The Super Ladies

by Petrone, Susan

  One of the biggest problems with long-term relationships is that it’s impossible to experience the exhilaration of a first kiss more than once. After nearly two decades of kissing the same man exclusively—a man who rarely seemed enthused about the whole kissing thing—the prospect of one last first kiss was tempting. But not yet, not now, not while she was still married. She might be having doubts about her marriage, but this wouldn’t clarify anything.

  “Excuse me,” she said, trying to extricate herself from the picnic table without shoving either her crotch or rear end into Gray Hair’s face. No more beer, no more flirting, time to go.

  “Do you have a first name, Ms. Jones?” he repeated, a bit too coyly.

  Katherine said the first name that came to her head, “Indestructa,” as she walked away.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The summer interns at Hoffmann Software typically congregated in the conference room at lunch. To be fair, they were scattered all over creation, with desks and computers shoved into cramped nooks and corners to give them some semblance of a work space. They needed a little room to spread out, but the conference room was across the hall from Abra’s office. It made for loud lunchtimes. It was always a relief after lunch when they all went back to whatever space they called home.

  Aletha was working with Abra, who was a department of one, and the sales force, which was a department of eight. At first it had felt as though her territory was being invaded, but after a few meetings with Aletha, Abra realized that her earlier assessment was correct: she was very sharp and a good egg to boot.

  The conference room was the largest open area in the office. The chairs didn’t exactly match, and the long wooden table was old enough to have burn marks on it from the days when people smoked in offices, but Abra loved the space. It was perhaps the only room in the entire office that had never been partitioned and thus still had the original polished wood molding along the baseboard and intricate plasterwork on the ceiling. It always felt like she was stepping back in time when she entered the conference room, even if it was currently filled with the anomalous sight of millennials staring at their phones. She never could figure out why all the interns bothered to eat lunch together if they weren’t actually going to interact.

  Abra waited until she heard the interns begin packing up their cutesy bento boxes and brightly colored insulated lunch bags that took up all the extra space in the refrigerator even though, as Abra had reminded people more than once, they were insulated and didn’t really need to be refrigerated. She took a step backward, away from the conference room door, and looked down the hall. No one was around. The interns seemed awfully far removed her experience. She was curious as to what these kids were thinking. Pass through me, she thought.

  Each time she became invisible, there was that familiar tug on her gut, as though she was turning herself inside out, then came the feeling of being lighter than air, of being light. She looked down and realized that she was now a loose blouse and an A-line skirt standing in the hallway. She went across the hallway to her office, glad that being invisible seemed to take all pressure off her still-a-little-sore ankle. Staying invisible, she quickly took off her blouse, skirt, and shoes and laid them on her desk chair where they couldn’t be seen from the door. Then she crossed back to the conference room. Most of the interns were still in there. Abra couldn’t remember all their names. They had a new crop of undergraduate interns every summer. Although she’d never admit it, half the interns looked alike to her. They always seemed to get some mix of computer science and business majors. Maybe it was her imagination, but the girls all seemed to be white with long, straight hair. They were typically the sales, marketing, and finance interns. The programming and tech interns all seemed to be male of varying races and in need of exercise and quality time outdoors. Abra was one of the few minorities in the office. She had to admit that was another reason she liked Aletha—sometimes it was hard being one of a handful of women of color in the office.

  This year’s crop of interns had a Matt, an Arjun, a Diwas, two Ryans, two Rachels, and a Miranda. The Miranda was the only one she was sure about because the name reminded her of The Tempest. They were all still in the conference room along with Aletha.

  Abra had never found the marketing interns to be all that helpful to her. Their writing was generally atrocious. And while some of them were clever, their ideas always seemed to revolve around social media. They didn’t appear to understand that the decision makers who purchased Hoffmann’s inventory programs weren’t the same people running their company’s social media feeds. It was difficult to get them to see the bigger picture. Aletha seemed to get it, but judging from the conversation in the conference room, she wasn’t getting much support from her fellow interns. When Aletha brought up the marketing research the other interns were supposed to be doing, only half of them seemed to pay nominal attention. All three of the young women and two of the young men still had their phones on the conference table in front of them or on their laps and were surreptitiously typing away as Aletha talked.

  Invisible, Abra crept up behind one of the Rachels and looked over her shoulder. “So sick of this,” the girl texted. The other Rachel, sitting two chairs away, typed something and her response immediately showed up: “Me 2.” Miranda was sitting immediately to Rachel #1’s right. She was typing away on her lap, looking up once in a while as though she was paying attention. Abra read the words “Kind of sick of A” and then “Acts like she’s in charge.” Aletha was the only other person in the office whose first name began with the letter “A.” Abra tried not to breathe on Rachel #1’s neck as she read the ongoing text conversation over her shoulder. They were going to town on Aletha, most of the other interns, as well as a few of the staff. While she could mostly agree on their assessment that Gary Sewicki in Software Development was “kind of creepy,” the rest of it was just mean-spirited.

