Calling Invisible Women

by Jeanne Ray

  “But then how will you get home?”

  “I’ll catch a ride with Arthur,” I said. “I’ll just go down and get in the backseat a few minutes before he’s ready to leave. He won’t know the difference.”

  In the thirty-one years since Arthur entered medical school, I could not begin to count the number of times he had mentioned how appalled I would be if I had to bear witness to his entire day. It was a blatant plea for sympathy, and it was sympathy I was happy to give him. I knew he worked hard, impossibly hard, but still, I couldn’t help but feel there was some vague accusation in his request as well, like I didn’t really understand what hard work was or I didn’t fully appreciate all that he did on our behalf. It was something I became especially sensitive to after my own professional life was squeezed down to an occasional drip. “I wish you could just watch one entire day,” he’d say to me. “You’d probably run screaming after an hour.” How many times did I say, “Yes! Okay! I’d love to go. It’s national Take Your Wife to Work Day. Show me how it’s done.” But of course it was the kind of thing you say, not the kind of thing you actually do. If the problem with Arthur’s days was that they were too busy, then bringing me along was hardly going to make things easier. I would be in his way. There would be all the introductions to make. I could picture his nurse Mary pushing me into a supply closet and locking the door.

  But as an invisible wife there was a real opportunity, and in some sense it was even better that he wouldn’t know I had been there. “You’re not going to do anything, to fix anything,” Irene said as she drove me to the office. “You’re just going to bear witness to his life. I think sometimes that’s the greatest gift we can give one another.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “It happens to be the exact thing I’m missing from Arthur these days.” I wriggled out of my clothes and rolled them into a ball, which I then pushed under the front seat.

  “You first have to be willing to give what you want to get,” Irene said. Irene changed lanes without checking her rearview mirror and I heard the sound of horns and screeching tires behind us. She was a beautiful soul and a terrible driver. What a thought, being in a car accident while invisible. Would they never find me? Would they tow me out to the junkyard and leave me there in the car? I shuddered.

  “Here we are!” Irene said. “Now if this doesn’t work out just call me and I’ll come and pick you up. Do you have your cell phone?”

  “You’ve got to go out there with nothing,” I said, opening my hands. “That’s the only way it works.”

  “Oh, Clover,” she said, her pale eyes blinking back tears. “That’s beautiful. That’s completely Zen.”

  “Drive home safe,” I said, and closed the door.

  Right from the start I was cheating. It was almost ten o’clock. Arthur had left the house a little after seven. He would have already made rounds at the hospital, returned a spate of phone calls, met with the pretty drug reps who encouraged him to push their niacins, their allergy tablets, their Ritalin. On top of all that he had probably seen maybe six or eight patients. He was probably halfway to exhausted while I had spent my morning perfecting my triangle pose. I pushed the elevator button. I decided if there was something important I felt like I was missing I could always come back tomorrow morning.

  There were seven pediatricians in Arthur’s group, five men and two women, and of the seven Arthur was the second oldest. Bill, the oldest, was winding down. He didn’t see new patients anymore, come in on Fridays, or take a rotation of weekend call (an unimaginable luxury as far as I was concerned). He had handed over the reins of the group to Arthur, though with only seven members I never thought that was asking so much. What did they talk about at their monthly meetings anyway? Whether or not to upgrade the quality of the toys in the toy box? Whether handing out Tootsie Pops after immunizations and booster shots promoted tooth decay and obesity? We would all have a party together at Christmas with the nurses and the receptionists and the women in billing. They were Arthur’s other family, the same way the newspaper people had been my other family. That had been the thing I’d missed most of all about working.

