Part One: The Red Line
I’ve been taking the Red Line in Chicago for twenty-six years, and I like to believe I’ve witnessed everything a train car can contain. I’ve seen a man perform a full set on a tuba between Belmont and Fullerton. I’ve seen a woman knit an entire baby sweater during her commute over one winter, and when she finished it, half the car applauded. I’ve witnessed a wedding proposal, three fistfights, a lost parakeet, and once, at two in the morning, a priest and a drag queen sharing a bag of Garrett popcorn while arguing about the Cubs. What I had never encountered before that Saturday in October was the type of quiet, intentional cruelty that wears a nice coat and convinces itself it’s merely claiming its fair share.
My name is Teresa Kowalski. I’m fifty-two years old, and I’m a charge nurse in the emergency department at a hospital on the South Side. I work Saturday days, seven to seven, and I take the Red Line from my apartment in Edgewater all the way down to work, which takes forty minutes each way if all goes smoothly. Twenty-six years of emergency nursing teaches you a few lessons. It teaches you to quickly assess a situation. It teaches you that those who express their pain the loudest are often not the ones in the greatest danger. And it teaches you to discern between a person occupying space out of ignorance and someone who does so with full awareness of the cost to others.
That Saturday morning, I had secured a seat near the middle doors of the sixth car, which is my car, the same one I take every week because it stops right at the stairs at Sox–35th. I had my coffee in a travel mug and a paperback mystery I’d been trying to finish for a month. The train was about two-thirds full: weekend riders, a few tourists with maps, some kids in Bears jerseys headed somewhere early, and a man asleep against the window with his mouth open. It was a perfectly ordinary October morning, gray and cold off the lake.
I was sitting across from him when I first noticed.
He was a large man, broad-shouldered, perhaps forty, and well-dressed in a way that indicated he wanted to be noticed. Charcoal wool overcoat, open over a navy quarter-zip. Good jeans. Brown leather boots that had never encountered salt or slush. He had a fresh haircut and a watch that glinted in the light every time he raised his phone. He was scrolling through something with his thumb, wearing the faint, satisfied look of a man who has never once in his life wondered if he was in anyone’s way.
And his knees were spread so wide that the women on both sides of him were squeezed into half of their own seats.
I don’t mean a little. I mean he was sitting in the center of three molded plastic seats and occupying the majority of all three. His left knee pressed hard against the leg of a young woman holding a toddler on her lap, and his right knee jutted into the space of a middle-aged woman with a grocery tote, who had contorted herself sideways against the pole like a closed umbrella. Both were attempting, in the manner women have learned to try, to make themselves smaller without creating a scene. The young mother had her son pulled tightly against her chest and her own knees pressed together and angled toward the aisle, and still that large knee followed her, resting heavily against her thigh as the train swayed.
I observed for two stops. I told myself it might be unintentional. Some large men genuinely don’t notice. My own late husband, God rest him, used to sprawl across our couch like a discarded coat and was always genuinely surprised to discover he was squashing someone. So I waited to see if the man would realize his encroachment.
He didn’t. Every time the young mother shifted even slightly away from him, his knee drifted that same slight distance to follow.
### Part Two: “Then Stand”
The younger woman finally spoke. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, with her hair pulled back in a quick ponytail and a diaper bag slung over one shoulder. Her son was maybe two, heavy and sleepy against her, sucking his thumb with his eyes half closed. She cleared her throat and asked politely, as one might request a stranger to pass the salt.
“Excuse me. Could you move your leg?”
He barely glanced up from his phone. “I’m a big guy.”
“Your knee is in my seat,” she asserted. Her voice was steady, but I noticed her arm tighten around her son.
“Then move over.”
“There’s nowhere to go.” She gestured toward the end of the bench, where the metal partition pressed against her other shoulder. She was already sitting on the last two inches of plastic.
He finally looked at her then, and he smirked. It was a small, almost lazy smile, the kind that suggests a person has had this exact conversation many times before and has always won.
“Then stand,” he replied.
