Sweetbitter

by Stephanie Danler

  “It isn’t two yet,” Ariel said. As if something switched at two.

  “Do you do this every night?”

  “Do what?”

  I nodded toward my glass of Boxler that refilled itself every time my eyes were averted. To the half-empty wine bottles that lined the bar for consumption. To Nicky eating cocktail olives while he and Scott told each other to fuck their mothers. To Lou’s gravelly serenade coasting down on us through a film of smoke. To the row of us, unkempt, glassy and damp, sweating drinks in our hands.

  “This?” Ariel waved away the smoke in front of my face, waved it away like it was nothing. “We’re just having our shift drink.”

  V

  WHEN I STARTED they told me, You have no experience. New York experience is all that counts.

  Well, I had a little now. A structure presented itself to me, like the grid of the city. There was the GM, there were managers. There were senior servers, servers, backwaiters. The backwaiters originally functioned as a holding pen where aspiring servers awaited transcendence, but there was so little internal movement, most of them seemed contented where they were. I had Heather to thank for my position—she had talked a reluctant Parker into serving after six years of backwaiting. That’s the only reason I existed.

  The backwaiter had three kinds of shifts: food running (the carrying of plates), dining room backwaiter (the busing and resetting of tables), and beverage running (assisting with the drinks), which included a fair amount of barista work. I noticed that even though we rotated the shifts, people showed an affinity for one area and developed a schedule around it.

  Will was an excellent food runner, with his Yes-Chef-No-Chef military mentality, his eyes-to-ground focus. So while he was a backwaiter, he also had some loyalties in the kitchen, which he exhibited in several annoying ways, such as partaking in kitchen beer, and complaining about “FOH” as if he weren’t one of the front of house.

  Ariel loved the freedom of being dining room backwaiter. She waltzed around, picking up a few plates, topping off a few waters, polishing a few knives and nudging them into place on the newly set table with first a look of pinched frustration, and then placidity when it came together. And while this wasn’t true of all backwaiters, Ariel was generally trusted to talk to the guests. If the rest of us so much as said “Hello” to a table, a scolding was sure to follow.

  Sasha was too good at his job to stay still. He got bored easily. If you put him in the kitchen, he could run your plates, drop off ice at the bar, and bus two tables on his way back in—all in the same amount of time it took me to find position 3 at table 31. It worked against him—I saw Ariel, Will, even the servers slack when they were on with him.

  Which left me. For several reasons I gravitated toward the bar. First, because I noticed that there was a spot open to be the beverage runner. Second, because I had an aptitude for beverage running, cultivated over many years making hearts in mediocre lattes. The third reason was that it was a chance to get away from Chef in the kitchen. The fourth, or first, or only reason was that Jake was a bartender.

  I assisted the servers in delivering their drinks to tables. I assisted the bartenders in keeping their bar stocked. I brought up crates of wine and beer, buckets of ice, ran the glass racks, the bar bus tubs, polished the glasses. If you were slow, the drinks were slow, and if the drinks were slow, the turn times lagged and we made less money. And then, about an hour and a half into each turn, the first espresso ticket would print. And then I was under it for the next thirty minutes.

  At the end of the night the bartender made a stocking list and I put the whole thing back together again. Some people dreaded beverage running because it was a pure shit show for most of the night—you got hit with the drinks on the initial rush and the coffee on the tail end. Yes, my neck, my hands, my legs hurt. I loved it.

  There was only one problem with my new position. The manual labor, the coffee—fine, that was the forty-nine percent of it. The fifty-one percent of beverage running was wine knowledge.

  —

  “APPETITE IS NOT a symptom,” Simone said when I complained of being hungry. “It cannot be cured. It’s a state of being, and like most, has its attendant moral consequences.”

  —

  THE FIRST OYSTER WAS a cold lozenge to push past, to push down, to take behind the taste buds in the back hollow of the throat. Nobody had to tell me this—I was the oyster virgin, my fear told me what to do when the small wet stone came into my mouth.

  “Wellfleet,” someone said.

  “No, too small.”

  “PEI.”

  “Yeah, some cream.”

  “But so briny.”

