Invisible City Read Online Free PDF Page A

mouth and exposed breasts and bare head, her stark, cruel anonymity—poked at it. I’ve had countless fantasies about my mom’s life the last twenty years: I’ve imagined her married, beaten by her husband, dying in childbirth, turning mute with the shame of abandoning me, committing suicide and leaving a note addressed to me; in my mind she’s come to Orlando and watched my school play from the back row, then ducked out when the curtain fell; she’s fled again, and is trying to contact Oprah to reunite us. She could be doing anything right now. She could have been in that cage.
    Hannah and Jenny go to the bathroom. Tony is no longer behind the bar, so Iris and I order beers from a woman with frizzy hair and blue eyeliner. She takes our order and fills it without ever really looking at us. I assume Tony knows I’m coming here tonight—Friday night is UCF night—but I’ve given him the brush-off since our last date. I’ve been processing a conversation we had over dinner at a brick-oven pizza place on Flatbush a little over a week ago, and I’m still not sure how I feel. We’d just ordered wine and were talking about our days. I told him about being sent to cover a fire in a housing project in the Bronx the day before.
    “Did they send you because they know you’ve written about that before?” he asked.
    “What?” I said. I’d written a series in college about fire hazards in Section 8 housing, but I was pretty sure I hadn’t told him about that.
    “The fires in those apartments. From last year. You won a prize, right?”
    “You read that?”
    “I Googled you. It was really … sad. I couldn’t believe the things that one guy said to you. ‘You get what you pay for.’ Unbelievable.”
    I should have been flattered. Even Iris was impressed when I told her about it afterward. She said it meant he was genuinely interested in me, and that he didn’t feel threatened by my success. But I felt violated. Like he’d poked into my world when I hadn’t invited him. Like he should have asked permission. I stiffened up immediately. When the pizza came—a scrumptious-looking white pie with artichoke hearts and spinach—I had no appetite. My stomach was buzzing with anxiety and we didn’t stay for dessert. Mercifully, Tony read me, and just gave me a quick hug when we parted at the steps of the subway.
    “Where’s Tony?” asks Iris.
    “He was here a minute ago,” I say. Brice is standing behind her, gazing around the bar, tipping a bottle of Bud Light to his lips every minute or so. He’s like her page.
    “Are you still pissed he Googled you?”
    I shrug and drink my beer.
    She puts her hand on my leg and leans toward me, tilting her head. Iris’s mother died during our freshman year. She’d been fighting breast cancer since Iris was thirteen, but the cancer won. I saw pictures of the two of them before prom and at Iris’s high school graduation. Her mom didn’t look good. Her skin was gray and her eyes hollow. After she died, Iris used to cry about all the ugly things she thought about her mom. She said she used to beg her to wear a pretty scarf or a hat to cover up her bald head. She tried to drag her for manicures and to department stores for clothes. But her mother didn’t care, or didn’t have the energy, or both. Iris said she felt like her mom had died years before the cancer killed her. She gave up on herself, Iris said. She didn’t think it was worth it to pretend she was still pretty. Her mom couldn’t have known how much her daughter needed her to pretend. Both motherless at nineteen, we got high one night and pretended we were each other’s mothers. Tell Mom what’s wrong, we said, and we took turns putting our hands on each other’s knees, leaning in and nodding sympathetically, listening, pledging love “no matter what.” As Mom, it turned out, we both gave pretty good advice. Who knows who I was modeling: some mash-up of Mrs. Garrett from The Facts of Life and the silent,