He returned to his phone. The young woman regarded him for a moment, and I watched her decide it wasn’t worth the trouble, especially with a two-year-old on her lap and a long day ahead. Instead, she gazed out the window. Two stops later, at Roosevelt, she gathered her son and her diaper bag and exited the train. I’m not certain that was actually her stop. I suspect it wasn’t.
A tiny elderly woman with a cane took her place.
She had boarded at Roosevelt, moving slowly and cautiously through the doors, and she must have been in her eighties: five feet tall at most, in a long camel-colored wool coat that had once been beautiful and was still very well-maintained, with a plum beret pinned to her white hair and a church bulletin peeking out of her handbag. She leaned on a dark wooden cane with a brass tip, and she lowered herself into the open seat with the particular care of someone who has learned not to trust her hips.
Within moments, his knee was pressing against her coat.
She noticed. I saw her notice. She shifted toward the partition, gathered her coat around her legs, and tucked her cane against her shoulder. The knee followed. She glanced down at it, then looked up at him with an expression I recognized from countless patients: polite, patient, and just a bit disappointed in humanity.
“Sir,” she said, “could you give me some room?”
He sighed, a long, theatrical exhalation, as if she had asked him to carry her groceries up four flights. “I’m six-four,” he stated. “Where do you expect my legs to go?”
She pondered the question seriously, as though it warranted a response.
“Just,” she said, “in front of you?”
### Part Three: Nobody Asked You
I could no longer remain silent. Twenty-six years in the ER, and I have intervened between many individuals and numerous poor choices. My mouth opened before my better judgment had a chance to intervene.
“She shouldn’t have to sit sideways,” I stated, “because you want two seats.”
His head whipped around to face me. For the first time, he truly looked at me: a short, round, gray-haired woman in navy scrubs and a puffy purple coat, clutching a travel mug with a sticker that read World’s Okayest Nurse. I watched him dismiss me in about half a second. I’ve been dismissed by surgeons with better haircuts than his.
“Nobody asked you,” he retorted.
“She’s asking you,” I replied.
A few passengers in the car had started to take notice. The children in the Bears jerseys had ceased their chatter. A man in a Northwestern sweatshirt lowered his earbuds. The woman with the grocery tote on the man’s other side, still folded against her pole, glanced at me with an expression that was half gratitude and half please don’t escalate this.
He leaned back against the window and spread his arms along the top of the seat back, as if he were settling into his own living room.
“If she’s uncomfortable,” he said loudly enough for the entire car to hear, “she can stand. Give her your seat if you care so much.”
And then the elderly woman began to push herself up. She did it slowly, with her cane planted on the floor and her free hand on the pole, a tiny woman in her eighties rising on a moving train so that a forty-year-old man could have more space for his knees. I’ve seen many things that infuriate me in my life, but I’m not sure I’ve ever been as angry as I was in that moment.
“No,” I said, using my charge-nurse voice, the one I employ when a drunk in Bed Four is attempting to pull out his IV. “Stay.”
She looked at me, surprised. Then, slowly, she settled back down.
The man laughed. He actually laughed, a short bark of sound. Then he leaned back even further and spread his knees wider, until the old woman’s coat was crumpled against the partition and the woman with the grocery tote was virtually hugging her pole.
“What are you going to do?” he said, grinning at me across the aisle. “Make me close my legs?”
Before I could respond, the train arrived at Cermak–Chinatown, and the doors slid open. A massive man in a work jacket stepped on. I mean huge, at least six-six, built like a refrigerator, dressed in a canvas Carhartt jacket stiff with drywall dust and a hard hat clipped to his belt. He looked like he’d just come off an overnight shift and wanted nothing more than to sit down. The car was full except for one spot: the narrow sliver of seat between Mr. Big Guy’s right knee and the woman with the grocery tote.
The woman with the tote, bless her, saw her chance. She stood up, smiled at the construction worker, and said, “Here, honey, take mine,” and moved to stand by the doors. The construction worker nodded his gratitude, turned around, and sat.
Instantly, the knees snapped together.