  Briny. PEI. A code. I took a second oyster in my hand, inspected it. The shell was sharp, sculptural, a container naturally molded to its contents, like skin. The oyster flinched.

  I suspended it on my tongue this time. Briny means salty. It means made by the ocean, it means breathing seawater. Metallic, musky, kelp. My mouth like a fishing wharf. Jake was on his third, flipping the shells over onto the ice. Swallow, now.

  “I’m going West Coast, it’s too creamy,” someone said.

  “But clean.”

  “Kumamotos. Washington, right?” he said.

  “He’s right,” said Zoe, smiling like a fool for him.

  I wrote it down. I heard him say, “Do you like them?”

  I was sure he was talking to me but I pretended to be confused. Me? Do I like them? I had no idea. I took gulps of water. The taste stayed. In the locker room I brushed my teeth twice, stuck my tongue out to the mirror, wondering when the residue would go away.

  —

  THAT SUNDAY AFTERNOON I was positive Mrs. Neely was dead, that she had died at table 13. I stayed away but kept her in my vision until another server went and revived her. She asked for more sherry for her soup. A shot glass for her soup, a glassful for herself.

  She was nearing ninety, born and still living in Harlem. She took the bus down to Union Square every Sunday in stockings, high heels, and a hat. She had a burgundy pillbox with silk flowers, and a cornflower-blue fascinator edged in lace. She had been a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall.

  “That’s why I still have these legs,” she said, pulling her skirt up to her thighs.

  “I dined at Le Pavillon. Henri Soulé, that bastard, he ran the door like a dictator. But I went, everyone went. Even the Kennedys went. Child, you don’t remember. But I remember. They really cooked your food back then. Where’s the cream, I say. The butter, the green beans, honey, you didn’t even need to chew.”

  “I wish I could have been there,” I said.

  “The haute cuisine, it’s done, it’s dead. Al dente. That’s what they do now.” She paused and looked around the table. “Did my soup come?”

  “Um. Yes.” I had cleared it myself ten minutes ago.

  “Now, I haven’t had my soup yet. I need my soup.”

  “Mrs. Neely,” I whispered stupidly, “you already had the soup.”

  Suddenly Simone was beside me, sweeping away my inefficiencies, making me irrelevant. I drew back as Mrs. Neely narrowed in on Simone.

  “Tell the chef I’d like my soup now.”

  “Absolutely, Mrs. Neely. May I bring you anything else?”

  “Oh you look tired. I think you would do to drink a little old wine. Some good old wine, like some sherry.”

  Simone laughed, her cheeks colored. “I think that’s exactly what I need.”

  —

  PARTLY IN THE HANDBOOK, but mostly just understood: You could sleep with anyone, except those above you. You couldn’t sleep with anyone on salary. Anyone that could hire or fire you. You could sleep with anyone on your level. All the hourlies.

  Anything slightly more romantic than sex had to be disclosed to Howard, but the sex passed freely below the surface.

  I asked Heather about her and Parker. She wore a small vintage engagement ring—his grandmother’s—but they hadn’t set a date yet.

  “Par
ker? Oh, I remember my first trail, seeing him from down the bar, and I said, Oh lord, look at Trouble. We were both betrothed to other people. He was engaged to—I’m not kidding—a Debbie Sugarbaker from Jackson, Mississippi, a lawyer-something, plain as white bread. Don’t you ever tell him I told you. Once we started talking, I thought, Here we go. My real life is coming for me, gunning at me like a train.”

  “Wow,” I said. My life, my train.

  “This place is a love shack, darlin’. Try to keep your panties on.”

  —

  THE INTERIOR OF Park Bar was dark and the decorations minimal. But watching over us, high up near the ceiling, was a huge reproduction of a painting that felt familiar. I told them I’d seen it before but that might have been a lie. Two boxers in a ring, midconflict, midinjury. Action everywhere, blows landing, receding. Except the faces. The two boxers’ faces were blurred together, one solid mass.

