Calling Invisible Women Read online

  After I cleaned up the kitchen, I put the hat and gloves back on and took Red over to Gilda’s. She had a glass front door, which was something I could never figure out, and she waved to me as she walked across her front hallway and I waved back to her. Red started barking like crazy, hopping up and down. Red was nuts about Gilda.

  I pulled off my gloves and hat when she opened the door. Red shot in like a bullet and started jumping all over her. Suddenly I felt like crying. “You were right,” I said. “I’ve lost my mind.”

  Gilda crouched down to rub the dog and when she looked up to ask me what I was talking about all of the color drained from her face. She covered her mouth with her hands.

  “What?” I said. Honestly for a second I wasn’t putting it all together. It had been a very confusing morning.

  “What do you mean, what? I can’t see you.”

  I held out my hands in front of me and my hands weren’t there and all of a sudden it hit me—I had in fact disappeared and my husband had failed to notice. “I thought I was crazy!” I sat down next to her in the front hall and put my head between my knees. I felt like I was going to faint. I wondered what it meant to have low blood pressure when you didn’t have any blood.

  “Didn’t you notice?” Gilda’s voice was shrill. She wasn’t screaming exactly but her tone was piercing.

  “I was sure that Arthur saw me. I kept trying to talk to him about it but he didn’t seem to think anything was wrong. I woke Nick up yesterday and asked him if I was invisible and he acted like I was a complete idiot because by then I wasn’t invisible, except maybe I was still invisible and he just didn’t notice.” Now I had started to cry. I could feel the big wet tears running down my face. I could see them hitting my pants and making dark spots. “I didn’t want to go through all that with Arthur. I mean, you’d say something if you noticed your wife wasn’t there but she was still talking to you, wouldn’t you?”

  “Clovie, this is serious.” She leaned forward and with one tentative finger pulled down the front of my sweater. “You’re completely gone.”

  “He didn’t notice!” A pure grief washed through me. It was bigger than the problem at hand.

  “Do you need a Kleenex? I can’t tell.”

  A fresh sob burst forward and I nodded my head.

  “Can I get you some Kleenex?” she said.

  Head nodding was out. I tried to catch my breath. “Please,” I said.

  Gilda scrambled to her feet and Red made his way into my lap. I ran my invisible hand over his head and down his back, watching as his fur flattened out and then sprung up again. It was hypnotic, really, the mechanics of petting.

  “Were you invisible when he came home last night?” Gilda put the Kleenex box on the floor in front of me and sat down, though not too close.

  I took a tissue and dried my eyes, blew my nose. I was certainly generating fluid. “I have to think. Everything is jumbled in my head now.” Arthur was late. Arthur was coming in the door. “No, I was still here last night. He was completely exhausted. He fell asleep before dinner.”

  “Are you sure you were there?”

  I nodded, then checked myself. “I think I’m sure, not that it makes any difference.”

  “It does make a difference. You’re going to have to tell someone. You at least have to go to the doctor. Clearly there is something very wrong with you.”

  “I’ll go to the doctor as soon as I come back,” I said, though in truth I couldn’t think of the last time I went to the doctor. I got Jeannine, Arthur’s nicest nurse, to call in the refills for my prescriptions. I felt like not going to the doctor was the perk of being married to a doctor.

  “When you come back from where? Don’t tell me you’re planning on going somewhere like this?”

  “I just meant when I come back, you know, when you can see me again.”

  “But what if you don’t come back?” Gilda extended her hand as if she had meant to take mine and then she thought better of it. “What makes you think this is something that just goes away?”

  “I came back yesterday,” I said defensively. I found myself petting Red faster and suddenly Gilda was watching his fur go up and down and I stopped.

  “This is uncharted territory. You have no idea how long you’re going to stay this way. How long were you invisible yesterday?”

  “Maybe fifteen minutes.”

  “And what about today?”

  I leaned over to look at Gilda’s watch. “I don’t know actually. This is how I woke up.”

