Calling Invisible Women

by Jeanne Ray

“Dad has apparently been handing out leaflets to that effect.”

  “So I told her that was crazy and I’d never seen you so happy in my life. I said you were probably missing yoga because you’ve been raising money to cure cancer and hanging out with your friends and writing great articles and teaching Red to balance on a beach ball.”

  “Did you tell her that?”

  Nick was quiet for a moment. “Yeah. I did.”

  Arthur’s mother taught yoga at the YMCA on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and weekly meditation workshops at the Unitarian Church on Saturday afternoons and the occasional vegetarian cooking class, though now she was a vegan. She was seventy-six. She would be sympathetic to my invisibility. She would also be positive that she knew exactly how to reverse it, and that would no doubt involve me drinking great quantities of wheatgrass juice. I just wasn’t feeling up to wheatgrass yet. I told my son I loved him and went out to face the unknown.

  Over the years I had attended many of my children’s sports banquets at the Sheraton (that’s counting cheerleading as a sport), along with a few bridal shows and a couple of Ohio board of tourism conventions that I covered for the paper. So it wasn’t as if I had any problems walking into the Sheraton, but still, it was taking me a few minutes to get my courage up. I sat in the car until 9:50 and then took out the fresh Kleenex I had put in the side pocket of my purse and went inside.

  For a few minutes I snooped around discreetly, looking for an easel with a signboard on it saying “Welcome, Invisible Women!” or something like that. When I didn’t find anything, I went to the front desk, where a dark-haired girl in a navy suit was typing away at a computer. “Excuse me,” I said.

  “Just one minute,” she said, drawing the word one out until it had five syllables. She didn’t look up and so I was left to stand there and admire the gloss of her hair, wondering how it was that girls who worked in hotels always had such glossy hair, when I suddenly felt a strong hand on my upper arm, a security guard’s grip that was steering me away.

  “Hey!” I said sharply.

  The glossy-haired girl, no doubt thinking I was reprimanding her for having asked me to wait, glanced up just in time to see me being dragged across the lobby by nothing at all.

  “One minute,” a quiet voice said.

  I was marched around the corner to a row of comfortable chairs and was then deposited into one of those chairs. The grip on my arm was released, and the chair beside me turned in my direction.

  “Sorry about that,” the voice said. “I’m always telling the group we should put more information in the ad.”

  “I was just going to ask where the meeting was.” I spoke to the air.

  “The people at the Sheraton don’t know we use their hotel. The old-timers get here early to grab up the newcomers but I was in the bathroom. My bad.”

  “Excuse me?” There was absolutely nothing there, but then I saw it, crumpled in the corner of the chair, a Kleenex. Was this really possible? I reached into my pocket and pulled out a Kleenex of my own.

  “I know you’re invisible,” the voice said. “I figured that out.”

  “But I can’t see you. I don’t mean to sound dense but I can’t even see your clothes.” I leaned forward without knowing if I was leaning too far forward. “Does everything you touch become invisible?” I whispered.

  “No. I’m just not wearing any clothes.”

  I sat back. “Are you serious?”

  “Alice Trumbull. Naked.” A hand took my hand and shook it.

  “You mean to tell me you just walk around naked all the time?”

  “No, I wouldn’t drive a car naked. People need to see a driver in a car or they get very freaked out. That’s why we meet at the Sheraton. They’ve got a nice big locker room in the gym. We can come in, get undressed, put everything in a locker. Some of the women even work out later. They’ve got a pool. We like to suggest you swim underwater though. If you do a stroke with a lot of splashing it can be upsetting to the guests.” Alice Trumbull had a very nice voice, straightforward Midwestern, not sarcastic.

  “Are there many of us here?”

  “I’d say usually twelve to fifteen, though I suspect there are some others who just don’t speak up.”

  “So how long have you been invisible?”

  “Six months,” she said.

  I let out an audible gasp. I had never really considered that it could go on that long.

  “And I’m not the senior member here, not by a long shot. Listen,” she said, and I felt a comforting pat on my arm. “I know what this is like for you, all the questions, all the fears, how finding out there are other people like you makes it better and worse at the same time. It’s scary as hell when you drop off the face of the earth and no one notices. I’m assuming no one has noticed.”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Have you told your husband? I see you’re still wearing a ring.”

