Calling Invisible Women

by Jeanne Ray

  I saw the lights of Arthur’s car in the driveway, and, as if on cue, my beautiful waif of a daughter stumbled down the stairs in a tiny Ohio State T-shirt and a pair of gray sweatpants with the word OHIO emblazoned across her rear end. “Mommy,” she wailed, and fell into my arms, the tiny rack of her shoulders shuddering against my chest.

  “Home again,” Arthur said brightly at the door, and Evie, who always was a daddy’s girl, made a perfect pivot out of my arms and fell against her father’s chest.

  eight

  “Hi, I’m Clover Hobart, and I’m an invisible woman.”

  “Hi, Clover!”

  I waved my Kleenex at the group and they waved their Kleenex back at me. “It’s been a really hard week. Just knowing that you’re out there, that I have other invisible women that I can call, well, that’s really been a help to me. I don’t mean to say it’s all bad. Lila Robinson and I had a real adventure spending the day in high school. Is Lila here?”

  A Kleenex flapped lightly from the other side of the circle. “Right here.”

  “Have you gone back again?”

  “Every day,” she said. “And you’re right, I’m already making a big difference. Disruptive conduct reports are pretty much down to zero. I’ve busted up incidences of cheating and bullying, thwarted some minor drug deals in which I made the kids flush the pot down the toilets themselves. I think I’ve done more for that school in the past five days than I did in thirty years. Each day I write down everything I’ve done and I leave it on the principal’s desk. In another couple of weeks I’m going to ask for my job back.”

  This news was met with enthusiastic applause.

  Lila hushed the group so that she could go on. “I’ve got to thank Clover here for telling me to stop feeling sorry for myself and get back to work. She hasn’t been invisible very long but she knows how to jump in there and get things done. And thanks to Laura Worthington, too. Laura gave me the great advice about the importance of documenting what I was doing.”

  More applause, and another Kleenex wave from someone I assumed was Laura.

  “You would have gone back to school without me,” I said. “You’re a natural. Anyway, I’m glad I could be helpful to someone else because I’m not doing nearly as good a job with my own life. I went to spend the day with my husband at work and I felt completely overwhelmed by all the pressure he has on him and I have no idea how to help him. Then when I came home my daughter, Evie, was there. She says she’s dropped out of college because her boyfriend has broken up with her.”

  Audible groans.

  “I know. She’s twenty years old! Who cares if your boyfriend breaks up with you when you’re twenty? She should probably send him a thank-you note. She’s been home for three days now. All she does is cry and text.”

  “Does she know you’re invisible?” someone asked. I thought it was the group leader, Jo Ellen.

  The very thought forced an involuntary burble of laughter up my throat. “Evie is a sweet girl but she wouldn’t notice if the house was on fire. The extent to which she never lifts her eyes from her iPhone cannot be overemphasized. I actually worry about her poor little thumbs.”

  “Is the boyfriend still texting her?” There was Alice. She was sitting right next to me.

  “Constantly. I can remember when I was visible I was so curious about her texts. What could these kids possibly be discussing at such length? Now that I can just stand over her shoulder and read them all day I have to say I have never encountered anything so boring in my entire life. They are literally saying nothing over and over again for hours on end.” I sighed and shook my head. “This isn’t what I wanted to talk about. Evie and Vlad have broken up, Evie’s dropped out of school, she cries, they text. Chances are she’ll pull it together and go back by the end of the week, at least that’s what Nick tells me. He also figured out that this is her fall break so dropping out of school doesn’t have quite the same punch just yet.”

  “Who’s Nick?” a voice asked.

  “My son. He graduated from college two years ago but he’s living at home again and looking for a job.”

  More groans.

