The Super Ladies

by Petrone, Susan

  Margie loved their hidden three-street neighborhood that was one suburb over from Katherine and Abra. Most of the backyards on their block were open, with kids running back and forth among yards, sprinklers, sandboxes, and swing sets. Joan and Grant liked having Anna around as a temporary little sister. Eli was always nice with the younger kids, although this year he hung around the house, helping Karl and Hal with the grill and Margie in the kitchen because he wanted to learn how to cook before he went to college.

  “Better late than never,” Margie said.

  “That’s very admirable,” said Katherine as she unloaded the dishwasher. Margie loved that her friends knew her kitchen as well as they knew their own. “Everyone should know how to cook. And not just boxed macaroni and cheese.”

  “It’s hard to learn how to cook when you’re the child of a control freak.”

  Katherine and Abra looked from Margie to each other and started to laugh. “Your mother is not a control freak,” Abra said. “Now Katherine: there’s a control freak.”

  “It’s true. I am. Ask Anna.”

  “I keep trying to tell you, Eli, you hit the mommy lottery.” Margie sighed. She knew she had trained her kids well because Eli completely ignored their teasing. He stood in front of the island in the middle of the kitchen. On the giant wooden cutting board in front of him were a cantaloupe, half a watermelon, a colander of washed purple grapes, and a pint of strawberries. He picked up the large French knife in one hand and balanced the cantaloupe on its stem with the other. “Oh honey, no,” Margie said. “Always cut a melon this way,” she said, drawing an imaginary line around the equator of the cantaloupe with her finger.

  “Oh,” Eli said and turned the melon slightly.

  “Do you know how to tell if it’s ripe?” Katherine asked.

  “Yeah. If Mom bought it, it’s ripe,” Eli said with a smile.

  Ignoring him, Margie picked up the melon. “You want it to be soft but not mushy. If it’s a rock, it’ll take ages to ripen. Here, sniff it.”

  “Sniff it?” Eli took the cantaloupe gingerly and held it up to his nose. “It smells like cantaloupe.”

  “That means it’s ripe. But not as ripe as that T-shirt—when was the last time you washed it?”

  “It was clean this morning.”

  “Is that the shirt you wore for the race?”

  “Yeah. You always tell me not to put clean clothes in the wash.”

  “If you wore it for the race, it’s not clean.”

  Eli lifted an upper arm to his nose and took a little sniff. “Maybe I’ll change.”

  “It might be a good idea.”

  “Be right back. Leave the fruit. I’ll do it.”

  Eli loped out of the kitchen and up the stairs. Margie watched her oldest go, feeling a strange mixture of parental pride and relief that she actually needed to tell her teenage son to put on a clean shirt. Some of Eli’s OCD tendencies seemed to have lessened as his depression lifted. And she realized she couldn’t remember the last time she really had to worry about what he might do to himself later. “He’s turned out okay, hasn’t he?” she said.

  Abra looked up from where she was happily filling deviled eggs. “More than okay, sweetie,” she said.

  “He’s fine,” Katherine added.

  Margie watched both of her friends for a moment, feeling a wave of love for everyone around her. She waited until Katherine paused in unloading the dishwasher and Abra put down a half-filled deviled egg, and they both looked at her.

  “What?” Abra asked.

  It seemed like one of those situations where the best course of action is just to dive in. “So,” she said brightly, “anybody turn invisible lately or, I don’t know, get cut and not bleed?”

  “No,” Abra said at the same time that Katherine said, “Yeah.”

  She and Abra both stared at Katherine, who gave a little shrug. The open window above the kitchen sink looked out onto the backyard. Hal and Karl were on the deck, drinking beer and watching the grill. Anna, Grant, and Joan had moved from the creek to playing soccer in the yard with Juno. No time like the present. “Okay, beer, living room, now.”

  Katherine and Abra didn’t protest, and soon they were seated in Margie’s living room, where there was some semblance of privacy. “Talk to me,” Margie said.

  Katherine took a deep breath. “I think there’s a connection between the explosion and the whole thing with the knife and what’s happening to my body.”

