Calling Invisible Women (9 page)

“Germ Man could walk through cholera epidemics in Haiti and heal the sick just by going past them. He could go to AIDS clinics in Africa and everyone would hop off their cots and follow him out into the streets.”

“And when he’s not saving the sick, he’s locked in mortal combat with brilliant mad scientists who are trying to hold the world hostage with germ warfare.” Arthur ran his tongue along the rim of my ear. “I’m finding this very sexy,” he said.

“You could be Germ Man,” I said. “And I could be your faithful sidekick, Clover Hobart, who has been injected by an evil scientist with such a virulent germ that the only way you can overpower it is by making love to her.”

In truth, invisibility had put quite a kick in our sex life. Passion was the one thing that was keeping me connected to Arthur. It allowed me to forgive him for everything he was missing. It was also one of the few times I felt completely there, like nothing in my body had changed.

“My poor, germ-laden Clover Hobart,” he whispered in my ear, pulling his hand up my thigh.

It was wonderful, don’t get me wrong. I loved it. But still, I had been hoping he would have said at some point, “So Clover, what superhero power would you most like to have?” That could have been part of the game as well.

six

T
he next day I called Lila Robinson, who I was trying not to call Mrs. Robinson in my mind. She wasn’t that much older than I was. I got her number off our local invisible women’s website, www.invisibleme.com. Turns out it was there all along, it’s just about 200,000 hits down on Google. When she answered at the end of the first ring I suspected that she might be spending too much time at home.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said in the meeting,” I told her.

“There is an awful lot of time to think these days,” she said. Her voice sounded tired.

“What I think,” I said, “is if you still want to be at the school, then what’s to keep you from going there? I mean, you aren’t going to get a paycheck, but would you want to be there even if you weren’t getting paid?” I was trying to utilize Irene’s advice, become proactive.

“They don’t want me,” she said. “They made it very clear.”

“Okay, say for now we forget about what they want. Why can’t we do good where we see good needs doing? Why do we have to sit home waiting for permission to do what’s right? We have a superpower. We’re the rarest creatures in the world. Maybe it’s not our first choice but here we are. Shouldn’t we make something out of it?”

“Clover, what are you talking about?”

Maybe we didn’t know each other that well. Maybe we knew each other better than any two more-or-less strangers ever would. “I’m talking about this: if you found out that tomorrow you were going to become permanently and irrevocably visible again, what would you regret not doing that you didn’t do while you had the chance?”

The other end of the line stayed quiet. Lila was sketching it out in her head. “I’d want to ride the school bus and stop the bullies,” she said finally. “I’d want to go to the school and keep the bad kids from doing bad things they didn’t really want to do. I’d want to figure out a way to give the loser kids a boost and settle down the classrooms so the teachers can teach. And then I’d want to go to Tiffany’s and try on enormous diamond rings.”

This last one I wasn’t expecting. “Seriously?”

“You asked.”

“So the bus tomorrow?”

“I think you’re crazy,” she said, but I could already hear the yes in her voice. I knew I’d hardly have to tap her to push her over the edge.

“Listen, pretty soon I’m going to have to fly to Philadelphia to break into the offices of a pharmaceutical company and find out what they know about the fact that they’ve poisoned us. I’ve got to get outside my comfort zone immediately. I think a high school and some diamonds would be just the thing.”

“I’ll be on the bus in the morning,” she said. “Be sure to bring a Kleenex.”

In the morning it was raining. Rosemary had called the night before to tell me the Dexter-White guy had postponed our meeting. High school now felt like small potatoes. Benny Kempton was waiting on the corner for the bus. Benny almost never took the bus—Steve or Gilda or Miller drove him to school. Maybe this morning everyone was busy. I went and stood behind him, wishing that Benny was the sort of kid who believed in umbrellas, but I guess no high school boy believed in umbrellas. He wore the rubberized hood of his rubberized raincoat pulled up while the water sluiced off my invisible head and down onto my invisible, naked body. I may as well have been standing in the shower.

Benny sniffed the air. “Mrs. Hobart?” he said, and turned around to look behind him.

