Calling Invisible Women

by Jeanne Ray

  “How did you get in?”

  “We’re invisible,” Jane said. “Figure it out.”

  “I was interested in helping you, or helping your friend Rosemary.”

  “Terrific,” I said. “We’re interested in being helped. And don’t worry about Rosemary. Her daughter had an orthodontist appointment and she couldn’t get away. But invisible women are very interchangeable. You help one of us, you help all of us.”

  He screwed the cap back on his pen and sat for a moment. “I don’t like to be ambushed,” he said. “I’m not prepared for this.”

  “Take your time,” Jane said. “We can wait.”

  “It isn’t my fault that you’re invisible,” Dr. Holt said. Now the color was coming back to his cheeks. Our visit was inconvenient. He was getting upset with us.

  “It isn’t your fault,” I said calmly, “but it is your responsibility. You work for a company that manufactures three drugs that, when taken in combination, render women invisible, and despite our letters and phone calls and visits, no one is doing anything about it. We need to see those drugs taken off the market in order to protect other women, and we need someone, possibly you, to figure out how to get us back.”

  “No one is taking Singsall off the market. It’s America’s most-prescribed antidepressant.”

  “I’ve found being invisible very depressing,” Jane said. “But I don’t think I should take it anymore after what it’s done to me. You understand. Clover here is better adjusted than I am. She probably has the energy to follow you home and sit on your bed at night. We can do that, you know. We’re like lice, like bedbugs. Once you get invisible women in your life it’s almost impossible to get rid of them.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “Yes and no,” Jane said. “Really, I’m just being honest with you. Do I want to haunt you? No. I’m not a ghost. Will I haunt you if you make it absolutely necessary? Yes, I will, because even though I can see my children and my husband, I’d like for them to be able to see me. Something has to be done about this. This company has inflicted bodily harm on us and now they’re ignoring the damages.”

  “So why me?” he said, his voice full of disbelief. “Why are you coming after me?”

  “Well, in truth, it was because you were nice enough to take Rosemary’s call,” Jane continued. “No good deed goes unpunished, Dr. Holt. By talking to her you at least proved you know what’s going on. You’ve heard about invisible women and you know their fate as it is connected to Dexter-White. That saves us from having to shake down every chemist and doctor and researcher in this place who spends his days torturing mice and would have no idea what we’re talking about. Now if you want to turn over a list of your superiors, the people who you know are ruining our lives, we would be perfectly happy to bring our plague of locusts down on them, but you have to understand, we’re coming down on somebody in this place and it’s going to happen soon.”

  “I’m going to call security,” he said, picking up the phone. “This is harassment.”

  “You shouldn’t bother them,” Jane said. “Even in a room this small we are impossible to find.”

  “Are you married, Dr. Holt?” I asked. There were pictures of him with his arm around a woman who was a head taller then he was. Neither one of them was particularly attractive. They looked happy.

  “My personal life doesn’t figure into this,” he said.

  “Oh, you might as well tell us. It’s so easy to get into the backseat of your car and follow you home.” I picked up the picture and held it out to him. “This woman here,” I began. “Let’s just say for the sake of argument that she’s your wife. Let’s say she’s been through menopause and she’s being eaten alive by hot flashes so her doctor gives her some Premacore. After that the same doctor finds that her bone density isn’t quite what it should be and so he gives her some Ostafoss as well. But on top of that she’s a little depressed. Can you blame her? She’s just been through menopause, and you’re working all the time, so he gives her some Singsall, just a touch, just to brighten up the picture.”

  “Clover, you’re telling my story here,” Jane said.

  “All of these improvements come to your wife through the wonders of modern pharmacology. She didn’t pick this combination out for herself, it’s given to her. Then one morning you wake up and you’ve got nothing in your arms but a nightgown. Is that okay with you, Dr. Holt? Don’t you think your wife deserves some help? Or do you figure now that no one can see her she doesn’t have any rights? Would you sweep her under the rug, tell her not to make a fuss? She’s been poisoned, Dr. Holt, by your company. She’s been robbed of her very being. Are you going to tell her to go away?” I handed him the picture and he took it. He sat with it for a long time.

  “We’re working on it,” he said finally. “We’re not unaware.”

  “What are you working on?” Jane said.

  “An antidote.” Dr. Holt sighs and props the picture back up on his desk.

  “I thank you. I’d love one. But that isn’t good enough,” Jane said. “At least one of these drugs has to come off the market. You can’t make endless numbers of women invisible and then bring them back because it’s better business. This can’t be good for us.”

  “But it isn’t endless numbers of women. In the control groups, only a very limited number of women became invisible.”

  “What?” I said.

  “They knew this at the outset?” Jane said.

  “If every woman who took these three drugs in combination became invisible, we would be losing people out of every city, every neighborhood. These are very popular drugs; some people would go so far as to say they are critically necessary. There isn’t an outcry against this because not enough of you are gone. If you want a public outcry, try getting rid of Singsall.”

  “Good Lord,” I said. I sat down in a chair at his desk. “If there isn’t an outcry, it’s because nobody else has figured out that you’re the ones who’ve done it.”

