Calling Invisible Women Read Free Page A

smile it could be given out as a gift. “If you don’t ask me whether or not I found a job today, I won’t ask you if you’re losing your mind.”
    “It’s a deal,” I said.
    Then Nick put his cereal bowl on the floor, a few corn flakes floating in a thin lake of milk, sending Red into a frantic, lapping ecstasy. Everybody was happy.
    I remember so many details about that last day, the time I wasted answering e-mails, the two loads of laundry I folded and put away. Nick went off to his coffee shop, where he assumed his daily post scouring the Internet for job listings, and I changed his sheets and picked up towels off the floor because I was feeling like I owed him. Evie called to say she needed sixty dollars to replace the tiny underpants to her Ohio State cheerleading uniform, which had been lost, and I didn’t have the nerve to ask her how they had been lost or how an article of clothing so insubstantial could be so expensive. I put the check in the mail. I wrote my weekly gardening column for the newspaper: “Your Chrysanthemums’ Second Act.” Just because those bright yellow daisy mums have ceased their dazzling bloom, it doesn’t mean they’re bound for the compost heap . Everything the same, everything in order, except that a couple of times I pulled down my sock to make sure my ankle was still there. By the end of the day I had come full circle and was back to thinking it had all been some crazy misunderstanding with the mirror.
    Which was not to say I wasn’t anxious for Arthur to come home and give me some plausible explanation for what had happened, or what it might have been had an eight-year-old been involved. Arthur and I had known each other since college, and even though I often found myself thinking we should find a way to spend a little more time together, I also thought of him as the person who knew me best in all the world, the person I was closest to.
    I finished making dinner and left it in the oven to keep warm. I gave Red his dinner and then I took him for a walk. I poured a glass of wine. I started to read a book on composting because my next article was on composting. Nick came in briefly and went out again. I tried Arthur’s cell phone. I read another chapter on composting.
    Even for Arthur, 8:15 was late, and very late without a phone call. The chicken by now would be tough and dry, the fresh roasted asparagus reduced to the consistency of canned. I had become a fairly lousy cook over the years trying to guess the time of my husband’s arrival. When we heard the back door open, Red and I sprang up and raced toward it, Red beating me there by three terrier lengths.
    Arthur held up the palm of his hand. “Don’t,” he said. I stopped in my tracks but the dog did not. Arthur crouched down and scratched his ears. “I’ve got to take a shower. One of the Abbot girls threw up on me first thing this morning. I changed lab coats but I’m still feeling a little toxic. The nurses swore up and down that I smelled fine.”
    “Oh,” I said. “Sure.”
    Arthur looked at Red. “I could fall over and go to sleep right here,” he said, holding his muzzle. “Right on top of you.”
    “Do you want dinner?”
    Arthur got up slowly, shaking his head no. “Sure,” he said. “Just let me clean up. You wouldn’t believe all the things that happened today. A woman came in with triplets. All three of them had the croup. Then the head of the hospital board comes in and wants to talk to me about a new chief of staff and he stays for an hour, telling me one of his granddaughters bites her fingernails and his daughter is worried that the child may have some kind of mental dysfunction because of it and he’s going on and on and it’s two o’clock and I haven’t finished seeing the morning patients yet.” He put his hand over his eyes and shook his head. “Sometimes I wonder how much longer I can do this.”
    “I wonder that myself,” I said.
    Arthur walked past me, keeping a safe