  Sure enough, my ring was floating out there. “He doesn’t know,” I said.

  “It took my husband four months to figure it out.” Alice stood up. I could see the seat of her chair smooth out and feel the smallest shift in the air around me. “Come on, we’ll get you a locker. It’s time for the meeting to start.”

  “Why do I need a locker?” I asked. I stood up but didn’t know which way to go until Alice took my sleeve and guided me along, the invisible leading the invisible.

  “So you can store your clothes.”

  I stopped. “But I don’t really want to take my clothes off.”

  “I know,” she said, nudging me to move forward again, “but eventually you do. That’s just part of it. And besides, if they see people sitting in a conference room with clothes on they’ll ask us to leave. It’s happened before.”

  I could feel a little invisible lump rising in the back of my throat. I was not what you’d call a naked person. I was the kid who changed her clothes in the toilet stall before gym class. Even now, if I’m walking from the bathroom to the closet after a shower, I put on a robe. To just stroll around my own house naked, even if no one was home and it was dark and the shades were down, no, it would never happen. So the idea of walking naked through the halls of the Sheraton—“Won’t it be cold?”

  Alice stopped. “Aren’t you ever naked? None of us gets hot or cold anymore. It’s one of the perks of the invisible life—climate control.”

  “I guess I have noticed that,” I said, feeling disappointed to have lost my best excuse.

  “You need to hustle up,” Alice said. “We’re going to miss the reading of the last meeting’s minutes and the introduction of new members, which would be you.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sure.” I took off my jacket, my silk scarf. I sat down on the bench and unzipped my boots, pulled off my stockings. “Are you still here?”

  “I can’t see you,” Alice said, sounding slightly exasperated. A locker door opened and my neatly stacked clothes floated up and landed inside. I took a deep breath and pulled off my underpants and bra. Then the door was closed. “Now hide your Kleenex inside your fist, like this. Nobody likes to see Kleenex floating down the hall.”

  How odd it was that someone would notice a Kleenex but not notice that the woman standing beside them had no head. We got on the elevator and took it up to the third floor. I crossed my arms over my breasts. The last time I’d gone braless I was twelve. “I’m not entirely comfortable with this,” I said as a way of making conversation.

  “It grows on you,” she said. “Since I’ve been invisible I’ve come to see clothing as the Great Oppressor. Also, you wouldn’t believe how much money you save. Clothes are really expensive.”

  We walked down the hallway and into the Magnolia Room, where a dozen chairs made a lazy circle beside a buffet table laid out with a coffee urn and a tray of Danish. Alice shook out the Kleenex in her hand and waved it like a flag over her head. “Friends, we have a newcomer today!”

  Suddenly there was a flurry of Kleenex waving back and forth, a smatter
ing of applause. One would think that as an invisible person myself I would look upon this non-sight, this empty room full of people, as the most comforting thing in the world. Sisterhood! Solidarity! But in fact I found the whole thing as creepy and disconcerting as I would have before when I walked Ohio in my full flesh. I thought of how Gilda must shiver a little bit every time I walked into her house and how bravely she had continued to love me when I wasn’t there. I did my best to remember my manners. I unrolled my Kleenex and said hello.

  “Come get your coffee and something to eat,” a new voice said, very cheerful, sunny. “We don’t eat during the meetings. It has to be before or after, otherwise someone from housekeeping walks in in the middle of a discussion and picks up all the plates. Do you want coffee?”

  “Please,” I said, trying to find my natural voice. “Black.”

  “Just like me,” the voice said, and someone else laughed, though I didn’t know if the speaker had meant she liked black coffee or was herself a woman of color. I actually found myself squinting, as if I might be able to see her if I just tried a little harder.

  I turned around to take the cup and in doing so knocked someone’s cherry Danish off their plate. “I’m so sorry,” I said. If I had skin I would have been jumping out of it.

  “You didn’t see me,” the woman said. Another voice, a new one. “It’s all right. That’s what the Kleenex are for. Just try to keep it visible. ‘Be Aware of Your Kleenex and Other People’s Kleenex.’ That’s one of our first codes of conduct for the meetings.”

