Calling Invisible Women

by Jeanne Ray

  “Speaking of which,” Jo Ellen said. “What’s the update on the meeting with the Dexter-White chemist?”

  “Could you let her finish talking first?” someone said.

  “It’s okay,” Roberta said. “It’s sort of emblematic of what I’m talking about.”

  “He keeps changing the date,” Rosemary said. “He says it’s because he’s busy but I think he’s nervous.”

  “Well, just be sure to keep on him and give us the updates. Roberta, I’m sorry,” Jo Ellen said. “You were saying.”

  Roberta began again. “My husband and my kids didn’t notice I was missing. I’d ask them to pick stuff up for me at the store and they’d do it. I was home all the time and the house was really clean and the food was great and everything was washed and ironed and put away. I brushed the dog a lot. I think they knew that something was different but as far as they were concerned it was better. They were happy, so, you know, end of story.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Gilda said. She leaned in the direction of the voice. “That’s horrible. I mean, I know Clover’s family didn’t notice she was missing but I thought it was just them, they’re busy, they’re obtuse, whatever. Are you telling me this sort of willful insensitivity is endemic to the entire situation?”

  “Pretty much,” someone said.

  Gilda shook her head. We could all see on her face the pain she felt for Roberta, for all of us, and seeing it felt good. Maybe we’d needed one regular woman at the meetings all along. It was so satisfying to have a visual to go along with the story. “Forgive me,” Gilda said. “I’ve interrupted you, and I want to hear your story. What happened next?”

  “I had so much time on my hands I started reading the entire paper, the business section, the sports section, the want ads.”

  “The want ads!” we all said together.

  “And by the way, Clover, great piece about the bank robbery. We were all glad you were okay.”

  “Thank you,” I said, feeling excited. I hadn’t seen the paper before I left.

  “She was great!” Gilda said in a stage whisper.

  Roberta went on. “And that’s how I found my way to this group. The first time I came I took the bus. I wore a wig and sunglasses that were so big they would have embarrassed Jackie Onassis. I can hardly believe I was ever that person. Now look at me—I’m talking, I’m naked, and all of it’s thanks to you. The women in this room literally saved my life. And now, because of the great example set by Lila Robinson, I’m back on the job as a nurse. They don’t know it yet but I’m there flushing out IV lines, rubbing people’s feet. It reminds me of why I wanted to be a nurse in the first place. I wanted to help people, not make sure that I was meeting the requirements of the charge nurse. Of course I’d like to get paid again—”

  “We’ll get paid again,” Lila said, and ran her Kleenex through the air.

  “I think that’s right,” Roberta said. “So, thank you, everybody.”

  “Thanks, Roberta,” we said.

  Gilda took my Kleenex and wiped her eyes. “I can’t believe you women. You’re so brave. Why aren’t you on Oprah?”

  “We don’t make good television,” Laura Worthington said.

  “Anybody else?” Jo Ellen asked.

  A Kleenex went up right away. “It’s Patty Sanchez.”

  “Hi, Patty.”

  “I wanted to tell you that I’m taking piano lessons. A couple of weeks ago I called a woman in our neighborhood who gives lessons in her house. My boys used to take from her when they were younger. I just called her up and said, hey, I want to take piano lessons and I’m invisible. Are you okay with that?”

  “You just told her straight out?” Gilda said with an enormous smile. Gilda had the loveliest smile. “Good for you!”

  “Why not? She was interested, you know, she had some questions about what had happened. She wanted to know if it was contagious.”

  “Are you serious?” I asked. “What did she think, it rubs off?”

  “People are ill-informed,” Patty said. “That’s our fault. If invisible women had a higher profile—”

  “If we were more visible,” Alice said.

  Everybody laughed. “Whatever,” Patty said. “I’d rather that she just said what was on her mind instead of making up some excuse about why she couldn’t give me lessons. And I’m telling you, the piano is great. I don’t know if it’s because I’m older or it’s because I’m invisible but I feel no sense of embarrassment whatsoever. I come home and I practice for hours, I don’t care what it sounds like. I mean, this is my chance. When else would I ever learn how to play the piano?”

