Give and Go

I

In this basement gym, the Annex of our local YMCA, two men perform the act known as a chest curl. Each holds a considerable dumbbell and lifts it sideways across his body. The motion looks like the pledging of allegiance, the solemn swear, the crossing of a faithful heart.

On my bench, on my back, I work my own chest muscles in a move called the lying fly. Outside, snow swirls the air but does not decorate the sidewalk. Though it's early afternoon, the sky holds no sun. It's one of central Pennsylvania many secrets, one of this Happy Valley's many secrets, how little sunshine in the winter, how little snow actually makes it to ground.

I'm on my second set when the men begin their pattern: curl and speak, speak and curl.

"That guy got his knob polished," says the one, "and free tickets."

"Sideline, maybe," says the other. "That boy should be grateful."

"A free blow job, and he didn't have to do anything," says the other. "He didn't even have to pay."

The lying fly, like all other weight-bearing exercise, needs a third round of repetition to be complete. It's one of my secrets, how much I need these repetitive motions, especially here in this place, this valley. The combination of the physical weight paired with the routine of the motion resets my mind like little else. I'm like a dog who circles once, twice, three times before curling up to sleep. Interrupt me, and I'll begin again.

But this Sunday afternoon, I stop. I know these men are speaking of the man known as Victim Number One. He has testified that as a boy, at 13 or 14, Jerry Sandusky performed oral sex on him about 20 times.

I rise mid-rep and move toward the lifting men, shaking my head. The smaller one locks the eye contact and steps to me, and we meet in the middle, by the weight rack, before the larger man intervenes. He puts a hand out to hold back his friend. We stand like that, an awkward trinity, a long while before I turn away.

It's winter 2011, and in our small town courthouse, a few blocks away, a Centre County grand jury has decided to charge former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky with 40 counts of molesting eight boys from 1994-2009. I have been listening to softer versions of this curl and speak for weeks—on my campus, at the coffee shop, at the grocery store. This day, I'm overfull. This day, I'm so angry I'm incapable of return speech, of forming the right sentence, of forming anything like sentence.

I re-rack my weights because nothing but routine is required. The larger man still holds the arm of the smaller. I grab my jacket and head into the flurried gray without another look back.

This town, Bellefonte, sits atop rolling hills, eleven miles from the Penn State campus. This town will hold the Jerry Sandusky trial in spring of the following year. The media will swarm our Victorian village, and I will explain to my daughter, just turned five years old, how a bad man did bad things, how now the world is watching.

"Is he in prison or jail?" she says.

She knows already to parse the difference because she has two best girlfriends, one whose mother is just out of jail, the other whose father is in prison. She knows at five that one is a temporary place, the other, more lasting.

"He'll go to prison," I say before turning up the radio.

Sandusky will be found guilty, and in fall of 2012, sentenced to 30-60 years in prison. The verdict offers the proximity of completion.

But that day, I leave the Annex, incomplete, all lack. Merriam-Webster first defines this word, "annex" as a transitive verb meaning "to attach as a quality, consequence, or condition."

I jog up Allegheny Street past the storefronts and houses of this, our Victorian village, up the steep hill leading to...