Calling Invisible Women (13 page)

“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.

“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.