The Super Ladies

by Petrone, Susan

  “Uh-oh,” Joan said at the same time Katherine said, “Oh shit.” Before Margie had time to move or even take the swab stick out of her mouth, the entire thing exploded with a tremendous Boom! that shook her eardrums and knocked her to the floor.

  For a moment, Margie wasn’t sure where she was or why she was sitting on a hard linoleum floor. All she could hear was the low hissing of gas issuing out of the CO2 pump. A cloud of hot, sticky steam enveloped the room. It tasted like sour metal and mingled with the sweat on her arms and legs. The collection vessel was lying on its side on the floor in front of her. Margie blinked a few times, trying to focus. Abra and Katherine were on the floor on the same side of the counter as she was, looking equally stunned. It wasn’t until she heard a voice quietly say “Mom?” that Margie remembered exactly where she was and what was happening.

  She couldn’t stand quickly enough—most of her body parts were sore, and the floor was slippery—so she crawled around the corner of the counter to where Joan was sitting and trembling with tears in her eyes. Margie grabbed hold of Joan and held her tight. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Joan said quietly. She said something else that Margie couldn’t understand, and Margie realized she was holding on so tightly the kid could barely breathe, much less talk. Margie eased off on the hug just a bit. Abra poked her head around the corner of the counter, and Katherine’s face peered over the top. Joan started full-on crying. “I’m sorry, I messed it all up…”

  Margie shushed her, whispering that everything was okay. Abra and Katherine both chimed in that they weren’t hurt. “Everybody’s fine,” Margie soothed through the heavy mist. It seemed like all sound had stopped, or maybe it was just her ears ringing from the blast. “Nobody’s hurt, everything’s okay.”

  “But my project…” Joan sobbed. “I’m never going to the state science fair this year. I’m gonna flunk…”

  Margie scooted back a bit and took Joan’s cheeks in her hands, realizing as she did so just how covered in slimy steam they all were. She looked her daughter directly in the eye, trying to will her to calm down. “Joan, honey, you couldn’t go to the state science fair if you were in the hospital either. You’re okay. That’s the only thing that matters right now.”

  ⍟ ⍟ ⍟

  Margie and Abra stayed on the floor, Margie holding Joan and Abra holding Margie. Katherine stood over them, feeling as though she was guarding them from further harm. There wasn’t anything to do. She was confident that the pump wasn’t going to explode again, but they all ought to get some fresh air. They should get out of there, if only she could will her legs to move. The world still seemed fuzzy.

  The door to the chemistry lab rattled with the insistent shaking of someone trying to get through a locked door. Voices on the other side of the door shouted questions: “What happened? Is anyone hurt? Do you need help?”

  “I can get it,” Katherine said, less to the others than to herself. She could get the door, she could still move, still think. The shock of the explosion didn’t end anyone’s life. Still, it seemed to take forever to walk the length of the chemistry lab on legs that felt as though she’d just run a marathon. Once she was there, the door didn’t seem to want to open.

  Katherine prided herself on being cool in a crisis, but her legs were trembling and hands shaking as she struggled to unlock the door. The sour steam that permeated the room made her feel a little woozy, and her wet, slimy hands slipped every time she tried to turn the deadbolt. All she wanted to do was lie down and rest, but she had to open the door, and it wouldn’t open. Just turn the lock, she thought, trying to focus. Turn it.

  She finally managed to get the door unlocked. As soon as it opened, a scrum of teachers, science fair judges, parents, and kids swarmed in. Then there was explaining and explaining and more explaining, as the four of them had to recount what happened, fill out incident forms for the school district, and get checked out by an emergency medical squad. Calling an ambulance seemed like a bit much, and Katherine said so. The superintendent of the school district and a couple members of the board of education who were in the building for the science fair assured her that it was absolutely necessary.

  “Why? None of us is going to sue the district.”

  “Of course not,” Margie added. Katherine couldn’t help but smile as the assistant principal gushed over Margie with a chorus of “Better to be safe than sorry.” He must have known she was married to a lawyer.

