Summer in the Invisible City

by Juliana Romano

  “Did you have fun at the beach?” my mom asks, when we sit down at our favorite restaurant.

  “It was okay. Have you ever been to the Rockaways?” I ask her.

  “Hmm . . . have I?” she muses. “Yes. I’m pretty sure.”

  “Did you like it?” I ask.

  “Did I? I think so.” She shrugs. And then she points to the eggplant. “Have you tried the bharta tonight? It’s especially good. I don’t know how they make it so good here.”

  “It’s weird how much where you’re from affects who you are,” I say. “There was this guy at the beach from New Hampshire and it just made me think, wow, what would that be like, you know?”

  My mom nods and reaches for the naan.

  “Did you ever wish we lived in the country? So we could be outdoors more?” I ask.

  “I feel like we’re outdoors plenty,” she replies. “You walk to school every day.”

  “I know but still. It’s weird how nature is this commodity that people have to buy and sell,” I say, thinking about what Sam said earlier.

  My mom takes a bite of rice and smiles. “There is so much going on in that mind tonight, huh?”

  —

  After dinner, I go into the new FroyoWorld on our corner and get a huge vanilla and chocolate swirl. My mom waits outside because she’s too disciplined to get one herself.

  We walk back to our apartment up Avenue A, watching people flow in and out of the trendy bars in sloppy, drunken packs. A taxi pulls up in front of us and a gaggle of sorority-looking girls in high heels tumbles out.

  “This neighborhood is always changing,” my mom muses, after they’ve passed. “It’s funny. When Allan lived in this neighborhood and we used to come down to see him, it was so much quieter. Now, it’s so busy.”

  I’m so surprised to hear Allan’s name I almost stop walking. My mom never talks about him. For the first time, I realize that she doesn’t know he’s coming to New York this summer. I have no idea how to tell her that I want to see him by myself.

  “Let me have a bite of that,” my mom says, eyeing my Froyo. “You’re not even eating it and it’s melting.”

  I hand her my spoon and she takes a huge bite and then another, avoiding the rainbow sprinkles because she thinks they taste like wax. I knew she was gonna end up eating half. That’s why I got such a big one.

  “Why you need to drown it in toppings I’ll never understand,” my mom says, more to herself than to me.

  If I told her about Allan, she’d think I was being ridiculous and dramatic. I’m sure she’d say, “Of course you can see him on your own,” but then when the time actually came, she’d forget about this conversation and assume she was invited. And then I’d have to disinvite her and that would be even more complicated.

  Around us, people weave down the sidewalk, winding around trash bags and parking meters. Some people hold hands with their friends and some walk alone, listening to their headphones and tuning out the real world. Everyone is trapped in their own heads and their own routines and their own sets of friends, just like me. Here I am: trapped in between two parents who hardly know each other and forced to swing across the empty space between them alone.

  Chapter 8

  My mom and I went to LA two summers ago so that she could do a Yoga workshop with an old dancer friend of hers. We stayed at her friend’s mansion near Hollywood, and every day, my mother did Yoga and I lay by the pool, bored.

  Then, on the second to last day, me and my mom made a plan to have lunch with Allan. It was going to be the first time I saw him in over five years.

  We met him at an outdoor Mexican restaurant. Everything in LA seemed weird and half empty, like you were on the outskirts of a city instead of in the middle of one.

  All through lunch, I couldn’t stop staring at Allan. When I was little and I saw him, I thought he was big and tall and weird looking, but now I saw that he was handsome. His features were strong. He had wide-set, heavy-lidded gray eyes and full lips. It occurred to me for the first time that I actually looked more like him than my mom.

  My whole life, I wished I looked like my mom with her high cheekbones and her delicate nose. I would watch people’s gazes flick from her perfect face to mine, trying to do the math—how did she make me? Realizing that I looked like Allan was exhilarating. In a way, looking like him felt like belonging to him.

