Invisible Ellen

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

Publishers Since 1838

Published by the Penguin Group

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Copyright © 2014 by Shari Shattuck

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shattuck, Shari.

Invisible Ellen / Shari Shattuck.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-698-14287-9

1. Overweight women—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3619.H3575I58 2014 2013030313

813'.6—dc23

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book is for anyone who has ever felt they didn't count.

You do.

Your spirit shines as strong and as pure as any
other.

O
ccasionally, though not very often, Ellen Homes would wonder how she had gained two hundred and seventy-three pounds and simultaneously disappeared. Not that she necessarily needed an answer, or even wanted one, because, simply put, being unseen was everything that Ellen Homes had ever wanted.

It was also all she could remember. Her mother, a noun she used for lack of an inoffensive alternative, had apparently at some point forgotten that she'd had a daughter. Ellen had a vague memory of the woman packing up her vodka bottles and glass pipe before leaving her alone in a grubby room of a halfway house when she was five. The only thing she clearly recalled from that event was gnawing hunger, and the joy of eating a cinnamon bun someone had eventually given her. But details of life with that woman, and especially that particular day, Ellen enthusiastically and effectively smothered, preferably under artificial nondairy dessert topping, or gravy.

Her memories of being found by the police, turned over to social workers, and the different foster families she'd subsequently been forced upon were also spotty and best forgotten. Ellen had ultimately been discarded in a group home. There, adults and kids alike had
either taunted or ignored her. Preferring the latter, Ellen had assumed evasive techniques, avoiding attention by adopting a silent watchfulness and eluding all but the most necessary contact with others.

What Ellen did remember was how she sought out shadows to avoid the repulsion she met in the light. She found dark corners and attics to hide in. Hoarded packaged food, when she could get it. She learned to wear her straight brown hair longer, so that it covered the left side of her face, veiling her from the world around her and hiding the scar that permanently drew her left eye halfway closed and limited her vision. Since every human she'd ever met preferred not to look at her, a half step backward or an inverted slump was often sufficient to avoid potential scrutiny or even notice. Ellen became very good at being absent, even when she was there.

At nineteen she'd first noticed her complete visual absence. Ellen had tentatively offered help to a man staring with frustration at the bus schedule. He started as if addressed by a disembodied voice. His eyes, flicking past her, quivered slightly at the place her face would have been, and then he hurried away.

And Ellen had rejoiced, thrilled that a lifetime of cultivating the skills required for averting human interaction had finally paid off. The quality of being looked
through
, instead of
at
, felt so right.

Ellen reveled in her anonymity. She learned she could sustain her visual absence at work—the nighttime cleaning crew at a Costco—on busy streets, where people shifted their bodies away if she drew near as though shying from a cold draft, and best of all, in her tiny apartment, where she spent most of her time watching the neighbors from behind the embracing arms of closed doors.

Observing silently from the shadows may have begun as a crucial survival technique, but it had eventually grown into her most passionate interest. Real life enthralled Ellen—as long as it did not
include her. The rare occasions she needed to be seen exhausted her. It was just too much effort, and opened the door to
participation
, the prospect of which horrified her more than running out of snack food or, unthinkably, bacon.

By twenty-four, Ellen had perfected her own invisibility to the degree that even her cat, Mouse, seemed only vaguely aware of her. Ellen and Mouse shared the one-room apartment and a love of caloric excess—especially bacon—but not much else.

The front door of that narrow studio apartment opened onto the main room, a dozen steps brought her to the kitchenette, which ended in a back door featuring a small window. Gazing through a triple layer of smog-grimed screen, dirty glass slats, and wrought-iron security bars, Ellen could see into a tiny courtyard smothered in gravel the color of bleached tombstones. It was a desolate spot. No whimsical water feature softened its echoing walls and there was an utter absence of refreshing greenery. Occasionally, Ellen would notice a weed that had strained its way upward through the sharp chunks of granite, but inevitably, its goal finally realized, the vegetation would take a look at the harsh environment, topped off by a minuscule patch of smoggy, dirt-brown sky, and die. She imagined that its last thought, if plants had thoughts, had been,
I'd rather be mulch
.