  “What is happening to your body? I mean, you ran an incredible race this morning. Is that what you mean?”

  “Yes, but there’s more than that.” Katherine took a breath and paused as though what she had to say was monumental. “I could have finished the race faster today.”

  Margie wasn’t a runner, but she knew Katherine’s final race time was astonishingly fast. She’d finished third overall, even beating Eli, who lost a bit of steam in the final mile. How much faster did she mean?

  “You were running, like, five-minute miles the entire way,” Abra said.

  “Five-twelves actually,” Katherine said. It was just like her to have to correct someone.

  “Regardless, you were faster than I’ve ever seen any woman our age run. Not to be rude, but you were faster than I ever thought you were capable of running.”

  “I wasn’t capable of it until the explosion.”

  Margie thought about that for a moment. The explosion had felt like some kind of turning point, but she couldn’t put her finger on why. Joan didn’t seem affected—she was still pissed off that it had happened, but she remained the same fourteen-year-old bundle of contradictions she’d always been. Margie herself had had a strange tingly sensation for a few days after it happened, but that was all. That still didn’t mean Katherine couldn’t have been affected in some way. “What do you think happened?” she asked.

  “This is a crude theory—I’d need to see Joan’s data to really understand it, but my working hypothesis is that the explosion caused a hormonal shift.”

  Abra half snorted. “You’re kidding, right? How does getting hit with a blast of wet tofu equate to a hormonal shift?”

  “Joan had already run the extraction. It was a blast of concentrated phytoestrogens.” Katherine paused for a moment, as though looking for the right words. “You know how I told you my period stopped eight months ago? Crazy as it may sound, I think there’s a connection between my not bleeding and my not bleeding.”

  If it were anyone but straightforward, meticulous Katherine, if she hadn’t seen for herself the knife cutting into Katherine’s arm, Margie would have dismissed the whole thing as a joke, as impossible. Still, she couldn’t help but say “That sounds nuts.”

  “I know. But it explains a lot.”

  “What’s the connection with you getting so fast all of a sudden?” Abra asked. She looked unconvinced.

  “I have another theory,” Katherine said. “Your body has thresholds, points after which you can’t go any faster, can’t lift any more weight. It’s where you’ve used up all the glycogen stored in your muscles and your heart can’t pump blood fast enough to meet your oxygen demands. Essentially your body is so exhausted that it can’t do any more work. But if your body can’t be hurt, if it can’t hurt, then it doesn’t reach those thresholds. It can go on indefinitely and do anything.”

  “Like run five-minute miles,” Abra said.

  “Five-twelves,” Katherine corrected.

  This was all a bit much to take in, but it explained more than just Katherine. “Abra,” Margie said, but then wasn’t sure what to say. “Has…has anything else unusual happened to you since the…”

  Katherine finished the question: “Since The Incident With The Knife?”

  “What? Oh, no. I mean, I was there. You both saw me.”

  “Actually, I didn’t see you,” Margie replied. “At
least for a few seconds I couldn’t see you.”

  “So you think the explosion did something to me too? It couldn’t have; my period hasn’t stopped.”

  This seemed to make sense, then Katherine said, “Didn’t you say you felt like people couldn’t see you lately?”

  Abra burst out laughing. “Are you saying you think I can turn invisible?”

  “Don’t look at me,” Margie said. “I didn’t say it.” I thought it, didn’t say it.

  “If people don’t notice me lately, it’s because I’m middle-aged and flat-chested in a world that likes young and curvy, not because I can turn inVISible.” Abra waved her arms around as she said “invisible” and added an overwrought, ghostly “Woooo!” before plopping down in the recliner.

  “I know it sounds ridiculous,” Katherine said.

  “It sounds impossible. And from a science teacher, no less.”

  “It’s implausible, but it’s not impossible,” Katherine said. “And remember, this is coming from a science teacher. You can make something invisible—you just have to bend light around an object so that it doesn’t cast a shadow and it can’t cast a reflection.”

