Love Me Back

by Merritt Tierce

  A fucking virgin, everybody. Chris grabs my hand and yanks it up into the air like I won a boxing match. This is Marie, and today’s her first day in a restaurant. Welcome to hell, baby. He laughs a sadistic laugh. He has beautiful beautiful teeth. I pull my hand down and look toward the office but Mr. George is on the phone, his back to us.

  Don’t look at him, says Christopher. You gotta make it with us. He don’t know shit about how to wait tables.

  I nod. I know, I say, I was just looking at the clock.

  Uh-huh, says Christopher. There’s only two times in a restaurant: before and after. You walk in, you white-knuckle it, try not to fuck up till it’s over and then it’s over. You made money or you didn’t.

  God, leave her alone, Chris, says one of the women. Ignore him, she says to me. He’s so full of himself it’s disgusting.

  Christopher walks toward her so I follow him. What’s disgusting, Tara, he says softly, is how full of me you’d like to be. Fuck off, says Kelly. Tara yells toward the office, Raj, Chris is harassing me again! but then both women start giggling. Don’t worry, sweetie, Kelly says. He’s all talk. That’s not what she said last night, says Christopher. Kelly rolls her eyes. Fine, you win, she says. I would rather fuck myself with an OG bread stick but you can pretend if you want.

  Don’t believe anything he says, she tells me as she pushes open the kitchen door with her back, pulling her hair up into a ponytail.

  How old are you, anyway, asks Christopher, leading us into a humid room off the kitchen where a man in a plastic apron says Hola. He is using a big nozzle on a spring to spray some large metal pans in a deep sink. This is the dish pit, yells Christopher over the noise of the water and the clanking of the pans. And watch out, they haven’t put down the mats yet. You got good shoes? He leans over and pinches my pant leg away from my knee, lifting the hem so he can see my black canvas sneakers. He has three fingers behind my knee, and when he closes his hand his thumb is so high up on my inseam I look at him to see what it means. He looks at me back and squeezes as he says Those won’t work. You need some nonslip soles or you’ll wind up on your ass wearing cannelloni. Payless in the mall has some cheap ones.

  I’ll be eighteen in two weeks, I say, adding a year. He whistles. He puts an arm around my shoulder and yells at the dishwasher, pointing at me with his other hand, Hey José, es una bambina!

  Stop, I say. What? he says. I just said you’re a babe. I know what you said, I say. Ella hablas español también, he yells at José. No me llamo José, says the dishwasher. He sticks out a wet red hand. Mario, he says. Marie, I say, shaking his hand. Ah, Maria! he says. Somos gemelos! I smile. Mucho gusto, I say. Come on, says Christopher, enough fucking around. Let’s get to work.

  The third man I’d ever had sex with was an ex–corrections officer who is six-four and the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen or ever will. It may seem rash to hand out that superlative to someone I met as a teenager, but perfection cannot be perfected. His teeth were perfectly square, even, and white, his smile dazzling beneath thick blue-black hair, his eyes a brilliant unseen color of bottle green backlit with navy, his olive skin so smooth and taut it made you feel that if you closed your eyes you might be his, you might be somewhere else. In the restaurant where we worked, he would take four crates of clean glasses from the dish machine, stack them, and balance them above his shoulder with one arm to bring them into the kitchen. I could barely lift two to chest level using my whole body. But there was no bulk, he was just on the solid side of lean. The strength in him was panther-dark and menacing and in spite of the ordinary green lines across the toes of his dress socks I was too scared of him to get wet. He fucked me anyway, with a giant penis I couldn’t bring myself to look at. I was like a child, I was quiet and tense and bit my tongue and lip to keep silent when he pulled out and ground himself to a sterile stop on me. Pushing through every layer of sensitive tissue and fat to pin me to the bed, he succeeded in giving himself an orgasm, avoiding ejaculation, controlling his breathing, and keeping his face composed. He made no sound and took no notice of me—I knew of his completion only through the ripples against my mons. Later when I put my hand on his on the gearshift on the way back to the restaurant he said from behind his aviators Do you know what the words No one mean. Three weeks later he was fired in the middle of a shift for harassing the underage salad girl and I had to take over his tables.