  “If you want to ask a question, raise your Kleenex and wait to be called on.” I saw something glinting in front of me and realized the speaker was wearing contacts.

  “I still think that’s a little much,” Alice said. I recognized her warm Midwestern vowels. “I don’t think we need to dictate rules of social behavior.”

  “We rely on visual cues to know when we’re supposed to talk. Now that the visual cues are gone we have to find reasonable substitutions.”

  All the voices were running together. Why couldn’t we wear clothes? We could each chip in and pay for the cost of the conference room and wear our clothes. The hotel would take our money, our money wasn’t invisible. If people were wearing clothes I could at least match a voice to a sweater. I felt like I was at my first social mixer at a school for the blind. I was just getting used to the fact that no one could see me—now I couldn’t see anyone else either.

  “We used to each carry white roses,” someone said. “What a sentimental debacle that turned out to be.”

  “Why?” I asked. Certainly it was a lovelier gesture than the Kleenex.

  “Well, for one thing, they were hard to come by, and if too many of us went to the same florist they were likely to get freaked out. Then there was the business of the thorns.”

  “And inevitably some little girl would come along and snatch it right out of your hand, even on the street. Little girls are brazen thieves when it comes to unattended flowers.”

  “Once a girl walked into our meeting and picked up every single rose like she was some sort of bride or something and they had been put out just for her. She made herself a bouquet and then turned around and left.”

  “They never steal Kleenex.”

  The voices came at me from every direction and I couldn’t begin to separate them out. It was like standing in the middle of a blizzard and trying to differentiate the snowflakes.

  “Ladies,” a voice said, raising itself above the others. “I think it’s time for the meeting to come to order.” But wait! I recognized that voice. It was the one who had been talking about the need for visual cues.

  There was a shuffling among the group. Uneaten bits of Danish were dumped into a trash can or quickly eaten. The used plates were stacked, the used coffee cups arranged themselves into the same configuration they had been in to begin with. There were no smears of lipstick against the sides of the heavy china cups, no last few sips sitting coldly in the bottoms. Invisible women left things tidy, they way they had found them. It was as if we hadn’t been there at all.

  I went to sit down in a chair and sat instead in the wide naked lap of someone I did not see. My heart nearly stopped at that singular sensation of flesh against flesh. I bolted up. “My God,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It happens,” the woman said, her voice forgiving. “It takes some time to get this down. Just watch for the Kleenex.”

  “I now call the meeting of invisible women to order,” another voice said.

  “That’s Jo Ellen. She’s taking her presidency very seriously,” Alice whispered in my ear. How did she know to sit beside me? How did she know that was my ear?

  “I’m Jo Ellen, and I’m an invisible woman.”

  “Hi, Jo Ellen!” The group chimed.

  “We have at least one new member today,” Jo Ellen said. “She’s with Alice. Alice, will you introduce your friend?”

  “I’m sure we will be friends but the truth is I just found her in the lobby this morning. She was trying to ask the girl at the desk where the meeting was.”

  The group got a good laugh out of this. I was sitting naked among a group of strangers in the Sheraton and they were laughing at me. It was the stuff of grade school nightmares.

  “I didn’t even ask you your name,” Alice said. “I’m losing all my social skills. You’re going to have to do your own introduction.”

  “Do I stand up?”

  “It’s all the same to us,” the woman on the other side of me said, the wearer of contacts. “Whatever makes you comfortable.”

  I stayed in my seat and gave my Kleenex a tentative flap. “My name is Clover Hobart, and I’m an invisible woman.”

  I heard a sharp, collective inhale go around the room.

  “What?” I said.

  “We don’t use last names in the meetings.”

  “Why not? Alice told me her last name.”

  There was a long silence. Silence in a group of invisible women was not a comfortable thing. Had they left? Were they leaving? Should I leave?

  “Why don’t we use last names?” Alice asked.

  “It’s a little strange when you think about it,” someone said on the other side of the circle. “It’s not AA. I don’t care who knows my last name.”

  “I’m Lila Robinson,” a voice piped up. “Clover, I had Nick and Evie in my second-grade class at Brookside Elementary.”