It was true, I’d been wearing a little more perfume lately. I thought it helped people locate me, even though I wasn’t so interested in being located by Benny. I kept my mouth shut. In the distance I could see the school bus wobbling up the road. The closer it came to us the more Benny started to shift his weight from side to side, like maybe he was thinking about breaking into a sprint in the opposite direction. Why was Benny on the bus this morning? Why did Benny never take the bus?

As soon as the doors swung open, I knew. As he climbed up the stairs the bus erupted into a chorus of heckles and catcalls. “It’s the bone man!” the boys called out. “It’s the boner!” The girls turned away, laughing like jackals. It was an easy bit of cruelty, as Benny, so thin and suddenly tall, looked like a model in an anatomy textbook. I could see the wings of his shoulders curve down on themselves as he slumped ahead, dripping wet. His soaking lunch bag tore in half beneath the weight of its plastic-wrapped tuna sandwich. The apple he’d brought rolled under the seats, never to be seen again. “His mommy makes him lunch!” the boys crowed. As if their mommies didn’t do the same. I had one foot on the stairs when the bus doors tried to snap closed, very nearly snapping me in half.

“Come on,” the driver said, yanking repeatedly on the handle of the door as if he were trying to manually detach my foot from my leg.

“Will you ease up on that thing?” I said. Grabbing on to the handrail, I dropped my Kleenex. It flew out the door and settled into a puddle on the pavement.

The driver squinted and opened the door again. “Somebody else getting on?” he said. A few of the smaller kids, the ones who sat in the very front of the bus and said their prayers, leaned forward to look but saw nothing. The driver shifted into drive. I leaned over, picked up Benny’s sandwich, and stuck it in the zippered compartment of his backpack.

It may seem counterintuitive, but it is not necessarily the goal of invisible people to go unnoticed. In fact, I saw a whole world of beauty and injustice I had never dared to notice before and I feel it is my right to act on it. Kids sprawled across their seats, pushing their wet coats and backpacks over any empty spaces, denying Benny the right to sit down. The bus driver hit the brakes and we all lurched forward. I thumped into a chubby boy and knocked his breakfast Pop-Tart out of his hand. “Hey!” he said, turning to look for a fight.

“Sorry,” I said. Mine was a grown-up’s voice, a mother’s voice, and so the kid turned back with a distinctly rattled expression.

“Everybody’s got to be sitting down,” the driver said without inflection. “Do I need to tell you this every morning? We don’t go forward until everyone takes a seat. That’s the rule of the bus.”

I chose a pretty girl with chestnut hair and a raspberry-colored sweater who was wearing less makeup than your average Las Vegas showgirl. I picked up her books, her bag, and her enormously puffy coat and, rolling them together, I placed them on her lap. Suddenly a seat became available and Benny, bless his heart, thought that he had actually caught a break, that this was his invitation. He sat down beside her, careful to keep his soaking coat away from her thigh, though in truth everything was wet. “Thanks,” he mumbled very quietly.

A look of panic and disgust crossed her pretty face as she stuffed her iPod buds into her ears and pressed herself against the window.

“Jessica’s got the boner!” a boy across the aisle shouted.

“Boner! Boner! Boner!” the chorus answered.

I pinched that first boy’s earlobe hard between my thumb and forefinger. I would eventually get to all of them. “I know your mother,” I whispered, though this was in fact a lie. I licked my lips before letting them touch his ear. “Start behaving like she’s going to hear about all of this, because she will.”

The boy sprang to his feet. Using his earlobe as a lever I sat him down again. “Decency,” I said softly. “That’s your word for today. I’m right here watching you.”

It’s true, I wished I had some clothes on. Being naked in the Sheraton among your peers was one thing, being naked among raging children was quite another. I did not enjoy the unpleasant sensation of vulnerability but these are the moments that build character. I leaned across Benny and tugged one of the tiny speakers from Jessica’s ear. “You’re a nice girl,” I said. “Act like it.”

She looked at Benny but he was staring at his own knee, his entire body pivoting away from her. She looked up, her eyes locked so directly onto mine that it startled me. “I’m your conscience,” I said, a terribly corny line. “I’m strongly suggesting that you do the right thing.” Benny was once again sniffing the air.

“Do you smell something?” he said to the girl very quietly. “Like something nice?”