I mean instantly. It was like witnessing a pair of garden shears close. One moment, Mr. Big Guy was sprawled across three seats with his arms along the backs like a king on a throne. The next, the construction worker’s thigh was pressed against his, and his knees had pulled in so quickly I heard the fabric of his good jeans whisper. He lowered his arms. He pulled his elbows in. He sat up straight. For two stops, all the way to Sox–35th, he somehow fit perfectly within his own seat, as neat and compact as a schoolboy in the principal’s office.
He did not glance at the construction worker once. He did not utter a word about being six-four.
### Part Four: The Smile
At Sox–35th, the construction worker exited, and I should have gotten off too. That was my stop; I had a shift starting in twenty minutes. But I remained seated with my coffee and paperback in my lap because something had just become very clear to me, and I wanted to confirm my suspicion.
A woman took the construction worker’s place: a slender woman in her thirties in a gray coat with a laptop bag, who sat down carefully with her knees together and her bag on her lap. For about thirty seconds, nothing occurred. Then, slowly, as the train swayed out of the station, that knee began to drift outward again. An inch. Two inches. Until it rested heavily against her thigh.
She glanced down at it and shifted toward the aisle. He noticed her discomfort. I watched him notice it. And he smiled.
That was when I grasped the reality. It wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t that he was unaware of his size. He was fully aware of how big he was, and he knew exactly what he was doing. He had folded himself up as small as a pocketknife the moment a man larger than him sat down, and he had unfolded again the moment that man was replaced by a woman. He wasn’t occupying space because he needed it. He was occupying space because he could, because he had figured out long ago that most women would prefer to stand rather than confront him, and he relished watching them make that choice.
I’ve treated men like that in the emergency room. Not physically like him, but in the way they navigate a room. They’re very polite to the doctors and very rude to the nurses. They refer to the male residents as “Doc” and call me “sweetheart.” They know precisely whose discomfort they can afford.
I looked at the old woman with the cane, still squeezed against the partition, her plum beret slightly askew. I glanced at the woman in the gray coat, now perched on the edge of her seat with her laptop bag clutched to her chest. Then I looked out the window at the gray October morning passing by, and I took out my phone and did some quick calculations in my head.
It was 7:22 on a Saturday. The next stop was 47th, then Garfield, then 63rd. And on the third Saturday of every October for the last six years, I knew precisely who would be standing on the platform at 47th Street at 7:26 in the morning, because I’d ridden with them numerous times and cheered for them twice as many. I sent a quick text, and I received a response back in under ten seconds, because my daughter has never once in her life been more than three inches from her phone.
### Part Five: Would You Trust Me?
At Garfield, I stood up.
He watched me rise from my seat, and his smirk returned.
“Finally leaving?” he asked.
“No,” I replied.
I crossed the aisle, gripping the pole as the train jolted, and leaned down toward the women on either side of him: the elderly woman with the cane on his left and the woman in the gray coat on his right. I spoke softly, but not too softly that I was concealing anything. I wanted him to be aware that something was about to happen. I just didn’t want him to know what.
“Would you trust me,” I asked them, “for two minutes?”
The two women exchanged a look across him, the old woman’s pale blue eyes meeting the younger woman’s brown ones over the broad expanse of his navy quarter-zip. I observed something pass between them, the silent conversation women have been having across men for about ten thousand years. Then they both nodded.
I leaned closer and whispered one thing to them. Just one sentence. The old woman’s eyebrows lifted under her plum beret. The woman in the gray coat covered her mouth with her hand, and I noticed her shoulders shake once.
The man laughed.
“Oh, this should be interesting,” he said. “What are you doing, lady? Organizing a protest?”
“You’ll see,” I replied, and returned to my seat across the aisle, sitting down with my coffee.
He continued to smirk. He tilted his head back against the window and closed his eyes, the very image of a man who had never lost an argument on public transit and did not intend to start now. His knees remained exactly where they were, spread wide across three seats’ worth of plastic.
The train slowed for 47th Street. Through the window, I could see the platform approaching, and right where the sixth car would stop, a crowd of young women in matching navy-and-gold warm-up jackets, with duffel bags slung over their shoulders and their hair pulled back in tight braids. A few of them were holding cleats tied together by their laces. One of them was carrying a ball shaped like an oversized egg.
