Love Me Back

by Merritt Tierce

  At home we slept some more. I was always that heavy, iron kind of tired. My exhaustion was metallic. Sharp, flat, invincible. And I was always hungry because she was always hungry. For my shift meal I would have the black-bean burger plain with Swiss and I would eat every bite and every French fry and I would drink the chocolate milk shake with the sprinkles every night. And I still couldn’t sit on the floor or in a wooden chair because there was nothing to support my bones. Even if the floor was carpet I was so thin it hurt. I ate whatever I wanted and it all turned into milk.

  When he got home at four thirty in the afternoon I would be dressed for work and finishing nursing her one last time. She was six months old when I started there so while I was at work he would give her some mashed banana or some rice cereal and sometimes a bottle of water. By the time I got home at eleven or midnight my breasts would be huge rocks and I would get into bed and wake her up and nurse her for a long time, both sides. That always felt so good, when they were that full and I could finally nurse her. I had to be careful at work the last hour or so because if I thought of her or heard a baby cry sometimes I would feel the pricking of the milk letting down and I would have to try to push on my breasts without anyone seeing, but most of the time when you’re waiting tables you’re doing something with your hands or you’re in front of people. Once or twice I couldn’t stop it because I was taking an order or running food and the milk soaked through my shirt. When it happened the first time I was wearing a blue shirt and two dark round circles appeared on my chest. We could wear blue, red, or black Chili’s shirts, polos with the embroidered red pepper logo. After that I always wore the black shirt.

  I never called or visited my parents, after we got our own place. They didn’t live far from us but I didn’t know what to report. I hate that I hate my life? They were there when she was born and they were insatiable for her but I didn’t feel like she was my baby while we lived with them. They were always taking her from me. Now I realize that was nothing more than the ravenous craving of a grandparent for the bodily wonder—the heft, the face, the smell—of a grandchild. At the time I was afraid that everyone could tell how lost I was, how lacking in maternal instinct, how sad. At the time I thought they thought I wasn’t fit to have her, but I was afraid to call them on it and hear them say what I thought was true. So I let them take her from me and give her back to me when she was hungry, as if I were only her nursemaid. Home was the one place I nursed her in private, so no one could watch me try to be her mother.

  When she was three months old I found an apartment for the three of us and we moved out. I let my husband explain it to them because they couldn’t talk to him the way they talked to me, and I didn’t know what to say. My mother said You don’t have to do this as she handed me the baby. I didn’t respond. I just took the baby and started fitting her into her car seat. My husband said to my mother, who had started to cry, Hey. It’ll be fine. I’ll take care of her. We’re just across town.

  My dad came up to the Chili’s one night to check on me. My husband had probably told them I wasn’t doing well. He talked to them more than I did but it wasn’t a conspiracy. I didn’t talk to anyone and he liked people so he did. My dad ate a Paradise Pie while I waited for the last table on the other side of the restaurant to leave so I could finish the closing duties. I was sweeping my station, pulling out the empty booths to pick up menus and crayons that had fallen in the cracks. He sat in a booth and talked to me while I swept. I think he was trying to convince me to hang in there. I listened but I knew I wouldn’t. I learned a lot of things while I worked there. I learned how to sweep aggressively and efficiently. I learned how to anticipate and consolidate, which is all waiting tables is. I learned how to use work to forget. I learned how to have an orgasm and I learned I was a bad wife.

  I didn’t have the constant decapitating images at work. At work my mind became gray and busy and it was okay. But the next morning I would see a butcher knife plunged into my chest, pinning me to the bed. Or a machete that would go through my pelvis and all the way through the mattress and the box spring to the floor below.

  Eating scrambled eggs or toast in the kitchen I was afraid for her. I cried and moved slowly all day long. I thought it must be bad for her to have that as her mother. So far away. She was like her dad. The same peachy complexion and disposition, the same red hair, the same feet.

  I didn’t talk to her. I was a silent mother. Touching was talking. I smelled her a lot, especially her breath, which smelled like butter.