  “No reflection? So now I’m a vampire. Thanks.” Abra leaned the recliner back all the way so that she was almost lying down. “You. Are. Out. Of. Your. Gourd.”

  Katherine stood up and leaned over the recliner so she could look Abra in the eye and say to her face: “No, I’m not.”

  Margie heard Eli’s heavy footsteps running down the stairs and couldn’t help but grin at the sound. “Sometimes I think my children don’t actually go down the stairs so much as they succumb to gravity. Could we maybe table this conversation for a moment? Kids,” she added with a nod in the general direction of the stairs.

  Katherine sat down next to Margie on the sofa and put her beer bottle on the coffee table. “Actually, Eli could help me. I’ve been doing some experimenting,” she said. “But there are things I don’t know about bleeding and…cutting.”

  For a split second, Margie felt her heart stop. She knew what Katherine was asking. Eli hadn’t cut for three years, of that she was sure. He was doing great, although sometimes it seemed like she and her eldest were walking through a minefield called emotional stability. She still worried one poorly placed step would blow up their lives again. She looked at Katherine’s open, pleading face. “I wouldn’t ask under normal circumstances,” Katherine said.

  “I know you wouldn’t,” Margie replied.

  Margie had always believed that she’d know if one of her children were in trouble, that her gut would instinctively tell her if one of them were in danger. That Maternal SuperSense wasn’t going off. Trusting her gut, she called Eli into the living room and asked him to sit down next to her. He looked a little puzzled. “Am I in trouble?” he asked.

  “No, no, not at all,” Margie said.

  “Does somebody have an ugly niece they want me to go out with or something, because you know that won’t turn out well.”

  “No, sweetie. I, um—”

  “I” Katherine interjected, “I wanted to ask you—”

  “About cutting,” Margie said. She could see Eli visibly retreat and suddenly felt horrible for asking him. “Forget it.”

  She looked at Katherine, who nodded and emphatically said, “Forget it. Wrong question.”

  Eli looked from his mother to Abra to Katherine. “Why ask me and then say ‘forget it’? It isn’t something I do anymore,” he said with enough conviction that Margie’s heart felt a little better.

  “I thought you wouldn’t want to talk about it.”

  “No, that’s okay. I can talk about it.” Eli took a deep breath. “So what do you want to know?”

  Katherine took the stammering lead. “We…I wanted to know if you ever knew of anybody who found a way to cut themselves without bleeding.”

  Eli looked down at the coffee table for a moment. Margie watched his deep brown eyes, tried to follow him into his most painful memories, found that she couldn’t. “So, uh…I remember a couple of times in group somebody would talk about how they tried to cut themselves without bleeding so there wouldn’t be anything to clean up or they’d try to cut themselves and not leave a mark because they didn’t want anybody to know they were cutting. You can’t do that, so people would just cut themselves in weird places. I met this one girl who used to cut her pits.”

  “Her armpits?” Abra asked.

  “Yeah. She wanted to feel something, to feel the pain.”

  “I’ll bet she did,” Abra said.

  “But everybody bleeds,” Eli said. “You get cut, you bleed.”

  “What if you don’t feel anything?” Katherine asked suddenly. “I mean, were there any kids who cut themselves or hurt themselves and didn’t feel anything? No pain?”

  “I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I don’t think so. Feeling something, pain or whatever, is kind of the point. There were times when I just felt like this big lump of nothing. So feeling pain was at least feeling, you know, something. It kind of gets you high—it makes you feel like you’re in control of something. So yeah, it hurt but it made me feel other things too. Sometimes it felt like all the bad things I was feeling were pouring out of the cut with the blood.” He paused and looked at the three of them, puzzled. “Why are you asking me this?”

  Margie looked from Katherine to Abra then said, “It’s a long story. There is nothing wrong and nothing to worry about. Thank you so much for talking to us, honey.”

  Eli was incredulous. “That’s it? Pick my brain about cutting and then tell me to move along? Geez, Mom, I’m not a little kid. You can tell me.”