  When I opened the door to the waiting room I found myself in the midst of barely controlled chaos. While I will admit my first impulse was to hustle straight back to Arthur’s office, I decided I would do well to prop myself up against the wall for a couple of minutes and observe. It made me feel like a journalist again, undercover as no one had ever been undercover before. The waiting room was, after all, part of the experience. While there were big chairs and little chairs and very tiny chairs circling the room, nearly all of them were empty. Children were careening all over the floor. I couldn’t distinguish the sick from the well. They were running fire trucks in circles while adding in the wailing noise of sirens themselves, scampering in the front door and out the back door of a plastic castle, rolling and tumbling and turning the pages in picture books so fast that the pages sailed across the room. I imagined the germs colliding, the impetigo bumping into the sore throat who pushed over the earache who sat on the one who was only there for an annual checkup. It was easy to picture them on a school bus soon enough. Their mothers chased them helplessly, and then gave up to talk to other mothers.

  Jeannine, who was my favorite of all the nurses, opened the door. She wore a blue smock covered in SpongeBob SquarePants. “Mr. Goldberg,” she called in a cheerful voice.

  Mr. Goldberg, who was all of three years old, had an instant before been marching a dinosaur across the floor. Now he sat down and began to cry. His mother, greatly pregnant, leaned over and heaved the boy up with one arm and carried him.

  “Max!” Jeannine said. “Aren’t you glad to see me?”

  Max wailed. “He isn’t feeling well,” his mother said.

  I slipped into the hall behind them. In fact Max was very flushed and I reached over without thinking and touched his bright hot forehead. At the brush of my cool hand the boy was so startled that he forgot to finish crying but left his mouth hanging open in wonder.

  “There you go!” Jeannine said cheerfully.

  We were just rounding a corner when I saw Arthur standing at the nurses’ station. His back was to us and he appeared to be looking at a chart. His lab coat was crisp and white and he was holding a big baby, a girl of maybe one, somewhat carelessly on his hip. She was looking at him with love and concentration. Clearly she did not feel well, and clearly in the arm of my husband she felt better, and so she hung there quietly and let him do his work, comforted by his proximity and the clean, starchy smell of his coat. Just like that my eyes filled up with tears and I blinked them back. Did everybody fall in love with him or was it just me? Arthur had given up running years ago and he ate pimento cheese sandwiches every day for lunch. Around his eyes he wore the look of the perpetually exhausted, yet he shone like the sun, the center of a small, specific solar system that spun around him all the days and nights. He turned and whispered something in the child’s ear and then handed her back to her mother, a pretty redheaded girl who looked to be all of twenty.

  “Dr. Hobart,” Mary said, guiding him on. “Room five.”

  Mary had been with Arthur for ten years and without her, he had said so many times, he would probably manage to see about five patients a day. She was younger than I was and prettier, though it was impossible to think of her as either pretty or young. She was the harness and the plow, Arthur was always the mule. She took the chart from his hand, handed him another chart, and pointed to the door marked five. At every moment the telephone was ringing. Pam, the third nurse, answered, put someone on hold, and answered again, put them on hold, went back to the first call. Jeannine, having deposited the Goldbergs in room four, picked up another line and asked what she could do to help. Suddenly the redhead and the baby were gone and I was dashing down the hall to slip into room five before Mary closed the door on me.

  There on the high exam table, atop a sheet of white paper, sat a twelve-year-old boy with thick brown curls brushed bac
k from his forehead. He was a boy who looked like a player, a boy who could catch and throw and run. Maybe there was something wrong with his elbow. Behind him his mother was standing, her arms folded across her chest. The room was small and with Arthur and Mary and the mother and the boy I had to press myself into the corner near the sink.

  “How are you doing today, Owen?” Arthur said.

  “Still wetting the bed,” the mother said flatly. Owen kept his eyes fixed forward, his fists pressed between his knees.

  “A lot of people do,” Arthur said. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “We’re going to run a few tests is all. Figure out what the problem is.”

  “The problem is he won’t get up in the night,” his mother said.

  “That can be part of the problem,” Arthur said to her sympathetically. “Would it be all right if Owen and I talked for a minute about this by ourselves?”

  The mother sighed and held out her hands. “Have at it. I hope you’ll have more luck with him than I do.”