  I don’t remember much about working there. I remember the to-go girl was incredibly good at her job and that was the first time I had ever seen anyone work smart and hard like that. The phone on her shoulder, the competent look on her face, how she shaved a fraction of a second off her process by not letting the cash drawer open all the way. The tough way she stapled the order chit to the bag. I wanted to be like her and not like Barrett. It wasn’t that I liked waiting tables so much then—it was that I had somewhere to be. Some function in life. I didn’t understand how to be a wife or mother. But there were rules to being a waitress. The main one was don’t fuck up. Another was whatever you skip in your prep will be the one thing you need when you’re buried. If you look at the stack of kids’ cups while you’re tying on your apron in the afternoon and decide there will probably be enough for the night because you really don’t want to go out to the shed and dig around for the new sleeve, eight soccer teams will come in at nine, and you’ll have to go out to the shed anyway, and by the time you get back you’ll have killed your tips on all your other tables. That incessant fulfillment of Murphy’s Law taught me to be superstitious. I never said It looks like it’s going to be a slow night and we’ll get out early because that would suddenly make the smoking section fill up. The smokers took forever. You could never turn those tables because they just weren’t in a hurry. They smoked before they ordered. They always had appetizers and drinks. They smoked after the appetizers. They always had dessert. Their tabs were inevitably more, but they undid it by staying there for so long you could have had three $25 tables instead of one $40, even though the smokers tipped better. And I never said I think we’re going to be busy tonight because then it would be dead and they wouldn’t cut anyone and you’d stand around for six $2.13 hours. If I knocked over a saltshaker while I was refilling it or wiping down a table I always threw a pinch over my left shoulder.

  I got chlamydia from John Smith. That was actually his name. John Fucking Smith, said my husband. You cheated on me with John Fucking Smith?

  Yes, I said. Do you have to call it cheating?

  What the fuck does it matter what I call it, Marie. Is there anyone else? he said.

  Yes, I said.

  What? he said. His eyes went hard then and he crossed his arms. We were standing in the ugly galley kitchen of our apartment. It was right next to a highway. It never got dark at night and I pretended the constant sound of the traffic was the ocean. It was an all bills paid one-bedroom and the rent was $397. We stood in the kitchen under the fluorescent lights. His face was so white and his eyes were so black. He was still and I heard a semi downshift and I could hear the lightbulbs buzzing and a moth flicking around inside the fixture. Then he lunged away from the counter and I covered my head even though he was the most gentle person I’d ever known. He started kicking the oven. Kicking kicking kicking. Stop! I yelled. Stop! The baby cried from our bed.

  He stopped kicking the oven. Did you even make it a year? Tell me, he said.

  Yes, I said.

  Chlamydia, he said. Fuck you, Marie, he said. The baby was crying louder. He took his keys off the counter and went to the door. He put on one boot and lost his balance while he was putting on the other and dropped his keys and then he said Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck! and jammed his foot into the boot and stood up and punched the wall next to the door. It made a hole in the sheetrock and he bent over and held his hand between his legs. He picked up his keys and slammed the door behind him. The baby w
as crying so hard she was losing her breath between screams. I went into our bedroom to get her and the neighbor above us stomped on the ceiling and shouted Shut up, man!

  I lay down on the bed with the baby and shushed her. She smelled so sweet and she was so soft and warm. She made the most urgent little sounds as she latched on to my nipple. Shh, I said. She stopped crying and nursed until she fell asleep again.

  Business had been so sluggish the night before Thanksgiving that Damon, the assistant manager, cut down to just me by eight thirty, and I walked out with $32, twenty of which was given to me by a man who had a cup of tortilla soup and a Shiner and said he was sorry I had to work the night before a holiday. When I got out I went to the Albertsons next door and bought bananas, brown rice, black beans, a yellow onion, a can of Ro*Tel, and everything to bake a pumpkin pie. I never baked so I didn’t have any of the spices or sugar or flour at home, or a pie pan. I had eight dollars left after checking out so I stopped for gas on the way home.

