Magna Comes Loudly
By Megan Stielstra
Here is how it would go: She’s waiting for the el, bag in one hand, book in the other. She’s trying to read, but people keep bumping into her. It’s ten after five and crowded in the underground, everyone pushing closer to the yellow line to fight their way onto the express train. Magna’s trying to stay calm, to breathe through her mouth like her yoga teacher says, but there’s a bubble in her chest that expands, slowly filling with an ssssss sound, pushing down into her stomach and up in her lungs. It’s getting bigger. Bigger. It’s just a matter of time.
She has forty minutes to get home and fifteen to shower, which leaves a half hour to get dressed and make it to dinner with Greg at seven, then Selly at nine thirty, Mike after that, and she’s got to be at the counseling center tomorrow by six a.m. Her life is meticulously scheduled in back-to- back blocks; there isn’t time to pop.
But she can imagine it. She imagines it all the time: She’d take a deep breath, tighten her shoulders, and swing her tote bag in circles, whacking into the people standing around her. She’d get a real momentum going so they’d have to jump back out of the way to avoid getting whipped by the canvas, and they’d crash into other people. Someone would try to stop her, say some guy in a baseball cap and flip-flops. “What the fuck—” he’d yell, and Magna would interrupt: “Here’s the fuck. You’re in my way and I if I don’t break big right now I’ll break bigger later, and would you want that kind of pressure? Could you deal with that kind of responsibility?” and then she’d slam her out-turned palms into his chest and he’d fall back over the yellow line, and Magna’d push at whomever was next to him, whomever was within her reach. They’d all wonder what was happening—here is a perfectly respectable- looking girl, normal enough, pale and tall and Banana Republic sale rack, she’s really not that different from me—until they’d get Magna’s elbow full force to the teeth and blood would come and the train would come—you can hear it, the grinding groaning building down the tunnel—and Magna’s still slamming into people, throwing her whole body into theirs like in the mosh pits she used to watch back in college when everything still seemed possible.
She was shopping on Michigan Avenue and walked right past herself when she was a kid—this fourteen- year-old girl in a uniform skirt and untucked button-up, one knee sock at her knee and the other at her ankle, all braces and tangled hair and awkward and chubby. Her eyes were on the sidewalk and when she walked past, Magna stopped, turned, and watched her. She remembered being that girl, avoiding people’s eyes because you thought they pitied you, looking at the ground so you don’t accidentally catch your reflection in store windows. Magna hated her reflection. Hated photographs. She never had a full-length mirror for that reason, and even now, years later, with most of the fat tread-milled off and muscles from yoga, Magna doesn’t like looking at herself. She only sees what she is supposed to lose. She sees cheesecake, bread, cheese casserole. Her seeing is broken.
At six-forty the cab lets her out a block from Gioco, a swanky restaurant in River West. As she walks towards it, she is watched by the two guys parked in a black SUV, their eyes on her hips. They see the line of her ass in that skirt, the heels that she plants accidentally in a pile of dog shit on the sidewalk. The SUV’s windows are rolled up so they don’t hear her say, “Of course, I would step in dog shit. It makes perfect sense.” They see her bend over and scrape her shoe on the edge of the curb. They see this as their chance. “Hey,” one calls, rolling down the passenger side window. “You need a Kleenex?” Magna walks to the window, accepts the offer, wipes at her shoe. “Where you going, looking so fine?” he says, and she looks up then, his wide, stupid face, his gelled hair, his perfect skin. How do you get pores like that? Do you exfoliate? Do you tone? “Wait. Are you hitting on me?” she asks out loud, amazed. “While I am cleaning excrement off myself?” He opens his mouth to respond, and she can see herself shoving the mound of shit into his lineless, radiant skin.
“Magna comes loud!” is what the kids yelled at recess. She knew the words were cruel but had no idea what they meant. Even then, she was oblivious to most things sexual.
