The Super Ladies

by Petrone, Susan

  “Nope. Melted it. It’s on the sidewalk. I was gonna clean it up, but it’s still kind of gooey.”

  Katherine stifled a laugh as James swiftly walked past Margie. They heard his feet pound down the stairs. Margie and Katherine followed him. As they went down the stairs, Katherine asked quietly, “Shadow, you with us?”

  “Right behind you,” came Abra’s voice.

  Behind them, Katherine heard Sandra call to her children that she’d be right back. When they got outside, James was standing on the cracked concrete sidewalk looking at a handgun-shaped, oozy mass of metal and polymer. Katherine thought it would have fit in well with Salvador Dali’s melting clocks.

  James was livid and came charging back into the yard, slamming the gate behind him. Sandra seemed to shudder a bit at the rattling of the chain-link fence. Margie stepped in front of her at the same time Katherine did. “I got this,” Margie said softly.

  “That Glock cost me three hundred bucks,” James sputtered. “What the hell did you do to it?”

  “I told you: I melted it.”

  “How?”

  Katherine was quietly pleased to see James recoil just a bit when Margie held up her right hand and said simply, “With my hand.” James glared at her. Katherine had to resist the urge to step in, had to trust that Margie did indeed have this. “Look,” Margie said, “we don’t want any more trouble with you. We’ll be back to check on Sandra. And you never know when Shadow is going to pop by.”

  “You keep talking about Shadow. There ain’t no Shadow.”

  “Hey, hi, I’m Shadow. Now you see me,” Abra said. She was now visible, standing off to one side of the tiny yard. “Now you don’t.” With that, she turned invisible again.

  The expression on James’s broad face was one of absolute shock and, for the first time, perhaps just the tiniest bit of fear. He opened his mouth, but no words came out. “I know this is a lot to take in,” Margie continued. It seemed she was speaking as much to James as she was to Sandra, who looked as though she couldn’t believe what was happening in her front yard. “We aren’t here to hurt you. We are here to protect Sandra and the kids.” She addressed James directly. “No more violence,” she said. “Ever.”

  James stood motionless, as though he was worried some unseen person was going to jump him. Finally he nodded and gave a quiet “Okay.”

  “We’ll be watching,” Margie added.

  “Okay,” he repeated. “But who are you?”

  Katherine couldn’t resist answering: “We’re the Super Ladies.”

  Without another word, the three of them got into the minivan, making sure the still-invisible Abra was with them. It was only after they pulled away from the house that Katherine felt herself breathing normally. She hadn’t been scared. On the contrary, she was exhilarated. This was something meaningful, something almost tangible. They had saved someone from harm, maybe even stopped something bad from happening in the future. And she had made it happen.

  Katherine turned around and saw Abra sitting contentedly in the backseat. “You’re back,” she said.

  “I never really leave,” Abra replied.

  She looked over at Margie, who was waiting to make a left-hand turn onto Chester Avenue. Margie glanced over at her and grinned. “Well done, Katherine,” she said.

  “You too.”

  “Just one thing—next time, I get to say, ‘We’re the Super Ladies.’”

  IC_SuperLadies posted: The Super Ladies: Have powers, will travel.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  While the majority of his acquaintances from high school were going to college in other cities, other states, Eli was going to Baldwin-Wallace, a small liberal arts college on the far west side of Cleveland. B-W had a strong fine arts program, plus he had managed to eke out a tiny, drop-in-the-bucket scholarship. Saying “I got a scholarship to B-W” provided a reasonable explanation for staying so close to home. Nobody needed to know that the proximity to home was an escape hatch, a fail-safe against any lingering worries about how he’d cope, whether he’d feel comfortable, whether he’d start cutting again. Margie or Karl could be there in thirty minutes. It was close enough that he could take the light rail and a bus on his own to come home in a pinch. He could even commute if he really wanted to. Not that he was planning on doing so, as he repeatedly reminded his parents. It was just nice to have the escape hatch if he needed it, even if he never used it.

