Calling Invisible Women Read online

  I shook my head.

  “I wonder if French women ever feel invisible,” she said, deftly trying to steer the subject away from the personal and toward the cultural. “People are always talking about how chic and secure French women are, but if the twenty-year-old Brigitte Bardot passed the seventy-six-year-old Brigitte Bardot on the street, there isn’t going to be any contest as to who gets noticed.”

  That was when I came to the conclusion that feeling invisible was something that could be talked about for hours on end but being invisible was a conversational no-man’s-land. I blew on my tea and looked at my watch. “I should probably get to work. I’ve got a column due. Is it okay if I just take the cup with me?”

  “Of course you can take the cup, but I haven’t been any help at all.” Gilda sounded genuinely sorry.

  I waved her off. “I’m fine,” I said. “I just needed to talk.” In truth, maybe Gilda had been more of a help than she had realized. Maybe I had suffered a brief bout of insanity and by not acknowledging it, she was allowing me to keep my dignity. I had no real idea what had happened. I just had a strange, unsettled feeling, like you do when you’re out and think you might have left the oven on or the windows open in the rain. Later, of course, I found out this feeling was all part of it. Some of the women in the group call it an invisibility hangover, like every cell you’ve got has had a tiny whiplash from coming back into focus again.

  When I got back to the house, Nick was sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of cereal, and Red, who didn’t even turn his face in my direction when I came in, was staring up at him. Nick always let Red lap up the last of the milk when he was finished with it. “You’re stirring awfully early,” I said without thinking.

  “Thank you very much for that,” he said. “What was up with you this morning anyway?”

  “This morning?” I asked, not wanting to do it all again.

  “Do you see me?” Nick said, mimicking my panic in an unbecoming manner. He was working the crossword puzzle in the Times. His father must have been in a rush this morning. Since Nick had come home, Arthur usually remembered to hide the arts section so that he wasn’t left with the pathetic puzzle in the local paper.

  “My contact lens was stuck,” I said, coming up with a slightly plausible lie. “I think I’m going to have to stop wearing them. My optometrist says I have dry eyes.”

  “You don’t wear contact lenses, and even if you did, what would that have to do with whether or not I can see you?” He filled in an answer with a ballpoint pen. It was the Thursday puzzle. Not easy.

  “I said, ‘I can’t see.’ I’m sorry. I just panicked for a minute.”

  “You didn’t say, ‘I can’t see.’ You said, ‘Can you see me?’ There’s a difference. Mid-arthropod, six letters.”

  “Do you have anything?”

  “Starts with T.”

  The T was what I needed because the word that had instantly come to mind was Lorax, a tufted Dr. Seuss character. “Thorax,” I said. “And about the rest of it, if you could just chalk it up to early dementia I would be grateful.”

  Nick wrote in the word and seeing how nicely it fit, he smiled. My firstborn child had such a lovely smile it could be given out as a gift. “If you don’t ask me whether or not I found a job today, I won’t ask you if you’re losing your mind.”

  “It’s a deal,” I said.

  Then Nick put his cereal bowl on the floor, a few corn flakes floating in a thin lake of milk, sending Red into a frantic, lapping ecstasy. Everybody was happy.

  I remember so many details about that last day, the time I wasted answering e-mails, the two loads of laundry I folded and put away. Nick went off to his coffee shop, where he assumed his daily post scouring the Internet for job listings, and I changed his sheets and picked up towels off the floor because I was feeling like I owed him. Evie called to say she needed sixty dollars to replace the tiny underpants to her Ohio State cheerleading uniform, which had been lost, and I didn’t have the nerve to ask her how they had been lost or how an article of clothing so insubstantial could be so expensive. I put the check in the mail. I wrote my weekly gardening column for the newspaper: “Your Chrysanthemums’ Second Act.” Just because those bright yellow daisy mums have ceased their dazzling bloom, it doesn’t mean they’re bound for the compost heap. Everything the same, everything in order, except that a couple of times I pulled down my sock to make sure my ankle was still there. By the end of the day I had come full circle and was back to thinking it had all been some crazy misunderstanding with the mirror.

