Calling Invisible Women

by Jeanne Ray

  That was when the bell rang and we both looked sadly up at the clock. “Meet me at the bus at three,” Lila said. I watched her chair push back from the table as she set out to make the school a safer place for education.

  I hung in there for a long time but I’ll admit I didn’t make it all the way through to the end. I lost my way in a study hall that would have tried the patience of Gandhi. I found myself randomly smacking kids on the back of the head as they pushed The Great Gatsby aside to text and talk and pummel one another with spitballs. I harassed them and spooked them and reasoned with them as if I were their dead grandmother looking down on them from heaven with disappointment, but nothing worked for more than three minutes. Every three minutes they pushed some internal reset button and their world began anew. The ones I had steered toward their better selves relapsed almost instantly, leaving me to start it all again. Exhausted and defeated, I finally left them to their deviant ways and went to sit by myself in the bleachers that surrounded the baseball diamond. By myself! Have there ever been two more beautiful words?

  That was when I heard Benny laughing.

  I had listened to Benny Kempton laugh since he was three years old and that particular sputtering giggle, the one he used when he really got going, was dear to my heart. I finally found him by looking down between the slats of the bleachers. There he was, underneath and in a corner, laughing with Jessica. Jessica from the bus! Way to go, Benny! But then the breeze shifted directions and I caught a whiff of their merriment. Benny and Jessica were smoking a joint during last period.

  I would say at that moment I was the unhappiest invisible woman in the world. I didn’t want to know what Benny was doing. I didn’t want to see it or smell it. I wanted to know nothing other than he had, at least for the afternoon, gotten the girl. I didn’t want to bust their happiness, nor did I want this good boy to get busted by someone else who might deal with him harshly, nor did I especially want him to get away with it because Benny could so easily be a pothead and that was nothing but misery. I owed it to Benny and the girl to break it up. I owed it to Gilda. I owed it to Arthur, who had gone to the trouble of removing a grape from this child’s windpipe when he was three years old. I hauled myself up and walked softly down the bleachers. Poor lambs, they never saw me coming.

  I went and sat beside them in the grass. Jessica was laughing now, the wind-chime laugh of a beautiful girl. I could see the wonderment on Benny’s face, the stark gratitude for this perfect moment I was about to ruin. He handed Jessica the joint. She laughed once more and inhaled.

  “Look, kids,” I began.

  Jessica’s head shot up. She ground the joint into the grass and sat on it. Benny raised up on his knees, his torso craning in every direction.

  “It’s too late,” I said. “I’ve already seen it.”

  “It’s the Rive Gauche again!” Jessica said, sniffing the air like a beagle. “It’s my mother. I smell her.” She looked around and, seeing nothing, closed her eyes tight. “What are you doing to me?”

  I sniffed my own wrist. I found it hard to believe any trace of perfume had survived the day but the girl was right, it lingered there.

  “It’s not your mother,” Benny said, his nose tracing the air. “It’s the lady from the bus this morning.”

  “You heard a lady on the bus, too?”

  “She sounds exactly like our neighbor,” Benny said.

  “I’m not your mother or your neighbor,” I said, winging it as I went along. “The brain makes these voices into people you know so that Jessica hears me as one person and Benny hears me as another.”

  “How do you know our names?” the girl wailed. I thought she was going a little over the top.

  “Because I’m you, and you know your own name. It isn’t complicated. This is what happens to people who smoke pot. Maybe some people can do it but the two of you can’t. You’re not chemically wired for it. It’s going to wreck you. You’re going to hear me badgering you every time you try. You’re going to get caught, you’re going to get suspended, your parents are going to find out, you won’t get into college, you’ll wind up working at Dunkin’ Donuts.”

  Maybe I was laying it on a little thick but heavens, it was nicer than anything the principal would say were they dragged into his office. Jessica was crying openly now, Benny pushing the sleeve of his sweatshirt against his eyes. I gave them a minute to sit with this bitter picture of their future.

  “Or,” I said, as if presenting an equally plausible scenario, “you can skip all of that, say that was your last joint, and go on to have happy, successful lives.”

  “How are you so sure pot doesn’t agree with us?” Benny said with a trace of skepticism.

  “You’re hearing voices. You’re both hearing the same voices. Believe me, once you get to this phase there’s no going back.”

  “It’s never happened to me before,” Benny said.

  “I’ll be sure to tell your mother that,” I said.

  Jessica started scrambling to gather up her books and get the hell out of there. I put my hand on her wrist. “Look, now you’ve got something to bond over. You can be the kids who don’t smoke pot together. There are a lot of other ways to have fun. Take the money you save and go to the movies. Benny, ask Jessica to go to the movies.”

  He looked at her for a minute, cocking his head as if wondering if she was hearing the same thing. “Do you want to go to the movies on Saturday?”

  Jessica waited to see if I would answer for her but when I didn’t she gave a very small nod. “Okay.”

  I didn’t announce my exit. I thought it was better to let them keep on thinking I was there for a while. Pot was good for paranoia. I walked away marveling at the powers of the unseen. Had I given them the exact same talk while they were looking at me they probably would have blown the smoke in my face. But as an invisible person I had real gravitas. I walked across the playing field feeling triumphant, then went and took my place behind the bus driver, where I found Lila, her paper napkin reduced to a tiny shred.

