Calling Invisible Women (12 page)

To make a sweeping generalization, the children would all be fine. With or without medical treatment they would survive the things that ailed them. It was the mothers who needed to be seen. Throughout the day they leaned forward and held Arthur’s wrist. When he was finished examining their child they turned that child upside down to show my husband one more freckle, a fingernail that was perhaps less than lovely. They held up the daughter and asked if her knees were perfectly even. They stretched out the son, a mere infant, and commented that he had no neck, as if this could be a condition that required emergency surgery. Through it all, Arthur was patient. He put his glasses on and gave serious consideration to every bump. He listened to every story about the child who kept getting up in the night and crawling into the parents’ bed. He leaned forward, nodded, tapped the shin gently with a small silver hammer to show them how normally the foot jumped. He soothed the mothers with his intelligent consideration of their nattering madness. Honestly, the man was a god.

Every five minutes Mary knocked on the door like a mad theater director. “Dr. Hobart, you have a call.” “Dr. Hobart, a Dr. Jenkins needs to speak to you.” “Dr. Hobart, we have a situation in the waiting room.” And every time he politely extricated himself from the crisis at hand to go and attend to the crisis that was eight feet away, then he cycled back without losing his place in the sentence he was speaking or listening to. It went on and on and on. One of the other doctors grabbed him in the hall, waving an X-ray in his hand. “This will take one minute. I just need you to look—” But it never took one minute. The day was full to bursting but the phone continued to demand that he squeeze in just a few more. Everyone was sick. Everyone was urgent. Everyone needed to be worked in. Dr. Hobart was needed at the hospital. Dr. Hobart was already late for the luncheon the drug reps were putting on. Dr. Hobart would not get lunch. A two-year-old named Lucas had swallowed a very large screw, a Phillips head, though why this detail was included was anyone’s guess, and Dr. Hobart needed to line up a surgeon if in fact a surgeon would be needed. I followed Arthur over to the emergency room, where Lucas had to be comforted and his mother had to be comforted and doctors were consulted but the X-rays revealed no screw.

“Could it be hidden?” the mother asked, looking up at the light board. “Maybe it’s behind a bone.” She was wearing an enormous knit poncho with long fringe that Lucas seemed to enjoy weaving his fingers through.

“Metal shows up pretty well,” Arthur said.

And so the housekeeper was called again and yes, this time she managed to find the screw. At least she thought it was the right one.

Children cried and blew their noses and the contents of their tissues were inspected. Standing in various corners of rooms one through five, I was reeling. The day marched on and the tide continued to rise and rise—more phone calls, more sick children, more needy mothers certain they had done something wrong, that they had ruined everything, until I wanted to scream,
Leave him alone!
Oh, Arthur, why didn’t you tell me it was like this? Is it really like this every day? We could sell the house. I could get a job at Macy’s. No one should have to work like this.

A child named Asa with straight black hair and pale blue eyes attached herself to both of his legs, making Arthur a tree trunk. The last patient was scheduled for four o’ clock. The last patient was seen at five thirty. The mothers grumbled to the nurses, there would be traffic now, and what about dinner? Did they think it was fair that people with small sick children should be made to wait? The nurses apologized. Mary apologized. “It was a very busy day,” she said, not explaining that in fact all of them were exactly the same, only some were worse.

“If he doesn’t have time to see all these patients, then he shouldn’t schedule them,” one mother said in a voice sharp with reprimand, a voice that made me sorry for her child.

The charts were picked up. The toys were picked up, wiped off, returned to the bin in the waiting room. The nurses straightened up the rooms, washed their hands. One by one they stuck their heads into his office. “Good night, Dr. Hobart.”

He said good night three times. I was lying on the floor beneath his desk where no one would step on me. My head was empty of thoughts. I was too tired to think. Instead I replayed the faces of the children. I saw them like crayons crowded into a box, all of them standing up next to one another very straight. It was impossible to try and consider each one separately.