  There was a nice round of applause for Patty.

  “Is that everybody?” Jo Ellen said. Jo Ellen was one to wrap things up on time.

  My Kleenex shot up. “Hi, I’m Clover.”

  “Hi, Clover!”

  “I’ll make this quick but I wanted to tell you I overheard my son talking to his friend in a coffee shop yesterday. His friend is Gilda’s son. It was a complete coincidence that I was there but they were talking about getting tattoos.”

  The group let out a moan, the collective heartbreak of all suburban mothers.

  “So I got in the backseat of his car and I rode to the tattoo parlor with them and I busted it up. I sent them home.”

  How? How? How? Everyone wanted to know.

  “She just went in there and told them to leave,” Gilda said, the color rising in her cheeks at the memory. “She didn’t care. She saw what needed to be done and she did it. This woman is brave, I’m telling you, she’s a hero. All that stuff you read in the paper about the bank robbers throwing their guns away, they didn’t throw their guns away. I was right there and she’s the one who did it.” She pointed in my general direction. “My friend Clover Hobart took them down.”

  And with that the invisible women commenced to holler and cheer and carry on to such an extent that finally a manager came and opened the door of the Magnolia Room and there he found nothing but Gilda and fourteen empty chairs arranged into an imperfect circle. “I got some good news,” she said, holding up her cell phone to him, then she stood up and walked out of the room.

  After the meeting, Gilda had an appointment to get her teeth cleaned, one more ritual of human upkeep in which I could no longer participate. I went home to find the boys in the kitchen, both of their laptops open, both of them pecking away. Vlad was wearing a homemade sweater with a homemade scarf, even though it was hardly that cold in the house. All he was missing to secure a role in La Bohème was a cap and a pair of fingerless gloves. I had a feeling he meant to protect us from the bruise on his neck. “Where’s Evie?” I asked.

  They both looked up at me and gave a very similar shake of their heads. I looked at the clock. It was just past nine. “So what are you doing up?”

  “Do you know how many lawsuits Dexter-White has pending against them?”

  “No idea,” I said, pouring myself a cup of coffee. Good boys, they had made an entire pot.

  “If we could get all the invisible women together,” Nick said, looking at his screen, “we could have the class-action lawsuit of the century. Of course you’d have to wait until I was finished with law school so you could let me file it. How many of you are there anyway?”

  “Again, no idea. Just remember, I’m not looking to get rich off this. I’d just like to be able to see my own hands again, and to keep it from happening to other women in the future.”

  “We’ve decided to divide up the research,” Vlad said. “I’m looking into the medical aspects and Nick is taking the legal. I called my mom and she didn’t know anything about Dexter-White, but I got a list of all the pills she’s taking.” He held up a piece of paper. I didn’t need to read it.

  “Premacore, Ostafoss, and Singsall,” I said.

  Vlad’s mouth dropped open but he did not speak.

  “Chances are she also had an injection of Botox at some point but she might not have mentioned that.”

&nb
sp; “You did Botox?” Nick said.

  “Once,” I said. “And keep your judgment to yourself.”

  “We’ve got to find someone in the company,” Vlad said, visibly shaken. “Somebody on the inside who’ll talk to us.”

  “We’ve found him, or at least Rosemary found him. He’s agreed to meet with us but he keeps getting cold feet, changing the date. We’re sort of in a holding pattern.”

  “A holding pattern,” Nick said. “Since when do you sit around waiting for your sources to call you back? I thought you were a reporter.” He slid the paper across the table and there I was, below the fold but still, front page. “Nice article, by the way.”

  I picked up the paper. THE VIEW FROM THE FLOOR, by Clover Hobart. It felt pretty good.

  “If you know somebody there I think we should go,” Vlad said.

  “We should go?”

