Calling Invisible Women (6 page)

I looked at the date on the paper. It was Tuesday. Since becoming invisible I had found that dates and times were less and less important. But I would make it a point to remember Wednesday at ten.

four

I
was worrying about what I should wear. How dressy was a meeting of invisible women? Were there wigs involved? I had considered getting a wig, but the more time that went by the less imperative it felt. I put on black tights and boots, a plain dark dress with a collar that could be turned up. In truth, I thought I looked good. I had lost some weight since becoming invisible. Food was less interesting when no one could see you eat it. I took off my clothes and put on a skirt and a sweater but it lacked sophistication. It said, I’m a preppy housewife who thinks being invisible is fun! Not the message I wanted to send. I tried a nice pair of jeans and a blazer but then what if they thought I didn’t care? I went back to the dress and added on the scarf that Arthur had bought me for our anniversary last year. I kept telling myself that I was getting all worked up for nothing. This was not going to be a group of women who were invisible, this was going to be a couple of plastic surgeons peddling the joys of facial fillers. This was going to be the first meeting of a new Weight Watchers club. This was going to be another encounter with the metaphor of invisibility because as far as the real thing was concerned, I seemed to be the only one suffering from that. Still, how could I not go? It wasn’t every day a call for invisible women was going to run in the paper.

When I went downstairs, Nick was in the kitchen eating breakfast. He glanced up, giving me a split second of his morning’s attention. “Where are you going?”

“What makes you think I’m going anywhere?”

“You’re not wearing sweatpants.”

I poured myself a cup of coffee and refilled his. “I have to go in to the paper. Every now and then we have to check in with the mother ship.”

“Crappy paper,” Nick said, sliding it in my direction. It was still perfectly folded. He was reading the
Times
.

“True,” I sighed, and nodded my head. “But it used to pay the bills.”

“That must have been nice,” Nick said. “Think up something you’re actually interested in doing, something you might be good at, and then go to that place and get a job and then they train you and over time you learn to take on more responsibility and you get better at it. I want to live in a world where I could at least think, ‘There’s a newspaper! Maybe I can write for a newspaper!’ ”

“The job search isn’t going so well?”

I watched Nick’s shoulders slump forward, a nearly imperceptible bend. “I appreciate how rarely you ask about it. It shows real discipline on your part. Dad, on the other hand, thinks that maybe I’m performing neurosurgery somewhere and just forgot to mention it. I keep telling him, once I get a job the two of you will be the first to know. I’m actually doing the crossword puzzle just to spite him. I figured out he was hiding them in the knife drawer.”

“I can pick up another paper,” I said.

“I just wish I knew what I was supposed to be doing. I’m overqualified for every job that’s stupid and underqualified for every job that’s smart.”

“I know how you feel.”

It was the moment when a different son might have looked his mother in the eye, but my son pressed down his chin and studied the paper harder. “How do you know how I feel?”

Because, my love, you feel invisible. You think you have no definition. “Well, I used to have a demanding full-time job,” I said, because this was also true. “I used to have a career. I’m a little underemployed myself at the moment.”

“But you’re a mom,” he said, letting himself sound younger than he was. “You’ve got a house and a dog and you’re married to a doctor. You’re fine.”

“It’s not all about the money, kiddo. You’re right, I’m not out on the street, but neither are you.” I squeezed his wrist. “I bet we’ll both find something.”

“You’ve got a meeting,” he said, brushing me off. “Underemployed people shouldn’t be late for meetings.”

“Okay,” I said. “You’re right. Throw the tennis ball for Red a few times before you go?”

“Sure,” he said. “I’m good at that. If there was a job posting for a tennis-ball thrower for terriers I’d have it all sewn up.” He filled in another word. “Oh, by the way, Grandma called. Maybe you were in the shower. She wanted to know why you haven’t been in yoga class. She said that Dad told her you were depressed.”

“Dad has apparently been handing out leaflets to that effect.”

“So I told her that was crazy and I’d never seen you so happy in my life. I said you were probably missing yoga because you’ve been raising money to cure cancer and hanging out with your friends and writing great articles and teaching Red to balance on a beach ball.”

