Part Six: The Lakeshore Ladies

For a second, he still looked smug. He had his eyes closed and his head back, and he didn’t see the doors open or the crowd of young women stepping on, laughing and talking, the car suddenly full of the sound of twenty voices and the squeak of sneakers on the rubber floor.

Then the old woman with the cane stood up, quick and neat, and the woman in the gray coat stood up at the same moment on his other side. “Here, girls,” the old woman said brightly, 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 sat down on either side of him.

I should explain 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 play 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 everybody 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 who don’t follow rugby, is the position in the front of the scrum where you lock shoulders with the biggest player on the other team and push. She has a degree in civil engineering, and she 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 short. Car 6, middle doors. Need my two biggest girls to sit in two seats. Long story. Trust me.

Her answer 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 she’s played rugby since she was fourteen. She’s a kindergarten teacher in Bronzeville. She has a laugh you can hear from 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 sits, which is to say comfortably, naturally, like an athlete, with her knees at a normal angle and her shoulders square. Neither of them sprawled. Neither of them pressed. They simply occupied their own seats fully, the way he never had, and there turned out to be no room left over for his.

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 watching the whole thing with his earbuds in his lap. He tried to stop himself and failed, and his laugh came out 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, put her face in her hands and laughed until her shoulders shook. And then the elderly woman with the cane, holding the pole beside her, started to laugh too, a high, delighted giggle like a schoolgirl’s.

He looked around, confused. He looked at the people laughing, and then at the two women on either side of him, who were sitting there smiling pleasantly as though nothing at all had happened. I don’t think he’d figured it out yet. I think at first he thought they were laughing at something else, a video somebody was watching, a joke he’d 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 big gold letters, it said: LAKESHORE LADIES RFC. And under that, smaller: WOMEN’S RUGBY.

He looked to his right. Big Shan’s jacket said the same thing. He looked up and down the car, at the twenty young women standing in the aisle and holding the poles and leaning against the doors, every one of them in navy and gold, every one of them with LADIES across her chest, every one of them looking at him with the bright, interested expression of a team that had just been told by its captain, on the walk down the platform, that there was a man on this car who thought women should stand if they didn’t like it.

His face turned bright red. It started at the collar of his quarter-zip and climbed up his neck and into his cheeks and all the way to 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 problem.

He whipped his head toward me across the aisle. His knees were still pressed together, his hands still flat on his thighs. “What the hell did you do?!” he said.

Part Eight: Where Do You Expect My Legs to Go?

The whole car went quiet, waiting for my answer. I took a sip of my coffee first. I’ll admit I enjoyed that. Then I set the mug down on my knee.

“I found you some neighbors,” I said. “You said if somebody 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 said. “That’s my daughter on your left. Say hi, Maddie.”

Maddie gave him a little wave, three fingers. “Hi,” she said. “Sorry if I’m crowding you. I’m a big girl.”

A ripple of laughter went 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 probably uses on kindergartners who’ve dropped their ice cream.

“Is your knee okay, sir?” Shan asked. “You look kind of cramped.”

“I’m fine,” he said through his teeth.

“Because if you need more room,” Shan said kindly, “you could always stand.”

The car exploded. The kids in the Bears jerseys were bent over, holding onto each other. The Northwestern man was wiping his eyes. One of the rugby players in the aisle actually did a little dance. And the old woman with the cane laughed so hard she had to sit down in an empty seat by the doors that someone quickly offered her.

He sat there between the two women with his face burning, his knees clamped together, and I watched him try to think of something to say. I watched him run through the options: anger, sarcasm, a cutting remark about women’s sports. I watched him look 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 agreeably. “I’m five-eleven,” she said. “Shan’s six-one. And look.” She gestured down at her own knees, which were sitting comfortably in front of her, inside the boundaries of her seat. “Turns out they go in front of you.”