Invisible Ellen (2 page)

The possibility of this was a revelation with the impact of a small, localized explosion in Ellen that cracked open a thin fault line of panic. Maybe she had wished for the wrong thing, and a thought struck her.
Maybe it's better not to see than to be unseen.
A strange jealousy gripped Ellen; cold green fingers slid across her rib cage and squeezed on her stomach. She could feel ragged fingernails piercing the well-developed organ.

Ellen checked her watch. As usual, she was an hour early for work, a precaution that allowed her to review the assignment list and get started before the rest of the crew was still stumbling into the locker room. There were easily forty-five minutes to spare if she
chose to get off the bus two stops early; why shouldn't she? Suddenly overcome with a need to know more about this unique person seated next to her, Ellen blew the dust off her guts and cleared her throat.

“Next stop, Grant,” she said.

The girl tilted her tangerine topper to one side, causing it to flop like a day-old daisy. “Yeah, that's what I thought. Thanks.”

Ellen hoped her reluctant grunt would suffice as an answer.

The girl put away her book and stood up in preparation for disembarking, keeping a firm hold on the back of the seat in front of her. “Have a nice day,” she said.

Turning to look out at the dusky gloom and strangely reluctant for the girl to leave, Ellen risked a connection. “Uh. It's pretty much night.”

The girl slung her satchel over one shoulder and gripped her stick. She angled toward Ellen again, and leaned down.

“It's all midnight to me, baby.” The laugh came again, so powerful that it triggered an aftershock in Ellen that levered open the fissure in her protective shield a few millimeters wider.

The stick tapped its way down the aisle, the air brakes hissed their discontent, and, as the Day-Glo cap bobbed out of sight, Ellen felt as though something had been stolen from her. Without thinking, she jumped up to follow the girl and, in her haste to make the door, her oversized bag smacked the newspaper of the bastard hogging the handicapped seats, ripping it in half. “What the f—?” he exclaimed, but Ellen was already off the bus, the closing doors almost catching her billowing black tent of a shirt.

The crowd was a mass of gray and brown as twilight stole the color from all lesser pigment, but the intriguing stranger's fluorescent hat bobbed above the muted waves of commuters like a beacon. As Ellen hurried to catch up with it, something else snagged the
corner of her eye. Two men had peeled themselves from a doorway and started after the girl with the steady focus of predators. In their dirty jeans and baseball caps, they stood out in the upscale midtown neighborhood that was mostly peopled with men and women in business suits or parents in Lycra yoga pants and matching tops, jogging in place behind three-wheeled strollers as they checked their pulses against their expensive watches. With a nasty jolt, Ellen realized that she wasn't the only one interested in the blind girl and this struck her as grossly unfair. She'd been following her first and she didn't want to share. She hitched up her fanny pack and went on.

After three blocks, the girl turned off into a narrow alley, the two men followed, and bringing up the rear was an increasingly determined Ellen, who by now was thinking of the girl as her story and the two men as interlopers. This dead-end access to the surrounding buildings had no other foot traffic and ended in a brick wall with a large dumpster pushed against it. It was clean and lit by a bright streetlamp. On either side of the alleyway, several large metal doors interrupted the patterned brickwork of high walls. The girl pulled a set of keys from her pocket as she tapped along. The men glanced back, surveying the busy avenue they had just left. Neither of them registered Ellen, hugging the brick a few feet from the corner, their eyes fixing instead on a cop car sitting stopped at a light. The traffic began to move along the main avenue, and the alley was once again hidden from the prying eyes of the city's finest.

The men returned their predatory attention back to the girl, and Ellen started cautiously down the alley after them. It was as though the window she usually only looked through had opened and she were venturing inside instead of watching from out. The tingly feeling was alien to her, uncomfortable certainly, but not entirely unpleasant.

All at once, the men stepped up their pace and the girl paused, tilting her head to listen, and then she hurried forward. As the men overtook her, she spun, clutching the strap of her bag. Ellen saw the flash of a knife and felt a physical pain in her chest as she gulped in a sharp, silent, terrified breath. In the next second the knife swiped neatly and the girl cried out and cowered, then straightened. She was left intact, but holding nothing but the strap of her bag, now dangling useless. As the men raced back toward the avenue with her satchel, she recovered and screamed after them. “Pathetic bastards!!” she railed furiously. “Police! Police!” she shouted, the words echoing even as they were repeated.

