Calling Invisible Women (22 page)

“Jane!” I called.

I began to walk in a slow, clockwise circle around the perimeter of the building, chanting her name like a prayer. I was thinking how odd it was that I had no idea what Jane looked like. I was thinking that if we ever got this worked out and if I ever got home again, I would have a party at our house and ask all the invisible women to wear their favorite outfits and bring pictures of themselves so that when I closed my eyes I would be able to picture them in my mind. What if somehow they had trapped her upstairs? What if Dr. Holt had a button under his desk that called security? They could have thrown a sheet over her or caught her in a net. In my mind I had terrible images of poor invisible Jane struggling against her captors. I went back into the building, much to the consternation of the guards. I decided to go back to the fifth floor, back to Dr. Holt’s office. I would find out what they had done with her. I was waiting for someone to come and get on the elevator. I was wishing that Gilda was waiting in the car the way she’d wanted to, or Nick or Vlad. I wished that there was someone there to save us.

And then, as I pictured Gilda and Nick and Vlad all crunched together in the backseat, I remembered what I always told the children when they were younger: “Go to the car.” I made everybody make note of where the car was every time we got out of it. I told them if they were ever horribly, hopelessly lost they should go to the car and wait there, and so I turned and made my way out of the building.

I didn’t know what time it was. I missed wearing watches. The sky looked like dusk but I didn’t know if it was bad weather or if it was really so late. I started to run. Every few minutes I called out again, “Jane!” I was almost to the parking lot when I saw the red pants and white top coming in my general direction.

“Clover!” she called.

“Jane!” I was bounding toward her.

“Clover!”

I threw myself in her arms. Not since I found Evie had I ever been so glad to see anyone, even someone I couldn’t see.

“I came back to the car,” she said, breathlessly. “I thought if I had some clothes on you might be able to find me.”

“What happened?”

“He called me back in. I opened the door and then he said he needed to know how to get in touch with us. You must have gone straight down the hall. By the time I got downstairs you’d already gone.” She was holding on to my arm. We held on to each other all the way back to the car.

“Do you want to come back to the city and spend the night with us?” Jane asked. “My husband would love to meet you. It just seems like too much for you to fly back after all of this. We could talk some more, maybe come up with some ideas.”

“I need to get home,” I said. “My husband doesn’t even know I’m gone.”

And so Jane drove me back to the airport. We were too tired to talk anyway. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll be back in a couple of days.”

“We’re a good team,” she said.

We said our goodbyes and I headed in. It was late and the lines through security were long. If I’d had to stand in them, I would have missed my flight. There wasn’t a seat going back, and so for a while I crouched on the floor near the bathroom, but then too many people needed to use the bathroom. I sat in the middle of the aisle but the flight attendants were bent on pushing their carts around, distributing cups of soda. I spent the entire flight squeezing into various small spaces, trying to avoid being stepped on. I would have hoisted myself up into the overhead bin and waited there but everyone brought carry-on luggage and there was not an available inch of space. It was a miserable trip and I felt extremely sorry for myself, thinking how nice it would be to have a ticket and a seat, to order a glass of cheap wine in a plastic bottle. That was when the seat belt sign came on and the captain announced we were coming in for a landing. For that, and for so many other things that were still ahead, I braced myself.

fourteen

D
ear Gilda, pal that she was, was there to take me home. I gave her the overview but I was too demoralized to get into the details.

“But what happens next?” she asked as she pulled up in front of my house.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t figured it out. But think about it, okay? Something’s bound to occur to one of us.”

Gilda leaned over me, squinted. “Is there somebody on your front porch?”

I looked out into the darkness. “I don’t see anything.” But then I did see something, a tiny point of orange light that for an instant got brighter and then faded.

“There!” Gilda said, pointing. “It looks like somebody’s smoking a cigarette.”

“Then it must be a friend of Nick’s.”

“I’ll wait here,” she said. “Unless you want me to go with you.”

“I want you to go home. I’ll be fine. If I can stop bank robbers I can certainly stop someone from smoking.”

Gilda allowed that this was probably the case and so we said our good-nights. It was very dark. I’m the one who turns on the porch lights every night, turns on the lights in the living room. It appeared that there was no one home, unless you counted the person sitting on the front steps smoking. Maybe I could see some shoes, maybe a jacket. I really couldn’t make out anything clearly. Some other night it would have been alarming, but tonight it was only one more thing to be added to the list.

“Hello?” I called out quietly.

The cigarette stood up. “You are Mrs. Hobart,” a voice said. It was more of a pronouncement than a question. There was some accent, something I couldn’t place. The orange light had one final, powerful glow, and then it fell to the ground and was crushed out by the shoe.

“I am.”

“I am Ariana Sawyer, mother to Vlad. My son tells me you are invisible woman.”

“Oh, Mrs. Sawyer,” I said. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t here to meet you. I’ve been in Philadelphia. Vlad didn’t tell me you were coming.”

“I did not tell Vlad. I tell Vlad, he would say Mother, stay home, do not make trouble for these nice people. But forgive me, Mrs. Hobart, I must make trouble for you. I can no longer bear to be only invisible person in the world that I know.”

I reached out and took her hand. My eyes were adjusting to the darkness and I could see now that she was fully dressed, wearing tights beneath her skirt, wearing a hat. “I’m glad you came. Let’s go in the back. The door is unlocked.” As we went past the garage the motion light came on and Mrs. Sawyer stopped to look at me.

“You are very invisible,” she said. “More so than me. Everything is invisible.”

“I’m naked,” I said. “I was traveling.”

She took her hand from mine. “This is confusing.”

“It’s a long story. I had to fly and you can’t fly unless you can show identification and I no longer resemble my identification.”

“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.”