  “Would you let your wife take these drugs together?” Jane asked.

  Dr. Holt removed his glasses, rubbed his tired eyes. “Of course not.”

  “So where do you suggest we go with this now? Are you going to take us upstairs, introduce us to your boss?”

  “Do you know how many years it takes to get a drug through development? We’re going to need time.”

  “It doesn’t take any time at all to pull something off the shelves. We’re willing to settle for that for starters.”

  “I’m going to need more time,” he said. “Let me push them. If I take you upstairs, the only thing that’s going to happen is that I’m going to get fired, and all that means to you is that you’ve lost the one person who’s sympathetic to your case. And believe me, ladies, I am sympathetic.”

  “And the rest of them aren’t?” Jane asked.

  “This is a business,” he said. “A giant, multinational business. Whether or not you can see yourselves in the mirror is not of primary concern. I want to be in touch with you both. Actually, you could be invaluable in our studies. We’ve got drugs in development now but we’re going to need invisible women who are willing to be part of the program.”

  “You want us to be guinea pigs?” Jane asked.

  “You want us to take another Dexter-White drug? Why? So we can risk losing something else? Our speech? Our sight?” My hands were shaking. I had to restrain myself from turning over his desk, which, I believed, I was capable of doing.

  “We would never put you in danger,” he said. His voice was oddly soothing.

  “Too late. You have forty-eight hours,” I said. “Tell whoever you want. You have exactly forty-eight hours to fix this and after that we’re coming back.”

  “Forty-eight hours isn’t enough time to change anything,” he said. “It’s not enough time to schedule a meeting in this place.”

  “But it’s enough time for me to figure out what I’m going to do to you and everyone you work with if I don’t see som
e action.” I wanted to bite him. I wanted to kick. These were feelings unknown to me since junior high.

  The door swung open and I had to assume Jane walked through it. I followed her out and down the hall, all but blinded by rage. They knew! They knew! The elevator doors were open and I got in. They don’t make you have a key to get off the floor, only to get on. I stormed through the lobby, past the security guard and out the double doors, just barely able to contain myself until I was outside.

  “They knew!” I said, my voice too loud. I was crying now, thinking of all the women who had been hurt and how little it had mattered to anyone. “We’re nothing to them. We’re a reasonable loss. We’re a margin of error. It’s one thing to be invisible but it’s another thing to know that somebody did it to you and it didn’t even matter to them because the profits were too high.” I let out a huge breath, shook my head. “Come on,” I said. “I just want to get out of here.”

  Nothing. In the distance there were some people walking up the hill. I was by now standing in a grassy patch maybe twenty feet from the front door. It was like Singapore, everything was so neat. There wasn’t so much as a gum wrapper blowing down the street. “Jane?”

  Nothing.

  Invisible women should not lose one another. This was imperative. Once separated we were as helpless as a pair of blind kittens. “Jane?” I said, and then I raised my voice. “Jane? Jane? Jane?”

  Had I come out the right door? I went back into the building. The security guard lifted his head and watched as the door opened and closed and no one was there. On the other side of the lobby there was another security guard at another desk, another set of glass doors facing another grassy patch of lawn, another row of straight, leafless trees. I went and stood in the middle of the lobby, equidistant from the two men. There were enormous abstract paintings on the walls, a Calderesque mobile, or maybe even a Calder mobile, hanging down from the high ceiling, all no doubt holdovers from the eighties when large corporations bought large pieces of art. I tilted back my head. “Jane?” Both of the guards looked behind them. I exited the building in the other direction. “Jane? Jane?” I said into the wind.

  I could remember I once lost Evie in the dress section of a department store. At first I thought she was playing. She liked to crawl between the clothes and hide in the bottom of the racks. I began to part them one at a time, looking down through the folds of fabric and calling her name—“Evie?”—but every time I looked my voice got a little higher, my heart beat a little faster. I couldn’t find her. That was the last time I felt this way—what I remember feeling that day was that I was lost, that I would be forever lost without her. Someone had picked up my child while I was looking for something to wear to a dinner party. I grabbed a saleswoman. I was already in tears. It wasn’t two minutes before there was a voice on the loudspeaker calling out Evie’s name. The entire store was quiet. And then a young woman in a black suit came up the escalator holding my daughter. Somehow Evie had gone down by herself and had not been able to figure out how to go back up. Crying and confused, she had wandered over to the Chanel counter, my Evie, four years old and drawn to the sight of lipsticks. The Chanel woman brought her back to me.

  “Jane!” I called.

  I began to walk in a slow, clockwise circle around the perimeter of the building, chanting her name like a prayer. I was thinking how odd it was that I had no idea what Jane looked like. I was thinking that if we ever got this worked out and if I ever got home again, I would have a party at our house and ask all the invisible women to wear their favorite outfits and bring pictures of themselves so that when I closed my eyes I would be able to picture them in my mind. What if somehow they had trapped her upstairs? What if Dr. Holt had a button under his desk that called security? They could have thrown a sheet over her or caught her in a net. In my mind I had terrible images of poor invisible Jane struggling against her captors. I went back into the building, much to the consternation of the guards. I decided to go back to the fifth floor, back to Dr. Holt’s office. I would find out what they had done with her. I was waiting for someone to come and get on the elevator. I was wishing that Gilda was waiting in the car the way she’d wanted to, or Nick or Vlad. I wished that there was someone there to save us.