  At lunch, when Allan caught me staring, he flinched as if my gaze stung. It seemed as though he could look at me, and he could speak to me, but he couldn’t do both simultaneously.

  The whole time, my mom kept doing this weird thing where she filled the air with all this useless chatter, which is really unusual because she’s such a quiet person.

  When Allan got up to go to the bathroom, my mom grabbed my hand.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” I snapped. “You’re the one who’s being weird.”

  That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed next to my mom in the unfamiliar guest room and watched patches of light glide across the ceiling when a car passed by on the street.

  Finally, I got up and tiptoed downstairs through the dark house. I crept through the back doors and walked out to the tennis court. I lay down on the smooth, soft ground. California wasn’t hot like New York. The night air was mild and damp. I looked up and watched as the clouds moved by too quickly, skating across the sky. Somewhere far away, a red searchlight drew circles in the dark.

  I thought about Allan and wondered if he was thinking about me. Did he leave New York because he loved LA so much? Or did he just want to get away from me and my mom?

  I wondered what his house was like. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to leave New York to live somewhere that felt so much like nowhere.

  —

  The next day, Allan stopped by where we were staying unannounced. I was still in pajamas and my mom had already gone to take her Yoga workshop so he and I were alone. It was the first time since I was nine years old that that had happened, when he lived in New York.

  “I have something for you,” he said when I answered the door. We were standing in the shadowy foyer of my mom’s friend’s house. “I figured I’d just leave it if you were out.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “This,” Allan said. He was holding a camera in a leather carrying case that fit it tight as a muzzle. “My old camera.”

  My heart felt as if it were literally expanding. “Really?”

  “Yeah. Come outside. I’ll show you how to use it,” Allan said.

  Allan and I sat side by side on the front porch. Looking up at him in the white LA sun, I could see him clearer than ever.

  He took the camera and unscrewed the lens from its base. Without the lens, the camera was a simple rectangle with a hole in the middle. In the opening was all this tiny, delicate machinery.

  “This is the shutter,” Allan explained. He pushed a button and the shutter opened and clapped so quickly, I almost missed it, like the batting of an insect’s wings.

  “What you just saw, that’s how pictures happen. That fraction of a second when this hole opened, that is when light gets in and exposes the film,” he explained. “This is really basic, but basically the wider the opening, the less time you need to expose the film.”

  I wasn’t following everything Allan was saying, but I didn’t mind. At lunch the other day, his attention had been scattered and nervous, but now, he was patient and clear.

  Everything about the camera felt ancient and magical. I looked through the viewfinder and practiced releasing the shutter. I loved the way that it sounded when I pressed the button, like a tiny heartbeat or a gasp of breath.

  “You’ll spend a fortune getting your film developed,” Allan said. “But it’s worth it. Good to participate in these dying art forms. Who knows, maybe your school even has a darkroom. It tak
es institutions a while to overhaul them and put in digital labs.”

  Everything Allan said came from a place of so much knowing, I suddenly became immensely curious about what else he knew. What kinds of things had he taught his students that he’d never had the chance to teach me?

  I loved my new camera and even more, I loved that it came from Allan. Here I was, my peeling black pedicure exposed on my barefoot toes, and I was happy. Nothing about this world was familiar, the wide lawn and the rows of palm trees, their elegant trunks all bending gently to the left like the arms of dancers in the corps de ballet. It was all new and strange.

  I looked up at Allan. His mouth was in a straight line but it felt like a smile. We hadn’t spent the same amount of time together as most fathers and daughters, but suddenly that didn’t matter so much. Now that I had his camera, we had a bond that was stronger than time.

  Chapter 9

  Monday afternoon, I’m the last person in the photo lab. Benji is in his office doing work, but all the other students have left. I could leave if I wanted to, because we don’t have any assignments to work on. But I stay because I’m dying to develop my film from the weekend and see the pictures I took.

