Sweetbitter

by Stephanie Danler

  Everyone stood up together. The people around me stacked their plates on top of my full one and left. I held them to my chest and pushed through the swinging doors in the kitchen. Two servers walked by on my right and I heard one of them say in a false singsong, “Oh, the Harmand-Geoffroy, of course,” and the other girl rolled her eyes. Someone walked by on my left and said to me, “Seriously? You don’t know what a dishwasher looks like?”

  I moved toward a trough laden with dirty dishes that ran the length of the room. I set my stack down apologetically. A tiny, gray-haired man on the other side of the trough huffed and took my stack, scraping the food off of each one and into a trash can.

  “Pinche idiota,” he said, and spat into the trough in front of him.

  “Thank you,” I said. Maybe I had never actually made a mistake before in my life and this is what it felt like. Like your hands were slipping off of every facet, like you didn’t have the words or directions and even gravity wasn’t reliable. I felt my trailer behind me and spun around to grab him.

  “Where do I—” I reached out for an arm and noticed too late that it wasn’t striped. It was bare. There was a static shock when I touched it.

  “Oh. You’re not my person.” I looked up. Black jeans and a white T-shirt with a backpack on one shoulder. Eyes so pale, a weatherworn, spectral blue. He was covered in sweat and slightly out of breath. I inhaled sharply. “My trailer person I mean. You’re not him.”

  His eyes were a vise. “Are you sure?”

  I nodded. He looked me up and down, indiscreetly.

  “What are you?”

  “I’m new.”

  “Jake.” We both turned. The woman who knew the wine stood in the doorway. She didn’t see me. Her gaze distilled the kitchen light to its purest element.

  “Good morning. What time does your shift start again?”

  “Oh fuck off Simone.”

  She smiled, pleased.

  “I have your plate,” she said, and turned into the dining room. The doors swung back violently. And then all I could see was his feet pounding the last few stairs.

  —

  THEY SHOWED ME how to fold. Stacks of plastic-wrapped, blindingly white linens. Crease, turn, crease, fold, fan. Wrap with napkin bands, stack. The servers used that time to catch up, engaging in full conversations. Crease, turn, crease, fold, fan. I was lulled into a trance by the motions, by the lint gathering in my apron. No one addressed me. At least I can fold napkins, I said to myself, over and over.

  I watched Jake and Simone. He stood at the end of the bar hunched over his plate with his back to me, and she talked without looking at him. She tapped the screen at the computer terminal. I could tell they were attached far underneath the surface of the restaurant. Maybe because they weren’t laughing, or bantering—there was no performance. They were just talking. A girl with a button nose and a debutante’s smile said, “Hey,” and stuck her chewing gum into the napkin on my lap, and the trance was over.

  —

  I DIDN’T LOOK UP for weeks. I asked to work as many days as possible, but there was an alarming delay in money while the new paycheck cycle started. And when it came it was training pay. Nothing. With my first paycheck I bought a used mattress for $250 from a couple moving out a few apartments down.

  “Don’t worry,” they said, “no bugs. It’s full of love.”

  I took it, but that to me was more disturbing.

  —

  ON THE OTHER END of the linen spectrum came the bar mops. Every new trailer opened the session with, “Did someone explain bar mops?” And when I said yes they said, “Who? So-and-so always fucks it up. I have a secret stash.” I learned four different and elaborate systems for managing what were essentially rags they kept under lock and key.

  There were never enough. We could never attain healthy bar mop equilibrium. The kitchen always needed more, or the guy in the back never got set up before service, or the bartenders went on a cleaning spree. Invariably you forgot to save some for yourself. The victim of this bar mop negligence got to yell at you. When you asked a manager for more, they got to yell at you too, for burning through bar mops before service even started. If you begged—and everyone begged—the manager would unlock the cupboard and count out ten more. You told no one about the ten extra bar mops. You hid them, and then doled them out heroically during emergencies.

  —

  “THE KITCHEN IS a church,” Chef screamed at me when I asked my trailer a question. “No fucking talking.”

