Calling Invisible Women

by Jeanne Ray

  “Naked,” she said in wonder. Mrs. Sawyer was carrying a suitcase and I took it from her as we went inside.

  “My husband must be working late.” I looked around. Red came shooting out of the darkness and barked a stern reprimand. I gave him a biscuit. “I don’t know where everyone else is.”

  “That is very cute dog.” Red turned to her and wagged. “Vlad and Evie have gone back to school. I called him when I arrived and he was horrified. He said I must drive home immediately. I said not until I have seen another invisible person. I could drive home now, Mrs. Hobart, if you are very tired, but to say the truth I would like very much to speak with you first.”

  “How far away do you live?” I asked.

  “In Cookville. It is four hours away.”

  “Then you’ll have to spend the night,” I said. True, it wasn’t the perfect night for a houseguest, but I had one and I would proceed accordingly.

  “Thank you very much,” she said. “May I trouble you also for red wine? I am sorry to ask but my nerves, they are not perfect. I have started smoking again. I smoked when I was a girl in Russia, never in the United States, never until now.”

  “Oh,” I said, “Russia.”

  “Being invisible has been very trying. I have considered divorcing my husband. I have considered many things. My children tell me I am not in right mind but I do not say that to alarm you. You know the mind of the invisible person. It is what it is.”

  I found the corkscrew and the wine. I poured us each a glass. We toasted. “Very true,” I said.

  “Vlad tells me you went to Dexter-White to confront them about what they have done. Vlad says you are very brave woman.”

  “It isn’t as hard being brave when no one can see you.”

  “I have found this to be the same. Did you get the company to agree to change us?”

  “I think they’d like to change us but they don’t know how yet. They lack a sense of urgency about the whole thing.”

  “That is because people cannot see. What you cannot see you do not care about. My husband proved this to me. Two weeks I am missing and he did not notice.”

  “I’ve got you beat on that one,” I said, and took a long sip of wine. “And there are women in my group who have me beat as well. You should come to the meeting tomorrow. It’s an entire roomful of invisible women.”

  “You are very understanding woman, very compassionate to husband. That is not the Russian way.”

  “Is your husband Russian?”

  “My husband is thoughtless farmer whose people have been in Ohio since beginning of time.”

  “Then how did you meet?”

  “I place ad in magazine and he orders me. This was 1982. There was then a big business in Russian brides. We all thought we would go to New York City, marry millionaire who gave us champagne in bed of silk sheets. That was not so. Still, it was a better life than the one I had before. I knew how to work. We were not unhappy until I disappeared. You come to a country and learn a man’s language. He did not learn Russian, not single word, not hello or goodbye. I bore him three children. I fix his dinner and clean his house and feed his chickens. I make him sweaters. I work as secretary at State Farm insurance and I put all of paychecks into joint account. Everything I do, I do for him and when I was gone he did not notice.”

  “It’s hard,” I said. “But I tell myself it’s because he knows me so well. He sees me even when I’m not there.”

  “That is very beautiful thought, Mrs. Hobart, but I do not believe it is true.”

  “Please, call me Clover.”

  “Ariana.” Ariana tilted back her wineglass until it was empty and then placed it down on the table with a decisive click. “So, Clover, our husbands are not interesting. We must turn our mind to the cause.”

  “Dexter-White claims to be working on a drug to reinstate us, but what we’re more concerned with is getting the drugs that are making women invisible off the market immediately. They have a problem with this. The drugs are making them a great deal of money and they say only a very small number of the women who take them are disappearing.”

  “A small number? One is not a small number in a matter such as this.”

  “I agree with you,” I said. “They do not.”

  “So what will you do?”

  “I need to figure out what I can do. Dexter-White is a very large company and invisible women are difficult to find.”

  Ariana reached across the table for the wine bottle. “When I thought I was the only invisible woman in the world, when I did not know how this had happened to me, I thought the problem was very great. Now that I know that you are here, that you have other invisible friends, I see that it is no longer a problem.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s a problem.”

