Calling Invisible Women

by Jeanne Ray

And then Nick opened his eyes.

  “I got into the backseat of your car and I went with you to the tattoo parlor. You saw the door open.”

  “Mom,” he whispered, leaning forward. “Where’s your head?”

  Red barked twice and I scratched his ears. Nick watched the fur compress and then release beneath my fingers.

  “You came into my room,” he said. He was pale now. “You said, ‘Can you see me?’ ”

  “That was when it all started.”

  “That was,” he stopped and swallowed. “That was a long time ago.”

  “I should have told you.”

  “How did it happen? Did you get electrocuted? Did something horrible spill on you?”

  “It was nothing like that. I think it has to do with a pharmaceutical company called Dexter-White. I think I took the wrong combination of pills. I’m trying to figure that out.”

  “Does everybody know? Did you and Dad just decide not to tell me?”

  “Oh, Nicky, no, nothing like that.” I reached over and put my hand on his wrist and he stared at it like it was making him uncomfortable so I took it away. “Dad doesn’t know, Evie doesn’t know. I walk around all day and nobody knows. It’s kind of a remarkable thing. Nobody gets it.”

  “Dad doesn’t know?”

  “I kept thinking he would figure it out, and now there never seems to be a good time to tell him.”

  “He thought you were depressed. He talked to me about it.” Nick shook his head. “So who knows you’re …” Either he couldn’t find the word or he wouldn’t say it.

  “Gilda knows, and Grandma. They figured it out right away. I go to an invisible women’s group at the Sheraton. I’ve made some friends there. Do you remember Mrs. Robinson, your second-grade teacher?”

  “And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson?” Nick said, but he didn’t sing it.

  “She’s in the group. She’s invisible now.”

  Nick kept shaking his head back and forth like a slow pendulum and Red’s head went back and forth as he watched him. “Anybody else?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Because I’m feeling like a complete jerk and I guess I’m wondering who isn’t a jerk.”

  “It isn’t like that. I think that people just don’t look at one another anymore, or they look at girls like Evie or the shampoo girl whose hair you sniffed, but they don’t look at anybody else. I don’t want you to take this personally.”

  It was at that unfortunate moment our houseguest walked in the kitchen, mercifully without Evie, and assessed the scene in front of him, looking carefully at me and then at Nick. I made a face that said, Please, Vlad, keep your mouth shut. It did me no good.

  “You told him,” Vlad said.

  I put my head down on the table.

  “You told Vlad!” Nick said. “He’s in the house for one night and he knows you’re invisible?”

  Vlad reached behind him and closed the door. “It’s not what you’re thinking.”

  In half a second Nick was on his feet, his chair shooting out behind him. “Why don’t you tell me what I’m thinking, farm boy?”

  Vlad, who, it turned out, was the star of the Ohio State hockey team, held up his hands. “I swear to you, I felt the exact same way.”

  And that was it. Nick took a swing at him, punching Vlad, who was a great deal taller and wider, in the side of the neck. The connection made a dull, smacking sound. Vlad used the other half of the second to lunge for Nick but then he thought better of it. He stood back and chose not to kill my son and for the second time I thought how lucky my daughter would be to marry such a man. Unfortunately Red jumped off my lap and bit Vlad then, tearing his jeans but, thankfully, not the skin.

  “Red!” I shouted, and Red released. “His mother is invisible,” I said, grabbing the back of Nick’s shirt. “I didn’t tell him. He figured it out.”

  Vlad was rubbing the side of his neck. “Fuck,” he said, and then he said, “Excuse me.”

  “Go right ahead,” I said.

  “Oh, man,” Nick said, his head still turning back and forth like it would never stop. “Man, I’m sorry.”

  “I wanted to punch somebody when I first found out, but I didn’t do it. Don’t ever punch someone in the neck,” he said.

  “Does Evie know?” Nick said.

  Vlad held up his hands. “I didn’t tell her. I have no plans to tell anybody anything. Based on how this one went down I think it would be a good idea if everybody cooled it for the night. Let’s just digest what we know.” He looked at Nick. “If you’re okay with that.”