As the doors began to open, I winked at the two women.
“Ready?” I asked.
They nodded.
### Part Six: The Lakeshore Ladies
For a moment, he still appeared smug. He had his eyes closed and his head back, and he didn’t notice the doors opening or the group of young women stepping on, laughing and chatting, the car suddenly filled with the sounds of twenty voices and the squeak of sneakers on the rubber floor.
Then the old woman with the cane stood up, swiftly and neatly, and the woman in the gray coat stood up at the same time on his other side.
“Here, girls,” the old woman said cheerfully, in a voice that carried. “We’re getting off soon. Take ours.”
And the two largest members of the Lakeshore Ladies Women’s Rugby Football Club settled down on either side of him.
I should provide some context about the Lakeshore Ladies. They’re an amateur women’s rugby club in Chicago, one of the best in the Midwest, and on the third Saturday of every October, they compete in their biggest match of the fall season against a club from Milwaukee at a park on the South Side. They board the Red Line together at 47th Street because their captain lives on that block and makes everyone meet at her apartment for oatmeal at six-thirty. I know this because their captain, for the past three seasons, has been my daughter.
Madeleine Kowalski is twenty-six years old. She’s five-eleven and weighs one hundred and ninety pounds, and she plays tighthead prop, which, for those unfamiliar with rugby, is the position at the front of the scrum where you lock shoulders with the biggest player on the opposing team and push. She holds a degree in civil engineering and can deadlift more than any man in her office. She is also, I’ll have you know, the gentlest person I’ve ever met. She cries at dog food commercials. She knits.
The text I’d sent from my seat was brief.
Car 6, middle doors. Need my two biggest girls to sit in two seats. Long story. Trust me.
Her reply had come back nine seconds later.
Me and Big Shan. Coming in hot.
Big Shan is Shannon Okafor, the team’s loosehead prop, Maddie’s partner in the front row. She’s twenty-eight, six-one, and has played rugby since she was fourteen. She’s a kindergarten teacher in Bronzeville. She has a laugh that can be heard across a field, and shoulders like a doorway.
So that’s who sat down on either side of him. My daughter on his left, in the old woman’s seat. Big Shan on his right, in the gray coat woman’s seat. Both of them in their warm-up jackets with their duffel bags on their laps, both of them smiling the warm, open, friendly smiles of women who had just been given a seat on a crowded train.
And his knees snapped together.
It was even faster than with the construction worker. His eyes flew open, and his whole body jerked upright as two very large, very solid women settled into the plastic seats beside him, each one sitting exactly the way she always does, which is to say comfortably, naturally, like an athlete, with her knees at a normal angle and her shoulders squared. Neither of them sprawled. Neither of them pressed. They simply occupied their seats fully, the way he never had, and there turned out to be no room left over for him.
His knees came together with a soft clap. His elbows pulled in against his ribs. His good wool coat bunched up around his shoulders. He was suddenly sitting bolt upright, perfectly straight, his hands flat on his thighs, squeezed into exactly one seat and not a fraction of an inch more, like a man in a middle seat on a cross-country flight.
### Part Seven: What He Saw
Someone across the aisle burst out laughing. It was the man in the Northwestern sweatshirt, who had been observing the whole scene with his earbuds resting in his lap. He tried to stifle himself and failed, and his laugh emerged as a kind of honking snort.
Then another person laughed. One of the kids in the Bears jerseys. Then the woman in the gray coat, standing by the doors, covered her face with her hands and laughed until her shoulders shook. And then the elderly woman with the cane, holding the pole beside her, began to laugh as well, a high, delighted giggle reminiscent of a schoolgirl’s.
He looked around, bewildered. He glanced at the people laughing, then at the two women on either side of him, who were sitting there smiling pleasantly as if nothing at all had happened. I don’t think he’d figured it out yet. Initially, I think he believed they were laughing at something else, a video someone was watching, a joke he had missed.
Then he saw it.