“Did you tell her that?”

Nick was quiet for a moment. “Yeah. I did.”

Arthur’s mother taught yoga at the YMCA on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and weekly meditation workshops at the Unitarian Church on Saturday afternoons and the occasional vegetarian cooking class, though now she was a vegan. She was seventy-six. She would be sympathetic to my invisibility. She would also be positive that she knew exactly how to reverse it, and that would no doubt involve me drinking great quantities of wheatgrass juice. I just wasn’t feeling up to wheatgrass yet. I told my son I loved him and went out to face the unknown.

Over the years I had attended many of my children’s sports banquets at the Sheraton (that’s counting cheerleading as a sport), along with a few bridal shows and a couple of Ohio board of tourism conventions that I covered for the paper. So it wasn’t as if I had any problems walking into the Sheraton, but still, it was taking me a few minutes to get my courage up. I sat in the car until 9:50 and then took out the fresh Kleenex I had put in the side pocket of my purse and went inside.

For a few minutes I snooped around discreetly, looking for an easel with a signboard on it saying “Welcome, Invisible Women!” or something like that. When I didn’t find anything, I went to the front desk, where a dark-haired girl in a navy suit was typing away at a computer. “Excuse me,” I said.

“Just one minute,” she said, drawing the word
one
out until it had five syllables. She didn’t look up and so I was left to stand there and admire the gloss of her hair, wondering how it was that girls who worked in hotels always had such glossy hair, when I suddenly felt a strong hand on my upper arm, a security guard’s grip that was steering me away.

“Hey!” I said sharply.

The glossy-haired girl, no doubt thinking I was reprimanding her for having asked me to wait, glanced up just in time to see me being dragged across the lobby by nothing at all.

“One minute,” a quiet voice said.

I was marched around the corner to a row of comfortable chairs and was then deposited into one of those chairs. The grip on my arm was released, and the chair beside me turned in my direction.

“Sorry about that,” the voice said. “I’m always telling the group we should put more information in the ad.”

“I was just going to ask where the meeting was.” I spoke to the air.

“The people at the Sheraton don’t know we use their hotel. The old-timers get here early to grab up the newcomers but I was in the bathroom. My bad.”

“Excuse me?” There was absolutely nothing there, but then I saw it, crumpled in the corner of the chair, a Kleenex. Was this really possible? I reached into my pocket and pulled out a Kleenex of my own.

“I know you’re invisible,” the voice said. “I figured that out.”

“But I can’t see you. I don’t mean to sound dense but I can’t even see your clothes.” I leaned forward without knowing if I was leaning too far forward. “Does everything you touch become invisible?” I whispered.

“No. I’m just not wearing any clothes.”

I sat back. “Are you serious?”

“Alice Trumbull. Naked.” A hand took my hand and shook it.

“You mean to tell me you just walk around naked all the time?”

“No, I wouldn’t drive a car naked. People need to see a driver in a car or they get very freaked out. That’s why we meet at the Sheraton. They’ve got a nice big locker room in the gym. We can come in, get undressed, put everything in a locker. Some of the women even work out later. They’ve got a pool. We like to suggest you swim underwater though. If you do a stroke with a lot of splashing it can be upsetting to the guests.” Alice Trumbull had a very nice voice, straightforward Midwestern, not sarcastic.

“Are there many of us here?”

“I’d say usually twelve to fifteen, though I suspect there are some others who just don’t speak up.”

“So how long have you been invisible?”

“Six months,” she said.

I let out an audible gasp. I had never really considered that it could go on that long.

“And I’m not the senior member here, not by a long shot. Listen,” she said, and I felt a comforting pat on my arm. “I know what this is like for you, all the questions, all the fears, how finding out there are other people like you makes it better and worse at the same time. It’s scary as hell when you drop off the face of the earth and no one notices. I’m assuming no one has noticed.”

“Not really,” I said.

“Have you told your husband? I see you’re still wearing a ring.”

Sure enough, my ring was floating out there. “He doesn’t know,” I said.

“It took my husband four months to figure it out.” Alice stood up. I could see the seat of her chair smooth out and feel the smallest shift in the air around me. “Come on, we’ll get you a locker. It’s time for the meeting to start.”