  Silence was observed in the kitchen. People entered on tiptoe. The only person allowed to directly address Chef during service was Howard—sometimes the other managers tried to do it and got their heads bitten off. The silence probably helped the cooks, but it made learning anything difficult to impossible.

  —

  IN BETWEEN shifts I went to the Starbucks that smelled like a toilet and drank one cup of coffee. On my evening off, I bought individual Coronas from the bodega and drank them on my mattress. I was so tired I couldn’t finish them. Half-empty bottles of warm beer lined my windowsills, looking like urine and filtering sunlight. I put slices of bread from the restaurant into my purse and made myself toast in the mornings. If I had a double I took naps in the park between the shifts. I slept hard, dreaming that I was sinking into the ground, and I felt safe. When I woke I slapped myself to get the grass marks off my cheeks.

  —

  NO NAMES. I didn’t know people. I grabbed whatever characteristics I could: crooked or fluorescent teeth, tattoos, accents, lipsticks, I even recognized some people by their gait. It’s not that my trailers were withholding information. I was just so stupid that I couldn’t learn table numbers and names at the same time.

  They explained to me that this restaurant was different—real paychecks first of all, and health benefits, sick days. Some nonsalaried servers even got hourly raises. People owned homes, had children, took vacations.

  Everyone had been there years. There were senior servers who would never leave. Debutante-Smile, Guy-with-Clark-Kent-Glasses, Guy-with-Long-Hair-and-Bun, Overweight-Gray-Hair-Guy. Even the backwaiters had been there at least three years. There was Mean-Girl, and Russian-Pouty-Lips, and my first trailer, whom I called Sergeant because of the way he ordered me around.

  Simone was Wine-Woman, and a senior server. She and Clark-Kent-Glasses had been there the longest. One of my trailers called her the tree of knowledge. Every preshift the maître d’ rearranged the seating chart because regulars demanded to sit in her section. The servers would line up to ask her questions, or they sent her to their VIP tables with a wine list. She never looked at me.

  And Sweaty-Boy, Jake? In those weeks of training I didn’t see him again. I thought maybe he didn’t work there, had just been filling in that day. But then I came in to pick up my first check on a Friday night and he was there. I put my head down when I saw him. He was a bartender.

  —

  “SO I HEARD you’re a barista,” drawled Guy-with-Long-Hair-and-Bun. “That makes my training day real easy.”

  It was like arriving to a coffee station on another planet. Everything silver, futuristic, elegant. More intelligent than me.

  “Ever worked on a Marzocco before?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The machine, the Marzocco. It’s the Cadillac of espresso machines.”

  All right, all right, I thought. I know how to make fucking coffee. Even a Cadillac was still a car. I picked out the portafilters, saw the grinder, the tamper.

  “You know the four Ms? What kind of espresso were you guys using?”

  “The kind that got dropped off in big bags,” I said. “It wasn’t exactly a gourmet place.”

  “Oh shit, okay, I heard you were a barista. No big deal, I’ll train you and we’ll check in with Howard after—”

  “No. No.” I twisted the portafilter out and discharged the spent espresso into the trash can. “Where are your bar mops?” He handed me one and I wiped the basket. “You guys use t
imers or what?”

  “We use our eyes.”

  I exhaled. “Okay.” I turned on the grinder, wiped the steamer wand, flushed out the group head. Twenty-five seconds was a perfect shot of espresso. I would count it myself. “One cappuccino, coming right up.”

  —

  I STUDIED the menu, I studied the manual. At the end of every service a manager asked me questions. I found that even if I didn’t know what on earth a Lobster Shepherd’s Pie was, even if I couldn’t imagine it, if I knew it was the Monday night special I was going to pass my trails. Even if I didn’t know what the fuck our tenets meant, I repeated back to Zoe perfectly, “The first tenet is to take care of each other.”

  “And do you know what makes a fifty-one percenter?”

  Zoe was eating the hanger steak at her desk in the office. She swirled a piece of it through mashed potatoes and frizzled leeks. I was so hungry I could have slapped her.

  “Um.”

