Calling Invisible Women (21 page)

Jane was quiet for a long time and suddenly I was worried that one of us had wandered off. It was of vital importance that we not get separated. “Jane?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was just thinking about what you were saying. It’s good advice, actually. You remind me so much of Irene. People must tell you that all the time.”

“No,” I said. “They don’t, but it’s nice to hear.”

“Well, tell your husband he found a girl like his mother. What about you?” she said. “What did you used to do?”

It was an overcast day, no rain but plenty of bluster. The bare little trees stood in neat rows, not a single leaf on the ground. “I was a reporter, but that was a while ago.”

“A reporter!” she said. “My God, no wonder you like being invisible.”

We went through the double doors of a large building where yet another security guard was checking the badges of people who had had to obtain ten different levels of clearance in order to make it into this building in the first place.

“Leave nothing to chance,” I said to the guard as we walked past and he nodded his head, never wondering who might have spoken.

“Wilhelm Holt is on the fifth floor,” Jane said. “It’s a keyed floor so we’ll need to wait for just a minute until someone else is going up.”

It did turn out to be just a minute because two men in gray suits came down the hall and punched the button, the elevator operators of our dreams. The four us went in together, and one of the men held his key card to the sensor and punched the sixth floor.

“Five, please,” Jane said.

And without missing a beat he held his key up again and punched five. “Tony, I’ve got to say it, you smell good.”

“Thanks,” the second man said, giving a small smile in the direction of his shoes.

The door opened on five and we got out.

“What in the
world
was that about?” I asked.

“One day I was on the elevator for forty-five minutes trying to get to a keyed floor and no one was punching the right button. I don’t mind elevators but I was about to go out of my mind, so finally I just said it, asked for what I wanted, and no one blinked an eye. Nobody looks at anybody in an elevator. And just for the record, it isn’t Tony who smells good, it’s you,” Jane said.

We went down the hallway and when we were standing in front of Wilhelm Holt’s door I asked Jane if we had a plan.

“Not exactly,” she said in a quiet voice. “At least he knows that invisible women exist, so he’s less likely to completely freak out. We’ll just ask some questions, see if we can figure out what he knows. Let’s try not to scare him.”

We turned the knob and, very slowly, opened the door.

Wilhelm Holt was a small man whose bald head was fringed in a half circle of gray curls. He was wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a white lab coat, which made me feel fondly toward him in a Pavlovian way. His office was not particularly large, there was a desk with one chair behind it and two chairs in front of it, a bookcase full of books, a smattering of framed diplomas nailed to the wall. He was working hard on something, and while he was extremely focused he was also vaguely aware that the door was now closing and someone was in the room. “You should knock,” he said.

“We should,” Jane said, “but we didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves.”

He put down his pen and looked up, and when he didn’t see anyone there he went back to his work without a single question to the air.

“Dr. Holt?”

“Yes?” he said, still working.

“My name is Clover and this is Jane. We’re from the invisible women’s group in Ohio. You spoke to my friend Rosemary on the phone. You’ve e-mailed her as well. You made plans to meet her at a Target store in Cheltenham, I believe in the shampoo aisle.”

I had his attention now. His head was up and he was looking around the room as if he believed he could find us if only he tried a little harder. “You shouldn’t have come here,” he said. He was pale, but still, he had a world more color than either of us.

“I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “But you’ve already broken your engagement several times and, frankly, we got tired of waiting.”

“How did you get in?”

“We’re invisible,” Jane said. “Figure it out.”

“I was interested in helping you, or helping your friend Rosemary.”

“Terrific,” I said. “We’re interested in being helped. And don’t worry about Rosemary. Her daughter had an orthodontist appointment and she couldn’t get away. But invisible women are very interchangeable. You help one of us, you help all of us.”

He screwed the cap back on his pen and sat for a moment. “I don’t like to be ambushed,” he said. “I’m not prepared for this.”

“Take your time,” Jane said. “We can wait.”

“It isn’t my fault that you’re invisible,” Dr. Holt said. Now the color was coming back to his cheeks. Our visit was inconvenient. He was getting upset with us.

“It isn’t your fault,” I said calmly, “but it is your responsibility. You work for a company that manufactures three drugs that, when taken in combination, render women invisible, and despite our letters and phone calls and visits, no one is doing anything about it. We need to see those drugs taken off the market in order to protect other women, and we need someone, possibly you, to figure out how to get us back.”

