The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

by Megan Stielstra

  Turns out they liked me more than he did.

  21

  New neighborhood, new apartment: a two-bedroom in Logan Square. I didn’t spend much time there. I was at school. I was at work. I was at the Empty Bottle, the Subterranean, Estelle’s, Rainbo. One night I saw an ex’s new girlfriend in the bathroom at Metro. She was wearing sunglasses, and she took them off at the mirror to fix her makeup.

  Both of her eyes were black.

  It didn’t happen to me. But it happened to someone. It’s happening to someone all the time. Right now, as you’re reading this—it’s happening.

  21

  My dad left a message on my voice mail: “Hey kid. I quit my job.”

  21

  My dad left a message on my voice mail: “Hey, kid. I’m moving to Alaska.”

  22

  My dad left a message on my voice mail: “Hey, kid. I’m getting married.”

  22

  “I’m scared of writing.”

  I said this to Randy, my favorite teacher. Now I wonder what exactly I meant. Scared of the stories I had to tell? Scared of what I’d discover? How young I was, how naive? Scared of what my parents would think? Scared of what reviewers would think? Scared I wasn’t good enough, whatever that meant? Scared of trying to make a living as a writer, sans 401K, eating cat food? Scared that the things that mattered to me would seem trivial to others, and if not trivial, then cruel or stupid or wrong?

  Randy listened. He is what listening looks like: leaning forward and fully engaged, whether he’s talking to Salman Rushdie, an interim provost, my seven-year-old son, or a twenty-two-year-old student figuring out what the hell she was doing. “Fear is a logical response,” he said. “This is your life.” We were in his office, high above Michigan Avenue. One windowed wall looked over the lake; everything else was books. “But—” he said, and I’ve returned to this moment a thousand times, when writing is too the fuck much, when higher ed administration gets in the way of higher ed’s mission, and when I talk to my own students about their hopes and fears—“you’re having fun, right?”

  He turned to his books, searching stacks till he found the one he wanted, searching pages till he found the magic that would fix my whole life. He’s done this many times over the past two decades, but on that particular day it was the final passage of Kafka’s Diaries:

  More and more fearful as I write. It is understandable. Every word, twisted in the hands of the spirits—this twist of the hand is their characteristic gesture—becomes a spear turned against the speaker. Most especially a remark like this. And so ad infinitum. The only consolation would be: it happens whether you like or no. And what you like is of infinitesimally little help. More consolation is this: You too have your tools.

  The last line was underlined.

  “You too have your tools.”

  I don’t know what that meant for Kafka. I don’t know what it means for you, but for me it’s the books and stories and poems and movies and art and songs that save us.

  22

  Back then, the creative writing department where I finished my undergraduate degree offered a combined MFA in writing and the teaching of writing. I thought that was a way I might be of use: show others how to use their voices the way my teachers showed me. I got some fellowships, and my mom helped, but for the most part I worked at the Bongo Room after it moved from Damen to Milwaukee Avenue. I was there for over a decade. The lines for brunch still stretch down the street. Everyone in Chicago knows those pancakes: chocolate mascarpone and pumpkin spice and lemon blueberry whipped cream. More than one customer asked me if the secret ingredient was cocaine. Shhhhhh, I’d say.

  At one point I started counting the pancakes I carried across the room. How many equal a graduate degree?

  I’ll tell you what: that program was worth every fucking second.

  I sat in semicircles with incredible writers. They made me work harder. I’d come home exhausted wanting to drink beer and watch The Simpsons, but then I’d think of that semicircle. They were awake, I knew: writing, reading, working, digging deep, and I’d turn off the TV and show up at the computer. Here I am! I’d announce to no one. I! Am! Here!

