Play Me Backwards

by Adam Selzer

  She had been dressed like all the other girls before, but now she was showing up in black blouses and a lot of mascara, like she was trying to go goth using only things she already had in her wardrobe. We didn’t let her into the back room, obviously, and we watched what we talked about when she was around, but it was kind of charming to see her going from prep to freak, in her way. I guess she found that she felt more at home among the weirdos in black than she did in “girl world.” She’d found her place in the universe.

  The fact that her place in the universe was a joint like the Ice Cave was sort of bad luck for her, but sometimes your place in the world is enough just because it’s yours. That’s what I decided when I walked out of the West Egg. It may have been better than the Cave, but it would never be mine.

  Just because something is classier than something else doesn’t make it automatically better. Take my parents, for one. All the times they could have been at the West Egg, they were staying home, dressing like hillbillies, and making fun of meals like creamed cow brains on toast and dips where the main ingredient was crumbled Cheetos. They chose fun over class, and there’s something to be said for that.

  The weekend before the debutante ball, they decided to do another food disaster night, and Paige came to eat with us again. This time I persuaded my parents not to do Lester and Wanda, or to do the meal “in character” at all, but they still insisted that we at least dress according to the cookbook, which in this case meant dressing up like we worked in an early 1960s advertising office.

  “The important thing,” my mom said, “is that you have to wear your suit.”

  “Yeah,” said Dad. “If you think we’re going to let you get away with not wearing it in front of us now and then, you’ve got another thing coming, kid.”

  The cookbook of the night was Cooking to Reel Him In, a weird little volume from 1962 that featured a cartoonish drawing of a mermaid with pointy, nippleless bare breasts on the cover. She was holding a fishing line and reeling in a guy dressed as an executive. I took a picture of it and sent it to Paige as soon as I saw it.

  “Oh, God,” she texted back. “Do you think they’re trying to tell us they know we have sex?”

  “Why would they use a mermaid to tell us that?” I replied. “Mermaids can’t do anything. No parts below the belly button.”

  I didn’t tell her that my parents always used to give me thinly veiled warnings about the dangers of drugs, casual sex, and online fandom communities and shit during food disasters; I guess they thought that hearing that sort of stuff from Lester and Wanda or whomever made it seem less traumatic. So the topless mermaid might have been a subtle message from them, for all I knew. Maybe they’d picked a mermaid with really pointy boobs as a way of warning me that I could poke my eye out.

  Paige spent the rest of the afternoon while I was at work texting me ideas of exactly what she could do with me as a mermaid, and did such a good job of convincing me that I was tempted to pick her up early so we could spend some time in the nook.

  With my suit on and hair combed in the early sixties “duck’s ass” style, I could have passed for a junior ad exec, or maybe even a wannabe member of the Rat Pack from the days before any of them had gone to “Stan’s place.” I looked in the mirror and tried to be smooth, early sixties style.

  “Hey there, doll face,” I said. “Dynamite gams. Get ’em into the kitchen or it’s ring-a-ding-ding.”

  I felt like a complete asshole, but I couldn’t help but wonder if Paige would actually like it if I talked like that. She loved those romance books where the guys act like controlling dicks, and girls in her circle certainly didn’t seem to mind dating douche bags. Douchey guys never did seem to hurt for company.

  Paige liked the suit, in any case. When I picked her up, she was wearing a more modest version of the sort of dress she’d been wearing on Valentine’s Day, and she gave me a look like she wanted to eat me alive as soon as she opened the door.

  “You should wear that much more often,” she said.

  “Where could I wear it?” I asked.

  “School.”

  “No one wears a suit to school except teachers.”

  “Trust me,” she said. “If you had been dressing like that all year, I would have had a lot more competition than just a girl who lives four thousand miles away.”

  “The fact that it’s black doesn’t intimidate you?” I asked. “The salesman said girls are afraid of men in black.”

  “Not me.”

  And she moved her hand across my chest and sort of purred, which I’d never heard her do before. As we drove to my house, she showed me just how unafraid she really was. I tried to return the favor as well as I could while driving, but pretty soon I had to insist that we stop fooling around, before I ended up at home with a conspicuous hard-on. I spent the last block or two of the drive forcing myself to think about unsexy things like Stan’s underpants, the razor from the West Egg, and Mrs. Smollet.

  My parents’ outfits were actual period getups that Dad had found in some vintage store out in Valley Junction, and while they cooked, they were talking to each other like they worked in a midcentury ad agency. Mom was pretending to be a secretary who wanted a coffee break every five minutes and dreamed of marrying an exec and moving to Long Island. Dad kept calling her “sweet cheeks” and generally harassing her, which just made her giggle. Paige and I sat at the table, and she seemed to be enjoying the show, while I wished I could just disappear. I did not need to see my parents pinching each other’s butts.

  “You guys said you’d just be yourselves tonight,” I said. “You promised.”

  “We said we’d be ourselves when we ate,” said Dad. “Didn’t say anything about when we were cooking.”

  Paige leaned over to me. “It’s adorable,” she said. “They’re role-playing!”

  “Don’t even say it,” I whispered.