  “So let’s say you became invisible just after you went to sleep. You could have been like this up to eight or ten hours by now.”

  “Will you stop?” I stood up from the floor. “You’re not making me feel any better.”

  “I’m not trying to make you feel better. I’m telling you, you need to get to a doctor. You probably should go to the emergency room. I can drive you.”

  That was when Benny stuck his head around the corner. He was six foot three and looked as much like a skeleton as any boy who had found himself tall overnight ever did. “Mom, are you taking me to school or what?”

  “You don’t say hello anymore?” Gilda said.

  “Hi, Mrs. Hobart. Hi, Red. We’re already late.”

  Red jumped off my lap and ran over to say hello to Benny. We both looked up at him as if we’d been caught doing something we shouldn’t have been doing. The boy was nothing but angles, all elbows and knees. Even his hair was sticking out in starched planes.

  “I’ll be right there,” Gilda said. “My keys are in my purse. Go start the car.”

  “Bye, Mrs. Hobart,” Benny said, and gave me a little wave. He went around the corner and then just as quickly came back. “Why are you guys on the floor?”

  “Red had something stuck in his paw,” Gilda said, deftly dispatching one of the innumerable lies of motherhood. “Now give me one minute.”

  We waited until we heard the back door close and then we looked at each other, which is to say I looked at Gilda and she looked at the top of my sweater. “I’m still not here, right?” I said.

  “Maybe men can see you and women can’t.”

  “I’m sitting here, a sweater, a pair of pants, no head, no hands. He just didn’t notice?”

  “No,” she said sadly. “He didn’t.”

  “Okay.” I got up off the floor. “I’m going to go call the doctor.”

  “I can drive you over as soon as I get back.”

  “I still know how to drive. I’ll wear some glasses and a hat. The one thing we can be sure of is that nobody’s going to notice.”

  It turns out I hadn’t been to the doctor in even longer than I’d thought because when I called Dr. Perkins’s office, I was told that he had moved to Minneapolis two years ago. His practice had been divided among the other doctors, the nurse informed me, and it was my lucky day because Dr. Anderson had a cancellation at eleven. What kind of insurance did I have?

  I hesitated. There was no such thing as an internist who was available to see you on the very day you wanted to go. I knew I should call Arthur, who could at least tell me whether or not he’d heard of Dr. Anderson, but Arthur would never call me back because Mary wouldn’t give him the message until the end of the day, and if for some reason he did call me back he would want to know if I was sick, and I would no doubt say something along the lines of as if you’d ever notice. And that wouldn’t be a good place to start the conversation.

  “Ma’am?” the nurse said. “Do you want to take the appointment?”

  I did.

  I had a memory of an old black-and-white movie about an invisible man that I had seen on television as a child. I think it was supposed to be scary, though I don’t remember anything particularly scary about it. What I remember was that when the invisible man needed to be seen he wrapped himself up in an endless strip of surgical gauze and put on a suit and a hat and dark glasses. When he needed to disappear, he simply twirled down to nothing, stepping out of the pile of clothi
ng and gauze to get away scot-free. I, on the other hand, having taken the most limited of surveys, didn’t think this was going to be my problem. I suppose I ran the risk of alarming someone but there was no chance they were going to be more alarmed than I was. I simply dressed to achieve maximum coverage, which was appropriate for the weather, and then I added on glasses and a hat.

  Dr. Caleb Anderson was in a practice of ten internists, of which he was the alphabetical front man. I went through the transaction at the receptionist’s desk with complete ease: I signed in, handed over my insurance card, filled out a ream of paperwork regarding my medical history, my ability to pay, and how I was feeling today, then I sat in a corner behind a magazine and waited.

  “Clover Hobart?” called a heavyset young woman in flowered scrubs. She was looking at my chart as I followed her through the door and down the hallway. “How are you feeling today?” she asked over her shoulder.

  “Invisible,” I said.