  “You think that we are Chechnya and this Dexter-White is mighty Russia. This is where you must change your thinking. They are Chechnya. We are Russia. We are tanks and guns. We are force of history. We will crush them beneath our heels like bugs.”

  “What in the world are you talking about?”

  “I have begun to study empowerment and visualization. We are Russians. Do not doubt me. We will bring our tanks to Philadelphia, City of Brotherly Love, and we will flatten them. You don’t know where to find invisible women. You find them where you find everything else in the world—on Internet. We will Facebook invisible women. We will Twitter them. We will call them to arms.”

  “I don’t know how to do any of that.”

  “That is why we gave birth. Children do this. We will call Oprah. Oprah will take invisible women to her bosom. We will call Regis and Kelly and New York Times. Vlad says you write for newspapers.”

  “A gardening column.”

  “We must stand and make powerful noise that will call our sisters out from every corner of this country. Then united we go to Dexter-White like the force of Mother Russia and bring the pharmacologists to their knees. They will not know how many of us there are. We are invisible. If we are one hundred, we say we are one thousand. If we are one thousand, we say we are ten thousand. Where there are streets, we march, where there are microphones, we speak.”

  “Dear God,” I said. “Have you been working this out in your head all this time?”

  “No,” she said. “I did not know who I was fighting. I thought I was fighting my husband. Now you have given me Dexter-White and I will promise you I am here to destroy them.”

  That was just about where we were when Arthur and Nick came in the back door and found a woman they didn’t know sitting in the kitchen wearing a great deal of clothing and drinking two glasses of wine.

  “Hello?” Arthur said, not sure if he was approaching a burglar or a houseguest.

  “Where have the two of you been?” I asked.

  Arthur sighed. I was home. Everything was fine.

  “I knew you had that big meeting today so Dad and I decided to go out to dinner,” Nick said.

  Darling Nick, already covering for me. “This is Vlad’s mother, Ariana Sawyer. She came to see him but they just missed each other.”

  Arthur held out his hand and our guest took it. “I’m so glad you’re here, Mrs. Sawyer. We’ve enjoyed getting to know Vlad so much.”

  “He thought to break up with Evie,” Ariana said. “I call him idiot. I said, in what world will such girl ever speak to you again?”

  Nick was doing an excellent job not staring but something about Ariana seemed to have caught my husband’s attention. “We’re very glad they patched up their differences. You know that young people can—” He stopped and looked at her. He tried to start again. “Young people—” He blinked. “Clover? May I speak to you in the living room for just a minute? You’ll forgive me, Mrs. Sawyer.” His face looked funny and his breathing had become shallow and rapid. “Something at work today.”

  “Go, go,” she said, and then she turned to Nick. “So, you are Evie’s brother. Vlad told me you punched him in misunderstanding over mother.”

 
“I felt bad about that,” Nick said.

  “Never feel bad when you defend mother.”

  Arthur was out the door and in the living room. “Clover!” he called.

  “I’m right here. Are you okay?”

  “You’re right where?”

  “Here.” I took his hand. “Sit down for a minute. You don’t look so hot.”

  “Didn’t you notice? That woman in the kitchen?”

  “Ariana,” I said.

  “I can’t see her! You seem to be able to see her and Nick seems to be able to see her but she has no head, no hands. I shook her hand and there was nothing there.”

  Another woman might have been upset. After all, he had missed my invisibility for more than a month and then picked up on someone else’s in a matter of minutes, but Arthur was a doctor. He had a talent for spotting problems in other people. As for me, he always trusted that I was fine. “I know,” I said.

  “So you can’t see her either?”

  “I can’t.”

  “And this doesn’t bother … Clover? Clover, where are you?”

  “I’m sitting right here,” I said. I squeezed his hand. I loved him. In his moment of panic and recognition, in this moment I had imagined so many times, I loved him more than I ever thought possible.

