Calling Invisible Women (17 page)

“I figured as much. You have a nice day,” he said. He was very gallant for a man who had lost his only customers. He held open the door.

eleven

“I
need you to take me back to my car,” I said. “It’s at the library.”

“Are you going to tell me what happened?” Gilda said. It was clear she was trying not to scream.

“I blew it, that’s what happened. I yelled at them. I told them to go. I was trying to wait for you to come and get them out of there but then Nick took off his shirt and the tattoo man was all but firing up the drill. I couldn’t wait anymore.”

“So they know you’re invisible. Who cares? Sooner or later they were going to figure it out. All that matters is that you stopped them.”

“You’re right. I know you’re right. It’s just that now I wish I’d told him before. I wish I could have sat down at the kitchen table and told him like a nice mother would.” Like Vlad’s mother did, that’s what I was thinking. It made me incredibly sad. “I shouldn’t have sprung it on him.”

“You should have sprung it on him if it kept him from getting a tattoo! You had to play your card, Clover. You didn’t have any choice.”

“Promise me you won’t light into Miller about it, at least not until I’ve had the chance to talk to Nick.”

“You mean you want me to go home and not kill him?”

“I think it’s best for now. Nothing actually happened. He might not try to figure out what my role in all this was.” I was not being particularly forthcoming. I didn’t want Miller to know I was invisible because then Benny would know I was invisible, and if
Benny
knew it might be his invitation to start smoking pot again. Given the circumstances, I wasn’t about to drop all of that on Gilda.

“What were they thinking about going to get tattoos in the first place, that’s what I want to know. Were they drunk?”

“Not drunk,” I said. “I think they were depressed. Or I think Nick was depressed. Miller may have been going along for the ride.”

“What are they depressed about?” Gilda ran a stop sign. There was no one else at the intersection, but still.

I put my hand on her arm. “Listen, don’t kill us, okay? That’s not going to help anything.” I was wearing my seat belt. Even I found the sight of a seat belt on my naked, invisible self to be slightly disquieting. “I think they’re depressed about not having jobs.”

“Is that what they said?”

“No.”

“Then why do you think that?”

I sighed. I wanted to tell her they had decided to get the bleeding heart special with the word “Mother” written inside. “They were getting tattoos that said ‘unemployed.’ ”

With that piece of news Gilda swung her car over to the side of the road. She took a deep breath and then dropped her head to the wheel. “I can’t stand this,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “Neither can I.”

It had been my intention to go home to face Nick, but once Gilda had dropped me off I didn’t feel ready. I pulled on a shirt and a hat and drove over to Arthur’s office instead. I decided the jig was up. It was time for me to pull him into his office and tell him everything. A very clear lesson had been presented to me today and for once I was going to act on what I’d learned. It’s time for us to all come clean, I was going to say. I know you’re sitting alone in your office at night looking at bikes and boats and planes, and Nicky is going to a tattoo parlor because he can’t find a job, and Evie, well, Evie is a total mystery so let’s skip her, and I’m invisible. We have to start pulling together as a family instead of everybody dealing with their own problems individually. I need your help if I’m going to get through this, that’s what I was going to say. I want us all to help one another.

Once I was in the parking garage I took my clothes off again and went upstairs. For some reason I figured that if I was going to tell Arthur I was invisible I might as well be completely full-frontal invisible when I did it. At the end of the hall I saw my husband rush by and I followed him. I meant to put my hand on his sleeve but there were too many people all over the place, nurses and children and mothers and drug reps and Lonnie who brought around the files. Arthur was moving quickly into a room and I slipped in behind him just before Mary closed the door. There was a mother in there waiting, a pretty girl with round blue eyes and heavy brown hair that hung straight down to her shoulders and was pushed back behind her ears. She was having her own bad day, and she was crying. Arthur took her baby from her arms and after a minute of stroking his head and saying how pretty he was, he put him down on a blanket on the table. He was maybe six months old. He cried a little but it was a tired cry and soon he stopped. Arthur listened to his heart and then touched his head again. He crouched down to look into the baby’s ears. And when he bent forward I bent forward too and touched my forehead very lightly to his back. I breathed in the starch of his lab coat and let myself be comforted by the warmth he was putting out. I wasn’t going to ask him for anything else. I wasn’t going to ask him to finally notice what had happened to me, at least not now. This baby was sick. Even I could see that.