While I lay there Arthur dictated letters, made notes in every chart, called other doctors, attended to every detail that his day had not allowed. “Isn’t there someone you could hire to do all this?” I wanted to ask him. “Couldn’t I come over at night and do this for you?” Finally I got up and went and stood behind his shoulder. I ached. I wondered if I had caught something awful. There was a line drawn through the name of every person on his list of people to call and there was only one chart left. It wasn’t very late. After all of this, Arthur would be coming home early. And so I blew him a kiss and went downstairs and through the parking garage to the space with his name on it. But all four of the Acura’s doors were locked. Arthur believed in locking the car, a habit I had never picked up. I waited, looked around. Even if no one could see me there, I don’t like parking garages. I decided to go back upstairs. Maybe I could find his keys, go and unlock the car, then bring the keys back up. I was working through the complicated scenarios when I went back to Arthur’s office. He was still at his desk but now the computer was on. He was looking at a website with bicycles. Bicycles? Did Arthur want a bicycle? This was news to me, but I made a mental note of the make and model he seemed to admire. Christmas was not too far off, as the decorations in the mall had reminded me, and Arthur was impossible to buy for. Maybe he wanted a bicycle because he wanted to exercise more. He wanted to do something for himself. He moved the mouse around and clicked. Up came a picture of a boat. It was a sailboat, and as he scrolled down, it was pages and pages of sailboats. Arthur had sailed with his father when he was a boy, and one summer between his sophomore and junior years of college he crewed on a boat that went down to Bermuda. It was a story he liked to tell. “One day,” he often said, “we’ll get a boat, the two of us, and we’ll go to Bermuda. Maybe we’ll get a bigger boat and take the kids.” For a long time I would tell him how I got seasick, how I wasn’t keen on confinement or long-term exposure to sun, but after a while I got it. It wasn’t about a boat. It was about thinking about a boat. Then he switched the screen to planes and watched a few YouTube videos of aerobatics, stomach-plummeting spins and dives. He sat there in his white coat and watched the planes turn upside down and right side up, over and over again. That was when I got it. He wasn’t coming home for a long time.

I went down the hall and called Irene from the phone at the front desk. “I think I’m going to need that ride,” I said.

I got home and took a hot shower. I felt like I was crawling with germs. I put on some jeans and a sweater and ran back downstairs to heat up some stew I had made the night before. Red was bouncing around my ankles like he was on a trampoline he couldn’t get off of.

“He isn’t used to you being gone all day,” Nick said.

“I know. The time just got away from me.”

“But your car was here, and you didn’t have your cell phone on.”

I looked up at him. “Your grandmother picked me up, and you know I never know where my phone is. Did something happen?”

Nick pointed up at the ceiling. “Evie’s home. She’s a disaster. She said her boyfriend broke up with her, Vlad or whatever his name is. She says she’s dropping out of school, that she won’t go back.”

“What did you tell her?” It was impossible that Evie would come home now. If Vlad had actually left her she would require more patience and compassion than Mother Teresa possessed, much less her own mother.

“I reminded her that Ohio State was playing Iowa a week from Saturday at home, and if she was going to be something as stupid as a cheerleader, then she needed to get her butt back to school and start practicing.”

“Wow, Nick. Well done.”

“It’s not like I said that when she walked in the door but she’s been crying
all day
. I tried to call Dad but that witch Mary answered the phone and she wouldn’t let me talk to him. He’s got to do something about her.”

I saw the lights of Arthur’s car in the driveway, and, as if on cue, my beautiful waif of a daughter stumbled down the stairs in a tiny Ohio State T-shirt and a pair of gray sweatpants with the word
OHIO
emblazoned across her rear end. “Mommy,” she wailed, and fell into my arms, the tiny rack of her shoulders shuddering against my chest.

“Home again,” Arthur said brightly at the door, and Evie, who always was a daddy’s girl, made a perfect pivot out of my arms and fell against her father’s chest.

eight

“H
i, I’m Clover Hobart, and I’m an invisible woman.”

“Hi, Clover!”

I waved my Kleenex at the group and they waved their Kleenex back at me. “It’s been a really hard week. Just knowing that you’re out there, that I have other invisible women that I can call, well, that’s really been a help to me. I don’t mean to say it’s all bad. Lila Robinson and I had a real adventure spending the day in high school. Is Lila here?”

A Kleenex flapped lightly from the other side of the circle. “Right here.”

“Have you gone back again?”