  I forgot that the Owner had said to me: “You were hired because you are a fifty-one percenter. That’s not something we can train for—you have to be born with it.”

  I had no idea what that meant. I looked at the choking sign on the wall. The man asphyxiating in the sign looked calm and I envied him.

  —

  FORTY-NINE PERCENT of the job was the mechanics. Anyone can do this job—that’s what I was always told about waitressing. I’m sorry, serving.

  You know, just memorize the table numbers and positions, stack plates up along your arm, know all the menu items and their ingredients, never let the water levels drop, never spill a drop of wine, bus the tables cleanly, mise-en-place, fire orders, know the basic characteristics of the basic grape varieties and basic regions of the entire wine world, know the origins of the tuna, pair a wine with the foie gras, know the type of animal the cheeses come from, know what is pasteurized, what contains gluten, what contains nuts, where the extra straws are, how to count. Know how to show up on time.

  “And what’s the rest of it?” I asked my trailer, out of breath, dabbing paper towels into my armpits.

  “Oh, the fifty-one percent. That’s the tricky stuff.”

  —

  I FLUNG OFF my sweated-through work jeans, twisted the top off a Pacifico because they were out of Corona, and sat on my mattress with the manual. I am a fifty-one percenter, I said to myself. This is Me:

  • Unfailingly optimistic: doesn’t let the world get him or her down.

  • Insatiably curious: and humble enough to ask questions.

  • Precise: there are no shortcuts.

  • Compassionate: has a core of emotional intelligence.

  • Honest: not just with others, but most essentially with oneself.

  I lay back on the bed and laughed. Rarely, but sometimes, I thought about my old coworkers back in nowhere—where our training consisted of learning how to switch on the coffeepot—watching me sweat and run and parrot back this manual, unable to see five feet in front of me. They watched me spend every clocked-in moment blind and terrified, and then we laughed about it.

  The corner of South Second and Roebling was crowded with Puerto Rican families in their lawn chairs with adjacent coolers. They played dominoes. Kids screamed through the stream from a detonated hydrant. I watched them and thought back to that coffee shop on Bedford from the first day. I could probably walk in there now. I would say, Yeah I’ve worked on a Marzocco—oh, you don’t know it?

  But it wouldn’t be enough. Whatever it was, just being a backwaiter, a server, a barista—at this restaurant I wasn’t just anything. And I wouldn’t call it being a fifty-one percenter because that sounded like a robot. But I felt marked. I felt noticed, not just by my coworkers who scorned me, but by the city. And every time a complaint, a moan, or an eye roll rose to the surface, I smiled instead.

  III

  AND ONE DAY I ran up the stairs into the locker room and a woman from the office followed me. She carried three hangers hung with stiff, striped Brooks Brothers button-downs. They were the androgynous kind of shirt that straddles the line between the boardroom and a circus.

  “Congratulations,” she said in monotone, like her clothes. “These are your stripes.”

  I put them in my locker and stared at them. I wasn’t training anymore. I had a job. At the most popular restaurant in New York City. I fingered the shirts and it happened: The escape was complete. I put on navy stripes. I thought I felt a breeze. It was as if I were coming out of anesthesia. I saw, I recognized, a person.

  —

  SHE STOPPED ME on my first steps into the dining room, holding a glass of wine in her hand. I had the fleeting impression that she had been waiting for me a long time.

  “Open your mouth,” Simone said, her head raised, imperious. Both of us looked at each other. She painted her lips before each service with an unyielding shade of red. She had dark-blond hair, untamable, frizzy, wisped out from her face like a seventies rock goddess. But her face was strict, classical. She held the glass of wine out to me and waited.

  I threw it back like a tequila shot, an accident, a habit.

  “Open your mouth now,” she commanded me. “The air has to interact with the wine. They flower together.”

  I opened my mouth but I had already swallowed.

  “Tasting is a farce,” she said with her eyes closed, nose deep in the bowl of the glass. “The only way to get to know a wine is to take a few hours with it. Let it change and then let it change you. That’s the only way to learn anything—you have to live with it.”