  I’d already figured out that Mom and Dad weren’t really going to food disaster conventions when they went away for the weekend, but I’d never really connected the dots to notice the general kinkiness behind their hobby.

  “So, what are you two office drones cooking up?” I called out, if only to change the subject.

  “Turkey Marco Polo,” said Mom. “Turkey, broccoli, and Gilbert’s supreme sauce. Only without any actual Gilbert’s products, since they went belly-up years ago.”

  She passed us over the cookbook, which featured the logo for Gilbert’s Condiments right on the rock the mermaid was sitting on. This meant that it was one of those cookbooks that wasn’t so much a collection of recipes as an ad for Gilbert’s Condiments. Every recipe called for ungodly amounts of some Gilbert’s product or another; the “supreme sauce” used three different Gilbert’s sauces mixed together. The turkey and broccoli part sounded okay, but when slathered in the sauce, I wasn’t sure. The grainy black-and-white picture made it look like a mass of engine oil and boogers.

  Mom and Dad had substituted store-brand condiments for the Gilbert’s, of course. Around the stove the two of them were still carrying on like they’d just snuck out of a production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Dad was making lewd advances and Mom was giggling and saying, “Oh, Mr. Harris, you’re such a card!”

  “Seriously, you guys,” I said. “I’m gonna need therapy over here.”

  “If you squares want us to knock it off, come finish the cooking for us and we’ll sit down,” said Dad.

  “Gladly.”

  We switched places, and they sat down and just talked about real estate and accounting, like normal parents, while Paige and I picked up the cooking. There wasn’t much left to do besides stir at that point.

  The sauce, to my utter surprise, actually smelled fantastic. This appeared to be one of those rare food disasters that was a whole lot better than it looked. I turned up the heat and leaned over to stir it while Paige worked on one of the side dishes, and for a minute we were just cooking together, and it was kind of awesome. Not countin
g sex, we hadn’t had a project to collaborate on since the Slushee hunt. I’d been feeling like I was in the doghouse since the whole thing with her sister, but things seemed okay now, and any resentment or animosity seemed to disappear in the steam that rose above the stove. When we were just about finished, Paige leaned in to me.

  “This is fun,” she said. “Thanks for having me.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “I thought the food disaster thing was kind of weird the first time, but I think I get it now. My parents never have fun together like that.”

  “Not in front of you, anyway.”

  She socked me in the shoulder, and we got back to cooking.

  True to their word, Mom and Dad didn’t pretend to be 1960s office employees at the table. Instead of pretending to be a secretary who enjoyed sexual harassment, Mom talked about real estate horror stories, and Paige and I told customer horror stories, and we all laughed and had a good time.

  When we were all finished, Dad suggested we all go someplace for dessert.

  “I wouldn’t mind going into the Ice Cave dressed like this,” I said. “Just to see the looks on everyone’s faces.”

  “Please not there,” said Paige.

  “Well, not Penguin Foot Creamery, either,” I said.

  “We’re all dressed up,” said Dad. “Why don’t we go to the West Egg Steakhouse or something?”

  Everyone else seemed to think this was a great idea, and I couldn’t exactly object. I’d just been picking on Dad for not going to more places like the West Egg a couple of weeks before, and I guess that in doing so I’d basically dared him to start going there more. I could only hope that no one there would recognize me from a few days before. I hadn’t been totally up-front with Paige about what had gone on there, and my parents didn’t know I was applying for new jobs at all.

  With the suit on, and a mission to keep from being recognized, I could easily imagine myself as James Bond as we walked into the West Egg. I almost wanted to try out some of Bond’s old single entendres on Paige, but it wasn’t the sort of thing I dared to do in front of my parents.

  We sat at a table near the bar, surrounded by a bunch of overgrown business school bozos, and just kept chatting, but I zoned out while I looked around. I recognized the formerly scruffy guy when he came out of the kitchen for a second, and he caught my eye. Bad news.

  A few minutes later, when a waiter brought out our desserts, he grinned at me.

  “We’ve been passing your application around in the kitchen all week,” he said.

  “What application?” I asked.

  “Aren’t you the guy who cussed Brad out the other day?”

  “Who’s Brad?” I asked.

  “The manager. Some guy sent in this funny job application, and Brad somehow didn’t notice it was a joke and offered the guy a gig. I hear the guy threw the application in his face, cussed him out, and ran off. One of the guys in the dish pit said it was you.”

  I was swelling with pride on the inside—my antics seemed to have made me a legend among the staff. But I couldn’t take credit for it. Not here. Not in front of Paige or my parents.

  “Must have been someone else,” I said.

  My parents didn’t suspect a thing, as far as I could tell, since they didn’t even know I was sending applications around. But Paige started to look ill and basically dropped out of the conversation for most of dessert, and I felt that gnawing feeling back in my guts, knowing that a fight was probably coming as soon as we were alone.

  But she still looked ill when we were in my car later. When I started to drive in the direction of the nook, she just shook her head and pointed me in the general direction of Oak Meadow Mills.

  “Okay,” I admitted. “I went in for an interview there and walked out. It wasn’t quite like that guy was saying, though.”