He looked down at Maddie’s warm-up jacket, which was zipped open over her practice jersey. And across the front of the jersey, in bold gold letters, it read: LAKESHORE LADIES RFC. And beneath that, in smaller letters: WOMEN’S RUGBY.
He looked to his right. Big Shan’s jacket had the same inscription. He scanned the length of the car, at the twenty young women standing in the aisle and gripping the poles and leaning against the doors, each one in navy and gold, every one of them with LADIES emblazoned across her chest, all of them gazing at him with the bright, interested expressions of a team that had just been informed by its captain, on the walk down the platform, that there was a man on this car who believed women should stand if they were uncomfortable.
His face flushed bright red. It started at the collar of his quarter-zip and climbed up his neck and into his cheeks, reaching the roots of his fresh haircut, a deep, rising, mottled crimson I usually only see in the ER on people whose blood pressure is about to become my concern.
He whipped his head toward me across the aisle. His knees were still pressed together, his hands flat on his thighs.
“What the hell did you do?!” he exclaimed.
### Part Eight: Where Do You Expect My Legs to Go?
The entire car fell silent, awaiting my response. I took a sip of my coffee first. I’ll confess I relished that. Then I placed the mug down on my knee.
“I found you some neighbors,” I said. “You said if someone was uncomfortable, they could stand. These ladies were standing on the platform, and these other ladies were uncomfortable, so they traded.”
“That’s—” He looked from Maddie to Shan and back again. “You set this up.”
“I sent a text,” I replied. “That’s my daughter on your left. Say hi, Maddie.”
Maddie waved at him with three fingers.
“Hi,” she said. “Sorry if I’m crowding you. I’m a big girl.”
A ripple of laughter spread through the car. He opened his mouth, and Big Shan turned toward him with the most sympathetic expression I have ever seen on a human face, the one she likely uses on kindergartners who’ve dropped their ice cream.
“Is your knee okay, sir?” Shan asked. “You look a bit cramped.”
“I’m fine,” he gritted through his teeth.
“Because if you need more space,” Shan said kindly, “you could always stand.”
The car erupted in laughter. The kids in the Bears jerseys were doubled over, holding onto each other. The Northwestern man was wiping his eyes. One of the rugby players in the aisle even did a little dance. And the elderly woman with the cane laughed so hard she had to sit down in an empty seat by the doors that someone promptly offered her.
He remained seated between the two women, his face burning, and I observed him try to think of something to say. I watched him sift through the options: anger, sarcasm, a cutting remark about women’s sports. I watched him glance at the twenty rugby players in the aisle and decide against every single one of them.
Finally, he said, very quietly, almost to himself, “I’m six-four.”
Maddie nodded in agreement.
“I’m five-eleven,” she said. “Shan’s six-one. And look.”
She gestured down at her own knees, which were comfortably positioned in front of her, within the confines of her seat.
“Turns out they go in front of you.”
### Part Nine: Mrs. Odom
It might have ended there, with a red-faced man and a car full of laughter, and honestly, that would have sufficed for me. But then the elderly woman with the cane did something none of us anticipated.
She had regained her breath by then, and she was observing him from her seat by the doors with her head tilted to one side, as if examining a photograph she was trying to place. Then she leaned forward on her cane, squinting a little behind her glasses.
“Young man,” she said. “What’s your name?”
He blinked at her.
“Why?”
“Humor an old lady,” she replied.
He hesitated, and I think something in her voice resonated with him because he answered.
“Marcus.”
“Marcus what?”
“Bell,” he said. “Marcus Bell.”
The old woman reclined against her seat. She placed one gloved hand flat against her chest, over the church bulletin in her coat pocket, and shook her head slowly.
“Marcus Bell,” she said. “From Langley Avenue? Mama’s name is Denise?”
He stared at her. The red in his face transformed into something else, something paler.
“How do you know my mother?”
“Because I taught you third grade, Marcus,” she said. “At Doolittle Elementary. Room 114. Nineteen ninety-two.”
She smiled, and it was a smile imbued with forty years of classroom memories.
“I’m Mrs. Odom.”
The car fell silent once more, but this time it was a different kind of silence. The rugby players in the aisle exchanged glances. Maddie turned in her seat to look at the old woman, as did Big Shan.