  Which was not to say I wasn’t anxious for Arthur to come home and give me some plausible explanation for what had happened, or what it might have been had an eight-year-old been involved. Arthur and I had known each other since college, and even though I often found myself thinking we should find a way to spend a little more time together, I also thought of him as the person who knew me best in all the world, the person I was closest to.

  I finished making dinner and left it in the oven to keep warm. I gave Red his dinner and then I took him for a walk. I poured a glass of wine. I started to read a book on composting because my next article was on composting. Nick came in briefly and went out again. I tried Arthur’s cell phone. I read another chapter on composting.

  Even for Arthur, 8:15 was late, and very late without a phone call. The chicken by now would be tough and dry, the fresh roasted asparagus reduced to the consistency of canned. I had become a fairly lousy cook over the years trying to guess the time of my husband’s arrival. When we heard the back door open, Red and I sprang up and raced toward it, Red beating me there by three terrier lengths.

  Arthur held up the palm of his hand. “Don’t,” he said. I stopped in my tracks but the dog did not. Arthur crouched down and scratched his ears. “I’ve got to take a shower. One of the Abbot girls threw up on me first thing this morning. I changed lab coats but I’m still feeling a little toxic. The nurses swore up and down that I smelled fine.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sure.”

  Arthur looked at Red. “I could fall over and go to sleep right here,” he said, holding his muzzle. “Right on top of you.”

  “Do you want dinner?”

  Arthur got up slowly, shaking his head no. “Sure,” he said. “Just let me clean up. You wouldn’t believe all the things that happened today. A woman came in with triplets. All three of them had the croup. Then the head of the hospital board comes in and wants to talk to me about a new chief of staff and he stays for an hour, telling me one of his granddaughters bites her fingernails and his daughter is worried that the child may have some kind of mental dysfunction because of it and he’s going on and on and it’s two o’clock and I haven’t finished seeing the morning patients yet.” He put his hand over his eyes and shook his head. “Sometimes I wonder how much longer I can do this.”

  “I wonder that myself,” I said.

  Arthur walked past me, keeping a safe distance. “Any news for Nick on the job front?”

  “Not that he told me.” Suddenly I felt unnerved, thinking of what Gilda had said. Is it Arthur? When in the world was I supposed to work in the news of my day?

  Arthur started up the stairs and then stopped halfway and called down over his shoulder. “Mary said you called today.”

  “I did,” I said. I was looking at my hands, first the palm side and then the back. Still here.

  “Any problems?”

  I turned my face toward the stairs. I was going to say no, none at all, but he was already gone.

  • • •

  I had studied journalism and literature while Arthur was in medical school. I got that lousy job kids get at newspapers when I first started out, covering the city council meetings and the police desk from midnight to six a.m. But I was a reporter at heart and I always found something to report on. The great payola scandal in the state house of representatives? That was my story. I chased down labor bosses. I made myself a little name. After the kids were born I moved ove
r to the arts section because the arts just seemed safer, and later I was editor of the book review section, because back then such things existed even in Ohio. For a long time I was very busy, reading and writing and assigning and editing and raising Nick and Evie. Arthur was building a practice and there were nights he got home before I did and he made dinner and left it warming in the oven for me, though even as I write that sentence I can scarcely believe it was true. It was right around that time that everything began to unspool and my whole career was played out in reverse. The Internet, that voracious weed, started to put the squeeze on us. The paper lost advertisers, the paper got smaller, the book review section became two pages, which became the occasional book review that I still write. By then no one thought I could be a reporter again, not even me. News could go to the arts but the arts never came back to news. I felt lucky to get the gardening column two days a week, especially because for the most part I was making it up as I went along. For every hour that was taken out of my job, another hour was added onto Arthur’s. Maybe we were lucky. We had two kids, we needed the money. It was good that his practice was booming. With my newfound free time I drove the kids to soccer practice and ran the coat drive for the homeless and made better dinners, which would, over time, become worse dinners. It all worked out. It just didn’t work out the way I thought it was going to.

