooting range, and until she gets to the part where she tells him she shot a woman in the foot with an arrow he’s only half-listening.

“You
what
?” Derrick almost slides off his kitchen chair where he has been trying to keep himself awake.

“I accidentally shot one of the women in my class in the foot with an arrow.” Jane says this as if she is talking about the grocery list or her next hair appointment.

Derrick is a nice man. A really nice man. Jane knows that he loves her, even when she’s keeping him up like this. He loved her when she swore at his parents. He loved her when she said she needed a break from trying to have a baby. He loved her when she said the adoption thing would absolutely not work for her. He loved her when she called him to come and pick her up from the police station after she was arrested. She’s certain that he loves her now when she desperately needs someone to talk to. But everyone, she also realizes, even a loving spouse, has a breaking point.

“Honey?” he questions, looking at her as if he’s never seen her before.

Jane can almost read his mind. She’s certain he’s thinking that something has changed, and changed so drastically during the past few years, that he isn’t sure he has even been sleeping with the woman he married. The real-estate-market collapse has taken away her self-assured persona—at least around the house—and she has reassured him dozens of times that her behavioral changes are due to that. She knows she’s been snippy and not as kind when they’re together as she used to be. He’s even asked if she’s taken a lover! Derrick has told her a hundred times that she is absolutely the most beautiful woman he has ever known, but now he’s looking at her as if she’s the town witch.

“What?” she fires back.

“Look, something is going on with you beyond this anger school or class or whatever it is,” he asserts, sitting straight up. “This morning I found a pine branch sticking out of your underwear drawer, for God’s sake!”

“Derrick, take a breath,” she orders, taking yet another sip of wine. “That was from my hike. What is wrong with
you
?”

“Jane, none of this makes any sense. It sounds like you were at a shooting range.”

“I was.”

Jane loves her wine so much that she’s not sure she wants to keep talking. She’d rather drink in silence. Maybe if Derrick doesn’t drink his wine she can have his glass when he toddles off to bed. After all, she’s had quite the evening.

“Start from the beginning, please,” he asks, pushing his wineglass toward the center of the table and wondering how he’ll be able to get up for work in five hours.

By the time Jane gets to the part where she made a horrible mistake and let the arrow fly before Bob had given them permission to do that, Derrick is staring at her as if she just stepped off a spaceship. What kind of counselor takes women to a shooting range?

“The arrow nicked a spot just below her ankle, where the skin is thin, and there was blood everywhere,” Jane tells him nonchalantly. “She was screaming as if she’d been shot.”

“Well, Jane,” Derrick says, daring to set her straight while she’s drinking. “I suppose she was scared and it hurt, and technically she was
shot
.” He thinks this Dr. Bayer person should be shot.

Jane moves her hand across her face as if she has spotted a fly on her nose, takes a sip of wine, and shakes her head.

“Grace is a nurse. She was pretty tough. I would have cried like a baby.”

“Of course you would have,” he says, relieved, as Jane admits that she really does have a soft side. “Tell me what happened next.”

And Jane launches into the story as if she’s trying out for a spot on a reality show. Her arms flail, she jumps up, she shouts and she tells Derrick everything.

Grace went down as if she’d been struck by lightning. They all ran to her and everyone was mortified by the amount of blood—lots and lots of blood. It looked as if Grace had popped a vein, but she was surprisingly calm—well, after she stopped yelling at Jane and calling her an asshole. Bob whipped out his handkerchief—can you imagine a man still carrying one of those—and Grace quickly tied it around her ankle and wanted to know if there was a first-aid kit.

Then the wounded woman was absolutely adamant about not calling an ambulance. She seemed more terrified about other people showing up than she was about the pool of blood that was seeping into the dirt floor.

“I know my rights and I do not want to be taken anywhere,” she shouted, lying on the floor with the handkerchief turning red before Bob came back with a rather hefty first-aid kit.

During all of this, while Grace instructed Leah, of all people, how to disinfect her wound, apply the butterfly bandages, and then tape it all over with a huge gauze pad, Dr. Bayer looked as if she might faint. Dr. Bob thought it best to let Grace take charge of her own wound. She was obviously competent.

Bob went to steady Dr. Bayer, and Jane could hear them asking each other over and over if they had to follow Grace’s orders and not call the paramedics. And of course, the way Bob was holding Dr. Bayer’s arm made Jane wonder if they were more than just shooting buddies.

Derrick is now totally awake and listening to this story as if someone is revealing details on how to find a massive hidden treasure. When Jane pauses to fill her glass again, Derrick realizes that she genuinely cares about these Tuesday-night women. He looks at her in a different way and feels strangely happy at the thought that she feels bad about what happened. Perhaps the wine, her constant talking, even the way her shoulder keeps moving back and forth, are simply her way of letting go.

Jane explains how Leah finished bandaging Grace and instructed Kit to go get some wet paper towels so that she could wipe off Grace’s leg.

“I could have done that,” Jane says, almost pouting.

“Honey, you were the one who shot her,” Derrick bravely reminds her.

Jane’s eyes get very large, and this is when Derrick tells himself that he will keep his mouth shut until she finishes the story, rise to leave, kiss her on the top of her head, and exit the room as quickly as possible. Jane wants to talk tonight, not listen. Maybe he shouldn’t be happy at all.

