Calling Invisible Women (3 page)

“I did,” I said. I was looking at my hands, first the palm side and then the back. Still here.

“Any problems?”

I turned my face toward the stairs. I was going to say no, none at all, but he was already gone.

•   •   •

I had studied journalism and literature while Arthur was in medical school. I got that lousy job kids get at newspapers when I first started out, covering the city council meetings and the police desk from midnight to six a.m. But I was a reporter at heart and I always found something to report on. The great payola scandal in the state house of representatives? That was my story. I chased down labor bosses. I made myself a little name. After the kids were born I moved over to the arts section because the arts just seemed safer, and later I was editor of the book review section, because back then such things existed even in Ohio. For a long time I was very busy, reading and writing and assigning and editing and raising Nick and Evie. Arthur was building a practice and there were nights he got home before I did and he made dinner and left it warming in the oven for me, though even as I write that sentence I can scarcely believe it was true. It was right around that time that everything began to unspool and my whole career was played out in reverse. The Internet, that voracious weed, started to put the squeeze on us. The paper lost advertisers, the paper got smaller, the book review section became two pages, which became the occasional book review that I still write. By then no one thought I could be a reporter again, not even me. News could go to the arts but the arts never came back to news. I felt lucky to get the gardening column two days a week, especially because for the most part I was making it up as I went along. For every hour that was taken out of my job, another hour was added onto Arthur’s. Maybe we were lucky. We had two kids, we needed the money. It was good that his practice was booming. With my newfound free time I drove the kids to soccer practice and ran the coat drive for the homeless and made better dinners, which would, over time, become worse dinners. It all worked out. It just didn’t work out the way I thought it was going to.

I waited for a long time after the shower stopped running for Arthur to come back downstairs. When I finally went up I found him asleep on top of the bedspread wearing my toweling robe. His must have been in the wash. I got a blanket out of the closet and covered him up. I never even considered waking him to tell him what had happened. He was exhausted, he needed to sleep. It was a decision I later came to regret. By the next morning I was gone.

two

I
think I knew it as soon as I woke up, maybe even in the moment before I opened my eyes. It could have been that I was dreaming I was invisible, people bumping into me at a cocktail party, stepping on my toes. When I stuck my hand out from underneath the covers and saw nothing I hardly even felt surprised. If anything I was vindicated. It wasn’t my imagination! Looking down, I could see the shape of myself beneath the blankets. It was just a shorter version of the shape that Arthur made beside me, the only difference being that there was a head on Arthur’s pillow. At the foot of the bed Red made a neat ball between us. It wasn’t that I had been reduced to nothing exactly, had that been the case the bed would have appeared to contain only a man and a dog, it’s that I had been reduced to something mystifyingly clear—definite substance and no form. I thought about waking up Arthur but considering yesterday’s debacle with Nick I decided to just wait until I came back. After I was visible again I’d figure out what was going on.

And so I waited, my invisible arms behind my invisible head. Of course, I didn’t know exactly when I’d vanished yesterday. Could it have been in the shower? Was it possible that I could have washed my hair without realizing I was gone? And then something else occurred to me, something darker and more unsettling: what if yesterday wasn’t the first time? What if I had been flickering in and out for a while now—in my sleep or in the car or in the kitchen chopping vegetables? It had been years since I’d really kept an eye on myself. Could I be positive how long this had been going on?

My need to look in the mirror was becoming overwhelming. As quietly as possible, I rolled out of bed and stepped into my slippers. My nightgown came down well past my knees with sleeves past my elbows, and even though there was nothing sexy about it, it had a pretty scoop neckline and was soft from years of washing. It had once been pink but now was more a color that called pink to mind. I stood in front of the mirror on the back of the closet door and looked at the nightgown floating there, the slippers standing empty. I tried to remain calm. I would come back. It was only a matter of waiting it out.

“You’re up early,” Arthur said in a sleepy voice.

I jumped. The nightgown jumped. And then I turned around.
For better or for worse
, I thought.
In sickness and in health
. “Arthur?”

