Calling Invisible Women (23 page)

“Go, go,” she said, and then she turned to Nick. “So, you are Evie’s brother. Vlad told me you punched him in misunderstanding over mother.”

“I felt bad about that,” Nick said.

“Never feel bad when you defend mother.”

Arthur was out the door and in the living room. “Clover!” he called.

“I’m right here. Are you okay?”

“You’re right where?”

“Here.” I took his hand. “Sit down for a minute. You don’t look so hot.”

“Didn’t you notice? That woman in the kitchen?”

“Ariana,” I said.

“I can’t see her! You seem to be able to see her and Nick seems to be able to see her but she has no head, no hands. I shook her hand and there was nothing there.”

Another woman might have been upset. After all, he had missed my invisibility for more than a month and then picked up on someone else’s in a matter of minutes, but Arthur was a doctor. He had a talent for spotting problems in other people. As for me, he always trusted that I was fine. “I know,” I said.

“So you can’t see her either?”

“I can’t.”

“And this doesn’t bother … Clover? Clover, where are you?”

“I’m sitting right here,” I said. I squeezed his hand. I loved him. In his moment of panic and recognition, in this moment I had imagined so many times, I loved him more than I ever thought possible.

It took a while to iron out all the details. There was a lot that Arthur wanted to know, and while I hit on a few of the major points, I reminded him we had a guest, not to mention the fact that the sheets in Evie’s room had to be changed and neither Ariana nor I had had supper. Arthur moved through the evening like a somnambulist, not like his usual exhausted self but like someone in a trance. He poached us some eggs and made toast. He told us to sit there, to have another glass of wine. His voice was very weak. Nick went upstairs and cleaned the bathroom.

“This is excellent husband,” Ariana said. “I can see now why you excuse him to me. My husband, when he finally troubles to notice what has happened, he is very defensive. He tells me it is my fault for not alerting him. He feels bad for himself. Your husband is clearly upset because he has been so neglectful for so long.” She spoke as if Arthur wasn’t in the room.

“Yes,” he said, putting the plates down in front of us. “You’ve hit the nail on the head.”

“Tomorrow we launch campaign,” she said. “I say we work very fast. Make big push. You write piece for tomorrow’s paper. Get this started.”

“It’s too late,” I said. “Too late for tomorrow.”

“You call editor now, tell him you’re invisible. It will not be too late when he knows that no one can see you. He will take it tonight. Tomorrow we make signs, what you call pee-kit signs. We make T-shirts. We take over Internet. We need slogan. We need to be very catchy.”

“Invisible—Indivisible,” Nick said. He had just come back in the room and was washing out a pan.

We all looked at him. “So smart,” Ariana whispered.

I excused myself and went upstairs to write.

“How is it possible that I didn’t know?” Arthur said when we were lying in bed that night after the story had been filed.

“Lots of people didn’t know. I should have told you. Seriously, I’m sorry about that. I shouldn’t be giving you tests.”

“You’re invisible,” he said. “It’s not like you’re asking me to name the capitals of all fifty states. It just kills me to think you’ve been going through all of this on your own.”

“Not exactly on my own. I had Gilda and your mother. I had the invisible women.”

“We need to hire some lawyers to approach Dexter-White,” he said. “Those guys are serious players. I think it’s great that you want to print leaflets but it’s going to take more than that.”

“The problem is I’ve been thinking of myself as Chechnya,” I said.

“What?” Arthur said.

“I thought I was Chechnya.”

“You?” Arthur was laughing. “Chechnya? Absolutely not. Not even remotely possible. You’re Russia. You’ve always been Russia.”

“I know that now,” I said, and took him in my arms.

fifteen

T
he next morning Vlad and Evie were back. Ariana had texted them.

“But classes start today,” I said.

“We are invisible,” Ariana said. “This is more important than school. Tell invisible women that meeting will be here immediately. Tell everyone to bring laptop and cell phone. Tell them to bring friends and grown children and pads of paper. They should bring husbands if husbands are good.”

I looked around the room. “I’m not sure that many people will fit.”

“They stand up. We give them assignments and then they should go.”

