Sweetbitter

by Stephanie Danler

“You’re only beginning to learn what you don’t know. First you must relearn your senses. Your senses are never inaccurate—it’s your ideas that can be false.”

I DIDN’T KNOW what a date was and I wasn’t an anomaly. Most of the girls I knew didn’t get asked out on dates. People got together through alcohol and a process of elimination.

Yes, those were luminous September days. The afternoon light pearling, the mood alert, turned-on, compassionate. Out in the Greenmarket people circled patiently, holding cartons of prune plums, ears of the last silken corn, thin-skinned lavender eggplants. The air vibrated like the plucked string of a violin.

“And it’s time for you to open a bottle of wine.” “Not for a table!” I saw myself being pushed overboard, Simone with a knife at my back, the sea black, turbulent, bottomless.

“What’s up Baby Chef?” Usually they would start fighting, he especially hated that name, but he moaned instead. “I need help.” “Apologize for hitting on her.” “Ariel, I wasn’t. I swear. That girl loves cock, I can’t help it.” “Bye-bye,” she said and stuck up her middle finger, the nail painted black. She turned to leave and he yelled, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I will never look at her again, I have a small dick, I’m insecure, I’m untalented, I’m stupid, I will cook you whatever you want for breakfast.” She stopped. “Steak salad. And dessert. And whatever new girl wants.” “Fine. Hand them over.” “You’re disgusting. But you’re not untalented. I want to be fair about this.” She clapped her hands. “Okay, beverages first.” Sundays had a candid feeling. There were no laws, no stakes. Howard and Chef were both off, as was most of the senior staff. Scott ran the kitchen and Jake was the most senior on the floor. It was his only day shift, and it was clear he was in a fog for the entire service. It was also Simone’s day off. The people who remained on this pared-down crew were usually mildly hungover at best, actively ill at worst.

SIMONE’S TOUR further enforced that I was on a pedestal at the center of the universe, and perhaps Deborah Erikson’s extra napkin was the first stranger’s secret that I learned how to carry. The life of this woman was so insidiously but totally disturbed—and she was buffered from it by a staff of people, of which I was now one.

Next to him was a stack of the night’s expired menus. He changed the specials every day. The mornings were filled with printing, with changes, edits. Behind him was a paper shredder, the bin half removed and overflowing. A four-foot-high trash can touching the desk was full of paper. And here he was at midnight shredding what he had spent all day creating. I was touched by his sleep. The scope of his job expanded, it filled up the room. I leaned in farther and saw more, clusters of shredded dinner menus all over the floor, tumbleweeds, as tangled as hair.

Sometimes my sadness felt so deep it must have been inherited.

We went outside. The air tasted of steel knives and filtered water. An actual chill like a warning.

AT THAT MOMENT there was no Jake, no restaurant, no city. Just my desires running flagrantly, power-drunk, through the streets. Merciless, all of them. Was I a monster or was this what it felt like to be a person?

“Toast,” I said, when my turn came. I tried to think of something more glamorous, but toast was the truth. I expected to be mocked. My suburban-ness, my stupidity, my blankness. “What on top?” “Um. Peanut butter. The raw kind you get from the health-food stores. I salt it myself.” My clumsiness. My dullness. Instead they all nodded. They treated my toast reverentially. Which was exactly how I thought of it when I made it in the morning. I ate it standing up in the narrow kitchen, which had one pan, paper plates, and a toaster. A small window at the end where I could scan the buildings and watch pigeons on telephone wires. Sometimes I had two pieces. Sometimes I ate it naked, leaning up against the window. “I’m going to throw up.” We all agreed. “Nightcap?” We all agreed. The bill was nothing and the table was destroyed. We left a pile of cash on the spinning tray and rolled ourselves into the ample night.

I wanted to live in this queasy moment of fantasy for as long as possible. My body was agitated and possessed, but I found the Bricco, I broke down the case. I held it in my body—the precarious balance between the quotidian and Technicolor madness.

“I’m in love with you.” The words smashed together when he said it, but it was one of those unmistakable phrases. It was built that way so you could never take it back.

“Yeah…that’s great.” When he said great it sounded like sad. I steeled myself. The only way out of this was hospitality.

I NEVER WOULD HAVE recognized him. I didn’t belong to his world anymore. We called them the Nine-to-Fivers. They lived in accordance with nature, waking and sleeping with the cycle of the sun. Mealtimes, business hours, the world conformed to their schedule. The best markets, the A-list concerts, the street fairs, the banner festivities were on Saturdays and Sundays. They sold out movies, art openings, ceramics classes. They watched television shows in real time. They had evenings to waste. They watched the Super Bowl, they watched the Oscars, they made reservations for dinner because they ate dinner at the normal time. They brunched, ruthlessly, and read the Sunday Times on Sundays. They moved in crowds that reinforced their citizenship: crowded museums, crowded subways, crowded bars, the city teeming with extras for the movie they starred in. They were dining, shopping, consuming, unwinding, expanding while we were working, diminishing, being absorbed into their scenery. That is why we—the Industry People—got so greedy when the Nine-to-Fivers went to bed.

“Do people tend to underestimate you?” “I have no idea. I’m too busy trying not to fuck up.”

I could tell you damage isn’t sexy, it’s scary. You’re still young enough to think every experience will improve you in some long-term way, but it isn’t true. How do you suppose damage gets passed on?”

“There are times in life when it’s good to live without knowing,” Howard said, interrupting what must have been a look of unruffled idiocy. “I mean that we can allow ourselves to live and not really know what it is that we’re doing. That’s all right. It’s an accumulation stage.”

When you can’t see in front of you life is nothing but surprises. Looking back, there were truly so few of them.

“The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.”

“We always just miss New York. I watched it with this neighborhood. When I moved here everyone was mourning the SoHo of the seventies, Tribeca of the eighties, and already ringing the death knell for the East Village. Now people romanticize the Alphabet City of Jonathan Larson. We all walk in a cloud of mourning for the New York that just disappeared.”

It was a hazard of my job—or maybe it was my nature, maybe that’s what they’d hired me for—that I was too hospitable to strangers. On street corners, in bars, in line, I felt a duty to entertain, as if I were clocked in. I didn’t know how to be uninviting.

This is what happens when the body anticipates a wound. It steels itself. A pliable mind twists vainly to avoid logic, all judgments, all conclusions, if only for a few seconds longer.

Wasn’t it spring? Hadn’t the trees shaken out their greens to applause? Isn’t this what you dreamed of, Tess, when you got in your car and drove? Didn’t you run away to find a world worth falling in love with, saying you wouldn’t care if it loved you back?