Magnet Man

Photo by the author

I shift from foot to foot. Both my feet hurt. I'm packing magnets at my dad's factory, and the rubber mats meant to cushion my joints from the floor don't help.

A little to my left is bald-topped Tom, and a little to my right is chatty Candy, and in front of me is a concrete wall. If I go further to the left of Tom, the warehouse door opens out onto the parking lot, where my dad eats lunch in his car. I understand why he does—he's a salesman, albeit one trained in the physics of ferrite, who draws complex equations for his clients in China—but still, he spends a lot of time on the phone: yak, yak, yak. I'd hate it: I'd rather pack, although I'm not allowed to pack the rare-earth bundles, so strong they could crush my fingers without enough cardboard between to keep their relentless attractions apart. Plus, the packing jobs I do are not always so good to start: a few broken shipments have come back in the mail, and sometimes I wonder if I ever properly learned to count. Candy shows me how to weigh the smaller pellet-magnets properly in batches, and that helps a little.

________

For as long as I can remember, my dad has worked in this field. When I was little, he used to run factories: machines pouring water over metal to cool, cut, and convert raw matter into magnet. Now, he sells the attractive and repulsive pieces of metal for a boss he dislikes. I live, for the moment, at his house in his spare room, and he gives me sixty dollars a week to clean, out of kindness, as I am broke. I pack at his factory while I think about my ex-fiancé. What a dumb word, fiancé: a label for the in-between. It felt fake when I said it to people, and I felt like a liar when I went to try on dresses: something wasn't quite right in the idea of marrying Jacob at the time I'd agreed to. But, staring into the plain gray factory walls, I still miss him. Beyond the walls and the factory parking lot and my dad in the car are several open tall-grass fields, like there always are at Dad's factories, and I wish I could wander there alone with my thoughts instead of slapping on packing labels, then slapping on my best attempt at a smile when Candy comes to chat. But I can't. I have to make money.

________

When I walked back into the Portland International Airport after my impending marriage collapsed, the famously green-bubble carpet looked suspiciously, for the first time, like barf. When I got to baggage claim, my whole little family was there. Mom had remarried into a tiny new apartment where there was no room for visitors, and my brother explained his disinclination to host me this way: "Every time you visit, you drop your bags on the floor, and they explode your stuff all over my house." He made the motion of a little big bang with his hands, fingers blooming slowly outward. "Plus, I don't know when you'd leave."

Certainly, jobs can be tough to find in Portland, what with the influx of people just like me (youngish, educated, artsy) competing en masse in similar industries. But I felt like leaving everywhere all the time now, I almost said to my brother—and even running off to Peru, a place I'd always dreamed of visiting, after the breakup hadn't brought any joy—so not to worry; I doubted I'd stick around long. But that might have sounded too grim.

I hadn't seen my dad since I'd told him, over the phone in an argument three months prior, that he was a "conditionally loving parent," yet he was the one who offered me a guest room to land in...