The Super Ladies

by Petrone, Susan

  Zee had been the subject of a number of conversations in the faculty lounge because of her gender nonconformity. One or two faculty members and a handful of parents had apparently made a stink a year earlier when Zee wore a suit and tie to the junior prom. Katherine hadn’t taught at the school then, hadn’t had Zee in class, but knew she was an excellent student. She was also one of the stars of the cross-country and swim teams, all of which made her inclined to like the girl. Tonight, Zee was wearing a perfectly tailored tuxedo with a rainbow cummerbund and bow tie. She wore her blond hair super short, a boy cut. If the tux pants weren’t so well tailored to show off an unmistakably female hip and rear, she could easily be mistaken for a boy. Her date wore a straight-cut dress reminiscent of a 1920s flapper, right down to a pageboy haircut. Taylor’s date snickered as they walked by.

  “Bye, Mrs. Krenzler,” Taylor said. “Have a nice night.” Every word she said was, on the surface, polite, but Katherine could hear an abrasive, sarcastic edge underneath.

  “We’d better go too!” the other girls said brightly and followed Taylor over to a table on the far side of the ballroom. She noticed a few of the boys glanced over their shoulders at Zee and her date, not necessarily dirty looks, just looking. Examining.

  Hal seemed unfazed by most of this. “Where are we supposed to sit?” he asked. He sounded bored and annoyed already.

  “Anywhere. With some of the other teachers, I guess. Don’t you think that was kind of weird?” Katherine asked as she scanned the tables for other faculty.

  “What? The girl in the tux? Who cares?”

  “I don’t care. I’m just kind of disappointed that some of my students seem to have a problem with it.”

  They moved among the tables, Hal hanging back and looking as though he’d rather be anywhere else. Katherine tried to be sympathetic. He hated crowds to begin with and had only met a handful of her colleagues in the short time she’d been at the school. He was polite and friendly whenever she introduced him to someone, but when they finally sat down at a table and had a moment alone, he was silent, dour even. For a moment she almost wished she’d come alone.

  “Thanks for being here,” Katherine said, and nudged her shoulder to his.

  “You’re welcome,” he sighed. She nudged him again, a little gentler this time. “What are you doing?”

  “Um, being playfully romantic?”

  “No offense, but being in a roomful of high school kids is the exact opposite of romantic.”

  She moved one hand onto his thigh under the table. “Come on, doesn’t prom night make you feel like a horny teenager?”

  “No.” He scanned the crowd of kids. “Why are all these girls dressed like prostitutes? I thought prom dresses were supposed to be long and formal.”

  “Most of them are,” Katherine replied, taking her hand off his thigh. She rested her chin on her hands and looked at all the young women in their prom dresses, half of which were cut a couple inches above the knee. The ones that were long and semiformal had slits that showed off firm teenage thighs or necklines that plunged halfway to the basement. They didn’t look like the prom dresses she remembered. These girls were dressed like women, deliberately sexy women.

  “Dear, you’re being too generous,” Hal said in his mansplaining voice. “And just for the record, Anna will never, ever be allowed to wear something like that.” With a slight nod of his head, he indicated a girl and her date walking past. The girl’s dress was tight enough that Katherine truly wondered how she managed to go to the bathroom but short enough that it probably didn’t matter. “You can practically see her underwear.”

  “Why are you looking at teenage girls’ butts?”

  “Isn’t that why they’re wearing them? So the boys will look at their butts?”

  “You’re not a boy,” she replied. The conversation was heading into argument territory. She wasn’t even sure what was at stake here. She didn’t necessarily think Hal was wrong, just too judgmental. These were her students, her girls. She knew many of them, knew them as clever, funny, silly human beings. Why should she care that their dresses were short? Wasn’t “too short” just a matter of opinion? Yet it still troubled her. Much as she wanted to tell Hal he was being old-fashioned, perhaps even a little sexist, part of her agreed with him.

  One of the things she had discovered she loved about teaching at an all-girls school was how free the girls were. Without the daily distraction of boys, most of the girls seemed focused, happy. There was still plenty of drama—teenaged girls seemed to be brimful of drama, but there was also plenty of silliness, of girls being themselves and not caring how they looked. Wearing a super-sexy dress changed that dynamic, as though the first thing you were supposed to notice about any of these girls was a breast, a leg, a well-shaped rear end, not her creativity, her talent for science, an ability to calculate complex numbers in her head. They should be allowed to wear what they wanted, but Hal’s words still rang true. She couldn’t imagine letting Anna wear a short-short, skintight dress to prom or anywhere else.

  Katherine stayed away from any possibly incendiary conversation the rest of the night. Hal being Hal didn’t say much, but he went through the motions and even danced a couple slow dances with her. It wasn’t exactly a date night, but it was okay. Katherine thought they could have had more fun if Hal would just stop acting as though everything on earth was beneath him.

  At the end of the night, after she had made a point of saying goodbye to a few of the other teachers and the principal (“Get the brownie points, babe,” Hal encouraged), they stood in the arched entrance to the ballroom and took a last look around. Prom was definitely starting to wind down. A good number of kids had already left for the after-prom.

