Calling Invisible Women

by Jeanne Ray

  “Everybody down!” he said, the force of his voice so enormous it could have knocked us to the floor by itself. We fell without thought, the entire room in perfectly synchronized obedience. The man’s eyes went to Evie of course, where else could they go, and he saw that she was still texting, no doubt recording the moment as it happened. He stormed toward her and pointed his gun at my daughter’s bright head as he snatched her phone from her hands. He might as well have ripped out her heart the way she screamed. He screamed at her in reply, “No phones! Hands flat out on the floor in front of you. Everybody! Hands out!”

  What I heard at that moment was Arthur’s voice. “Clover!” he said as he held me that night after I told him about the man in the parking lot. “For all you knew that man had a gun.”

  It is an impractical superpower that requires both an exit to change clothes and then a reentrance to the scene of the ongoing crime. Who has time to change? I could not leave to find a phone booth or make my way back to the bat cave, but oh, did I have a lifetime of experience getting out of my clothes. While the puffy-jacket bandit was making his way to the tellers I was already out of my pants and shoes and socks. Flat on my back I was twisting out of my top.

  “What are you doing?” Gilda hissed.

  “I’m saving the day,” I said. Sweater, jacket, big, failed scarf, I was wriggling free of all of them. I was on my feet. It was my moment. It was the revenge of all invisible women.

  “Clover,” Gilda said, her voice forceful and low. “Your bra.”

  I looked down and saw a particularly ratty beige Maidenform bra floating in space, dangerous in how it all but drew a bull’s-eye over my heart. I reached behind me and fumbled with the hook and eye. It gave me a split second of trouble that I didn’t need, as now I saw a second man, younger and equally armed, standing near the door, and he was watching the bra, having no idea what it was about. Evie was back to her weeping and Gilda was craning her head around. I threw down the last of my undergarments.

  My superpower was my absence, nothing else. Shoot me and I assume I’d be as dead as anyone. But while the people who could be seen were rightfully paralyzed by fear (it was easy to shoot what can be seen, especially when it was lying still on the floor right at your feet), invisibility allowed me to bypass fear and progress straight to rage. Enough of being stolen from! Enough of being told to shut up and get down! Enough of anyone terrorizing my daughter, my friend, these strangers, the poor skinny teller who with trembling hands was now being forced to lift the full tills out of every cash drawer. I reached around the puffy-jacket man, who, I realized once he was in my arms, was wearing the coat to make himself appear bigger than he was, and took a gun out of each of his hands. There was nothing tricky about it. The grips were wet from the sweat of his palms and they slipped out as if they were oiled. Quickly, quickly, because no one likes the part where guns seem to be flying through the air, I gave one to the guard and one to the man in the nicer suit. The boy at the door, seeing that the tides of fortune were shifting, turned to make a run for it. I took his gun as well. I didn’t want to capture him, capturing was not in my job description, but I would have hated to see him hurt someone on his way out. That third gun I gave to Gilda. I put it under her hand that was spread out flat on the floor.

  “I don’t want a gun,” she hissed. The security guard had handcuffed puffy-jacket’s arms behind his back and was leading him to a glass office. The manager, dazed and now armed, was helping the clientele up from the floor.

  “It’s good for you,” I said. “Take responsibility.” I crouched down beside her on the floor. “Listen, if it’s okay I’m going to go wait in the car. I don’t want to try and explain all this.”

  “Sure,” Gilda said, sitting up tentatively. “You did a great job.”