  “When he gets to Jefferson we’ll get off and walk over to the mall,” I said, my voice quiet enough to stay hidden beneath the cacophony of teenagers recently released from school. Whereas in the morning they had possessed a savage cruelty, in the afternoon they were singing along with their iPods, bouncing up and down in their seats, hanging out the windows, drawing pictures in magic marker on one another’s thighs. They had all been released from prison and now they were planning to party together.

  “It’s okay,” Lila said. “I was just being silly. I know you’re tired.”

  “I don’t think I ever wanted to go to Tiffany’s and try on diamonds before,” I said. “But I’d never spent an entire day in a high school, that is, since I was last in high school myself. They didn’t have a Tiffany’s in the mall back then.”

  And so we hopped off the bus like a couple of errant schoolgirls, opening the door for ourselves while the poor, beleaguered driver raged at what he could not see or understand. I felt like screaming with joy just to be away from those kids. “How do you do it?” I said to Lila. “I mean without killing them or killing yourself. How, how, how?”

  “Here, take my hand,” Lila said. “I don’t want to lose you.” There we were, the invisible, naked women holding hands. “When I started teaching I was with the little kids and I loved them. I loved your kids. But after a while I wanted to do something more challenging. I wanted to read books that didn’t have ponies or trains on the cover. I went back and got certified for high school and at first it was great because my high school students had all been my second-graders once and we all loved one another. Those kids really tried for me. They minded me the same way they had when they were little. It was some kind of Pavlovian thing, I guess. The sound of my voice made them sit up straight and quiet down. For a few years it was all really great, but then the kids who were coming in weren’t kids I’d taught before, and I had to learn how to control them on my own. In the end it really isn�
��t so different from teaching second grade. You just have to always be bigger than they are. Even when you’re not bigger physically.”

  “Do you have kids of your own?” I asked. I really knew nothing about Lila Robinson, other than that I used to sing her name in the car with my children.

  “Three,” she said. “All grown up. I’m a grandmother now. A very young grandmother, but still. If you could see me you would swear it wasn’t possible.”

  We both laughed. We walked in through Macy’s and I told Lila I wanted to go to the perfume counter. “I need to freshen up,” I said. I found a bottle of Rive Gauche and she picked up the Chanel No. 5. We gave ourselves a healthy spritz.

  “Now I’ll know how to find you,” she said.

  On the way to the mall we walked through the shoe department. I would very much have liked to be wearing shoes. My feet were unaccustomed to so much unsupported work. I passed a table full of high heels and thought how much they looked like fancy sleds with impossibly long nails sticking out the bottom. They were fantastically nonsensical. No one in the world, no one, would wear high heels if there was nobody who could see you do it.

  It was nowhere near Thanksgiving and already the mall was tricked out for Christmas, green boughs and white lights and flashing tinsel decking the endlessly long halls. “Do you still have to meet everyone’s holiday expectations if you’re invisible?” Lila asked.

  “No, once you’re invisible you realize that it wasn’t about other people’s expectations in the first place. It was always about your anticipation of other people’s expectations. If they don’t miss me they certainly aren’t going to miss a Christmas tree.”

  “Your husband hasn’t noticed yet?” she asked.

  I shook my head, that pointless gesture. “Nope.”

  “He will,” she said, and squeezed my hand.

  “Does Mr. Robinson know you’re gone?”

  “Mr. Robinson is blind,” she said. “So I had to tell him. He said it was all the same to him. I never thought of blindness as a good thing until I started going to those meetings and listening to everyone else’s story. Larry’s taught me a lot about how to deal with a disability.”

  “Well,” I said. “That’s a healthy dose of perspective.”

  “Perspective is what it’s all about,” Lila said as we walked in to see the diamonds.

  Tiffany’s was crowded with young couples holding hands and teenaged girls longing for charm bracelets and matrons looking at china and nervous men looking at rings. Everything in the store sparkled and flashed, but discreetly. It didn’t really dazzle until you were right up against the cases. “I’ve never done this,” I said. We passed a necklace that made me stop, clusters of diamond flowers that looked as though they should have been draped around Audrey Hepburn’s neck.

  “Never been in here? Oh, I’ve been in here, but I’ve never had the nerve to try anything on. The gentlemen in the suits are very polite, always asking what they can show me. I guess they operate on the assumption that you never know who’s rich. It makes me feel like a terrible fraud.”

  We stepped behind the counter, away from the crowd, and even that felt illegal. Still, the view was a lot easier to take in from the other side.

  “I don’t want a big diamond,” she said. “I promise you, I’m way beyond that.”

  “That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try one on,” I said.

  We went and stood next to one of the gentlemen, who had opened a case to show a modest ring to a boy not much older than Nick. Perish the thought. I reached in and picked up a little number the size of a robin’s egg. It had a considerable heft, and I moved it slowly so that no one would see it flying off. It was such a strobe light, that ring, it was hard not to notice. “Something like this?” I said.