Across that narrow back-access space, she could look into the kitchens of the neighbors she so vigilantly avoided. In the window across from hers was a blanket, sun-faded and tacked up with nails she had watched the young couple pry from the molding, the fabric blocking her view into the only other upstairs unit with infuriating opacity, but on the ground level there were two apartments whose renters were so lazy and hopeless that they had never bothered with any kind of window covering, probably because, Ellen thought, it
had never occurred to them that anyone would take an interest in their lives.

Because their lives weren't interesting, except, of course, to Ellen, who found constant fascination in how the occupants, whom she thought of as her pets, spent their hours. The girl in 1B Ellen called Heidi because, when she wasn't dressed for work—a cocktail waitress or a prostitute, to judge from the outfits—she wore her blonde hair in two braids that hung limply down the sides of her scrubbed pink face. The man in 1A, she dubbed T-bone because he was as thin as a rib and the bandanna he appeared intent on wearing until it rotted off was the color of raw meat.

A few months earlier, Heidi's midsection had started to swell. Her pregnancy, now at about eight months, Ellen guessed from the soccer-ball protrusion under her straining T-shirt, caused an interruption in whatever employment she did have, and now Heidi spent most of her time in the apartment, screaming at herself in a mirror or crying at her kitchen table. Ellen followed Heidi's antics with the enthusiasm of a sports fan during a play-off series. Tonight, with a bag of chips in one hand and a Tinkerbell pen in the other, Ellen made notes on one of the lined school pads so generously, and unwittingly, donated by her employer to her cause. “Heidi gets a beer,” she wrote as she crunched a handful of cheddar chips into paste. “Debates over whether to drink it for ten minutes, then downs it in forty-five seconds.” A minute later she added, “Throws up beer in the sink.”

Shifting her gaze to the next window, she saw T-bone. The most interesting thing T-bone did was repackage big bags of marijuana into smaller ones. Tonight he was seated in his easy chair, smoking what Ellen had overheard him call a “Bob's Big Boy.” The smallness of the space and the unmuffled solidity of the courtyard's walls sent
any sound echoing up to her apartment, so it was easy for her to hear what she wanted to, and impossible to block out what she didn't. T-bone kept a sad potted plant on his windowsill, which he'd forgotten to water again today, a misdemeanor Ellen dutifully recorded. She had quite a collection of these notebooks, carefully labeled with the corresponding dates, and glancing at the shelf where she kept them, she felt a sense of accomplishment.

Slow night,
Ellen thought as she closed her notebook, stuffing it into a large canvas sack. The impending entry to the world outside brought on a bout of compulsive, repeated stroking of her hair down over her left cheek. A habitual, unconscious warm-up, like an athlete stretching before a workout. She donned her faded black drawstring pants and loose smock shirt in preparation for work. She scowled at the sole of her left sneaker, the toe of which had come unglued from the canvas top, causing the rubber sole to flap each time she took a step. She needed to buy new ones, but that distasteful task could be put off a while longer with the clever combination of ingenuity and half a yard of duct tape. After applying the appropriate technology, and field-testing it with a lap around the apartment, requiring a grand total of eighteen steps, to see if it would hold at least for the night, she dumped some dry food in Mouse's dish, snapped on her fanny pack, the girth of which she had extended with a child's belt, and checked to be sure that the front stairs were free of human occupancy before venturing out.