  Mary opened the door and the mother made her exit, but when she closed the door Arthur looked at her. “You too,” he said. “Just a minute.”

  Mary gave him a small frown. Once she was out of the room it was nearly impossible for her to keep him moving forward in a straight line. Arthur gave her a very small nod, which told her he understood and he wouldn’t be forever. It was as if he were gently pushing her out. When finally she was gone he waited for the door to click before turning back to Owen.

  “The Cardinals,” he said gravely. “Do you think there’s any hope for the play-offs?”

  To make a sweeping generalization, the children would all be fine. With or without medical treatment they would survive the things that ailed them. It was the mothers who needed to be seen. Throughout the day they leaned forward and held Arthur’s wrist. When he was finished examining their child they turned that child upside down to show my husband one more freckle, a fingernail that was perhaps less than lovely. They held up the daughter and asked if her knees were perfectly even. They stretched out the son, a mere infant, and commented that he had no neck, as if this could be a condition that required emergency surgery. Through it all, Arthur was patient. He put his glasses on and gave serious consideration to every bump. He listened to every story about the child who kept getting up in the night and crawling into the parents’ bed. He leaned forward, nodded, tapped the shin gently with a small silver hammer to show them how normally the foot jumped. He soothed the mothers with his intelligent consideration of their nattering madness. Honestly, the man was a god.

  Every five minutes Mary knocked on the door like a mad theater director. “Dr. Hobart, you have a call.” “Dr. Hobart, a Dr. Jenkins needs to speak to you.” “Dr. Hobart, we have a situation in the waiting room.” And every time he politely extricated himself from the crisis at hand to go and attend to the crisis that was eight feet away, then he cycled back without losing his place in the sentence he was speaking or listening to. It went on and on and on. One of the other doctors grabbed him in the hall, waving an X-ray in his hand. “This will take one minute. I just need you to look—” But it never took one minute. The day was full to bursting but the phone continued to demand that he squeeze in just a few more. Everyone was sick. Everyone was urgent. Everyone needed to be worked in. Dr. Hobart was needed at the hospital. Dr. Hobart was already late for the luncheon the drug reps were putting on. Dr. Hobart would not get lunch. A two-year-old named Lucas had swallowed a very large screw, a Phillips head, though why this detail was included was anyone’s guess, and Dr. Hobart needed to line up a surgeon if in fact a surgeon would be needed. I followed Arthur over to the emergency room, where Lucas had to be comforted and his mother had to be comforted and doctors were consulted but the X-rays revealed no screw.

  “Could it be hidden?” the mother asked, looking up at the light board. “Maybe it’s behind a bone.” She was wearing an enormous knit poncho with long fringe that Lucas seemed to enjoy weaving his fingers through.

  “Metal shows up pretty well,” Arthur said.

  And so the housekeeper was called again and yes, this time she managed to find the screw. At least she thought it was the right one.

  Children cried and blew their noses and the contents of their tissues were inspected. Standing in various corners of rooms one through five, I was reeling. The day marched on and the tide continued to rise and rise—more phone calls, more sick children, more needy mothers certain they had done something wrong, that they had ruined everything, until I wanted to scream, Leave him alone! Oh, Arthur, why didn’t you tell me it was like this? Is it really like this every day? We could sell the house. I could get a job at Macy’s. No one should have to work like this.

  A child named Asa with straight black hair and pale blue eyes attached herself to both of his legs, making Arthur a tree trunk. The last patient was scheduled for four o’ clock. The last patient was seen at five thirty. The mothers grumbled to the nurses, there would be traffic now, and what about dinner? Did they think it was fair that people with small sick children should be made to wait? The nurses apologized. Mary apologized. “It was a very busy day,” she said, not explaining that in fact all of them were exactly the same, only some were worse.

  “If he doesn’t have time to see all these patients, then he shouldn’t schedule them,” one mother said in a voice sharp with reprimand, a voice that made me sorry for her child.