  I felt like I was just about to make my point when the big double doors to the Magnolia Room opened and an older Filipino woman, not the one from last week, came in and closed the door behind her. Before we even had time to drop our Kleenex she pulled a chair out from the circle. I didn’t know who was sitting in it but I saw the Kleenex dart up, and then the woman sat down, removing a sandwich and a cell phone from her pocket. Once she’d peeled back the plastic wrap from the sandwich and taken a bite, she punched in a number and began a loud conversation in a language I did not understand. Whoever was on the other end of the line couldn’t get a word in edgewise. The invisible women waited patiently, as patience is our particular virtue, but after a while I started to wonder how long this woman’s break was. The conversation, if you could call it that, appeared to be endless.

  “Do you think she would hear us if we kept on talking?” Alice said.

  We waited, but no, she didn’t seem to hear. The Magnolia Room was enormous, but because of its enormity it was also the room that was the most consistently available. “Let’s just move our chairs,” Jo Ellen said. And so we got up and dragged our chairs to the other side of the room, reassembling our circle far away from the caller, who didn’t seem to notice the furniture moving away on its own.

  “That’s better,” Jo Ellen said. “Not perfect, but better. Clover, I believe you were talking.”

  Over a one-sided conversation in Filipino I began again. “What I wanted to say is that having Evie home is really teaching me something about invisibility. She’s invisibility’s polar opposite. She’s the most visible creature on the planet. Even I can’t stop staring at her. It’s as if she’s walking under a klieg light every minute of the day and you can’t help notice every single thing about her, the length of her eyelashes, the shadow under her collarbone. She twists her hair up with one hand and jams a pencil through it with the other and I swear to you a team of New York stylists could not create anything so flawless.”

  “So what’s wrong with this Vlad?” Alice asked. “Assuming she’s a nice girl, why did he dump her?”

  “From what I can piece together from his texts it’s all too terrifying for him. He’s a kid himself, and a kid named Vlad on top of that. He’s afraid she’s going to leave him. All of his friends are teasing him. All of his friends are hitting on her. Everywhere she goes people turn around and stare. We go to the grocery store and people ask her questions: Where did you get that lip gloss? What color is your nail polish? Frankly, even her grief seems to make her more beautiful. She’s turned this extraordinary combination of pale and flushed. She looks like the inside of a seashell.”

  “So you have a pretty daughter,” Jo Ellen said flatly. “I’m sure we’re all happy for you.”

  “Hey,” Lila said. “She’s trying to make a point here.”

  I closed my eyes, though against what view it would have been difficult to say. I listened to the continuing drone of conversation from across the room. It made a shelter of white noise. I opened my eyes to our nothingness, our Kleenex, our empty chairs. “I have a pretty daughter, I do. She’s like a bonfire on the darkest night of the year, a bonfire on a prairie in a snowstorm. You can’t help yourself, you’re going to turn in her direction, and she’s doing nothing to make this happen. She’s wearing sweatpants and she isn’t bathing very much and nothing decreases the light she’s putting out, and that’s what I keep thinking about: where’s the light we’re putting out? Part of what’s so painful about being invisible is that I realize now how long it’s been going on, how long it’s been since anyone on the street turned around and looked at me, how long it’s been since my husband really looked at me, or since I looked at myself. I mean honestly, I don’t even know how long I was invisible before I noticed. But if Evie stopped turning up, it would be like a power outage in Manhattan.”

 
“The beautiful are seen and the less than beautiful aren’t seen,” Laura Worthington said. Hers was the voice of experience. “That’s the way of the world.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Right. But there’s more to it than beauty. Beauty is the easy part. We relied on it, we got used to it, and then when it faded we faded along with it. But what I see in Evie is this light, this bright life, and even though it’s all tied up in beauty for her it doesn’t have to be for us. We’ve got to start thinking about what makes us light. Simply put, invisible women have to work a lot harder to be seen. We don’t have our youth. We don’t have the clothes or the jewelry to get a little flash.”

  “Jewelry doesn’t work,” Lila said.

  “So we’ve got to figure out who we are. We’ve got to stop standing around in the corner wondering if anybody is missing us. We have to find our light so people still know that we’re here. Lila found it. She went back to school. Pretty soon they’re going to realize they can’t make the place work without an invisible woman. Even if they can’t see her, her light is going to be everywhere.”

