Love Me Back

by Merritt Tierce

  He grew giant supremely nourished marijuana plants in a closet in his bedroom, but I didn’t know that until I’d been going over there for eight or nine months. The strange part was that I had never even looked in that closet, or asked what was there. I hadn’t noticed it but it was right there in the wall, a door with a knob. It was odd because I am the kind that will notice everything in a house and will peek under papers.

  There were three transformations: He gave me my first orgasm. We stayed up all night listening to Ben Harper on the expensive fantastic stereo in the living room. We lay on the floor wrapped in a blanket. We kissed and then he pulled my pants off and stretched out on his belly. He held me down so firmly I couldn’t scoot away even though in the beginning it was just too much. So much. He had his arms wrapped under my legs and back over and his hands pulling back the lips and he flicked my clit so hard and pointed and precise and sweet. I couldn’t do anything but feel it. I didn’t know how to help then. He did it all. When it came it was a train, it was heavy and I couldn’t do anything but have it. I sang out—I was so loud he covered my mouth even though there was no one in the house. He said I don’t think they’ve been taking care of you have they.

  The second was pot. He taught me how to do that. He was beautiful with it. So deliberate. Grinding the buds for the joint, rolling it. The way he sat forward on the couch with his arms balanced on his knees and his handsome fingers handling the paper with such respect and delicacy. So serious. His glasses would slip down his nose a bit while he focused and he would pause and hold the paper trough so still in one hand while he nudged his glasses up with the other. Nothing happened of course the first few times but one afternoon when we were both off we went to the Olive Garden on a date. I was married. I didn’t hide it from my husband. Damon and I smoked out before we left his place to go to the restaurant. It was in the car that I finally felt it and I tipped forward and put my hands on my knees and felt warm and good. I felt desperate and so content. I felt like I knew everything about life. I knew what it was. I knew it was real and I knew what real meant. My eyes were closed and I said Oh. Damon said Hey Marie are you good? I didn’t say anything. I was thinking about life. He said Hey. I could feel him looking at me. Hey, he said. You got to be able to shake that off. I don’t want to shake it off, I said. Sit up, he said. I leaned back but I didn’t open my eyes. When we got to the restaurant I didn’t want to get out of the car. We sat in the parking lot listening to Dar Williams. The bright rasp of her fingers lifting off the strings connected my ears with my nipples with my cunt. My ears pulsed and my nipples pulsed and my cunt pulsed. I felt the milk and I pushed in on my breasts and thought about my husband and my baby and how much I loved them. Hey, he said. Open your eyes. I looked at him. You ready to go inside? Or what. I’m ready, I said. Okay, he said. You’re cool?

  I’m great, I said.

  We went inside. We sat across from each other with the breadsticks between us. I don’t know what we talked about. Everything tasted amazing. He said I sure was occupying a lot of space in his head. I don’t think I said much. Olives don’t even grow in a garden, I said.

  The last one was that night when we got back to his place. We didn’t turn on any lights but there was a full moon shining down on the tree in the middle of the house and everything inside was gray and blue. I said I wanted to listen to the Powderfinger album so he turned it on and then he sat down on a barstool with one foot on the floor and one on the bottom rung. I kissed him and pressed my hard breasts against his chest and then I unbuckled his pants and pulled out his cock and I felt such affection for it. Such devotion. It was so big and so fat and so hard and so straight. I kissed the top of it and then I was sucking on him and licking him forever. With so much love. There was nothing but my mouth around him. Nothing else but feeling what he was feeling and giving him what he wanted. I gave myself over to it and I knew what to do. The sounds he made were so genuine and grateful. I was moving with the music. I was performing. Just like that I understood how to be sexy like I’d finally understood what it was to be high and it was as if I had always known even though I hadn’t until that night. When he came he curled forward over me and cradled my head and I was wrapped up in the middle of him and I was swallowing it all and I could feel the vibration of his sounds on the back of my head. I stayed there with him far back in my throat after he’d finished and I had swallowed all of it. I waited until he sat up and then I let him go gently and sat back on my heels and looked up at him and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Damn, he said. Damn. Where’d you learn to do that? he asked, looking at me with admiration and disbelief. Here, I said.