  Alone, I step into the light-safe closet where we go to unload our film. Even a tiny bit of light could damage the image, so it’s completely sealed up. There is no darkness in the world like the flat, black darkness of this space. I fumble blindly until my fingers, now familiar with the procedure, pop the film canister open. I feel the negatives uncoil quickly, wings flapping in my palm. Gently, I work my way through the process. When the canister has swallowed up the whole roll, it’s safe.

  Then, I set out treating it in the chemical baths. While my film processes, I sit at the desk in the photo lab and thumb through one of the old stained PhotoPro magazines that’s been in here forever.

  —

  When I finally look up from the magazine, it’s four o’clock. If I left now, I could still catch some daylight. I could walk home the long way and get an iced coffee and get lost in the throngs of people stripping down to swimsuits on the grass at Tompkins Square Park. But I can’t bear the idea of leaving without seeing my new photos.

  I always liked photography. But ever since I started taking Benji’s class, it’s as if everywhere I look, I see photographs. There are two worlds now—the real world, and then this other world on top of it, or underneath it, which can be frozen and framed and lasts forever.

  I see this other world all the time now. I see it when I’m waiting for a bacon, egg, and cheese at the greasy bodega on the way to school. I fall in love with the way the cook’s crisp white apron contrasts against his dark, worn hands—leathery and ropy with old age. I saw it the other day when my mom asked me to go to the store to buy cinnamon. I was standing in front of the spices, and suddenly I felt as if the whole wall of jars was splitting open and jumping to life. Each jar had an identity and a history. There was a person who had designed the label, and a factory where the glass was molded, and each one had traveled around the world to end up in front of me. I knew it wasn’t an unusual sight and that this was just like any other aisle in the fluorescent-lit grocery store. But for some reason it felt miraculous. And this morning, while I was zoning out eating cereal at the kitchen table I saw a sliver of white light tremble on our shiny hardwood floors. It slipped from side to side like it was alive, and I felt compelled to take a picture.

  When I walk around with my camera, I feel certain that what I’m doing is important. I’m solving a mystery, but I don’t know what the mystery is. It’s as if my pictures are contributing to some story that needs to be told and I’m just a vessel, that some other force bigger than me is using me to channel its message.

  My phone lights up and I glance at the screen. At first, I think it’s just another Google alert about Allan, but then I do a double take. It’s an e-mail. I grab the phone and wait for the message to load, every fraction of a second an eternity. And then there it is: an e-mail from Allan, RE: Visit to NY?

  It reads, “Yes, I am headed to NY in July. Install starts Monday the 12th. Drop by the gallery anytime that week. Looking forward, XX, Allan.”

  I touch the screen lightly to close the e-mail, zinging with excitement.

  While I wait for my film to dry, I daydream about Allan’s visit. Maybe I should invite him to come to the darkroom one day while he’s in town. I imagine myself giving him a tour, showing him our different stations. I always feel so grown-up down here, adjusting all the timers and managing my film. I would love for Allan to see me like this. I can practically hear him telling me he’s impressed. “Sadie,” he’d say, “this is really something. You are really something.”

  —

  When the negatives are dry, I make proof sheets in the darkroom and then finally sit down with a magnifying glass and inspect my work. There it is: the last week of my life, compressed and chopped up into a grid of one-inch stills. Some are bad, like this series of my mom’s breakfast from the other day that I thought was going to be brilliant. But things that I don’t even remember taking came out well, like this photograph I took of the side of a bus with a stupid advertisement on it. I was trying to photograph the advertisement, but what I didn’t realize is that I took a picture of one of the passengers on the bus: a white-haired woman staring out the window.

  In real life, the world is a jumbled mess. But in here, it has an order. As neat as a string of beads. There’s a message in these pictures, I’m sure of it. Like Morse code or fortune-telling tea leaves. I just wish I knew how to read it.

  Chapter 10

  Willa got a 102 percent (a grade I didn’t even know was possible) on her AP Bio test, and to celebrate she wants to go see the worst, most overproduced, biggest budgeted, 3-D action movie of the summer, Stellar Warrior 2.