  “Don’t you hate that?” She patted the scale. “Hop on up here for me.”

  I stepped up. For the first time in my life I was sincerely curious. For all I knew I didn’t weigh any more than my clothes. The girl pushed the iron weights up and then gently tapped them back down.

  “One hundred forty-two,” she said.

  “Really?” I leaned forward to look for myself but she quickly slid the weights down to the end as if to erase the evidence.

  “I won’t listen to any complaints about one forty-two. I would kill to weigh one forty-two.” We sat down at a desk, where she took my blood pressure without making me roll up the sleeve of my long-sleeved T-shirt, took my temperature by handing me the thermometer, and asked me questions about my medications and alcohol consumption, whose answers she dutifully recorded in my chart. When all of that was through, she put me in a room and told me to wait. “The doctor is going to be right with you,” she said.

  Maybe being invisible wasn’t a problem. It was depressing to find out just how little attention people paid, but I was beginning to think there would probably be some advantages. For one thing, I would never worry about that crease between my eyebrows again.

  “Clover?” The door was open and I looked up to see a young man in a white coat holding my chart.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Dr. Anderson.” He put the chart down next to the sink and started to wash his hands, a task he performed in a manner that would have made Howard Hughes blush. “I see you were a patient of Dr. Perkins.”

  “I was.”

  “Well, we all miss Bill but he’s doing great up in Minnesota. Both of his daughters live in Minnesota.” He was working over the left hand with a little brush, employing such vigor that I had to wonder what exactly he had been doing in the room before mine.

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “He said it was the fishing that got him up there but I don’t know that those girls didn’t have something to do with it.” He switched the brush to his left hand and then began to dig into the right. He looked over at the open file beside him. “It says the last time you were in was more than three years ago. It says you had some arthritis in your left shoulder and Dr. Perkins sent you to a rheumatologist, Dr. Sewa. Did you like Dr. Sewa?”

  I strained to remember. It was a long time ago, and I don’t think I had been in his presence for more than three minutes. “I did,” I said, mostly to be polite. “It turned out to be tendonitis.”

  Dr. Anderson was now washing his wrists, using his forearm to pump liquid soap onto one wrist and then grinding them together in a circular motion so as not to involve his already clean hands. Hand washing, it seemed to me, should be like stair sweeping—you start at the highest point and work your way down. I did not mention this. “That’s good!” he said brightly. “You don’t want to get arthritis at your age. Really, not at any age.” He finished up with the soap and then just held his wrists under the water for a long, long time. From where I was sitting they looked raw. “So it says here you’re doing some hormone replacement therapy and taking Ostafoss for calcium.”

  “I am.” I didn’t mention the antidepressant, Singsall. It was such a little dose, a pinch. Arthur had talked me into trying it when, two years after the book review section folded in our paper, I would still get weepy on Sundays when I saw the New York Times Book Review. I was sure I could go off it now but the truth was I liked it. It just brightened things up a bit, made the day run smoother. I never saw any reason to tell Dr. Perkins about it and I saw even less reason to tell Dr. Anderson. In fact, I realized now, I didn’t want to tell Dr. Anderson anything. He had been in the room for five minutes. If he hadn’t noticed that there was no one sitting in these clothes, then he wasn’t the man for the job.

  “I’ll tell you, I think you should go off the Premacore. It puts you at an increased risk of breast cancer.”

  “I’ve taken that into account.” Though what I wanted to suggest was that he should try going through menopause sometime and get back to me.

  He dried his hands on seventeen paper towels. Seventeen actual towels. I counted as he pulled them out of the wall dispenser. “After we get some blood work we’ll sit down and discuss it, figure out what’s best for you.” He took a pen out of his coat pocket. I was surprised that he didn’t even bother to rinse it off. He made a couple of check marks on my chart. “Do you wear a seat belt, Clover?”

  I looked up at him, or at his back. “Are you serious?”