  It took a while to iron out all the details. There was a lot that Arthur wanted to know, and while I hit on a few of the major points, I reminded him we had a guest, not to mention the fact that the sheets in Evie’s room had to be changed and neither Ariana nor I had had supper. Arthur moved through the evening like a somnambulist, not like his usual exhausted self but like someone in a trance. He poached us some eggs and made toast. He told us to sit there, to have another glass of wine. His voice was very weak. Nick went upstairs and cleaned the bathroom.

  “This is excellent husband,” Ariana said. “I can see now why you excuse him to me. My husband, when he finally troubles to notice what has happened, he is very defensive. He tells me it is my fault for not alerting him. He feels bad for himself. Your husband is clearly upset because he has been so neglectful for so long.” She spoke as if Arthur wasn’t in the room.

  “Yes,” he said, putting the plates down in front of us. “You’ve hit the nail on the head.”

  “Tomorrow we launch campaign,” she said. “I say we work very fast. Make big push. You write piece for tomorrow’s paper. Get this started.”

  “It’s too late,” I said. “Too late for tomorrow.”

  “You call editor now, tell him you’re invisible. It will not be too late when he knows that no one can see you. He will take it tonight. Tomorrow we make signs, what you call pee-kit signs. We make T-shirts. We take over Internet. We need slogan. We need to be very catchy.”

  “Invisible—Indivisible,” Nick said. He had just come back in the room and was washing out a pan.

  We all looked at him. “So smart,” Ariana whispered.

  I excused myself and went upstairs to write.

  “How is it possible that I didn’t know?” Arthur said when we were lying in bed that night after the story had been filed.

  “Lots of people didn’t know. I should have told you. Seriously, I’m sorry about that. I shouldn’t be giving you tests.”

  “You’re invisible,” he said. “It’s not like you’re asking me to name the capitals of all fifty states. It just kills me to think you’ve been going through all of this on your own.”

  “Not exactly on my own. I had Gilda and your mother. I had the invisible women.”

  “We need to hire some lawyers to approach Dexter-White,” he said. “Those guys are serious players. I think it’s great that you want to print leaflets but it’s going to take more than that.”

  “The problem is I’ve been thinking of myself as Chechnya,” I said.

  “What?” Arthur said.

  “I thought I was Chechnya.”

  “You?” Arthur was laughing. “Chechnya? Absolutely not. Not even remotely possible. You’re Russia. You’ve always been Russia.”

  “I know that now,” I said, and took him in my arms.

  fifteen

  The next morning Vlad and Evie were back. Ariana had texted them.

  “But classes start today,” I said.

  “We are invisible,” Ariana said. “This is more important than school. Tell invisible women that meeting will be here immediately. Tell everyone to bring laptop and cell phone. Tell them to bring friends and grown children and pads of paper. They should bring husbands if husbands are good.”

  I looked around the room. “I’m not sure that many people will fit.”

  “They stand up. We give them assignments and then they should go.”

  Arthur called in sick to work. I had never seen this happen. He went to work sick. When he had the flu he discreetly excused himself from the exam room and threw up down the hall. “Are you even allowed to call in sick?” I asked.

  “First, I love you,” he said. “This is a huge moment in your life and I want to be there for you. Second, I am not about to have that woman see me going off to work.”

  “Good point.”

  Irene was in the kitchen making vegan carrot muffins and gallons of green tea. “I sent out a tweet this morning,” she said, handing me a cup. “Calling Invisible Women to take over Dexter-White tomorrow at noon.”

  “You tweet?”

  “Evie taught me,” she said.

  Arthur and Evie came into the kitchen together. Arthur took a muffin and gave his mother a kiss. “I understand why Clover didn’t tell me,” he said. “But I still can’t believe you didn’t tell me. My own mother.”

  Irene shrugged. “When you were a little boy you wanted me to do your science projects for you and I wouldn’t do it.”

