Love Me Back (4 page)

That was the best body I ever had, and the worst mind. I was seventeen. I was slender and strong and I also had swollen C-cup breasts. I had never even worn a bra before my milk came in for her, and I had always been ashamed of my breasts before then. The way they looked if I leaned over. Sad little triangular flaps of skin just holding my nipples to my chest. If I was lying on my back they disappeared completely and I could have been a boy except that my nipples were big and square. I had no breast tissue. I didn’t feel like a girl when I was a child. I didn’t feel female. I felt neutral. Then I had her and I had breasts and I felt like I had become a girl. Femininity is shocking. Women always seem smaller and softer than I expect, when I hug them. Even if they don’t look small or soft. When I had breasts I was aware of them
all the time. They were something new in my field of vision and they made my body intrude into another plane of space. But my mind was an open sore. It was black. I couldn’t tell if I was deep inside it or totally outside it. I would imagine being fatally cleaved all day long. By a gallows axe, the T-shaped kind. By a heavy medieval sword like Excalibur. Or bludgeoned, usually blows to my head, usually by the butt of a rifle.

I don’t know what we did all day. I went for walks with her. I read while she nursed. Magazines and biographies mostly. I would go to the library and take one of the subscription cards from something that looked interesting and check Bill Me and then I would get two or sometimes three issues before they cut it off. I used to read the magazines at the library, because there was a nice overstuffed chair there and I could put my leg up to support her while she nursed, which was the most comfortable position. If she was nursing on the left I would put my left leg up with my knee bent and my foot in the chair and that way I didn’t have to put all her weight on my arm. Then I would switch. Then she would fall asleep. I could read through three or four magazines that way. But one day when it was exceptionally quiet there she was smacking and swallowing and I liked the sound myself but it’s not a subtle sound. There’s no mistaking it. I didn’t mess with any of those awkward cloths they sell to cover you while you nurse, I just lifted my shirt and put her on. But we were good at it, you would never see my nipple or even my skin the way we did it. Still the reference librarian came up to me that one day and she stopped about five feet away from the chair like I was contagious and she leaned toward me
and whispered I’m sorry honey but you can’t do that here. About that time the baby choked because the milk was flowing so hard and she came off the nipple and the streams were pulsing out into the air. The milk went all over my shirt and the baby’s face. She started crying and I had to put my hand right on my breast and push on it because that was the only thing that would stop it. I said Okay to the librarian and I stood up with the baby but I knew she wouldn’t stop crying until I put her back on, so I turned away from the librarian and got her nursing again while I was standing there. Then I said Would you mind putting these magazines back for me. We walked out. There was nobody there.

At home we slept some more. I was always that heavy, iron kind of tired. My exhaustion was metallic. Sharp, flat, invincible. And I was always hungry because she was always hungry. For my shift meal I would have the black-bean burger plain with Swiss and I would eat every bite and every French fry and I would drink the chocolate milk shake with the sprinkles every night. And I still couldn’t sit on the floor or in a wooden chair because there was nothing to support my bones. Even if the floor was carpet I was so thin it hurt. I ate whatever I wanted and it all turned into milk.

When he got home at four thirty in the afternoon I would be dressed for work and finishing nursing her one last time. She was six months old when I started there so while I was at work he would give her some mashed banana or some rice cereal and sometimes a bottle of water. By the time I got home at eleven or midnight my breasts would be huge rocks and I would get into bed and wake her up and nurse her for a long time, both sides. That always felt so good, when they
were that full and I could finally nurse her. I had to be careful at work the last hour or so because if I thought of her or heard a baby cry sometimes I would feel the pricking of the milk letting down and I would have to try to push on my breasts without anyone seeing, but most of the time when you’re waiting tables you’re doing something with your hands or you’re in front of people. Once or twice I couldn’t stop it because I was taking an order or running food and the milk soaked through my shirt. When it happened the first time I was wearing a blue shirt and two dark round circles appeared on my chest. We could wear blue, red, or black Chili’s shirts, polos with the embroidered red pepper logo. After that I always wore the black shirt.

I never called or visited my parents, after we got our own place. They didn’t live far from us but I didn’t know what to report. I hate that I hate my life? They were there when she was born and they were insatiable for her but I didn’t feel like she was my baby while we lived with them. They were always taking her from me. Now I realize that was nothing more than the ravenous craving of a grandparent for the bodily wonder—the heft, the face, the smell—of a grandchild. At the time I was afraid that everyone could tell how lost I was, how lacking in maternal instinct, how sad. At the time I thought they thought I wasn’t fit to have her, but I was afraid to call them on it and hear them say what I thought was true. So I let them take her from me and give her back to me when she was hungry, as if I were only her nursemaid.
Home was the one place I nursed her in private, so no one could watch me try to be her mother.