  There was a small room in the hall between the bedrooms. I don’t know what it was supposed to be. It didn’t have any windows but it wasn’t a closet. He had set up his own stereo in there and his guitars were lined up on their stands. There were speakers in each corner and a big beanbag in the middle of the room. After I learned how to get high and suck dick we started going in there at night. He’d light a candle and turn on Jack Johnson or something else mellow. Ani DiFranco. Sometimes Patrice Pike. The Honeytree Lie. One night it was Alanis singing something better than the ironic song and I found her voice and figured out how to give it up to him too. I was lying with my back on the beanbag and my bottom on the carpet and he was inside me and I rode her voice with my pelvis. I let it go. Oh God Marie he said. I let him have all of it and he came and I knocked over the candle with my foot and the flame went out but we didn’t do anything about it because we were both having his climax. He passed out right away. I didn’t move. I was comfortable in the dark on the beanbag with his weight on me and his cock inside me. I liked it in that room. The smallness of it made me feel right. It was like a secret. Like we had found a place outside of life. Or under it. Away. When You Oughta Know came on I was glad the stereo remote was by my hand so I could skip it without disturbing him. I lay there in the dark listening to her and looking at the dark and smelling his neck. I closed my eyes and cried while she sang. You choose you learn she said. You pray you learn. You ask you learn. I was crying without letting my body move. It was only tears. I was keeping my breathing normal and I wasn’t making any sounds but the emotions made the milk come out fast and hot and I couldn’t push on them because he was lying on top of me. I hadn’t nursed her in over eight hours and there was so much milk. He woke up when he felt it on his chest. I’m leaking, I said. Wow, he said. He got up off me and when he did I could feel all the streams streaking away from my body and he said Whoa! because some of it was still reaching him. I didn’t try to stop it because I needed to let the milk go anyway if I wasn’t going to feed her. He turned on the overhead light and when he saw that the milk was shooting out and dripping off my body onto the floor he said Hey! Shit! and grabbed his shirt off the floor and covered me with it.

  I took what I’d learned back to my husband and taught him how to go down on me. I mean I didn’t explain it or anything but I knew what to do with my hips and I knew what to ask for and I discovered that he had a sweet mouth and he loved making me come. He loved me.

  The morning I didn’t get up and pulled a package of saltines out of the drawer of the nightstand and took small bites without raising my head up off the pillow he said Is it mine? I don’t know, I said. I could feel him staring at the ceiling. He went with me to Planned Parenthood. If I had known whose it was I would have had it. If it had been Damon’s I would have wanted it. If I had known it was my husband’s I would have wanted it. But I couldn’t want it without knowing.

  After that I stopped seeing Damon for a while but my husband seemed older and wise in the saddest way. He didn’t want to eat and his cheekbones sharpened. He went for long walks with the baby. One night we had candlelit sex on the floor in the living room. We would have done it on the couch but the couch was covered in clean laundry. Her toys were all over the floor around us. When he came he kicked the door to her little plastic barn and it made the cow stick its head out with a l
oud electronic moo. We laughed. The baby woke up and cried and I went to feed her.

  I walked out of Chili’s one Saturday morning when Kevin tried to punish me. I worked all the time. Every night and doubles on the weekends. I would pick up anyone’s shift, anything to get my mind into that gray place. Everyone knew I would work for them if they asked. I had agreed to take this girl’s shift but I didn’t realize it was an opener’s. I was supposed to be there at ten fifteen and I got there at ten forty. I thought I was early because I thought her shift started at eleven. I still had plenty of time to do all the opening work but Kevin was pissed and told me I couldn’t wait tables. He told me to go stand in the dish pit and take plates from the servers. When lunch got going and they started bringing me stacks from their tables each of them asked me what I was doing there. I was embarrassed and angry and I thought it was dumb since I never fucked up and I always came in early and stayed late. I didn’t understand how it was going to teach me anything to stand there in the dish pit. I was so angry I felt my nose blush and my eyes start to water so I took off my apron and left it on a stack of clean glasses on my way out the to-go door.

  I went over to Damon’s. I had only been seeing him at work. I would stand close to him while he scooped chips out of the warmer. He would look at me and raise his eyebrows. When he opened the door he said What’s up. I came in and we went back to his bedroom. The door of the weed closet was open and he was in the middle of tending the plants. What?! I said. You didn’t know? he asked. No idea, I said. I sat on the bed and watched him. There was a bong on the floor so I picked it up and took a hit. I lay back on the pillow still holding the stem and I imagined someone driving the blunt glass tip of the stem into the hollow of my throat. He came and sat down next to me and picked up the bong and I handed him the stem. So what’s happening, he said. I quit, I said. I walked out. I told him why and he took a bubbly hit and while he held the smoke in his mouth he said Kevin’s a prick. He lifted his chin and pushed up his glasses and inhaled twice and then he let out the smoke in rings.

