Love Me Back (21 page)

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.

The Private Room

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.

Same thing with these types in The Private Room, the unpredictability. Sometimes they want a girl with their steak—a rival establishment across town employs only women—and sometimes they don’t think a girl can do the job, or they seem embarrassed for you.

I won’t be talking much from here on out, and with the look of them I’m glad of that even if it might have worked out better for us with me up front. I fill their wineglasses and pick up the cocktail napkins they’ve brought with them from the bar. Are you ready for another, sir? I say. One of them has already downed three Jack ’n’ waters and the hors d’oeuvres haven’t even arrived. His nose is red and his eyes are pushed deep into a big waxy face. I ring up another for him and when I head into the well to pick it up DeMarcus is there, loading some other cocktails onto a tray. I point at the Jack and ask him if he’ll take it with him so I can prep some mise en place. Who’s it goin to? he asks. You know, I
say, Lushie. Ah, he says, big fella? They’re all big, I say. Well, they’re all lushies too, he says.

Back in the room Lushie is standing, whiskey in hand, inviting everyone else to sit. He starts talking about their colleague who passed recently, due to an aortal aneurism. You can tell the others think this is a downer. They just got going on their buzz and they have to tell it to hold on a minute because it’s making them want to laugh when they should be serious, so they start playing with their forks and staring at the tablecloth and they start drinking even harder. You look down the table and the arms and glasses are going up and down quietly but nonstop like derricks. Lushie is using long medical terms with the somber educated air of a preacher bringing the word.
The word is
—
what?
I think.
Heartsick? Moderation? Death? Quit it all right now?

Finally he drains his glass and sits all in one motion and the chatter folds back in around us and I can tell some of them feel like they barely made it out. Now they’re talking merger, due diligence, cash flow, liquidity, execute, and the deadly amortization. I have my language too, so though I think about asking Lushie if he wants me to mainline it for him I put it the nice way and say with a prompting lilt in my voice, Would you like me to keep those coming for you sir? and I start making them double-talls to slow him down, something Cal taught me.
He wants to drink let him drink, and make him pay for it too—he feels that second or third double hit his ass and he don’t slow down, more power to him. But you don’t got to be running around for him like his goddamn lil bitch
.

We take the order, DeMarcus on one side of the table and I on the other. We have an unspoken rivalry about who can get from position one to position fifteen the fastest. The pros get the order taking down to a call-and-response that reads each guest’s mind and draws out his selections for three courses with all pertinent temperatures and modifications in forty-five seconds or less, without letting him feel the slightest bit rushed. You expand your intake words, like Certainly and Absolutely and That won’t be a problem, sir, you let them hang rich and pillowy in a smile and the guest thinks only of how accommodating and efficient you are, he doesn’t hear the ticking of the giant railroad clock in your head that is Chef, waiting on the line for this order because a big party will affect the cook times for everything in the house. I’m one position behind DeMarcus, since one of my guys takes forever to acknowledge me, even though I’m standing there next to him saying Sir? Sir? Have you had a chance to decide? At some point you have to give up and wait for the friends he’s talking to to advocate for you, give him a sign with their eyes that he’s being rude to you. I hear DeMarcus talking to his seat eight about what vegetables he wants on the table for the party. This guy calls him Mark—DeMarcus is sensitive about his name, at least in the restaurant, and I don’t blame him. He’ll truncate it like that if he feels he needs to, though I think his name sounds regal and hip in the parking lot late at night when his brother swings by to get him and they ask me to climb in for a puff. On my side, on Lushie’s right, there’s one black guy. Guess he’s their EEOC compliance. He’s the only one of the lot who doesn’t order a steak—he asks for the salmon, well-done, and wants to make sure some greens
will be on the table. Then I bend over by Lushie’s ear to get his order, and he does that thing fat people do where they sit facing forward but they tilt their head back and up toward you like a flower looking for the sun. He says he’ll have the ribeye. Maybe he’s thinking the same thing I am about that because when I ask him what he’ll have for dessert he pauses piously and says, I don’t believe I’ll have dessert tonight. I’ll pass. You’ll pass, okay, I say seriously while making notes like a doctor.