Lily Hoang: Invisible Women

We often wonder about this woman down the hall, why it is that she is the way she is, and she tells us that we wouldn’t understand, but that if we knew our folktales, she’s in there. She is the shadow that was left behind for our benefit, and whereas we are flattered — no honored — we can’t help but be sad for her, that she must live here, with us, when she belonged to a time so very long ago, a time of folk tales and magic and sublime fairy tales, a time without maps, a time of legends, and that she must endure this, just for us.

The woman down the hall has hair longer than is even possible. Sometimes, we think she is Rapunzel, but we don’t believe in fairy tales so we ignore this possibility. We should note, however, that she lives at the apex of this building, that even though we say she lives down the hall, she really lives up the hall, high up, higher up that we can even see.

We’ve never seen her room, this woman down the hall. We’ve never even seen its door, although we’ve tried. Lord knows we’ve tried. Just the other day, in fact, we took the stairs up to her room — the elevator doesn’t go up that high — but we kept stepping and stepping until we’d stepped for days, and even then, there was no door. Our building isn’t so tall and yet we couldn’t reach it’s top. So we stepped for more days and days until one of us, we’re not sure who, passed out of exhaustion, but still, we forged upward. We hiked our way up until we literally couldn’t go one step further. Then, we rolled bodies into tight balls and bounced our way down. We simply could not have endured all those steps again.

And yet, when we see this woman down the hall who we like to call Rapunzel we do not ask her how she gets into her tower. Instead, we prefer to watch her knit her hair in the lounge. We try to not to disturb her, lest she lose count of her stitches and must begin anew.

The woman down the hall is anonymous. She could be any woman. She looks like every other woman. There is nothing particularly noticeable or unique about her. The woman down the hall is a faceless woman among so many others, another person wandering in a crowd.

We have never seen a woman so plain, so utterly unremarkable. Perhaps this is why we are so interested in her. We try to speak with this woman, but she is so plain that she slips away without us even noticing, and another woman, equally uninteresting, has taken her place. This is not something we notice at first, but there is some small glimmer of difference between the two or three or however many of them there are. We notice only because we watch. We observe her and her other anonymous friends. We are certain we can unlock the truths behind every woman if only we can know one of them.

But they are not really every woman, and they are not truly anonymous. We have learned that they too have names and homes and some of them live right down the hall. Imagine that! These women that we’re only now learning to recognize have lived right down the hall all these years if only we’d bothered to notice.

The woman down the hall, she’s a crazy old loon. She’s not to be trusted. The old crone is the devil, we swear. We’ve never seen anyone so wretched, just for the sake of being wretched. She twists our ears to watch our eyes swell with salty tears, to watch our eyes clench shut for the stinging, to see our noses begin to drip, and she doesn’t stop until our mouths are filled to the brim with snot, and even then, she makes us swallow it in one gulp before she releases us, and we hate her. We’ve never hated anyone so much in our lives.

And yesterday, you won’t even believe this, yesterday, that old bitch down the hall pinched a cloud from the sky and crumpled it into the smallest ball, and that old witch down the hall punched us square in the jaw so hard that our faces broke, and that old woman laughed and laughed.

It was then that we decided that she had to die, that we can’t stand even one more moment of her alive.

So we killed her.

The woman down the hall simply doesn’t know how to shut up. We swear she talks and talks like she doesn’t even need to stop for air, and when we see her, we run. We call her Dragon Woman — infernaled — and it wouldn’t be so bad if she only talked about more interesting things, but she doesn’t. Dragon Woman gabs about the most banal things. She goes on and on about her pewter plates and how she chose pewter, and sometimes, the mere imitation of the sound makes us sick. Sometimes, we hear the word computer and by default, we want to spit up. She’s insufferable, this Dragon Woman with her continuous words. Seeing her, we want to plug up our ears, but even then, her voice has this way of sneaking in, the nasal squeak makes us want to shove a whole box of tissues down her throat.

The woman down the hall is a hoarder, and her tiny apartment is a labyrinth of boxes and trash. She never emerges from her layer of debris, and yet somehow it grows to consume the edges of the walls and all the empty spaces in between.

The woman down the hall slinks her body over and between, collapsing into the tiniest spaces because that is where she feels safest.

She is a rat, this woman. We imagine her apartment is a three-dimensional maze, and she maniacally rushes through it, chasing the scent of something absolutely delectable.

We have never seen this woman, but we know she is real. At nights when it is quietest, we can hear the shuffle of something moving somewhere, the scrape of her skin against all that trash.

Her apartment stinks of rot. It is a landfill, a dumping ground. It smells of teenaged boys after gym class, that irremovable odor of adrenaline and adolescence. It hovers for yards around her door. For a while, this smell drove our guards away, but we are a diligent kind. We do not waver. Sooner or later, someone will come or go. She is human, and she must eat to survive.

She has been here longer than any of us, longer than the groundskeeper and the landlady, and we hope that somehow she will survive until after we are gone. We would hate to have her myth destroyed for a heart attack or high cholesterol, something mundane. We have invested too much imagination and effort into creating her, this hidden woman, this woman who has forgotten the rest of the world.

The woman down the hall is fat. She’s nothing but a bucket of lard, only larger. Much larger, and she’s got skin that folds over itself, forever hidden. There must be mold and mildew in those pockets of skin and flesh that never see light, and in those pockets, there must live these little creatures who recycle all that perpetual sweat and stink. She is a virtual ecosystem, this gross woman down the hall with all her lard and all her skin and all her stink, and strangely, we want to explore it. We want to claim it as our own, if only we could find an adequate place to stake our flagpole.

The woman down the hall no longer lives here. One — for everything of any note occurs at night — she packed her entire apartment into one small handbag and walked away, leaving a large hole where her home once sat. It was as if she opened her satchel and invited the wallpaper and the siding, the lamps, light fixtures and their ceilings in to leave with her.

The hole gapes at the world outside. The hole where the woman down the hall used to live reveals our most hidden secrets.

Beneath the woman down the hall, there is another woman. She is tucked beneath ruffles of skirt and ebony corset. She is a small woman, this woman beneath another woman, but she is happy.