Calling Invisible Women Read Free

held out my arm to show us both. “I’m not delusional, at least I don’t think I am. I got out of the shower this morning and for a few minutes I couldn’t see myself.”
    “I don’t think I’d mind that,” Gilda said.
    I threw up my hands. “I swear to you this isn’t coming around to a punch line. I can’t explain what happened, but it did happen, and then it was over. I guess I was just wondering …”
    “Wondering what?”
    “If it ever happened to you.”
    The kettle let out its high-pitched wail and Gilda rescued it from the flame and filled our cups. “No,” she said tentatively. “Not if we’re talking about a lack of physical matter. Have you had your eyes checked?”
    I shook my head.
    “I wonder if French women ever feel invisible,” she said, deftly trying to steer the subject away from the personal and toward the cultural. “People are always talking about how chic and secure French women are, but if the twenty-year-old Brigitte Bardot passed the seventy-six-year-old Brigitte Bardot on the street, there isn’t going to be any contest as to who gets noticed.”
    That was when I came to the conclusion that feeling invisible was something that could be talked about for hours on end but being invisible was a conversational no-man’s-land. I blew on my tea and looked at my watch. “I should probably get to work. I’ve got a column due. Is it okay if I just take the cup with me?”
    “Of course you can take the cup, but I haven’t been any help at all.” Gilda sounded genuinely sorry.
    I waved her off. “I’m fine,” I said. “I just needed to talk.” In truth, maybe Gilda had been more of a help than she had realized. Maybe I had suffered a brief bout of insanity and by not acknowledging it, she was allowing me to keep my dignity. I had no real idea what had happened. I just had a strange, unsettled feeling, like you do when you’re out and think you might have left the oven on or the windows open in the rain. Later, of course, I found out this feeling was all part of it. Some of the women in the group call it an invisibility hangover, like every cell you’ve got has had a tiny whiplash from coming back into focus again.
    When I got back to the house, Nick was sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of cereal, and Red, who didn’t even turn his face in my direction when I came in, was staring up at him. Nick always let Red lap up the last of the milk when he was finished with it. “You’re stirring awfully early,” I said without thinking.
    “Thank you very much for that,” he said. “What was up with you this morning anyway?”
    “This morning?” I asked, not wanting to do it all again.
    “Do you see me?” Nick said, mimicking my panic in an unbecoming manner. He was working the crossword puzzle in the Times . His father must have been in a rush this morning. Since Nick had come home, Arthur usually remembered to hide the arts section so that he wasn’t left with the pathetic puzzle in the local paper.
    “My contact lens was stuck,” I said, coming up with a slightly plausible lie. “I think I’m going to have to stop wearing them. My optometrist says I have dry eyes.”
    “You don’t wear contact lenses, and even if you did, what would that have to do with whether or not I can see you?” He filled in an answer with a ballpoint pen. It was the Thursday puzzle. Not easy.
    “I said, ‘I can’t see.’ I’m sorry. I just panicked for a minute.”
    “You didn’t say, ‘I can’t see.’ You said, ‘Can you see me?’ There’s a difference. Mid-arthropod, six letters.”
    “Do you have anything?”
    “Starts with T .”
    The T was what I needed because the word that had instantly come to mind was Lorax , a tufted Dr. Seuss character. “Thorax,” I said. “And about the rest of it, if you could just chalk it up to early dementia I would be grateful.”
    Nick wrote in the word and seeing how nicely it fit, he smiled. My firstborn child had such a lovely