  “I can’t…” Margie looked helplessly at Katherine. It was her secret to tell.

  Katherine stood up. “You know what? Yes, you can. It’s time for an experiment. Come on.” Without another word, Katherine walked out of the living room and down the short hallway to the kitchen.

  “Wow, she must be serious. She didn’t even pick up her beer,” Eli said.

  Margie “tsked” him.

  “What?” he protested.

  They walked into the kitchen to find Katherine standing by the sink, the long, sharp French knife in her hand, poised over her left arm.

  “Whoa, whoa!” Eli said. “Mom, what the hell?” He rushed over and grabbed the knife out of Katherine’s hands. “Aunt Katherine, what are you doing?”

  “I think I know what she’s doing. But why not use this knife?” Margie said and handed Katherine a paring knife.

  “Wait, you’re letting your friend cut herself? Mom, this is messed up.”

  Margie grabbed Eli and gave him a big hug. “Sweetie, I know this looks strange.”

  “It’s an experiment, Eli,” Katherine said. “That’s all. I have a hypothesis. It’s been tested once. I’m going to replicate it under more controlled circumstances.”

  “My hypothesis is that you’re going to bleed all over the freaking kitchen.”

  Abra spoke up. “No, she won’t, Eli. That’s the thing. We’re pretty sure she won’t.” Margie noticed Abra had picked up a dish towel and was holding it at the ready. Abra caught her looking. “Just in case,” she added.

  Katherine had the knife against her arm. “I’m more than pretty sure,” she said. “Here goes nothing.” She put the edge of the paring knife up to her right arm and ran the blade across her forearm. Nothing happened.

  “That knife probably isn’t that sharp,” Margie said. “Sorry, I’ve been meaning to get it sharpened and keep forgetting.”

  “Mom.”

  “Sorry.”

  Katherine placed the knife against her arm and looked completely out of her element. “Eli,” she said. “Eli, I know this has to be the weirdest thing your mom and I have ever done, but I have to ask you: how do you cut yourself?”

  Eli looked at Margie
. “It’s okay,” she said. “I know it’s seems crazy, but it’s okay.” Eli looked at the knife poised next to Katherine’s arm. For a moment, he looked lost and vulnerable. Margie felt a million miles of guilt. She put a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry, sweetie,” she said. “Forget it. This isn’t fair.”

  “No, I’m good, Mom. You wouldn’t be doing this if you didn’t have a good reason. I have no idea what it is, but I trust you.”

  Margie’s eyes welled with tears as she looked up at her son. “Thank you.”

  Eli took a deep breath. “Okay, put the blade right against your arm, so it’s pushing against your skin. Then you push a little harder and turn the blade down just a bit so it can…cut. It’s kind of like going off the high dive for the first time. You just have to do it. Press down hard and swipe.”

  It’s a leap of faith, Katherine,” Margie said. “It may not hurt at all.”

  “Of course it’s gonna hurt,” Eli said.

  “No, it won’t,” Katherine said and sliced her arm.

  Chapter Nine

  Abra hadn’t been exactly sure what to expect, but when she looked at Katherine’s arm and saw a narrow cut and no blood, she was unable to speak for a few seconds. The first time it had happened, there had been nothing but a lone streetlight and the headlights of the minivan illuminating the scene. Margie’s big, sunny kitchen had no shadows, nothing to make you think what you’re seeing is a trick of the light. In natural light, what you see is what you get.

  Eli’s jaw dropped as he stared at Katherine’s arm. “You aren’t bleeding,” he stammered. “Nothing.”

  “Oh my gosh, you really aren’t!” Margie said and started to laugh. Katherine looked up from her arm, her face a combination of shock and relief. “I’m sorry,” Margie said. “I know it isn’t funny but it’s—wow.”

  Katherine’s face broke into a huge smile. “Yeah,” she said. “I kind of can’t believe that worked. It didn’t even hurt. I mean, I felt it, but it was like running your fingernail against your arm or something.” She took the knife and made a second slash on her arm. Still no blood.