  Arthur looked at her. “What in the world does that have to do with what I just said?”

  “I didn’t do your science projects and so you were forced to either figure science out for yourself or fail in the process of honorably trying. You grew up to become a brilliant doctor. I didn’t tell you Clover was invisible because you had to do the work yourself. I couldn’t make your journey for you.”

  “So do you think I might grow up to be a brilliant husband?”

  Irene reached up and patted his cheek. “That’s what I’d wish for you.”

  “If someone had bothered to tell me,” Evie said, “we wouldn’t have had to drive all the way to school and back.”

  “You’ve had a lot on you,” I said, giving her a hug. “I didn’t think you needed this.”

  “Mother, you’re invisible. I’m not that narcissistic.”

  This was news I was glad to hear.

  Gilda’s husband, Steve, stayed home from work as well and they came over with Miller and Benny to move half of the team across the street to their house so that there were fewer people to step on. I wore a sticky name tag on my sweatshirt. Everybody did. HI! I’M CLOVER.

  Benny sidled up to me in the hall. “You are so busted,” he said quietly, and then walked away.

  Who had connections? Did anyone know Anderson Cooper? The hive buzzed with action. T-shirt orders were placed with a company that knew about emergencies. Nick rented a bus. Arthur brought in the paper and waved it like a flag above his head. Just as Ed had promised—page one above the fold. CALLING INVISIBLE WOMEN, by Clover Hobart. As of tomorrow at noon, invisible women are stepping out of the shadows and into the hallways of Dexter-White, the Philadelphia-based pharmaceutical giant whose products have created a nightmare for untold numbers of American women.

  The phone rang. The cell phone rang. Nick’s phone rang. It sounded like Arthur’s office.

  “AP wire services picked up the story,” Ed said. “It’s everywhere. This is huge, Clover. It’s nine in the morning and we’ve sold out on every stand in town. I’m going to want blow-by-blow reporting on this. You’re going to cover every minute of it.”

  Evie tweeted to the American Cheerleading Association. Vlad posted on the Facebook page of t
he American Hockey League, which had been recruiting him hard. We e-mailed Oprah and Ellen and The View. All three of the producers called back within ten minutes. Lila and Alice and Jo Ellen took the calls. I was out in the backyard, talking to NPR on my cell phone.

  “I think at first I was in shock,” I said to Nina Totenberg, who was filling in for Steve Inskeep. “And after that, I suppose I had a sense of shame. I didn’t know what had happened to me. I didn’t know how to talk about it.”

  “It seems like all that has changed,” Nina Totenberg said.

  “It has. It was a case of women coming together at the right time and deciding that we were going to stand up for ourselves and stand up for other women. Once we coalesced for action it felt like nothing could stop us. These drugs have got to come off the market. If only one woman was rendered invisible it would be too many.”

  Nina Totenberg herself reminded listeners that they could get more information about tomorrow’s demonstration, and about invisibility, at npr.org or invisibleme.com.

  A representative from Dexter-White declined to comment.

  The phone rang. It was Wilhelm Holt. “You said forty-eight hours.”

  “Well, it will be forty-eight hours from the time I left until the time I come back.” I walked around to the kitchen window and watched the flurry of activity. Right in the middle of all of it Irene was teaching tree pose to an invisible woman in a pair of jeans and a polar fleece top.

  “So the plan is to ruin a company without even sitting down to talk?”

  “I did sit down to talk. I was in your office yesterday, sitting. I would have talked to anyone. How long have you known about this, Dr. Holt? How long have you known that Dexter-White was making women invisible and done nothing about it except talk?”

  Wilhelm Holt hung up the phone.

  Evie had set up our own Facebook page and now Patty Sanchez and Laura Worthington were doing nothing except trying to answer the enormous volume of inquiries from invisible women. They were explaining to them how to work the airlines, the buses, and where to meet.

  “Oh my gosh,” Laura said. “I have to run. Channel Four is putting me on the news at noon and five.”