  It was fun, crazy fun, and all the raucous hormones of high school fell away as we engaged in what felt like a very grown-up activity. “Oh my,” Lila said. “You’ve got a good eye for this.”

  A good eye for diamonds, who knew! She put her hand down on the counter and slid the ring on so that if anyone was looking for it they would see that the ring was right there. We stared at it. It twinkled. We blinked.

  “Oh,” Lila said.

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “Sort of needs a hand,” she said.

  “A hand is certainly what’s missing.”

  “Somehow I hadn’t thought about that part.” She turned her nonexistent hand from side to side.

  “Maybe a different ring?” I suggested. “A ruby?”

  “No,” she said, “I really think the problem would still be the same.”

  “Do you want to try one of the big necklaces?”

  She took the ring off and nestled it back into its velvet slot. “Then I think I’d need to have a neck.”

  “So I guess that means the earrings are out too.” We laughed a little now that we could see the folly of our desires.

  The gentleman straightened up, sniffed the air. “Can I help you ladies?” he asked, looking to his right and his left, polite even to the invisible.

  “Just looking,” Lila said, and we stepped back to the public’s side of the showcase and then went back into the mall. “That was really very liberating,” she said once we were outside. “I wouldn’t have guessed that.”

  “Me neither,” I said. We were doubly lucky that day. Not only did we discover that we didn’t want diamonds, as soon as we stepped up to the curb we found a bus to take us near enough to home.

  By the time I got home I was exhausted. I sat in a hot bath and rubbed my aching feet. The bathtub was still a bit unnerving: the displacement of clear water by a clear person made a disconcerting visual for a person who otherwise had no visuals. I dried off and put on some more perfume, a sweat suit, and some big, plushy slippers and went downstairs to make dinner. Arthur called at 6:30 to say he was finished, he was walking out the door, but I knew better than to fall for that. He came in an hour later.

  “Germ Man’s invisible shield has failed him,” he said, dropping his coat over the back of the couch. “I must have seen twenty kids with the flu today and every single one of them wanted to kiss me.”

  “Come sit down,” I said. “Do you want a glass of wine?”

  “What I’d love is a hot rum toddy with some honey and lemon.” He worked his tie from side to side and unbuttoned his collar. “I don’t mean to complain,” he said.

  “No, please,” I said. “Do.”

  “I just wish you could spend one day in the office with me, just see what it’s like start to finish. I don’t think you’d even believe it. Crying children, crying parents, fifty phone messages to return, dictation, insurance companies to fight with, nurses who want to come in and tell me all their personal problems, a baby with a very suspicious rash and now I’m worrying about her. I’m nowhere close to retirement but when I think about doing this for another ten or fifteen years it just doesn’t seem possible.”

  I felt for him, I really did. I knew how hard he worked. I would have loved for him to say “Tell me what happened to you today. Anything exciting?” but the most exciting thing that ever happened to me anymore was getting a galley of a decent book to review. It probably no longer occurred to him to ask.

  Which is all by way of saying, I had never meant to have a secret life, but now I did.

  seven

  As for the issue of clothing versus nakedness, I found that neither one was the perfect answer for every occasion. As a result, I seemed to run a straight fifty/fifty split. There were times that clothes just felt appropriate—Irene’s yoga class, for example, where I simply could not imagine getting into downward dog in a roomful of people regardless of whether or not they could see me. For one thing, I appreciated her adjustments and comments on my form, which she could manage easily as long as I had on a pair of sweatpants and a long-sleeved T-shirt.

  “Sit bones reaching up,” she said, her voice melodic, soothing. “Chest toward the floor.”

  I was glad to be
back under her instruction. I needed to stretch. I needed to be reminded to breathe. Out of sight, out of mind, as the old adage goes. I had been slack when it came to looking after that which I could not see. As for the other women in the class, they noticed nothing unusual about me. Irene preached the doctrine of focus turned inward. “Yoga is not a competitive sport,” she said as she walked between our mats. “Stop looking around.”

  I stayed in shavasana until everyone else had left, lying on my mat like the invisible dead. “Arthur is always saying he wishes I could watch one of his days start to finish,” I told his mother, my eyes still closed. “He was talking about it again last night and I thought, why not? No time like the present.”

  “Maybe he’s feeling unseen,” she said. “It’s possible that that’s the lesson in all of this, not who sees you but who you can learn to see.”

  Irene was sitting in lotus position on the floor beside me wearing white pants and a white top. “My mother-in-law, my guru,” I said.

  She laughed. “I’m not telling you what to do, but it does seem like you have a real opportunity in front of you. I know this is a hardship, but I have to say there are certain elements of your life I envy. You have a new perspective on everything. You’re both learning about yourself and learning to break away from yourself, at least in the more trivial aspects.”

  I thought about the diamonds, the high-heeled shoes. “You have a point.”

  “Go find out what Arthur’s day is like,” she said. “And then tell me. I’d be curious to know.”

  “Could you drop me off at his office?” I asked. Irene had very nicely picked me up at the house this morning, a teacher’s best bet for ensuring her student would come to class.