“No one is taking Singsall off the market. It’s America’s most-prescribed antidepressant.”

“I’ve found being invisible very depressing,” Jane said. “But I don’t think I should take it anymore after what it’s done to me. You understand. Clover here is better adjusted than I am. She probably has the energy to follow you home and sit on your bed at night. We can do that, you know. We’re like lice, like bedbugs. Once you get invisible women in your life it’s almost impossible to get rid of them.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Yes and no,” Jane said. “Really, I’m just being honest with you. Do I want to haunt you? No. I’m not a ghost. Will I haunt you if you make it absolutely necessary? Yes, I will, because even though I can see my children and my husband, I’d like for them to be able to see me. Something has to be done about this. This company has inflicted bodily harm on us and now they’re ignoring the damages.”

“So why me?” he said, his voice full of disbelief. “Why are you coming after me?”

“Well, in truth, it was because you were nice enough to take Rosemary’s call,” Jane continued. “No good deed goes unpunished, Dr. Holt. By talking to her you at least proved you know what’s going on. You’ve heard about invisible women and you know their fate as it is connected to Dexter-White. That saves us from having to shake down every chemist and doctor and researcher in this place who spends his days torturing mice and would have no idea what we’re talking about. Now if you want to turn over a list of your superiors, the people who you know are ruining our lives, we would be perfectly happy to bring our plague of locusts down on them, but you have to understand, we’re coming down on somebody in this place and it’s going to happen soon.”

“I’m going to call security,” he said, picking up the phone. “This is harassment.”

“You shouldn’t bother them,” Jane said. “Even in a room this small we are impossible to find.”

“Are you married, Dr. Holt?” I asked. There were pictures of him with his arm around a woman who was a head taller then he was. Neither one of them was particularly attractive. They looked happy.

“My personal life doesn’t figure into this,” he said.

“Oh, you might as well tell us. It’s so easy to get into the backseat of your car and follow you home.” I picked up the picture and held it out to him. “This woman here,” I began. “Let’s just say for the sake of argument that she’s your wife. Let’s say she’s been through menopause and she’s being eaten alive by hot flashes so her doctor gives her some Premacore. After that the same doctor finds that her bone density isn’t quite what it should be and so he gives her some Ostafoss as well. But on top of that she’s a little depressed. Can you blame her? She’s just been through menopause, and you’re working all the time, so he gives her some Singsall, just a touch, just to brighten up the picture.”

“Clover, you’re telling my story here,” Jane said.

“All of these improvements come to your wife through the wonders of modern pharmacology. She didn’t pick this combination out for herself, it’s given to her. Then one morning you wake up and you’ve got nothing in your arms but a nightgown. Is that okay with you, Dr. Holt? Don’t you think your wife deserves some help? Or do you figure now that no one can see her she doesn’t have any rights? Would you sweep her under the rug, tell her not to make a fuss? She’s been poisoned, Dr. Holt, by your company. She’s been robbed of her very being. Are you going to tell her to go away?” I handed him the picture and he took it. He sat with it for a long time.

“We’re working on it,” he said finally. “We’re not unaware.”

“What are you working on?” Jane said.

“An antidote.” Dr. Holt sighs and props the picture back up on his desk.

“I thank you. I’d love one. But that isn’t good enough,” Jane said. “At least one of these drugs has to come off the market. You can’t make endless numbers of women invisible and then bring them back because it’s better business. This can’t be good for us.”

“But it isn’t endless numbers of women. In the control groups, only a very limited number of women became invisible.”

“What?” I said.

“They knew this at the outset?” Jane said.

“If every woman who took these three drugs in combination became invisible, we would be losing people out of every city, every neighborhood. These are very popular drugs; some people would go so far as to say they are critically necessary. There isn’t an outcry against this because not enough of you are gone. If you want a public outcry, try getting rid of Singsall.”

“Good Lord,” I said. I sat down in a chair at his desk. “If there isn’t an outcry, it’s because nobody else has figured out that you’re the ones who’ve done it.”

“Would you let your wife take these drugs together?” Jane asked.

Dr. Holt removed his glasses, rubbed his tired eyes. “Of course not.”