Arthur called in sick to work. I had never seen this happen. He went to work sick. When he had the flu he discreetly excused himself from the exam room and threw up down the hall. “Are you even allowed to call in sick?” I asked.

“First, I love you,” he said. “This is a huge moment in your life and I want to be there for you. Second, I am not about to have that woman see me going off to work.”

“Good point.”

Irene was in the kitchen making vegan carrot muffins and gallons of green tea. “I sent out a tweet this morning,” she said, handing me a cup. “Calling Invisible Women to take over Dexter-White tomorrow at noon.”

“You tweet?”

“Evie taught me,” she said.

Arthur and Evie came into the kitchen together. Arthur took a muffin and gave his mother a kiss. “I understand why Clover didn’t tell me,” he said. “But I still can’t believe you didn’t tell me. My own mother.”

Irene shrugged. “When you were a little boy you wanted me to do your science projects for you and I wouldn’t do it.”

Arthur looked at her. “What in the world does that have to do with what I just said?”

“I didn’t do your science projects and so you were forced to either figure science out for yourself or fail in the process of honorably trying. You grew up to become a brilliant doctor. I didn’t tell you Clover was invisible because you had to do the work yourself. I couldn’t make your journey for you.”

“So do you think I might grow up to be a brilliant husband?”

Irene reached up and patted his cheek. “That’s what I’d wish for you.”

“If someone had bothered to tell me,” Evie said, “we wouldn’t have had to drive all the way to school and back.”

“You’ve had a lot on you,” I said, giving her a hug. “I didn’t think you needed this.”

“Mother, you’re
invisible
. I’m not
that
narcissistic.”

This was news I was glad to hear.

Gilda’s husband, Steve, stayed home from work as well and they came over with Miller and Benny to move half of the team across the street to their house so that there were fewer people to step on. I wore a sticky name tag on my sweatshirt. Everybody did.
HI! I’M CLOVER
.

Benny sidled up to me in the hall. “You are so busted,” he said quietly, and then walked away.

Who had connections? Did anyone know Anderson Cooper? The hive buzzed with action. T-shirt orders were placed with a company that knew about emergencies. Nick rented a bus. Arthur brought in the paper and waved it like a flag above his head. Just as Ed had promised—page one above the fold.
CALLING INVISIBLE WOMEN
, by Clover Hobart.
As of tomorrow at noon, invisible women are stepping out of the shadows and into the hallways of Dexter-White, the Philadelphia-based pharmaceutical giant whose products have created a nightmare for untold numbers of American women
.

The phone rang. The cell phone rang. Nick’s phone rang. It sounded like Arthur’s office.

“AP wire services picked up the story,” Ed said. “It’s everywhere. This is huge, Clover. It’s nine in the morning and we’ve sold out on every stand in town. I’m going to want blow-by-blow reporting on this. You’re going to cover every minute of it.”

Evie tweeted to the American Cheerleading Association. Vlad posted on the Facebook page of the American Hockey League, which had been recruiting him hard. We e-mailed
Oprah
and
Ellen
and
The View
. All three of the producers called back within ten minutes. Lila and Alice and Jo Ellen took the calls. I was out in the backyard, talking to NPR on my cell phone.

“I think at first I was in shock,” I said to Nina Totenberg, who was filling in for Steve Inskeep. “And after that, I suppose I had a sense of shame. I didn’t know what had happened to me. I didn’t know how to talk about it.”

“It seems like all that has changed,” Nina Totenberg said.

“It has. It was a case of women coming together at the right time and deciding that we were going to stand up for ourselves and stand up for other women. Once we coalesced for action it felt like nothing could stop us. These drugs have got to come off the market. If only one woman was rendered invisible it would be too many.”

Nina Totenberg herself reminded listeners that they could get more information about tomorrow’s demonstration, and about invisibility, at npr.org or invisibleme.com.

A representative from Dexter-White declined to comment.

The phone rang. It was Wilhelm Holt. “You said forty-eight hours.”