  We went up into the mountains, to a village outside Toluca, and we built a road. It was as hard as it sounds. Endless scraping in the heat, turning your mouth into your shirtsleeve to try to breathe through the asphalt fumes. Your dad soaked a bandana in water and wrung it out and draped it over his head like a wig, his cap on top to keep it in place. He looked funny but before long we all did it to stay cool. After eight hours we had completed about three feet of road. I was the only girl who had stuck with it all day. The others had stopped after lunch and gone to distribute clothes to the schoolchildren. You’re tough, he said, offering me a paper cone of water. I drank it and said I just feel strange around children. We drank more water and then saw our local guide gesturing for us to join the rest of the group to walk back into town, where we were staying. Vámonos, said your dad. He grabbed one side of the water cooler and I took the other.

  Two years later. I sat on our balcony in a plastic chair and stared at the people in the cars going past. Some of them looked back at me and I wondered if the ones who didn’t felt the look and just didn’t look back, or if only some people can feel it when others look at them.

  I didn’t make your dinner, your dad did. You came and sat in my lap while he made your sandwich. Just you in your diaper. Your sunset hair, so long down your tiny back. You sat quietly with me as if we were considering the same thing. He brought you the sandwich on a plastic plate and I held the plate for you. You pointed at the sandwich—thin ham between two soft pieces of brown bread—and said Cut it. Cut it, Mama.

  The Dream Café

  I was fired from the Dream Café. The lunch rush was over so I was taking my break, sitting in one of the two-person booths with a grilled scone and the crossword. It was a Wednesday, the last day of the week that I bothered to attempt such clues as First PM of Burma (three letters).

  Marlo sat down across from me as I put a buttered bite into my mouth. We need to talk, she said. I saw what you did today.

  I chewed and swallowed. She told me not to ring them up so I thought it was okay, I said.

  Tanya may act like she owns this place but she doesn’t. I do. So I’m going to have to let you go, said Marlo.

  Whenever anyone says let you go I see myself falling like the girlfriend in Cliffhanger. I nodded, wondering how let you go became the way to say You’re fired. It sounds like an act of mercy or kindness. Releasing a feral cat after trapping and spaying it.

  Do you have anything to say? Marlo asked.

  I wasn’t sure what she wanted there. For me to grovel? I knew that what I’d done was sketchy. But I used to let myself be led into that kind of situation—I could see it coming, or feel it, but I went toward it anyway, in some kind of perverted defiance. Tanya had come in for lunch on her day off and we were doing half-price poinsettias to get rid of three gallons of cranberry juice that had been opened but seemed untouched. Marlo had stalked around the place trying to figure out who was responsible but there was no incentive to confess or turn someone in. I was supposed to ring them up before I made them, but I was in a hurry and Tanya was pounding them like shots. Then when I went to ask if she wanted anything else before I brought the check she said How many of these girly drinks did I have? Eight, I said. She whistled. That many, she said. Let’s call it five, okay? Maybe you lost count. Since it’s been so busy, she said. Okay, I said. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you, she said. She looked at my hand, as it lifted her plate off the table. She looked at my arm. I like your—accessorization, she said, twirling her fingers in the air like she was opening a safe. I was wearing six copper bracelets. I could tell their jangling annoyed Marlo but I liked the way they punctuated all my movements.

  Tanya had been halfway nice to me, in that beatup way career low-grade hospitality workers have. The ones in whom something has quit, bitterly, and then quit again, resigned. They’ve made it this far by not fucking up too much or knowing how to manage it when they do, so they’re typically proficient if not too shiny. Tanya exhibited the classic mix I’ve seen in certain individuals who’ve been in the business for ten years or more: an air of woundedness, of insult, attributable to their prolonged indentured servitude, combined with an in-spite-of-it pride in their personal performance of the job. Especially when new people showed up.

  So she’d taken me under her dubious scraggly wing. She was tall and butch. This was a restaurant on the edge of the gayborhood so I was in the heterosexual minority. Tanya sometimes cooked and sometimes waited tables. Her face was usually gray, like someone on the verge of death. Even behind the line, where it got so hot Nacho and Fili would put cornstarch on their balls to keep them from sticking too bad, her face didn’t heat up. She showed me how to carry three glasses in one hand so I wouldn’t need a tray to get drinks to a four-top. She told me which bussers would roll your silverware for five bucks. Does that look appetizing to you? she said to me one day when I was so slammed I couldn’t get back to the window to run a hot cobbler before the à la mode had melted into a sad moat. I was going to drop it on the table anyway but she stopped me. Not really, I said. So don’t take it out, she said. Wait a few minutes and I’ll get you a new one. Those two won’t even notice. She could see my table over the kitchen line—two older gay men on the same side of the booth, clearly having an intense relationship talk.

  She pulled the cobbler from the window. What do I tell Marlo? I asked. Don’t, she said. I do the count anyway. It was a spill.