  I think he could tell I was pregnant the day we did it. I don’t think he cared. I begged him to fuck me. I followed him around the restaurant, touching him. I stood next to him when we sang Buona Festa. I didn’t even know how to fuck. It was four months then but I still didn’t show through my clothes at five, or six and a half. At seven I had to move the apron down to my hips. I worked there until she was born.

  We went back to the restaurant together that day because we were both between doubles. I know that’s what we did but I forget that. It seems like I stayed on the bed and he left. I see myself naked. I hadn’t touched my belly yet. I never looked at it. Christopher didn’t answer my phone calls. I started calling him that night after work but he never answered. I called him all the time. I knew he wouldn’t answer but then I would be calling him without even knowing why or what I would say. In the restaurant he’d say Hey if I said Hey Christopher but he never said my name and he ignored me. I see myself on the bed naked calling him. Christopher. Christopher. If he would just answer I would touch my belly.

  I never wore makeup in high school so I didn’t know how to do it. But I bought some Maybelline at the drugstore and I spread it on my face. It made me look older and ugly. Even though he ignored me I would wait in the parking lot until I saw his Camaro pull in and then I would time my walk so we reached the employee entrance at the same time. The day I wore the makeup I couldn’t tell he was looking at me because of the sunglasses but he said Come here when we got close to the door. What is it, I said. I was standing next to him and he had his hand on the door but he took it away from the handle and pulled me to him by my arm. I tripped forward and he shoved me back. I just need to get this shit off your chin, he said. Jesus. He rubbed across my jawline with the heel of his fist and then took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his hand on it. He whipped the handkerchief unfolded with a snap and pressed it to my face with his palm. I was humiliated but his hand was on my face and that was the first time he had touched me since that other afternoon. I could feel the warmth of his hand on my whole face and I could smell his aftershave and I put my hand up over his hand, to push his hand into my face harder. He jerked his hand down when I did that. What are you doing you little freak, he said. Go wash your face.

  I washed my face in the women’s restroom. We weren’t supposed to use the front-of-house restrooms even before the restaurant was open. I hadn’t broken any rules before that but I didn’t want to use the employee restroom because it was unisex and anyone who came in would see me. When I came out of the restroom there was the pay phone between the women’s and the men’s restrooms and I picked up the receiver and called the baby’s father. We weren’t supposed to use the phone ever. My ear was still wet from washing my face. I called him collect. He answered on the first ring and the operator said Will you accept the charges from Marie Young and he said Yes and then he said Are you okay? and I said Let’s get married.

  I tried to stiff my busser once. I didn’t know anything. I hadn’t made any money that night. Maybe thirty-five dollars and it was two days past my due date. We were supposed to give the busser three percent of our sales and they had to initial the cashout. I just skipped that part and the busser said something to Tara. She confronted me and said Mama I know you’re about to pop and all but that shit is not cool. Give him his money and don’t ever do that again. He’s got a family too.

  I’m so sorry, I said to him. I know he was mad when he told Tara but when I told him I was sorry he hugged me and said it was okay. I gave him the money. It was only six dollars.

  My mother thought I was trying
to lose you. The midwife told me if I didn’t start gaining weight she was going to put me in the hospital. I weighed one hundred twenty-eight pounds when I got pregnant with you, and at the end of the first three months I weighed one hundred ten. I woke up sick, in the same bedroom I’d been sleeping in since I was four. I’d puke at six in the morning and lie on the floor in the bathroom in my robe with the shower running on cold so there’d still be hot water when I could finally stand. I listened to the running water and took tentative mouse-bites of a banana. I was a temp at the corporate office of Sally Beauty Company and I would puke there at nine. The restrooms were too far from my cubicle, so every day I puked in my trash can.