Marcus Bell appeared to be a man who had just been struck by a very small, very polite truck. His mouth opened and closed.
“Mrs. Odom,” he finally said. His voice had risen about an octave. “Florence Odom?”
“That’s right.” She folded both hands atop her cane. “You were the biggest boy in the class, even then. Bigger than the fifth graders. Do you remember Tanya Pruitt?”
He swallowed.
“Little Tanya with the braids?”
“Little Tanya with the braids,” Mrs. Odom confirmed. “She was the smallest child in my room, and she used to get pushed out of line at the water fountain every single day by the fourth-grade boys. Do you remember what you did about it?”
Marcus didn’t respond. He looked down at his hands.
“You stood behind her,” Mrs. Odom said, her voice resonating throughout the entire quiet car. “Every day at recess for the whole spring. You’d stand behind that little girl in line with your arms folded like a bodyguard, and nobody pushed her again. When I asked you why, you said, Because she’s little, Mrs. Odom, and I’m big, and big is for helping.”
She allowed that to linger for a moment in the swaying car.
“I wrote it on the chalkboard,” she said. “I left it up all year. Big is for helping. Your mother cried when she saw it at parent-teacher night.”
### Part Ten: Big Is for Helping
Nobody laughed this time.
Marcus Bell sat between my daughter and Big Shan with his knees pressed together and his face in his hands. When he finally raised his head, his eyes were wet. He looked across the car at the tiny woman in the camel coat and the plum beret, and for a moment he didn’t resemble a well-dressed forty-year-old man in an expensive overcoat. He looked like a big eight-year-old boy who’d just been caught.
“Mrs. Odom,” he said. “I didn’t recognize you.”
“I know,” she replied gently. “That’s all right. I’m a lot smaller than I used to be.” She tapped her cane on the floor. “And you’re a lot bigger. But I’d have thought you’d still remember what it was for.”
He remained silent for a long time. The train rocked through the gray morning toward 63rd Street, and the entire car seemed to be holding its breath.
“I don’t know when that happened,” he finally said, so quietly I almost didn’t catch it. “I used to be the one standing behind somebody.”
“I know you did,” Mrs. Odom said. “I was there.”
He wiped his face with the back of his hand, and then he did something that surprised everyone, perhaps even himself. He turned to Maddie on his left and said, in a voice that sounded as if it hadn’t been used for this type of thing in years, “I’m sorry for being a jerk.”
Maddie regarded him for a moment, the way she assesses an opposing player after a hard tackle, evaluating him. Then she nodded.
“Okay,” she replied. “Apology accepted.”
He turned to his right.
“Sorry,” he said to Big Shan.
“We’re cool,” Shan said. “But you owe Mrs. Odom one too.”
He glanced across the car at the old woman. He opened his mouth. And then, instead of speaking, he stood up.
He stood all the way up, six-four in his fine wool coat, and walked across the swaying car, gripping the pole, and crouched down in front of her seat so that his face was level with hers, as one would crouch to speak to a small child, except that it was the other way around.
“Mrs. Odom,” he said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I tried to make you stand up.”
She reached out one gloved hand and gently patted his cheek, twice, the way I imagine she patted many third-grade cheeks in Room 114.
“I know, baby,” she said. “Now go tell that young lady in the gray coat too. And next time you see the girl with the little boy, you’ll know what to do.”
### Part Eleven: 63rd Street
At 63rd Street, the Lakeshore Ladies exited the train in a great noisy wave of navy and gold, duffel bags bumping and cleats swinging, and Maddie leaned in to kiss my cheek as she passed.
“You owe me a story, Mama,” she whispered. “A long one. Tonight.”
“Go win your match,” I replied.
Big Shan stopped in front of Marcus Bell on her way out. He’d returned to his seat, and he was now sitting in it, just one seat, knees forward, coat buttoned, appearing smaller than I would have believed possible for a man of his size. Shan extended her fist, and after a moment, he bumped it with his own.
“Big is for helping,” Shan said, grinning. “I’m stealing that for my kindergartners.”
