Calling Invisible Women (2 page)

I went across the street and three houses down to the Kemptons’. I knocked on Gilda’s door.

“Have you ever noticed that my eyelids are uneven?” I asked her. I was standing on the porch. There was a cold wind prying the last of the red leaves off the maple tree in her front yard and I shivered.
That time of year thou mayst in me behold when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
.

“Come inside,” she said. She put her hands on my shoulders and moved me around in the light as if she was having trouble seeing me.

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold. Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang
.

“I need to get my glasses,” she said.

Gilda and Steve Kempton had five children, all of them boys, and their house always had the vague aura of a summer camp, even though four of those boys were technically grown and three of them were actually gone. There were always helmets and hockey sticks in the front hallway, always an odd number of tennis shoes on the stairs. In the summer the floors had a vaguely sandy crunch to them even though we lived in Ohio, and nowhere near a beach. Benny, the baby, was in high school now, and Miller, who was the second to the oldest, had boomeranged straight back into his childhood bedroom the day after graduating from college and had been there for more than a year. I believed that it was Miller who set the bad example for Nick.

Gilda came back with a pair of readers and, looking through her glasses, gave my eyelids serious consideration. Then she put her thumb between my eyebrows and made little circles over the crease there. “I tried that,” I said. “It doesn’t go away.”

“Botox.” She tapped her own forehead, a smooth lake of tranquillity.

“I did that once. You know I don’t like needles. And anyway, the wrinkles grew back.”

She shrugged and looked again. “You don’t really notice it,” she said, but not in a way that made me feel better. Gilda and I had been friends for twelve years, ever since we’d moved into the neighborhood. It was her honesty that I counted on. If I needed a comforting lie I was perfectly capable of telling one to myself. She was walking into the kitchen, stepping over a couple of tennis racquets, and I followed her. She put the kettle on.

“So if you aren’t interested in needles, why are you making an assessment of your face? Your only two options are to fix it or live with it. There’s no point in just beating yourself up about it.”

“The thing is,” I started tentatively, not knowing how to talk about what I wasn’t really sure had happened, “this morning—” I stopped.

Gilda, that source of constant motion, stopped as well. “This morning,” she said. I could tell she was thinking I was about to give her bad news.

“I was invisible.”

Gilda turned and got down two cups from the cabinet beside the sink, let out a dispirited sigh, and then dropped a tea bag in each of those cups. “I hate that.”

Something in my spine caught a small jolt of current and straightened to attention—it was understanding, recognition. It was everything I was hoping for. “It’s happened to you?”

Gilda lowered her chin and looked up at me, a move I now realized was meant to stand in for a knitted brow. “Are you kidding me? Except for a very few breakout moments, I’ve been invisible since the new millennium. The boys can be looking at naked women on Facebook and they don’t so much as twitch when I walk into the room. I can ask Steve what time he wants to eat dinner and he keeps on texting like I wasn’t even there. A woman wheels her cart right in front of mine and cuts into the checkout lane, a car cuts me off in traffic, I wave at the waiter and he’s looking at the wall behind my head. It’s just the plight of women after a certain age. No one can see you. Sometimes I find myself daydreaming about that girl I used to be, how I could always get a table in a busy restaurant. I could raise my hand on a street corner in New York in the pouring rain and get a taxi.” She shook her head at such an impossible memory. “That’s just gone now. We’re nothing but the ghosts of our former selves.”

“True,” I said. I had forgotten the feeling of going into a very busy restaurant at eight on a Friday night and getting a table without a reservation. “But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

“So what are you talking about?”

“Invisibility. Literal invisibility.” I sounded less than certain. Gilda and I told each other pretty much everything but I found these words were heavy in my mouth.

“You mean where you walk right up to someone and it’s as if they can’t even see you?”

“No, where I look in the mirror and can’t see myself.” There was nothing metaphorical about it.

“Does this have to do with Arthur?”

“He wasn’t even there. It was after he’d left for work.”

“No, but I mean he’s been very busy lately. You’ve said it yourself. You hardly ever see him.”

“Which is not the same thing as hardly ever seeing myself. Do you think this is hysterical invisibility? I’m developing some strange new disease in an effort to get the doctor’s attention? The only way I could get Arthur’s attention, medically speaking, is with a bad case of cradle cap.”

“He can’t help how busy he is,” Gilda said defensively. “He’s busy because he’s good. He’s busy because everybody loves him.”

Everybody including Gilda. Not long after we’d moved into the neighborhood, Arthur dislodged a grape from Benny’s windpipe at a Fourth of July party and saved his life. Arthur had noticed that Benny, who was only three at the time, was standing stock-still in the middle of a crowd of adults, just standing there, not even blinking. Arthur said later he knew something was wrong because he’d never seen Benny stand still before. He grabbed the boy’s ankles and, flipping him over in midair, shook him like a pillowcase. Out popped the grape, which was followed by the enormous wail the grape had blocked in his throat. With a little cajoling, Benny got over the shock of it almost immediately. Gilda never did. “This has nothing to do with Arthur,” I said.

“Okay.” Gilda tilted her head slightly to the side. “So can you see yourself now?”

“Of course I can see myself now.” I held out my arm to show us both. “I’m not delusional, at least I don’t think I am. I got out of the shower this morning and for a few minutes I couldn’t see myself.”

“I don’t think I’d mind that,” Gilda said.

I threw up my hands. “I swear to you this isn’t coming around to a punch line. I can’t explain what happened, but it did happen, and then it was over. I guess I was just wondering …”

“Wondering what?”

“If it ever happened to you.”

The kettle let out its high-pitched wail and Gilda rescued it from the flame and filled our cups. “No,” she said tentatively. “Not if we’re talking about a lack of physical matter. Have you had your eyes checked?”

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.”