  “I think we should—” Nick stopped. “Never mind. I don’t know what I think.”

  Vlad opened the freezer and filled a dish towel with one enormous handful of ice cubes. “I’m going to let you two get back to your conversation. I’m going upstairs where it’s safe.”

  “What are you going to tell Evie about your neck?” Nick asked.

  “I’m going to tell her it’s a hickey,” he said, and went out the door.

  After that Nick and I just sat there looking at each other. It was easier for me than for him. “This is very weird,” he said.

  “It is,” I said. “Though not quite as weird as getting a tattoo that says ‘unemployed.’ ”

  “Seriously? Are we still even thinking of that?”

  “I am. I’ve had a while to live with the other part.”

  Nick laughed. It was a much-needed addition to my afternoon. “Everything’s perspective, right? This morning it seemed like a great idea to have the word unemployed carved into my shoulder. It meant I stood with the masses of the suffering. I was at one with the common man. Let’s just say that now I’m not feeling quite so sorry for myself.”

  “Because you’re feeling sorry for me?”

  Nick gave me a solemn nod even though he was still smiling. “Yes. Now I’m feeling sorry for you.”

  “Well, if it means you’re not getting a tattoo, I’ll take it. So are you going to tell Evie and Dad? Are you going to tell Miller?”

  “Who you tell is for you to decide. I’m not going to out my own mother, who, I would hope, has no plans to out me either. Dr. Dad doesn’t need to know we all went to the tattoo parlor today.”

  “I’d agree with that.”

  Nick yawned. “I think we should both take Vlad’s advice. I just want to cool it for a minute. This whole thing took a lot out of me.”

  I looked at the clock hanging over the kitchen sink. Somehow, amazingly, it was nearly four o’clock and I hadn’t given a thought to dinner. And then I realized I hadn’t given a thought to anything. “Nick, my article.”

  “What article?”

  “That’s why I was in the library today. I wrote an article for the paper about the robbery and I forgot to turn it in.” I ran out to the car and got my computer. The case was freezing and I wondered just how cold a computer could be before all your work disappeared.

  “Did you have anything to do with the robbery?” Nick asked in a hesitant voice.

  “I took the guy’s guns, that was all.”

  “Oh, thank God,” Nick said, and closed his eyes. “That’s so much better than you trying to rob the bank.”

  A footnote to the afternoon: Ed thought the piece was terrific. The phone rang twelve minutes after I sent it in. He said I could have all nine hundred words. “Send me stuff like this,” he said, “and I’ll put you in the paper every day.”

  “There isn’t going to be a bank robbery every day,” I said. “At least I hope there isn’t.”

  “But there’s always going to be something,” he said. “Trust me on that.”

  And I did.

  When Arthur came home that night I thought things were a little stilted, what with Vlad and Nick trying not to look at each other and looking entirely too much at me, and Evie rattling on about cheerleading and how they needed to get back to school tomorrow for practice, and Arthur, in the dark on everything, talking about a mother who refused to have
her baby inoculated against polio because she’d read somewhere online that polio had been eradicated. He shook his head. “People can be very, very stupid,” he said to the children. “This is a quality I urge you to avoid in yourselves.”

  “I’m working on it,” Nick said. “I’ve had some good guidance.”

  “I’ll get the dishes,” Vlad said, standing up and taking my plate.

  Evie put down her fork. “That isn’t fair,” she said. “You had to do the dishes last night. Nobody should have to do the dishes two nights in a row.”

  “Mom does the dishes every night, you moron,” Nick said to his sister. Vlad stopped and looked at Nick and in return Nick pressed his lips together and nodded his head. He got up from the table and began to fill his hands with plates. “Vlad and I will do the dishes.”

  “Then what am I supposed to do?” Evie said.

  “You can do the pots,” Nick said. “Come on. It’s going to be some kind of crazy fun.”

  There on the fence between curious and petulant, our daughter finally rose from her chair and hesitantly gathered up the glasses so that she could follow the boys into the kitchen. “That was a first,” Arthur said, the two of us suddenly alone at the table.