  I waited for a long time after the shower stopped running for Arthur to come back downstairs. When I finally went up I found him asleep on top of the bedspread wearing my toweling robe. His must have been in the wash. I got a blanket out of the closet and covered him up. I never even considered waking him to tell him what had happened. He was exhausted, he needed to sleep. It was a decision I later came to regret. By the next morning I was gone.

  two

  I think I knew it as soon as I woke up, maybe even in the moment before I opened my eyes. It could have been that I was dreaming I was invisible, people bumping into me at a cocktail party, stepping on my toes. When I stuck my hand out from underneath the covers and saw nothing I hardly even felt surprised. If anything I was vindicated. It wasn’t my imagination! Looking down, I could see the shape of myself beneath the blankets. It was just a shorter version of the shape that Arthur made beside me, the only difference being that there was a head on Arthur’s pillow. At the foot of the bed Red made a neat ball between us. It wasn’t that I had been reduced to nothing exactly, had that been the case the bed would have appeared to contain only a man and a dog, it’s that I had been reduced to something mystifyingly clear—definite substance and no form. I thought about waking up Arthur but considering yesterday’s debacle with Nick I decided to just wait until I came back. After I was visible again I’d figure out what was going on.

  And so I waited, my invisible arms behind my invisible head. Of course, I didn’t know exactly when I’d vanished yesterday. Could it have been in the shower? Was it possible that I could have washed my hair without realizing I was gone? And then something else occurred to me, something darker and more unsettling: what if yesterday wasn’t the first time? What if I had been flickering in and out for a while now—in my sleep or in the car or in the kitchen chopping vegetables? It had been years since I’d really kept an eye on myself. Could I be positive how long this had been going on?

  My need to look in the mirror was becoming overwhelming. As quietly as possible, I rolled out of bed and stepped into my slippers. My nightgown came down well past my knees with sleeves past my elbows, and even though there was nothing sexy about it, it had a pretty scoop neckline and was soft from years of washing. It had once been pink but now was more a color that called pink to mind. I stood in front of the mirror on the back of the closet door and looked at the nightgown floating there, the slippers standing empty. I tried to remain calm. I would come back. It was only a matter of waiting it out.

  “You’re up early,” Arthur said in a sleepy voice.

  I jumped. The nightgown jumped. And then I turned around. For better or for worse, I thought. In sickness and in health. “Arthur?”

  “I fell asleep on you last night,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I got out of the shower and thought I could lie down for one minute. I used to be able to do that when I was an intern. Remember the one-minute nap?” He sighed, stretched. “I’m not the man I used to be, Clover.” He patted the bedspread beside him and Red wiggled up and rolled over on his back, presenting his tummy. “I’m a dog,” Arthur said, giving Red a vigorous scratch. “We’re both dogs, aren’t we, Red?”

  “Hey,” I said, not thinking there was any need to state the obvious.

  “That reminds me.” He closed his eyes and pressed a palm to his forehead. “There’s a group meeting tonight and the drug reps are bringing in dinner so count me as covered.”

  “What reminds you?”

  “What?”

  “You said ‘that reminds me.’ ”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Nothing reminded me. I’m just free associating. It’s so nice to just have a minute to talk. Did I tell you Missy Tate came in with her baby yesterday as a new patient? Missy was one of my first patients. She was two years old when her parents brought her in. She had been one of Jack Aldo’s patients when he retired. You remember Jack Aldo, I got a lot of his practice. Anyway, the prettiest little girl. As soon as she walked in the door I knew who she was, and she had her baby who looked just like her. God, tell me that didn’t make me feel like I was one hundred and ten.”