  Will had finally asked me to join them for a post-shift-drink drink, or Shift Drink Part Two. I hung close to him while Nicky locked up the restaurant. People said their good-byes, discussed which trains were running, flagged down cabs. I remembered Ariel’s voice daring me—“It isn’t two yet”—and I checked my phone: 2:15 a.m. They headed into the parking garage across the street from us. Oh do you have a car? I asked. Will said, No, we’re going to Park Bar. Ariel hummed into the echo. We walked farther underground. Rubber soles on cement, oil stains, gasoline fumes. The guard waved to Will. We ascended and we were on Fifteenth Street under a huge lit-up sign that said PARK. And there was, indeed, a bar.

  No one asked me if I did coke. Ariel asked me if I wanted a treat and I said sure. I had done it seemed to be the same as I do it. I caught the subtext that everyone did a little bit of coke and nobody had a problem. If I had any inclination to think about it the noise in Park Bar ran right over it. It was crowded and Will and Ariel knew everyone.

  Scott and the cooks held up a table in the corner. I recognized some of the prep guys. We moved toward the table and I set my purse by them just like Ariel. I saw people that had been cut earlier, people who worked the a.m. Ariel pointed to different tables and said, “Blue Water, Gotham, Gramercy, some retards from Babbo, and so on.” I nodded.

  Will held on to my elbow as we made our way to the bar, where Sasha sat next to a Dominican man with huge diamond stud earrings.

  “Oh look who finally graced us from her present!” Sasha said, and shocked me by kissing me on both cheeks. The other man introduced himself as “Carlos-at-your-service.” He was a busboy at Blue Water Grill and he sold drugs to every server within a ten-block radius.

  The line for the bathroom ran in humid pairs, some ear-piercingly loud, some whispering as they waited. It wound around the room. After two sips of my beer, Ariel took my hand and we joined the line. When our turn came, we shut a flimsy door, hooked it, and locked the handle. She dipped a key into a small plastic bag and handed it to me. Someone banged on the door.

  “Wait your fucking turn motherfucker!” she screamed. She dug the key around and took a bump herself.

  “What do you think of Vivian?”

  “The one Scott was talking about?”

  “Don’t listen to him. He’s lying, they’re all fucking homophobes.”

  “She’s pretty,” I said. “She has great tits? I don’t know. I don’t feel anything. Can I have some more?” Ariel handed me the bag and I pyramided up the powder. “Are you gay gay or just half gay?”

  “Jesus, you’re something. Where do you come from? Okay, stick this in your mouth.”

  She stuck the key in my mouth like a pacifier. It tasted like battery acid and salt.

  “You good babe? How do I look? Torrid? Like a natural disaster?” She ruffled her hair up like she’d been in an electrical storm. I nodded. She kissed me on the forehead, and where she kissed tightened, first in my skin, then in my skull, then in my brain. A saccharine, sentimental drip ran down my throat, and I was blinded by how stupid I had been not to see that everything was absolutely, one hundred percent going to be okay.

  The boxers panted furiously above my head, I could hear them: let me go, let me go. They put on Abbey Road and I wanted to tell everyone at the bar about how for my sixth birthday I knew I wouldn’t have a party because my father didn’t believe in birthdays but I stole two pastel Hallmark invitations from the grocery store by slipping them into the back of my jeans and I used all my colored pencils to decorate them and addressed one to John Lennon and one to my mother, asking them to please come to my house for tea on my birthday, and the night before my birthday I put them in the empty planter next to the front door and I went inside and I prayed on my knees next to my bed and I begged God to come and deliver the invitations to John Lennon and my mother, I promised him I would never cry again, I would always finish my dinner, and I wouldn’t even ask for another birthday for the rest of my life, and I went to bed holding an unendurable, trembling joy in my arms, thanking God for his hard work tracking the two of them down, thanking him for knowing how badly I needed them, and when I woke in the morning and the cards were in the planter, wet and mushy, I threw them away and I didn’t cry in front of my father, but later in school I started crying at my desk and couldn’t stop and they sent me to the nurse and I told her I knew that God didn’t exist and they called my father to come pick me up, and I heard the nurse arguing with him and then she said to him, exasperated, “Do you know that today is her birthday?”

