Calling Invisible Women (16 page)

Whatever it was, good for Nick.

“Here’s a job,” Miller said. “Dog grooming. We could groom dogs.”

“Doesn’t that require a little bit of skill?”

Miller shook his head. “We could practice on Red. We’ll give flattops to all the poodles.”

Nick tapped on the curser and rolled the screen down, looking for opportunities. “Maybe we should just resign ourselves to the army.”

My heart froze in my chest.

“A fine idea, except that there’s a war going on,” Miller said.

“Right,” Nick said. Then his hands came off the keyboard and for a moment his nose went into the air. He turned behind him and looked right at me, then he scanned the room.

“What?” Miller said.

“I thought my mother was here.” He shook his head, pushing the thought aside, but in another minute he got up and went to sniff the hair of a pretty girl who was sitting two stools away. She was reading an Italo Calvino novel and drinking a cappuccino. Her look was one of surprise but not complete displeasure.

“Is there something I can help you with?” she said.

Nick shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was distracted by your perfume.”

“I’m not wearing perfume.”

“Maybe I was distracted by your shampoo then.” He stood up. “Then again I may be losing my mind.”

“That’s a shame,” she said, and gave him a pleasant smile before going back to her book.

“I really do think I’m cracking up,” Nick said when he came and sat down next to Miller.

“Some girl in here is definitely wearing your mom’s perfume but I don’t think that means we can just start sniffing all of them. Besides, ‘You smell like my mother’ isn’t exactly the greatest pickup line I’ve ever heard. Now how about this for you,” Miller pointed to the screen. “Legal secretary. I mean that would at least be a good warm-up for law school.”

“Except I’m never going to get into law school because all the other unemployed history teachers in America have already applied and the ones that get in will someday become unemployed lawyers and those are the people who will fill out the five hundred applications to be a legal secretary.”

Nick had applied to law school?

“Man, you are in a very negative place.”

Nick hit Miller lightly on the arm. “Come on, let’s get this thing done.”

“Really?”

“Stone cold sober in the light of day.”

Miller looked at his watch. “I’ll be interested to see if the tattoo parlor has a lunch crowd.”

“Are you out of—” I clapped my hand over my mouth. Nick stopped and looked again at the shampoo girl, who in turn looked at him and shook her head.

“This place is giving me the creeps,” Nick said, and they were out the door.

Idiot boys! Needless to say, I stayed close as they loped down the street, looking so much like a couple of fresh-faced kids off to shoot hoops. When they opened the back door of the car to put in their computers and their backpacks, I jumped inside.

“Who told you about this place, anyway?” Nick asked.

His car was messy. There were soda bottles on the floor of the backseat, CDs without cases sliding around, a green hooded sweatshirt that belonged to his father rolled up in a ball, an empty sack from White Castle. I was getting irritated about all of it.

“A guy I knew in high school used to work there. His tattoos were good.”

“Did he get them there?”

Miller shrugged. “I don’t know. This isn’t the kind of thing where you can just check Angie’s List. It’s a tattoo parlor, I mean, I doubt they’re rated.”

They were both over twenty-one. Weren’t they free to do what they wanted to do with their own bodies? No. The answer was certainly no. I had made one of those bodies myself and I wasn’t about to let a temporary moment of stupidity mar it for the rest of its days on this earth. I was still the mother, after all. That counted for something.

“I swear to you I smell it again,” Nick said.

Miller leaned back and sniffed. “Me too. It must be on you somewhere. Maybe your mom got some perfume on your wash or on your pack or something.”

Nick thought about this for a minute. “I guess. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

Miller sniffed again. “I’ve got to say it though, your mom smells fine.”

“Drop it,” Nick said.

We were heading for what Arthur referred to as the Down Side of Town. There were no railroad tracks, but if there had been we would now be on the other side. Pawnshops and check-cashing centers sat in the shadow of billboards that advertised the services of bail bondsmen. Miller was punching something up on his iPhone. “Thirty-three forty-three,” he said, and with that Nick pulled into the Bleeding Heart Tattoo Parlor.