When she was three months old I found an apartment for the three of us and we moved out. I let my husband explain it to them because they couldn’t talk to him the way they talked to me, and I didn’t know what to say. My mother said You don’t have to do this as she handed me the baby. I didn’t respond. I just took the baby and started fitting her into her car seat. My husband said to my mother, who had started to cry, Hey. It’ll be fine. I’ll take care of her. We’re just across town.

My dad came up to the Chili’s one night to check on me. My husband had probably told them I wasn’t doing well. He talked to them more than I did but it wasn’t a conspiracy. I didn’t talk to anyone and he liked people so he did. My dad ate a Paradise Pie while I waited for the last table on the other side of the restaurant to leave so I could finish the closing duties. I was sweeping my station, pulling out the empty booths to pick up menus and crayons that had fallen in the cracks. He sat in a booth and talked to me while I swept. I think he was trying to convince me to hang in there. I listened but I knew I wouldn’t. I learned a lot of things while I worked there. I learned how to sweep aggressively and efficiently. I learned how to anticipate and consolidate, which is all waiting tables is. I learned how to use work to forget. I learned how to have an orgasm and I learned I was a bad wife.

I didn’t have the constant decapitating images at work. At work my mind became gray and busy and it was okay. But the next morning I would see a butcher knife plunged into my chest, pinning me to the bed. Or a machete that would go through my pelvis and all the way through the mattress and the box spring to the floor below.

Eating scrambled eggs or toast in the kitchen I was afraid for her. I cried and moved slowly all day long. I thought it must be bad for her to have that as her mother. So far away. She was like her dad. The same peachy complexion and disposition, the same red hair, the same feet.

I didn’t talk to her. I was a silent mother. Touching was talking. I smelled her a lot, especially her breath, which smelled like butter.

I don’t remember much about working there. I remember the to-go girl was incredibly good at her job and that was the first time I had ever seen anyone work smart and hard like that. The phone on her shoulder, the competent look on her face, how she shaved a fraction of a second off her process by not letting the cash drawer open all the way. The tough way she stapled the order chit to the bag. I wanted to be like her and not like Barrett. It wasn’t that I liked waiting tables so much then—it was that I had somewhere to be. Some function in life. I didn’t understand how to be a wife or mother. But there were rules to being a waitress. The main one was don’t fuck up. Another was whatever you skip in your prep will be the one thing you need when you’re buried. If you look at the stack of kids’ cups while you’re tying
on your apron in the afternoon and decide there will probably be enough for the night because you really don’t want to go out to the shed and dig around for the new sleeve, eight soccer teams will come in at nine, and you’ll have to go out to the shed anyway, and by the time you get back you’ll have killed your tips on all your other tables. That incessant fulfillment of Murphy’s Law taught me to be superstitious. I never said It looks like it’s going to be a slow night and we’ll get out early because that would suddenly make the smoking section fill up. The smokers took forever. You could never turn those tables because they just weren’t in a hurry. They smoked before they ordered. They always had appetizers and drinks. They smoked after the appetizers. They always had dessert. Their tabs were inevitably more, but they undid it by staying there for so long you could have had three $25 tables instead of one $40, even though the smokers tipped better. And I never said I think we’re going to be busy tonight because then it would be dead and they wouldn’t cut anyone and you’d stand around for six $2.13 hours. If I knocked over a saltshaker while I was refilling it or wiping down a table I always threw a pinch over my left shoulder.

I got chlamydia from John Smith. That was actually his name. John Fucking Smith, said my husband. You cheated on me with John Fucking Smith?

Yes, I said. Do you have to call it cheating?

What the fuck does it matter what I call it, Marie. Is there anyone else? he said.

Yes, I said.

What? he said. His eyes went hard then and he crossed his arms. We were standing in the ugly galley kitchen of our apartment. It was right next to a highway. It never got dark at night and I pretended the constant sound of the traffic was the ocean. It was an all bills paid one-bedroom and the rent was $397. We stood in the kitchen under the fluorescent lights. His face was so white and his eyes were so black. He was still and I heard a semi downshift and I could hear the lightbulbs buzzing and a moth flicking around inside the fixture. Then he lunged away from the counter and I covered my head even though he was the most gentle person I’d ever known. He started kicking the oven. Kicking kicking kicking. Stop! I yelled. Stop! The baby cried from our bed.