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 6:00 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 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 As. 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.
There was one man she trusted. His name was Greg and he wasn’t Magna’s lover. He was her friend. They’d met years ago at sleep-away camp for fat kids, eight weeks of grapefruit and group activities. Now, fifteen years later, Greg is attractive and anal-retentive, a lawyer at some big-league downtown firm. He wears Hugo Boss and does bootcamp, owns a condo in Lakeview, and runs the Chicago marathon every year. He doesn’t have time for dating, he says, but meets Magna once a month for dinner, somewhere swanky, with long wine lists. He always refuses the bread basket.
“You’re late,” he said, when Magna got to the table. “I called and called.”
“I don’t have my cell.” In answer to his look, she said, “Monday I went into my voicemail and there were eight new messages and it’s just too much to deal with.”
“Today is Thursday,” Greg pointed out.
“And?”
“So you’ll have a ton more messages to deal with.”
“I know.” She sighed, reached for wine. “It’s been a week since I opened my email.”
“You need help,” he said. This was a rehearsed speech, a monologue. “You can’t run that place by yourself.”
“There isn’t money for help,” she said. “I got rejected for two more grants, and if I don’t get this last one in on Monday I’m fucked. Roberta can’t work as much cause she’s pregnant, so I’ve been picking up more hours and—”
“Why don’t you close early?” Greg asked.
“It’s a counseling center,” she said. “You can’t close early.”
“And you need time to yourself! You look exhausted.”
Your friends tell you something about yourself and automatically you become it. Magna slumped down in her seat as if she could pass out right then and there, chef’s tasting menu before her, napkin on her lap. She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again.
“What?”
“It’s weird.”
“Try me.”
Magna remembered how Greg would share breadsticks he smuggled in from Olive Garden and hid in his pillowcase, and she leaned closer across the table. “I have these urges,” she whispered. “To smash things. I want to pick up this plate and—” as she talked, she could see herself doing it, see herself acting, see and hear it all. All around her, restaurant patrons calmly sat and ate their food, but in Magna’s mind’s eye they were on their feet, shocked by her actions.
“Magna,” Greg said, her name a statement. “You need sleep.”
“I know.”
“You need a break.”
“I know.”
“You need fun.”
“I’m having fun. I’m having fun with you, and later I’m going to meet Selly and—”
“Who’s Selly?”
Magna gulped her wine. “A friend,” she said, and in response to the look Greg gave her: “A new friend.”
What happened was, Selly had come to the center to drop off a box of donations and stood in the front hallway, not knowing where to put them. “Excuse me?” she called. There was no answer, looked like no one was there. “Excuse me?” she said again, and walked in a little deeper. There was a door on her left and she shifted the box to her right hip and peeked in. What she saw was Magna, eyes closed, both hands pressed palm flat against the wall with her forehead between them. Softly, rhythmically, she was tapping her forehead against the wall. Selly stood there holding the box and watched for a while. Then she said, “Hey.” Magna didn’t open her eyes. She didn’t stop tapping. “I just need another minute,” she said aloud. Selly stepped back out of the doorway. She waited. After a while, Magna appeared with her hair smoothed and a big cheery smile. “What do you have for us today?” she said, her voice all head cheerleader, and Selly decided to save her.
They’d meet for drinks and have heavy conversations, the kind where you’re getting to know someone, trying to drill deep into the base of their brain. One night it was a cowboy bar with red-tinted windows. Another was an all-night coffee shop in Humboldt Park. In Selly’s car, once; lost for three hours, back and forth between the North and South Sides, and another time at night on a children’s recess playground after three or four bourbons, Magna sitting at the base of the slide and Selly dangling from the monkey bars.
This was how Magna tackled projects: game plan, step-by-step methodical panic and unrest until completion, done by deadline and celebrate. She did not start something that would not be finished. She needed the end in sight, within her grasp, almost mathematical. A+B=C. Treasure at the end of the rainbow. Nevada at the end of the drive. So when she figured out that Selly had taken her on as a project, you can imagine her unease.
“I am not Nevada,” she said aloud to the kitten.
The kitten didn’t break the stare.
Her mother left the day after Magna graduated from high school. She had another job in another city, another lease already signed. “Obviously, she waited until you were no longer a liability,” said her therapist. No shit, she could’ve said. You’re a fucking asshole, she could’ve said. She could’ve said, She loved me so much. She could’ve told him about the nights on the kitchen floor, the two of them sharing spoons, and she’d whisper, “Mom, let’s leave.” There was so much she didn’t know then about love, about power, about money and jobs and lawyers and custody, things her mother had already tried and failed, threats she’d already made and lost, stands she’d already taken and punishments already received.
Every woman Magna listened to at the center showed her a part of her own story.
Her father refused to talk about her mother. For graduation, he got Magna a treadmill.
She was late to the Double Door. Nine-forty, and the band had already started by the time she got stamped and let in the side door. The bar ran the length of the wall to her left, stage at the far end, and everything in between was full of people, dancing, heads nodding up and down, bodies bobbing to the pulse of the music. Magna scanned the crowd, wondering how in the hell do I find—and Selly appeared at her elbow. She was tiny, her body delicate, but double attitude, tough girl chic, tattoos, and dyed blue hair that contrasted sharply with Magna’s J.Crew prep. They hey’d each other, hugged, and Selly made the you want a drink gesture. Magna’d already had too much wine at the restaurant, but convinced herself that more would be okay, more would be healthy, she’d been working too hard lately and maybe Greg was right, she needed this night, needed to let loose, she could schedule a nap tomorrow after she finished the grant. She nodded to Selly and turned to the band. The music was loud. It filled her brain and this was good. If it was full, she didn’t have room for bullshit. Hey, thanks! she said to the music. You’re a pal, yeah, you are! and she planted her feet to steady herself.
