Merritt Tierce - Love Me Back

You get tired of being a fixture in a restaurant every night, even if like me you somehow love the job. Something about the word waitress too that always bothered me, made my lower belly quiver in that bad way, like when you walk through a nursing home. I quit The Restaurant the day I waited on Carter Wells and he asked me what I would do if I could do anything right this second, if money were no object. I said as I poured the taste, a swirl of the $800 Lafite Rothschild he’d ordered even though he was alone, Sir money is an object and could never be else but if money were no obstacle I’d live in a place where my little girl could go to a good school. Or maybe I wouldn’t even make her go to school, maybe we’d just see the world together from your side of the table.

With this I raised the glass with its swirl as if to toast the imaginary gift of an imaginary life and I put my whole small face inside the bowl and inhaled and then I drank that wine and said You enjoy your evening and I walked out of The Restaurant, holding the glass in my hand.

No. I would never do that.

But believe me that move is not original in the business. I knew a guy who did that in Morton’s one night, they have a spiel with a cart and all these props, and there’s a part where you have to hold up a potato and talk about what they can do with it. He held up the potato and — I can’t do this, he said, and put the potato down and left. He told me After you do it it feels like the stupidest thing because most likely you just end up in some other restaurant holding some other potato but way behind on your rent.

I did think about it though. Especially late at night when I was so hungry. Around ten thirty or eleven when I’d been at work for hours and hadn’t eaten since lunch, and the place was still brutally busy so I knew I wouldn’t eat until one or two in the morning. Then I would be running some steaming potatoes au gratin to some table and I’d think If I ever walk out this is how: Step up to the table with that bowl and instead of serving them stand there spooning the hot buttery crumbly cheesy potatoes into my mouth. We all became scavengers late at night. The law may require a lunch break but how are you going to take a lunch break at the height of service? At midnight I’d see a half-eaten dish of potatoes on the edge of a deuce in the bar and I’d catch their server’s eye. She knew what I wanted because she wanted it too. She’d start bussing the table in that ungodly sexy way she had, leaning over with her luscious tits in their nose, asking if they wanted dessert and laughing when they said As long as it’s you, like she didn’t hear that every night. I’d meet her in the back and we’d hide behind the glass polisher, scarfing. If Danny came into the back the glass polisher would yell Hola jefe and one of us would turn nonchalantly to the sink to wash our hands while the other began carefully creating an upside-down bouquet of stemware to carry back into the bar. We’d leave the last bites of the potatoes for the glass polisher.

People had been punished and fired for eating in the restaurant, surrounded by food. So most nights I didn’t risk it. I just finished my work and went home and went to bed, too tired to eat but not too hungry to sleep.

When I walk across the stage as valedictorian six weeks after the mission trip I still don’t know. I didn’t track my cycle very closely and the end of high school is a busy time. My parents invite everyone from church to a backyard barbecue to celebrate my acceptance to Yale. I have visited New Haven and met some of my professors. I sat in Sterling Memorial Library and read from Shusaku Endo’s Silence and thought about your dad but I was about to do something no one I knew had done, and there was no way for him to come with me.

I also thought that what we had done was wrong.

The elders accept the youth minister’s resignation. In his letter to the congregation he says that he deeply regrets having failed to safeguard the children in his care, referring to me I suppose.

The elders meet with me privately, in the library. Nine of them and a seventeen-year-old girl. Well, you’re the last person we’d have expected this to happen to, one says. Now, I don’t know what the circumstances were, says another, and you don’t have to tell us. But we all know how young men are. Ultimately it’s you girls who have to decide, who have to make choices to stay in the straight and narrow when it comes to purity.

I am so ashamed, so mortified, that I leave myself there at the table. I make myself four inches tall and I wing over to a bookshelf in a far corner. I alight on the highest shelf and look down at the girl in the red tank top. Her hair obscures her face and she stares at the table, trembling. I don’t know her, and I don’t know these men in dark suits, and there is nothing I can do to help her. She is too small, and there are nine of them. I tiptoe behind a book and lie down. I turn away from the room and fall asleep.

I wake up in my room at home. I feel the thick woozy tiredness that is new to me because I have never been pregnant before.

I didn’t take personally anything The Restaurant ever had in store for me. I just did the next thing as well as I could and then the next. The fifth or sixth sous-chef I worked with was griping at Florida John one night over some mess that had gone down earlier in the evening, when I walked up to restock some plates. Why can’t you be like this one? said the sous-chef, putting his hand on my shoulder. Don’t matter what happens out there, she’s ice. What’s your secret? he asked. Enlighten this motherfucker.

Accept that shit is all fucked up and roll with it, I said. Don’t bitch. Just adapt. Nothing is going to go right and everything is going to be hard.

Jesus, Confucius, said the sous-chef.

You crawl in bed with me in the middle of the night. You put your little arm on my chest and say you are afraid I’m going to die while I’m sleeping. I say You’re not afraid I’m going to die while I’m awake?

When you’re awake I can keep an eye on you, you say.

No, that doesn’t make sense, I say. You mean that when you’re awake you can keep an eye on me.

No, when I’m sleeping and you’re awake I dream about what you’re doing, you explain. But when you’re sleeping I never know.

Tonight they’ve put me on thirty men in The Private Room. The men are all white, fat, and over fifty. Sometimes parties like this will show up all at once on a hotel bus or in a drove of limos, if they’re in town for a convention and everything is organized. But these guys trickle in, and by the time the last few arrive some of them have already been drinking for two hours. DeMarcus, my partner on the party, got everything started — introduced us, went over the set menu, helped them pick out their wine.

I wonder if it’s a good thing that DeMarcus will be the face and I’ll be backwaiting. You get to know the look of new money and the look of old; you can call on sight, with near-perfect accuracy, whether a person is a martini, a red wine, a Stella, a Just water no ice extra lemon and a straw did I say no ice?; you know that certain European accents doom your take. You have an entire catalogue of these things in your head but still there will come that table, they’re wearing jeans and when you ask them what they want to drink they say two Diet Cokes and an iced tea and you think you know what you’re in for — an appetizer as an entrée, split three ways, ten percent on a tab that’s missing a couple digits. They’re making out at the table, he looks twice her age, you can’t figure out why the other one is with them. Low-class , you think, guess it’s not my night . Then you walk up with the second basket of bread they asked for and they say to bring out a bottle of Dom Rosé. After that they drink the 2000 Harlan Estate and order the big lobster tail. You start moving like you’ve got somewhere to be and when the bartender tries to play around with you instead of handing over the decanter you snap at him because if they come through you stand to make $500 off a three-top.