  “That Vlad’s a good influence,” I said.

  “Tell me something,” Arthur said, absently looking back toward the door to the kitchen. “Do you think they’ll ever leave?”

  “Vlad just got here, and Evie hasn’t been back any time at all.”

  Arthur shook his head. “That’s not what I’m talking about. I mean, do you think they’ll ever all leave at the same time?”

  “Is this about Nick finding a job?”

  Arthur tilted his head from side to side as if trying to fix on the true nature of his question. “Nick will find a job, but then Evie will graduate from college and she won’t find a job. She’ll move home and then she’ll miss Vlad too much and so he’ll move here too, and then Nick will lose his job and Evie will have a baby—”

  “What in the world has gotten into you?”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” my husband said. “We’ll love this baby. Our first grandchild.”

  “Arthur, seriously, did something happen at work today?”

  He sighed. “Sometimes I wish we had a little time alone.”

  I wished I could reach out and squeeze his hand. I thought of him in his office in front of his computer. I thought of the baby that was sick. I thought of how tired he must be some nights. “The children will grow up and move on and we will miss them terribly,” I said in a voice once used for bedtime stories. “We’ll look back on this conversation with disbelief thinking of how lucky we were to have them around.” I didn’t know if this was true but I hoped it would be true.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “We’ll miss them, but only when we have the time. We’ll be very busy.”

  “Doing what?” Arthur was still looking at the door, as if willing them to stay in the kitchen.

  “We’re going to get an old river barge and fix it up ourselves, a big old wooden boat. Then we’re going to take it up the Rhine.” This very cleverly alleviated my problems with sailing and seasickness.

  “How do we get it to the Rhine?” Arthur asked. He was smiling now.

  “Don’t ask a lot of questions. It spoils the story.” I lowered my voice. “We keep two bicycles on the barge and in the afternoons we tie up the boat and we ride to the little villages and buy bread and wine and cheese and then we have picnics on grassy slopes.” I had worked in the boat and the bikes but I felt that throwing in a plane might tip my hand.

  “We’ll write the children postcards and tell them how much we miss them,” Arthur said. “We’ll write to them from the grassy slopes.”

  “Exactly.” I was whispering. “But for now I’m going to take this opportunity to call it an early night. It’s felt like a very long day.”

  “Music to my ears,” Arthur said, pushing back from the table. “If I don’t go to bed right now I’m going to sleep on the dining room table.”

  But when we finally were in bed, the lights off and the door closed against children who were doing God only knew what downstairs, Arthur whispered to me in the darkness, “I had such a powerful feeling about you today. Feeling … that’s not exactly the right word. Maybe it was a premonition, except it wasn’t about something that was going to happen. It was just about you. It was like you were standing in the room with me.”

  “Hmm,” I said, because I had no idea what else to say.

  Arthur snuggled up behind me, kissed my neck. “It was a visitation. An extremely pleasant visitation. That’s what it was.”

  “I’ll try to come more often,” I said, and then, because the door to the bedroom was locked and the children never dreamed that such things happened anyway, I rolled over, suddenly less sleepy than I’d been, and kissed him.

  twelve

  There was a 7:30 meeting at the Sheraton on Tuesday mornings. Usually I didn’t go because it was too tricky to explain where I was off to so early (and you had to get there way before 7:30 if you wanted to get out of your clothes and up to the Magnolia Room on time), but this morning I really needed a meeting. Even if I was only going to sit and listen, I needed to be in the room with invisible women. I told Arthur his mother was having an early bird yoga class.

  “Give Mom a kiss for me,” he called out from the shower.

  Irene would never mind being my alibi.

  • • •

  I was just rushing, darting into the locker room to take off my clothes, darting down the hall and just making it into the elevator before the doors shut. All I was thinking about was the time, making the meeting, not being late. I had gone two floors before I realized I was standing next to Gilda. She was wearing a blazer and a skirt, which was for Gilda extremely dressed up.

  “Gilda?” I touched her shoulder and she jumped.

