by Jeanne Ray
Once the boys had left, Gilda came and put her hand lightly on my back. “You can’t take it personally. We’re just not interesting to them,” she said.
“I don’t care that I’m not interesting to your family, but I do mean to be interesting to my own family.”
“You are. They love you more than anything. They just take you for granted, that’s all. If anything ever happened to you they’d be devastated.”
“Something did happen to me.” I stopped and wiped the sleeve of my sweater over my eyes.
“You should at least go and see another doctor. There’s got to be a specialist.”
“An invisibility specialist?” I sniffed. “I don’t think so.”
“What if you called your brother?”
“If Arthur’s too busy to figure out what’s going on with me, then George doesn’t stand a chance.” My younger brother had married at fifty, invested in Clomid, and immediately had a set of gorgeous twin girls with his forty-five-year-old dermatologist wife. He was sunk.
“But isn’t he an endocrinologist? Don’t you think invisibility would be related to the endocrine system?”
“If I get diabetes on top of everything else I’ll be sure to call him. Listen, I know you’re trying to help me but I really think I’m beyond help. I need to figure out how to come to terms with this because I don’t think anybody’s going to fix it.” With that I went outside and shook out the mop, then I stood for a minute and watched the endless dust motes falling like a silvered snow in the autumn light. Even the dust was more identifiable than I was.
When I went home I checked my cell phone and found a text message from my daughter.
R U D-PRESSED?
If I was depressed, wouldn’t it be nicer to call? And what was with the dash? Didn’t it take as much time to type a dash as it would have taken to type an e? Texting was the heartbreak of all English majors.
WHO TOLD YOU I WAS DEPRESSED?
I held the phone and waited. It was my belief that Evie took her showers with her cell phone in one hand. I imagined her executing her perilous cheerleading flips while texting. One day she would text through her own wedding. I could call her and not hear back for a week, but sending a text meant a guaranteed reply in under five seconds. She must have come to some kind of understanding with her teachers.
DAD.
I nodded my head. At least he noticed something was different.
I’M FINE. DON’T WORRY.
And I suppose she didn’t, because that was the last I heard from her.
I ran out of things to do so early in the day. I had already written a listless column on spring bulbs, “An Act of Faith in Your Own Backyard.”
No one knows what the future holds. We think we have a long life ahead of us and then bang, the guy barreling toward the intersection never sees the light turn red. Still, nothing says “I believe in tomorrow” like the willingness to spend a backbreaking afternoon chipping holes into the frozen earth and dropping in a handful of fancy Dutch tulip bulbs. Will the voles eat them before they ever have the chance to take root? Were the bulbs actually twenty years old and the joke was on you for buying them in the first place? Will you wind up with an armload of bright red tulips the size of goose eggs that would make Martha Stewart weep with envy? You’ll just have to wait until spring to find out.
When I sent it in I got a one word e-mail back from my editor, Ed. DEPRESSED?
At least he’d bothered to use the e.
I decided I would go to the grocery store and then take Red to the park. Red, the only mammal in my life who still seemed able to see me, was pretty much my main companion these days. I pushed my cart listlessly up and down the aisles. Nothing sounded good to me and I could no longer make myself care what Nick and Arthur liked to eat. I picked up bags of rice and cans of beans and frozen trays of macaroni and cheese, food for the apocalypse. My mood was not improved by the fact that the checkout girl and the bagging boy were locked in a rapturous flirtation and never unlocked their eyes from each other the entire time I dropped my supplies on the electronic conveyor belt. I lugged the groceries out to the car and Red and I started out of the parking lot. That was when I saw a man, a big man, leaning over a woman who was considerably smaller and pressed into the side of a car. His face was bent down near her face and he was yelling at her. Though my windows were up and I couldn’t make out the words, I could get the general gist from their faces—he was furious, she was frightened. At any other time in my life I would have driven by. I would have thought, bastard, or poor girl, but today I stopped the car. Today my thought was Mister, I have had enough of you. I left the keys in the ignition, closing the door so that Red wouldn’t follow me, and I walked up to the trouble at hand. “Do you need help here?” I asked the woman.
The man told me to mind my own business, though he didn’t say it nicely. I could smell his sweat, his beery breath. I could see the tails of his tattoos poking out from the cuffs of his winter jacket. So where was my fear? I did not have a drop in me. For the first time this difference in myself didn’t feel like such a bad thing. I felt clear as in pure, clearheaded, a force of determination.
“Do you need help here?” I said again. I went to stand beside the woman. She was smaller than I was and I put my hand on her arm.
“It’s okay,” she said to me, but her tone was unconvincing.
“Tell her to get lost!” the man said to the woman he had pinned. He wasn’t that old, really, probably not even thirty. He had a beard and mustache that looked as if they had been drawn in with an eyebrow pencil. I was so close to his face I could see the inordinate amount of time it must have taken him to shave. I could see that the gold hoop in his ear contained the tiniest diamond chip known to man and still the sun managed to catch it for a second and make a flash.