Selly came back from the bar with something on the rocks. As she handed it to Magna, her shirt rode up with the lift of her arm, exposing a smooth line of skin just above her belt loops. Her tummy was flat, the hipbones curving out and up like sculpture. Magna couldn’t stop staring. She pulled at her drink to freeze the heat that ran down her spine. She felt out of control suddenly—not like usual, not like she wanted to throw the glass against the wall—but like she wanted to reach out and touch Selly’s hip. No, what she really wanted was to squat down on the floor, wrap both arms around her waist. Gently, pressing lip to flesh. Stay there for the next hundred years.
You should know something about Magna: all her life she’d looked at other women’s bodies, but always out of envy. Look at her ass:, it’s higher than mine. The skin under her arms doesn’t flop. Her thighs are tight. She thought it was the fat woman’s curse, but this thing with Selly was different. It was the first time Magna had ever looked at another woman’s body and wanted not to have it, but to touch it. To blend it in some way, no matter how insignificant, with her own.
“Hey,” Selly said then, more like yelled over the music. “What’s up with you?” She wrapped her fingers around Magna’s upper arm and Magna thought she might die. She pulled back her arm, took a few steps away, and dropped her drink. “I have to—” she started, then stopped.
“You have to what?” Selly asked, concerned, serious, and took a few steps forward. Magna stepped back again and Selly stopped. “What’s going on?” she said. “Magna, what’s—” But Magna was already turning, going, hiding. The thought of dealing with her feelings was waaaay too much to handle right now, I mean, she had to be up, there was that grant, and there were meetings, and there had to be sleep sometime, right? Sometime, time, there wasn’t time to think, or process, or handle, the drama, the emotion, the buildup, building, higher, higher, and Magna was out the Double Door’s door, hand in the air to the street.
It sits and they stare. Magna exhales smoke and says, “I can’t give you what you need.” The cat sits very still. “If I give some to you, I have to give it to everyone.” The cat raises one paw and bats at the air. “You should find someone else,” Magna goes on. “Someone who can be that for you, ’cause you’re really cute and you deserve to have someone who can love you.”
By the time the cab dropped her off at home, there were six messages on her voicemail. Not the cell phone—she still hadn’t touched that one—but the home phone. Magna pressed play, then slid down the wall and took off her boots as she listened to their voices in her living room.
“Hey, it’s Mike. I’ve been trying your cell. Where are you?”
“Hey, it’s Selly. I can’t even hear myself think in this goddamn bar, but you just ran out of here and I don’t get what happened—”
“Okay, so I just got cut off, but what I was saying was I’m here for you. I’m here.”
“It’s after twelve. I thought you were coming over.”
“Sooner or later you’re going to have to deal with the fact that there are people who want to be a part of your life, there are people who love you, and I—”
“I’m still up. I can still come over.”
Magna felt the bubble climb her throat, blocking her windpipe. She leaned her head against the wall and breathed in and out like in the yoga classes she took every morning. She told herself they were to keep the weight off, but the truth is this: without the woman standing in front of her and telling her to breathe, she would forget. She would crack. She would pop. She would hurt someone. She would hurt herself. She would throw that answering machine through the window and pick up a shard of glass and cut something on her body and then there’d be blood and the hospital and increased deductibles and missed work plus the broken window which would take at least a week for her landlord to fix not to mention the hundred or so dollars or whatever it would cost to replace the damn things and the thought of it exhausted her, exhausted her, she was exhausted.
“How did you get through it?” she asked her mother after the divorce went through, the two of them in her new apartment unpacking boxes: her papers, her art, her books. She looked like how Magna remembered her from childhood: bright, active, filling space. Her arms were full of Austen. Her hair was down. She wore color. She played music, pop-heavy and bounce-kick.
It was the first time they’d talked about it in the light, the beginning of a conversation they’d have for the rest of their lives.
“Oh, honey,” she said.
“You have to keep moving,” she said.
“What worries me the most,” she said, “is you’ve never seen what love is.”
Magna woke up to pounding on the window. She’d fallen asleep against the wall in the living room, next to her boots, the answering machine still clicking. “Magna!” Mike was yelling from the porch, and “Magna!”— that time, Selly—“Are you in there?” Magna looked around her dark living room: the outline of a couch, a bookshelf. She could see herself getting up, opening the door, and facing them: Selly in her army jacket and blue hair and hipbones, Mike with his smile, both of them so lovely, so loving, it was all too goddamn much. “Can’t we all just go to a movie?” she wanted to say, and, “I am not Nevada.”
She got up, went into her room, and changed her clothes. Outside, they were still pounding, still calling her name, and she put on headphones to block out the sound; pop-heavy, bounce-kick. The treadmill blinked when she pushed its buttons, whizzing to life, and she got on and ran like her life was on the line.
You have to keep moving.
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.