Calling Invisible Women (11 page)

“Me neither,” I said. We were doubly lucky that day. Not only did we discover that we didn’t want diamonds, as soon as we stepped up to the curb we found a bus to take us near enough to home.

By the time I got home I was exhausted. I sat in a hot bath and rubbed my aching feet. The bathtub was still a bit unnerving: the displacement of clear water by a clear person made a disconcerting visual for a person who otherwise had no visuals. I dried off and put on some more perfume, a sweat suit, and some big, plushy slippers and went downstairs to make dinner. Arthur called at 6:30 to say he was finished, he was walking out the door, but I knew better than to fall for that. He came in an hour later.

“Germ Man’s invisible shield has failed him,” he said, dropping his coat over the back of the couch. “I must have seen twenty kids with the flu today and every single one of them wanted to kiss me.”

“Come sit down,” I said. “Do you want a glass of wine?”

“What I’d love is a hot rum toddy with some honey and lemon.” He worked his tie from side to side and unbuttoned his collar. “I don’t mean to complain,” he said.

“No, please,” I said. “Do.”

“I just wish you could spend one day in the office with me, just see what it’s like start to finish. I don’t think you’d even believe it. Crying children, crying parents, fifty phone messages to return, dictation, insurance companies to fight with, nurses who want to come in and tell me all their personal problems, a baby with a very suspicious rash and now I’m worrying about her. I’m nowhere close to retirement but when I think about doing this for another ten or fifteen years it just doesn’t seem possible.”

I felt for him, I really did. I knew how hard he worked. I would have loved for him to say “Tell me what happened to you today. Anything exciting?” but the most exciting thing that ever happened to me anymore was getting a galley of a decent book to review. It probably no longer occurred to him to ask.

Which is all by way of saying, I had never meant to have a secret life, but now I did.

seven

A
s for the issue of clothing versus nakedness, I found that neither one was the perfect answer for every occasion. As a result, I seemed to run a straight fifty/fifty split. There were times that clothes just felt appropriate—Irene’s yoga class, for example, where I simply could not imagine getting into downward dog in a roomful of people regardless of whether or not they could see me. For one thing, I appreciated her adjustments and comments on my form, which she could manage easily as long as I had on a pair of sweatpants and a long-sleeved T-shirt.

“Sit bones reaching up,” she said, her voice melodic, soothing. “Chest toward the floor.”

I was glad to be back under her instruction. I needed to stretch. I needed to be reminded to breathe. Out of sight, out of mind, as the old adage goes. I had been slack when it came to looking after that which I could not see. As for the other women in the class, they noticed nothing unusual about me. Irene preached the doctrine of focus turned inward. “Yoga is not a competitive sport,” she said as she walked between our mats. “Stop looking around.”

I stayed in shavasana until everyone else had left, lying on my mat like the invisible dead. “Arthur is always saying he wishes I could watch one of his days start to finish,” I told his mother, my eyes still closed. “He was talking about it again last night and I thought, why not? No time like the present.”

“Maybe he’s feeling unseen,” she said. “It’s possible that that’s the lesson in all of this, not who sees you but who you can learn to see.”

Irene was sitting in lotus position on the floor beside me wearing white pants and a white top. “My mother-in-law, my guru,” I said.

She laughed. “I’m not telling you what to do, but it does seem like you have a real opportunity in front of you. I know this is a hardship, but I have to say there are certain elements of your life I envy. You have a new perspective on everything. You’re both learning about yourself and learning to break away from yourself, at least in the more trivial aspects.”

I thought about the diamonds, the high-heeled shoes. “You have a point.”

“Go find out what Arthur’s day is like,” she said. “And then tell me. I’d be curious to know.”

“Could you drop me off at his office?” I asked. Irene had very nicely picked me up at the house this morning, a teacher’s best bet for ensuring her student would come to class.

“But then how will you get home?”

“I’ll catch a ride with Arthur,” I said. “I’ll just go down and get in the backseat a few minutes before he’s ready to leave. He won’t know the difference.”

