Eat Your Heart Out (2 page)

“What the hell are you doing alone at this bar?”

“I'm with you.”

“You know what I mean, showing up alone. Don't you have friends?”

“Yeah.”

I looked at her, expecting her to carry on like usual. But she didn't. She just looked around the bar, sipping her vodka-soda.

I stuck my hand out in the middle of the table and made a summoning-type motion at her, like “Tell me more.” I near gave myself carpal tunnel doing all that summoning before she finally caught on. She was wearing a real showy shirt that night, and I kept trying to stare at her eyebrows.

“Oh! Yeah, I have friends. I have lots of friends back home. I've just been moving around a lot lately. I've only been here for like six months, and . . . oh, you don't want to hear it.”

“I asked you, didn't I?”

She laughed. I was always making her laugh. She thought I was so smart and I could tell she wished she knew more people like me.

“Okay. Well, I had this boyfriend, and I really liked him, you know? And—and then, well, I don't know what changed, I thought he really loved me too, and . . .”

Out of nowhere she started crying. And Maggie's crying never started slow and built up, like a normal person's. She went from smiling to full-out woman-hysterics bawling.

So, I was sitting there, at the bar with her, and she was just crying her guts out. Everyone was looking at me like I'm the bad guy, like I must be breaking this young thing's heart or something.

I looked to all the other patrons. “We're not together!”

“Oh, that's great, Rich!”

I hate it when women cry. I hear these alarm bells go off in my head, saying, “Make it stop! Make it stop!” In my life, I've done near everything to make a woman stop crying. If I had a dime for every lie I told to make a woman stop crying, I'd be a millionaire, believe you me. So I did to Maggie what I always do when I'm telling a woman something I want her to believe. I started to pat her hand, real slow and convincing.

And she looked at me after a couple of pats, thankful, like I'm some knight in shining armor.

“I'm sorry, Rich.” She took a bar napkin I had given her and blew her nose so loud that anyone who wasn't already looking at us could start. “This is why I didn't want to talk about it.”

Knowing better than to engage in conversation with an emotional woman, I said, “Don't worry, we don't have to . . .”

But before I could get my sentence out, she carried on like all crying women do; fast and like I care.

“I just really loved him, you know? His name was Jared, and one day I noticed he started to look at me different. We were living together at that point—”

“What the Christ are you doing living with someone at your age?”

“Rich, a seventeen-year-old girl is the same maturity as a thirty-year-old man. That's a literal fact.”

“Oh for fuck's . . . from where?
Bullshitter's Digest
?”

“Can I finish my story, please?”

I nodded begrudgingly.

“So, we were living together, and I didn't know what to do. I would just try to be nicer and nicer to him. But the nicer I was, the less he wanted anything to do with me. I don't know what I did wrong. Then he kicked me out, said he met someone new. I know who too. She's this trashy, fat, blond girl. That made it way worse. It was like I bugged him so much that he was willing to date a fat girl just to get away from me.”

She had a point there.

“And I was new to town when we got together, so all of his friends became my friends. That was stupid of me. Now his friends don't want anything to do with me either. It's just been sad because I guess he never meant anything he said.”

Then she looked at me like she couldn't believe that someone would ever say something they didn't mean.

“Well, yeah, that's people for you,” I said. “Let me tell you something.”

She stopped crying for a moment and perked up.

“People are always saying shit they don't mean.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I hate to break it to you, but you can't trust anyone. Just your own self.”

“How do you know?”

“I've had my heart broken too.”

This piqued her interest. “Who was she?”

“Her name was Rosemary. I was a little older than you when we got together but not much.”

“Was this the woman you were married to?”

I forgot I'd told her that. Took me off centre a little.

“Uh, well, yes.” I shrugged when I said that. Don't know why.

“What happened?”

I felt myself wanting to tell her what happened.

“Hey, we are talking about you. Not me.”

“You can tell me.” She inched forward and put her hand on my hand now, like she was comforting me. I moved away fast.

“Well, what happened was, it didn't work out.”

She let her straw fall out of her mouth, and her lips went into this pretty pout. She did look charming, even with makeup all over her face.

“Trust me, you get sick of being the good guy.”

She got real quiet after I said that. Then she goes, “You sound like my dad” in such a way that I took it as a compliment.

“Your dad must be a pretty smart guy then.”

She kept sipping her drink.

“I don't know him really.”

“What do you mean?”

“He left about five years ago. I haven't seen him in a year or so. Not since I left home. And before he left, he was in and out. Mainly out. I really just know what my mom told me he thought about stuff. Sounds kind of like you.”

Then she shrugged and looked down, back to sipping her drink.

I felt really bad for her. It made me think I could tell her stuff. Tell her things he should have told her. See? That's where the charity part came in.

“Don't trust people,” I said.

She pushed her drink to the middle of the table. She interlaced her little fingers, making a fist, and rested it on the marked wood between us.

“That's a sad way to be.”

I was surprised by her saying something so blunt to me.

“Who's the one crying here?”

“Yeah, I'm crying this time, but lately, at night, I think about how next time it'll be different. It'll work out. Because I'll make the new guy I'm with happy too. As happy as Jared made me.”

“No one is going to make you happy.” I said, and I meant it.

Then she looked away, real wistful, like what I was telling her was hurting. She took her lip gloss out and put too much on.

Fleetwood Mac's “Landslide” started playing at the bar, and she turned to me, all excited and drunk, how young women get, and said, “Oh! I love this song! This is my favourite song!”

I looked at her, tipsy myself, and I remembered something I had forgotten for a long time.

“It was Rosemary's too.”

