Calling Invisible Women

by Jeanne Ray

  “It does,” Arthur said.

  “The whole thing went by in about a minute,” I said. “Maybe we have post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  “Then Vlad came,” Evie said, reaching beside her to wrap her arm around the arm of her dinner companion. “The bank was like a million years ago.”

  Still, Arthur and Nick and Vlad wanted to hear every detail, and so we told them, Evie and I, splitting the narrative between us: we were going shopping, stopped by the bank, writing checks, sending texts, a sudden shout, On the floor! (Evie delivered that one with surprising gusto), then the gun, the loss of the beloved phone, and then, inexplicably, it was over. Everyone was very impressed that we were not afraid. They said how odd it was, the robber throwing his guns away.

  “I think he had a change of heart,” Evie said. “If he hadn’t stolen my phone I would have thought he wasn’t such a bad guy.”

  “It’s a shame you aren’t a reporter anymore,” Nick said to me. “That’s the kind of story that could get you back on the front page of the paper.”

  I looked at my son and the room wobbled slightly, the way it had that moment I first saw the gun. I was a reporter at a bank robbery. How had I not thought of that?

  When finally the story had been told and retold to everyone’s satisfaction and we were all finished eating, Arthur announced that he was sorry to leave good company but he had an early day tomorrow and he had to get to bed. Nick said he had promised to go over to Miller’s to watch a basketball game, Evie said she had to go and straighten up her room (no doubt the floor was covered in clothes), and Vlad said he would like to wash the dishes. My family, just on the verge of scattering, stopped to stare at him.

  “You don’t need to do that,” Evie said, graciously neglecting to mention that that was why they had me.

  Vlad stood up and began stacking plates. His arms were nearly long enough to clear the entire table without moving from his spot. “I always wash the dishes,” he said. “In my family we all have a job and that’s my job.”

  “Marry him,” Nick said to his sister, and, saying good night to the rest of us, was out the door.

  While the rest of the Hobarts all disappeared, I picked up the glasses and followed Vlad into the kitchen. He put his stack of plates in the sink and reached behind me to shut the door. He waited a minute, making sure their footsteps had all retreated. “How long?” he said.

  “How long what?” I asked him. I was thinking it was a question about Evie: How long had she cried for? How long had she missed him?

  “How long have you been invisible?”

  I turned to him, this giant boy. I was dumbstruck, gobsmacked. It was more surprising than the gun. “A month maybe.” My voice was just a whisper. “Somewhere around a month.”

  “And none of them know?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “I was going to say something to Evie but then I thought I shouldn’t. If she had known, she would have told me. She sort of tells me everything.”

  For a minute I couldn’t find my words and I thought, Now I am invisible and mute. I swallowed. “I appreciate you not telling her.” He was just a kid and, I would have thought until about thirty seconds ago, a sort of average kid, who had figured out the thing that even the people who loved me most in the world had failed to grasp. “How did you know?”

  “Well,” he said, looking puzzled at my simplemindedness, “I can’t see you.”

  “Sure, but no one can see me.”

  “And my mom’s invisible.”

  “You’re kidding me!”

  “It’s going on a year now. It took my dad almost two weeks to notice and she was so mad at him by the time he did that she wanted to get a divorce. I mean, from where I’m standing it looks like you’re being really nice about this.”

  “I have my bad days,” I said. “How long did it take you to notice your mom was gone?”

  “I was away at school and so they called and told me on the phone. I mean, I guess I don’t know what it’s like to not be looking for it because when you know what to look for, it’s like, just so obvious. I mean, you don’t have a head. You’d think they’d catch on to that.”

  I had to agree. “You would.”

  He looked back at the closed door as if he imagined they were all standing outside listening. He lowered his voice. “So why don’t you just tell them? Wouldn’t it be better for everybody?”

  “It would,” I said. “I know it would. But after a while it just becomes a point of pride. You start to wonder just how far it can go.”

  He hit his forehead with his hand. “That’s exactly what my mom said!”

  “Are your parents okay now?”

  He teetered his head back and forth. “Honestly? If you wouldn’t mind my telling them about you I think it would really help a lot. We live on a farm, you know. We’re sort of isolated. The town is real small, not like it is here. There aren’t any other invisible women. I mean, we haven’t seen them.”

  I leaned over and patted his hand. “You have your mom call me,” I said. “If you can just hold off telling Evie for a little while I’ll tell your mom anything she wants to know.”

  Vlad gave me a small smile of genuine happiness at the thought that he might have saved his own relationship and his parents’ marriage in a single day. He turned on the water and started rinsing off the plates. “She’d really like that. I’ve changed my major to chemistry since this happened to her. I’m going premed. I’m going to figure this thing out. I know that might sound stupid to you, like I’m just talking, but I promise it’s really important to me. A woman becomes invisible and nobody seems to care one way or the other. But it’s my mom, you know, and now it’s Evie’s mom. I’m going to do something about it.”

  “I’d be very grateful,” I said. There was a lump coming up in the back of my throat, a big, invisible lump.

  “It was you who stopped that bank robbery today, wasn’t it?”

  Nothing got by this kid. I couldn’t believe him. “It was me.”