Her parents, the academics, named her Magna after Magna Cum Laude, the honors designation for a student graduating with a GPA of 3.8 or above. Her mother’s field was nineteenth-century studies, and her father’s was child psychology. They had appointments at two separate universities in two separate states, so for the most part growing up it was her and her mom, her father a faraway voice and impossible expectations. “We want you to do your best,” he’d say over the phone, twice a year when her report card arrived. “But I had you tested, and this isn’t your best.” When she was twelve, her father won an international award and tied a faculty position for her mother to his contract renegotiation. You’d think they would be happy, all of them finally together, but her dad was bigger and louder than she remembered, her mother so suddenly small and quiet, tiptoeing around this strange house, this strange man. That was when Magna first felt the bubble, tiny and elastic like a baby balloon, expanding or deflating depending on an A or a B, a glare or a smile, a slap or a hug. It was an intricate dance for someone so young, and in the middle of the night Magna would sneak to the refrigerator and eat brownies out of the pan, sitting on the floor in the dark.
She was fourteen when she woke up to go to the kitchen and tripped over her mother, wrapped in a sheet on her bedroom floor. Was she there to protect Magna from her father, her body a physical barrier between them? Or so Magna would protect her from things he wouldn’t do in front of his daughter? The questions spun her brain. The bubble grew to a grapefruit. She weighed one sixty and had few friends; her time was spent in her mother’s books. D.H. Lawrence and Henry James and Edith Wharton and all these writers who threw love around like a Frisbee.
A couple months earlier, Magna started scheduling smoke breaks. She doesn’t smoke, but she needed those ten minutes, and would sit on an upturned crate in the alley behind the counseling center where she worked, turning the cigarette between two fingers and trying to control her breath. After a while, a kitten would appear, this tiny scraggly thing with black matted fuzz and yellow eyes. It would sit at Magna’s feet and look up at her. Magna looked back and counted in her head, one one thousand two one thousand three one thousand, the stare-down game she’d play when she was a little girl.
She always looks away first.
She’s too scared to see.
What she does see are the women who come into the center. It’s a three- room office at Ashland and Ogden, underneath the el tracks, kept funded by space grants that Magna applies for twice a year. One of the rooms is big, full of beds and boxes of blankets and clothes and toys that were all sent by donation, many from students at local colleges who’d been to centers like these before with their mothers, or when they needed help that their schools couldn’t or wouldn’t give. Some of those students stayed and interned with Magna. Some of them, like Danielle and Courtney, had stayed at the center before and came back to volunteer, and there was another woman, Roberta, who worked the night shift. But mostly it was Magna, finding beds and money, answering the phones and the mail and the great exploding need. The littlest room was her office, which fit a desk and two chairs and a file cabinet full of classified information. The third room held file cabinets with public information: resources for women about jobs and school and day care and health care. There were blocks and trucks and stuffed toys underfoot. There were the women, who came in the middle of the afternoon and the middle of the night to get away from husbands or boyfriends or fathers, with kids and suitcases and puffy bruises, with pride and fear and strength.
That afternoon she’d talked with a woman named Veronica: early twenties with two deep parentheses on either side of her mouth. She’d been to the center twice before, but this time her eye was black and she moved gingerly, a wince for each step.
“Are you going to go back?” Magna asked. Veronica stared at the desktop and said, “He loves me.” “That’s not love.” “What do you know about it?”
Here are some ways she could respond:
“I know that you matter. I know that I care.” Or: “Nothing. I’m not qualified to counsel you. I’m not qualified to have this job. It pays shit and nobody else will do it and I think it’s important so I’m trying to do something good with my one dumb life.”
Or: “One night when I was fourteen I heard them yelling and I got up and went to the kitchen and made cookie dough in the dark and then I sat on the floor eating it out of the bowl and my mom came and sat on the floor next to me and she was breathing really hard and her face was all fucked up and I didn’t know what to say so I just handed her the spoon.”
Or: Maybe the bubble will burst. She’ll go over to the classified cabinet and take out the files inside and rip them up into millions of pieces and throw them in the air, watching them fall around her face like confetti. She’ll pick up her telephone and call Danielle at the front desk and say, “Dani, cancel all my appointments and hold all my calls and tell my wife I’ll be late for dinner ’cause I’m going to Vegas, baby!” She’ll jump on the desk and pound her chest and say to the startled women there for her sanctuary, “We’re running away to Vegas! Pack up your daughters and let’s get the fuck out of this life!”
Once, she went home after a particularly horrible day and asked Ben—that’s the guy she was dating at the time—if he would hit her.