  I was supposed to be compiling the departments’ Y2K contingency plans into a comprehensive binder for my boss but instead I read The Seven Storey Mountain. My boss wanted everything in binders so if I heard someone coming toward my cubicle I popped open the binder rings and then snapped them shut. I usually puked again around noon. Sometimes I made it until two. After the third puke I would be painfully hungry. Shaky, dizzy, pale. I would eat my lunch slowly over the last two hours of the workday but on the drive home I would puke one more time.

  At night I would call your dad, who was working as a trim carpenter for his uncle’s contracting business in East Texas. He spent the day wiping sweat out of his eyes so he wouldn’t miss with the nail gun or the circular saw, finishing closets and chair rail and laying baseboard and trying not to keel over from heatstroke. We talked about how we’d never want to live in that kind of house, the two-car garage most of what you saw from the street. As if a house was mainly a place to keep your cars. We talked about that but not as if we assumed we would live together in a house. Not as a joint assertion of what we wanted for our unified future. Or maybe he did mean it that way but he knew I didn’t.

  I didn’t want to talk about Sally so I asked questions about housebuilding while the pauses between my questions and his answers got longer and longer and finally he’d say Well I’m passing out, I guess I’ll let you go, I have to get up early. And I’d say Don’t let me go and he’d say quietly We’ll figure it out, Marie, but we never talked about it. It felt like if one of us would make a decision the other would accept it, but neither of us knew how to take the lead.

  We had spent only five days together. Spring break of our senior year, 1999, but I had skipped a grade so I was sixteen and he was eighteen. We met on a mission trip to Mexico. We were next to each other on the airplane and it was like we had always known each other. In our ordinary environments I would have thought he was too popular and good-looking for me and he would have thought I was too smart for him, but we had none of that context to impede us, and as the plane circled down over the vast bowl of Mexico City he leaned across me to look out the window, letting his arm press against mine. That was so much then. Look, I said, it goes on forever. The colorful jumbled squares of buildings spread out in all directions. When it was our turn to exit the plane he stepped into the aisle and motioned for me to go in front of him. I reached overhead for my backpack but he was a head taller and said I got it, Shorty.

  They told me the sickness would stop at twelve weeks but it didn’t. The temp position at Sally wasn’t renewed, probably because the CPA stationed next to me was tired of listening to me puke. At fifteen weeks I woke up at six and went into the bathroom and knelt by the commode, but then I realized I didn’t need to puke, and the strange new fluttering in my belly was you.

  Chili’s

  It looked like you were selling drugs to Barrett, says Kevin. Kevin is the general manager of the Chili’s where I work. He is attractive but has a sour edge. So I can’t let you keep working here, he says.

  I have a bad habit of becoming quieter and quieter the more important it is that I say something. I stare at Kevin’s shoes. I did sell Barrett the drugs. About thirty Vicodins left over from wisdom teeth. But I don’t use drugs. I don’t even drink. I am thinking about whether or not it is ironic that I am being fired for selling drugs when I know I am much less advanced in the field than my coworkers. That Alanis Morissette song about isn’t it ironic is always playing on the sound system and I overheard one of my tables talking about how nothing in the song was actually ironic. I wanted to say Isn’t that ironic? but the people are not there for you. They are there for the food and the people they came with.

  I am so clueless I brought the pills to work in the prescription bottle, and then poured them into a plastic ramekin in the to-go station by the back door. Kevin walked by right as Barrett handed me some money and I handed him some pills. I went about my sidework and I suppose Kevin went about thinking over what he’d seen because he didn’t call me into the office until the shift was over.

  Even though I haven’t said anything Kevin waffles. I don’t get it, he says. I know you have a baby. You’re a hard worker. I saw Damon has you closing three times this week.

  I like closing, I say. Well I can’t have people selling drugs in the restaurant, he says. I know, I say. Kevin says I mean, it’s one thing if Barrett had a headache or something and you gave him some medicine you had. And then he happened to owe you some money for some reason. Is that what happened?