  We’re meeting at Union Square, but I’m early so I watch strangers pour out of the throat of the subway station. People are always moving in the city, twisting up and down stairways, and gliding to the tops of high-rises in elevators. Sometimes, I think this place is nothing more than an ocean, with layers of interlocking life.

  “Congratulations!” I squeal when I see Willa, throwing my arms around her neck. “You’re so smart. How does it feel to be so smart?”

  “Get off of me.” She laughs.

  We walk and get candy at Duane Reade so we won’t have to buy the expensive kind at the movie theater.

  On the way there, I tell Willa about Allan’s e-mail. I didn’t want to tell her that he was coming to New York until he had e-mailed me himself, otherwise I knew she would reprimand me for stalking.

  “Wow,” Willa says when I’m done telling her. “How do you feel about that?”

  “How do I feel about what?” I ask.

  “About seeing your dad,” she says.

  “I’m excited,” I say, though isn’t it obvious? “It’s really good timing because I’m obsessed with my photo class and I can’t wait to show him what I’m working on. It’s gonna be so different than it was when I was younger because now we have stuff in common. Like, real stuff.”

  Willa nods carefully, and then says, “That’s great.”

  “And you’re finally gonna meet him!” I squeal. “You have to come to his opening. It’s gonna be amazing.”

  Willa purses her lips.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” she says, blinking away whatever was on her mind.

  “I wonder if he’s gonna be like how you imagine,” I say. “How do you picture him?”

  “I don’t really picture him being any way,” Willa replies.

  Willa is being sort of hard to read, so I say, “You want to meet him, right?”

  “Of course,” she says.

  I must look skeptical, because she smiles brightly, loops her arm through mine, and says with a little more enthusiasm, “Come on! You know I’m excited to finally me
et your dad! His show is gonna be so great.”

  —

  I follow Willa through the revolving doors into the bright, fluorescent-lit Duane Reade.

  “Izzy was really funny about it because she didn’t know who Allan was when I told her, because no one knows artists by name. Unless, they’re like, van Gogh or whatever,” I say. “But then she said she Googled him the other day and she was like ‘Sadie, I had no idea your dad is famous.’”

  “Izzy Tobias,” Willa says cryptically.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Are you guys, like, becoming friends?” she asks.

  “I don’t know, maybe,” I say. “The beach was really fun last week, you should have come. Phaedra Bishop was there and she’s so cool. She’s so down to earth even though her family is who they are.”

  “Down to earth?” Willa scoffs. “Yeah, right.”

  “You don’t even know her,” I reply.

  “Neither do you,” Willa quips. “Besides, I just don’t get why you idolize people so much. She’s not any cooler than you. Even if her godmom is Beyoncé or whatever people say.”

  “I don’t idolize people,” I reply, putting air quotes around the word people. “But she’s Phaedra. Everyone idolizes her.”

  “I don’t.” Willa shrugs.

  “Yeah, but you’re abnormal,” I say. “You’re . . . I don’t know. You’re you.”

  “Aw, you’re making me blush,” Willa teases, rolling her eyes.

  We’ve arrived at the candy aisle, and Willa puts her hands on her hips and examines our options.

  Watching Willa decide between Junior Mints and Hot Tamales, it occurs to me that we haven’t done this nearly enough lately. We’ve both been so busy with our separate summer programs. It feels good to be reunited.

  —

  Stellar Warrior 2 takes place in outer space, and with our 3-D glasses on, we zoom through black holes and swim through the galaxy. Broken pieces of spaceships float right out in front of our noses. The air-conditioning combined with the candy sugar-high combined with the way that Willa looks like such a cute nerd with her regular glasses and her 3-D glasses on at the same time makes it a perfect night. Halfway through the movie, I take a selfie of the two of us and post it online. And then the people behind us shush me and tell me to turn off my phone and that makes me and Willa crack up.