In the thirty-one years since Arthur entered medical school, I could not begin to count the number of times he had mentioned how appalled I would be if I had to bear witness to his entire day. It was a blatant plea for sympathy, and it was sympathy I was happy to give him. I knew he worked hard, impossibly hard, but still, I couldn’t help but feel there was some vague accusation in his request as well, like I didn’t really understand what hard work was or I didn’t fully appreciate all that he did on our behalf. It was something I became especially sensitive to after my own professional life was squeezed down to an occasional drip. “I wish you could just watch one entire day,” he’d say to me. “You’d probably run screaming after an hour.” How many times did I say, “Yes! Okay! I’d love to go. It’s national Take Your Wife to Work Day. Show me how it’s done.” But of course it was the kind of thing you say, not the kind of thing you actually do. If the problem with Arthur’s days was that they were too busy, then bringing me along was hardly going to make things easier. I would be in his way. There would be all the introductions to make. I could picture his nurse Mary pushing me into a supply closet and locking the door.

But as an invisible wife there was a real opportunity, and in some sense it was even better that he wouldn’t know I had been there. “You’re not going to do anything, to fix anything,” Irene said as she drove me to the office. “You’re just going to bear witness to his life. I think sometimes that’s the greatest gift we can give one another.”

“It’s true,” I said. “It happens to be the exact thing I’m missing from Arthur these days.” I wriggled out of my clothes and rolled them into a ball, which I then pushed under the front seat.

“You first have to be willing to give what you want to get,” Irene said. Irene changed lanes without checking her rearview mirror and I heard the sound of horns and screeching tires behind us. She was a beautiful soul and a terrible driver. What a thought, being in a car accident while invisible. Would they never find me? Would they tow me out to the junkyard and leave me there in the car? I shuddered.

“Here we are!” Irene said. “Now if this doesn’t work out just call me and I’ll come and pick you up. Do you have your cell phone?”

“You’ve got to go out there with nothing,” I said, opening my hands. “That’s the only way it works.”

“Oh, Clover,” she said, her pale eyes blinking back tears. “That’s beautiful. That’s completely Zen.”

“Drive home safe,” I said, and closed the door.

Right from the start I was cheating. It was almost ten o’clock. Arthur had left the house a little after seven. He would have already made rounds at the hospital, returned a spate of phone calls, met with the pretty drug reps who encouraged him to push their niacins, their allergy tablets, their Ritalin. On top of all that he had probably seen maybe six or eight patients. He was probably halfway to exhausted while I had spent my morning perfecting my triangle pose. I pushed the elevator button. I decided if there was something important I felt like I was missing I could always come back tomorrow morning.

There were seven pediatricians in Arthur’s group, five men and two women, and of the seven Arthur was the second oldest. Bill, the oldest, was winding down. He didn’t see new patients anymore, come in on Fridays, or take a rotation of weekend call (an unimaginable luxury as far as I was concerned). He had handed over the reins of the group to Arthur, though with only seven members I never thought that was asking so much. What did they talk about at their monthly meetings anyway? Whether or not to upgrade the quality of the toys in the toy box? Whether handing out Tootsie Pops after immunizations and booster shots promoted tooth decay and obesity? We would all have a party together at Christmas with the nurses and the receptionists and the women in billing. They were Arthur’s other family, the same way the newspaper people had been my other family. That had been the thing I’d missed most of all about working.

When I opened the door to the waiting room I found myself in the midst of barely controlled chaos. While I will admit my first impulse was to hustle straight back to Arthur’s office, I decided I would do well to prop myself up against the wall for a couple of minutes and observe. It made me feel like a journalist again, undercover as no one had ever been undercover before. The waiting room was, after all, part of the experience. While there were big chairs and little chairs and very tiny chairs circling the room, nearly all of them were empty. Children were careening all over the floor. I couldn’t distinguish the sick from the well. They were running fire trucks in circles while adding in the wailing noise of sirens themselves, scampering in the front door and out the back door of a plastic castle, rolling and tumbling and turning the pages in picture books so fast that the pages sailed across the room. I imagined the germs colliding, the impetigo bumping into the sore throat who pushed over the earache who sat on the one who was only there for an annual checkup. It was easy to picture them on a school bus soon enough. Their mothers chased them helplessly, and then gave up to talk to other mothers.