  Evie was searching around for her phone. I was trying to push my clothes together into a discreet pile and roll them into my jacket. When the police burst in I saw my chance and made a break for it through the open door, my bunched-up clothing tucked beneath my arm like a cowboy’s bedroll. I would ride right out of town and no one would miss me. Nobody but Gilda knew I had saved the day, that Clover Hobart was that masked man.

  nine

  It turned out to be a long, long wait in the car, plenty of time for me to get dressed again and wonder if there was some order in the universe. After all, suburban bank robberies were hardly common fare in this day and age. I had made it fifty-four years without ever having stumbled into one. So was this my newfound luck or lack of luck? In truth, I felt pretty good as I silently replayed the movie in my mind. A surge of adrenaline was still pumping through my invisible veins. I used to wonder what the chances were that banks would so often be robbed in front of Superman, so many purses snatched outside the diner where Spider-Man drank his coffee. But now I knew they must have gone looking for trouble. Trouble, it turned out, felt good. It was a kick and a half to see justice prevail, and only mildly disappointing that no one would ever know that you were the one who made it happen. I could picture a world in which I wandered through the roughest bars at night, looking for people to set straight. Then again, that’s what Lila and I had done all day in the high school and that had been nothing but exhausting. Maybe what made it fun was the sheer surprise of it all.

  When Gilda and Evie finally arrived they were visible wrecks. Gilda came around to the passenger side and handed me the keys. “You drive,” she said.

  “How did you get out to the car?” Evie said, collapsing across the backseat. “We looked for you everywhere.”

  “I just walked out. I thought you were both behind me. Then the police closed the building and that was that.”

  “Well, you were smart,” Gilda said. “I found the crime scene more taxing than the crime. They kept us forever. They wanted to know what I was doing with a gun.”

  “So what did you tell them?”

  “I told them the truth,” Gilda said pointedly. “I had my head down, I didn’t see what happened, and the next thing I knew a gun came skidding across the floor in my direction. I caught it, that’s all. I was lucky it didn’t hit me in the head.”

  “I would say we were all pretty lucky,” I said, and I meant it. There was no way things could have been better and almost every way in which they could have been worse.

  “But they wouldn’t give me back my phone!” Evie said. “They found it right in the guy’s pocket but they said they had to take it in as part of the evidence. I mean, it’s pink and it says Evie on the back of it. Of course it’s mine! They said even if it was my phone he might have used it to make calls. Like, duh, when did he have time to make calls while he was robbing the stupid bank? They wouldn’t even let me check my messages! Now I don’t know when Vlad is coming or even if he’s coming. He may have broken up with me again.”

  I dug my phone out of my purse with one hand and tossed it over the seat. “Here,” I said. “Text your heart out.”

  Evie looked at my phone and gasped. “There are only numbers on your phone.”

  “The letters are underneath the numbers,” I said. “Just like the old days. It just takes a little longer.”

  “I can’t believe you use this.”

  “Your father and I are trying to save money so our children can get an education.”

  But at the mention of saving money, Evie turned and looked out the back window at the shopping complex that was receding behind us. “I thought we were going to the mall,” she said in a very small voice.

  “No!” Gilda and I said together.

  She turned and slumped down in her seat. “Now I don’t have a phone and I don’t have an outfit,” she said, though mostly to herself. “Great outing. I should have just stayed home.”

  “How about this?” I said. “ ‘Mom! Gilda! We weren’t shot by a crazed bank robber. How exciting is that!’ ”

  “He didn’t look so crazed,” Evie said petulantly.

  “He put a gun to your head!” Gilda screamed. “Clover, pull the car o
ver so I can climb back there and hit your child.”

  I thought about it, I really did, but I just wanted so badly to get home.

  As soon as I pulled into Gilda’s driveway Evie was out of the car and running across the street so that she could get to work on her grooming. I had reminded her that she hadn’t taken every article of clothing she owned to college, such a thing would never have been possible, so surely she could find something in her closet that Vlad had never seen before. Once she was gone, Gilda and I sunk down in our seats. For a long time we were quiet, just watching the lines of the bare branches hatching up the gray clouds behind them.

  “Cup of tea?” I asked finally.

  “Bottle of merlot?” she replied.

  “I don’t think I should drink. I’m really tired all of a sudden.” So tired, in fact, that sleeping in the car for just a minute didn’t strike me as a bad idea.

  “She never noticed,” Gilda said, her voice all hollow.

  “Noticed what?”

