Whisper Network

by Chandler Baker

We fell asleep with the heat of laptops burning our thighs.

identified as “compassionate conservatives,” which Ardie took to mean that they wanted gay people to get married, but preferred to pay as little in taxes as possible.

“God, we can invent smart toothbrushes,” said Ardie. “My robotic vacuum can find its home and put itself to bed at the end of the night and we can’t invent a thingamajig to suck out milk that works a little better than that?” The machine was sort of grotesquely mesmerizing. “Men have teeth.” Grace raised her eyebrows. “And floors.”

Children turned men into heroes and mothers into lesser employees, if we didn’t play our cards right.)

It’s hard to register differences in the status quo. Like trying to measure slight drops in temperature without a thermometer.

None of us had time. For anything, it seemed. If time was currency, we were all going broke.

Sloane’s most closely held tenet was that women could not be real friends unless they were willing to talk shit together.

It was amazing how, even now, even in the privacy of her own head, Ardie glossed over her role in the story. The secret that was buried so deep that it registered only the smallest spike in her pulse as she skipped through the memory. A blank space. A lie.

Unopened mail on kitchen countertops. Thank you cards written but never sent. In the back of her mind, she was already moving on, adding this mental reminder to the detritus of unfinished tasks to be recycled into background stress, where it would serve as fuel for her spotty and unexplained bouts of insomnia, chin acne, and stomach bloating.

No two people of the opposite sex argue over subjects as mundane as condiments unless they want to sleep together.

She wore a shiny new engagement ring, given to her by a man who loved her, trusted her, and would need her financially from now until eternity. She felt powerful. She felt like she wanted to blow shit up.

Sloane did feel better. Emptier. Cleaner, even. This was the thing we all loved about exercising, the way it could push everything else out except for the one pressing, present matter—the hurt.

She read in a Post article that it was sleep deprivation not waterboarding that ultimately got Al Qaeda members to talk.

I will leave my husband for you, she’d told the aromatherapy treated bathtub. We’ll run away together. We’re soul mates. There’s just this one issue of my breasts keeping my child alive, but, just give me a couple months to sort things out. You’ll see. I promise. I love you.

Sloane sniffed the air. “It smells like McDonald’s in here, Ardie. Please tell me you did not go to McDonald’s.” “Okay, I didn’t go to McDonald’s.” Sloane walked over to the trash bin and pinched a fast food bag between her fingers, the remnants of a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit that Ardie had grabbed on her way into work. It had been delicious.

The office was an environment perfectly engineered to breed distrust. Every confidence, every request for advice was a leap of faith and we all had horror stories of times when we’d misplaced it.

And then we took it as a compliment when one of the men in the office told us we had balls. So, tell us again how this wasn’t a man’s world.

Her body, she knew, had always had the better memory.

Ardie, like many of us, had caught perfectionism, an illness that we heard was more common in women by a factor of roughly twenty to one.

We were the prisoners, strapped to the medieval stretching device, having enjoyed the rare privilege of both loving and having chosen our torturers.

Money can’t buy everything, we’d always been told. Money can’t buy time. To which we called B.S. We had the Care.com and Instacart accounts to prove it. Money was what we were after.)

Mondays arrived with the same promise of New Year’s Resolutions—we would eat healthier, exercise more, procrastinate less, not let our children watch so much television. They arrived with the gut-level, self-effacing instinct that by Friday we would have failed on at least half those counts.

She read a book a week.

No way this woman works this hard and reads so much

“I’m one of the good guys, Sloane.” She pushed her weight so that the door slid backward and she was nearly encased in the cylinder of glass. “Are you sure that’s not an oxymoron?” she called back.

Failure was a luxury we couldn’t afford, all chained together as we were, our fates locked up tight.

Like a kid on a pool deck, Ardie had to will herself not to jog. The spirit of anticipation prodded her faster. The chance for vindication—a strong word maybe, but one that was nearly within reach.

At twenty-five, she reasoned she could go on to practice criminal law after she’d paid off her student loans. And this, she learned, was probably the way most career dreams perished.

We had long seen the problem at the heart of it all: being a woman at work was a handicap that we’d been trying to make up for by erasing our femininity in just the right ways.

Women walked around the world in constant fear of violence; men’s greatest fear was ridicule.

Sloane stretched across the table and squeezed both Grace’s and Ardie’s hands, and Ardie felt a little sorry for men because they never got to hold hands with each other.