  “Do you have to go to this after-prom thing?” Hal asked.

  “I don’t have to, but it’s at Electric Avenue, that retro arcade on the west side? You wanna play pinball and video games all night?”

  “Sure, then we’ll pay the babysitter half our mortgage this month.”

  “I’ll take that as a no.”

  “Yes. Can we go?”

  Katherine didn’t answer. Hal was getting into one of his single-minded moods. He wanted to leave. Period. When he was like this, nothing she or anyone else in the world could say or do would change his mind. Katherine appreciated decisiveness, but a little flexibility once in a while would be nice.

  As they turned to go, Taylor came leading her much-slower boyfriend by the hand, talking enough for both of them. “Mel and Gretchen and Ashley are already at Electric Avenue and Caitlyn and her guy are leaving now. I don’t want to be the last ones to get there.”

  Katherine couldn’t help but smile watching Taylor’s enthusiasm and her spiky-haired boyfriend’s lack thereof. Maybe it wasn’t just her and Hal.

  “I just gotta take a pee break. Meet me right there,” she said, pointing to the bank of brass-doored elevators. Taylor gave her boyfriend a kiss and scampered off down the hall in heels, Katherine noticed, that were higher than her own.

  They ended up standing in front of the elevators with the boyfriend, who gave a dull “Hey” in response to Katherine’s greeting. She was a little surprised when the kid got on the elevator and rode down to the lobby with them. Maybe he got confused, she thought. He looked like the type who didn’t pay attention.

  When they got to the lobby, Katherine asked Hal to wait a moment while she adjusted one of the straps on the sexy, strappy shoes. They were starting to hurt. For a second she felt foolish for having worn them. As she was fixing the shoe, she watched the spiky-haired boyfriend walk over to the registration desk and announce he was checking in for the night.

  “That’s weird,” she whispered to Hal, who was checking his wallet for the parking garage ticket.

  “What?”

  “Taylor’s boyfriend is getting a room.”

  “So?”

 
“So that means he isn’t taking her to after-prom.”

  “None of our business,” Hal said. “Your shoe okay?” He didn’t wait for a response, but as Katherine was now standing upright, took her hand and started walking across the lobby to the door marked “Parking Garage.”

  “But I’m her teacher. I mean I was last semester.” She stopped walking, forcing Hal to momentarily stop as well.

  “Katherine, she’s past the age of consent, and you aren’t her mother.”

  “We should do something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know…something.”

  “It’s none of our business,” Hal repeated, a little more gently this time. “Let’s go.” He started walking across the lobby, not waiting, just expecting Katherine to follow. She hesitated, worried that maybe one of her students was getting into something she wasn’t expecting and didn’t want, wondering if she was overreacting, and mostly feeling a growing sense of anger at Hal for not giving a shit either way.

  Hal was holding open the door leading to the parking garage, waiting for her with an annoyed look on his face. Single-minded Hal wanted to go home. Period. That was always what he wanted. He never seemed enthused about going out or anything else for that matter. Katherine took a last look over her shoulder at the spikey-haired boyfriend as she reluctantly followed her husband.

  Hal was silent on the ride home. That was pretty typical for him too. Katherine liked to debrief a bit in the car after a big event, while he processed everything internally. The differences in their personalities had always been there. In the past, Hal’s quiet ways had been endearing. She could think of a lot of words to describe the way he dealt with—or didn’t deal with—the world and the people in it. “Endearing” wasn’t one of them.

  All through the silent ride home, Katherine kept thinking about the fact that one of her students might need some help. It was her business. And Hal had kept her from it.

  Chapter Eight

  Between some end-of-the-school-year events and work commitments, Katherine didn’t really talk to Abra or Margie for more than a week. When they found a spot at the starting line for the annual five-mile Memorial Day race at John Carroll University, Katherine realized she and Abra hadn’t run together since before The Incident With The Knife.

  She and Abra always ran the Memorial Day five-miler together. Last year, Eli had run it with them while Margie, the husbands, and the younger kids did the one-mile Fun Run. This year, Joan was doing the five-miler for the first time, and she queued up at the starting line in the middle of the pack in between Katherine and Abra. Eli and his long legs politely said, “See you all at the finish” and headed toward the front of the three hundred or so assembled runners.

  Katherine watched the top of his head and its shaggy brown hair move through the crowd. “I remember when I used to smoke that kid in races.”

  “You always let us win,” Joan said.

  “That was when you were really little. Once you hit middle school, all bets are off.”

  “How old do you need to be before I have to start letting you win?” Joan asked.

  “Gads, you are so your mother’s daughter,” Katherine said.

  Joan gave a tickled little grin and drifted a bit closer to the front, maybe so she could start with Eli.

  Abra looked over and said, “Sorry I’ve been MIA for our runs. I’ve had to get into work early the past week, so I’ve just been running in the evening.”

  “No worries. My schedule has been weird too.” She checked to see where Joan had gone. There were other runners around them, some chatting, some stretching, some with ear buds firmly planted, all of them waiting for the starting buzzer. In a crowd like that, no one is actually listening to each other. Still, Katherine felt the need to lower her voice. “This may sound strange, but have you noticed any, I don’t know, unusual changes to your body lately? Since the last time we all went out?”