Jeannine, who was my favorite of all the nurses, opened the door. She wore a blue smock covered in SpongeBob SquarePants. “Mr. Goldberg,” she called in a cheerful voice.

Mr. Goldberg, who was all of three years old, had an instant before been marching a dinosaur across the floor. Now he sat down and began to cry. His mother, greatly pregnant, leaned over and heaved the boy up with one arm and carried him.

“Max!” Jeannine said. “Aren’t you glad to see me?”

Max wailed. “He isn’t feeling well,” his mother said.

I slipped into the hall behind them. In fact Max was very flushed and I reached over without thinking and touched his bright hot forehead. At the brush of my cool hand the boy was so startled that he forgot to finish crying but left his mouth hanging open in wonder.

“There you go!” Jeannine said cheerfully.

We were just rounding a corner when I saw Arthur standing at the nurses’ station. His back was to us and he appeared to be looking at a chart. His lab coat was crisp and white and he was holding a big baby, a girl of maybe one, somewhat carelessly on his hip. She was looking at him with love and concentration. Clearly she did not feel well, and clearly in the arm of my husband she felt better, and so she hung there quietly and let him do his work, comforted by his proximity and the clean, starchy smell of his coat. Just like that my eyes filled up with tears and I blinked them back. Did everybody fall in love with him or was it just me? Arthur had given up running years ago and he ate pimento cheese sandwiches every day for lunch. Around his eyes he wore the look of the perpetually exhausted, yet he shone like the sun, the center of a small, specific solar system that spun around him all the days and nights. He turned and whispered something in the child’s ear and then handed her back to her mother, a pretty redheaded girl who looked to be all of twenty.

“Dr. Hobart,” Mary said, guiding him on. “Room five.”

Mary had been with Arthur for ten years and without her, he had said so many times, he would probably manage to see about five patients a day. She was younger than I was and prettier, though it was impossible to think of her as either pretty or young. She was the harness and the plow, Arthur was always the mule. She took the chart from his hand, handed him another chart, and pointed to the door marked five. At every moment the telephone was ringing. Pam, the third nurse, answered, put someone on hold, and answered again, put them on hold, went back to the first call. Jeannine, having deposited the Goldbergs in room four, picked up another line and asked what she could do to help. Suddenly the redhead and the baby were gone and I was dashing down the hall to slip into room five before Mary closed the door on me.

There on the high exam table, atop a sheet of white paper, sat a twelve-year-old boy with thick brown curls brushed back from his forehead. He was a boy who looked like a player, a boy who could catch and throw and run. Maybe there was something wrong with his elbow. Behind him his mother was standing, her arms folded across her chest. The room was small and with Arthur and Mary and the mother and the boy I had to press myself into the corner near the sink.

“How are you doing today, Owen?” Arthur said.

“Still wetting the bed,” the mother said flatly. Owen kept his eyes fixed forward, his fists pressed between his knees.

“A lot of people do,” Arthur said. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “We’re going to run a few tests is all. Figure out what the problem is.”

“The problem is he won’t get up in the night,” his mother said.

“That can be part of the problem,” Arthur said to her sympathetically. “Would it be all right if Owen and I talked for a minute about this by ourselves?”

The mother sighed and held out her hands. “Have at it. I hope you’ll have more luck with him than I do.”

Mary opened the door and the mother made her exit, but when she closed the door Arthur looked at her. “You too,” he said. “Just a minute.”

Mary gave him a small frown. Once she was out of the room it was nearly impossible for her to keep him moving forward in a straight line. Arthur gave her a very small nod, which told her he understood and he wouldn’t be forever. It was as if he were gently pushing her out. When finally she was gone he waited for the door to click before turning back to Owen.

“The Cardinals,” he said gravely. “Do you think there’s any hope for the play-offs?”