  “Huh,” she said, looking out the window and not at me, so I couldn’t see how serious the look on her face was.

  “It didn’t pay much more than the Cave, and I doubt they would have let me take the night of the debutante ball off.”

  She nodded weakly, and I asked if she was mad.

  She took a deep breath, then, instead of actually answering, she asked me what was in the “supreme sauce” from the Turkey Marco Polo.

  “I just stirred it, but I think it was three sauces, a bit of white wine, and some half-and-half. Maybe some other seasonings.”

  “I think I might have gotten food poisoning,” she said. “I started feeling sick at the West Egg and now I feel like shit.”

  A minute later I dropped her off, and before I’d even found my way out of Oak Meadow Mills, she texted that she was puking, and that my parents and I had probably better watch out. She wouldn’t have been the first person to get sick after a food disaster. It was one of the many side effects of the hobby.

  I felt fine, though. Especially now that I knew she had started to seem sick because she was sick, not because she’d figured out that I’d made a bit of a scene at the West Egg. I felt better than I had in a while, if anything. I felt like she’d found out the truth about what had happened and hadn’t wanted to argue about it, and that was enough to make me want to break into song, Dustin Eddlebeck–style.

  Instead of going right home I swung by the Ice Cave, just for the sheer novelty of showing up in a suit. George and Stan were so wrapped up in one of their conversations over paperwork that they barely seemed to notice me, except to encourage me to join in the contest Dustin and Jake were having in the back. I found them deeply engaged in a battle over who could fit the most gummy worms in his mouth. Jake had a clear biological advantage, being roughly twice Dustin’s size, but Dustin put up a respectable fight.

  When Dustin started to throw up, I thought it was just because of all the candy he’d crammed down his gullet.

  But it turned out it wasn’t the gummy worms for him, and it wasn’t food poisoning for Paige. They were simply among the first people in town to come down with the Montreal Flu, which was roaring in from Canada to the midwestern states.

  It would leave the school looking like a ghost town the next week.

  25. BARF

  I know you aren’t supposed to go around judging other people’s cultures, but there are some traditions that people really ought to rethink. Like, take that thing in the Middle East where they celebrate special occasions by firing semiautomatic rifles in the air. That’s just asking for trouble. Sometimes you can get away with keeping dumb things going just because they’re an ancient tradition, but obviously that custom isn’t that old. It’s not like people in ancient times had assault weapons.

  Another is the thing where everyone takes communion out of the same cup in Catholic churches. At my grandparents’ church, the one my family went to now and then, they pass out little individual cups, but the time I went to a service at Dustin’s cathedral (which is also Stan’s, at least on paper, though he never actually goes), everyone went to the front and took a turn drinking out of one big goblet. They wiped it down between drinkers, but still. When a virus is going around, you’d think they’d at least tell everyone to bring a straw or something.

  But they don’t. Or, even if they normally do, as of Sunday morning, no one seemed to realize that the Montreal Flu had hit Des Moines, so they didn’t take any extra precautions. I can’t help but think that even though Dustin probably didn’t single-handedly spread the virus around by taking communion the morning after he was puking at the Ice Cave, he couldn’t have helped much.

  On Monday there were a lot of empty chairs at school, including Paige’s. During second period two people got up to go to the bathroom and never came back. Three more did the same thing halfway through third. By the end of the day it was like the rapture had come and half the people in school had disappeared.

  The Montreal Flu wasn’t exactly the Black Death; it was just one of those bugs that messes you up for a few days and that’s it, unless you already have a heart condition or something. It made its way t
o me on Thursday, the day Paige went back to school, and for two days I was barely able to lift my hand to answer all the texts from her. Even when she sent me naughty texts asking if Nurse Paige needed to give me a very thorough examination, I didn’t have the energy to respond. All I had the strength to do was throw up.

  On Sunday night, when we finally both felt better, we headed straight for the nook behind Earthways to celebrate. We barely spoke at all until after we finished, when we were curled up in the backseat with her on my lap, her hair spilling onto my shoulders and my hand reaching underneath her butt and coming to rest between her legs. With half the town still sick, no one else was waiting for a turn behind us, so we could just lie there and enjoy the sweaty afterglow.

  “So, the yearbook looked really good,” she said.

  “You saw it?” I asked.

  She turned her head towards me. “We got the proofs in,” she said. “I texted you about it.”

  “It might have gotten lost in the shuffle when I was sick,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “They looked great. You did a good job on the layout.”

  I smiled. It wasn’t every day that someone told me I did a good job on anything. I was usually willing to settle for just not being told I’d been a letdown.

  That was how it was with the sex, still. Paige seemed to be having a good time when we did it, and she wasn’t actively complaining, but I wasn’t entirely sure I was doing a particularly great job. I couldn’t quite figure out exactly what she wanted, what she really liked. And I hadn’t told her all the things I wanted to try, because I was afraid she’d decide I was a sick bastard.

  But she hadn’t complained, and I always made a point of getting her off before we went all the way. I didn’t think she was faking. I stood by my work, even if there was probably room for improvement.