Ellen shrunk against the alley wall, stained the same soot color as the faded black of her clothes, her heart racing. The men sprinted toward her, their eyes fixed on the avenue and escape, only a few paces away. As they came level with Ellen, some limp emotion in her suddenly stiffened. Without planning it, she thrust a foot out into the path of the thief nearest to her. He went down hard, letting go of the stolen bag to catch himself, his hands slapping smartly on the rough cement of the sidewalk and scraping off layers of skin as he slid. Obviously unfamiliar with the buddy system, his accomplice did not pause, but rounded the corner and disappeared like a rat from an attic light.

The satchel was lying on the cement. Ellen darted out and grabbed it up while the thwarted purse snatcher was shaking his head and desperately gasping for the air that had been punched from his lungs. Gulping like a goldfish whose misguided leap for freedom had ended in a rude whack on the kitchen linoleum, he stared around, clearly stunned by both the fall and its cause. Moving behind him, Ellen stomped down hard on the instep of the man's sneaker and he wheezed a yelp—a choking, airless expression of pain.

“Beat it, asshole,” Ellen screamed, her voice so rusty with disuse at that volume that the words came out in a low, throaty rasp. The asshole struggled to his feet, holding his scraped and bleeding palms out in front of him, and ran off without looking back.

Clenching the satchel to her hammering chest, Ellen collapsed against the rough bricks. Her whole body was shaking so violently from the unexpected confrontation that she worried she might disintegrate.

It took a full minute before she could hear anything except the panicked thumping of her heart, and when she could, she realized that outside her head it was oddly quiet. The girl had stopped shouting for the police and was standing still, listening.

“Hello?” the girl called out tentatively. “Who's there?”

“It's okay,” Ellen gasped. “It's me, the lady . . . from the bus. I . . .” She sucked a huge lungful of air and tried to direct the oxygen to the sharp pain in her thudding chest. “. . . have your bag.”

There was a moment of silence—then the girl said, “Really?” She sounded dubious.

Ellen couldn't imagine anything more “really” than what had just happened, but she couldn't be annoyed. She was having trouble believing it herself. “Yeah . . . really,” she said.

“Sweet.” The click of the cane brought the girl the few yards back up the alleyway. She stopped just in front of Ellen, who was, no doubt, easy to locate due to the fact that she was panting like a Saint Bernard on an August afternoon. “Are you all right?” the girl asked.

“I . . . think . . . so.”

“What happened? I heard him go down.”

“Um . . .” Ellen shuffled her feet uncomfortably and said, “I tripped him.”

“Nice. I hope he scraped his face off. Thanks. I'm Temerity.” She held out one hand, only slightly off course.

Confused by the gesture, Ellen realized she was still hugging the satchel and thrust it at the hand. Temerity took it, tucked it under her left arm and then extended her right hand again. “And you are?” she asked pointedly.

“Uh, Ellen,” Ellen said. She took the hand between her thumb and fingertips and gave it an awkward shake. From the point of uncommon contact, she felt a creeping sensation spread across the skin of her wrist and up her forearm, as though a swarm of ants was following a parade route over her shoulder and across her back.

“Well, Ellen, can I buy you a cup of coffee or a beer or something to thank you?”

“No,” Ellen blurted in horror, and then fumbled, “I mean, I have to go to work. I work nights.”

“Where?”

“Costco.”

“I didn't know they were open nights, not that it makes any difference to me.”

“They're not, I clean.”

“You clean,” she repeated. “Do you eat?”

Ellen glanced down at her lumpy, overstuffed body. The prolonged conversation was making her increasingly anxious, and hollow. She needed food to stabilize herself. “Sure, sometimes.”

“So, that's good.” Temerity felt along the side of the strapless satchel until she located a small zippered pocket. Taking out a card, she ran her fingers over the raised lettering, then held it out. “Here's my number. I want you to call me tomorrow and I really want to take
you to dinner, or breakfast, or whatever works for you. Like I said, it's all midnight to me.”