  “You, what you did. How you risked your life to save all of us. That you’re invisible. She didn’t notice any of it.” My friend shook her head sadly. “I love that girl but I don’t know how you put up with it, Clover. If I were you I’d be pretty depressed right now.”

  I shrugged and the shoulders of my jacket went up, then down. “Actually, I’m feeling pretty good. I’m starting to see the benefits of my condition. Maybe I was meant to fight crime. That wouldn’t be such a bad outcome to all of this. Anyway, we didn’t have to take Evie shopping.”

  “When you put it that way I can see your point.” We sat quietly for a minute. Neither one of us had enough energy to open our car door. “Clover?”

  “Right here,” I said.

  “Do you remember the winter we went to Florida? When you first moved into the neighborhood, when we were first friends?”

  “Of course I remember Florida.” We had gone to Fort Lauderdale and stayed in a Hyatt. We left our husbands alone with our children. From where we were sitting now it seemed like an impossible dream. “There was that guy in the bar who kept hitting on us.” Not an attractive guy, but still, a guy.

  “ ‘Are you girls from Fort Lauderdale?’ ” Gilda said in a slurry voice.

  “And you said, ‘Listen, my friend and I only have two nights of vacation and we’re not going to spend one of them being polite to you.’ I remember thinking, there is a woman who knows how to take charge of life.”

  “But we didn’t get two nights of vacation.” Gilda was staring out the window looking like she had just that moment gotten bad news. “Benny got sick. Do you remember? Steve wanted me to come home.”

  “Well, that’s motherhood. You do what you have to do. We still had a good time.”

  “He wasn’t that sick,” Gilda said.

  “You didn’t know it then.” Arthur had taken Benny to the office for a culture. Was it strep? Not that it made any difference.

  “The point is, we swore we’d go back every year. We drank a toast to it in the airport. We’d go back to Florida every winter—”

  “Even if it was only for a night,” I said. I remembered. We were drinking Salty Dogs.

  “We didn’t go back, Clover,” Gilda said, turning to me. “Somebody tries to shoot you in a bank and you think about those things. I want to have my toenails painted and sit on the beach and read a stupid magazine. If that’s what I’m asking for in the face of death, I have to say it doesn’t strike me as a lot.”

  “I can’t get my toenails painted anymore,” I said. I thought of the poor pedicurist trying to find my toes and I started to laugh and then we both started to laugh.

  “I wonder if you’d still have to use sunblock?”

  “What if I tanned? I’d still be invisible but sort of beige.”

  “Like smog,” Gilda sputtered and then poked my arm. “Promise me we’ll go again when things have settled down.”

  “Promise,” I said. “But we might not want to wait that long.”

  I walked in the door of my house and went straight to bed. All I wanted was a few minutes of sleep. It turned out that crime fighting, after the initial adrenaline rush wore off, was exhausting. But Evie kept waking me up to ask which of her adorable outfits she looked most adorable in.

  “This?” she asked. She was wearing a pair of breathtakingly short shorts, some Uggs that looked like slouchy sweaters, and a tank top topped with a charcoal blazer with the sleeves rolled up. It was a compelling combination of coverage and nudity.

  “Where did you get the blazer?” I asked. It was familiar to me and yet I wouldn’t have pegged it as Evie’s style.

  “Nick’s closet.” She looked at herself in the mirror, then she turned around to scrutinize her backside. “It makes me look fat.”

  “That, my love, is not possible.” I could barely keep my eyes open.

  “Wait,” she said, as if I had someplace to go. As soon as she was out of the room I pulled the covers over my head and went to sleep. It made her change of clothes seem like a magic trick because as far as I was concerned she had been gone exactly one second and now she was back again in a different outfit. She was poking my shoulder through the covers. “Mom?”

  This time she was wearing a pink gingham-check shirt dress that buttoned up the front. It had been her favorite dress in high school and for one summer she had worn it at least three times a week. It was faded and soft looking and I wanted to scoop her up in my arms and make her take a nap with me. “You look so cute.”

  She turned to the mirror to confirm my assessment. “I hate it,” she said.

