Instead of taking her to A Cutting Tale, the link took her to an online comic called The Super Ladies. The front page featured a red-and-yellow banner with the title and cartoon drawings of three women. The tallest figure had long, wavy hair and stood with her arms folded, looking muscular and somewhat indestructible. The smallest figure was wiry, with short curly hair and a darker skin tone. Her hands were at her sides, but she looked ready for anything with an expression that said she had a secret she wasn’t telling you. The third figure was a little rounder but drawn to be voluptuous and curvy. Her hands were outstretched and looked as though heat waves were coming from them. Unless Margie’s brain had completely backfired, these figures were supposed to be Katherine, Abra, and her.
There weren’t many strips yet—the first comic had only been posted about a week before. But there was Margie making a carful of rowdy teenage boys overheat with just the touch of her hand. There was Katherine, cutting her arm at the kitchen sink and triumphantly showing that she was unharmed. And there was Abra, tripping over the dog (Margie figured she could forgive Eli for using Juno’s real name) and turning invisible. Eli had done some editorializing, developing these events as the beginning of a running story about three middle-aged suburban women with superpowers. It was well done.
Margie hated typing anything longer than a sentence on her phone; she preferred her old laptop with its real keyboard for emails. She usually spent half an hour or so before bed reading The New York Times online or checking email. Eli had gone to bed unusually early. Now she knew why: he didn’t want to be around when she saw the comic. For a long minute, she wasn’t sure if she was angry or elated. On one hand, he was sharing something personal without consulting her or Abra or Katherine. Wasn’t it their story to tell, not his? But he hadn’t used their names, and the cartoons weren’t necessarily caricatures. They were obviously based on the three of them, but the Super Ladies in the comics weren’t supposed to be them. If you didn’t know the three of them and hadn’t seen firsthand examples of their powers, you would think it was entirely fiction.
Eli had also given the characters nicknames. The one based on Katherine was “Indestructo.” Abra’s character was “Shadow.” Margie’s was “The Schvitz.” You are so my child, Eli, she murmured. That’s when Margie decided she was elated.
She sent the link to Katherine and Abra. Then, because she didn’t want to wait, she texted each of them too. It was after ten. Abra still had to work in the morning and was an early riser to boot. She was probably in bed. But Katherine was on summer break. She was probably still awake.
Modern technology gives the illusion that everyone you know is sitting around just waiting to return your call or text. The idea that you should be able to make instant contact with anyone you wish makes waiting even three minutes for a response an anxiety-inducing experience. Instead of waiting, she went upstairs to see if Eli was still awake. His door was mostly closed and the light was off. She poked her head into his room for a moment and listened to him breathe. He didn’t sound asleep, but he didn’t seem to want to talk either. It could wait until morning.
She went back downstairs to the living room, where she’d left her laptop. The house had a living room, which stayed relatively clean because the furniture wasn’t as comfortable and no one sat in there unless Karl’s mother was over, and a family room/rec room/God-awful-mess that was much more conducive to actual “living” than the living room. Margie didn’t dare leave her laptop in the family room. The chances of someone borrowing, sitting on, or spilling something on it were astronomical. She’d left her phone in the living room too, and it rang almost as soon as she walked in the room. It was Katherine.
“Tell your child that the character should be Indestructa, not Indestructo. Feminine ending,” was the first thing she said.
“So I take it you like the Super Ladies comic?” Margie asked.
“Yeah, I think I do. And not just because I’m a closet narcissist.”
“I wouldn’t say closet narcissist…”
“Stop. I like it because he’s taking our story and retelling it in his own way.”
“That’s how mythologies start.”
“Exactly.”
After she hung up with Katherine, she got a two-word text from Abra: “Love it.”
The last thing Margie did before bed was send a quick reply to Eli: “Please use the feminine ending—it’s Indestructa, not Indestructo. How is it I never made you take Latin?”