  “Sure,” Nick said. “We’re in this together.”

  I kissed my son on the top of the head and then for good measure kissed Vlad as well. “As much as I appreciate it, this is a job for invisible women. If this source is any good we don’t want to scare him off. You be the lawyer, you be the medical researcher, and I’ll be the reporter. That said, I want you to give me all the information you’ve got.”

  “My mom is just going to freak when she hears about this,” Vlad said under his breath.

  Called to action by the pressure of two boys, I dug through my yoga bag until I found the phone number of Irene’s former student Jane in New York. I told her who I was and explained the situation. “Any chance you’re visible now?” I asked hopefully.

  “I’m as clear as an autumn night,” she said. “Who’s the guy from Dexter who said he’d meet with you?”

  “I think his name is Wilhelm something. He talked to Rosemary in our group.”

  “I don’t know any Wilhelms, but I sure wouldn’t sit around waiting for him to agree to meet with you at the Cheltenham Target. Come on up and I’ll take you out there. If there’s any opportunity with these people you have to go for it.”

  “Take us to Target?”

  “Heavens, no. I’ll take you to Dexter-White. The place is huge. E-mail me his last name and I’ll figure out where his office is. The element of surprise is always our greatest asset. You’re better off to just storm the castle, catch him off guard. Terrorizing the people at Dexter-White is starting to become my full-time job. Frankly, I could use a fresh perspective.”

  “When would be a good time for me to come?” I said. “I’ll have to check with Rosemary too.”

  “Tomorrow,” Jane said. “I was going out there anyway. Try to come in as early as possible. I can pick you up at the airport in Philadelphia.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “We should get moving on this,” Jane said. “Any Dexter-White employee who is willing to talk to an invisible woman isn’t somebody who’s going to be around there for long. Let me know what time your flight comes in. I’ll be waiting at baggage carousel three. I’ll be the invisible woman wearing red pants.”

  After Jane had hung up I sat there holding the phone for a few minutes. I had been waiting to go to Philadelphia for weeks now and yet tomorrow felt entirely too soon. It was like finding out the test had been rescheduled and I hadn’t been studying.

  “Tomorrow?” Rosemary said when I called her.

  “It wasn’t my idea.”

  “Tomorrow isn’t possible. I have work in the morning and then Katy has her big orthodontist appointment in the afternoon. It’s a major tightening. She’s been dreading it for weeks.”

  “Then she’d probably be thrilled if you put it off.”

  “These appointments are impossible to come by,” she said. “And then tomorrow night we have Mark’s parents’ anniversary party. We haven’t told them I’m invisible yet so I wouldn’t have a good excuse about why I wasn’t there.”

  I could make up good excuses for her all day long. “Which anniversary?” I asked.

  “Fifty-second. Why does it matter?”

  “Because you can skip the fifty-second anniversary, just not the fiftieth. Anyway, we’ll probably be back in plenty of time for the party.”

  “I shouldn’t risk it,” Rosemary said.

  I sighed. Who knows, maybe I was relieved. “Okay, I’ll just tell her it’s going to have to be another day. Tomorrow is very short notice. Look at your calendar and tell me—”

  “No!” Rosemary said, a little too loud. “It has to be tomorrow. Jane’s right. We’ve put this off too long as it is.”

  She was happy about it! Or at the very least she was relieved. “You want me to go alone? Rosemary, he’s your contact. You’re the one he’s talked to.” I was letting my mind get ahead of me. Go around airport security by myself? Get on the plane naked?

  “I only talked to him one time. He doesn’t care if it’s me, and even if he did it’s not as if he’d be able to tell us apart. And you’ll have Jane with you. There will still be two of you going.”

  “Not on the plane.”

  “Are you afraid to fly?”

  “Well, I wasn’t the last time I did it, but the last time I had a ticket and a suitcase. Have you gone on a plane by yourself since you turned up missing?”