  Instead I said, my voice coming out of me with brusque clarity: “On certain days, I forget why I came here.” They nodded empathetically. “Do I need to justify myself all the time? Justify myself for being alive and wanting more?”

  They introduced me to Terry, who bartered free drinks for free bumps. He was pushing forty, his hair balding from the top down so it was still long on the bottom, and he tucked it obsessively behind his ears. He raged like a bull in a pen back there, flirting, singing, snapping at the bar back. When I was introduced he pointed to his cheek so I kissed him and he gave me a beer.

  He said, “On this day in 1864, General Grant surveyed General Lee’s army and knew he was sending his men to their deaths. He told his soldiers, There will be no surrender, gentlemen. And we think we have it rough.”

  I thought, Is that even true? But instead I said, “At least they had something to fight for.”

  He shrugged. “I may have made some bad life choices. Who can tell?”

  A dagger of morning prowled outside the open windows. The air revived itself, my bones braced like something new was coming. We reentered the line for the bathroom, passing the bag between our back pockets, our hands lingering longer, a feeling of clouds, ominous, pads of melancholy on our fingertips, impending headaches….Mundane, yes, but thrilling to me, all of it.

  —

  “ALL RIGHT. What is Sancerre?” Simone’s brown eyes, serpentine.

  “Sauvignon Blanc,” I answered, my hands crossed in front of me on the table.

  “What is Sancerre?”

  “Sancerre…” I shut my eyes.

  “Look at France,” she whispered. “Wine starts with the map.”

  “It’s an appellation in the Loire Valley. They are famous for Sauvignon Blanc.”

  “More. Put the pieces together. What is it?”

  “It’s misunderstood.”

  “Why?”

  “Because people think Sauvignon Blanc is fruity.”

  “It is not fruity?”

  “No, it is. It’s fruity, right? But it’s also not? And people think you can grow it anywhere, but you can’t. Popularity is a mixed blessing?”

  “Continue.”

  “The Loire is at the top. It’s colder.” She nodded and I continued. “And Sauvignon Blanc likes that it’s cold.”

  “Colder climates mean a longer growing season. When the grape takes a longer time to ripen.”

  “It is more delicate. And has more minerality. It’s like Sancerre is the grape’s true home?”

  I waited
for affirmation or correction. I did not know half of what I’d said. I think she pitied me, but I received a grim smile and, finally, a half glass of Sancerre.

  —

  AFTER SERVICE the dishwashers rolled up the sticky bar mats and the smell of rot rose from the blackened grout in the tiles. The kitchen was a hollow amphitheater of stainless steel, still, but holding the aftereffects of the fires and banging and shouting.

  The kitchen boys were scrubbing every surface, rubbing out the night. Two servers sat on the lowboy, eating pickled red onions from a metal tin. Leftover ice cream sat on the bread station, turning to soup.

  “Hey, new girl, I’m in here.”

  Me? Jake was in the doorway of a walk-in. He had a cup full of lemon wedges in his hand. His apron was streaked with wine, his shirtsleeves were rolled high and I could see his veins.

  “Are you allowed to be in there?” What I meant is, Do you ever think about me the way I think about you?

  “Did you like them? The oysters?”

  When he said the word oysters, their flavor flamed on my tongue, as if it had been lying dormant.

  “Yes. I think I do.”

  “Come in here.” His tattoos showed themselves as he pressed the door open wider. I passed under his arm, looking back to make sure Simone wasn’t watching. I had never been in any space alone with him.

  “Are we going to get locked in?” What I meant is, I’m scared.

  Inside there were two open beers, the Schneider Weisse Aventinus, a bottle I’d pulled for the bar but never tasted. The beers were propped against a cardboard box labeled Greens but filled with littleneck clams. We were in the seafood closet. Crimson tuna fillets, marbled salmon sides, snowy cod. The air nipped at my skin, smelling like the barest trace of the sea.

  “What’s that tattoo?” I asked, pointing to his biceps. He pulled his sleeve down.

  Jake dug through a wooden crate labeled with masking tape, Kumamotos. He pulled out two tiny rocks, discarded the debris that clung to the outside. A strand of seaweed stuck to his pants.