“I fell asleep on you last night,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I got out of the shower and thought I could lie down for one minute. I used to be able to do that when I was an intern. Remember the one-minute nap?” He sighed, stretched. “I’m not the man I used to be, Clover.” He patted the bedspread beside him and Red wiggled up and rolled over on his back, presenting his tummy. “I’m a dog,” Arthur said, giving Red a vigorous scratch. “We’re both dogs, aren’t we, Red?”

“Hey,” I said, not thinking there was any need to state the obvious.

“That reminds me.” He closed his eyes and pressed a palm to his forehead. “There’s a group meeting tonight and the drug reps are bringing in dinner so count me as covered.”

“What reminds you?”

“What?”

“You said ‘that reminds me.’ ”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Nothing reminded me. I’m just free associating. It’s so nice to just have a minute to talk. Did I tell you Missy Tate came in with her baby yesterday as a new patient? Missy was one of my first patients. She was two years old when her parents brought her in. She had been one of Jack Aldo’s patients when he retired. You remember Jack Aldo, I got a lot of his practice. Anyway, the prettiest little girl. As soon as she walked in the door I knew who she was, and she had her baby who looked just like her. God, tell me that didn’t make me feel like I was one hundred and ten.”

“You knew her on sight,” I said. “Pretty amazing.” Here’s an interesting fact: I was neither warm nor cold. Invisibility seemed to exist at a perfectly controlled temperature. I smoothed down the front of my nightgown with my hands. I cleared my throat.

“Could you do me a huge favor?” Arthur asked. He was sitting halfway up in bed now, still wearing my robe. It would appear he was looking right at me but who’s to say? He didn’t have his glasses on and the room was not especially light.

“Name it.” What if I wasn’t gone, or I was only gone to myself? That would mean that this was insanity. Insanity being two rungs below invisibility on the ladder of diseases I wished to be suffering from.

“Would you make me a big breakfast? Eggs and bacon, the works? I’m starving.”

“You didn’t have dinner.”

“Right.” He cocked a finger at me. “I didn’t have dinner and I probably won’t have lunch today and who knows what the drug reps will bring for dinner, so this is my best bet for a meal today.” Then he got out of bed, and coming right toward me, he patted the small of my back and went into the bathroom. “You’re the best,” Arthur said, and then he closed the door behind him.

It turns out I was not invisible after all. That left partial blindness and mental illness. I made the bed and got dressed—jeans and a sweater and socks and shoes. I pulled out a hat and scarf and gloves to walk Red. Maybe I didn’t need them but I put them on anyway. Once I was dressed I looked remarkably like myself, an absent version of myself but it was better than nothing, which is what I had started with. Red followed me out to get the paper and down to the end of the block and back. I saw no one and no one saw me. Back in the kitchen I took off the hat and gloves because if this was mental illness, wearing a hat and gloves to make breakfast would look even crazier. I found the end of a goat cheese log in the refrigerator, the last decent tomato, some basil. I got out the bacon and the bread. The whole time I was thinking, I may be out of my mind but at least I can still make a nice breakfast. I poured out juice and coffee. I put a little pitcher of milk beside the cup, an unnecessarily attentive flourish. The bacon was spattering away in the pan, the eggs firmed up nicely. Cue the husband, handsome in his suit, walking into the kitchen, a tie in each hand.

“Which one?” he asked.

“The blue whales.” Arthur’s taste in ties ran toward the whimsical. The knife worked up and down, seemingly by itself, over the tender skin of the tomato and then across the basil, making a chiffonade.

Arthur sat down and folded the arts section to the crossword puzzle. I had put a pencil next to his fork. I had thought of everything. “What a lucky guy I am,” he said when I set down the plate, but he wasn’t looking at the plate, or the absence of the hand that left it on the place mat. He was looking at the paper. Red was looking up at Arthur, mesmerized by the smell of bacon.

“What are we going to do about Nick?” Arthur said absently, the folded puzzle in one hand, fork in the other.