  There was a long silence. “Look,” she said finally. “Jo Ellen assigned me to the Dexter-White committee and then I turned out to be pretty much the only one on it. I’m a librarian. I have good research skills. I didn’t lose my job because nobody cares whether or not librarians are invisible. But I’m not like you. I get nervous when I have to ask people questions. To tell you the truth, every time Wilhelm’s put me off I’ve been thrilled. I keep telling him, Great! Thursday was no good for me either! Even if I could go with you it would probably be a mistake. I could just wind up taking the whole thing down.”

  That was how it came to be decided that I would go to Philadelphia alone with no clothes, no ticket, no money, identification, or phone. Oddly enough, the part that worried me the most was the idea of not having a book. I had sat beside people who boarded planes with nothing to read and I couldn’t imagine how they had made such a serious mistake.

  “I’ll e-mail you all my files,” Rosemary said before we hung up. “That way you’ll know everything I know.”

  I, in turn, forwarded all of those files to Nick and Vlad, who were putting together essential fact sheets that I would memorize this afternoon and then leave behind. I felt like a spy being stripped of her former identity. I was going out into the cold.

  “Explain to me one more time why I’m not coming with you,” Gilda said on the way to the airport.

  “Well, for one thing you don’t have a ticket.”

  “Neither do you.”

  “And for another thing, you’re not invisible. What are you going to do, fly to Philadelphia to sit in the car all day?”

  “If it would be helpful.”

  I loved Gilda with all my heart because she would do it and think it was a perfectly sensible way to spend her afternoon. Nick and Vlad had also volunteered but it was a 6:30 a.m. flight. I didn’t tell them that. I left while they were sleeping.

  “What are you going to do if you get into trouble?”

  “I’m going to call you collect. You’ll have your phone on all day and you’ll answer any number.” We had gone over this a million times last night.

  “And what if you can’t find a phone?”

  “I’ll steal somebody’s cell phone.” This we decided would be okay as long as I also put it back. “Could we stop talking about what could go wrong? Nothing’s going to happen to me.”

  “Didn’t you read The Constant Gardener? Pharmaceutical companies can be the most dangerous places in the world.”

  “They’d have to find me first,” I said as she pulled into the “Departing Flights” lane in front of the airport. “This is it.”

  “I’ll be right here at seven ten tonight unless I hear otherwise.” Gilda leaned over and hugged me, even though she usually wouldn’t
get near me when I was naked. “Be safe,” she said.

  I had come to the airport an hour before my flight just the way we’re always told to, but it turns out that an entire hour is only what’s necessary for visible people. I knew that flying was a drag but it wasn’t until I could step outside the vastly complicated and demeaning process of trying to board a plane that I could see how bad it was. These people were herded like sheep, snapped at, admonished, redirected, bossed around like a bunch of little sisters, and they took it all mindlessly for fear that standing up for oneself in the name of good manners and common decency would get them booted from the line. The lines! They were everywhere, and what was asked of the travelers was constantly changing. After they stood in line at the confusing kiosk to get a boarding pass, they trudged off to another line where they held up their ID and boarding pass to show they were fit to enter the line where their ID and boarding pass would actually be scrutinized. It was only then that they were made to unpack their bags, remove computers and liquids, take off their belts, empty their pockets, remember their boarding passes, remove their cardigans, put their shoes in a bin, and then wait with enduring patience until they were called to walk through a scanner that lit up the fillings in their teeth. After that someone patted them down. It was a horror to behold. I resolved on the spot that if I could ever be seen again I was giving up flying.

  Me, I swam upstream, went down the hallway marked “No Entrance” through which the arriving passengers poured, sailed past the guard who watched only for the people who might be coming in the opposite direction. I went to the bookstore and read the covers of all the magazines. I had so much time! I found a twenty-dollar bill on the floor and ran to put it in the pocket of an Indian woman who was cleaning the bathrooms. I tickled a baby who was crying in her stroller while her mother chased down a pair of three-year-old twins. I picked up paper cups and put them in the trash bin. I tried to make myself useful.