  He nodded. “My mom has done some crazy stuff since she went invisible. It scares my dad to death. He’s always saying she’s gone fearless.”

  I started putting the plates in the dishwasher, thinking how glad I would be if Evie and Vlad eloped tonight, giving me an invisible in-law. “Yes,” I said. “It’s just like that.”

  ten

  The first thing I did the next morning was call my editor at the paper, not an e-mail or a text, I actually picked up the phone. Right off the bat, Ed asked me what my angle was for next week’s gardening column. “I’ve been thinking about mulching,” he said.

  “Forget the leaves,” I said. “I’ve got news. I was at First United Bank yesterday.”

  “You went there after the robbery?” he said. I could hear his chair creak as he shifted his weight forward to sit up. Ed only sat up if he was interested.

  “I was there while it was being robbed. I was on the floor.”

  “And you didn’t think to call me until today?” His voice displayed a rare burst of emotion. “You should have called me while you were still on the floor.”

  “The bank robber wasn’t letting us file stories,” I said flatly.

  “Clover, it’s tomorrow already. This is a great pitch but you know it’s a day late.”

  “Cut me a break here, Ed. I’ve been writing gardening columns and book reviews for years now. I’ve lost my sense of timeliness. At least let me write an op-ed. Let me write something about how long it’s been since a bank was robbed in this city. I can make a link between bank robberies and the tight economy. I can talk about what it feels like to lie on a cold marble floor, to see the gun. You know this story has enough local interest to sustain two days of coverage. You could run it on the first page and sell papers off the stands.”

  There was a long pause. Ed was forty years old, he had three kids, he put in fourteen-hour days. Ed was interested in selling papers. It was how he kept his job. “Six hundred words.
And it’s in by three.”

  “Twelve hundred words,” I said. “And I have until five.”

  “Eight hundred words, maybe nine hundred depending on how the layout goes. But I’ve got to have it by four. And talk about the robber. People are saying he just threw the guns away and nobody can figure that out. The public defender isn’t letting him make a statement to the press but at least tell me what the whole thing looked like.”

  “Sold,” I said.

  I hung up the phone and for once was glad that no one could see me, the smile on my face was big enough to crack my head in half. In the years I had mourned the loss of a sustaining stream of book reviews and the job of being an editor myself, I had forgotten that I had once been a reporter. I’d been wasting my time trying to dream up interesting things that could be done with leftover poinsettias. In all my longing for a comeback, I had simply failed to remember the person I used to be.

  Arthur had already gone to work, and Nick and Evie and Vlad were still asleep. If I was here when they woke up, I would spend the morning making pancakes and scrambling eggs. But I had fed and walked the dog, and as far as I was concerned everybody else was on their own. I dressed for maximum coverage, put my computer in a bag, and drove to the library.

  If I had any problem it was keeping myself to nine hundred words. The minute I opened my computer I fell into typing. I was dying to write! Maybe it was a little odd to write a first-person account of how I lay trembling on the floor with the rest of the terrified patrons while the gunmen mysteriously threw their firearms in the air. It was the kind of thing that would have presented a problem to my journalistic sense of ethics when I was twenty-four, but at fifty-four it didn’t even strike me as a speed bump. I sailed ahead. The truth, we realize as we get older, is a very complicated pastiche of feelings and facts, of what can and cannot be said. It’s different for everyone. I read the piece over and then read it again. I polished, trimmed, improved my verbs. I checked my word count seventeen times, sighed, and pushed back from my desk. I knew I was completely and irrefutably finished but it was only eleven o’clock. If I turned it in now, Ed would think I wasn’t working hard enough, and then he’d spend the rest of the day making me rewrite things that didn’t need to be rewritten. I saved the file, went back to the Internet, and pulled up Dexter-White.

  It was as if my mind had suddenly come to life. How could a drug company knowingly manufacture a series of drugs that, when taken in combination, rendered women invisible, and how could they fail to do anything about it? How was it that all along I had been seeing myself as a victim of the industry instead of as an angry reporter poised to take the system down? Had I really needed only a simple comment from Nick to point me in the right direction over dinner? As it turned out, I was as capable of missing the obvious as the rest of them.

  I spent the next two hours sailing through case reports on drugs, reading the never-ending fine print of possible side effects (surprise! one was missing), and scouring the profiles of Dexter-White executives. Typing in “Dexter + White + invisible” led me nowhere. Invisible women around the country were out there working alone in the dark. How had we failed to coalesce into a movement? How had no one taken us seriously? Maybe because we were timid and hurt, having already spent so many years feeling invisible before the truth of the matter kicked in. If we didn’t have the starch to tell our own families that no one could see us, then how could we be ready to tell the world?