  Margie felt the uneasy tension between letting Eli fly off on his own and protecting him. Eldest or not, of all her kids, Eli seemed like the one who needed protection the most. Joan, on the other hand, seemed to resist any assistance by either parent, but especially Margie. She tried to treat all three of her children equally, but still, there were times when she heard herself saying “Be careful” to Joan and “Have fun” to Eli or Grant and wanted to kick herself. Inwardly she worried about Eli. But somehow his height and his age and his maleness made it seem that any danger to him would come from within, not without.

  When they brought him and his things to school on move-in day, Margie quietly fretted about everything: whether he would get along with his roommate (whom they had Skyped and texted with and the kid seemed nice), the food, his classes, and whether his burgeoning relationship with the fabulous Jamis Barberton (who was attending the University of Pennsylvania) would survive both time and distance. Eli had marked his sexual orientation on the roommate preference form, so presumably the roommate knew and didn’t care that he was gay. She could cross off one worry from her long list. Mostly she worried that freshman year in college would somehow be a repeat of freshman year of high school, when he began cutting.

  Joan and Grant had insisted they be allowed to help Eli move in, so they ended up having to take two cars—Margie’s minivan, which carried Eli’s stuff, and Karl’s smaller Honda sedan, which carried him and the two younger kids. Margie got Eli for the ride there, during which time she was proud to say she didn’t cry. They talked on the way as though they weren’t driving anywhere special. Eli insisted that she, Abra, and Katherine continue to tell him Super Ladies stories for the comic. She promised they would, knowing that Katherine would share everything with Eli even if she didn’t. Everything was fine as they pulled off the interstate and drove into tiny, little Berea, Ohio. It was only when they turned off Grand Street and onto Beech Street, home of Davidson Hall and Eli’s new address, that she noticed Eli was playing the nervous little finger game in his lap. She pulled into a parking spot near his dorm and turned off the car but didn’t move.

  Margie regarded her son for a moment, trying to think of the right thing to say. Her son regarded her right back. No matter how much he looked like a young man, all Margie could see when she looked at him was the little boy who used to play Go Fish with her while his baby sister slept. Finally she just said, “Remember that everybody you meet today is going through the same thing, and everybody is nervous. So whatever you’re feeling is totally normal.”

  The finger game stopped. “You’re right. Thanks,” Eli said. He took a long, slow breath, said, “Let’s do this,” and opened the car door.

  All around them were other families going through the same process of lugging suitcases, boxes, and crates containing the building blocks of some young person’s life. Eli was something of a neat freak and tended to travel light. Margie suspected half his things were art supplies. They met his roommate, Justus, a short, olive-skinned kid from Michigan, and his parents. Justus really did seem like a nice kid. He was an only child, and Margie wondered if he and his parents were taken aback by having the entire Joseph family filling up the tiny dorm room with noise and bodies. Grant kept touching everything and asking Justus questions about his things. Joan kept wandering out to the hallway to see if Eli had any cute neighbors. And Karl was chatting up Justus’s parents, trying to find common Ohio-Michigan rust-belt ground.

  At a certain point, both
boys’ things were in the room, and there was nothing to do but leave. Justus’s parents seemed to take the hint first, with the mother giving him a hug and a kiss on the cheek and the father a handshake with a pat on the arm.

  Karl wasn’t having any of that. He said, “We should probably get out of your hair too,” and gave Eli a fierce hug that almost knocked the boy over. Joan and Grant gave their big brother quick, almost embarrassed hugs. Eli just smiled, clearly secure in the knowledge that he only had to deal with his family for a little while longer. Finally it was Margie’s turn to say goodbye. She stood in front of Eli, one hand on each of his arms, keenly aware of the four other people who were watching.

  For a second she wished it was just her and her first child again, the way it had been right after Eli was born when Karl was working long hours and it was just her and Eli cocooned in their own little world. The world was much larger now that the cocoon had burst open and this huge butterfly of a young man stood in front of her. Except trying to explain all that to Eli right now would make no sense and sound ridiculous in front of so many other people. Instead, she gave Eli a hug and, standing on her tip toes to reach his ear, whispered, “I love you.”