  “Mrs. Robinson!” I said. The joy! I would have gone and hugged her had I known where she was. Oh, the children loved Mrs. Robinson! We would sing the song on the way to school every morning. And here’s to you, Mrs. Rob-in-son. Jeee-sus loves you more than you will know. Wo, wo, wo. How old would Mrs. Robinson be now?

  One by one the women went around the room giving their full names and waving their Kleenex, and after each one the rest of us said, “Hi, Alice Trumbull! Hi, Patty Sanchez!” Laura Worthington was there. She had been the weather girl on Channel Four a dozen years ago. She was willowy and blond with graceful hands that framed the cartoon images of smiling suns and angry clouds on the weather map. Everyone always said how much she looked like Vanna White.

  “Well, now that we know who everybody is and no one has any anonymity anymore, do you suppose we can proceed with the meeting?” Jo Ellen asked.

  A Kleenex went up on the other side of the circle. “Patty Sanchez. For the record, I have about as much anonymity as I can bear right now. And I love that Laura Worthington is in our group.”

  “For more than a year now,” Laura said.

  Together we made a small sound of wonder.

  “Who’d like to tell their story today?” Jo Ellen said.

  All the Kleenex stayed down for a while and then finally one gave a small flutter not too far from the seat of the chair. “Go ahead,” Jo Ellen said.

  “It’s Lila Robinson again,” Mrs. Robinson said.

  “Hi, Lila.”

  “I have to say, having Clover here today has got me feeling a little e
motional. Don’t misunderstand me,” she said quickly. “I’m glad you came. Sorry for you, of course, but glad to have somebody here I know from before. I had both of Clover’s children in my class. They were very good children, lots of energy. Your Evie would have turned cartwheels all day long if I’d let her. Did she keep up with her gymnastics?”

  “She’s a cheerleader at Ohio State,” I said. Something in me began to unclench the slightest bit.

  “It makes me think about all the wonderful students I had,” Mrs. Robinson said, the emotion coming up in her voice. “I was with the school system for almost thirty years but when I became invisible, bang, that was it. They were done with me. I think we could do with a few more invisible teachers, especially in the upper grades. Even if they couldn’t use us in the classrooms teaching regular classes, we could still be hall monitors or test proctors. If you ask me there would be a lot less bullying if we had invisible teachers. But no, I wasn’t normal. They thought I might upset the children. I told them I could come in naked, the children wouldn’t even know I was there, but then they said I could be violating their civil liberties.”

  “Because of the nakedness or the fact they wouldn’t know you were there?” someone snapped. Maybe it was Patty Sanchez. I wasn’t positive.

  “What about your civil liberties?” Laura Worthington said. Her voice I knew. Be looking for sunshine around the middle of the week.

  “We aren’t even covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act.” There was a low tide of grumbling in the room.

  “No one is interested in us,” Mrs. Robinson said. “When I look back on my life, I was invisible for so many years before I became invisible. I never did stand up for myself. If you don’t stand up before you become invisible, what chance do you have of making people pay attention to you when you aren’t there?”

  “Amen to that,” a voice said.

  We all had something to say now, all the Kleenex were up and people had started talking over one another. Jo Ellen raised her voice for order when all of a sudden the door to the Magnolia Room opened and a young Filipino woman pushing a cart came into the room. Instantly, we fell into a perfect silence, all of the Kleenex fluttering to the floor. Were we busted? I followed suit and dropped my tissue. The young woman stood in the door for a long time, her large, dark eyes sweeping the room from side to side. Finally she guided her cart over to the refreshment table. Like us, she made absolutely no sound. She was a tiny thing. The beige polyester uniform she wore was no doubt the smallest one they made and it was two sizes too big for her. She looked at the cups and the plates and, deciding they were actually dirty, loaded them onto her cart along with the coffee urn. She took a small bite off the edge of a cherry Danish and then picked up the tray. There she saw the twenty-dollar bill that someone in the group had left for her. After checking the door over her shoulder to make sure it wasn’t a test, she plucked the money up and put it in the pocket of her uniform. She then went around the circle and picked up all the Kleenex off the carpet one by one before pushing her cart back out of the room. After a few minutes of waiting, someone finally got up and shut the door behind her.