  As I put together a list of questions I would ask the Dexter-White chemist if he would ever stop canceling on us, I started to yawn. It hadn’t been a very good night’s sleep. I’d spent most of the night staring at the ceiling, thinking about what I was going to write if Ed would only let me. But now I was on to a story that could be much bigger than our local paper, a story that had comeback written all over it. I was thinking like a reporter again, and to that end I needed some caffeine. I left the library, stopping to lock my computer in the trunk of the car, and walked down the block to a little coffeehouse called the French Press, where young people drank lattes and wrote poetry and tried to pick each other up. I was placing my order for a regular cup of coffee when I heard a brief, familiar laugh behind me. I turned around and saw my son sitting on a high stool hunched over his computer. Miller Kempton was beside him. Right or wrong, I made my decision almost instantly. Leaving my coffee, I went back to my car, stripped off my clothes, hid the keys on top of the back left tire, and headed back to the French Press.

  After Nick graduated from Oberlin he taught American history to middle school students at a Chicago public school, but then the cutbacks came and the first hired were also the first to go. He sent out applications to just about every school that had an opening, private and public, Arizona to Maine, but he found himself in an ocean of well-qualified, unemployed teachers. Finally, he had to give up his apartment and leave Chicago. I knew Nick wanted to have his own life again, to get out of the house and find a job. I didn’t see how my asking him too many questions would be helpful. But I was curious, and I was invisible. Sometimes I used my powers for the greater good of my fellow citizens, and other times I squandered them by snooping on my children. I was only human. I picked up my coffee, which had remained mercifully undisturbed in the spot where I left it, and put in a straw so I could lean over and sip just behind the boys.

  “I still think we should go tonight,” Miller said.

  “That’s because you want to get drunk first,” Nick said. “I’m not doing this drunk and I’m not doing it in the dark.”

  Whatever it was, good for Nick.

  “Here’s a job,” Miller said. “Dog grooming. We could groom dogs.”

  “Doesn’t that require a little bit of skill?”

  Miller shook his head. “We could practice on Red. We’ll give flattops to all the poodles.”

  Nick tapped on the curser and rolled the screen down, looking for opportunities. “Maybe we should just resign ourselves to the army.”

  My heart froze in my chest.

  “A fine idea, except that there’s a war going on,” Miller said.

  “Right,” Nick said. Then his hands came off the keyboard and for a moment his nose went into the air. He turned behind him and looked right at me, then he scanned the room.

  “What?” Miller said.

  “I thought my mother was here.” He shook his head, pushing the thought aside, but in another minute he got up and went to sniff the hair of a pretty girl who was sitting two stools away. She was reading an Italo Calvino novel and drinking a cappuccino. Her look was one of surprise but not complete displeasure.

  “Is there something I can help you with?” she said.

  Nick shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was distracted by your perfume.”

  “I’m not wearing perfume.”

  “Maybe I was distracted by your shampoo then.” He stood up. “Then again I may be losing my mind.”

  “That’s a shame,” she said, and gave him a pleasant smile before going back to her book.

  “I really do think I’m cracking up,” Nick said when he came and sat down next to Miller.

  “Some girl in here is definitely wearing your mom’s perfume but I don’t think that means we can just start sniffing all of them. Besides, ‘You smell like my mother’ isn’t exactly the greatest pickup line I’ve ever heard. Now how about this for you,” Miller pointed to the screen. “Legal secretary. I mean that would at least be a good warm-up for law school.”

  “Except I’m never going to get into law school because all the other unemployed history teachers in America have already applied and the ones that get in will someday become unemployed lawyers and those are the people who will fill out the five hundred applications to be a legal secretary.”

  Nick had applied to law school?

  “Man, you are in a very negative place.”

  Nick hit Miller lightly on the arm. “Come on, let’s get this thing done.”

  “Really?”

  �
�Stone cold sober in the light of day.”

  Miller looked at his watch. “I’ll be interested to see if the tattoo parlor has a lunch crowd.”

  “Are you out of—” I clapped my hand over my mouth. Nick stopped and looked again at the shampoo girl, who in turn looked at him and shook her head.

  “This place is giving me the creeps,” Nick said, and they were out the door.

  Idiot boys! Needless to say, I stayed close as they loped down the street, looking so much like a couple of fresh-faced kids off to shoot hoops. When they opened the back door of the car to put in their computers and their backpacks, I jumped inside.

  “Who told you about this place, anyway?” Nick asked.

  His car was messy. There were soda bottles on the floor of the backseat, CDs without cases sliding around, a green hooded sweatshirt that belonged to his father rolled up in a ball, an empty sack from White Castle. I was getting irritated about all of it.

  “A guy I knew in high school used to work there. His tattoos were good.”

  “Did he get them there?”

  Miller shrugged. “I don’t know. This isn’t the kind of thing where you can just check Angie’s List. It’s a tattoo parlor, I mean, I doubt they’re rated.”

  They were both over twenty-one. Weren’t they free to do what they wanted to do with their own bodies? No. The answer was certainly no. I had made one of those bodies myself and I wasn’t about to let a temporary moment of stupidity mar it for the rest of its days on this earth. I was still the mother, after all. That counted for something.

  “I swear to you I smell it again,” Nick said.

  Miller leaned back and sniffed. “Me too. It must be on you somewhere. Maybe your mom got some perfume on your wash or on your pack or something.”

  Nick thought about this for a minute. “I guess. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  Miller sniffed again. “I’ve got to say it though, your mom smells fine.”

  “Drop it,” Nick said.