Love Me Back (24 page)

Do I smell like fries? I ask, trying to act like I am keeping it together, trying to pretend I didn’t just say something incomprehensible. The Restaurant is Zagat-rated and our party spent over four grand on one dinner that involved compotes, reductions, infusions, compound butters, a coulis, a pan jus, but somehow the smell of French fries is what I always carry home on me. He puts his nose in my neck and inhales tenderly. We’re still standing right there in the living room in front of his dad. Crème brûlée, he says. Come on, I’ll show you to the ladies’.

This is the thing about the service industry, you can get trained to be slick and hospitable in any situation and it serves you well the rest of your life. Once you figure out that everything is performance and you bow to that, learn to modulate, you can dissociate from the mothership of yourself like an astronaut floating in space. That’s how you can show a fucked-in-your-truck girl down the hall to the ladies’ and tell her her neck smells like crème brûlée in front of a zombie dad while some freebased flesh you’re related to waits for you to carry it inside. That’s how the crunked girl
can get in the shower like she’s told and stand over the drain and pee and not think about what might happen next.

I lose track of time in the shower. I wash my vagina and then stand there letting the water run over me. I’m hearing the water like it’s a waterfall, loud and like I’m inside it, when I’m high I hear sixteen layers of sound. I hear someone come into the bathroom, hear a belt buckle hit the floor. DeMarcus pulls back the shower curtain and steps in behind me. Clean yet? he asks. How’s your brother? I ask. He be all right, just gets carried away with the shit sometimes. Whose tricycle is that outside? I ask again. Excuse me, he says, stepping around me to get near the water, turning his back to me. My son’s, he says finally. How did I not know you have a son? I ask. He turns around but his hands are over his face, he’s rubbing his eyes. He shrugs. Work is work, he says. Don’t everybody got to know everything.

We get out of the shower and cross the hall into a bedroom. It’s dark, the shades are drawn, there is a bed shoved against the wall and J is lying on it, his back to the wall. His eyes are closed. Porn is playing on a television at the foot of the bed. DeMarcus is wearing a towel around his waist and disappears into the darkest corner of the room until he strikes a match and I see that he’s lighting a cigar. He candles the end and then turns it and puffs three times until it’s lit. He sits down on the edge of the bed and pats the place beside him. I sit down, I am naked and cold. I stare at the television but I hate porn. De is watching it and his eyes are bloodshot.
He says Let’s lie down so we do, he is on the outer edge of the bed with his ankles crossed and I am between him and J, who is silent and still. I have my head on De’s chest and I doze off lying on him while he smokes his cigar and watches a jarhead fuck a stripper on stage. She has her hair in two ponytails and he holds on to them like handles.

I wake up when I feel myself drooling on his chest. I wipe his chest and then my mouth. Sorry, I say. Happens, he says, no problem. You ready to go back? I’ll drive you. Sure, I say, thanks. I notice that J is gone but I don’t ask where he went. I feel something feathery on my skin. I get off the bed and can see by the bruised dawn light coming around the window shade that the bed is covered in cigar ash. Covered. Evenly, as if it is some new weather. His dad is not in the chair when we leave.

In the truck on the way back we don’t say much. My head hurts. I see a sign that tells me we are in Irving. Working tonight? I ask DeMarcus. I’m off, he says, you? I say I am and he says You never take off do you and I say I don’t. We’re quiet until we get near the restaurant and he says If you want that morning-after pill I’ll pay you back for it.

I hadn’t thought of that. Do I need it? I ask, more to myself than him. Couldn’t hurt, he says. Yeah, all right, I’ll let you know, I say. I don’t tell him I already have a dose at home because the last time they gave me an extra. It was fifty bucks and I don’t mind letting him pay it backward for me so I’ll tell him how much it cost next time I see him.

As he drives away I get in my car and I think
We never even smoked the weed he said he had at the house
and then I stare at the back of the restaurant and wish there were more hours between now and seeing it again later today. It’s seven in the morning and I have to be here at five this evening. I drive home, home to my clean apartment, to my clean bed. I take another shower and I take the first Plan B pill and I take some ibuprofen and I call my daughter’s father because it’s rare that I’m awake this early, when he’s getting her ready for school. I ask if I can talk to her and then I hear her high-pitched voice say Hi Mama and I hear her crunching toast. I ask her what kind of jelly she’s having today. I tell her I miss her. She asks if she can come up to the restaurant like last time, for a Shirley Temple. I say We’ll see. I imagine Hal in the green apron, smiling and asking What can I get started for you? He is thirty-four and has braces.