  The four of them were surrounded by school officials, teachers, and gawking parents and students. It made Katherine feel slightly under siege. Nevertheless, she waited patiently while the medics gave each of them a quick once-over. When it was her turn, she followed a penlight with her eyes, counted backward from one hundred by fives, and told the medics what day it was and who the president of the United States was.

  “I don’t have a concussion,” she told the medic, a slight, wiry African American guy who spoke so quietly she had trouble hearing him over the low rumble of conversation in the room.

  “You don’t know that for sure. Follow the light with your eyes,” he said, moving the penlight up and down and side to side.

  “I didn’t hit my head. The blast knocked me down. If anything, I may have sprained my coccyx.” On a chair next to her, Margie was going through the same routine with the other medic, while Abra gave a blow-by-blow account of the explosion to the assistant principal. Karl had come in and was standing with an arm around Joan. He managed to look protective even though Joan was nearly as tall as he was. Hal had stayed down in the gym with Anna and Grant. There were already too many people in the chemistry lab; why add to the muddle with her worried child and husband?

  By the end of the night, Katherine had told the story of the accident so many times it felt like it happened years ago, not hours. Hal kept insisting she go to the emergency room, but she just wanted to go home. She felt a little off but chalked it up to the shock of the explosion. And Anna needed to go to bed. She was already freaked out by the explosion. It had been loud enough to be heard downstairs in the gym, disrupting the entire science fair and, Anna added, making some of the younger kids cry (but not her).

  Katherine had every intention of going to work the next morning. It was a school day, and she had students who needed to prepare for final exams. But at 5:20 a.m., when she’d normally be getting up and going out to meet Abra for their morning run, she went right on sleeping. When Hal finally nudged her awake, Katherine opened one heavy eyelid and looked at the clock next to the bed. It read “7:07.” She always left for school no later than seven-thirty. She sat up so fast her head conked into Hal’s mouth, bruising his lip.

  “Sorry, sweetie! Crap, I’m late!” she said. Her head was starting to spin; she had definitely sat up too fast.

  Hal was holding one hand up to his lip. “No, yurf staying homph,” he mumbled through a swelling lip and a few fingers. A day off sounded heavenly but unnecessary. It hadn’t been a major lab accident. Hal stopped trying to hold his bruised lip. “I already called the school. They’ll find a substitute. The EMTs said you need to take it easy today.”

  Even as Katherine was saying “I can’t take the day off,” the top half of her body was gracelessly falling back onto the bed. She could almost hear her pillow whisper, “Welcome back” as she sank into it.

  Chapter Three

  “Surviving” a science fair explosion seemed like a verb too far. “It’s not like our lives were ever in danger,” Margie said over dinner a few days later.

  “Of course not. People just like making a fuss,” Katherine replied and took another sip of wine.

  There had been a fuss, of course. You can’t accidentally set off an explosion in a high school chemistry lab without causing a series of aftershocks. Once they’d dealt with the principal and the school superintendent and the paramedics, Margie and Joan had finally been permitted to leave. Then
they’d been ambushed in the stairwell by a reporter for the suburban paper who’d been at the high school taking pictures of the science fair. The explosion ended up being one of the lead stories on Cleveland.com the next morning.

  “I lost count of how many people sent me the link,” Margie said.

  Katherine gave a derisive snort, although it might have been a cough. “I’ve never understood that. Why are you sending me a link to a news item about me? I know what happened.”

  “Work was the worst” Abra sighed. “Everybody kept stopping by my office and asking about the explosion. I couldn’t get anything done.” Abra was sort of hunched over her martini, as though trying to shut out the steady din of noise from the crowded bar and live music. Their typical night out meant drinking cheap margaritas at the Mexican restaurant close to home, but surviving a chemistry lab explosion seemed like good excuse to step it up. Plus Katherine’s birthday was coming up, so they went to hear her brother, Billy. He was a jazz pianist who played Wednesdays through Saturdays at the Metropolitan, one of the uber-trendy restaurants in the Warehouse District downtown. Dinner at the Metro could run to figures more suitable to car payments, so they opted for drinks and appetizers.

