Stephanie Danler - Sweetbitter

The burns healed and your skin was boiled.

Knicks in your knuckles from tearing the foil unprofessionally from wine bottles.

Scott said, “The skin gets so tough, even a knife won’t scratch it.” He grabbed a plate out of the salamander with his hands to really illustrate the point.

—

BY THE TIME we waddled up to the bar it was well past midnight and we were as tattered as the dining room floor. It had been a hard one. The dishwasher broke in the middle of service and two of us were pulled to hand wash the glasses in scalding water. Then the air conditioners, usually mediocre at best, bottomed out. The technicians arrived as we sat down for our shift drinks. They propped open the door and we all looked wistfully at the street. No change in temperature arrived.

Nicky let the backwaiters have gin and tonics as rewards. My fingers were thoroughly poached, the muscle between my thumb and index finger throbbing from polishing. I didn’t even have the energy to contemplate sitting next to Jake and Simone. I took my stool next to Will wearily. An empty bottle of Hendrick’s stood on the bar like a mascot.

Walter sat on the other side of me. We had never overlapped. He was a large, elegant man in his fifties with a chic gap between his front teeth. He looked as tired as I felt, the lines around his eyes amplifying with each exhale. He asked how I was settling in and we made small talk. But when I told him I lived in Williamsburg, he grunted.

“I lived there,” he said.

“You? With all the dead-eyed slouchers?”

“In the late eighties — were you born then? Six years. God it was appalling. And look at it now. The trains used to stop running. Some nights we walked the tracks.”

“Ha!” Nicky slapped the bar. “I forgot about that.”

“It was a straight shot, the quickest way.” Walter finished his drink and pushed it toward Nicky. “Can I get a scooch for this story?”

“We had the whole building,” Walter said as Nicky emptied out a bottle of Montepulciano into his glass. “Three floors. My share was $550, which was not a little bit of money. I was with Walden…Walden and Walter of Williamsburg. We thought that was cute. Walden needed space for his paintings, they — well.” He looked at me. “Even you have probably seen them. The canvas itself took up a wall. He built them indoors and we broke them down to get them back out. And then his collage phase began in earnest. One of the floors we kept as a junk shop. Car fenders, defunct lamps, chicken coop wiring, boxes of photographs.” Walter chuckled softly into his wine. “This was so long ago, before his, what do they call it?”

Everyone at the bar was listening with their heads down, except Simone, who watched him patiently.

“His materialist phase,” she said.

“Ah, Simone remembers! If you ever forget something about your story, Simone will remember.” They looked at each other, not unkindly. “They called it his coup d’état. The beginning of his love affair with Larry Gagosian. Me-te-or-ic. And all the Williamsburg stuff, now I suppose it’s technically his juvenilia, worth millions. He dicked around with garbage and I sang opera in the bathtub.”

“I miss your singing,” Simone said.

“The third-floor skylight was missing. When it rained it was like the Pantheon, a column of water and light in the middle of the room. The floor rotted in this glorious black circle. It grew moss in the spring. They tried to sell it to us for $30,000. I am not kidding. We thought, Jesus, who would buy a place on Grand Street and Wythe? I assumed the river would swallow it up.”

He stopped. I took a tiny sip of my gin and tonic, which was too strong for me though I would never admit it.

“There are condos there now,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. My head was getting difficult to prop up. “All these half-finished, empty buildings. They’ll never fill them. There are no people.”

“You are condos, new girl,” Sasha said.

Walter stared into the bottom of his glass. “Fucking holes in the ceiling. Frozen pipes all winter, showering at the Y. We tossed crackheads out of the entryway weekly— weekly. One of them tried to stab Walden with a steak knife— our steak knife. And sometimes I wish we would have stayed.”

—

I RODE the L train, back and forth. Back and forth. In the beginning, I made eye contact with everyone. I applied mascara, I counted my cash tips on my lap, I wrote myself notes, ate bagels, redistributed the cream cheese with my fingers, moved my shoulders to music, stretched out on the seats, smiled at flashes of my reflection in the train windows.

“Your self-awareness is lacking,” Simone said to me one day as I was leaving. “Without an ability to see yourself, you can’t protect yourself. Do you understand? It’s crucial to your survival that you pause the imaginary sound track in your head. Don’t isolate your senses — you’re interacting with an environment.”

I learned how to sit still and look at nothing and no one. When someone next to me on the train started talking to themselves, I was embarrassed for them.

—

I WAS WORKING the dining room the first day Mrs. Neely didn’t have her wallet. I was replenishing the silver and I heard her exclaim. She threw her purse up on the table with her needle-thin arms and her knife fell to the floor. It sounded like an alarm. The surrounding tables turned. She pulled out slips of paper, crumpled Kleenex, several tubes of lipstick, her MetroCard.

Simone picked up the knife and put her hand on her shoulder. Mrs. Neely sat back down but her hands continued to flap in front of her face. “Well I…well I…Well.”

“You know, I believe we found it,” Simone said, catching one of Mrs. Neely’s erratic hands. “You are all set. I noticed you didn’t finish your lamb today, was it all right?”

“Oh it was underdone. I don’t know what you pay that chef for if he’s not able to cook a lamb. I attended a dinner with Julia Child once, and we had lamb. James Beard, he could cook a lamb, my dear.”

“Thank you for telling me. I will pass it along.” Simone picked up the check. I hadn’t seen Zoe come up next to me. Simone approached us.

“There’s no wallet,” she said and sighed. “I’ll go ahead and comp it.”

“I should check with Howard first,” Zoe said carefully.

“Excuse me?” Simone turned to her. I backed up.

“The situation is entirely out of control. It deserves a conversation. Chef is completely fed up — double orders of soup, lamb sent back three times? It’s getting worse.”

Simone stiffened, I felt it from a few feet away. Zoe kept her hands clasped behind her back, enforcing composure. A silence bubbled between them and I knew Zoe would break it first.

“You can’t just comp entire meals every week, Simone. That’s not your call. And it’s gone beyond the restaurant’s responsibility. Do you remember when she fell? That’s on us. Where is the line? Where is her family?”

She engrossed me. She flickered.

“Every week, Zoe. For twenty fucking years. You’re looking at her family. I’m taking care of the meal.”

There was now a small orbit of us around the hutch and when Simone turned we scattered. I ran into the kitchen and Ariel had wide eyes.

“Shit,” she said. “Queen Bee is getting written up for that. Picking up!”

—

WHEN I WOULD finally get to taste the wine at the end of our lessons, I would say idiotic things like, Oh I get it now. Simone would shake her head.

“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.”

—