  “Love you too,” Eli whispered back.

  “If I miss you more than you miss me, it means you’re having a great time.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it.”

  Saying anything else would start the waterworks, so Margie just patted Eli on the arm and led the Joseph Family Parade out of the dorm room.

  Joan drove home with her, while Grant went with Karl. The neat symmetry of it was surprising. For a second, Margie could almost believe that they had no third child at college, that they were mom, dad, daughter, son. Four not five.

  The males in their family were varying degrees of open, ranging from blunt (Grant) to merely talkative (Karl) to introverted-but-in-touch (Eli). In some respects, Margie had always found most men and boys to be simple. Not simplistic, not stupid, just uncomplicated. Even Eli with his anxieties in the midst of his darkest days was less of an emotional minefield than Joan on an average day. When he was in the hole, in the darkness, he made no pretense of being anywhere else. He had never given a noncommittal “Maybe” in response to the question “Are you hungry?” or passive-aggressively stacked four large items in the dishwasher so that nothing else fit and then claimed his chore was done. You always knew where you stood with Eli. And as for Grant—sweet, goofy, happy, thoughtful, open-book, little Grant—very few things made him angry. He liked to win at sports and games, but he wasn’t cutthroat and never held a grudge if he lost. He’d always been like that—a happy baby who became a happy kid who was growing into a happy young man. As long as he was active and well-fed, he was the easiest kid in the world to parent. And then there was Joan.

  All parents know there will come a time when their teenaged children will regard them as idiots. Somehow Joan seemed resentful of the complete fallibility of her parents, her mother in particular. Her mother no longer knew more math than she did, didn’t know as much about chemistry, couldn’t run as long, swim as fast, or kick a soccer ball as far as she could. Margie felt about as useful in her daughter’s life as the old stuffed bear named Thomas that Joan had had since age four. Thomas wasn’t anything Joan actually wanted to spend time with now; she just felt more comfortable having the bear around. Maybe once in a while she’d cuddle it if she needed the soft squishiness of the bear’s worn fur. Most of the time, though, Thomas just hung around on the shelf waiting for Joan to come back. Margie was Thomas the bear with a set of car keys.

  Joan had all the outer trappings of an enviable daughter: she excelled in school, played sports with enthusiasm and skill, and was a reasonably competent cello player. It was the consistently surly attitude that did Margie in. Being around her daughter sometimes felt like walking on a rickety bridge, where she wasn’t sure from moment to moment if it might collapse under her feet. In the car after bringing Eli to college, however, Joan was subdued. Margie had long learned to let animals and children come to you, so she didn’t say anything, just drove. Joan was silent for the first half of the trip home. If Margie had to bet, she’d lay even money on Joan missing her brother or thinking about something completely unrelated, like swimming or clothes. She was half-right.

  They were driving on Cleveland’s inner belt and passing by Progressive Field, when Joan spoke. “Is Eli going to keep doing the Super Ladies comic?” she asked.

  Margie hadn’t realized that Joan was even paying attention to the comic. Aside from the Fourth of July, she hadn’t outwardly expressed any interest in it. “Yes, I think so.”

  “How does he get the ideas for the comic? Do you give them to him, or does he think them up himself?

  Since the Miracle of the Macaroni and Cheese and the July Fourth Mom as a Bonfire, Margie had tried to keep the whole heating of things to a minimum in front of her family. They didn’t know that the story of The Schvitz melting an angry ex-husband’s gun had actually happened. They didn’t know that the melted motorcycle seat was true. They didn’t know that Margie had responded to a message someone sent to the Super Ladies on IcyU, gone to a strange house, and heated up some family’s broken sixty-gallon hot water heater so a mother could wash clothes and give her kids baths. The family didn’t have the money to get it fixed right away, so Margie had gone over there three times in one week to help. Karl, Joan, and Grant knew nothing of this. They didn’t know that doing these things made Margie feel less like a wife and mother and more like a human being. Still, she hadn’t exactly lied to them; she simply hadn’t given them key information about her life.