Then they departed, and the doors closed, leaving the car feeling very quiet and empty. The woman in the gray coat had taken a seat near the doors, and I watched Marcus get up again and approach her. I couldn’t hear what he said, but I observed her expression soften, and I saw her nod, and when he returned, he didn’t sit down at all. He stood holding the pole near the middle doors, even though there were half a dozen open seats now.
I had missed my stop by four stations. I was going to be late for the first time in eleven years, and the night charge nurse would give me a look I’d hear about for a month. I didn’t care. I got up and sat beside Mrs. Odom.
“That was something,” I remarked.
She chuckled.
“Forty-one years of teaching,” she said. “You’d be surprised how many of them I meet again on this train. The good ones mostly wave. The ones who forgot what they learned,” she shrugged, “I remind them.”
“You remembered him after thirty years?”
“Teacher’s secret,” she said, leaning toward me conspiratorially. “I remember all of them. Every face. They grow up and grow beards and wear big coats, but the eyes remain the same.”
She glanced over at Marcus, standing by the pole with his head bowed, staring at the floor.
“He had good eyes, that boy. He just let someone teach him differently.”
### Part Twelve: The Next Saturday
I didn’t anticipate seeing Marcus Bell again. Chicago is a vast city, and the Red Line is a long train, and individuals who are publicly humiliated typically switch cars, or lines, or start driving to work. But the following Saturday morning, at 7:14, when I took my usual seat near the middle doors of the sixth car, I looked up and found him standing at the far end of the car, gripping a pole.
There was an empty seat right in front of him. He wasn’t in it.
At Roosevelt, a young woman boarded holding a little boy on her hip and a diaper bag over her shoulder. I didn’t recognize her at first. Then I noticed the quick ponytail and the weary eyes and the toddler with his thumb in his mouth, and I realized it was the same young mother who’d been pushed out of her seat the week before.
She scanned the crowded car for a place to sit. And Marcus Bell, six-four in his fine wool coat, stepped forward and gestured toward the empty seat.
“Please,” he said. “Take it.”
She hesitated. She recognized him, I could tell; her expression became guarded and cautious. But he simply stood there with his hand extended toward the seat, not smiling, not smirking, just waiting. After a moment, she sat down. Her son looked up at the large man standing over them, and Marcus looked down at him and, very solemnly, made a goofy face, crossing his eyes and puffing out his cheeks. The little boy removed his thumb from his mouth and laughed.
“Thank you,” the young mother said.
“I owe you one,” Marcus said quietly. “From last week. I’m sorry about that.”
She regarded him for a long moment. Then she nodded.
“Okay,” she replied.
He stepped back to his pole and held on, remaining there for the duration of the ride with his knees pointed straight ahead.
At Sox–35th, as I made my way to the doors, he caught my eye across the car. He didn’t say anything. He merely gave me a small nod, the kind one stranger offers another when they both understand something they’re not going to discuss. I nodded back.
I’ve traveled the Red Line every Saturday since then, and I see him most weeks. He always stands. Sometimes he’s gripping a pole and reading his phone, and sometimes, when the car gets crowded, I see him do something small: shift his bag so a woman can pass, hold the door for a man on crutches, crouch down to retrieve a dropped glove. Once, at Cermak, I watched him stand up to offer his seat to an elderly man and then stand guard beside him the entire ride, arms folded like a bodyguard, while a group of loud teenage boys pushed their way through the car around them.
He no longer sprawls across three seats.
### Part Thirteen: The Chalkboard
In December, I encountered Mrs. Odom on the platform at Roosevelt. She was wearing the same camel coat with a red scarf for the holidays, and she was carrying a tin of cookies for her church choir. I assisted her onto the train, and we sat together, and as the doors closed, I posed the question I had been pondering for two months.
“Do you think he really changed?” I inquired. “Or do you think he’s just embarrassed?”
She contemplated it for a while, as I imagine she considered everything her third graders ever asked her.
“I don’t know that there’s much difference, at first,” she replied. “Most people begin changing because they’re embarrassed. That’s what embarrassment is for. It’s the body’s way of signaling that you’ve strayed from who you intended to be.”