  “Jesus, Clover, you’ve got to stop scaring me.”

  My heart was racing. She was looking for me, something was wrong. “What happened?”

  “Nothing happened,” she said. The elevator dinged, fourth floor, and the doors slid open. “I just felt like going to a meeting.”

  “What do you mean you felt like going to a meeting? You’re not invisible.”

  “In a lot of ways I am,” she said philosophically, taking the lead down the hall toward the Magnolia Room. “My children don’t pay any attention to me. They’re off getting tattoos. My husband is having an affair with his iPhone.”

  I took her arm and pulled her aside. “You can’t come.”

  “Listen, Clover, you’re not the only person around here who feels in need of a little group support. We’re friends. We do things together. If this is good for you, then it’s good for me, too. Why would you have a problem with that?”

  “You know full well why I’d have a problem with it. If you didn’t think I’d have a problem, you would have asked me yesterday and we would have ridden over together. You wouldn’t be sneaking up on me in the elevator.”

  “I was in the elevator first,” Gilda said sharply, but then her face softened even though she was looking far over my left shoulder. “Be a pal. Let me come. I want to meet your invisible friends. I promise I won’t embarrass you.”

  I looked at Gilda’s watch. I had seen several Kleenex go past us already. “Okay,” I said finally. “It’s a really bad idea but okay. And next time promise me we’ll talk about it first.”

  Gilda nodded her head with great solemnity. “Promise.”

  We walked in together. I held her hand and held my breath. The invisible women were a friendly bunch, I told myself. A dozen Kleenex turned in our direction. I cleared my throat. “Everybody,” I said, trying to sound bright. “I brought a guest today. This is my friend Gilda.”

  There was nothing, not a flutter, not a wave. A floating coffee cup came to rest on the table.

  “Come on, guys,” I said, wanting to sound light instead of pleading. “She r
eally wanted to come. She’s my best friend. She’s been incredibly supportive of me.”

  “She isn’t invisible,” Jo Ellen said flatly.

  Gilda nodded her head. “I know that,” she said.

  “This is a meeting for—”

  “Invisible women,” Lila said, and her Kleenex went up in gentle greeting. “So what? If she’s a friend of Clover’s—”

  “The entire world is for them,” someone said, but I couldn’t figure out who it was. “Can’t we have a single place—”

  Gilda turned to me. I was still holding her hand. “This is more complicated than I thought.”

  “No it’s not,” Laura Worthington said, raising her Kleenex. “We were visible not that long ago and with any luck we’ll be visible again. If I come back to my old self I don’t want to think I’m going to be drummed out of the meetings.”

  “You could always be in the meetings,” Jo Ellen said. “Once invisible, always—” She stopped herself.

  We were all still standing there around the Danish table. “I’m sorry,” I said, my heart breaking a little. “I think we should go.”

  “Vote!” Alice said, her voice loud and clear. “All in favor of Clover’s friend Gilda being an honorary invisible woman, raise your Kleenex!”

  It didn’t happen all at once, but ultimately eleven Kleenex went up. Two stayed down.

  “A landslide,” Lila said. “Take a seat.”

  “Careful where you sit,” I whispered. “Not on a Kleenex.”

  Gilda was pale. She was cutting off the circulation in my fingers. “I want to shoot myself.” Her voice was very quiet.

  “I know,” Alice said to her. “But you’ll get over it.”

  “Now that we’ve had our excitement for the day,” Jo Ellen said, “does anyone have something they’d like to talk about?”

  After an awkward pause, Roberta spoke up. “Hi, I’m Roberta, and I’m an invisible woman.”

  “Hi, Roberta!” we said. Gilda joined right in.

  “I’ve been invisible for about seven months now and at first I have to say I was pretty depressed. I just stayed in the house all the time. I didn’t feel like I could drive the car. I didn’t want to go to the grocery store. I was fired from my job as a nurse, though really I don’t know if it was because I was invisible or because I was crying all the time. I just felt so embarrassed, like everyone was staring at me and I couldn’t explain what had happened because I still don’t understand it myself.”