Calling Invisible Women

by Jeanne Ray

  Following the advice of my invisible sisters, I was the last person to board the plane, which, mercifully, did not appear to be full. I slipped in just as the flight attendant began to wrestle the door closed. There was an empty seat in first class, a seat I was just about to take, when the man next to it folded up his jacket and settled it there like a precious object. I wasn’t above sitting on someone’s jacket but it seemed possible there could be reading glasses or a phone or something else that could prove to be both breakable and uncomfortable. I headed back to coach.

  I made a quick appraisal of the available seats and who was sitting beside them and what they were reading and whether or not they seemed likely to dump a large bag in my lap after takeoff. By process of elimination I took 7B. The woman in 7A was maybe a few years older than I was, nicely dressed in a pearl gray suit and a large, lavender scarf, and possessed the winning combination of the new Philip Roth novel and a copy of Dwell, either one of which I would have been happy to read over her shoulder. I didn’t fasten my seat belt, but honestly if the plane went down I didn’t think it would do me all that much good anyway. All in all I had to say the entire process of flying seemed much simpler than I had thought it would. Once we were airborne I considered making a quick trip to Paris while I was in a position to do it so easily. What a treat it would be to skip the passport line and the customs check! I hadn’t been to Paris since my junior year of college. Still, Arthur and I had always said we’d go together.

  My seatmate opened her copy of Dwell and I leaned to the side as much as good manners would allow. There was an article about bamboo bathtubs that I found both dazzling and ridiculous.

  “Invisible?” the woman whispered.

  I sat up straight.

  “Maybe I’m crazy.” Her voice was very quiet. “But I’m a pretty good judge.”

  “Yes you are,” I said.

  She nodded her head. “I thought so. It’s funny, all the seats on the plane you could have chosen.”

  “I wanted to read that Roth novel,” I said.

  “This will be easier if we change seats.” She stood up and raised the armrest and I slipped over by the window. She put the novel in my lap, not that I ever opened it. “There,” she said. “Now it doesn’t look so much like I’m a crazy person talking to an empty seat.”

  “How did you know?” I whispered.

  “I used to be invisible myself,” she said. “After a while you have a very clear sense of when you’re in the presence of your own kind.”

  “You came back!” I said, my heart leaping in my chest. “I can’t believe it. I don’t think any of us have ever met—”

  “We’re so disorganized.” The woman shook her head. “There needs to be some central clearinghouse of information. Invisible women need to get their act together.”

  “How did it happen? What did you have to do?”

  She shrugged. “I wish I could tell you but the whole thing is somewhat of a mystery. I did a lot of things all at once. I took advice from a lot of different people. I took a sabbatical from work and gave myself over to this. I told people I was trying to find myself and let them draw whatever conclusions they wanted. I spent three months in an ashram in India, I drank a lot of wheatgrass juice, I took high doses of vitamin D, I went to Duke and did the rice diet, I tried steroids. I was very serious about coming back.”

  “So is it over? Are you visible all the time now?”

  For a moment she looked uncomfortable and I said I hoped my question wasn’t too personal. She shook her head. “It isn’t that,” she said. “It’s just that once you’ve been invisible you understand that it could come back anytime. You never have complete confidence in your own matter. I used to flicker in and out, and then every once in a while I’d do a slow fade. In the last six months I’ve been pretty stable, knock wood.” She looked around her seat. No wood. “Of course, who knows what we do in our sleep or when we’re not paying attention.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I wish I had made a more controlled study of coming back. I wish I had tried things one at a time so I had a better idea of what worked. For all I know it could have been the ashram but maybe that didn’t kick in for several months after the fact. I was taking the vitamin D the whole time, my doctor suggested that. I also think there’s a chance it’s just different for all of us. I mean my way back isn’t necessarily going to be your way back. The stewardess is coming. Are you going to want a drink?”

  “No, thanks.”

  When the flight attendant came by the woman shook her head. “I lead a pretty careful existence now, no alcohol, no refined sugar, no meat. If I really understood what had brought me back I think I’d be less worried about it. If I knew what had made me invisible in the first place I’d be a lot less worried.”

  “Are you serious? You don’t know?”

  The woman shook her head. Her hair was short and silvered, very pretty. I wondered if she’d stopped dying it because she thought it might have been the dye. “You used to take three drugs all manufactured by Dexter-White.” I gave her the list. “At some point you also used Botox at least once.”

  She gasped so loudly that the man across the aisle leaned over and asked her if she was all right. “A little asthma,” she said, and coughed. “I have my inhaler.”

  “Are you saying that it’s just our little invisible women’s club at the Sheraton that’s figured this out?” I whispered.

  My seatmate was shaking a little and I reached over and rubbed some circles on her back. “Just try and breathe,” I said. “Do you really have asthma?”

  She shook her head. “Not unless I’m getting it right now.”

  “You’re not still taking those drugs, are you?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “I’m here, aren’t I? How did you figure this out?”