  The one who pushed me the hardest was a guy from Kentucky named Lott. One weekend a month, we’d drive through Indiana to the Michigan side of Lake Michigan and write at his friend’s beach house, which had once been owned by Carl Sandburg. It had five bedrooms, four stories, with a tiny elevator, and a porch on the roof with rickety stairs leading to a widow’s peak. Winter lake winds would pound against the windows. Lott would make fires in the fireplace and we’d play made-up drinking games, writing our fears on little scraps of paper, putting them in a hat, and telling stories one by one. Love. Loneliness. Thesis (the word “thesis” was always followed by the word “fuck”: thesisfuck). “Have you written about that yet?” he’d ask, and when I said no he’d give me a look.

  Later, he’d read my nervous starts at stories and ask questions that gave me ideas.

  Later, on the way home from a Halloween party, some guys in a passing car would throw eggs at me and he’d run after them down Armitage Avenue and some drunk frat boys dressed as nuns would see him and yell: “What are you doing?” And he yelled back: “That car egged my friend!” And then the nuns ran down Armitage with him and they caught up with the car at a red light and had a little chat about manners.

  Later, he’d tell me—so carefully, so gently—that my boyfriend was actually gay.

  Later, we’d co-teach college classes on art and community engagement.

  Later, he’d get ordained on the Internet to marry my husband and me on the beach at Lake Macatawa, the most perfect day in my life.

  Later, when my son was six months old and puking all over the house, he and his husband, Ryan, came over so my husband and I could go to the hospital because we’d started puking, and then they started puking, and when I tried to apologize, he sighed and said, “We’re family. We’re supposed to infect each other.”

  Later, he was the executive director at the faculty development center where I worked for the better part of a decade.

  Later, when he was told to fire me, we’d get stupid drunk and I’d say, “Do it.”

  And he’d say, “I can’t.”

  And I’d say, “You have to.”

  And he’d say, “Okay. Okay. Okay—you’re fired,” and we’d laugh so hard we knocked over our prosecco.

  Later he and Ryan would take my son for weekends all summer so I could write this book.

  Later they’d send us pictures from their beautiful new home in California and I’d cry because I was happy for them and I missed them and where do you put all that love?

  But before any of that happened, we sat in front of the fire at Carl Sandburg’s house on the Michigan side of Lake Michigan.

  “Have you written about that yet?” he asked, and gave me a look.

  It meant: It’s time.

  22

  I was out to hear a band and a guy I didn’t know put his hand on my ass. The place was packed, everyone body to body, but this was no accidental brushup, no quick cop a feel. He reached around my hip, grabbed a fistful of my ass, pulled me into him, and grinned. “Let go,” I said, trying to jerk back, but he was too—I don’t want to say strong. Using your power, be it physical, societal, or financial to intimidate or manipulate or take something not given—that’s not strength. This guy was bigger than me. He was not stronger. “Let go,” I said again, but he yanked me closer, pressing his crotch into my stomach so I’d know his cock was hard and said, still with that pretentious fucking grin,

  “You have to say please.”

  I’d like to tell you that I spat in his face or kneed him in the balls or staked him through the heart, but I can’t. “At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them,” wrote Gavin de Becker in The Gift of Fear. “While at core, women are afraid men will kill them.” I hate admitting that. I hate knowing how fast and often these moments turn violent. I hate that
afterward I asked the bouncer to walk me to my car.* I hate how I still don’t listen to that band. I hate the memories that show up uninvited every time I go out dancing, or park my car on a side street, or swim, or clean the floor, or walk into the stairwell at the college where I worked or the restaurant where I worked or the L or the street between the L and my apartment or the alley where I walk my dog every morning or any of a thousand places. There are a thousand stories. Here’s why I chose this one:

  Please.

  I said it. I said please. I asked this asshole, nicely, to give me back my body. Look: I know how small this experience is in comparison, but whenever I hear talk about the “right” way to stand up for yourself, the “right” way to protest, I taste that please: bitter, burning, furious. Ask nicely to make decisions about your own body. Ask nicely for police to stop killing you. Ask nicely for your family to not be deported. Be patient as we discuss whether or not you may go to the bathroom. Be patient as we decide whether or not you are allowed to marry the person you’re in love with. Be calm when there’s a gun in your face. Be calm when there are tanks on your street. Be polite in the tear gas. Smile as your schools are closed. Don’t be so fucking sensitive.