It's strange sensation, remembering something that you forgot a long time ago. It reminds you of a lot of other stuff you used to know too.

Pretty soon, three
days a week, she got to meeting me after work for dinner. I told everybody she was my niece from out of town. I didn't want them thinking anything was going on. None of them seemed to remember that I was an only child.

I didn't mind taking Maggie out. Not if I didn't have anything better to do. I started taking her to the bigger city down the way.

“You know, Maggie, you shouldn't chew with your mouth open. It's unladylike.”

She closed her mouth real quick and covered her lips with her hand. She was disarming like that. She never got embarrassed, so I never felt bad for helping her.

She swallowed.

“So what's this called?” She took her chopsticks and pointed at a plate across from her.

“A spicy tuna roll.”

“Spicy? Is it hot?”

“Just try it.”

“What if it's too hot?”

“Just try it, Maggie. You should expose yourself to new things.”

“Why?”

“It'll make you more well rounded.”

“Oh.”

She said “Oh,” like she accepted that she had no idea what I meant, and like it didn't bother her. She had low expectations for herself. I didn't like it.

“You should ask me what I meant by well rounded, Maggie.”

She sighed. “What did you mean by well rounded?”

“I meant it will make you a more . . . a more fulfilled and a more exposed . . . a more . . .”

She started laughing at me.

“Let me finish.”

“Sorry.”

“It will make you a more educated person.”

“Like you?” She rolled her eyes and threw a piece into her mouth, chewing suspiciously. After a few seconds, she got this big grin on her face.

I got a real kick out of that.

“So what'd you do today, missy?”

“Oh, just regular stuff, cleaning and everything. This afternoon I looked around for another job. I just hate the restaurant and they aren't giving me enough hours. And then I hung around the place I'm staying and I don't know, waited for you to be done work. What about you?”

“Oh, nothing really. I interviewed the mayor about his plans for building that new highway, wrote about that for a bit.”

She looked like I had interviewed Jesus himself.

“You interviewed the mayor? Are you shitting me?”

“No. I'm not ‘shitting' you.”

“Wow, Rich! I can't believe it!”

“That guy's a liar and a crook.”

“But he is famous! You interviewed the mayor! I am so jealous. It must be so much fun to have such an exciting job like that. You must just love getting out of bed every day.”

I spilt some soy sauce down my tie.

“Yeah, that's what everybody thinks.”

“You don't like it?”

“Not really, no.”

“Why not?”

“Because I spend my life writing about everything bad that happens in the world. Or about all the liars who tell people they can fix everything bad. I work with a bunch of jackasses who can't write their way out of a wet paper bag.”

“You practise that or something?” she said and laughed, all proud of herself. God, she thought she was funny sometimes.

“You can't use my own lines on me. It's unoriginal.”

I took my napkin and dipped it in water, hoping to get the stain out. I was ferocious with my movements.

“If I had known what the paper would be like going in, I never would've taken the job,” I told her.

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, what would you rather do?”

“Scrub toilets.”

“I'm serious!”

“I don't know, kid. Write books. Be the next Ernest Hemingway.”

“Is he famous?”

“A bit.”

“Why don't you write books?”

“When you get older you'll know it's not that simple.”

“Why not?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

“Sorry.” She reached out, asking for my tie. I took it off and gave it to her. She dipped her napkin in water.

“No, it's just . . . life has a funny way of surprising you. You point it in one direction, and before you know it, it's taken off so far that way that you can't turn it back.”

She looked at me blankly. I wasn't sure if she understood what I meant. I opened my mouth to tell her more of what grown-ups know, but she butted right in, spinning her own yarn, never looking at me, just cleaning my tie.

“That was like this one time just after I moved out on my own. Money was real tight, and I was working at this shoe shop. But the owner was this mean old man, a pervert. All I wanted to do was quit and get another job, but I couldn't because I had to pay rent, I had to eat. No choice. So I stayed 'til someone else would hire me. Took a long time, me being so young and stuff. But I got through it.”

I stayed quiet for a second after she said that.

“What does that have to do with what I just said?”

“Oh! Probably nothing. That was stupid of me. I just thought, Two bad situations you didn't see coming, you know?”

“Oh, yeah, I see what you mean.” I lied. To this day I have no idea what she was getting at. She was a little loopy like that, drawing parallels, seeing herself in other people.

“Do you like the people you work with at least? Even if they aren't all smart like you?” she asked.

“Think about what you just asked me.”

She did, still cleaning my tie. She thought about it so hard that eventually I had to interrupt her thinking and answer my own goddamn question.

“I meant, if they were stupid, how could I like them?”

“Oh! Oh, I get it!”

“You must feel the same about dumb people, you're smart.”

“I'm not smart.”

“Yes, you are.”

“You think so?” She looked up at me for a brief moment.

“What do you mean? No one calls you smart?”

“No, not really. I mean, I didn't do great in school and my mom never called me smart, and you know about my dad, so, no. Not really.”

“Well, you are damn smart, and don't you let anyone tell you different.”

She shrugged.

“What are your parents like?” she asked.

“I didn't really know my dad. He died when I was young, he was kind of a drunk, you know? I figure I was better growing up without him. And my mom's fine. She means well, she's just . . . clueless, you know?”

“Oh?” She handed me back my tie. The stain was gone.

“She reads my columns, or she tries to. She calls me up about them, but most of the time I just think, What's the point? I don't see why she tries, you know?”

“Because she loves you, probably.”

“Yeah, probably. Just feels futile.”

“What does futile mean?”

“Pointless.”

“Futile . . .”

“Try to use it in a sentence tomorrow.” I got back to the point I was making. “My largest regret is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely and I blame my mother for that.”