“She did
not
want me near her. She made that very clear. Even after I said I was sorry, twice! I even thought she might want to keep the arrow as a souvenir, and she sort of snarled at me.”

Oh, Jane!

Derrick is inching toward the edge of his chair. The story must be ending soon. Please.
Keep the arrow for a souvenir? Is Jane drunk or delusional? Is the story almost over so I can get a few hours of sleep?

But Jane is just getting cranked up. She may never let him go. Derrick watches her eyeing his wineglass and knows that she wants it. He can’t remember the last time his wife had one glass of wine and put the cork back in the bottle. He has been monitoring the dwindling wine collection. Last Thursday he counted sixteen empty bottles in the blue recycling bin. Before long he expects her to get a DUI, and that will be the next class she must attend.

Jane is now explaining how Grace begged them—begged as in actually grabbed Kit by the leg while she was still lying on the ground kind of begged—not to make a big deal out of the arrow-in-the-foot incident.

“Can you imagine?”

“Honey,” he says, trying to reason with her, “don’t you think it’s embarrassing enough to have to go to a class like this without having to tell people you got shot in the foot with an arrow while you were at the class?”

“Well, I’m sure none of us wants to take out an ad,” Jane agrees.

“You don’t want anyone to know, either, do you?” Derrick looks exhausted again, and he’s tired of listening to her trying to justify her behavior. “It’s kind of embarrassing if you look at her side and your side—even if you didn’t shoot her on purpose.”

This is when the secrets try to ooze from Jane’s pores. It’s absolutely revealing how her mouth tightens. Her hands grip the wineglass so hard her knuckles turn white and her breathing deepens. Her physical manifestations are a dead giveaway. She’s fighting hard not to totally fall apart, not to be too emotional, not to be too vulnerable. But she stops herself. Poor Derrick has heard enough, Jane convinces herself. What an embarrassment she’s been to him, too!

A part of Jane does want to let go and tell Derrick the reason she’s rambling and drinking so much is because she feels like a big baby who keeps making mistakes. She wants to tell him she’s scared and almost fainted when she realized what she had done. She wants to have him pull her into his chest and tell her it’s okay, and that she was just excited and made a mistake. She wants to be soft and gentle, and even the thought of that, of totally letting go, absolutely terrifies her. So Jane stops.

Derrick can sense an invisible wall going up. It’s as if Jane has pressed a button and is now encased in a protective package that lets nothing out and nothing in. She’s keeping more and more of herself inside there and Derrick is exhausted, not just from lack of sleep but from the emotional weight of loving her so much, worrying about her, and praying that this class helps her to move forward.

Jane does take a moment to imagine that Grace would probably be looking at her in the same perplexed way that Derrick is looking at her right now. Grace’s feelings for Jane must be wretched by now. What kind of a fool can’t follow a simple instruction? Am I that competitive? Can’t I keep my mouth shut for three seconds?

Truth be told, even as a part of her felt sorry for Jane, who looked as if she was going to faint, Grace couldn’t bring herself to go there.

But Grace now has a much larger problem to deal with. To hell with the bandaged foot, which she must somehow explain at work in the morning. Maybe she can get away with a random dog-bite story. What happened after she left Bob’s Home on the Range was even worse than getting shot in the foot or attacked by a pack of wolves.

First she begged not to be taken to the closest hospital, which is where she happens to work. How humiliating would that be? If anyone there found out about the anger-management counseling, that would definitely be the beginning of the end.

Grace had really been having a good time, and thinking that her fears about others discovering her at a shooting range were baseless and that she was overreacting. Shooting a gun was something she never thought she would do. Her mother would really blow a gasket over that one! Once, after the third round of firing, Grace actually started laughing out loud as she imagined a conversation where she told her mother she had just gone target shooting.

She was laughing so hard she almost missed firing the next round. She couldn’t tell the other women what was so funny. How do you tell another grown woman that you were raised in the Dark Ages and that your mother has never worn a pair of denim jeans? Who would believe her if she admitted that so many turns in her life were programmed by parents who admonished more than nurtured her? Would they believe that a successful nurse, a hardworking mother, a woman who once brought home five lonely patients on Thanksgiving because they had nowhere to go had been all but disowned because she dared to get a divorce?

Even as Grace worries herself into one headache after another because maybe her mother is right, maybe she is a total failure, one part of her would absolutely love to whip out her bullet-riddled target and stick it in her mother’s face.

The arrow in the foot would be a different story. Grace insisted on driving her own car home and first had to prove to Dr. Bayer that she could operate the brake and gas with her right, unpierced foot. Then Dr. Bayer insisted on following her home. Then she insisted on walking her inside and then she would not leave Grace until her daughter came home.

Kelli was working late at her part-time job at the sandwich shop, and Grace refused to call her for a variety of reasons, the least of them being the fact that Kelli did not know that her mother had gone to a shooting range. Dr. Bayer refused to leave; instead, she pushed past Grace, found the tea stash, ignored the messy kitchen and the shabby furniture, and sat down.

“I can’t leave unless someone is here,” Dr. Bayer said forcefully. “That’s all there is to it.”