  “It’s good to ask. People forget.”

  “But what about why I came in today? Shouldn’t you ask about that first?”

  “Is that shoulder still bothering you?” He circled his own shoulder as if the very question had made it tight.

  “I’m invisible,” I said. I sat there waiting. I didn’t want to get into it with him but at the same time it was impossible to not even mention it.

  He nodded his head. “You wouldn’t believe how often I hear that. Once we get that blood work done we’ll know what’s missing. Don’t worry about it for now. We’ll get you fixed up. If you wait here just another minute, Polly will take you down to the lab.”

  I thought about offering my hand, but considering how clean his hands were, coupled with the fact that he’d never so much as taken my pulse, I felt it would be kinder not to. I waited a minute after the door closed before I picked up my purse and left. No one tried to stop me on the way out. It was possible they didn’t see me.

  three

  After that, I’ll admit it, I was low. I didn’t come back the way I thought I would, or not so much. One afternoon I was my same old self from the knees down for more than three hours. I quickly clipped my toenails and shaved my legs, though once those legs were gone again I had to wonder why I’d bothered. Sometimes I would catch sight of my own hand reaching across the table, the odd elbow, but these encounters with myself were always fleeting. As for Arthur and Nick, I’d made a terrible mistake. Instead of telling them what had happened, I dared them not to notice for themselves.

  And they didn’t notice.

  I continued to fix the food and clean the house without them having the slightest clue as to what was missing. I made a small effort to participate in conversation, but more and more I withdrew. In time, I didn’t come and sit with them at dinner, and when Arthur asked if I was feeling all right I only said I’d read in Oprah’s magazine that it was better to not eat after five. This feeble ploy struck them as completely reasonable.

  There were so many extra hours in the day! Had I really spent that much of my time on personal grooming? On small exchanges with the postman when he came to deliver the mail? Now I dressed for maximum coverage without any thought as to how I looked. No one cared how I looked. No one saw. I felt like I was under quarantine, except that I could go wherever I liked. I picked up Arthur’s suit from the cleaners, I went to the grocery store. Sometimes someone would notice that something was off and it was always a young girl who wouldn’t allow herself to believe what her eyes were telling her and
so she’d look quickly away, embarrassed, the way she might have if I’d had one eye in the center of my forehead. It was obvious her mother had drilled a lifetime of good manners into her. It isn’t polite to stare. But I always wanted to say to the girl, stare all you want, there’s nothing here to see.

  “Maybe you should go to a therapist,” Gilda said.

  I sighed. “And when the therapist failed to notice I wasn’t there I’d only get more depressed.”

  “You have to start taking some responsibility for your circumstances,” she said. “It’s been over a week now. You’re not a newbie anymore.” Gilda, mother of five, was a true believer in tough love.

  “What do you suggest I do? Have Red trained as a service animal?” I was running a dust mop around Gilda’s kitchen floor while we were talking. Cleaning was my attempt to find some order in the world.

  “Well, for one thing, you could talk to your husband before I do.”

  The mop came to an abrupt halt. “Don’t you dare.”

  “It’s bad enough that you’re invisible,” Gilda said. “But watching you play these unnecessary games with Arthur is getting to be unbearable.”

  “You think Steve would notice if you were missing, don’t you? Why don’t you just go ahead and say it?”

  That was when Benny and his older brother Miller came into the room. Each of them took a banana out of the fruit bowl. “Hi, Mrs. Hobart,” they said in unison.

  “Hey, guys,” I said.

  “Mom,” Benny said. “Miller said he’d drive me over to the comic book store.”

  “Is Nick home?” Miller asked me, leaning over to pet Red.

  “I don’t know where he is,” I said. “Why don’t you call his cell? I know he’d want to go.”

  “Cool,” Miller said, and then he looked at me. “Mrs. Hobart?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why are you cleaning our house?”

  “Because I finished cleaning mine,” I said flatly, and steered the mop toward the dining room.