  And then abruptly, as far as those of us who did not speak Filipino could tell, the woman across the room snapped her cell phone shut, threw away her piece of plastic wrap, and left the room without a glance in our direction.

  “So, Clover,” Patty Sanchez said. “What’s your light?”

  I looked at my Kleenex floating in the place just above where my knees should be. “I don’t know yet,” I said. “But I’m working on it.”

  When I got home no one was there, not even Red. I was standing in the kitchen shaking a box of dog biscuits and feeling the smallest edge of panic when my cell phone buzzed in my pocket—a text from Evie.

  KEMPTONS, it said, answering the question I had not asked.

  So everything was fine. I trusted Gilda to look after the dog. I barely trusted the children to look after themselves.

  Having just come in from a meeting I was fully dressed. I did think it was important to be dressed while driving. Still, I put on a big bunchy scarf that had been a failed experiment from last year’s brief knitting phase. Ever since the incident with the bathrobe, I tended toward greater coverage when I was with Gilda.

  Benny met me at the door and gave a couple of modest sniffs at the passing air after letting me in. I wish I could say he was on to me but I could see in his confused little eyes that he was nowhere close to putting the pieces together. “Why aren’t you in school?” I said suspiciously.

  “Fall break,” he whispered, and then motioned with his hand that I should follow him. Benny was wearing his socks without shoes and he made an effort to be very, very quiet as he walked. In the den I found Gilda sitting on the couch, Evie asleep with her head in Gilda’s lap, Gilda with her hand in Evie’s tumble of golden hair. Across from her Miller sat in a chair and silently watched as if this were a particularly riveting play that had just arrived at its heart-stopping final act. Benny took up the chair beside his brother and resumed his watching as well. Red, who was on the couch near Evie’s feet, raised his head and, looking at me, gave his tail a single, definitive thump of greeting and then he put his head back on his paws.

  “She just now fell asleep,” Gilda whispered.

  Miller glanced up in my direction, checking to make sure I had no intention of waking her or, worse yet, taking her away. “She’s been crying,” he said, or I think that’s what he said. His voice was so quiet I was practically lip reading, a favor that was never returned for invisible women.

  I sat down on an ottoman and joined the audience for my sleeping daughter. Truly she was something to behold. With her face clean of makeup (she didn’t bother with it when there was so much crying to do) and untroubled by dreams, she looked closer to twelve than to twenty. In fact, it was as if I were looking at the child she had been not so long ago, falling asleep across the backseats of so many cars. With her overlarge eyes and round rosebud mouth and thick blond eyebrows arched into wings, she was the fairest of all the Dickens heroines, Estella and little Nell and the beautiful, foolish Dora, at least that’s what I was thinking when her phone began to vibrate in her little pink fist. She let out a generic exclamation—ah! or oh!—and sat straight up, drawing her feet in so fast she knocked Red off the couch.

  “Is it him?” Gilda asked, pulling her glasses off the top of her head and down to her nose so she could read along.

  Evie held up her iPhone and commenced her crying again, although this crying was clearly of a different order, the diamond-bright tears of joy. “He’s coming! He says he’s in the car. He’s on the interstate now!” She turned and fell into Gilda. “He’s coming here!”

  Miller and Benny both leaned back, disgusted. The play had taken an unimaginable turn. They were finished. “I’ve got homework,” Benny said.

  “On the first day of break?” Gilda asked.

  “I’m going to the coffee shop,” Miller said. “See if Nick has found us a job.”

  “He’s texting on the interstate?” I said. “While he’s driving?”

  “I have to wash my hair!” Evie’s hand shot up to the extravagant mess of her head. “He didn’t say what time he left! He didn’t say what time he was going to be here!”

  “Well,” Gilda said, “he texted you ten minutes ago to say he wasn’t coming, so I think you can assume he just left.”

  “What if he changes his mind? What if he doesn’t come?”

  “Then you will be exactly as you are now except with clean hair,” I said.

