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Calling Invisible Women: A Novel - Softcover

Ray, Jeanne

 
9780307395061: Calling Invisible Women: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307395065 ISBN 13: 9780307395061
Verlag: Crown, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

A delightfully funny novel packing a clever punch, from the author of the New York Times bestselling Julie and Romeo
 
A mom in her early fifties, Clover knows she no longer turns heads the way she used to, and she's only really missed when dinner isn't on the table on time. Then Clover wakes up one morning to discover she's invisible--truly invisible. She panics even more when her family doesn't notice a thing. Her best friend immediately observes the change, which relieves Clover immensely--she's not losing her mind after all!--but she is crushed by the realization that neither her husband nor her children ever truly look at her. She was invisible even before she knew it.   

Clover discovers that there are others like her, women of a certain age who seem to have disappeared.  As she uses her invisibility to get to know her family and her town better, Clover leads the way in helping invisible women become recognized and appreciated no matter what their role. Smart and hilarious, with indomitable female characters, Calling Invisible Women will appeal to anyone who has ever felt invisible.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeanne Ray is the New York Times bestselling author of Julie and Romeo and several other novels. She worked as a registered nurse for forty years before she wrote her first novel at the age of sixty. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband and her dog, Red.

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9780307395054|excerpt

Ray / CALLING INVISIBLE WOMEN

one

I first noticed I was missing on a Thursday. Red and I had already been for our walk and he went to sleep on the bath mat while I was taking my shower. Red is a Cairn terrier. He’s bath mat size. After the shower I was standing in front of the mirror in a toweling robe brushing my teeth. When I looked up I was gone.

It didn’t startle me at first, not exactly. I thought it was just some trick of the light, a fog that had built up on the mirror, but when I wiped my sleeve over the medicine cabinet I still wasn’t there. My toothbrush was there, floating by itself several inches out from the cuff of my robe, and the robe was there, the collar and shoulders filling out the bottom of the mirror’s frame, but I was missing. I moved from side to side a couple of times trying to fit myself back into the picture, but all I saw was the open shower curtain behind me, the tiles of the tub, the built-­in shelf that held the shampoo and conditioner. I spat out the toothpaste and there it was in the sink looking exactly like toothpaste. That was when I thought: stroke. Pieces of my vision were missing, even though I couldn’t imagine what kind of stroke would just remove a face, a neck, a hand. Leaning forward toward the mirror, I gently tapped my invisible fingers against my invisible cheek and what had once been a finger was stopped by what had once been a face. Curiosity was quickly being replaced by a rising wall of panic. I was fifty-­four years old, and I was gone.

“Red?” I said, trying out my voice. Unlike the rest of me, my voice was still there. Red lifted his head from the bath mat and looked straight at me, his brown eyes bright and full of recognition. He wagged his tail, thinking that maybe I wanted to go for another walk. Tentatively, I held out my invisible hand to him, wondering if I was dead and, if I was, what effect it would have on the poor dog. But Red sniffed the place where my hand should have been and gave it a couple of licks. I felt the rough wash of his tongue working over my phantom wrist, which I took to be a good sign, and so I went back to the mirror again. Still not there.

I went into the bedroom feeling light-­headed, or feeling like someone who didn’t have a head, and, sitting down on the edge of the bed (which gave a creak of recognition), I picked up the phone and dialed the back-­line number at Arthur’s office. I suppose that any day one finds one’s self to be invisible was not going to shape up to be a lucky day, so when Arthur’s nurse Mary answered I shouldn’t have been surprised. Arthur has three nurses and getting Mary on the phone was the definite equivalent of drawing the short straw.

“Dr. Hobart’s office,” she said, impatient from the start.

“Mary, it’s Clover. I need to speak to Arthur.” I was struggling not to hyperventilate.

I could see her shaking her head. “He’s in with a patient. Is there something I can help you with?”

Maybe she thought I was calling in regard to a sick child, even though she knew that Nick was twenty-­three and Evie was twenty. “Can you get him for me?”

“He has patients waiting in all five of the exam rooms with fourteen more in the waiting room.” Her voice was both flat and brisk. “He’s in with the mayor’s wife now. Their second-­grader has a rash. It could be a tick bite. We’ve got a vomiting toddler in room three and a first-­time mother in room one who has brought in a week’s worth of used diapers that she has been refrigerating because she thinks the stool is inconsistent.”

“I get it,” I said, though there was nothing even notable about her report. This was Arthur’s day, all day, every day, from the minute he walked in the door of his office until the minute he left, and even when he left, much of his work managed to follow him home. I understood it was her job to protect him in any way possible, to use herself to create a human shield between him and the world, but I never did appreciate the fact that she applied that same shield against me. I almost never called the office.

“Is it an emergency?” Mary asked.

“It is.”

“Okay,” she said, but I could tell she had already been distracted. I could hear a shrill screaming in the background, and then, abruptly, the line went dead.

So there I was, the phone levitating in midair. I stared at it for a minute before hanging up. Even if I’d gotten Arthur on the line he no doubt would have told me that children don’t become invisible and so he wouldn’t know anything about it. Arthur had a way of making it sound like he had attended some special sort of junior medical school at which he had received absolutely no information whatsoever about the human body past the age of sixteen. It was his means of deflecting grown-­ups who casually hit him up for Adderall prescriptions at dinner parties, but it also meant he never was much of a help to the adult members of his own family.

And who’s to say I was invisible anyway? If I was cracking up, if I’d just suffered some sort of cerebral hemorrhage, I would in fact be a poor judge of the situation. I tightened the belt on my robe and I marched up the stairs to Nick’s room, Red right behind me. I could feel my bare feet against the floor. Nick is our oldest, and I opened the door to his room without knocking because he had gone away to college and stayed away for almost two years after graduating. I had made his room my office: a desk, a lamp, a chair. My mother had made my room a sewing room when I moved away. Now my computer was back in the kitchen. “Nick!” I said to the man who was sleeping face down and shirtless in a pile of crumpled sheets. “Nicky, wake up!”

When he didn’t wake up I took hold of his heel with my invisible hand and shook it. I could see his entire leg turning back and forth inside the flannel pajama bottoms I had bought for him two Christmases ago; I could feel the heat of his heel in my palm. Red jumped into the bed and stood for a moment on Nick’s back. In our household, only Red had experienced unequivocal joy at Nick’s return.

“What?” he said into his pillow. It wasn’t quite eight in the morning. It was for Nick an unseen hour.

“I need you to look at me.”

“You look fine,” he said, or I think that’s what he said. He hadn’t lifted his head.

I flicked the switch to the overhead lights, and then I went to the windows and snapped up the rolling...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307395065
ISBN 13 
9780307395061
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
2
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

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