I pulled off my glove and put my hand on his chest. I pushed him back. I don’t mean to say I had superhuman strength, but very ordinary strength, when applied to someone who was in no way expecting it, is more powerful than you would think. It didn’t take much to put myself between him and the woman, and when I was between them I used my free hand to take off my hat. “Look at me!” I said, because even as I was getting in his face he had not thought to look at mine. He was in essence looking through my head and into the face of the young woman behind me, and I continued to push him back until he figured out there were somehow three of us there, and that was enough to pull the glue out of his seams. I put my hands on either side of his face and brought his head toward me so that he would feel my breath in his ear. “I will follow you every minute of your life,” I said. “I will be with you all the time. Do you understand me? Bother this woman again, bother any of us, and I will be on you so fast you’ll never see it coming.”
He took several steps back, at which point the woman scrambled into the car and locked the doors. That’s when I noticed there was a baby seat in the car with a strapped-in toddler who was just starting to cry.
I patted his shoulder. “Okay,” I said. “Get out of here.”
He flailed his arms around like something was crawling on him but I just stepped aside. The woman was backing up fast and she clipped the bumper of my car as she spun out and away. The man with the fine-line beard watched her go, and while he was watching her I got in my car.
I was shaking! Shaking! And not because I was scared. In fact, I realized I had been scared all week and for the first time that feeling had passed. What had replaced it was the force of life pulsing through me. I had made him see me! I had made him listen! I suddenly was overcome with a desire to fight crime. Is this how it happens? Do people drive around town looking for kidnappings and armed robberies to bust up?
Red and I got out at the park and I put him on the leash and together we ran a victory lap around the circumference. “The times they are a-changin’,” I sang out loud, and then I said to Red, “Power to invisible people!”
• • •
Arthur got called in to the hospital just as he was leaving the
office, a possible case of meningitis, and Nick had left a note saying he was going over to Miller’s house to watch a ball game, so that left me and Red to have a bowl of popcorn for dinner and look at pay-per-view. We picked a comic-book action movie that touted an invisible woman, but what a load of hokum she turned out to be. She was about twenty-three years old with long blond curls, endless legs, and significant cleavage spilling out of her low-cut spandex unitard. She controlled her invisibility at will by closing her eyes, lowering her chin, and pursing her pretty lips together as if she were trying to solve a particularly difficult problem on an algebra exam. When she needed to be seen again, because such beauty was certainly a more powerful weapon than any superpower she could have wound up with, I suppose she just did the same thing in reverse and poof! she was back.
I turned it off halfway through, never even caring about whether or not the planet could be saved from evil masterminds. The premise was too ridiculous. To think a girl like that could ever be invisible.
I left a note on the table for Arthur telling him his dinner was all laid out on a plate in the fridge, and went to bed. I didn’t know how much time had passed, and I didn’t know whether I was awake or asleep, when Arthur crawled into bed beside me.
“Hey,” I whispered, not wanting to wake the dog.
“Hey,” he whispered back. He scooted up behind me and folded me in his arms. “My hands are cold.”
“They’re fine.” I took his hands in my hands. It was a dark night, no moon through the window, and we lay there like this for a while, just holding each other like nothing had ever been wrong. “Hard day?” I asked.
“It was pretty much like the others, maybe a little bit longer. What about you?”
“It was better than the others,” I said, and then I told him my story, a slightly modified version in which I was a little less brave and not at all invisible but still, the basic facts were true.
Arthur came up on his elbow and put his hand over my heart. “I can’t believe you! You could have been hurt! You could have been killed! For all you knew that man had a gun.”
“If he had a gun, then all the more reason to stop him. I did the right thing. You would have done it, too.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’d like to think so but I don’t know. What did the woman say to you once he left?”
“She didn’t say a thing. She got in her car just as soon as I pushed him away and pulled out as fast as she could.” I told him that the edge of my fender was slightly crushed and that I saw she had a child in the car.
“Clover, Clover, Clover,” he said, and wrapped me up in his arms. “I’m trying to diagnose a lousy case of meningitis and you’re out there saving the world.”
“It had to be saved,” I said. Then Arthur kissed me, and I kissed him.
To tell the truth, I made love with my eyes closed most of the time. Arthur did, too. I knew because from time to time I’d opened my eyes and looked at the sweet intensity on his face. We’ve been doing this a long time, the two of us, ever since college, waiting for one of our roommates to go out for pizza so that we could bolt the door and fall against each other with all of our twenty-year-old passion. Year after month and week after day we have come back to each other. We would know each other’s bodies blind. As for being invisible, I forgot about it that night, and Arthur never knew.
