Love Me Back (7 page)

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 into 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.

Craig was one of those people who worked out more
than two hours a day. He spent at least four in the gym next door to the Dream before he came in to work. Even Sundays. He drank three gallons of water during a shift. His upper body was ripped but he was kind of short and he had bad teeth. He smoked a lot. He had the angular weatherworn cheekbones of a shepherd from a hard land. Managing a restaurant is probably somewhat like being a shepherd. Doing the same thing every day. Same territory, over and over. Watching mammals eat. Keeping everyone in line.

I looked all over the POS while I watched him out the door, talking to them. I saw him laugh. I tried to remember where I was on all my other tables now that an interminable digression had broken my rhythm. I rang up two orders and grabbed a water pitcher and headed back into the breach, squeezing behind Craig to get to my station, putting him between me and the linebacker like a body shield. I’m so sorry, I said to forty-two, have you had a chance to decide?

No one found a credit card anywhere. Everyone was put on the lookout. After the madness Tanya and I looked through every single check presenter. I even got Nacho to check the men’s room. Nothing. When I went to turn in my cashout Craig said Why did you close out forty-three? Because I had the voucher, I said. Yeah but we never found the card. We can’t make them pay the bill if we lost their card, he said to me like I was trying to fleece them and he was their good-hearted defender. So what do I do? I said. I’ll comp it, just give me a second, he said. He was chomping through an enormous pile of steamed broccoli while he entered cashouts in the office.

I sat down in a booth to wait. I felt the clock pressing on me. Now I had less than two hours to rest at home before I had to be at the Italian restaurant where I worked nights. I closed my eyes. Can you help run some stock? barked Marlo. No, I thought. Sure, I said. If it got close to one hour there wasn’t much point in going home, and I kept my other uniform in my car because sometimes that happened. But sometimes even if I could only be home for five minutes I would make the drive. I would sit on the floor in the bathroom and close the door, even though I lived alone. To feel like there was something between me and all that for a few moments.