What are we going to do about Nick?
For the first time I realized that it wasn’t a question. It was a conversational filler, like asking what the weather was going to do. It was the thing we said to each other when there wasn’t anything to say. “Another piece of toast?” I answered by way of experiment.

Arthur looked at his watch and in response took a long, fast drink of coffee. “No, no. I’ve got patients starting at seven thirty. I have to go. It was a great breakfast.” He stopped then, checked the paper one more time. “What’s that Melville novel? The short one?”

“Omoo,”
I said. It seemed like it was in the puzzle once a week. He never remembered it.

He bit off half a piece of bacon and gave the other half to Red, then he wrote in the answer. “You’re a genius,” he said. “By the way, I left that suit on the floor in the closet, the one the kid threw up on. If you’re out today—”

“Right to the dry cleaners.”

That was when my husband blew a kiss in my direction and was out the door.

The toast was gone, the bacon, the coffee, the juice, but that perfect little goat cheese omelet sat on the plate untouched. I picked up Arthur’s fork and took a bite. For a minute I thought about running out to the garage and telling him to come back. It was that good. It was also wasted on me because I really didn’t have much of an appetite. I took a couple of bites and pushed the plate away.

After I cleaned up the kitchen, I put the hat and gloves back on and took Red over to Gilda’s. She had a glass front door, which was something I could never figure out, and she waved to me as she walked across her front hallway and I waved back to her. Red started barking like crazy, hopping up and down. Red was nuts about Gilda.

I pulled off my gloves and hat when she opened the door. Red shot in like a bullet and started jumping all over her. Suddenly I felt like crying. “You were right,” I said. “I’ve lost my mind.”

Gilda crouched down to rub the dog and when she looked up to ask me what I was talking about all of the color drained from her face. She covered her mouth with her hands.

“What?” I said. Honestly for a second I wasn’t putting it all together. It had been a very confusing morning.

“What do you mean,
what?
I can’t see you.”

I held out my hands in front of me and my hands weren’t there and all of a sudden it hit me—I had in fact disappeared and my husband had failed to notice. “I thought I was crazy!” I sat down next to her in the front hall and put my head between my knees. I felt like I was going to faint. I wondered what it meant to have low blood pressure when you didn’t have any blood.

“Didn’t you notice?” Gilda’s voice was shrill. She wasn’t screaming exactly but her tone was piercing.

“I was sure that Arthur saw me. I kept trying to talk to him about it but he didn’t seem to think anything was wrong. I woke Nick up yesterday and asked him if I was invisible and he acted like I was a complete idiot because by then I wasn’t invisible, except maybe I was still invisible and he just didn’t notice.” Now I had started to cry. I could feel the big wet tears running down my face. I could see them hitting my pants and making dark spots. “I didn’t want to go through all that with Arthur. I mean, you’d say something if you noticed your wife wasn’t there but she was still talking to you, wouldn’t you?”

“Clovie, this is serious.” She leaned forward and with one tentative finger pulled down the front of my sweater. “You’re completely gone.”

“He didn’t notice!” A pure grief washed through me. It was bigger than the problem at hand.

“Do you need a Kleenex? I can’t tell.”

A fresh sob burst forward and I nodded my head.

“Can I get you some Kleenex?” she said.

Head nodding was out. I tried to catch my breath. “Please,” I said.

Gilda scrambled to her feet and Red made his way into my lap. I ran my invisible hand over his head and down his back, watching as his fur flattened out and then sprung up again. It was hypnotic, really, the mechanics of petting.

“Were you invisible when he came home last night?” Gilda put the Kleenex box on the floor in front of me and sat down, though not too close.

I took a tissue and dried my eyes, blew my nose. I was certainly generating fluid. “I have to think. Everything is jumbled in my head now.” Arthur was late. Arthur was coming in the door. “No, I was still here last night. He was completely exhausted. He fell asleep before dinner.”

“Are you
sure
you were there?”

I nodded, then checked myself. “I think I’m sure, not that it makes any difference.”

“It does make a difference. You’re going to have to tell someone. You at least have to go to the doctor. Clearly there is something very wrong with you.”