In spite of the million-ant march advancing across her skin, Ellen gawked at Temerity in awe. “You eat at restaurants?” she asked.

Temerity's pretty face scrunched up into a sarcastic scowl. “No, I eat at libraries and furniture outlets. Of course I eat at restaurants, don't you?”

Ellen wasn't sure what to say. She wanted to know more about this woman, but the thought of making an actual social engagement spurred the anxiety ants into a fit of competitive flamenco dancing in miniature golf cleats. Uncertain of how to respond, she just said, “No, but, I mean, aren't you afraid that you'll, uh . . .” Her nerve failed her.

The head cocked to one side. “Make a spectacle of myself? Miss my mouth? Stab myself with a fork? Eat the toothpick? You don't have to be blind to make a complete fool of yourself, and anyway, who cares?” Temerity threw her arms out and spoke the last words so loudly that they echoed against the walls.

“I don't go to restaurants.” Ellen felt ashamed to say it out loud.

Temerity let out an exaggerated sigh. “In that case, I can truthfully tell you the only thing you're really missing out on is the onion blossom at Judy's. So yummy, and impossible to make at home without a grease fire. Fine. Call me, I live here”—she pointed up—“we can talk about your dietary peculiarities then. If you'd rather, you can come over and I'll cook at home. How about that?”

“Maybe,” Ellen said, anxious to get away now. “I gotta go.”

Turning, Ellen fled from the first human who had offered her anything in almost six years. And who, ironically perhaps, saw her because she couldn't.

A
s she rushed back into the flow of humanity on the busy avenue, Ellen's stomach churned and growled. Feeling exposed and faint, she stood turning in place, trying to get her bearings and find something familiar. She spotted a hot dog cart parked in the pool of a streetlamp's light. To the hollow, burning shakiness inside her, it shone forth like the aura of a holy relic.

The vendor was engrossed in conversation with another man who slouched next to him, shrouded in the fog of his own cigarette smoke. The language they spoke was foreign, rapid, and weighted down with dense consonants.

Approaching warily, almost against her will, Ellen watched them. Neither noticed her, of course. But the gnawing need for comfort and some speck of residual courage prompted Ellen to use her voice.

Ellen moistened her lips. “One hot dog, please,” she said.

The vendor neither glanced up nor interrupted the jumbled flow of his narrative as he produced a bun, slapped on the gleaming pink sausage and set it on the cart's stainless steel top. Without breaking stride, the man interjected the words “Three dollars” into his dissertation in the unidentified language—maybe it was Klingon, Ellen thought.

Ellen pulled the money out of her bag, laid it on the cart and hurried away, drenched in a sweat of relief that her voice had not summoned scrutiny. The first bite of the yielding, doughy bun absorbed the bitterness of fear from her taste buds, and the lusciously salty meat massaged her tongue. She swallowed, feeling the solid smoothness coat her stomach, and the heat began to ease. Four more bites finished the dog, but she felt only partly sated. Though she would have liked a second and maybe a third, the exchange with the vendor had required taking a risk, exacted a toll, and she'd been lucky to walk away unnoticed, so she didn't dare another. The possibility of being mocked or insulted in that rasping language required more fortitude than she could muster, ever. She reassured herself with the thought that soon enough she would be at work, the megasource for her dietary staples: processed snack foods. Turning, she headed back to the bus stop and caught the next number 12 bus after a short wait.

But this time Ellen found herself unable to perceive the other commuters with her usual emotional detachment, reducing them to illustrations in her personal comic book. She still studied them. A man in a suit was tapping his fingers nervously, a small hopeful smile playing across his mouth, and Ellen found herself wondering why he was smiling. Was he hoping something at work would get him noticed? Was he on his way to meet someone? A frightened-looking woman across from him, who constantly checked her silent cell phone, might have a child who was late coming home. Ellen was unclear on why these new, intrusive thoughts nagged at and unsettled her, but she did not like them. Ellen had always thought of the vignettes she loved to witness as her personal Polaroids, snapshots for a scrapbook without backstory or consequence. Return without investment.