I opened the door. It didn’t matter. People opened doors every ten seconds in that place. I went back to my car, got dressed, and went home.

I found Nick at the kitchen table. He was never one to hide. “Thin Man’s pooch,” he said when I walked in the door.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You know that. Asta.”

“I do know that,” Nick said, filling in the letters, “but it’s the one I was on.”

For a second I thought I was off the hook, that he wasn’t going to bring it up. Then he decided to continue.

“I’ve been able to come up with two options,” he said, keeping his eyes on the crossword puzzle. “The first option, very disturbing, is that I am losing my mind. The thing that keeps me from being sure this is the case is that it would mean Miller is also losing his mind at the exact same moment in the exact same way, and this seems unlikely. I like Miller but we don’t have that much in common. That brings me to option two, that somehow, in some way I cannot figure out, you’re spying on me, following me around to coffee shops and tattoo parlors to find out what I do during the day. If that’s the case, I ask you to not deny it, because if you deny it that leaves me with option one and that’s not a great option.”

Was it possible he still didn’t know, didn’t wonder, after all this? Granted I had dressed again in order to drive home but it really didn’t amount to much of a disguise. “Okay,” I said. “Option two. Do I get to defend myself?”

He glanced up, then he looked back at his puzzle. “No,” he said. “I don’t think you do.”

“Well, I’m going to anyway. You told me I had to tell you the truth and now you have to listen to it.” I threw my keys on the table and sat down. Red came barreling into the kitchen and leapt onto my lap, where he proceeded to lick my invisible face even though his breath smelled like fish. “I was not following you, not at first. I happened to go to the French Press for a cup of coffee. I didn’t know you were there.”

“I don’t believe that. I’m always there.”

“That may be, but at that moment I wasn’t thinking about you. I was at the library and I was sleepy and I wanted a cup of coffee, that was it. But then I saw you and Miller and I heard you talking.” I shook my head and started again. “Okay, I want you to imagine this: let’s say you had never wanted a tattoo in your life but while you were out you overheard me and Gilda talking. You heard us say we were going out to get tattoos. Wouldn’t you be a little worried? Wouldn’t you maybe follow us to make sure we were okay?”

Nick closed his eyes. “I would not have been sneaking around trying to listen to your conversation in the first place.”

“I wasn’t sneaking. I mean not any more than I’m always sneaking. I was right there.”

“I didn’t see you.”

“But you knew I was there because you smelled me.”

And then Nick opened his eyes.

“I got into the backseat of your car and I went with you to the tattoo parlor. You saw the door open.”

“Mom,” he whispered, leaning forward. “Where’s your head?”

Red barked twice and I scratched his ears. Nick watched the fur compress and then release beneath my fingers.

“You came into my room,” he said. He was pale now. “You said, ‘Can you see me?’ ”

“That was when it all started.”

“That was,” he stopped and swallowed. “That was a long time ago.”

“I should have told you.”

“How did it happen? Did you get electrocuted? Did something horrible spill on you?”

“It was nothing like that. I think it has to do with a pharmaceutical company called Dexter-White. I think I took the wrong combination of pills. I’m trying to figure that out.”

“Does everybody know? Did you and Dad just decide not to tell me?”

“Oh, Nicky, no, nothing like that.” I reached over and put my hand on his wrist and he stared at it like it was making him uncomfortable so I took it away. “Dad doesn’t know, Evie doesn’t know. I walk around all day and nobody knows. It’s kind of a remarkable thing. Nobody gets it.”

“Dad doesn’t know?”

“I kept thinking he would figure it out, and now there never seems to be a good time to tell him.”

“He thought you were depressed. He talked to me about it.” Nick shook his head. “So who knows you’re …” Either he couldn’t find the word or he wouldn’t say it.

“Gilda knows, and Grandma. They figured it out right away. I go to an invisible women’s group at the Sheraton. I’ve made some friends there. Do you remember Mrs. Robinson, your second-grade teacher?”

“And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson?” Nick said, but he didn’t sing it.