  Yes, I say emphatically, finally looking up at him. After a long pause Kevin says Okay. Go finish your station. If Barrett has a headache we have Advil in the first-aid kit.

  I’m sorry, I say. Thank you.

  Barrett had emo hair and ear gauges and wore one of those black belts with all the silver metal studs. He had mesmerizing eyes, the rare and exact shade of the pale flesh of a honeydew melon; unfortunately for his habits his eyes were sensitive, the irises nearly translucent and the whites prone to red. He kept Visine in his apron and I’d see him putting the drops in all the time but always in a walk-in or dry storage or somewhere the managers didn’t usually go. He slouched around in his slip-on Vans and had only one mild speed. You can’t be in the weeds if you don’t care, he said.

  At night she slept with us and when he got up at five to take a shower she stirred. I put her in her car seat and set it on the floor in the bathroom while he showered. She’d fall right to sleep again in there, I guess because the sound of the water and the steam were nice. I went back to bed and he left for the job site at five forty and she slept in the bathroom until seven thirty, when she got hungry and cried. I went to get her and her diaper was heavy and she fussed while I changed it but then I lay back down with her and nursed her and we both fell asleep again until nine or so. This was what we did every morning. Then laundry or some other housework. She was a calm quiet baby. She was happy. And if she cried I nursed her and she was fine again.

  That was the best body I ever had, and the worst mind. I was seventeen. I was slender and strong and I also had swollen C-cup breasts. I had never even worn a bra before my milk came in for her, and I had always been ashamed of my breasts before then. The way they looked if I leaned over. Sad little triangular flaps of skin just holding my nipples to my chest. If I was lying on my back they disappeared completely and I could have been a boy except that my nipples were big and square. I had no breast tissue. I didn’t feel like a girl when I was a child. I didn’t feel female. I felt neutral. Then I had her and I had breasts and I felt like I had become a girl. Femininity is shocking. Women always seem smaller and softer than I expect, when I hug them. Even if they don’t look small or soft. When I had breasts I was aware of them all the time. They were something new in my field of vision and they made my body intrude into another plane of space. But my mind was an open sore. It was black. I couldn’t tell if I was deep inside it or totally outside it. I would imagine being fatally cleaved all day long. By a gallows axe, the T-shaped kind. By a heavy medieval sword like Excalibur. Or bludgeoned, usually blows to my head, usually by the butt of a rifle.

  I don’t know what we did all day. I went for walks with her. I read while she nursed. Magazines and biographies mostly. I would go to the library and take one of the subscription cards from something
that looked interesting and check Bill Me and then I would get two or sometimes three issues before they cut it off. I used to read the magazines at the library, because there was a nice overstuffed chair there and I could put my leg up to support her while she nursed, which was the most comfortable position. If she was nursing on the left I would put my left leg up with my knee bent and my foot in the chair and that way I didn’t have to put all her weight on my arm. Then I would switch. Then she would fall asleep. I could read through three or four magazines that way. But one day when it was exceptionally quiet there she was smacking and swallowing and I liked the sound myself but it’s not a subtle sound. There’s no mistaking it. I didn’t mess with any of those awkward cloths they sell to cover you while you nurse, I just lifted my shirt and put her on. But we were good at it, you would never see my nipple or even my skin the way we did it. Still the reference librarian came up to me that one day and she stopped about five feet away from the chair like I was contagious and she leaned toward me and whispered I’m sorry honey but you can’t do that here. About that time the baby choked because the milk was flowing so hard and she came off the nipple and the streams were pulsing out into the air. The milk went all over my shirt and the baby’s face. She started crying and I had to put my hand right on my breast and push on it because that was the only thing that would stop it. I said Okay to the librarian and I stood up with the baby but I knew she wouldn’t stop crying until I put her back on, so I turned away from the librarian and got her nursing again while I was standing there. Then I said Would you mind putting these magazines back for me. We walked out. There was nobody there.