⍟ ⍟ ⍟
Katherine enjoyed the solitude of running alone in the mornings. She missed Abra, but solo runs for the past couple weeks had given her ample opportunity to experiment with the limits of what her body could do. The limits kept expanding.
She was starting to feel responsible for doing something—anything—with her powers. It seemed logical that she needed to go out and find some wrongs to right. Their neighborhood was filled with three-bedroom, one-bathroom bungalows that had been built in the fifties and early sixties, when the area was booming. She liked the cozy feel, loved that they lived in a diverse area with neighbors of different races and backgrounds. But after a few hundred predatory loans, house flippings, and foreclosures, a whole swath of the city was hanging onto its middle- to lower-middle-class status by two paychecks and a few thin strands of freshly mown grass. Still, the police blotter in the local paper only showed small crimes, most of which were centered in one of the two nearby commercial districts. The ones that weren’t seemed to be pretty benign—a stolen bicycle here, an unlocked car broken into there, a domestic disturbance that involved a lot of yelling but no violence. She felt secure in her neighborhood, felt secure letting Anna walk down the block to a friend’s house—usually with Hal surreptitiously keeping an eye on her from the front porch because he was overly protective, not because Anna was in any sort of danger. It wasn’t a wealthy neighborhood, but it was a safe one.
When she told Hal the next evening that she was going out, she didn’t say she was going out looking for trouble, although she had to admit that was the intended purpose. Hal assumed she was going out with Margie or Abra and simply said, “Make sure Anna knows you won’t be home before she goes to bed.” That was one of the benefits of having a disinterested husband: the evening was completely hers.
Actively seeking out crime in the making is a delicate situation. The full reality of this hit Katherine as she drove out of South Euclid and into neighboring Candlewick Heights. Seventy years ago, Candlewick had been a strong, desirable suburb. Bordering the city of Cleveland, it had some gorgeous architecture, including a number of houses built by John D. Rockefeller, and a massive city park. Then pretty much every bad thing that could happen to a city happened to it over the decades—closing of the streetcar lines, unemployment, a fleeing middle class, corrupt city politicians, poverty. Now it had half the population it formerly did and an unemployment rate above twenty percent. If you were going to find bad guys doing bad things, Candlewick might be a likely place to start.
It was only seven thirty on a Wednesday evening in the summer. There were a few people out on the streets, walking or waiting for a bus, even a couple of kids on bikes zooming around simply because they could. She saw a few pairs and groups of teenage boys walking down Euclid Avenue, Candlewick’s main thoroughfare. If you went far enough down Euclid you’d end up in downtown Cleveland. This section of Euclid Avenue mainly consisted of boarded-up buildings and chain fast-food restaurants. The teenage boys could be up to no good, or they could just be walking because they didn’t have transportation or bus passes. Either scenario was equally likely. Then she felt like an ass for assuming she’d find something bad happening simply because she was in a low-income neighborhood. Time to regroup.
Candlewick bordered the University Circle neighborhood of Cleveland, a two-square-mile area of museums, universities, and other cultural assets. There was a great little bar called the Barking Spider tucked aw
ay in what used to be a carriage house. They always had live music and in nice weather opened the wide carriage-house doors so patrons could sit out at picnic tables with their drinks and listen. It was a bar where a woman alone could feel comfortable.
Before she got out of the car, Katherine grabbed a pair of cheater reading glasses that Anna insisted she buy when they were at the Shaker Square farmers’ market a few weeks earlier. Katherine had mentioned that she sometimes had trouble reading small print. Anna immediately picked up on this and dragged her to the vendor who sold one-of-a-kind, hand-painted everything. There among the whimsically painted light-switch plates, garbage cans with unicorn-horn handles, and handmade cell phone covers was a selection of reading glasses in different colors, each one with tiny flowers or insects painted along the edges. Anna had insisted her mother get a pair of red cat-eye frames with little daisies painted along the sides. Katherine kept them in the car for emergencies and to humor the kid. If nothing else, they’d come in handy if she just hung out reading the free entertainment magazines stacked by the door.