  Margie, Katherine, and Abra made a point of getting together for dinner once a month—twice a month if circumstances necessitated. It started out as just Margie and Katherine, who met in their first jobs after college. Margie had been temping in the main office at Wiley Middle School in nearby Cleveland Heights when she met a first-year science teacher named Katherine Sayer. The temp job was, of course, intended to be temporary while she considered “the myriad opportunities available for a philosophy major. Ontologically speaking, I am either qualified for any job in existence or am completely unemployable. While I internally debate this paradox, I’m making copies of permission slips.” She and Katherine started eating lunch together, and when the temp job ended, their friendship had continued for twenty-four years.

  After that first race together, Katherine introduced Abra and Margie, correctly thinking they would hit it off. They had become each other’s extended family of choice. When Katherine’s mother was in the middle of a six-month battle with lung cancer that took her from robust to skeletal, the three got together once a week instead once a month. Sometimes it wasn’t for a meal, just a beer or cup of coffee and the solace of someone to lean on. When Eli was a spotty, frustrated thirteen-year-old who told his mother he had cut himself “just to see what would happen,” Abra and Katherine had been there to tell Margie she wasn’t a bad parent and help her decompress during the months when she took Eli to weekly counseling sessions and tried to figure out why her firstborn seemed to hate himself. When Abra’s father died, Margie and Katherine were the ones to look after Abra’s house and cat and take emergency phone calls in the middle of the night while she was in Florida with her mother, trying to box up a forty-eight-year marriage. And when Abra had her heart and credit rating broken by the same man, Margie and Katherine provided two shoulders to cry on and a suitable nickname for her ex. Four months later, they still referred to him as The Evil Richard Brewster.

  “You know, I worry about a lot of things with my kids,” Margie said. “Mass shootings and car accidents and date rape…”

  “Don’t even put that out there,” Katherine interrupted.

  “And playground injuries and sports accidents. Exploding tofu was never on the list.” Joan had been the closest to the source of the explosion. She said her ears were ringing for a few minutes after it happened, but a visit to the pediatrician showed no damage to the eardrum. Joan, at least, was fine. Margie wasn’t sure about herself. “Have you guys felt…different since the explosion? Like something is off?”

  The question seemed to pull Katherine out of the music and Abra out of whatever she’d been contemplating in the bottom of her martini glass. “Off how?” Katherine asked.

  “I’ve just been feeling sort of weird and tingle-y,” Margie replied. Somehow saying this in the middle of the Metro’s upscale bar made it sound even more ridiculous than it felt.

  Abra and Katherine were silent for a moment, then Abra said, “I felt the same way for about a day after. Kind of the same way you feel after your car skids on ice.”

  “Or if you’ve ever been in an accident,” Katherine added. “That’s how I felt for the whole next day, just kind of shaken up. But it passed.”

  Margie nodded. If Abra and Katherine were feeling okay, maybe it was just her. Or maybe it was just her imagination.

  Billy had been playing an old boogie-woogie-ish tune that she didn’t know. Now he ended it with a flourish, said, “I’ll be back in fifteen” into the microphone, and came over to their table to say hello. He gave Katherine a bigger hug than usual, then hugged Abra and Margie and asked, “What the hell did you guys do?”

  “It isn’t that big a deal,” Katherine said. “Just a little explosion.”

  “It was a big enough deal to make the front page of the paper.” Billy had the habit of straddling a chair from the back instead of sitting on it normally. Margie wondered if this was to counteract spending so much time on a piano bench hunched over the keys. He was tall, like Katherine, and shared her slightly wavy, dark hair. He kept it very short and, like every night at the Metro, was wearing a jacket and a tie. Even pushing fifty, Billy Sayer was still a hottie.

  “Online news—they’re always trolling for content,” Katherine said.

  “I’m just glad you’re okay. Margie, your daughter wasn’t hurt, was she?”

  “Shaken up but unharmed. I think the only thing injured was her pride.”