Before the adrenaline surging through her body had a chance to release her from its barbed-wire grip, she reached her stop. She disembarked and headed across a parking lot the size of Rhode Island, then around the side of the giant block of a building. It was a quarter-mile hike that brought her, sweaty and gasping, to the loading docks. As usual, a massive semi was disgorging its contents and it was easy to slip up the access ramp, slink past the dockworkers, through the incessant
beep-beep
of the forklifts, and into the break room.

Two hairy men in jumpsuits sat at a table, drinking sodas and eating MoonPies, a treat that made Ellen's mouth water. Standing over them was a dark-skinned man in a cheap suit. His thinning hair was combed across the top of his head. This was Ellen's immediate supervisor, the night shift manager known as “the Boss.” The title was an affectation he insisted his employees use to address him, something that thankfully Ellen, hired before his transfer to their store, had been able to avoid for four years. The three men glanced up as the door opened, blinked twice, then turned back to their conversation. The Boss was recounting a sexual conquest so lurid in detail that it would have earned him a slap from a hooker. As she passed them, Ellen heard the phrase “banged that bearded clam.” Containing the sneering laughs of the men and the ugly pictures the phrase had summoned in her mind by mentally backing the images into a heavy metal cage with a bullwhip, she slipped through the door to the ladies' locker room, a square affair with a block of lockers in the center and benches along the walls around them on three sides. The fourth wall opened onto a restroom and a shower area.

Ellen went to her locker, dumped in her bag, took out the apron and rubber gloves that she kept there for her personal use, and then sat waiting for the men outside to disperse. The door swung open again, letting wisps of obscenity and laughter slip into the
locker room along with a young Russian woman named Irena. The recent and perpetually terrified immigrant scuttled away from the lewd catcalls behind her, keeping her eyes down, and hurriedly gathered her things. She pulled out a battered CD player that she always carried and stuck the frayed earbuds into her ears. Ellen didn't understand why. She assumed that the music was one way to block out the world, and she could certainly understand Irena's desire to do exactly that, but for a frightened woman to not be able to hear what was going on around her seemed like an ill-advised choice. Yet when Irena opened the locker room door and was forced to pass back by the offensive trio, Ellen couldn't argue with the logic of canceling out their coarse commentary, though Irena still moved with the fearful slinking of a creature desperate to evade becoming lunch.

The men had vacated the break room when Ellen went back through. They had left their wrappers and cans on the table under a sign reading
CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELF!
She went down a long, L-shaped hallway to get a cart and gather cleaning supplies from the supply room. Turning the corner onto the last leg of the hall, she found herself in an eerie semidarkness. The nasty overhead fluorescent lights were sputtering through their last death throes, and the resulting feeble flicker was barely sufficient to illuminate the short section of the corridor.

The harsh, acidic tang of ammonia and pine cleaners stored inside the supply room had given Ellen the habit of opening the door reluctantly, as though if she snuck up on it, the smell wouldn't be so abrasive. She eased open the door and felt for the switch.

From deep in the gloom, beyond the stacked metal shelving of toilet paper, scrub brushes, and floor cleaners, she heard whispered voices, one aggressively male, and the other female, pleading and afraid. Ellen held still and listened.

Keeping a hand on the door so that it closed silently behind her, Ellen moved into the darkness. She recognized the smarmy, innuendo-filled male voice, the kind of voice that never missed an opportunity to turn any comment into a sexual reference. It was the Boss.

“Come on, you know you like it,” the Boss was saying in his creepy whine. “You want to keep your job, don't you? I know you have a baby and you're not really married. I could get you better hours. Just make me happy—nothing you haven't done before.” The Russian accent tinting the young woman's plea to be released told Ellen that the voice belonged to Irena. No doubt the horny Boss had been able to sneak up on her because of the ever-present earbuds.

“Are you even legal?” the Boss asked, a cruel tinge to his voice. “I'd hate to see things get difficult for you. Everybody needs friends in high places.” Ellen heard the sound of a zipper and then a sharp cry and a small scuffle. “Come on, I can be your friend.”