  Abra’s expression made it clear she wasn’t holding back information. “No. Why? What’s going on?”

  “I’ve had some…changes.” This was really an instance where it might be easier to show rather than to tell. “Okay, you know how you’ve always been faster than I am?”

  “No, I’m not,” Abra said politely, grabbing each of her feet in turn for a quick quad stretch.

  “You are.” The announcer had started giving a general outline of the course, telling everyone to pay attention to the volunteers and the arrow signs. The race was going to start any moment. “I feel…faster lately. Stronger.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “Yeah, I’m just not sure why or how.” She wasn’t exactly sure what she wanted to say. “Do you mind if we don’t run together this year?”

  “Of course not. You going for a personal record?”

  “Yeah, I am.” This was true. She felt like she could get a personal record without trying. Hell, she was feeling so strong lately, it felt like she could set a course record if she wanted to, if they even had such things for recreational races. This was just another recreational race among thousands across the country. It wasn’t anything special. Maybe she wasn’t anything special either—just another middle-aged body running for its life. But maybe she was.

  Even after years of running, the moment right before a race started was still nerve-wracking. She’d always start thinking too much about the actual distance she was about to run. The distance would somehow become mammoth, insurmountable in her mind. Today, she was thinking that five miles wasn’t nearly long enough.

  The hum of conversation quieted down, then there was a heartbeat of absolute silence before the sound of the starting buzzer propelled the crowd forward.

  The first hundred yards or so of any race is a process of runners finding their pace and their place. Fast runners pass slower runners and everyone settles in. Katherine used this time to steadily move her way toward the front. She saw Joan and fell into pace next to her. There had been several years where she and Hal thought they’d never be parents. Married and divorced twice, Billy didn’t have any kids. For a while, Margie’s kids seemed like the closest thing she’d ever get to being an aunt, much less a mom.

  “How are you feeling?” Katherine asked.

  “Ask me in a couple of miles,” Joan replied.

  “Abra’s right behind you. Do you want to run with her? I’m feeling extra good today and want to go for a personal record. Do you mind?”

  “Of course not, go. Beat Eli for me!”

  “I’ll do my best,” Katherine said and sped up again, side-stepping around and easily passing a barrel-chested guy running alongside a trim woman with a serious runner’s build. In a recreational race, if you pass someone, you won’t see them again. Katherine passed just about everybody, running at a pace that would normally have done her in after about four minutes, a sprint pace, somebody else’s pace. Not only did nothing hurt, she never hit the threshold where her heart and lungs couldn’t keep up with her body’s need for oxygen. She was breathing as easily as if she were walking.

  She ran quickly, easily, and very soon was trailing behind the lead pack of a twentysomething white hipster guy with a handlebar moustache and a tattoo sleeve on his left arm; two shirtless guys, one white, one black, wearing John Carroll University shorts; and Eli. That was it. The view from the front of the pack was a lot different than from the middle. For one thing, you had to pay attention to the route instead of merely following the people in front of you. More than that, running with the lead pack felt like freedom.

  As she ran, she pondered what the hell was happening to her body. Muscles have a limit. Every time the muscles in her legs strained and worked, they should have developed microscopic tears, tears that would then heal and build stronger muscle. It was the same principle as weight lifting. This was Physiology 101. Only her legs didn’t feel sore or fatigued, hadn’t felt sore or f
atigued in a couple of weeks. Not since the whole Incident With The Knife.

  Okay, let’s work backward, she thought as she ran. What had happened before The Incident With The Knife? The explosion in which she, Abra, and Margie had been sprayed with liquefied tofu. Before that? Nothing, except the loss of her period. The idea of linking some sort of crazy strength to the loss of her period seemed so ridiculous that she snorted back a laugh right around the second mile marker.

  Eli looked over his shoulder to where she was running, just behind him. “Hey, Aunt Katherine. Wow, you’re flying.”

  “So are you,” she replied. An almost-eighteen-year-old boy running in front of a forty-seven-year-old woman is logical. He’s younger and stronger. It only gets weird if the boy is running in front because the woman is letting him, because she is choosing to run behind for a few miles.

  A knife, an explosion, strength, she thought. How does a blast of tofu—no, it was a blast of phytoestrogens. Could that make a difference? Could that somehow have reacted with her hormonal and physical shift? Somewhere around mile three she thought, You don’t bleed anymore. This simple statement to herself made something in her brain click into place. What if you don’t bleed at all? What if you can’t be hurt? Maybe she was exponentially faster and stronger because strain didn’t harm her muscles. Nothing seemed to harm her. To be sure, she wanted to do one more experiment, but that would have to wait until after she kicked this race’s butt.

  ⍟ ⍟ ⍟

  After the race, everyone congregated at Margie and Karl’s house for a cookout. This had been their Memorial Day ritual for years. Even though it sometimes seemed like a lot of work, and Karl would occasionally gripe about having to host half the world, they both enjoyed having their friends over.