  Miranda didn’t text anything for a minute or two. Then she texted, “LOLZ, check this out” with a link. Rachel #1 clicked on it, and Abra was shocked to see the Super Ladies online comic. It was the one where The Schvitz shuts down the car full of teenage boys. Eli had done a nice job evoking the image of a clown car as the boys bailed out of the overheating vehicle. The tagline had a curvaceous Schvitz saying, “I’m taking the whole ‘hot’ thing to another level.” Rachel #1’s snort masked Abra’s stifled giggle. It was an odd sensation to think about random strangers reading the Super Ladies comic. It wasn’t necessarily about her, but she was part of the inspiration. It made her feel as virtually naked as she was literally half-naked in the conference room.

  As Aletha wrapped up the impromptu meeting, Abra realized she had to get back to her office and put her clothes back on. She had been so focused on reading the interns’ text messages and staying invisible that she hadn’t thought about the absurdity of standing in the office in her underwear—even if no one could see her.

  As the interns shuffled out of the conference room, she slipped around them and back to her own office. Mike Horowitz was lingering by her door. Crap, she thought. Abra pressed herself up against the hallway wall so none of the interns would accidentally bump into her. Then it was just her and Mike standing in the hallway. Why didn’t he leave? Who just stands around in the hallway outside someone’s office? Go away, she thought. Shoo!

  Horowitz wandered into her office and stood by the window, no doubt glancing out at the family of pigeons that had made a nest on the ledge across the way. It had proven to be a popular attraction among her office mates. Even the people who claimed to hate pigeons enjoyed looking at the chicks. Don’t look on the chair. Don’t look on the chair…Abra thought. Horowitz turned around, and the small, neatly folded pile of clothes on her office chair caught his eye. For a second, the light-filled feeling left her, and she suspected she was becoming visible. After Gary Sewicki, Horowitz was the last person she’d want to have see her in her skivvies.

  Pa
ss through me, she thought. For the love of God, pass through me. Abra felt the now-familiar gut-wrenching tug as her body moved from visible to invisible. Horowitz gave the clothes a quick look, lifting them up a bit with one hand as though to confirm that they really were women’s clothing. He gave a little shrug and walked out of her office. Abra breathed a sigh of relief, went into her office, and closed the door. She redressed in record time.

  Breathe; everything’s fine, she thought. It was only then she realized she’d broken out in a cold sweat when she saw Horowitz looking at her clothes. “I’ll tell him I went for a run at lunch,” she said aloud, testing the lie to see if it held water. It sounded legit, and she made a mental note to leave some running clothes in the office. Reading the interns’ text messages had satisfied her curiosity but didn’t tell her anything important. It was the equivalent of sneaking into a movie while invisible. But it did give her an idea.

  Later that night, as she was making dinner, she called for backup.

  “Hey,” Abra said as soon as Margie answered the phone. “What’s up?”

  “Making dinner. What about you?”

  “The same.” Abra had her phone lodged between her shoulder and her ear as she tore up lettuce for her salad. “Ugh, hold on a second.” She switched the phone to the other shoulder. “You know what I miss about having a landline? Having a phone large enough to rest on my shoulder so I can talk and still do things with my hands. I’m getting a crick in my neck.”

  “The bane of the multitasking woman,” Margie said. “If you want my landline, you’ll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.”

  “Why pay the extra money?”

  “Because I like knowing who’s calling my kids.”

  “They have their own phones.”

  “Grant doesn’t. And I like having one central number where people can still communicate with us as a family. I think I need to write an essay on this.”

  “‘In Praise of the Family Landline’?”

  “Yes. I’m going to steal that title too.”

  “Go right ahead. Hold on again.” Abra shifted the phone back to the other shoulder.

  “Why don’t you just put it on speaker?” Margie asked.

  “Ummm…because I like to do things the hard way?” Abra replied as she lay the phone on an uncluttered portion of the counter and hit the “speaker” button. “There, much better.”

  Margie’s voice sounded slightly warped through the cell phone speaker. “Did you call just to gripe about phones?”

  Abra gave a tomato a samurai chop. “No, I need to ask a favor.” Now there were tomato guts all over the cutting board. “But I’m playing with sharp knives, so maybe I shouldn’t have called now,” she said.

  “You know I will grant you any wish that’s within my powers.”

  “Thank you. Can we get together one afternoon next week?”

  “Sure. You’re still coming over on July Fourth, right?”

  “Absolutely. This is for something different. Can we do a week from Thursday?”

  “Yeah, but what exactly are we doing?”

  “Superhero stuff.”

  A genuine cackle came out of the phone. “I’m there.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Summer mornings at the Joseph house usually resembled the aftermath of a really great party: the kids slept late and there was typically some kind of a mess involving food to be cleaned up. Karl was always up and out of the house first. Working in a small firm doing contract law beat the seventy-hour work weeks back when he did corporate, but he still had to be in early.

  Margie went through her usual morning rituals:

  1) Walk Juno, making sure to avoid the guy in the black SUV who sped through their neighborhood every morning. As usual, she jumped out of the way and yelled, “Slow down!” to no avail.