  The next day I made the pie using the recipe on the back of the can. We were still getting WIC cereal and milk so breakfast was Kix and bananas. Thanksgiving dinner was the rice and beans with the onion and Ro*Tel added for flavor, which is what we usually ate, and the pie. He said the pie was the best thing he had ever eaten in his life. I let the baby eat some of the filling off my fingers and she went nuts for it too, flapping her short baby arms. Then we all fell asleep at about five and he got up to pee a couple hours later. When he came back he said For some reason it hurts when I piss. I said Really? but I didn’t say anything else, even though I knew that I had given Damon chlamydia and I knew I’d slept with my husband since then. Damon said it felt like he was pissing glass, and when he went to his doctor they stuck a Q-tip up his dick and he said it made him cry it hurt so bad. I went to the health department because we didn’t have health insurance. They said I did have it, even though I didn’t have symptoms. They gave me the medication to get rid of it. Damon asked me who else I’d been with because there was no way he’d given it to me. I said John and Luke and he said John gave it to you. I didn’t ask how he knew but I knew he was right. Luke had just broken up with a girlfriend he’d been with for six years and he’d told me he had never cheated on her. I had to tell John and Luke and I never saw them except at work so I had to tell them at work. John didn’t act surprised. That again, he said. Luke said You’re kidding and then he said I knew it was a bad idea. A few days after that there was an awkward moment when Damon was voiding something for John at a computer screen and Luke and I walked up at the same time to ring. I had told John about Damon and Luke but I hadn’t told Luke about the other two because I knew he would have cared. Damon caught my eye and fumbled his manager card. I could feel Luke looking at me so I walked away like I had forgotten something.

  I had thought about telling my husband but I kept putting it off. The day I decided I had to tell him I went to the apartment complex’s laundry center to wash a load of whites. His undershirts, the baby’s burp cloths and diapers and onesies, and our bath towels and dishrags. Our apartment was right across the parking lot from the laundry center so I started the washer and then checked on the baby who was asleep in her swing. I took a book outside and sat on the stairs in front of our door but I couldn’t read. I watched ants carry off pieces of a Cheeto. Half an hour later I went to put the clothes in the dryer and the laundry room smelled awful, like shit. I opened the lid of the washer to take out our clothes and there was shit all over the stuff at the top. The smell made me gag and I let the lid fall and backed away from the washer. I didn’t know what it meant but I didn’t want to touch the clothes. On my way out the door I had to walk past a wooden bench and there was a foot-long turd on it. Only a human could have made it. When my husband got home I told him someone had wiped their ass with our laundry. He couldn’t believe it either so he went to look. We left all our things in the washer because I said I wasn’t going to let any of it touch the baby even if we washed it again and he agreed. But then I didn’t want to tell him about the chlamydia.

  I did make it one year exactly. I first fucked John the day after our anniversary. I have a picture of the three of us at the Macaroni Grill. We went there because it was another Brinker concept so I could use my employee discount. Neither of us was old enough to drink. We ordered virgin daiquiris and played hangman and tic-tac-toe on the paper tablecloth. Roses are red, he wrote with the red crayon. Violets are blue, I wrote with the blue. What do you want? he wrote. I didn’t finish it because our food arrived. Our waitress took the picture. You guys are so cute, she said. He’s holding the baby and has one arm around me and we’re both smiling for real because the baby is grabbing his beard.

  The next night I went to a park with John after work. There was a jogging path that went back into some woods and we walked down it until we came to a bench. We sat down and it was so dark. He put his arm around me and brushed my nipple with his fingertips but I said Wait because I knew it would make me lactate and then we made out and I felt the milk, warm and soaking into the cloth circles I wore inside my bra. He tasted like onions but he was a good kisser. He had a nice face. Gray eyes with long eyelashes and dimples when he smiled. Soft spiky black hair. He pulled me into his lap and kissed my neck and said So you want this. Yes, I said. I waited for you in the walk-in. He paused and looked at me. No one falls for that, he said.

  He grew up on the streets of St. Louis, he said. He told me he never knew his dad and he was taken from his mother and put in foster care when he was seven. He smelled like amber, wood, musk, earth. He exuded sex but at no one in particular. He talked to you while he chewed and bits of lettuce fell out of his mouth, then he belched, then he offered to refill your water. If he came up behind me at a computer terminal sometimes he would stand close enough to me so I could feel his erection and once he said Meet me in the walk-in.

