Calling Invisible Women Read Free Page B

distance. “Any news for Nick on the job front?”
    “Not that he told me.” Suddenly I felt unnerved, thinking of what Gilda had said. Is it Arthur ? When in the world was I supposed to work in the news of my day?
    Arthur started up the stairs and then stopped halfway and called down over his shoulder. “Mary said you called today.”
    “I did,” I said. I was looking at my hands, first the palm side and then the back. Still here.
    “Any problems?”
    I turned my face toward the stairs. I was going to say no, none at all, but he was already gone.
•   •   •
    I had studied journalism and literature while Arthur was in medical school. I got that lousy job kids get at newspapers when I first started out, covering the city council meetings and the police desk from midnight to six a.m. But I was a reporter at heart and I always found something to report on. The great payola scandal in the state house of representatives? That was my story. I chased down labor bosses. I made myself a little name. After the kids were born I moved over to the arts section because the arts just seemed safer, and later I was editor of the book review section, because back then such things existed even in Ohio. For a long time I was very busy, reading and writing and assigning and editing and raising Nick and Evie. Arthur was building a practice and there were nights he got home before I did and he made dinner and left it warming in the oven for me, though even as I write that sentence I can scarcely believe it was true. It was right around that time that everything began to unspool and my whole career was played out in reverse. The Internet, that voracious weed, started to put the squeeze on us. The paper lost advertisers, the paper got smaller, the book review section became two pages, which became the occasional book review that I still write. By then no one thought I could be a reporter again, not even me. News could go to the arts but the arts never came back to news. I felt lucky to get the gardening column two days a week, especially because for the most part I was making it up as I went along. For every hour that was taken out of my job, another hour was added onto Arthur’s. Maybe we were lucky. We had two kids, we needed the money. It was good that his practice was booming. With my newfound free time I drove the kids to soccer practice and ran the coat drive for the homeless and made better dinners, which would, over time, become worse dinners. It all worked out. It just didn’t work out the way I thought it was going to.
    I waited for a long time after the shower stopped running for Arthur to come back downstairs. When I finally went up I found him asleep on top of the bedspread wearing my toweling robe. His must have been in the wash. I got a blanket out of the closet and covered him up. I never even considered waking him to tell him what had happened. He was exhausted, he needed to sleep. It was a decision I later came to regret. By the next morning I was gone.

two
    I think I knew it as soon as I woke up, maybe even in the moment before I opened my eyes. It could have been that I was dreaming I was invisible, people bumping into me at a cocktail party, stepping on my toes. When I stuck my hand out from underneath the covers and saw nothing I hardly even felt surprised. If anything I was vindicated. It wasn’t my imagination! Looking down, I could see the shape of myself beneath the blankets. It was just a shorter version of the shape that Arthur made beside me, the only difference being that there was a head on Arthur’s pillow. At the foot of the bed Red made a neat ball between us. It wasn’t that I had been reduced to nothing exactly, had that been the case the bed would have appeared to contain only a man and a dog, it’s that I had been reduced to something mystifyingly clear—definite substance and no form. I thought about waking up Arthur but considering yesterday’s debacle with Nick I decided to just wait