Calling Invisible Women (7 page)

“We rely on visual cues to know when we’re supposed to talk. Now that the visual cues are gone we have to find reasonable substitutions.”

All the voices were running together. Why couldn’t we wear clothes? We could each chip in and pay for the cost of the conference room and wear our clothes. The hotel would take our money, our money wasn’t invisible. If people were wearing clothes I could at least match a voice to a sweater. I felt like I was at my first social mixer at a school for the blind. I was just getting used to the fact that no one could see me—now I couldn’t see anyone else either.

“We used to each carry white roses,” someone said. “What a sentimental debacle that turned out to be.”

“Why?” I asked. Certainly it was a lovelier gesture than the Kleenex.

“Well, for one thing, they were hard to come by, and if too many of us went to the same florist they were likely to get freaked out. Then there was the business of the thorns.”

“And inevitably some little girl would come along and snatch it right out of your hand, even on the street. Little girls are brazen thieves when it comes to unattended flowers.”

“Once a girl walked into our meeting and picked up every single rose like she was some sort of bride or something and they had been put out just for her. She made herself a bouquet and then turned around and left.”

“They never steal Kleenex.”

The voices came at me from every direction and I couldn’t begin to separate them out. It was like standing in the middle of a blizzard and trying to differentiate the snowflakes.

“Ladies,” a voice said, raising itself above the others. “I think it’s time for the meeting to come to order.” But wait! I recognized that voice. It was the one who had been talking about the need for visual cues.

There was a shuffling among the group. Uneaten bits of Danish were dumped into a trash can or quickly eaten. The used plates were stacked, the used coffee cups arranged themselves into the same configuration they had been in to begin with. There were no smears of lipstick against the sides of the heavy china cups, no last few sips sitting coldly in the bottoms. Invisible women left things tidy, they way they had found them. It was as if we hadn’t been there at all.

I went to sit down in a chair and sat instead in the wide naked lap of someone I did not see. My heart nearly stopped at that singular sensation of flesh against flesh. I bolted up. “My God,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“It happens,” the woman said, her voice forgiving. “It takes some time to get this down. Just watch for the Kleenex.”

“I now call the meeting of invisible women to order,” another voice said.

“That’s Jo Ellen. She’s taking her presidency very seriously,” Alice whispered in my ear. How did she know to sit beside me? How did she know that was my ear?

“I’m Jo Ellen, and I’m an invisible woman.”

“Hi, Jo Ellen!” The group chimed.

“We have at least one new member today,” Jo Ellen said. “She’s with Alice. Alice, will you introduce your friend?”

“I’m sure we will be friends but the truth is I just found her in the lobby this morning. She was trying to ask the girl at the desk where the meeting was.”

The group got a good laugh out of this. I was sitting naked among a group of strangers in the Sheraton and they were laughing at me. It was the stuff of grade school nightmares.

“I didn’t even ask you your name,” Alice said. “I’m losing all my social skills. You’re going to have to do your own introduction.”

“Do I stand up?”

“It’s all the same to us,” the woman on the other side of me said, the wearer of contacts. “Whatever makes you comfortable.”

I stayed in my seat and gave my Kleenex a tentative flap. “My name is Clover Hobart, and I’m an invisible woman.”

I heard a sharp, collective inhale go around the room.

“What?” I said.

“We don’t use last names in the meetings.”

“Why not? Alice told me her last name.”

There was a long silence. Silence in a group of invisible women was not a comfortable thing. Had they left? Were they leaving? Should I leave?

“Why
don’t
we use last names?” Alice asked.

“It’s a little strange when you think about it,” someone said on the other side of the circle. “It’s not AA. I don’t care who knows my last name.”

“I’m Lila Robinson,” a voice piped up. “Clover, I had Nick and Evie in my second-grade class at Brookside Elementary.”

“Mrs. Robinson!” I said. The joy! I would have gone and hugged her had I known where she was. Oh, the children loved Mrs. Robinson! We would sing the song on the way to school every morning.
And here’s to you, Mrs. Rob-in-son. Jeee-sus loves you more than you will know. Wo, wo, wo
. How old would Mrs. Robinson be now?