“Well, it will be forty-eight hours from the time I left until the time I come back.” I walked around to the kitchen window and watched the flurry of activity. Right in the middle of all of it Irene was teaching tree pose to an invisible woman in a pair of jeans and a polar fleece top.

“So the plan is to ruin a company without even sitting down to talk?”

“I did sit down to talk. I was in your office yesterday, sitting. I would have talked to anyone. How long have you known about this, Dr. Holt? How long have you known that Dexter-White was making women invisible and done nothing about it except talk?”

Wilhelm Holt hung up the phone.

Evie had set up our own Facebook page and now Patty Sanchez and Laura Worthington were doing nothing except trying to answer the enormous volume of inquiries from invisible women. They were explaining to them how to work the airlines, the buses, and where to meet.

“Oh my gosh,” Laura said. “I have to run. Channel Four is putting me on the news at noon and five.”

“Your old station!” Alice said, and everyone applauded.

“Invisible woman on television,” Ariana said, and wiped her eyes with a napkin. “I never thought I’d live to see day.”

The next day, when it came, was far beyond anything we could have imagined. There were women who complained that it happened too fast, that it wasn’t possible for them to make it to the rally, but I think in the end Ariana was right. We had seized the energy of the moment, and by coming together so quickly we sent a message to the world that it would be impossible for invisible women to stand by for another day pretending that nothing was wrong. We poured into the campus of Dexter-White wearing nothing but our
INVISIBLE = INDIVISIBLE
T-shirts. We locked arms, Jane on my right, Lila on my left, and sang that Phil Collins song from the 80’s, “Against All Odds.” People were just sobbing, and I mean the visible people, the people who came out to stand with us and show their support: all of the Kemptons and Arthur and Nick and Evie and Vlad and Vlad’s dad, Bob, who had shown up at the last minute, and about a thousand others. We had found the place from which we were all lit from within, and oh, but we were shining.

Does this story have a happy ending? I guess that depends on what makes you happy. We brought down Dexter-White like a house of cards. Premacore and Ostafoss came off the market within the week. Singsall stayed on. Suits have been filed but I haven’t made myself a part of that. They also say they’re making great strides on a drug that would bring us back again but I won’t be the first person in line to swallow anything from Dexter-White. I am much more interested in what Erica Schultz has to say. She’s leading seminars and has written a best-selling book called
Seeing Me
. It turns out there was a high-profile New York literary agent at the demonstration who had been invisible herself for some time. The minute she started talking to Erica, she saw the potential for a blockbuster. As per the book’s instructions, I am drinking wheatgrass juice, which does taste like my front lawn, and taking vitamin D. I would like to go to an ashram someday but I don’t know when that’s going to be. I’ve been so busy at the paper I hardly have time for anything else. There is a great deal of work for invisible reporters. Jane has made some real progress following Erica’s program. She says on her website that she has entirely visible days. The rest of us have had a few flickers but nothing sustained. Still, we are not unhappy. Lila is the vice principal of the high school, Roberta is working as a nurse. Laura Worthington is actually back on Channel Four as the Invisible Weather Girl and Channel Four’s ratings have gone through the roof.

Here at home, Arthur and I have gotten serious about making more time for each other after everything that’s happened. We were putting aside some money, thinking maybe we could buy a little boat, but then Nick got into law school at Columbia. We both think that Nick is a better investment. Recently I asked Arthur how he would feel if I never came back.

“You haven’t gone anywhere,” he said. “You’re right here.” He went in to kiss me but he wound up hitting my collarbone, so he acted like he meant to kiss my collarbone.

“What if I come back years from now and I’m old and I don’t look anything like you remember me looking?” I think showing up five or ten years from now and aging all at once is a bad idea.

“Clover,” he said, putting a hand on either of my shoulders. “Look at me. Do you see me?”

“I do,” I told him.

“Well, I see you too,” he said. “I see you just fine.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JEANNE RAY
worked as a registered nurse for forty years before she wrote her first novel at the age of sixty. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband and her dog, Red. She is the
New York Times
bestselling author of the novels
Julie and Romeo
,
Julie and Romeo Get Lucky
,
Eat Cake
, and
Step-Ball Change
.