Katherine bought a beer and sat at one of the picnic tables in the back, just enjoying the cool evening air and the old-time stride piano of the musician playing inside. Try as she might, she couldn’t get the image of Taylor’s arrogant, spikey-haired boyfriend checking into the hotel out of her mind. She should have done something just to make sure Taylor wasn’t getting into something she didn’t want. What could I have done? She had blown that moment. Worse, she had let Hal make the choice not to get involved for her.
What can I do? There was documented evidence she could withstand cutting and high falls. Her runs were getting faster and her workouts tougher, but, if anything, her fatigue level afterward or even during was nil. Nothing hurt. Ever. Maybe I really am indestructible.
What would that actually mean? Katherine had always felt the standard female sense of caution when going out alone. In college, it meant the buddy system at a party. As an adult, it meant parking near a light or a security guard after dark or keeping an eye on her surroundings and a key in her hand, just in case she needed a makeshift weapon. Such precautions had become second nature. They were simply little things you did as a female navigating the world. Hal never understood her habit of leaving a light on if she and Anna were going to be coming home alone after dark, or her insistence on having the car interior light go on when the door opened.
What if she didn’t need to do those things anymore? What if she could do absolutely whatever she wanted whenever and wherever she wanted, without fear?
It was time for another experiment. She didn’t necessarily want to get into a fight—she didn’t like violence—but she needed a gauge, a way of measuring her growing strength against the opposite sex. The back area of the bar held three picnic tables. One was empty, she sat alone at the second, and at the last were three guys who appeared to be in their midtwenties. They looked like they might be graduate students from the university. Not big guys, but not the typical Case Western Reserve University engineering nerds either.
No fear, Katherine thought. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m doing an experiment on leverage versus muscle mass as it relates to gender inequity and was wondering if I could arm wrestle each of you.” Regardless of whether what she said made sense, saying it somewhat quickly and matter-of-factly made it sound legit. If they were grad students, they were probably so used to studies with long titles that her request wouldn’t seem odd. If they weren’t, they’d never admit to not understanding.
The three of them looked at her and then one another. There was some uncomfortable chuckling. Then the thinnest of the three, a pale-skinned guy who probably only had to shave seven facial hairs a day, said, “Sure. You said this is for a study?”
“Kind of, yes,” Katherine said as she sat down opposite him.
“Do you work at Case?” asked the beefiest of the three. He looked like he might play a competitive sport.
“No, but I’m a science teacher.” She realized it would be polite to find out something about them. “Are you students?”
“We all just graduated,” the thin guy said. “I’m starting my MBA in the fall.”
“Me too,” the beefy one said.
“I’m the odd man out,” the third guy said. He was dark-skinned with a slight accent. Maybe from the Caribbean? “I study computer science.”
“Well, nice to meet you all,” Katherine said. “Thanks for helping me with my experiment,” she added. She didn’t really feel like making new friends and merely placed her elbow on the picnic table, hand up, ready to arm wrestle. For a moment she felt foolish. What are you trying to prove? she thought. It wasn’t so much having to prove something as having proof, some sort of empirical evidence of her female strength against male strength.
The thin guy grinned sheepishly. “I’m not very good at arm wrestling,” he said.
“That’s okay. It’s for science,” Katherine replied.
She had forgotten how intimate arm wrestling could be until they clasped hands. She was touching a stranger. The guy with the slight accent put both his hands on top of theirs. Now she was touching two strange men. Katherine tried not to focus on the absurdity, only on the task at hand. With a lilting “One, two, three, wrestle,” he removed his hands from theirs. Now it was an arm-wrestling match.
Katherine knew the techniques to help win at arm wrestling—she had learned them years ago while trying to beat Billy. She had never managed to beat her big brother, but she dispatched the skinny business major in 1.4 seconds (according to the beefy one, who recorded the whole thing on his phone).