  —

  I HAD the next day off and wanted to celebrate. I took myself to the Met. The servers were always talking about the shows they saw—music, film, theater, art. I didn’t know a single thing they mentioned though I had taken an Intro to Art History course in college. I went because I needed something to contribute during napkin time.

  I don’t know how long I had been in the city, but when I got off the train at Eighty-Sixth Street I realized how narrowly I had been living. My days were contained to five square blocks in Union Square, the L train, and five square blocks in Williamsburg. When I saw the trees in Central Park I laughed out loud.

  The lobby of the Met—that holy labyrinth—appropriately took my breath away. I imagined being interviewed ten years from now. Not like with Howard where I was tested, but interviewed with admiration. My amicable interviewer would ask me about my origins. I would tell him that for so long I thought I would be nothing; that my loneliness had been so total that I was unable to project into the future. And that this changed when I got to the city and my present expanded, and my future skipped out in front of me.

  I stuck to the Impressionist galleries. They were paintings I had seen a hundred times reproduced in books. They were the rooms that people dozed in. Your body could go into a kind of coma from the dreamscapes, but if the mind was alert, the paintings galvanized. They were almost confrontational.

  “And that confirmed what I had always suspected,” I told my interviewer. “That my life before the city had only been a reproduction.”

  After I ran out of rooms I started again. Cézanne, Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Degas, Van Gogh. “This is what I want,” I said, showing my interviewer the painting of Van Gogh’s cypresses. “Do you see how, up close, it’s blurry and passionate? And from a distance, whole?”

  “And what about love?” my interviewer asked me, unprompted, as I stared at Cézanne’s apples. For a second I saw Simone’s red lips asking the question.

  “Love?” I looked around the gallery for the answer. I had wandered out of Impressionism, into early Symbolism. Where a moment earlier I could have sworn the room was crowded, it was now nearly empty except for an elderly man who stood with a cane and a younger woman holding his arm in support. When I was driving to the city I had said to myself, I’m not one of those girls who moves to New York to fall in love. Now, in front of a jury of Symbolists, Simone, and the old man, my denial felt thin.

  “I don’t know anythin
g about it yet,” I said. I moved next to the man and his friend. His huge ears looked like they were carved of wax, and I was sure he was deaf. He was too at peace. We looked at Klimt’s woman in white, Portrait of Serena Lederer, the title said. She certainly wasn’t one of his most daring, and stood in contrast to his later gold-leafed, erotic works. But though she looked like a virginal column, she had in her face a restrained joy. I remembered something about an affair between the artist and the model, rumors that her daughter was actually Klimt’s. She stood above the three of us, unconcerned with being stared at. The old man smiled at me before he walked off.

  “Show me,” I said to the woman in white. We regarded each other and waited.

  —

  I GOT OFF the train and the streets were glowing. I went to the wine stall in the mini-mall on North Fifth and Bedford. The man behind the counter had long hair and tired, hanging eyes. He turned down the Biggie he’d been blasting when I came in.

  I looked at every single bottle, but I didn’t recognize anything. Finally, after ten minutes, I asked, “Do you have an affordable Chardonnay?”

  He had paint all over him and a cigarette behind his ear. “What kind of Chardonnay do you like?”

  “Um,” I swallowed. “France?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, that’s the only kind, right? None of that Cali shit. How’s this? I have one cold.”

  I paid him and held the bag to my chest. I ran home, crossing to the opposite side of Grand Street so I wouldn’t be contaminated by the demons lounging outside of Clem’s. I ran up my four flights of stairs too, ran into the apartment, stole Jesse’s wine key and a mug, and ran up the last flight, pushing out onto the roof.

  The sky was like the paintings. No, the paintings were trying to represent this sunset. The sky was aflame and throwing sparks, the orange clouds rimmed with purple like ash. The windows in each high-rise in Manhattan were lit up like the buildings were burning down. I was out of breath, overtired from the museum. My heart drummed. A voice said, You have to live with it. Another voice said, You made it, you made it, and at the same time, in a blistering chorus I said, Made it where? Live with what?