  “Hopefully that will heal quickly too. Hey, I only have a few minutes. Do we need to play What’s New? I can kind of guess.” Billy played music full-time, giving him a schedule opposite that of anyone with a day job. About the only time Katherine or anyone else managed to see him was at a gig. He rarely had time to talk, so years ago they had started playing What’s New with him. It was like a conversation that consisted solely of bullet points.

  “And you would be correct. I have nothing beyond our minor explosion,” Katherine replied.

  “Nothing?”

  “Umm…I can’t believe I’m almost done with my first year of teaching at Beaumont, and if you told me when we were kids that I would grow up to count a few nuns among my friends, I would have thought you were crazy.”

  “That is crazy,” Billy said, “but Mom would be pleased.” Margie had two brothers, one older, one younger, both of whom lived out of town and felt more like friends than siblings. The glance that passed between Katherine and Billy at the mention of their late mother gave her a sudden wave of longing. Billy shifted gears quickly. “Okay, my thing is that I met this great woman named Nora.” Margie wasn’t the only one who saw Katherine’s slight roll of the eyes, because Billy added pointedly: “She’s a freelance illustrator and likes to draw at night, which means she and I are on the same schedule.”

  “Then congratulations,” Katherine said. “I look forward to meeting her.”

  “You will. Who’s next?” he asked.

  Abra gave her a “Go ahead” look. Margie sighed. The one thing lingering at the top of her brain wasn’t exactly news. It was more like a deadline: “Eli is graduating from high school in two weeks. Fill in accompanying waves of melancholy and feeling old at your discretion.”

  “Whoa,” Billy said.

  “I know.”

  “I have nothing to follow that,” Abra said.

  “Nothing?” Billy asked.

  “Nope.”

  After a couple more minutes of the kind of pleasant chitchat that someone in Billy’s line of work had to perfect in order to survive, he said good night and went back to the piano. Once it was just the three of them again, Katherine said to Abra, “What didn’t you want to tell Billy?”

  Abra gave a little resigned chuckle to the table then looked u
p. “I’m almost too embarrassed to tell the two of you, much less him.”

  “What?” Katherine asked.

  Abra took a breath and seemed to steel herself a bit. “Okay, I’m uh, I’m filing for bankruptcy.” This was big but somehow not unexpected given the mess The Evil Richard Brewster had left her. Abra bought her house with him at the tail end of the mortgage loan crisis, ending up with a bad loan for a house that needed more work than the inspection had shown. Using the argument that her card had a lower interest rate than his, Richard also maxed-out Abra’s credit cards for everything from lumber, paint, and drywall (which were still sitting in the detached garage) to a vintage Gibson guitar. Then he had decided he didn’t want to get married after all, took the guitar, and left, leaving her with an inflated mortgage and a mountain of debt.

  Katherine let out a low “Whoa. That sucks.”

  “What can we do to help?” Margie asked.

  “Nothing really, but thank you for asking. There’s just no way I’ll ever be able to pay down all the debt. About the only good thing is I can keep the house but that’s only because I’m underwater on the mortgage.”

  Katherine’s brow furrowed. Margie had always felt bad for any student who ended up on the business end of Katherine Sayer Krenzler’s wrath. “You ought to sue Richard,” Katherine said.

  “I let him use my credit cards, Katherine. He didn’t steal them. I thought we were a couple and stupidly, stupidly let him ruin my credit.”

  “You’ve got to stop beating yourself up over him.”

  “She’s right,” Margie added. “He isn’t worth it.” Nothing she could say was going to make Abra feel better or make her less in debt or send any sort of karmic retribution Richard Brewster’s way. It made her feel guilty to know she was going home to a dual-income, financially secure household. It would be more accurate to say her income-and-a-half household. Margie’s salary as the office secretary at Adrian Elementary School was only a small fraction of what Karl earned. Sometimes the whole idea of being married to a lawyer with a nice house in a suburb with good schools felt like the most ridiculous, overplayed stereotype in the world. She adored Karl, but all the external things that made him a good life partner also made him, and her life, seem overly staid. Boring, even.