“Could we try that again?” the skinny guy asked. “I wasn’t quite ready.” Katherine let his friends be the ones to say, “Sure you weren’t.” She merely raised her arm and beat him again. “Let Josh try,” the skinny guy said.
Josh was the beefy one. As they clasped hands, Katherine noted that he wasn’t chubby; there was muscle on that future MBA arm. Nonetheless, she beat him twice in a row. After she slammed his hand down the second time, Katherine had a moment of doubt, of wondering if she had just pissed off a stranger, if that was foolish or safe. No fear, she thought.
“You’re really strong,” Josh said. “Are you a weight lifter?”
She wanted to say, “No, I’m a superhero” or “No, I’m a scientist,” but that sounded too cocky. “Just strong, I guess,” she said. She looked over at the guy with the Caribbean accent. He looked to be in decent shape and was kind of tall with long arms. He would have a definite advantage as far as leverage.
He smiled. “Sorry, but I’m left-handed. It wouldn’t be fair.”
“But I need some left-handed opponents for this study. Would you, please?”
“All right then.” With a shrug, the guy sat down opposite Katherine and placed the elbow of a long left arm on the picnic table. She noticed that beefy Josh had his cell phone out again and tilted her head down so that her face would be obscured by her hair. The extra leverage didn’t help the guy with the lovely accent. She beat him twice, left-handed. Her muscles felt fine, not at all like they’d been straining or working.
By this time, some of the people who’d been inside listening to the music had wandered outside, intrigued by the sight of a grown woman defeating three young men in arm wrestling. A guy about her age only with far more gray hair asked if he could go up against her.
“Sure, why not?” was Katherine’s reply. She didn’t mean to slam the guy’s hand down, but it almost felt too easy to beat him or the four other men (including one guy with biceps the size of telephone poles) and one woman who tried arm wrestling her. She lost count of how many times she was challenged, but she won every time. Far from making anyone angry, her success bred more challenges and more success. At a certain point, it became comical. There was a lot of laughter. She had three beers lined up in front of her, each one bought by a different person she had beate
n arm wrestling. It was starting to feel like a party.
The guy with gray hair sat down next to her. “Your arm wrestling skills are quite impressive, Ms…?”
Something about the evening made Katherine want to stay anonymous, so she said the first name that came to mind: “Jones.”
“Ms. Jones,” Gray Hair said with a nod. “I love your glasses.”
The reading glasses were of such a light prescription that Katherine had momentarily forgotten she’d put them on, but now she was glad she had. Better people remember the glasses than her face. “Oh, thank you.”
“Someone said you’re a science teacher. Is there some sort of Archimedean secret behind all this?”
Men who reference Archimedes in a bar are either showing off their intellect or trying out a pick-up line. Or both. Katherine suspected it was the latter, although it had been ages since anybody had hit on her. Whether that was a result of circumstance or decreasing attractiveness was open to speculation. As a teacher, the vast majority of her colleagues were female and she was surrounded by children. Almost everywhere else she went it was with Anna or Hal or Abra and Margie or other parents. It was a rare occasion to be out and not immediately tagged as part of a couple or as a mother. The idea of being someone else for a little while was intriguing. “No secret,” Katherine said. “Just strong, I guess.”
She and Gray Hair made small talk for a few minutes. More people joined them at the picnic table. Katherine beat a few more people at arm wrestling. As the bench on their side grew more crowded, Gray Hair moved a bit closer to her.
“What’s your first name?” he asked. The tone of his voice and the proximity of his leg to hers felt oddly exciting. He wasn’t bad-looking, maybe a little older than Hal, but where Hal was tall and angular, this guy seemed slightly rounded with more substantial shoulders. Cuddly. For some reason, she focused on his mouth. Gray Hair had a nice smile, with beautifully formed, full lips. For a moment, she considered what it would be like to kiss him, considered throwing all caution to the wind and just kissing a stranger because she wanted to.
The Super Ladies Page 13