  “It happened before I joined the group. Everyone fills out a questionnaire when they start, except they do it later online since we don’t really have any means of dealing with papers at the Sheraton. There were questions about everything—shampoo, carpet cleaner, laundry detergent, proximity to power stations. The only consistent factor was the drugs. All of us took the exact same prescription drugs, the same dosage. This isn’t exactly a national study. The group has only been meeting for two years and on a day of perfect attendance we probably have fifteen members.”

  “I live in Princeton,” she said. “I never had a group. A couple of times I’d see somebody, or not see them, someone like you, and we’d talk, but invisible women are so hard to keep track of. Dexter-White is practically where I live.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m going there now. I’m meeting another invisible woman and we’re going to see what we can find out. I have a contact there, a chemist. I’m Clover Hobart, by the way.”

  “Erica Schultz.” She held out her hand and I took it. “Let me give you my card.”

  “No purse,” I said, “but I’ll write down all my information for you.”

  When the plane landed Erica came with me to baggage carousel three to meet Jane, who was easy to spot in her red pants. It’s pretty remarkable when you come up on an invisible woman wearing clothes. It seems almost impossible to believe she gets away with it without people screaming and pointing and running in terror but she does. Jane was thrilled to meet Erica and they exchanged information as well while the three of us stood around and talked, then Jane and I both hugged Erica goodbye and we stood there and watched her walk away.

  “It’s like meeting someone who escaped from Pompeii,” Jane said.

  thirteen

  “I’d go to an ashram,” Jane said to me in the car. “And I’d definitely take vitamin D and eat rice. I’m not entirely sure about the wheatgrass though. It’s like drinking a glass of your front lawn.”

  “Irene drinks wheatgrass,” I said.

  “Well, see, there you have it. Irene’s the toughest person I know. She was certainly the best yoga teacher I ever had. She could do anything.”

/>   “Sometimes I worry,” I said, but I didn’t finish my sentence. I was holding up my arm, looking through my hand at the other cars on the interstate.

  “What?”

  “Sometimes I worry that I like being invisible.” I waggled my fingers. Nothing. “I mean, there are parts of it that are awful and I really do need to tell my husband, but before it happened I felt like I had all of the burdens of no one paying attention to me and none of the benefits. Now I can see how many things you can do when no one is watching. It’s a huge freedom when you think about it.”

  “Well, it’s your freedom and you’re welcome to it,” Jane said. “I for one want to look in the mirror and see something.”

  “Sure, I understand that, but for maybe the first time since I was fourteen I don’t care what I weigh. I don’t care how my clothes look because most of the time I’m not wearing any. I don’t care that I’m getting older. I don’t feel bad about my neck. I feel like a source of good in the world. Everywhere I go I’m making things happen. My life hasn’t been like that in a long time.”

  “With all due respect,” Jane said, “I would urge you to file those feelings away because we are now pulling into the parking lot of Dexter-White. If they’ve got a pill to reverse the process, then you can choose not to take it.”

  “Then again, I may just be steeling myself against disappointment.”

  “If things don’t work out I’m going to call you every morning and ask you to repeat the whole speech to me. If I have to be invisible forever I’d like to be able to put a good spin on it.” Jane turned off the car and started to take off her clothes.

  I looked around. There was a sign right above us giving stern instructions as to who could and could not park here. “Um, do you think it’s okay to park in the employees’ lot?”

  “Sure,” Jane said, getting out of the car. “They never check.”

  The entrance to Dexter-White was through a security building that, while on a much smaller scale, was every bit as draconian as the airport. The few people in front of us were walking through a metal detector and having their briefcases searched. Visitors turned over their driver’s licenses and filled out copious forms regarding the nature of their appointment while the people they were meeting were called to come down and claim them. We sailed through without documentation.

  “What are they making in here, uranium?”

  “The security is the first clue as to what’s going on,” Jane said. “These people have secrets and they have enemies. If we were visible women with a drug-based complaint we couldn’t get past the first scanner. The public never makes it into this place. When I first found out Dexter-White was making us invisible I started calling them, trying to get an appointment to have someone sit down and talk to me. I couldn’t even get anyone to return my calls. Then one day I thought, just go, they aren’t going to be able to stop you.”

  “Have you talked to anyone?”

  “Lots of people. They can be very polite when you’re in the room but they never do anything. They figure I’m invisible so I won’t be able to bring them down.”

  As we walked through the campus of Dexter-White it reminded me of a movie set, a fake town that contained office buildings and houses and factories. People rode down the wide sidewalks in golf carts or walked in groups. They looked happy enough, and they looked smart.

  “It’s not the evil empire,” Jane said, “not exactly. They’re making a lot of good drugs, things people need. The problem is they’re making too much money. If they were willing to suspend just one of the drugs, say the Ostafoss or the Singsall, just until they got the interaction problem worked out, that would be enough. But that would mean admitting that something was wrong, which would mean lawsuits and who knows how many countless millions or even billions of dollars they’d have to spend to straighten things out. They won’t even run an ad saying not to take the medications together for fear of pointing out that they’ve known all along. Right now they’re finding that sticking their collective heads in the sand is the most cost-effective means of solving the problem.”