  Evie started to say something sharp, I saw the look cross her face, though just as quickly she thought it through. She pressed her hands across her Ohio State T-shirt. “I should go get something to wear, something pretty. I only came home with sweatpants.”

  “Don’t kill him,” Gilda said. “Washing your hair is plenty. He’s not driving down here to see your wardrobe.”

  The lovely yellow head of my daughter drooped, an un-watered daisy. “I look so awful,” she said, and then she did the most remarkable thing—she picked up a hank of her own hair and dried her tears.

  “Take the car,” I said, knowing that in the end I would give in anyway and wanting to just jump ahead. “The keys are on the kitchen counter.”

  Evie shook her head, sniffled. “You have to come with me. I can’t go by myself. I’m too upset. I wouldn’t know what to get.” She turned and took Gilda’s hand. “You’ll come with us, won’t you?” Her phone buzzed again and she dropped Gilda’s hand and started texting again.

  “The boy?” Gilda asked.

  Evie shook her head. “It’s Niki.” Her thumbs were flying. “It’s about cheerleading practice.”

  Gilda and I looked at each other, which is to say I looked at her and she looked above my scarf. She shrugged, then nodded. “Okay,” she said. “But I’m going to drive.”

  I knew this drill, and I knew that cash was the essential element. For however much Evie enjoyed my company and my input on how different outfits complimented her appearance, I also knew she was broke. The invitation to join her was not without agenda. To send a pretty girl off to the mall with a mother’s credit card was ruinous, unthinkable. I made it a point not to create scenarios in which my children were bound to fail. A set amount of cash at the beginning of such expeditions had been my traditional answer for avoiding meltdowns in J. Crew later in the day. It also meant that if at some point along the way my stamina failed me I could leave her there with the money and pick her up with her shopping bags later on.

  “I need to go to the bank,” I said to Gilda once the three of us were in the car.

  Had I been driving, no doubt the day would have turned out differently. I would have cashed a check at the drive-in window or gone to the ATM machine. But as luck would have it, Gilda needed to go to the bank as well—her bank, which was not my bank—and she needed to go inside, and since it was cold and Evie hadn’t worn a coat (coats were viewed as burdensome on shopping expeditions) she came in too. We stood at an island desk
in the center of the bank, its glass top covering a multitude of transactional choices—slips for savings withdrawals and checking deposits and payments of loans. I wrote out a check for Gilda to cash and Gilda tallied up a small stack of checks to deposit while Evie plunked herself down in a chair and proceeded to text the world the news of Vlad’s return. Because my chore was easier than either of theirs, I took a moment to look around. It was a pretty bank, much nicer than mine, with a brass chandelier stretching out above our heads and marble floors and a cherrywood counter behind which a multitude of tellers were ready and waiting to serve the dozen or so customers who were standing in line. There was a sleepy-looking security guard and four glass-fronted offices where bankers sat at desks and discussed mortgages and annuities with clients who listened and nodded.

  In truth, invisibility had done a great deal to heighten my powers of observation. Now that I realized how shameless people were in all they did not see, I made it a point to see more myself. Irene would have said this was part of the lesson of my journey. There was a too-thin teller in her fifties, her oversized glasses perching on the tip of her nose while she counted and recounted a pile of money. There was a man in a suit, a nicer suit than all the others, who was probably the manager, as he kept opening the glass doors of the glass offices and dispatching a sentence here and there. There was a mother of two small boys who was trying very hard to keep them from hanging on the velvet ropes that guided the lines to the tellers, but the ropes were irresistible to boys and no matter how desperately she tried to make them be good they could not oblige. There was a man in jeans with his hands buried deep in the pockets of his puffy blue jacket, his mouth set in a straight line, as if he was bracing himself for the news that his account was overdrawn, or at least that’s what I was thinking about him until he pulled a gun out of his pocket and at the same moment stepped behind the guard and pulled his gun out of the holster as easily as you could snatch a toy away from a child. He held up two guns.