She tapped her cane on the floor.
“The question is what they do once the red fades from their face.”
“He stands now,” I said. “Every week.”
“I know,” she said with a small smile. “He came to see me.”
I stared at her.
“He did?”
“At church, three Sundays ago.” She opened her handbag and produced an envelope, a plain white card, which she handed to me. “He found me in the bulletin. I’m on the welcome committee, you see, so my name’s on the back page every week. He attended the eleven o’clock service, sat in the back pew, and afterward he gave me this.”
I opened the card. Inside was a photograph, old and faded, of a classroom chalkboard. In neat white cursive across the top, in a teacher’s careful hand, it read:
BIG IS FOR HELPING. — Marcus B., age 8.
Beneath it, in blue ink, a man had written a note in blocky capital letters.
Mrs. Odom,
My mother kept this picture on her refrigerator for twenty years. She passed in 2014. I found it when I cleaned out her apartment, and I put it in a drawer, and I forgot about it until you reminded me on the train.
I’m sorry I forgot. I’m going to try to be the kid on that chalkboard again. Thank you for remembering him when I didn’t.
— Marcus
I read it twice. Then I returned it to her, and she carefully tucked it into her handbag next to the church bulletin.
“Forty-one years,” Mrs. Odom remarked, gazing out the window as the train ascended from the tunnel into the gray December daylight. “Do you know what I learned in all that time, standing in front of a room full of eight-year-olds?”
“What?”
“That every one of them already knows the right thing,” she stated. “Every single child. They know you share. They know you don’t push. They understand that the big ones look out for the little ones.”
She turned to me, her pale blue eyes shining brightly behind her glasses.
“And then they grow up, and the world spends thirty years teaching them to forget. All you can do is stand in front of them and remind them. Sometimes on a chalkboard. Sometimes on a train.”
### Part Fourteen: Room for Everyone
The Lakeshore Ladies won their match against Milwaukee that October, thirty-one to twelve. Maddie scored a try in the second half and dedicated it, in the team group chat, to “Mama and her secret weapon.” She recounted the story at the post-match party at a bar in Bridgeport, and by Christmas, half the women’s rugby players in the Midwest had heard it. Big Shan created a sign for her kindergarten classroom that read BIG IS FOR HELPING in rainbow letters, and she hung it above the coat hooks where every child sees it twice a day.
I still ride the sixth car every Saturday. Twenty-seven years now. I still read my mysteries and sip my coffee from my World’s Okayest Nurse mug and watch the city slide by the windows on the way to the South Side. And I continue to observe people, because that’s what twenty-seven years in the emergency room does to you. You can’t stop reading the room.
Here is what I’ve learned from observing it. Most people on a crowded train aren’t trying to harm anyone. They’re tired and distracted and preoccupied with their own day, and they take up a bit more space than they ought to, and when you ask them kindly, they pull in and apologize. Then there are a few individuals who occupy space intentionally, who’ve figured out whose discomfort they can afford and who’ve constructed their entire lives around never having to give anything back. They’ll tell you they’re just big, and they’ll tell you to stand if you don’t like it.
But I’ve learned something else too, watching a tiny eighty-four-year-old woman with a cane remind a six-foot-four man of who he used to be. Size was never the issue. A big man and a big woman and a tiny old woman can all sit side by side on a plastic bench on the Red Line, and it turns out there’s ample room for everyone. All it takes is for each of them to keep their knees in front of them and remember the oldest lesson there is, the one every eight-year-old already knows.
Last Saturday, the car was crowded, and at Roosevelt, a young father boarded with a baby in a carrier on his chest and a toddler by the hand. He scanned the area for a seat and found none, and before I could stand up to offer mine, a large man in a charcoal overcoat across the aisle was already on his feet. He waved the father into his seat and then crouched down to the toddler’s eye level, crossed his eyes, and puffed out his cheeks. The little girl giggled.
Then Marcus Bell stood back up, took hold of the pole, and rode the rest of the way to work standing, with his knees in front of him, precisely where they belonged.