“You’re crazy,” he said, not looking up from the crossword puzzle he was doing on the dining room table.
“I’m serious,” Magna said. “So am I,” he said. Magna went over to him and grabbed his pencil. “Think of it like a favor,” she said.
Ben looked up at her. She seemed normal enough. A little tired. Little baggy under the eyes. Little bit trembly around the mouth. He took her hand in his and stroked it. “Mag,” he said. “I’m not going to hit you.”
She said please. She said, “I’m asking you to do this one thing.” She said, “If you really cared about me—” He pushed her hand away. “Seriously,” he said. “You’re certifiable.”
Magna kept a lined notebook in her nightstand drawer. The pages were filled with words.
Cold
Distant
Sick
Pretentious
I don’t even know
Afraid
Cunt
Paranoid
The night Ben left, she opened the notebook and added certifiable to the list. Then she turned out the light and went to sleep. Alone. Easily.
She was accustomed to them leaving. To feeling their bodies grow cold in her bed.
The one in her bed right now was Mike. They fit well together, her a ball on her side and him curled around her, one arm under the pillow under her head and the other draped over her hip. His body was always hot, like a furnace, and Magna would wake up sweating. She’d unwrap her body from his and throw the covers off. Then she’d flip over, face to face, and study him in his sleep. He was dark, dark brown eyes and a perfect square jaw with a big smile cut across it. He smiled and she split in half.
They’d met at the Jiffy Lube, waiting for oil changes in that little room off the side of the garage. There were magazines in there to pass the time, and music over the loudspeakers.
“Excuse me,” he said. Magna looked up from Entertainment Weekly. “Yes?” she said, thinking he wanted her magazine, oblivious to the fact that he might want her. He was too good looking for her, really;, this was one of those out of my league sort of guys. He had style. He had a tattoo on his wrist of a dragonfly, which she saw close-up when he held out his hand to her and said, “They’re playing our song.”
Magna cocked her head and listened. “‘Maniac’ is our song?” she asked, “‘Maniac’? From Footloose?” and then he did it, that bastard, he smiled, a straight-line horizontal splitting half-moon across his face. He smiled, and she did, too, and then they laughed, and that happiness felt new and rare. Magna took his hand and stood, and he wrapped his arms around her and they slow-danced to ‘Maniac,’ which, for the record, is very hard to do;, it’s a very fast song, but they did it, there in the waiting room at Jiffy Lube. And the parking lot at Best Buy. And the bathroom at Lava Lounge. The elevator at the Cultural Center. The chip aisle at Dominick’s. The drive- thru window at the back of M Burger, and she’d pull back and lose herself in that smile, so easy, so calming, so light.
But now, as she looked at him in bed, she realized how long it’d been since she’d seen it. Lately there was a pinched line across his face. This came during conversations about their relationship, conversations that happened late at night, in bed, after sex, or sometimes in place of it, with her feeling guilty and lots of words like, “I know,” and, “why,” and, “can’t you.”
“What’s wrong?” she’d ask, knowing full well what was wrong, and he’d say that she was distant. She’d trace his upper thigh with the tip of her finger and wonder how much closer he wanted her to get. He wasn’t happy and she knew it. She was sucking away his joy. His life force. Slowly, like that girl from the X-men comics.
Here’s what she knew: it’s easier to be with someone who could destroy her than it was to destroy someone who loved her.
“Such transparent psychology, Magna!” her father would say. “Next you’ll say you try to make them leave!”
In high school he made her see a therapist. She was fat, and having panic attacks that sent her to the ER, which kept driving up his insurance premiums, and there were minuses after her A’s. The therapist was his colleague from the psychology department at the university. He looked like her father, talked like her father, and asked questions about her mother. Magna sat on his couch and imagined telling the truth: how her mother covered the bruises with thick pancake cream. How they went to the make- up counter at Marshall Field’s, and the saleswoman knew what her mother needed without her having to ask. There is a network of women behind counters. A network of women who see.
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Megan Stielstra is the author of three collections, most recently The Wrong Way to Save Your Life from Harper Perennial. Her work appears in Best American Essays, New York Times, Poets & Writers, Longreads, Tin House, Guernica, and elsewhere. She is currently an artist in residence at Northwestern University.