“Every day,” she said. “And you’re right, I’m already making a big difference. Disruptive conduct reports are pretty much down to zero. I’ve busted up incidences of cheating and bullying, thwarted some minor drug deals in which I made the kids flush the pot down the toilets themselves. I think I’ve done more for that school in the past five days than I did in thirty years. Each day I write down everything I’ve done and I leave it on the principal’s desk. In another couple of weeks I’m going to ask for my job back.”

This news was met with enthusiastic applause.

Lila hushed the group so that she could go on. “I’ve got to thank Clover here for telling me to stop feeling sorry for myself and get back to work. She hasn’t been invisible very long but she knows how to jump in there and get things done. And thanks to Laura Worthington, too. Laura gave me the great advice about the importance of documenting what I was doing.”

More applause, and another Kleenex wave from someone I assumed was Laura.

“You would have gone back to school without me,” I said. “You’re a natural. Anyway, I’m glad I could be helpful to someone else because I’m not doing nearly as good a job with my own life. I went to spend the day with my husband at work and I felt completely overwhelmed by all the pressure he has on him and I have no idea how to help him. Then when I came home my daughter, Evie, was there. She says she’s dropped out of college because her boyfriend has broken up with her.”

Audible groans.

“I know. She’s twenty years old! Who cares if your boyfriend breaks up with you when you’re twenty? She should probably send him a thank-you note. She’s been home for three days now. All she does is cry and text.”

“Does she know you’re invisible?” someone asked. I thought it was the group leader, Jo Ellen.

The very thought forced an involuntary burble of laughter up my throat. “Evie is a sweet girl but she wouldn’t notice if the house was on fire. The extent to which she never lifts her eyes from her iPhone cannot be overemphasized. I actually worry about her poor little thumbs.”

“Is the boyfriend still texting her?” There was Alice. She was sitting right next to me.

“Constantly. I can remember when I was visible I was so curious about her texts. What could these kids possibly be discussing at such length? Now that I can just stand over her shoulder and read them all day I have to say I have never encountered anything so boring in my entire life. They are literally saying nothing over and over again for hours on end.” I sighed and shook my head. “This isn’t what I wanted to talk about. Evie and Vlad have broken up, Evie’s dropped out of school, she cries, they text. Chances are she’ll pull it together and go back by the end of the week, at least that’s what Nick tells me. He also figured out that this is her fall break so dropping out of school doesn’t have quite the same punch just yet.”

“Who’s Nick?” a voice asked.

“My son. He graduated from college two years ago but he’s living at home again and looking for a job.”

More groans.

I felt like I was just about to make my point when the big double doors to the Magnolia Room opened and an older Filipino woman, not the one from last week, came in and closed the door behind her. Before we even had time to drop our Kleenex she pulled a chair out from the circle. I didn’t know who was sitting in it but I saw the Kleenex dart up, and then the woman sat down, removing a sandwich and a cell phone from her pocket. Once she’d peeled back the plastic wrap from the sandwich and taken a bite, she punched in a number and began a loud conversation in a language I did not understand. Whoever was on the other end of the line couldn’t get a word in edgewise. The invisible women waited patiently, as patience is our particular virtue, but after a while I started to wonder how long this woman’s break was. The conversation, if you could call it that, appeared to be endless.

“Do you think she would hear us if we kept on talking?” Alice said.

We waited, but no, she didn’t seem to hear. The Magnolia Room was enormous, but because of its enormity it was also the room that was the most consistently available. “Let’s just move our chairs,” Jo Ellen said. And so we got up and dragged our chairs to the other side of the room, reassembling our circle far away from the caller, who didn’t seem to notice the furniture moving away on its own.

“That’s better,” Jo Ellen said. “Not perfect, but better. Clover, I believe you were talking.”

Over a one-sided conversation in Filipino I began again. “What I wanted to say is that having Evie home is really teaching me something about invisibility. She’s invisibility’s polar opposite. She’s the most visible creature on the planet. Even I can’t stop staring at her. It’s as if she’s walking under a klieg light every minute of the day and you can’t help notice every single thing about her, the length of her eyelashes, the shadow under her collarbone. She twists her hair up with one hand and jams a pencil through it with the other and I swear to you a team of New York stylists could not create anything so flawless.”