Whisper Network

by Chandler Baker

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

Men could get away with hedging. It came across as thoughtful. If Sloane waffled it would sound like she didn’t know what the hell she was doing.

We had complicated relationships with our bodies, while at the same time insisting that we loved them unconditionally.

If Grace felt a kinship with any mothers at all since Emma Kate’s birth, it was with the ones that drove their minivans into a lake.

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.

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.

whatever happened, we were the defaults, the ones stuck with the task of figuring out what to do about, well, everything. Was it any wonder, then, that one of us snapped? Was that not precisely what the system was designed to accomplish?

We’d learned the hard way that money predicated success, not the other way around.

Sloane had been under the impression that middle-aged people were no longer allowed to get mad at each other.

Ardie wondered if something was wrong with her. Some actual diagnosis. A personality disorder. Something more concrete than just: natural introvert.

Ardie used to think it was a phase. This desire to retreat into herself, to claw inside her own skin like a hermit crab. It had always been this way.

The temptation, nurtured by people like Ames, had always been to conjure up an image of bored housewives in business formal attire, playing a game of telephone on the office lines. We had to have been overreacting, behaving hysterically,

a job was supposed to pay an employee, not cost her.