  “We give him the ideas,” Margie said as she slowed down to go through Dead Man’s Curve. Why anyone would put a seventy-five-degree turn in the middle of a freeway was one of life’s persistent questions.

  “Have you done any of those things in the comic strip? Or did you just make it all up?”

  Margie hedged her bets. “Some of them.”

  Joan was silent for a moment. When she spoke again, she sounded a little bit hurt, a little angry. “So you’re saying that some of those things are true? Not just the macaroni and cheese—you and Aunt Abra and Aunt Katherine have really done all those things in the comic strip?”

  Deep breath. “Not all of them.”

  “That isn’t fair,” Joan said, giving a kick to the underbelly of the dashboard.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It isn’t fair. Why didn’t anything happen to me? I was in the chemistry lab too, right in front of my experiment. I was right there when it exploded, but nothing cool has happened to me. Why you guys and not me?” She kicked the bottom of the dash again and then huddled into the corner of the passenger seat, looking out the window, her back turned to her mother as much as possible.

  “I don’t know why. I have a theory,” Margie said. There was no response, so she plunged in. “My guess is that the phytoestrogens didn’t affect you because you’re still an adolescent. Think about the ages of all the other women you had samples from. They’re either much older or much younger than Katherine, Abra, and me. There were already hormonal changes going on in us. The explosion just seemed to exacerbate them.” She shifted lanes to get out of the way of some guy doing eighty-five in a convertible.

  “I guess that’s a plausible hypothesis,” Joan muttered in her best surly teenager voice.

  “You’re the scientist. And a much better one than I’ll ever be.”

  After a second there was a barely audible “Thanks” from the passenger seat, although Joan still had her back to her.

  Margie waited. If you waited long enough, most people would come around. By the time they had pulled off the freeway, Joan wasn’t talking, but she no longer had her back to Margie.

  She wanted to tell her daughter that there was nothing special about her powers, that what she could do was akin to the talents of someone in a carn
ival freak show a hundred years ago. Being able to harness heat didn’t make her a better person. It didn’t change the fact that her entire existence revolved around taking care of other people. She went with it and asked Joan what she wanted for dinner. It seemed the path of least resistance at the moment.

  IC_SuperLadies posted: The Schvitz will never reveal her identity or her meat loaf recipe.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Margie started back to work at the same time Joan and Grant started back to school. Usually it was easy to slip back into the routine of getting multiple children, one husband, and herself out of the house on time and with all the necessary items—gym shoes, lunches, swim goggles, cellos, homework, permission slips—needed for a particular day. This year, it felt like drudgery. There was so much else to do, so much she could be and should be doing. Not in the abstract way of “I should lose ten pounds” or “I should finally take that Spanish class.” She could do things no one else could. She could help people and fight people and right wrongs and protect the weak. That’s what she should be doing. Not laundry. Not errands. Not a school administrative job that could easily be done by any number of reasonably competent, patient individuals. There was no one else who could do what she could.

  It was a mid-September morning when Margie felt something snap. It wasn’t a tendon or a ligament or a going-postal kind of snap. It was the cumulative effect of weeks that had turned into months that had turned into years of essentially the same screaming treadmill over and over. To be fair, every day was different. But, as she reminded herself, even Sisyphus probably stopped to admire the view once in a while.

  Some days Grant had an after-school club and needed to be picked up instead of taking the school bus home. Some days Joan “only” had 5:30 a.m. swim practice at the high school. Some days she had evening practice too. Some nights Grant had swim practice at the Y. Some days one of them had a music lesson. Some days Karl worked late. Some days she had a staff meeting after school. Some days she had to go to the grocery store or someone’s doctor or dentist appointment. Some days there was a pile of laundry to do or bills to pay or something that needed to be mended, fixed, glued, or thrown out and it was seemingly always her responsibility to perform the mending, fixing, gluing, or throwing out.