  Thanks, I said. I wasn’t sure what to make of the favor. Sometimes I thought she was flirting with me but I ignored it. Occasionally people—customers and new servers—thought I might be gay because I worked there and I didn’t try very hard with my face or my hair. I have big square hands I never grew into. They were meant for a farm or a piano. Or for carrying four full-size entrée plates up one flight of stairs, down two steps, up a ramp, through a door, around a fat clueless man waiting for a table on the lawn, and finally down a last set of stairs int
o the outdoor recessed patio. I never dropped anything there. That was years ago and I still feel like I need to knock on wood when I say that.

  So many times I ran that gauntlet. If I were to advise someone going into the service industry, my second suggestion after Don’t would be Walk through the place and look for the tables farthest from the kitchen. You’ll probably be stuck in that station for a couple months. Imagine walking from wherever that is all the way back to the kitchen for extra salad dressing. Now imagine it eighteen more times, and that’s just for one table. You may think you’ll be waiting tables but really your job is to walk fast in a circle for six to eight hours every day. Don’t work somewhere with stairs, steps, ramps, outdoor seating, small water glasses, or kids’ menus.

  The Dream Café had all those things. I never dropped food but I did lose a credit card once. On busy brunches I could have fifty or sixty covers in two hours and there was no stopping no matter what. The managers told us Don’t be afraid to ask for help, that’s what we’re here for but it wasn’t that I was afraid. I didn’t have time to ask for help. They were a beautiful family. The Dream Café was popular with trainers and athletes and otherwise regular people who spent more than two hours a day working out, because the menu was full of organic and vegetarian and local and whole before that was common. She looked like an aerobics instructor and he looked like a linebacker. She was tiny, and exquisitely proportioned. Every time she lifted a forkful of seasonal fruit to her mouth all of her elegantly defined arm muscles flexed slightly, as if eager and then disappointed that more was not being asked of them. He wore his Oakleys the entire time they were there, and he had to sit in the chair like he was riding a short horse, legs spread, knees almost touching the ground. Excuse me, miss, he said, after I had dropped off the check, picked up the check, run the card, stuffed the vouchers back in the book, and dropped it off again with a Thanks so much, take care, and they had begun the process of packing up their baby, who was undoubtedly beautiful too but could barely be found in the middle of a gigantic machine that looked more like a Bowflex than a stroller. I was seating a table behind them when I felt a light touch on my elbow. I turned around. Yes sir? I said. The woman was lifting the napkins, the plates, the coffee mugs, the sugar caddy. It’s not here, she said. Our credit card, said the man. It wasn’t in here. He handed me the check presenter. I opened it, like he could have missed it somewhere in the see-through plastic pocket that said PLEASE COME AGAIN. I saw that he had already filled out the voucher. Their brunch was seventy dollars, more than you could ever hope for from a two-top with a baby. He’d left me fifteen, indicating firmly that someone had taught him twenty percent. Oh no, I said. Do you think it could have fallen out? he asked. Yes, I’m sure that’s it, I said. Let me go look. I got down on my knees and looked under the table first, hoping they had dropped it, but it wasn’t there. Did you put it back in your wallet? she asked him. No, he said, don’t you think that’s the first place I looked? I’m sorry, I said, I’ll be right back. I ran-walked through the patio, scrutinizing the ground and the potted plants lining the walkway. Fucking shitfuck, I said under my breath. Excuse me, said a young man in a hoodie and flipflops with a party of three other guys in the same hangover brunch costume, could we get some drinks here? I pretended I didn’t hear him. Guess not, I heard him say. No credit card. I crashed into the back station where I’d run their card. Craig was standing there voiding something for someone. What now, he said, as if I were always walking up to him in crisis. Quite a few of my colleagues were, in fact, always in crisis, even when they had only one table, but I was usually able to handle my own shit well enough to help those people out. I certainly wasn’t one of them. Has anyone found a credit card? I asked. No, why? he said. Because I lost one. What do you mean, you lost one? he said, pausing in his heavy poking of the touchscreen to turn his face to me. I mean I can’t find it anywhere. I dropped off the check and it’s gone. What table? he said. Forty-three, I said. The big guy. We looked out the door toward forty-three. They were arguing. I wondered if we would have to comp the tab and there would go one of my biggest tips of the day. You’re kidding, said Craig. They own the Smoothie King up the street. Did you look everywhere out there? Yes! I said. Maybe he put it in his wallet, said Craig, still staring at him. God, I’d love to put something in his wallet, he murmured. He looked, I said. Could you please go talk to them? I have four other tables out there. I can’t go back if I have to go past him without his card, I said. I’ll talk to them, but you better keep looking, he said.