“She’s in the group. She’s invisible now.”

Nick kept shaking his head back and forth like a slow pendulum and Red’s head went back and forth as he watched him. “Anybody else?”

“What difference does it make?”

“Because I’m feeling like a complete jerk and I guess I’m wondering who isn’t a jerk.”

“It isn’t like that. I think that people just don’t look at one another anymore, or they look at girls like Evie or the shampoo girl whose hair you sniffed, but they don’t look at anybody else. I don’t want you to take this personally.”

It was at that unfortunate moment our houseguest walked in the kitchen, mercifully without Evie, and assessed the scene in front of him, looking carefully at me and then at Nick. I made a face that said, Please, Vlad, keep your mouth shut. It did me no good.

“You told him,” Vlad said.

I put my head down on the table.

“You told Vlad!” Nick said. “He’s in the house for one night and he knows you’re invisible?”

Vlad reached behind him and closed the door. “It’s not what you’re thinking.”

In half a second Nick was on his feet, his chair shooting out behind him. “Why don’t you tell me what I’m thinking, farm boy?”

Vlad, who, it turned out, was the star of the Ohio State hockey team, held up his hands. “I swear to you, I felt the exact same way.”

And that was it. Nick took a swing at him, punching Vlad, who was a great deal taller and wider, in the side of the neck. The connection made a dull, smacking sound. Vlad used the other half of the second to lunge for Nick but then he thought better of it. He stood back and chose not to kill my son and for the second time I thought how lucky my daughter would be to marry such a man. Unfortunately Red jumped off my lap and bit Vlad then, tearing his jeans but, thankfully, not the skin.

“Red!” I shouted, and Red released. “His
mother
is invisible,” I said, grabbing the back of Nick’s shirt. “I didn’t tell him. He figured it out.”

Vlad was rubbing the side of his neck. “Fuck,” he said, and then he said, “Excuse me.”

“Go right ahead,” I said.

“Oh, man,” Nick said, his head still turning back and forth like it would never stop. “Man, I’m sorry.”

“I wanted to punch somebody when I first found out, but I didn’t do it. Don’t ever punch someone in the neck,” he said.

“Does Evie know?” Nick said.

Vlad held up his hands. “I didn’t tell her. I have no plans to tell anybody anything. Based on how this one went down I think it would be a good idea if everybody cooled it for the night. Let’s just digest what we know.” He looked at Nick. “If you’re okay with that.”

“I think we should—” Nick stopped. “Never mind. I don’t know what I think.”

Vlad opened the freezer and filled a dish towel with one enormous handful of ice cubes. “I’m going to let you two get back to your conversation. I’m going upstairs where it’s safe.”

“What are you going to tell Evie about your neck?” Nick asked.

“I’m going to tell her it’s a hickey,” he said, and went out the door.

After that Nick and I just sat there looking at each other. It was easier for me than for him. “This is very weird,” he said.

“It is,” I said. “Though not quite as weird as getting a tattoo that says ‘unemployed.’ ”

“Seriously? Are we still even thinking of that?”

“I am. I’ve had a while to live with the other part.”

Nick laughed. It was a much-needed addition to my afternoon. “Everything’s perspective, right? This morning it seemed like a great idea to have the word
unemployed
carved into my shoulder. It meant I stood with the masses of the suffering. I was at one with the common man. Let’s just say that now I’m not feeling quite so sorry for myself.”

“Because you’re feeling sorry for me?”

Nick gave me a solemn nod even though he was still smiling. “Yes. Now I’m feeling sorry for you.”

“Well, if it means you’re not getting a tattoo, I’ll take it. So are you going to tell Evie and Dad? Are you going to tell Miller?”

“Who you tell is for you to decide. I’m not going to out my own mother, who, I would hope, has no plans to out me either. Dr. Dad doesn’t need to know we all went to the tattoo parlor today.”

“I’d agree with that.”

Nick yawned. “I think we should both take Vlad’s advice. I just want to cool it for a minute. This whole thing took a lot out of me.”

I looked at the clock hanging over the kitchen sink. Somehow, amazingly, it was nearly four o’clock and I hadn’t given a thought to dinner. And then I realized I hadn’t given a thought to anything. “Nick, my article.”