I was sitting in the back of the Honda Accord thinking about Nick’s first day of kindergarten. After I had handed him over to the teacher, all smiles, Nick waving goodbye to me as if it were the most natural thing in the world, I ran around to the back of the building, Evie on one hip, and peered through the window to watch him. I was the one who was crying. Nick was working the room like a tiny politician, going to see what all the other kids were doing, checking out their books and toys. He was so beautiful! The most beautiful child in the room. He was blond in those days, with big dark eyes, his ivory skin still unmarred, not a single tattoo on that boy. He turned off the car and in a split second I thought to grab his phone out of the side of his pack just before he reached for it. The next thing I knew they were walking inside. I have never punched out numbers so fast in my life.

“Nick?” Gilda said, sounding surprised when she answered. “Everything okay?”

“It’s me,” I said. “And nothing is okay. I took Nick’s phone. Get a pencil. I’m at the Bleeding Heart Tattoo Parlor, 3343 Thompson Lane.”

“How can an invisible person get a tattoo?” she said. “That’s insanity.”

“Insanity, yes, but not my insanity. Nick and Miller are in there now. I’m in the car but I’m getting ready to go in and stall things until you can get here and bust it up.”

“Miller’s getting a tattoo!” Gilda said. “I’ll kill him first. Whose idea was this?”

“I have no idea. All I know is that it wasn’t mine. I ran into them at the coffee shop and was eavesdropping. When they said what they were doing I followed them here. I mean I got into Nick’s car.”

“Oh, Clover,” Gilda said. “Thank God you’re invisible. Seriously, I don’t know what we’re going to do when you come back again.”

Through the plate-glass window I could see the boys talking to a large, tattoo-covered man who looked like he had recently escaped from prison by way of the circus. “Listen, I’ve got to go,” I said. “Just get here fast.”

I got out of the car and tried to close the door quietly, then I stood outside the glass door of the shop looking in. It looked like a barber shop but with only two chairs. The interior was both plain and spare, a yellowed linoleum floor, a half wall of mirrors, pictures of possible tattoos secured with tacks—a flaming dagger, a twisting snake, an overwrought Celtic cross that looked like a pattern stamped out by a fancy waffle iron. It appeared that midday traffic was low, only the two boys and the tattoo man discussing the menu options. The tattoo man was wearing a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off. One arm seemed to be where he or his brother tattooers had come to practice: two interlocking chain links, a very simple flag, a couple of names in script too elaborate to read, a bosomy girl balanced inside a martini glass. The other arm, however, was something of a masterpiece—a tree whose roots ran to his fingernails and whose trunk went up to his elbow, with a flourish of branches and leaves and a nest of birds on his upper arm, spreading into the darkness beneath his shirt. I saw the top leaves climbing up the side of his neck. Maybe a few of the birds had flown up into his beard. Impressive as it was, it was not the kind of thing I wanted for my son.

There were no other customers in the parking lot who I might have been able to slip in behind. People don’t think about the ways that being invisible can be tricky. If you don’t want to call attention to yourself it’s better not to open a door. Still, I wasn’t going to stand on principle and watch these children get inked. I went inside.

A bell jingled and all three of them turned their heads to look at nothing. They shivered in the sudden burst of cold air. “That’s strange. That never happens.” The big man almost walked right into me as he went over to open and close the door himself. “Must be one hell of a wind.” He shrugged and came back. “So just the one word?” he said.

“That’s it.” Nick tapped his shoulder. “On the deltoid.”

“How ’bout I put it in a bleeding heart? We’ve got a sale on bleeding hearts now, buy one, get one free.”

“That might be good,” Miller said.

“Then get one on each arm,” Nick said. “I just want the word.”

“Anything else on sale?” Miller asked.

“ ‘Mother,’ ” the man said solemnly. “ ‘Mother’ is always half price.”

“How’s that?” Miller asked.

“Because it’s respectful,” the man said. “People should respect their mothers.”

I had an awful lot to say on that subject but I managed to keep my mouth shut.

“Look through the books,” the man said, and pushed over two enormous books of the sort from which a person might chose a wedding invitation. “If you stick to just wanting one word, then you’re going to have to pick your lettering.”

Nick opened the book, glanced at two pages, and tapped on a row of type. “That’s the one.”