  “Even with a belt?” I asked hopefully.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed and covered her face with her hands. “He isn’t going to love me anymore. He probably isn’t even coming. He probably just said he was coming because he knew I’d run around trying to decide what to wear when he knows I didn’t pack when I left school and I don’t have anything to wear.”

  “Really,” I said. “He thinks about all of that?”

  “You don’t understand,” she said, and then she paused for a long time as if trying to decide whether or not she wanted to make me understand. “I wasn’t exactly nice.”

  I reached up and let my invisible hand disappear into the tangled corn silk of her hair. “So now he’s coming and you have a chance to be exactly nice.”

  She picked up the corner of the sheet and wiped her face. “I’m going to change,” she said.

  “Change your personality but leave your outfit alone,” I said. “You look terrific.” As she was walking away I was thinking that I’d take being invisible over being twenty any day of the week. Poor Evie, it was as if she were a princess who couldn’t decide which of her diamond tiaras to wear to the ball.

  I had just fallen asleep again and was dreaming one of those mortifying dreams of childhood where you’re at a party and you’re the only one who’s naked. Then suddenly the doorbell rang and Red exploded off the bed in a cacophony of frantic barking. I could hear Evie screaming as she ran down the stairs, “Vlad! Vlad!”

  When I came down she was wearing her Ohio State sweatpants and her Ohio State T-shirt again. Clearly he had arrived in between outfits. After all the weeping and embracing and pleas for forgiveness had subsided, I shook his hand. Vlad was as tall as a tree, pale as a root, his great head bowed at the thought that he could ever have been so wrong. How could he have managed without her? His light green eyes were rimmed in red. He looked unfed, unrested, unwashed. I saw him bite his ragged lip slightly and give me a sad look. Clearly this breakup had wrung the life out of him.

  “Vlad can stay in my room,” Evie said, both of her hands encircling his left elbow. She did not give me time to raise my eyebrows, which I had planned on doing, not that anyone would have noticed. “I’ll sleep in the den. He’s too big for the couch.”

  I wanted to point out that the boy would not get a moment’s rest on her ladybug sheets, though I could have also mentioned that Vlad had not been
invited to spend the night. Still, even I could see that there would be no sending this enormous boy into the night to drive back to wherever he came from. “We’ll work it out,” I said, and went to the kitchen to make dinner.

  I made a huge vat of pasta for dinner, adding in every last vegetable and hunk of cheese I could find. I was working on the assumption that certain desires I didn’t want to think about were often sublimated with food. There was bread in the freezer, enough lettuce to pull together a salad. Arthur came home and Nick came home and they were both relieved to see Vlad, who had as recently as last night’s dinner been referred to around our table as “Vlad the Cad” (though really, he could just as easily have been Howard the Coward or Tony the Phony). In truth, all anybody wanted was for Evie to stop crying, and after three long days of watching her weep we could all understand how a boyfriend might be tempted to dump her. At the table we raised a glass to reconciliation and good luck.

  “Good luck!” we all called out together and clinked our glasses.

  “Speaking of good luck,” Arthur said. “Did you hear there was a bank robbery today at the First United Bank? Apparently the robber had some sort of a seizure right in the middle of the holdup and threw his guns across the room. They caught the guy and no one was hurt.”

  “Did we hear about it?” Evie said, twirling her spaghetti around her fork. “Daddy, we were there. Didn’t Mom even call you?”

  “Not that she could have gotten through,” Nick said.

  “What do you mean, you were there?” Vlad asked.

  “You were driving by?” Arthur said.

  “We were in the bank when it happened, me and Gilda and Mom. I can’t believe she didn’t tell you. There were so many other things going on. Daddy, the robber took my phone.”

  Arthur dropped his eyes to his plate, searching out an artichoke heart with his fork. “I don’t understand what she’s talking about.”

  I had to smile at his blanket unwillingness to see what was in front of him. “The girl means what she says. We were in the bank when it was robbed. It does seem a little impossible that I forgot to tell you.”