  The longer we walked the more I realized that people were taking golf carts because the place was so big. It would be impossible to walk from building to building, back and forth, all day if you worked here. “How did you ever figure this place out?”

  “It took a lot of time,” Jane said. “Especially since I couldn’t exactly ask for directions. I came back so many times that finally my husband and I decided just to move to New York so I could be closer. I didn’t love all the flying anyway. It’s okay when you get a seat but a lot of times you don’t. I was always winding up with a rug burn. Our kids have all moved away, and my husband works as a consultant so he could be just about anywhere. We talked about living in Philadelphia but it wasn’t right for us. I think I didn’t want to be too close to this place. Sometimes I wonder what those smokestacks are blowing into the air.”

  I looked up at a set of smokestacks we were passing but for the moment they appeared to be empty and cold. “What did you do, you know, before all this happened?”

  “I’m a painter.”

  “Oh,” I said, “that’s good. At least that’s not a job you’d have to give up.” I noticed the buildings were getting taller. I wondered if we were nearing the center of the Dexter-White universe.

  “But the weird thing is I have given it up. I’m so distracted by all of this. All I want to paint are invisible women and that doesn’t work. My art is pretty realistic.”

  “It would work,” I said, because I could see these paintings very clearly in my mind as she was talking. “You could paint family portraits where the woman wasn’t there. Or you could paint pictures of us just before it happened. The more I think about it, the more I see we were invisible then, too.”

  Jane was quiet for a long time and suddenly I was worried that one of us had wandered off. It was of vital importance that we not get separated. “Jane?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was just thinking about what you were saying. It’s good advice, actually. You remind me so much of Irene. People must tell you that all the time.”

  “No,” I said. “They don’t, but it’s nice to hear.”

  “Well, tell your husband he found a girl like his mother. What about you?” she said. “What did you used to do?”

  It was an overcast day, no rain but plenty of bluster. The bare little trees stood in neat rows, not a single leaf on the ground. “I was a reporter, but that was a while ago.”

  “A reporter!” she said. “My God, no wonder you like being invisible.”

  We went through the double doors of a large building where yet another security guard was checking the badges of people who had had to obtain ten different levels of clearance in order to make it into this building in the first place.

  “Leave nothing to chance,” I said to the guard as we walked past and he nodded his head, never wondering who might have spoken.

  “Wilhelm Holt is on the fifth floor,” Jane said. “It’s a keyed floor so we’ll need to wait for just a minute until someone else is going up.”

  It did turn out to be just a minute because two men in gray suits came down the hall and punched the button, the elevator operators of our dreams. The four us went in together, and one of the men held his key card to the sensor and punched the sixth floor.

  “Five, please,” Jane said.

  And without missing a beat he held his key up again and punched five. “Tony, I’ve got to say it, you smell good.”

  “Thanks,” the second man said, giving a small smile in the direction of his shoes.

  The door opened on five and we got out.

  “What in the world was that about?” I asked.

  “One day I was on the elevator for forty-five minutes trying to get to a keyed floor and no one was punching the right button. I don’t mind elevators but I was about to go out of my mind, so finally I just said it, asked for what I wanted, and no one blinked an eye. Nobody looks at
anybody in an elevator. And just for the record, it isn’t Tony who smells good, it’s you,” Jane said.

  We went down the hallway and when we were standing in front of Wilhelm Holt’s door I asked Jane if we had a plan.

  “Not exactly,” she said in a quiet voice. “At least he knows that invisible women exist, so he’s less likely to completely freak out. We’ll just ask some questions, see if we can figure out what he knows. Let’s try not to scare him.”

  We turned the knob and, very slowly, opened the door.

  Wilhelm Holt was a small man whose bald head was fringed in a half circle of gray curls. He was wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a white lab coat, which made me feel fondly toward him in a Pavlovian way. His office was not particularly large, there was a desk with one chair behind it and two chairs in front of it, a bookcase full of books, a smattering of framed diplomas nailed to the wall. He was working hard on something, and while he was extremely focused he was also vaguely aware that the door was now closing and someone was in the room. “You should knock,” he said.

  “We should,” Jane said, “but we didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves.”

  He put down his pen and looked up, and when he didn’t see anyone there he went back to his work without a single question to the air.

  “Dr. Holt?”

  “Yes?” he said, still working.

  “My name is Clover and this is Jane. We’re from the invisible women’s group in Ohio. You spoke to my friend Rosemary on the phone. You’ve e-mailed her as well. You made plans to meet her at a Target store in Cheltenham, I believe in the shampoo aisle.”

  I had his attention now. His head was up and he was looking around the room as if he believed he could find us if only he tried a little harder. “You shouldn’t have come here,” he said. He was pale, but still, he had a world more color than either of us.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “But you’ve already broken your engagement several times and, frankly, we got tired of waiting.”