  The charts were picked up. The toys were picked up, wiped off, returned to the bin in the waiting room. The nurses straightened up the rooms, washed their hands. One by one they stuck their heads into his office. “Good night, Dr. Hobart.”

  He said good night three times. I was lying on the floor beneath his desk where no one would step on me. My head was empty of thoughts. I was too tired to think. Instead I replayed the faces of the children. I saw them like crayons crowded into a box, all of them standing up next to one another very straight. It was impossible to try and consider each one separately.

  While I lay there Arthur dictated letters, made notes in every chart, called other doctors, attended to every detail that his day had not allowed. “Isn’t there someone you could hire to do all this?” I wanted to ask him. “Couldn’t I come over at night and do this for you?” Finally I got up and went and stood behind his shoulder. I ached. I wondered if I had caught something awful. There was a line drawn through the name of every person on his list of people to call and there was only one chart left. It wasn’t very late. After all of this, Arthur would be coming home early. And so I blew him a kiss and went downstairs and through the parking garage to the space with his name on it. But all four of the Acura’s doors were locked. Arthur believed in locking the car, a habit I had never picked up. I waited, looked around. Even if no one could see me there, I don’t like parking garages. I decided to go back upstairs. Maybe I could find his keys, go and unlock the car, then bring the keys back up. I was working through the complicated scenarios when I went back to Arthur’s office. He was still at his desk but now the computer was on. He was looking at a website with bicycles. Bicycles? Did Arthur want a bicycle? This was news to me, but I made a mental note of the make and model he seemed to admire. Christmas was not too far off, as the decorations in the mall had reminded me, and Arthur was impossible to buy for. Maybe he wanted a bicycle because he wanted to exercise more. He wanted to do something for himself. He moved the mouse around and clicked. Up came a picture of a boat. It was a sailboat, and as he scrolled down, it was pages and pages of sailboats. Arthur had sailed with his father when he was a boy, and one summer between his sophomore and junior years of college he crewed on a boat that went down to Bermuda. It was a story he liked to tell. “One day,” he often said, “we’ll get a boat, the two of us, and we’ll go to Bermuda. Maybe we’ll get a bigger boat and take the kids.” For a long time I would tell him how I got seasick, how I wasn’t keen on confinement or long-term exposure to sun, but after a while I got it. It wasn’t ab
out a boat. It was about thinking about a boat. Then he switched the screen to planes and watched a few YouTube videos of aerobatics, stomach-plummeting spins and dives. He sat there in his white coat and watched the planes turn upside down and right side up, over and over again. That was when I got it. He wasn’t coming home for a long time.

  I went down the hall and called Irene from the phone at the front desk. “I think I’m going to need that ride,” I said.

  I got home and took a hot shower. I felt like I was crawling with germs. I put on some jeans and a sweater and ran back downstairs to heat up some stew I had made the night before. Red was bouncing around my ankles like he was on a trampoline he couldn’t get off of.

  “He isn’t used to you being gone all day,” Nick said.

  “I know. The time just got away from me.”

  “But your car was here, and you didn’t have your cell phone on.”

  I looked up at him. “Your grandmother picked me up, and you know I never know where my phone is. Did something happen?”

  Nick pointed up at the ceiling. “Evie’s home. She’s a disaster. She said her boyfriend broke up with her, Vlad or whatever his name is. She says she’s dropping out of school, that she won’t go back.”

  “What did you tell her?” It was impossible that Evie would come home now. If Vlad had actually left her she would require more patience and compassion than Mother Teresa possessed, much less her own mother.

  “I reminded her that Ohio State was playing Iowa a week from Saturday at home, and if she was going to be something as stupid as a cheerleader, then she needed to get her butt back to school and start practicing.”

  “Wow, Nick. Well done.”

  “It’s not like I said that when she walked in the door but she’s been crying all day. I tried to call Dad but that witch Mary answered the phone and she wouldn’t let me talk to him. He’s got to do something about her.”