One by one the women went around the room giving their full names and waving their Kleenex, and after each one the rest of us said, “Hi, Alice Trumbull! Hi, Patty Sanchez!” Laura Worthington was there. She had been the weather girl on Channel Four a dozen years ago. She was willowy and blond with graceful hands that framed the cartoon images of smiling suns and angry clouds on the weather map. Everyone always said how much she looked like Vanna White.

“Well, now that we know who everybody is and no one has any anonymity anymore, do you suppose we can proceed with the meeting?” Jo Ellen asked.

A Kleenex went up on the other side of the circle. “Patty Sanchez. For the record, I have about as much anonymity as I can bear right now. And I love that Laura Worthington is in our group.”

“For more than a year now,” Laura said.

Together we made a small sound of wonder.

“Who’d like to tell their story today?” Jo Ellen said.

All the Kleenex stayed down for a while and then finally one gave a small flutter not too far from the seat of the chair. “Go ahead,” Jo Ellen said.

“It’s Lila Robinson again,” Mrs. Robinson said.

“Hi, Lila.”

“I have to say, having Clover here today has got me feeling a little emotional. Don’t misunderstand me,” she said quickly. “I’m glad you came. Sorry for you, of course, but glad to have somebody here I know from before. I had both of Clover’s children in my class. They were very good children, lots of energy. Your Evie would have turned cartwheels all day long if I’d let her. Did she keep up with her gymnastics?”

“She’s a cheerleader at Ohio State,” I said. Something in me began to unclench the slightest bit.

“It makes me think about all the wonderful students I had,” Mrs. Robinson said, the emotion coming up in her voice. “I was with the school system for almost thirty years but when I became invisible, bang, that was it. They were done with me. I think we could do with a few more invisible teachers, especially in the upper grades. Even if they couldn’t use us in the classrooms teaching regular classes, we could still be hall monitors or test proctors. If you ask me there would be a lot less bullying if we had invisible teachers. But no, I wasn’t normal. They thought I might upset the children. I told them I could come in naked, the children wouldn’t even know I was there, but then they said I could be violating their civil liberties.”

“Because of the nakedness or the fact they wouldn’t know you were there?” someone snapped. Maybe it was Patty Sanchez. I wasn’t positive.

“What about
your
civil liberties?” Laura Worthington said. Her voice I knew.
Be looking for sunshine around the middle of the week
.

“We aren’t even covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act.” There was a low tide of grumbling in the room.

“No one is interested in us,” Mrs. Robinson said. “When I look back on my life, I was invisible for so many years before I became invisible. I never did stand up for myself. If you don’t stand up before you become invisible, what chance do you have of making people pay attention to you when you aren’t there?”

“Amen to that,” a voice said.

We all had something to say now, all the Kleenex were up and people had started talking over one another. Jo Ellen raised her voice for order when all of a sudden the door to the Magnolia Room opened and a young Filipino woman pushing a cart came into the room. Instantly, we fell into a perfect silence, all of the Kleenex fluttering to the floor. Were we busted? I followed suit and dropped my tissue. The young woman stood in the door for a long time, her large, dark eyes sweeping the room from side to side. Finally she guided her cart over to the refreshment table. Like us, she made absolutely no sound. She was a tiny thing. The beige polyester uniform she wore was no doubt the smallest one they made and it was two sizes too big for her. She looked at the cups and the plates and, deciding they were actually dirty, loaded them onto her cart along with the coffee urn. She took a small bite off the edge of a cherry Danish and then picked up the tray. There she saw the twenty-dollar bill that someone in the group had left for her. After checking the door over her shoulder to make sure it wasn’t a test, she plucked the money up and put it in the pocket of her uniform. She then went around the circle and picked up all the Kleenex off the carpet one by one before pushing her cart back out of the room. After a few minutes of waiting, someone finally got up and shut the door behind her.

“At least she didn’t stack the chairs,” someone said.

“Or vacuum.”

Once we were alone again it felt as if some of our energy had left us. We were all thinking the same thing—that none of us was quite as invisible as that girl.

“Lila?” Jo Ellen said.

Mrs. Robinson sighed. “No, nothing else.”