“So where do you suggest we go with this now? Are you going to take us upstairs, introduce us to your boss?”

“Do you know how many years it takes to get a drug through development? We’re going to need time.”

“It doesn’t take any time at all to pull something off the shelves. We’re willing to settle for that for starters.”

“I’m going to need more time,” he said. “Let me push them. If I take you upstairs, the only thing that’s going to happen is that I’m going to get fired, and all that means to you is that you’ve lost the one person who’s sympathetic to your case. And believe me, ladies, I am sympathetic.”

“And the rest of them aren’t?” Jane asked.

“This is a business,” he said. “A giant, multinational business. Whether or not you can see yourselves in the mirror is not of primary concern. I want to be in touch with you both. Actually, you could be invaluable in our studies. We’ve got drugs in development now but we’re going to need invisible women who are willing to be part of the program.”

“You want us to be guinea pigs?” Jane asked.

“You want us to take another Dexter-White drug? Why? So we can risk losing something else? Our speech? Our sight?” My hands were shaking. I had to restrain myself from turning over his desk, which, I believed, I was capable of doing.

“We would never put you in danger,” he said. His voice was oddly soothing.

“Too late. You have forty-eight hours,” I said. “Tell whoever you want. You have exactly forty-eight hours to fix this and after that we’re coming back.”

“Forty-eight hours isn’t enough time to change anything,” he said. “It’s not enough time to schedule a meeting in this place.”

“But it’s enough time for me to figure out what I’m going to do to you and everyone you work with if I don’t see some action.” I wanted to bite him. I wanted to kick. These were feelings unknown to me since junior high.

The door swung open and I had to assume Jane walked through it. I followed her out and down the hall, all but blinded by rage. They knew! They knew! The elevator doors were open and I got in. They don’t make you have a key to get off the floor, only to get on. I stormed through the lobby, past the security guard and out the double doors, just barely able to contain myself until I was outside.

“They knew!” I said, my voice too loud. I was crying now, thinking of all the women who had been hurt and how little it had mattered to anyone. “We’re nothing to them. We’re a reasonable loss. We’re a margin of error. It’s one thing to be invisible but it’s another thing to know that somebody did it to you and it didn’t even matter to them because the profits were too high.” I let out a huge breath, shook my head. “Come on,” I said. “I just want to get out of here.”

Nothing. In the distance there were some people walking up the hill. I was by now standing in a grassy patch maybe twenty feet from the front door. It was like Singapore, everything was so neat. There wasn’t so much as a gum wrapper blowing down the street. “Jane?”

Nothing.

Invisible women should not lose one another. This was imperative. Once separated we were as helpless as a pair of blind kittens. “Jane?” I said, and then I raised my voice. “Jane? Jane? Jane?”

Had I come out the right door? I went back into the building. The security guard lifted his head and watched as the door opened and closed and no one was there. On the other side of the lobby there was another security guard at another desk, another set of glass doors facing another grassy patch of lawn, another row of straight, leafless trees. I went and stood in the middle of the lobby, equidistant from the two men. There were enormous abstract paintings on the walls, a Calderesque mobile, or maybe even a Calder mobile, hanging down from the high ceiling, all no doubt holdovers from the eighties when large corporations bought large pieces of art. I tilted back my head. “Jane?” Both of the guards looked behind them. I exited the building in the other direction. “Jane? Jane?” I said into the wind.

I could remember I once lost Evie in the dress section of a department store. At first I thought she was playing. She liked to crawl between the clothes and hide in the bottom of the racks. I began to part them one at a time, looking down through the folds of fabric and calling her name—“Evie?”—but every time I looked my voice got a little higher, my heart beat a little faster. I couldn’t find her. That was the last time I felt this way—what I remember feeling that day was that I was lost, that I would be forever lost without her. Someone had picked up my child while I was looking for something to wear to a dinner party. I grabbed a saleswoman. I was already in tears. It wasn’t two minutes before there was a voice on the loudspeaker calling out Evie’s name. The entire store was quiet. And then a young woman in a black suit came up the escalator holding my daughter. Somehow Evie had gone down by herself and had not been able to figure out how to go back up. Crying and confused, she had wandered over to the Chanel counter, my Evie, four years old and drawn to the sight of lipsticks. The Chanel woman brought her back to me.