  And then, as I pictured Gilda and Nick and Vlad all crunched together in the backseat, I remembered what I always told the children when they were younger: “Go to the car.” I made everybody make note of where the car was every time we got out of it. I told them if they were ever horribly, hopelessly lost they should go to the car and wait there, and so I turned and made my way out of the building.

  I didn’t know what time it was. I missed wearing watches. The sky looked like dusk but I didn’t know if it was bad weather or if it was really so late. I started to run. Every few minutes I called out again, “Jane!” I was almost to the parking lot when I saw the red pants and white top coming in my general direction.

  “Clover!” she called.

  “Jane!” I was bounding toward her.

  “Clover!”

  I threw myself in her arms. Not since I found Evie had I ever been so glad to see anyone, even someone I couldn’t see.

  “I came back to the car,” she said, breathlessly. “I thought if I had some clothes on you might be able to find me.”

  “What happened?”

  “He called me back in. I opened the door and then he said he needed to know how to get in touch with us. You must have gone straight down the hall. By the time I got downstairs you’d already gone.” She was holding on to my arm. We held on to each other all the way back to the car.

  “Do you want to come back to the city and spend the night with us?” Jane asked. “My husband would love to meet you. It just seems like too much for you to fly back after all of this. We could talk some more, maybe come up with some ideas.”

  “I need to get home,” I said. “My husband doesn’t even know I’m gone.”

  And so Jane drove me back to the airport. We were too tired to talk anyway. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll be back in a couple of days.”

  “We’re a good team,” she said.

  We said our goodbyes and I headed in. It was late and the lines through security were long. If I’d had to stand in them, I would have missed my flight. There wasn’t a seat going back, and so for a while I crouched on the floor near the bathroom, but then too many people needed to use the bathroom. I sat in the middle of the aisle but the flight attendants were bent on pushing their carts around, distributing cups of soda. I spent the entire flight squeezing into various small spaces, trying to avoid being stepped on. I would have hoisted myself up into the overhead bin and waited there but everyone brought carry-on luggage and there was not an available inch of space. It was a miserable trip and I felt extremely sorry for myself, thinking how nice it would be to have a ticket and a seat, to order a glass of cheap wine in a plastic bottle. That was when the seat belt sign came on and the captain announced we were coming in for a landing. For that, and for so many other things that were still ahead, I braced myself.

  fourteen

  Dear Gilda, pal that she was, was there to take me home. I gave her the overview but I was too demoralized to get into the details.

  “But what happens next?” she asked as she pulled up in front of my house.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t figured it out. But think about it, okay? Something’s bound to occur to one of us.”

  Gilda leaned over me, squinted. “Is there somebody on your front porch?”

  I looked out into the darkness. “I don’t see anything.” But then I did see something, a tiny point of orange light that for an instant got brighter and then faded.

  “There!” Gilda said, pointing. “It looks like somebody’s smoking a cigarette.”

  “Then it must be a friend of Nick’s.”

  “I’ll wait here,” she said. “Unless you want me to go with you.”

  “I want you to go home. I’ll b
e fine. If I can stop bank robbers I can certainly stop someone from smoking.”

  Gilda allowed that this was probably the case and so we said our good-nights. It was very dark. I’m the one who turns on the porch lights every night, turns on the lights in the living room. It appeared that there was no one home, unless you counted the person sitting on the front steps smoking. Maybe I could see some shoes, maybe a jacket. I really couldn’t make out anything clearly. Some other night it would have been alarming, but tonight it was only one more thing to be added to the list.

  “Hello?” I called out quietly.

  The cigarette stood up. “You are Mrs. Hobart,” a voice said. It was more of a pronouncement than a question. There was some accent, something I couldn’t place. The orange light had one final, powerful glow, and then it fell to the ground and was crushed out by the shoe.

  “I am.”

  “I am Ariana Sawyer, mother to Vlad. My son tells me you are invisible woman.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Sawyer,” I said. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t here to meet you. I’ve been in Philadelphia. Vlad didn’t tell me you were coming.”

  “I did not tell Vlad. I tell Vlad, he would say Mother, stay home, do not make trouble for these nice people. But forgive me, Mrs. Hobart, I must make trouble for you. I can no longer bear to be only invisible person in the world that I know.”

  I reached out and took her hand. My eyes were adjusting to the darkness and I could see now that she was fully dressed, wearing tights beneath her skirt, wearing a hat. “I’m glad you came. Let’s go in the back. The door is unlocked.” As we went past the garage the motion light came on and Mrs. Sawyer stopped to look at me.

  “You are very invisible,” she said. “More so than me. Everything is invisible.”

  “I’m naked,” I said. “I was traveling.”

  She took her hand from mine. “This is confusing.”

  “It’s a long story. I had to fly and you can’t fly unless you can show identification and I no longer resemble my identification.”