Before tonight, Ellen would have blended in with the plaster and recorded the scenario with a nagging yet distant sensation of indignation, but now she thought of the satisfying slap of the bag snatcher's palms on the cement and she craved more of the same. Muted outrage and personal distaste for the greasy Boss welled up in Ellen, and she decided to disrupt this current attempt to misuse his puny authority, this abuse that was only one on a long list of his offenses that ended in Ellen's mind with three dots, as she'd seen in books when it meant the list went on and on. She backtracked to the door, grasped the handle, and threw it open as though she were just entering, letting it slam into the wall with a crash. She switched on the light and started rummaging through the cleansers closest to the door, on the bottom shelf, stooping down behind one of the carts. In a few seconds she heard the sound of a muffled sob and Irena's feet
rushing past her out the door and then the slower, heavier tread of the Boss. Ellen could see his dark, scuffed lace-up shoes between the wheels of the cart as he came around the shelving. They paused, then turned away, and the door opened and closed. Ellen straightened up. Good, now she could get to work.

Wheeling the cart into the hallway, she spotted Irena coming back for her own cart, her startled face streaked with tears. Her eyes glued to the floor as she scurried past, a frightened mouse in a gray jumpsuit, scrambling for cover. There was no sign of the Boss, or the earbuds.

Wishing she had seen his face when he was deprived of his toy, Ellen moved on, working her way to the snack-food section to replenish her dwindling home stock.

Often, it was as easy as finding the packets that had been torn open, partially devoured and then stuffed behind other items on the shelves by shoppers who regarded the store's goods as a complimentary all-you-can-eat buffet. This smorgasbord without a waitress happened far more frequently than Ellen would have thought possible in a crowded store. Though the official policy of Costco was that any opened packages should be discarded, and this was partially to discourage the employees from damaging packages themselves, most of the managers overlooked their minimum-wage coworkers taking home the unsellable remains. Tonight's finds included a full box of Oreos—all that was left of a three-package value pack—and a torn-open assortment of individually wrapped Fruit Roll-Ups. Both nice, but Ellen knew she would want salty before sweet. The easiest thing to pilfer was chips. Ostensibly reorganizing the three-pound sacks of ranch-flavored Doritos, Ellen took a small trash bag from a pack on her cart.

As she snapped the white plastic in the air to open it fully, she glanced at the security camera mounted on the wall about fifteen feet up. There were exactly twenty-seven of these cameras placed around the store, and Ellen had memorized their locations. That and a few surreptitious trips past the glassed-in security booth, which housed the monitors, had helped Ellen identify precisely what was revealed by these watchful electronic eyes, and, more important, what they missed. Making sure that her cart was blocking the chip bag from the lens, Ellen produced a box cutter that she kept in her fanny pack, made a slit down the back seam of the chips bag, shook about a fourth of the product into the clean bag, knotted it loosely and placed it on top of her cart. Then, using a roll of clear packing tape, she closed the seam of the Doritos bag and repositioned it. It looked much like the others. With a self-satisfied grunt, Ellen read the words “Contents may have settled during shipping.”

When her shift was over, Ellen would punch her time card and then spend an extra hour cleaning—off the clock. It was her way of paying for the items she took home. She knew they would never be missed, but she was a barterer, not a thief.

During break, Ellen went to a stall in the ladies' room, taking with her a liter of orange soda and a family pack of Xtra Cheddar Goldfish snacks. She was munching the last broken fin crumbs when she heard the door open and someone enter. Closing one eye, she peeked through the crack in the door to see Irena standing by the sink, sobbing with her face in her hands. After a few minutes, the woman splashed cold water over her face, wiped it roughly with the brown paper towels, and left. Ellen came cautiously out. She did not like that Irena had been mistreated. She gingerly prodded the part of her that felt good she had done even a small thing to deter it. It didn't
hurt, so she decided to keep a closer eye on the whipped Russian puppy. Somehow, the idea made her feel . . . bigger, but then, she thought, maybe that was the Goldfish.

Remembering the satisfying feel of the bag snatcher's instep under her stomping foot, a new and totally unexpected character trait raised its hand to request a turn in Ellen's persona, like an infant flexing a tiny muscle, and Ellen's cautious smirk writhed and curled deliciously.

So, the Boss thought that his antics were invisible.

Ellen thought,
Welcome to my world
.