The short walk to the bus stop was clogged with people returning home for the evening but, as usual, the busy sidewalks cleared enough for her to pass. A small group waited impatiently for the number 12 bus to stop, its air brakes shushing out a harsh reprimand as it pulled to the curb. Ellen assumed her usual space in the queue, left open by people whose eyes swept past her with only the
slightest shiver as their sight line crossed the place she occupied. She climbed the two steep, rubber-stamped stairs and collapsed onto a pair of open seats, effectively occupying one and a half of them. No matter how crowded the bus became, no other rider ever took what was left of the seat next to hers. She passed the time switching her attention from passenger to passenger as though changing channels in an attempt to find something intriguing, or at least educational, to watch. She tuned in first to a few seconds of a young man bullying his younger girlfriend, but quickly became bored with the girl's frightened passivity. She flipped over to an elderly woman performing a lonely monologue, then switched to a man leaping nimbly up the stairs onto the bus. He flopped onto one of the handicapped seats, set his gym bag on the other, and opened a paper. Pulling out her notebook, Ellen wrote, “Healthy guy sits in the handicapped seats.” His infraction duly recorded, she returned her attention to the teen couple, the girl looking less frightened and more pissed as the boy taunted her. Ellen felt a shimmy of detached anticipation. Pencil poised, she settled on that channel and hunkered down to enjoy the show.

But she was distracted from the promising scenario when the doors hissed open at the next stop and Ellen heard a woman's clear voice call out, “Is this the twelve?” She perked up. The number 12 was clearly displayed on both the front and side of the bus. Hoping for the antics of at least an eccentric personality, if not a full-out lunatic, she waited eagerly to see what would unfold.

A mumbled, indifferent reply from the semi-catatonic driver seemed to satisfy the woman, and Ellen watched curiously as a white stick tipped in red tapped its way onto the aisle, followed by a young woman with dark hair cascading from an arrogantly orange cap. Though it was rapidly growing dark outside, the twenty-something
woman wore sunglasses. Reaching one hand in front of her, she felt for an available handicapped seat. The man with the gym bag rustled his newspaper in annoyance as she brushed his shoulder, saying irritably, “These are taken. There's open seats halfway down.”

With a disdainful smile that clearly said she knew he didn't belong there and thought people like him were descended from a long and undistinguished line of particularly disgusting silverfish, the girl groped her way on down the aisle. She was steps away from Ellen when the bus lurched out into traffic, sending her stumbling forward. She fell to her knees, one arm smacking on the empty seat next to Ellen. The girl reclaimed her balance and, holding the seat back to steady herself, struggled up.

“I'm fine!” she called out in an amused voice to the bus full of people studiously not helping her. “Don't bother about me, save yourselves!” With a light, derisive laugh, which she clearly relished, she slid in next to Ellen, making squishy contact with Ellen's overlapping thigh and midriff.

“Oh, sorry,” she said, turning only partially toward Ellen. “Didn't see you there.” Then she laughed again and pulled out a book, opening it to a plain, white textured page marked by a ribbon. “The face—pretty,” Ellen noted without assigning the quality any particular value—angled toward her again, as though studying some fascinating object up ahead to the right.

She said, “Sorry to be a bother, but could you possibly let me know when we get to Grant Avenue?”

Ellen felt her neglected voice catch in her throat. She was being spoken to. Of course, the girl couldn't see her any more than anyone else, less actually, but she had felt her. “Uh, okay,” Ellen muttered.

“I've always depended upon the kindness of strangers,” the girl said in a sorghum Southern accent, then added from the side of her
mouth, “But I wouldn't recommend it; most of them are bastards.” Then she put her head back and a burst of laughter so hearty escaped her that Ellen felt physically assaulted and pressed herself protectively against the cold of the window. Unaware, or uncaring, of Ellen's reaction, the girl began to run her fingers over the blank white pages of her book.

Though Ellen was flustered by even the girl's partial, uninvited acknowledgment, the unabashed laughter resonated with her. She puzzled over it for the next few blocks, jerking whenever the blind girl would chuckle unexpectedly at something her fingers had converted from bumps to wit.

It wasn't, she thought, that she'd been “noticed,” though that was novel. She knew it had only been the curious accident of physical contact that had enabled the blind girl to perceive her. No, what intrigued Ellen was that this young woman—topped off with a ridiculous hat roughly the size, color, and shape of a crushed traffic cone—was utterly unconcerned with the people around her, even the ones who stared blatantly. She couldn't see them, so they didn't matter.