  23

  I don’t remember his name. I don’t remember what he looked like. But he was the first man who went down on me when I was on my period, who wasn’t afraid of blood and more so liked it, loved it, looked up from between my thighs with his face smeared red and I came so hard I slammed the back of my head against the wall.

  23

  On one of our last nights in the apartment on Armitage, I tried to make dinner for Heather and Pete. This was a big deal. I don’t cook. Left to my own devices, I would subsist off of pinot noir and a cheese plate.

  Half of the apartment was already packed, books and clothes and duct tape everywhere, but the kitchen was still untouched. Truly, it was a biohazard. I’m surprised we’re still alive. Heather and Pete had gone to Jewel-Osco for more boxes and I made tuna casserole because hey, Who can fuck up tuna casserole? Noodles, cheese, peas—voilà. I put it in the oven and went to work on the mess stacked in the sink, plates and pots and mugs and flatware. It’s possible they’d been there since the day we moved in. We had zero counter space, so I got two bath towels and laid them on the floor, putting dirty stuff on one so I could get at the sink and newly clean stuff on the other to dry. Some of you reading this are disgusted with us. Some of you have been there. Some are there right now. I’m here to tell you to forget about the dishes. Fuck the dishes. Grab your friends and go dancing: hands here, feet here, ass like this. Grab them and tell stories: “Poor baby. You just want to feel all right.” Grab them and hold on. It may be the last time you’re all together.

  I burnt the casserole, but you knew that was coming. I also forgot to add the tuna; maybe you knew that, too. Pete ordered a pizza and we went into his room, away from the burnt smell, and ate it on the floor. I remember how empty it was with everything in boxes. I remember the shock of the walls, recently painted a neutral color per our agreement with the landlord. The angry, furious paintings on grocery bags had been removed long before. I don’t know how long he kept them up.

  A day? A week?

  In my memory, they’re still there.

  24

  New neighborhood, new apartment: a broken-down, termite-infested fucking awesome yellow two-flat at the corner of North and Humboldt, a block from the park. There were mint bushes everywhere. So much mint. The mint went insane like the tomatoes in The Witches of Eastwick. It overtook the whole yard, the whole house; we drank mojitos 24/7. We drank wine and whiskey and too much coffee and ate leftovers from fancy restaurants where friends worked and cheap pizza delivered at 2:00 a.m. Like in many Chicago apartments, the bedrooms were tiny; once you got the futon inside you couldn’t open the door all the way. Stay off the back porch—it’s a death trap. In the summers, electric bills skyrocket from portable air conditioners and in the winter we froze, even after meticulously insulating the windows with Saran Wrap–like shrink film sealed with hair dryers.

  I lived upstairs with my friend Sue, and Mike and Dia were in the apartment downstairs. In the mornings I’d drink all their coffee while Dia finished her thesis, an enormous quilt made from clothing given to her by different women along with the story of what it meant to them. I gave her one of the nylon grandmother slips I’d worn on Martha’s Vineyard, telling her how sexy, how powerful, how free it made me feel. We were piloting an arts integration program called AIM, teaching writing through textile art in elementary schools around Chicago. We wrote curriculum and waited tables and thought we could change the world.

  Later, she’d read my nervous starts at stories and ask questions that gave me ideas.

  Later, she’d sit at her sewing machine in our basement/fashion studio/craft studio/recording studio/dance club/rehearsal space/smoking lounge and make clothes that actually fit my body.

  Later, when I was in the guts of a particularly gnarly breakup, she’d lock me in her bedroom and play Ben Harper’s “Walk Away” on repeat: “Oh no/ Here comes the sun again/ That means another day/ Without you my friend.”

  Later, she’d move to San Francisco and I couldn’t stop crying, the sad kind.

  Later, I’d go to San Francisco to meet her girlfriend Jessica and I couldn’t stop crying, the happy kind.