“You should be sure,” the man said, looking down at his arbitrary choice. “These things last.”

“It’s fine.”

Miller was perusing all his options. He was looking at a page of frogs wearing tiny crowns. But Nick was all business. Gilda might very well arrive in time to save her own son but she was going to be too late to save mine. Frantically I looked around for a distraction. I saw what appeared to be the workbench.

The big man turned the pages in Nick’s book. “These are your color options.”

“Black,” Nick said without looking.

The man picked up Nick’s wrist between his thumb and forefinger and turned it from side to side in the fluorescent light. “I’d suggest a dark navy. With your coloring the black is going to be too harsh. The letters just wind up looking like a bunch of bugs.”

“You’re the boss,” Nick said. It was a stupid thing to say to a tattoo artist, but Nick was listless, as if he couldn’t care less. Miller, on the other hand, was tapping on a little Aztec god. “This is pretty cool.”

Nick looked over. “If you’re an Aztec,” he said. “But we’re not Aztecs. We’re unemployed.”

There on the table was a boxful of small white paper packets. Using as much stealth as I possessed, I moved one to the table and silently tore it open. It was a needle sitting in a plastic bit with a clear plastic cap. How very sanitary of them. I had thought it would be a good idea to bend the needles but I could see now that it was a job that would take me most of the afternoon. Everything was so sterilized, so disposable. The ink was in tiny, individual pots. There were boxes of rubber gloves. I could throw the drill itself on the floor and step on it but I didn’t imagine that that would go down well with the tattoo man and I still had my child’s safety to think of. I kept looking out the window into the parking lot. Gilda, Gilda, Gilda.

“Take your shirt off,” the big man said, and Nick obliged, unbuttoning his plaid flannel shirt and then pulling his T-shirt over his head. It was more than I could bear, seeing his slender white back in this cold room. I thought of those half-dressed boys sitting on Arthur’s examining table, Arthur telling them to breathe in and breathe out as he listened with his stethoscope. Then the man handed Nick a piece of paper. “You better write it down,” he said. “I never was great at spelling.”

Nick printed out the word and handed the paper back to him. I leaned forward to look.
Unemployed
, it said.

“All right.” I grabbed the paper and crushed it into a ball. “That’s enough. Nick, Miller, the show’s over. Put your clothes back on, get in the car, and go home.” I had meant to be quiet, to wait for Gilda, but the words poured forth like marching soldiers that could not be stopped.

Nick stood up, as did the hairs on the back of his neck. “Mom?”

“That’s right—Mom. You’re finished. This is over.”

All three of them were turning in slow circles, their chins pointed up to the humming strips of light. It was like a moment from
The Nutcracker
. It was the dance of the snowflakes.

“Your mom’s here?” the tattoo man asked, scanning the empty room.

“Speakerphone?” Miller said, looking at the ceiling.

Nick patted down his pockets. “I don’t have my phone,” he whispered.

“Just go,” I said. “And not to another tattoo parlor. You can forget about that, mister. I’ll be there, too.”

Suddenly Nicky’s eyes welled with tears. “I’ve been smelling her all afternoon,” he said in a low voice. “Miller, remember? We smelled her in the coffee shop and then in the car.”

“Is your mother dead, man?” the tattoo guy said.

“Mom?” Nick said. “Are you—” He didn’t say the word.

“I’m fine. No tattoos. That’s it. Go, go, go.” I held open the door and the two boys walked through.

“Right there,” Miller said, stopping right in front of me. “I smell her there.”

“Go!” I shouted in his ear, and then their speed increased. They were out the door and in the car and out of the parking lot in seconds flat.

The tattoo man came and stood beside me at the door. He gave his beard a scratch. “Just as well,” he said, watching them go. “That was just about the most depressing tattoo anyone’s ever asked me for, except the ones that are some dead guy’s name. They didn’t need it.”

“Who needs it?” I said.

He shrugged. “Drunk boys, sailors, people who just fell in love, people who just lost their mother.” He turned in my direction. “You’re sure you’re not dead?”

“Not the last time I checked.”

“Well, that’s good.”

I saw Gilda pull into the parking lot doing about eighty-five. Her tires squealed as she spun toward the curb. “That’s my ride,” I said.