  Come on then, he said, and stood up holding me. I put my feet on the ground and unzipped his pants. He unzipped mine and turned me around so I was facing the bench. He pulled down my pants and I knelt on the bench, bracing myself against the back of it. It wasn’t very comfortable and I had bruises on my knees the next day.

  On his chest the tattooed face of a pit bull he said was the best friend he’d ever had, on his left calf a beckoning, bare-titted mermaid. Over his entire back a flaming skull, the fire burning up toward the nape of his neck and the jaw narrowing to a chin cleft at his tailbone. On his wedding finger a black band where a ring would go, on his left upper arm a cross made of scar tissue that stretched from shoulder to elbow, which he cut in with a knife in his other hand. Uncircumcised and he’d once had a Prince Albert but said it stopped him from penetrating as hard as he wanted to.

  September was John, October was Luke, and November was Damon. There was some overlap which is how they all got the disease but John was unreliable and Luke felt bad about it and Damon was into me so he’s the one I started seeing regularly. John lived in a shitty efficiency and I went over there sometimes if he said I could stop by and sometimes I went without asking. Most of the time he wasn’t there, even when he’d said I could come over. He had a twin mattress on the floor of the apartment but he’d put it up in front of the bathroom when I was there and we did it on the carpet. I think he didn’t want me to get the idea that he wanted me. I remember one time he told me I looked good and one time I told him his bread was moldy.

  Luke was the one I should have wanted. He was tall and too good-looking. He had a deep voice that made me wish for so many things and he had a pretty bird dog. I’ve never liked dogs but that one was fine. Eric. He was a lot like Luke. Calm and well-bred. Luke told me how they’d go for a run and Eric would suddenly flash into a bush and Luke would find him rigid, stuck in his pointer pose, staring at some prey concealed in the brush. Luke would have to pick him up and set him down somewhere else before he would release his muscles. One afternoon we were all three on Luke’s bed and Luke was lying behind me. He started rubbing my ass over and
over, soft and unhurried. Petting me. I felt so contained. He was always so warm, like he had a fever. When he had rubbed my ass through my jeans for a long time he nudged me up on my knees in front of him and unbuttoned his jeans with one hand while he breathed in my ear and put his other hand up my shirt. He found my nipple and slid his thumb across it and back across it. Then he moved his hand down to my pants and unbuttoned them and pushed them down. He put his penis against my lips. I never got very wet for anyone but for him that day I was slick and he took so long to ease himself inside me. So slow. I had my head down on the bed by Eric because there was nowhere else to put it and I had a hand on his flank. He smelled clean and he was just lying there watching us. Luke pressed into me so slow that by the time he was all the way in I was massaging Eric’s flank with one hand and his shoulder with the other. Mashing on him like a cat making biscuits. I didn’t really know I was doing it but I had to put the intensity somewhere. I could feel Luke getting harder and longer and then he reached over me and pushed Eric off the bed. He took hold of one of my wrists and gathered the other wrist up in his grip so he was pulling my arms tight away from my head and pressing my wrists down into the bed. I was so much shorter than he was that he still had his other hand on the small of my back. Pushing it down firm on his cock. He held me in place like that and I kept myself taut against him almost as if I were trying to resist or get away but it was the best thing I had ever felt with a man.

  Damon had smooth knotty forearms. I’d never been with a black man then. His forearms were pecan colored and his lips were superfat and perfect. I think his hair was thinning but it was kept carefully in scrawny dreads. He was adopted. He was wary and closed and seemed untethered. Not crazy. Just without anyone. When we were together he talked and I listened. He talked about what he was getting next from Best Buy or the J. Crew catalogue. He talked about making his record on CD Baby. He wanted some tropical fish. He was long-term housesitting for some friends in one of the nicer neighborhoods where professors and retirees lived. There was wisteria. The house was spacious and felt uninhabited. There was a housemate I never saw but I was loud at night so I was glad I never ran into him. There was a tree in the middle of the house. A big old magnolia. Damon said they hadn’t wanted to cut it down when they built it so they built the house around it. The house was in the shape of a square with the center cut out. That was where the tree was, and all the interior walls of the house were glass so you could see it.