  Later, she’d help me put on my wedding dress because I kept getting it stuck in the Spanx and she was like fuck spanx and I was like you’re right fuck spanx and I didn’t wear the fucking Spanx.

  Later, she’d call to say I couldn’t help her put on her wedding dress because she and Jess had to get married right then, that day, before Prop 8.

  Later, she’d hold my newborn son while I locked myself in the bathroom and pretended everything was fine.

  Later I’d hold her newborn son while my three-year-old pet his tiny face and said, “Cousin, cousin, cousin!”

  Later we’d hold hands helpless watching multiple real-time Twitter feeds broadcast Michael Brown’s murder and the protests in Ferguson: riot gear, tear gas, tanks. I went to check on our boys, their little bodies wrapped together in sleep, and I understood something then like lightbulb, lightning bolt, ton of bricks: as a black mother, she has to talk to her black son about how to walk in this world and not be harmed, and as a white mother, I have to talk to my white son about how to walk in this world and not perpetuate that harm, to stand up when we see it and fight it like a dragon.

  But before any of that happened, it was the four of us together in that yellow two-flat, my first understanding of chosen family.

  If I was scared of anything, it was knowing it would end.

  24

  EXT. BACK PORCH—DAY

  Megan and Dia sit in lawn chairs. It’s the last day of 1999.

  MEGAN:

  Computers will reset to the nineteen hundreds. Everyone will panic, exposed and off guard. That’s when they’ll strike. It’s like Skynet. It is Skynet. They came back from the future and planted the Terminator movies so we’d have context for the takeover. You know sci-fi is real, right? I mean, all fiction is real, but sci-fi is like, prophetic. H. G. Wells wrote about the atomic bomb in nineteen fourteen. E. M. Forster wrote about cubicles—cubicles!—in nineteen hundred and nine. Before Oculus Rift porn there was Demolition Man, and escalators and debit cards and face-scan technology and sure, fine, some of that stuff is cool as hell but for the most part, we’re fucked.

  DIA:

  How much pot have you smoked today?

  MEGAN:

  (starts to cry)

  Tonight we all die.

  DIA:

  Who cares so long as our student loans are wiped.

  24

  I graduated with my MFA in May of 2000. The ceremony took place in Chicago at Navy Pier, a long stretch of shops and restaurants and theaters sticking out of the Loop and into Lake Michigan, all neon color and swarms of people milling about. My grandparents and my mom had driven in from Mi
chigan to support me and to take a million pictures.

  I walked across the outdoor stage at Navy Pier, hugging Randy and receiving my diploma. The whole process took ten seconds. It was freezing cold in May. I sat with my friends Lott and Joe and shivered. The commencement speaker went on and on. I don’t remember about what. I wanted to get out of my seat and ask my family if we should sneak out and grab a beer. But for the ten seconds I was up there, I looked out into the crowd and I saw my grandpa. My mom and grandma and friends were applauding and taking pictures, but my grandpa just stood there with this smile on his face. I knew how proud he was of those ten seconds, and the seven years it had taken me to get to those ten seconds, and I knew we’d both sit in that freezing outdoor auditorium for the next three days if need be: he’d sit there for me, and I’d sit there for him.

  In the center of Navy Pier is a Ferris wheel. It’s big, way up high in the sky. It takes an hour to ride the long, slow circle through the air and back around to the ground. My grandfather stood under that Ferris wheel and stared up. Then he looked at me. I don’t do heights but I did that day. We didn’t talk much, which was rare ’cause my grandpa and I could talk. We talked about the war and the stock market and his family and my future. We argued a lot. Once, when I was in high school, we had a real intense one about some charged political issue I don’t even remember now and I left his house furious. A few weeks later he sent me a letter about how he’d been thinking about what I’d said. Had talked to some friends about it, and the priest at his church. And I think that’s the most important thing I ever learned from my grandfather: No matter how set in our ways, we still have much to learn. We can listen. We can try. That is possible.