The hole my mother left in me never healed. It’s like the space my wisdom teeth left in the days after I had them pulled: a raw gap, tender and prone to infection. The woman in the metal cage-her open 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, smiling women who bake cookies for groups of children in Nestlé commercials? Maria left advice-imparting to my dad. I think she was uncomfortable playing mom to the little girl who never knew hers.
“I thought you really liked him,” Iris says.
“I did,” I say. “I do.” I look up at Brice, a little uncomfortable talking about anything in front of him, but he’s got his eyes on the TV above the bar. Good boy.
“So give him a chance,” says Iris. “When was the last time you actually liked a guy?”
It’s been a while. “I know,” I say. We both drink from our beers, and then Iris changes the subject.
“How was your day?” she asks. When we created the Mom game, “how was your day” was very important. Mothers always ask about your day. Apparently.
“I was on a body. A woman. She was naked.”
“You saw her?”
I nod. “She was just lying there, in this crane. In the cold. And there were all these men around. Oh, and there were Jews.”
“Jews?”
“Like, my mom’s Jews. With the…” I make a spiral motion with my finger indicating sidecurls.
“Really? Did you talk to them?”
“I talked to a little boy, actually. Just for a minute.”
Hannah comes back and takes her seat. Iris straightens from her Mom posture; our game wasn’t a secret the year after her mom died, but four years later, I think we might both be a little sheepish about how much we still rely on it.
Right behind Hannah comes a group of men. They squeeze in next to Brice, one snagging Jenny’s stool.
“Excuse me,” says Hannah. “This seat is taken.”
“I know,” says the new occupant, a big guy with a goatee. “By me.”
“Uh, I don’t think so,” she says, snapping instantly into bitch mode. Hannah raises the left corner of her upper lip and reaches her arm across the bar, in some attempt to keep him from ordering. “My friend is in the bathroom and this is her seat.”
“Look,” says the man, turning toward her in his enormous puffy coat. His eyes are bloodshot and he smells like dust. “I’m fucking beat and your friend didn’t leave no handbag…”
“She didn’t need to leave a handbag,” says Hannah. “I said I’d watch her seat.”
Now the man’s friends are watching. I’m trying to figure out how to avoid becoming involved. Brice steps back, probably thinking the same thing. Iris and I angle away, sipping our beers and watching.
The man sighs. He looks exhausted. “Well, you did a shitbag job, lady.”
Hannah puffs out her chest. “Lady! Don’t you fucking…”
“Look, hon, all you had to do was ask me to move. I’m not a pig. But I don’t take orders from no bitch. Not today.”
Hannah’s mouth hangs open and for a moment, she’s speechless. And then Jenny comes back from the bathroom.
“Uh, hello!” shouts Jenny, taking long, uneasy strides toward the bar. She’s moving so fast, she stumbles and plows right into the man in her seat, spilling a pint glass of beer she must’ve swiped from some pushover Florida boy all over him. The man jumps up, and as he tries to wipe the liquid off his lap, shoves Jenny, who falls dramatically to the floor.
“Oh my God!” she screams.
“Did you see that?” shouts Hannah.
Jesus. I hop off my bar stool and kneel down beside Jenny. “Come on,” I say. “You’re fine. It’s okay.”
“He fucking hit her!” shouts Hannah.
“He didn’t hit her,” says Iris, but not loud enough that Hannah pays her any attention.
The man is wiping beer off his jacket, unzipping the front and shaking out the cuffs. His friends have backed away. Tony appears and offers Jenny his hand to get up.