She sniffed. She was practically sniffing my neck. “It’s perfume,” she said. She sniffed again. “It’s Rive Gauche. It’s the perfume my mom wears.” She gave a little shudder along with her recognition. I could hardly believe my good luck. “It’s like my mom is on the bus,” she whispered to Benny.

“Jessica and Ben are kissing!” shouted three girls who were three rows behind them. They then broke out in an ecstatic pantomime of kissing one another that no doubt the boys would all be remembering later on in bed tonight.

Jessica turned in her seat and raised her voice to high. “Would you
shut
the fuck up now?” The girls, startled, surprised even themselves by doing what they were told. Jessica sat back down, keeping her eyes straight ahead. “My mom’s been telling me to be nicer,” she said to the seat back in front of her.

“I think you’re doing a great job,” Benny said.

Every few minutes the bus stopped and another one or two children would creep on looking like they were boarding a transport helicopter for the deserts of Afghanistan. Sensing fresh prey, the tougher kids began to ridicule and torment the newcomers, and so left Benny and Jessica alone in the wake of their carnage. Seats were denied the newcomers and so I found them seats. I thumped the heads of horrible girls, pinched the collarbones of terrible boys, not hard enough to hurt them but enough to get their attention so that I could whisper words of moral betterment in their ears. It was like performing some sort of social triage. I would stanch the flow of cruelty from one mouth only to see it burble forward in another. When finally we pulled up in front of the school I was utterly spent. I collapsed onto the long bench seat in the back and found it to be sticky and wet and unpleasantly warm. That was when I heard Lila’s voice. I had forgotten all about her.

“Are you still on the bus?” she said.

“Back row,” I said.

She came and sat beside me. “I lost my Kleenex,” she said.

“The Kleenex never stood a chance.” I put my head in my hands. “That was the most harrowing thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

“They should raise the bus driver’s pay by about two hundred thousand dollars a year.”

“I never want to get on a school bus again, and at the same time I don’t want to think of those poor children riding around without someone invisible.”

“It’s only eight a.m.” Lila said. “We haven’t even started.”

Had I ever spent the day in our neighborhood public high school as an invisible woman while my children were still enrolled there, I no doubt would have insisted on home schooling. Lila and I had our work cut out for us: patrolling the stairwells, gently pressing unruly students back in their chairs during classes, removing countless iPod buds from countless ears so that we could whisper in the importance of respectful attention. After stopping at least a dozen students from cheating on an Algebra II exam while the teacher sat at her desk reading a back issue of
People
magazine, I broke up a small extortion ring in the bathroom, three bigger boys who were promising to pierce the ear of a much smaller boy if he didn’t show up with a significant cut of his allowance. Lila and I had agreed to meet up again at a back left-hand corner table in the cafeteria at 12:30. There was barely enough time to wrestle the poor child away from his predators and get to lunch.

“I have never worked this hard,” I said, dropping down in my chair. “Not once. Not ever.” I’d brought a few squares of toilet paper along with me. As best as I could tell there wasn’t a single Kleenex in the entire institution. Lila had snagged a paper napkin to be her marker.

“But it’s exhilarating, isn’t it? Don’t you feel exhilarated?” Lila’s voice was bright and full of wonder. She sounded like the second-grade teacher I knew when my children were small.

“Seriously? I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck.”

“You were completely right about our just going ahead and coming over here. This is what we need to be doing! Kids don’t want to be bad, they just have no idea how to stop themselves. They’re so wrapped up in their image they can’t make the right choices. That’s why we’re so good at helping them. We don’t have any image. They can’t feel threatened by us.”

“I hope they feel a little threatened,” I said. I had never threatened so many people in my life as I had this morning. I saw an unfortunate girl standing stock-still in the middle of the cafeteria holding her tray, as frozen as all the deer in all the collective headlights of humanity. “Just a minute,” I sighed to Lila. I walked over to the lost child, who was burdened with both bad skin and bad hair and was trying to make up for all of that with a very tough-looking pair of combat boots. With a single finger on her shoulder, I gently steered her to a table of girls who I noticed had behaved decently for the entire day. I pulled out a chair and dropped her into it. “Hi!” I said brightly. The girls all looked around, trying to figure out where the voice had come from, but as they lacked the powers of complex reasoning there was nothing they could do but accept it.