  “You knew her on sight,” I said. “Pretty amazing.” Here’s an interesting fact: I was neither warm nor cold. Invisibility seemed to exist at a perfectly controlled temperature. I smoothed down the front of my nightgown with my hands. I cleared my throat.

  “Could you do me a huge favor?” Arthur asked. He was sitting halfway up in bed now, still wearing my robe. It would appear he was looking right at me but who’s to say? He didn’t have his glasses on and the room was not especially light.

  “Name it.” What if I wasn’t gone, or I was only gone to myself? That would mean that this was insanity. Insanity being two rungs below invisibility on the ladder of diseases I wished to be suffering from.

  “Would you make me a big breakfast? Eggs and bacon, the works? I’m starving.”

  “You didn’t have dinner.”

  “Right.” He cocked a finger at me. “I didn’t have dinner and I probably won’t have lunch today and who knows what the drug reps will bring for dinner, so this is my best bet for a meal today.” Then he got out of bed, and coming right toward me, he patted the small of my back and went into the bathroom. “You’re the best,” Arthur said, and then he closed the door behind him.

  It turns out I was not invisible after all. That left partial blindness and mental illness. I made the bed and got dressed—jeans and a sweater and socks and shoes. I pulled out a hat and scarf and gloves to walk Red. Maybe I didn’t need them but I put them on anyway. Once I was dressed I looked remarkably like myself, an absent version of myself but it was better than nothing, which is what I had started with. Red followed me out to get the paper and down to the end of the block and back. I saw no one and no one saw me. Back in the kitchen I took off the hat and gloves because if this was mental illness, wearing a hat and gloves to make breakfast would look even crazier. I found the end of a goat cheese log in the refrigerator, the last decent tomato, some basil. I got out the bacon and the bread. The whole time I was thinking, I may be out of my mind but at least I can still make a nice breakfast. I poured out juice and coffee. I put a little pitcher of milk beside the cup, an unnecessarily attentive flourish. The bacon was spattering away in the pan, the eggs firmed up nicely. Cue the husband, handsome in his suit, walking into the kitchen, a tie in each hand.

  “Which one?” he asked.

  “The blue whales.” Arthur’s taste in ties ran toward the whimsical. The knife worked up and down, seemingly by itself, over the tender skin of the tomato and then across the basil, making a chiffonade.

  Arthur sat down and fo
lded the arts section to the crossword puzzle. I had put a pencil next to his fork. I had thought of everything. “What a lucky guy I am,” he said when I set down the plate, but he wasn’t looking at the plate, or the absence of the hand that left it on the place mat. He was looking at the paper. Red was looking up at Arthur, mesmerized by the smell of bacon.

  “What are we going to do about Nick?” Arthur said absently, the folded puzzle in one hand, fork in the other.

  What are we going to do about Nick? For the first time I realized that it wasn’t a question. It was a conversational filler, like asking what the weather was going to do. It was the thing we said to each other when there wasn’t anything to say. “Another piece of toast?” I answered by way of experiment.

  Arthur looked at his watch and in response took a long, fast drink of coffee. “No, no. I’ve got patients starting at seven thirty. I have to go. It was a great breakfast.” He stopped then, checked the paper one more time. “What’s that Melville novel? The short one?”

  “Omoo,” I said. It seemed like it was in the puzzle once a week. He never remembered it.

  He bit off half a piece of bacon and gave the other half to Red, then he wrote in the answer. “You’re a genius,” he said. “By the way, I left that suit on the floor in the closet, the one the kid threw up on. If you’re out today—”

  “Right to the dry cleaners.”

  That was when my husband blew a kiss in my direction and was out the door.

  The toast was gone, the bacon, the coffee, the juice, but that perfect little goat cheese omelet sat on the plate untouched. I picked up Arthur’s fork and took a bite. For a minute I thought about running out to the garage and telling him to come back. It was that good. It was also wasted on me because I really didn’t have much of an appetite. I took a couple of bites and pushed the plate away.