  2) Do five Sun Salutations on the deck off the kitchen to pretend that she was still “doing yoga,” to rid herself of insane revenge fantasies against the guy in the black SUV, and to purge the lingering resentment and doubt about whether her chosen life path was slowly corroding her sense of well-being.

  3) See what type of destruction her family had wrought. Even if the counters were clean and all the dishes in the dishwasher before she went to bed, things seemed to spontaneously multiply overnight.

  When she walked into the family room and saw Eli sprawled on the dark brown sofa that took up most of one wall, it took her a moment to remember that she had, in fact, not added any more children to the household. The sofa was a thrift store find that dated back to her and Karl’s first apartment. Every time they thought about replacing it, some major appliance would fail or a car would break and they put off getting another sofa. After years of supporting countless rear ends and lower backs, the cushions had become concave, each one resembling a great misshapen lump of fudge with a bite taken out of it. One had to be close to exhaustion to fall asleep on the family-room sofa.

  The small notebook and pencil stub Eli carried just about everywhere lay on the floor. A larger drawing pad was on his lap. Margie glanced down and saw that he’d been working on a new Super Ladies cartoon, this one depicting Indestructra in feats of superhuman strength, starting out arm wrestling a bunch of people at a bar and ending up with her pushing a little old lady’s stalled car up a steep hill to a gas station. At the end of the strip, the little old lady says, “Thank you, Indestructa Jones!” to which Indestructra replies, “Don’t thank me. Thank my DNA!” The last panel showed the little old lady saying, “DNA? Darn, that’s not covered by Medicare.” This last line had a big “X” through it, so it looked like the punchline might not make the cut, although Margie thought it was kind of funny.

  She put a gentle hand on Eli’s shaggy head. His hair still felt as soft as baby hair to her. “Hey sweetie, good morning,” she said softly.

  Eli slowly opened his eyes. “Hi, Mom,” he said groggily.

  “Maybe you ought to go up to your room. You’ll be more comfortable in your own bed.”

  “Ohhkay…except there’s some stuff I need to finish.”

  “Finish it after you get a little more sleep. You aren’t in school yet. You don’t have any deadlines,” Margie said as Eli sat up and swung his long, spindly legs off the sofa.

  He picked up the drawing and started looking around for his pencil. “Yeah, but I need to get a new comic up on the site.”

  “Why? What’s the rush?” Margie said as she picked the pencil stub up off the floor.

  “Page views, Mom. I’m building a readership. I put a new comic up every Monday and Thursday.”

  Up until this point, Margie had thought the Super Ladies comic was just a fun sideline, something Eli was doing as a sentimental joke and maybe, if he stuck with it, an undergraduate thesis project. It just seemed somewhat theoretical, a hobby. The idea of the Super Ladies comic having a readership just seemed, well, kind of silly. When Eli told her that each installment was getting more page views and comments and shares than the installment before, she was momentarily floored. “Wait a minute,” she said. “You can say that you’ve doubled the readership with each installment, but you’re talking twenty people instead of ten people, right?”

  “Well, at first, yeah,” Eli admitted. “But it keeps growing. The last strip had more than fifteen hundred page views the first day. Pretty cool, huh?” Fifteen hundred was more than twenty, but in internet terms, it was a tiny little fingerling potato. Then Eli added that he’d only been doing the strip for two weeks. “My goal is to get up to ten thousand page views per strip by the end of the month. I want to keep it going once I get to school too.”

  “Do you think you’re taking this a bit far…?” It was difficult for Margie to find the words when she wasn’t even sure how she felt about all this.

  “And I have a really good plan to increase page views. I’ve started a Super Ladies feed
on IcyU.”

  “That means nothing to me.”

  Eli rooted around for his phone. “Oh, it’s a social media site where you can share pictures and video clips and let people know where you are and stuff.”

  “It sounds like a one-stop shop for stalkers.”

  Eli looked up from his phone and gave an exasperated little sigh. “You can change the privacy settings if you want. It’s just another way for people to connect. And it’s cooler than Twitter and Tumblr.”

  “What about Facebook?” Margie asked. She still had a Facebook page out there in the ether, although she didn’t check it too often.

  “Uh, yeah. Facebook is kind of…for older people,” Eli said delicately. He held up his phone. “Here. Look at this. I sent the link with the login information to you, Aunt Abra and Aunt Katherine a few days ago.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. Aunt Katherine is the only one who responded. She knew what it was because all her students are on IcyU.”

  “Sorry, I thought it was spam or something.”

  Eli gave her a my-mother-is-hopelessly-out-of-it look then showed her how to log on to the account and talked her through the IcyU interface. It was kind of fun. You pronounced it “I See You,” but the site was structured a bit like a college campus. The IcyU logo was a cartoon polar bear cub that was, by any standard, freaking adorable. “Because who doesn’t love polar bear cubs?” Eli said.

  “Climate change deniers?”

  “True. Okay, so we’re new and don’t have a lot of followers yet. We’re freshmen. As we get more followers—except they call them classmates—and more seniority, we move up. You start only being able to post a hundred and fifty characters at a time. Then you move up to two hundred, then two fifty, then three hundred when you’re a senior.”

  “So the people who’ve been there the longest have more to say?”