Merritt Tierce - Love Me Back

Cal’s daughter Elena, he got her in with this modeling agency. That was him — that belief in the most pressing uniqueness of his own life. No question. My daughter was beautiful too, at three she had flossy red hair down to her waist and strangers would use adult beauty words to describe her, like gorgeous. But I was always thinking something like Nothing is really all that special .

Cal was always thinking the opposite. And his daughter was what modeling agencies look for these days, a mixed-race child with fluffy hair and skin that one caramel Polynesian shade. She was tall, five feet when she was eight, with long delicate bones. Like Cal’s having her in ballet and modeling from the time she was small made her that way or something. Like he willed it. He said Man, Maxine will not have that talk with her and I keep getting on to her, telling her it should be a young lady’s mother has that talk. She’s dangerous, she looks too old, boys gonna be after her in a minute and she so young inside still. I told Max she don’t talk to her by her next birthday I’m gonna do it my own self, he said.

Max was Mexican, from Laredo. Cal said After my first marriage I knew the next one would be outside my race, but he never explained that or how he knew. His first wife Tamara was a black woman; they had a baby that was stillborn and took the marriage with it. Angeline, tattooed on his heart, scroll, script.

I was always moving the furniture around in that apartment. Couldn’t get situated. There was a beige velvet loveseat from 1974, which my parents bought the year they married and kept for thirty more. With that kind of example you’d think I wouldn’t have turned out so transient, you’d think I’d have been more like Cal, rooted, a straight line from point of origin up. There wasn’t anything wrong with the couch when I got it and it seemed like I should have had that kind of unblemished momentum too, considering who I came from. I put it in the dining room until I made enough jack to get a tiny bistro table at a restaurant supply store. By then I felt like I had been living in restaurants forever and would never escape so I don’t know why I wanted to feel restaurant at home too. I had thick ceramic café mugs and those standard restaurant highballs and pint glasses. I had those bar towels, white with the single red stripe. The aesthetics of high volume are usually durable and plain I suppose. Plain itself is durable and that appealed to me, so I didn’t deploy the theater that Calvin unfurled on his tables. I didn’t even give them my card at the end of the meal. I never said Ask for me next time. Cal was pushy about that, made them feel like they’d be dumb if they didn’t.

First the loveseat was in the dining room, that’s where Cal told me about Angeline and I told him about how I’d married my daughter’s dad when I was seventeen because my own dad hit me for the first and only time. Whacked the side of my head and said we needed to plan a wedding before I started showing. I went along but when she was three I left. Her dad’s a good guy and I love her like nothing. Neither of those changed the fact that I’d felt crazy since she was born, like I wasn’t meant for it. I just woke up one day and said I can’t do this. This isn’t real. I’m in the wrong life. It was that abrupt, overnight, like a snake molting out of a skin. Leaving it behind, slithering away cold-blooded.

When I got the table for the dining room I moved the loveseat into the living room, canted to face the corner. But after Ryan Doak broke my bed frame trying to fuck Iraq out of himself I moved the mattress into the living room as if the place were a loft and put the loveseat in my bedroom. The bed that broke I got from my parents too, and it was an antique mahogany four-poster, even older than the loveseat. I’d been staring at the geometric inlay on that headboard since I could remember.

It was when the mattress was there in the living room, its last stop, that I had to talk to Max on the phone. Cal called me and said Listen I need you to talk to Max. He said it in such a way that I knew she was right there and it was over. I talked to her on my back on the mattress and I’m afraid I sounded like a junkie. Laconic. In a call center you’re not supposed to lean back in your chair if you’re trying to sell something, you’re supposed to sit up straight and pretend the person can see you. It affects how you talk. I should have sat up. I think I said what I was supposed to say to her but my rebellion was lying down so she’d hear some other thing in my voice, hear some tip tap of the truth.

I was supposed to say and did say Nothing is going on with me and your husband even though he had a $600 cell phone bill last month, and it was all calls to me. The thing I shake my head over now is how for probably $589 worth of that $600 I couldn’t understand what he was saying, I was just listening. He would talk, he would fall into a chant, and something about his mellow voice and his way of speaking and the connection combined to make him unintelligible. I just said Uh huh and Oh yeah? or whatever was called for by the tone. But I didn’t think it would make sense if I said to Max I’m sorry the phone bill was so high but trust me I don’t even know what he said to me. And I couldn’t say Yes — your instincts — what you cannot think on has most definitely occurred, I have been heavily petted by Calvin D. Colson every day for three months, and your husband was in his underwear, but he wouldn’t let me touch his cock. I didn’t figure that last would give any comfort. And I knew Cal would kill me if I said anything real.

That was the contradiction, that’s what I’m trying to get at. He took it for granted that you would do some things that just weren’t straight, and he took it for granted that that was justified. I guess that’s corruption. Riding those actions like a boss. One afternoon before the afternoons ended he brought me a twenty-bag. He knew I’d gone back to coke even if I wasn’t giving it up to everybody anymore. He couldn’t believe I hadn’t gotten pregnant or caught something during all that. Young lady, you got some kind of angel looking out for you, he said. But the main reason I was keeping it to myself was so I could have a chance with him, because I knew he would never go there with me if he caught the scent of anybody else. I let him think I was learning how to be a woman, as he put it, instead of just trying to get what I wanted from him.

He said the coke was from the Baron. The Baron was this Turkish guy who pretended to be Italian and dropped by The Restaurant once or twice a year. He’d show up like we’d been waiting for him and no one else through all that intervening time, each of us frozen in uniform, in place, until his presence disseminated some magic dust to make us come alive again so we could fulfill our destinies of serving him. The magic dust was some green and some white and all handshook. I’m sure Cal got the don’s share of both and he told me he kept the bags to pass on to his people, just like he kept cigarettes and disposable cameras in his locker for when they ran out of smokes or got engaged. Once I even saw him fix a lady’s dress with a safety pin he had in his pocket.

I never knew anybody who kept coke though, which is the main fissure in my Cal wall. It’s a terrible habit but I tend to believe what people tell me, so when he told me the story of how years ago he quit using crack and coke I believed it. Then he gives me that twenty-bag and tells me he got it from the Baron and he’s been keeping it under the floor mat in his BMW. I looked at him and thought You don’t make your daughter breakfast and you’re fucking Cassandra Melton and you didn’t quit partying and you’re not going to make it. I looked at him and looked away and I cut it into lines on top of a drawing my daughter made, the two of us portrayed as lean and grinning neighbors in one of those stick-figure sketches that seemed more a demand for normalcy than a depiction of the actual. This is the kind of obstinate I was. I thought it was bad form to lay it out on her little picture like that, like it seemed too obvious a send-up of my failings, like I ought to keep her effort sacred if only out of superstition. But that’s what I wanted to face down — mine was an inversion of Cal’s just got to be you and bring it . I wouldn’t let myself look away from what I was doing and to punish myself for seeing it I wouldn’t let myself fix it. Sometimes I would get home from work and I would get stuck in the car, just sitting there in the carport looking out over the steering wheel. An hour could pass as I watched the security light come on and go off as the bars let out, flushing cars up Greenville Avenue.