“Why do I need a locker?” I asked. I stood up but didn’t know which way to go until Alice took my sleeve and guided me along, the invisible leading the invisible.

“So you can store your clothes.”

I stopped. “But I don’t really want to take my clothes off.”

“I know,” she said, nudging me to move forward again, “but eventually you do. That’s just part of it. And besides, if they see people sitting in a conference room with clothes on they’ll ask us to leave. It’s happened before.”

I could feel a little invisible lump rising in the back of my throat. I was not what you’d call a naked person. I was the kid who changed her clothes in the toilet stall before gym class. Even now, if I’m walking from the bathroom to the closet after a shower, I put on a robe. To just stroll around my own house naked, even if no one was home and it was dark and the shades were down, no, it would never happen. So the idea of walking naked through the halls of the Sheraton—“Won’t it be cold?”

Alice stopped. “Aren’t you
ever
naked? None of us gets hot or cold anymore. It’s one of the perks of the invisible life—climate control.”

“I guess I have noticed that,” I said, feeling disappointed to have lost my best excuse.

“You need to hustle up,” Alice said. “We’re going to miss the reading of the last meeting’s minutes and the introduction of new members, which would be you.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sure.” I took off my jacket, my silk scarf. I sat down on the bench and unzipped my boots, pulled off my stockings. “Are you still here?”

“I can’t
see
you,” Alice said, sounding slightly exasperated. A locker door opened and my neatly stacked clothes floated up and landed inside. I took a deep breath and pulled off my underpants and bra. Then the door was closed. “Now hide your Kleenex inside your fist, like this. Nobody likes to see Kleenex floating down the hall.”

How odd it was that someone would notice a Kleenex but not notice that the woman standing beside them had no head. We got on the elevator and took it up to the third floor. I crossed my arms over my breasts. The last time I’d gone braless I was twelve. “I’m not entirely comfortable with this,” I said as a way of making conversation.

“It grows on you,” she said. “Since I’ve been invisible I’ve come to see clothing as the Great Oppressor. Also, you wouldn’t believe how much money you save. Clothes are really expensive.”

We walked down the hallway and into the Magnolia Room, where a dozen chairs made a lazy circle beside a buffet table laid out with a coffee urn and a tray of Danish. Alice shook out the Kleenex in her hand and waved it like a flag over her head. “Friends, we have a newcomer today!”

Suddenly there was a flurry of Kleenex waving back and forth, a smattering of applause. One would think that as an invisible person myself I would look upon this non-sight, this empty room full of people, as the most comforting thing in the world. Sisterhood! Solidarity! But in fact I found the whole thing as creepy and disconcerting as I would have before when I walked Ohio in my full flesh. I thought of how Gilda must shiver a little bit every time I walked into her house and how bravely she had continued to love me when I wasn’t there. I did my best to remember my manners. I unrolled my Kleenex and said hello.

“Come get your coffee and something to eat,” a new voice said, very cheerful, sunny. “We don’t eat during the meetings. It has to be before or after, otherwise someone from housekeeping walks in in the middle of a discussion and picks up all the plates. Do you want coffee?”

“Please,” I said, trying to find my natural voice. “Black.”

“Just like me,” the voice said, and someone else laughed, though I didn’t know if the speaker had meant she liked black coffee or was herself a woman of color. I actually found myself squinting, as if I might be able to see her if I just tried a little harder.

I turned around to take the cup and in doing so knocked someone’s cherry Danish off their plate. “I’m so sorry,” I said. If I had skin I would have been jumping out of it.

“You didn’t see me,” the woman said. Another voice, a new one. “It’s all right. That’s what the Kleenex are for. Just try to keep it visible. ‘Be Aware of Your Kleenex and Other People’s Kleenex.’ That’s one of our first codes of conduct for the meetings.”

“If you want to ask a question, raise your Kleenex and wait to be called on.” I saw something glinting in front of me and realized the speaker was wearing contacts.

“I still think that’s a little much,” Alice said. I recognized her warm Midwestern vowels. “I don’t think we need to dictate rules of social behavior.”