“But wait,” I said, confused by what seemed to me to be a key point. “This is Clover again. There are people out there who know that we’re invisible? I mean, it isn’t a secret?”

“Absolutely not. The only time it’s a secret is when we make it a secret out of shame or fear of rejection,” a voice said, sounding like she was reading off part of the invisible women manifesto. “Plenty of people know we’re there and they just continue to ignore us. They say we make them uncomfortable. They say they don’t know how to deal with us. We don’t fit in the system. Nobody talks about us.”

We sat in silence with that one for a good long time. We were gone and no one missed us and none of us knew what to say.

“Next order of business,” Jo Ellen said finally, trying to steer the meeting away from the topic, which had caused a good bit of sniffling in the circle. “Rosemary, do you have a medical report?”

Rosemary cleared her throat to pull herself together. “I’ve been calling Dexter-White every day. I actually got through to a senior chemist on Thursday, a total fluke. He agreed to meet me next week in the shampoo section of the Cheltenham Target at noon.”

The group made a collective sound that was somewhere between hopefulness and pleasure, half
ooohhh
and half
aaahhh
. Only Rosemary was unimpressed by the news. “We’ll see if he shows,” she said.

“Dexter-White the pharmaceutical company?” I asked. “In Philadelphia?”

“One and the same,” Rosemary said.

“What do they have to do with this?”

“Everything in the world,” Alice said. “Assuming you’re taking Premacore hormone replacement therapy, and Ostafoss calcium supplement, and Singsall antidepressant, all Dexter-White drugs.”

“It’s that exact combination for all of us,” Rosemary said.

“Plus we’ve all tried Botox at least once, but we don’t know if that has anything to do with it.”

I had done this to myself? Someone had done this to me? Someone knew this was happening and still continued to do it to other women? “I’m assuming—”

“We’ve all stopped taking the pills,” Jo Ellen said. “We’re invisible, not stupid.”

“It’s a perfectly reasonable question,” Mrs. Robinson said in my defense. “You don’t need to be short.”

“I’ve been looking at maps of Philadelphia,” Rosemary said. “I think I’ve figured out how to get from the airport to the Target using public transportation.”

“Couldn’t you just take a taxi?” I asked. “Wear a coat and a hat. You can get a cab.”

“True,” Laura Worthington said. “But then you can’t get on the plane.”

“Anyway, I’d like someone to come with me, preferably someone with medical connections who knows how to ask questions.”

The room fell quiet. No one seemed interested in flying to Philly. I had a husband and a brother who were doctors, and, even though it seemed like an impossibly long time ago, I had once been a reporter. “I’ll do it,” I said finally.

“Up and back in a day,” Rosemary said, her voice sounding both happy and relieved. “No one’s even going to notice you’re missing.”

five

W
hen Gilda opened her door the next morning she looked down at Red. “When did you learn how to ring the bell?” she said.

“I picked him up so he could push it with his paw,” I said.

Gilda put her hand to her heart and for an instant closed her eyes. “You scared me to death.” She looked to the left and then to the right. “Where are you?”

“I’m right in front of you,” I said. The air was laced with decorative snow, tiny flakes being blown from side to side with no intention of sticking.

“Then why can’t I see you?”

“Jeeze, Gilda, it’s not like anything has changed. You know why you can’t see me.” I came in the house and Red followed behind, but Gilda stood stock-still in the middle of her entry hall, her hands spread out to either side.

“I don’t understand what’s going on,” she said. “Are you in the house? Did you find some invisible clothes?”

“I’m not wearing clothes.”

Gilda looked down at Red as if he were the one who was spreading rumors. “That isn’t possible.”

“It is, actually. I’m naked. I thought I would hate it but really, it feels kind of great.” I touched her hand so she would know where I was and she yelped.

“It’s freezing outside!”

“I know, but it doesn’t bother me. It turns out I’ve got the invisible thermostat. All the women have it. We don’t get cold and we don’t get hot. It’s sort of the reward for everything else.”

“All what women?”

“That’s what I came over to tell you. I went to a meeting of invisible women at the Sheraton yesterday.” I passed by her and went into the kitchen to fill the kettle. “There were a dozen women there. Alice thinks there could be more who come and just don’t say anything at first. They call them the wallflowers.”