Stephanie Danler - Sweetbitter

“ ’Kay, I’ll bring the rye but homeboy here can get his own Fernet.” She eyed Will’s glass, which had a black liquor in it, reeking of oversteeped tea and bubble gum. “You drink it, you stock it.”

“Fuck off, Ari.” Will exhaled smoke toward her.

“Fuck you, darling.” She flounced away. Will shot back his drink.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Medicine.” He burped. “It’s for the end of a meal. Incredible…curative properties for the digestive tract.”

He reached over the bar and started to fill a water glass with beer. Nicky stopped working and watched.

“I just fucking cleaned that, Will, if you spill one fucking drop…”

The beer shook in Will’s hand, and the head rose an inch out of the glass. A hush. It kept rising but didn’t spill.

“I’m a pro,” Will said.

“Misery,” said Ariel. She put two bottles of rye on the bar and pulled out the stool on the other side of Will. She was in a black slip, or maybe she thought it was a dress. Her bra was neon yellow like a traffic sign saying Proceed with Caution.

“Hm…what is open?” She tucked her legs under her and reached into the speed rack behind the bar.

“Can you animals get off my bar? I’m trying to clean.”

“Is that Gigondas still good? When did we open it?”

“Two nights.”

“Pushing it.”

“Worth considering.”

Nicky put up a glass and a black bottle with an insignia at the top and went back to his cleaning.

“Self-service tonight? You poured for the new girl.”

“Ariel, I’m not fucking around, you barely stocked. She doesn’t even know her head from her asshole yet and I think she could have done a better job. You’ve put me back twenty minutes.”

“It looks like you picked the wrong night to be bartender, old man.” Ariel emptied the wine into her glass, smelled it, and flipped open her cell phone.

If Nicky had spoken to me like that I would be flattened. But nothing happened. There wasn’t even residual tension. Nicky yelled, All clear, into the kitchen and the porters sprang from behind the doors. They ran bags down the line behind the bar, an endless caravan of black bags to the curb. They propped the door open and the hot, dark air rushed in, as sticky as fingers running over my face. Misery. I drank my Riesling. Medicine.

“It’s been really hot,” I said. Nobody responded.

“Summer,” I said.

Droning came in from the streets, then a rustling. For a second I thought it was the claustrophobic noise of the cicadas from my childhood. Or the wind bending branches. Or the moans of cows in fields. But it was cars. I wasn’t used to it yet — the elimination of nature, the brimming whine of overheating machinery.

I shifted a little toward Will, wanting to seem open in case anyone talked to me. Will and Ariel were on their phones and Nicky was cursing to himself behind the bar. I thought about taking my phone out. It was new. I had left my old one on my dresser back home. I wondered what my father had done with it, with the boxes of books. Though I was also fairly certain he hadn’t opened the door to my room. When I got my new phone, the area code felt like a badge: 917. I dutifully copied everyone’s contact information into it. But I didn’t have missed calls or messages. No one even asked me to cover shifts yet.

“I don’t have an air conditioner,” I said.

“Really?” Will shut his phone and turned to me. “Seriously?”

“They’re expensive.”

“Misery,” Ariel interjected. She leaned around Will and looked at me inquisitively. “What do you do?”

“Oh, I have big windows and a fan. When it’s really bad, like that stretch last week, I take cold showers to get the sweat—”

“No,” she said. Her eyes said, You fucking idiot. “What do you do ? In the city. Are you trying to be something?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m trying to be a backwaiter.”

She laughed. I made Ariel laugh.

“Yeah, after that the sky’s the limit.”

“What do you do?”

“I do everything. I sing. I write music. I have a band. Willy here is trying to make a film. A claymation version of À Bout de Souffle. ”

“Okay, that was one idea, it’s not the worst idea.”

“No, it’s very admirable, a week of sculpting clay to get the right look of boredom—”

“Ariel, I can’t be offended that you don’t understand anything about art. I blame first, your gender, second, the system—”

“Honestly though, Will, tell us the truth. You’re just masturbating, right? In that little dark room with your clay Jean Seberg?”

Will sighed. “I will admit, it’s hard not to.” He turned to me. “I actually am working on something else. I’m writing a feature—”

“The comic-book one? The hero’s journey? The exploration and reaffirmation of the patriarchal narrative?”

“Ariel, do you ever shut the fuck up?”

She smiled and rested a hand on his shoulder. She picked up her glass of wine and was about to sip when she said, “Oops,” and turned to us.

“Cheers,” she said gravely.

“Cheers.”

“No, in the eyes, new girl.”

“Look her in the eyes,” Will said, “or she’ll put a hex on your family.”

I looked in her blackened eyes and said cheers like it was an incantation. Our three glasses touched and I pulled a mouthful of wine. The joints in my spine softened, like butter going to room temperature.

—

THEN THREE THINGS HAPPENED, seemingly at once.

First, the music changed. Lou Reed came over the speakers like a mumbling, beloved poet-uncle.

“You know I saw him once at the Gramercy Park Hotel — have you seen what they fucking did over there? That, my friends, is a rotten omen if ever there was one. So anyway, I’m sitting there and it’s like, Lou-fucking-Reed, and I’m thinking, Thank you for teaching me how to be human, you know?”

I tried to keep listening. I nodded when Ariel looked at me. But the song was as intimate as a faucet dripping in the night.

Next, the bar stools filled. The cooks, the closing servers, the dishwashers, all out of their uniforms now, commandeered them. Everyone looked sloppy and criminal without their stripes. To see the scarred hands of the cooks against rumpled polos or old heavy-metal T-shirts, you wondered what it would be like to see one of them on a subway, without knowing they had a secret authoritative life in whites.

Simone walked down the line, her hair untied. I tried to catch her eye but she went to the far end of the bar with Heather, and who I now understood to be Heather’s boyfriend, Parker, the man who’d initiated me on the coffee machine. Simone didn’t look like a statue of herself anymore. She wore plain leather sandals and she swung one off her foot once she crossed her legs.

And finally, Chef banged out of the kitchen with a baseball cap and a backpack on. All his rage had melted away, leaving a man who looked like a dad on his way to a minivan. Everyone said, Good night, Chef, in a forceful singsong. He waved without looking. He barreled through and exited the building.

—

A CURTAIN CAME DOWN as Nicky reappeared behind the bar in a white undershirt and turned the lights up. The restaurant where I worked turned into a social club after hours. The bartenders weren’t performing bartender anymore. They were mixing drinks with playful proportions. The cooks weren’t looking over their shoulders for Chef, or walking numbly into hot pan handles. They were rolling joints, giggling, punching each other. The servers were stretching their arms and shoulders, comparing knots in their necks, stirring drinks with a finger, while complaining in one long, loving torrent about Howard, Zoe, dissecting the guests with a tone of passive contempt. I started to be able to tell when they were talking about regulars, because they would all want to outdo each other, demonstrating that they were the favorite.