The next morning when he leaned in and kissed my shoulder, my neck, I started to think about it all another way. Maybe Arthur didn’t see me because he knew me so well and his vision automatically filled in all the things I was, based on the slightest hint of shape or scent. Maybe when you’ve been with someone so long you don’t so much see them as you project them onto things. Arthur could have been making love to my twenty-year-old self, my forty-year-old self. He could have made love to all the women I had ever been. Maybe he saw all of us together. Anyway, this morning I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I made him breakfast, I wished him a good day. I sat down at the kitchen table and ate the piece of toast he hadn’t had time for, then I picked up the local paper. My piece on composting was in: “This Year’s Eggshells Are Next Year’s Tomatoes.” I started to read it through but it was too boring. I looked at the front page, which discussed the potential merits of a new ice-skating rink, the recipes (“Living Large with Quinoa”), my horoscope (“Today you will take a chance on a new group of friends who think that you’ll fit right in with their club”). I looked at the puppies to good homes column. I asked Red if he was interested in having a friend. He wagged his tail and I realized he was interested in the rest of my toast so I gave it to him. My eyes scanned the want ads, apartments for rent, pianos for sale, men wanting women, men wanting men, calling invisible women.
I stopped. I went back. There, between a notice for a divorced Christian singles group and a notice for Tupperware representatives, was the following:
Calling Invisible Women.
Downtown Sheraton, Wednesday at 10:00 a.m.
Bring a Kleenex.
Was it possible that the answer was in our pitiful newspaper that I very nominally still worked for? I went to the computer and googled “Invisible Women,” but all that came up were pictures of the blond girl in the superhero suit followed by a series of articles about women who loved too much and did too much and gave too much. I tried “Invisible Women Ohio” and “Calling Invisible Women” but I got more or less the same series of hits, including one for inflatable invisible women.
I looked at the date on the paper. It was Tuesday. Since becoming invisible I had found that dates and times were less and less important. But I would make it a point to remember Wednesday at ten.
four
I was worrying about what I should wear. How dressy was a meeting of invisible women? Were there wigs involved? I had considered getting a wig, but the more time that went by the less imperative it felt. I put on black tights and boots, a plain dark dress with a collar that could be turned up. In truth, I thought I looked good. I had lost some weight since becoming invisible. Food was less interesting when no one could see you eat it. I took off my clothes and put on a skirt and a sweater but it lacked sophistication. It said, I’m a preppy housewife who thinks being invisible is fun! Not the message I wanted to send. I tried a nice pair of jeans and a blazer but then what if they thought I didn’t care? I went back to the dress and added on the scarf that Arthur had bought me for our anniversary last year. I kept telling myself that I was getting all worked up for nothing. This was not going to be a group of women who were invisible, this was going to be a couple of plastic surgeons peddling the joys of facial fillers. This was going to be the first meeting of a new Weight Watchers club. This was going to be another encounter with the metaphor of invisibility because as far as the real thing was concerned, I seemed to be the only one suffering from that. Still, how could I not go? It wasn’t every day a call for invisible women was going to run in the paper.
When I went downstairs, Nick was in the kitchen eating breakfast. He glanced up, giving me a split second of his morning’s attention. “Where are you going?”
“What makes you think I’m going anywhere?”
“You’re not wearing sweatpants.”
I poured myself a cup of coffee and refilled his. “I have to go in to the paper. Every now and then we have to check in with the mother ship.”
“Crappy paper,” Nick said, sliding it in my direction. It was still perfectly folded. He was reading the Times.
“True,” I sighed, and nodded my head. “But it used to pay the bills.”
“That must have been nice,” Nick said. “Think up something you’re actually interested in doing, something you might be good at, and then go to that place and get a job and then they train you and over time you learn to take on more responsibility and you get better at it. I want to live in a world where I could at least think, ‘There’s a newspaper! Maybe I can write for a newspaper!’ ”
“The job search isn’t going so well?”
/> I watched Nick’s shoulders slump forward, a nearly imperceptible bend. “I appreciate how rarely you ask about it. It shows real discipline on your part. Dad, on the other hand, thinks that maybe I’m performing neurosurgery somewhere and just forgot to mention it. I keep telling him, once I get a job the two of you will be the first to know. I’m actually doing the crossword puzzle just to spite him. I figured out he was hiding them in the knife drawer.”
“I can pick up another paper,” I said.
“I just wish I knew what I was supposed to be doing. I’m overqualified for every job that’s stupid and underqualified for every job that’s smart.”
“I know how you feel.”
It was the moment when a different son might have looked his mother in the eye, but my son pressed down his chin and studied the paper harder. “How do you know how I feel?”
Because, my love, you feel invisible. You think you have no definition. “Well, I used to have a demanding full-time job,” I said, because this was also true. “I used to have a career. I’m a little underemployed myself at the moment.”
“But you’re a mom,” he said, letting himself sound younger than he was. “You’ve got a house and a dog and you’re married to a doctor. You’re fine.”
“It’s not all about the money, kiddo. You’re right, I’m not out on the street, but neither are you.” I squeezed his wrist. “I bet we’ll both find something.”
“You’ve got a meeting,” he said, brushing me off. “Underemployed people shouldn’t be late for meetings.”
“Okay,” I said. “You’re right. Throw the tennis ball for Red a few times before you go?”
“Sure,” he said. “I’m good at that. If there was a job posting for a tennis-ball thrower for terriers I’d have it all sewn up.” He filled in another word. “Oh, by the way, Grandma called. Maybe you were in the shower. She wanted to know why you haven’t been in yoga class. She said that Dad told her you were depressed.”