I go to sleep at eight and wake up at three. Her school day. I make coffee and wonder if I have any diseases now. We have been warned there might be a test on the hand-sell wines this week so I review them.
’01 Stags’ Leap Winery, Napa, $90 down from $120. Ruby red, plum, earth, green tea, velvety tannins, complex
. Wine is all words. People who know wine don’t need your help and people who don’t will believe anything you say if it sounds good. Our sommelier would think that was a shitty attitude to have.

I eat a piece of vegetarian sausage while I stand in the kitchen drinking my perfect coffee and reading over the hand-sells. I look lean and I wear a digital sport watch on my left wrist so sometimes my guests will ask me if I run. I don’t say No I’m just snorting a lot of coke right now. I say that I do run and they say I bet you don’t eat much meat do you
and I say No actually I’m vegetarian and they laugh at this because I have just shown them a tray of ten pounds of raw beef carved into the different cuts of steak we offer. I hype it, the tiny mystique of my being vegetarian and working there. I say Meat is my profession, which often leads someone at the table to say Well you’re certainly a professional. I don’t say
I know, because I’ve made a hundred people before you say that same thing in this same situation, I’ve made you remember your charming professional vegetarian server when it’s time for you to put a number on the tip line
, and I don’t say,
I’m not vegetarian because of the animals; I’m vegetarian because I hate the way meat feels in my mouth
.

At four I get in the shower, scrubbing everything hard. I pluck my eyebrows, brush my teeth, do my makeup, fix my hair, file and buff my nails. They see your hands more than anything. I put on my pants and undershirt and grab all my tools. I put the second Plan B pill in my pocket and hope I will remember to take it when everything is madness at eight o’clock. I stop at the cleaner’s to swap soiled for pressed, I have a good man on the corner of Greenville and Belmont who does my shirts the way I want them and doesn’t charge much. He starches everything to spec, so my long bistro apron can stand on its own and the creases in my sleeves will be so pointy that even at ten thirty tonight when I walk up to my last table for the first time they will see those creases and they’ll trust me just a little. My name is Marie, and I’ll take care of you tonight.

Acknowledgments

This book owes most of its existence to Ben Fountain, who was the first person to champion and publish my writing, and whose friendship and encouragement have never wavered. He is the most generous writer I know, and I am grateful to have had the guidance of his example.

For telling me my restaurant stories were a book before I knew it myself, and for feeding me in Iowa City better than I’ll ever be fed again, Xander Maksik. I aspire to hone my aesthetics, in life and in art, to the razor’s edge where Xander lives. It’s hard to know someone who exists and writes with the purpose and ferocity of a bullet and not feel intimidated, but it’s very good for quashing internal excuses. Also for forcing me to have fun, for sharing the whole ride of “emerging” with me, and for freakishly good advice on all fronts.

To Gregory Sherl, Roxane Gay, ZZ Packer, Kathy Pories, David Hale Smith, Erica Mena Landry, Lee Fountain, Willard Spiegelman, and the editorial staffs of
CutBank
and
Reunion: The Dallas Review
for loving, selecting, publishing, and/or nominating my stories.

To my teachers Ethan Canin, for crushing my fear of structure and for appreciating what I do well, and Michael Martone, for infectious excitement.

To Jon and Leslie Maksik, for the beauty and peace of Sun Valley and for hospitality of the highest form.

To the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards, and the National Book Foundation, for invaluable financial and psychological support.

To my agent, Anna Stein O’Sullivan, and my editor, Coralie Hunter, for making my book better and this first trip good.

To Charlie Drum, for stepping in as a miraculous surrogate grandparent and showing my children the time of their lives in Iowa City and beyond. Knowing your kids are with someone who loves them as much as you do while you try to write opens up impressive stores of energy and focus.

To my mom, for the books, and my dad, for how to tell a story.

For everything, Chad Wilhite.

And for seeing me, wanting me, knowing me, trusting me, making me laugh enough to dispel two decades of sadness, loving me right, and letting me be deeply happy for the first time in my life, Evan Stone.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Merritt Tierce was born and raised in Texas, and graduated from college at the age of nineteen. Her first published story, “Suck It,” was anthologized in Algonquin Books’
New Stories from the South 2008
, edited by ZZ Packer. She received her MFA in fiction writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was named a Meta Rosenberg fellow. In 2011, she was a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the National Book Foundation named her a 2013 5 Under 35 honoree. Her work has also been featured in the anthology
Dallas Noir
(Akashic Books), edited by David Hale Smith. Merritt lives near Dallas with her husband and children.
Love Me Back
is her first novel.