Stephanie Danler - Sweetbitter

“Yes, yours are a shame too.”

The driver took the turn too fast and her head smashed into the window on the other side. She moaned the rest of the way. I was patient with her on the stairs. I couldn’t make her brush her teeth. She was asleep before I finished brushing mine, taking up the entire bed, her black hair splayed like spider legs on my pillow. Who lives here?

I HEARD THE RAIN while I slept, heard the cars moving, like scissors shearing paper. It was my day off. I woke up out of breath, inflamed from the radiator. Someone was playing Édith Piaf out their window. It washed through the rain, the claustrophobic sky, and shot in my open window. It hit me in the chest right where old Édith intended it to land. I couldn’t imagine another life.

They were both on today, their first shift back. He would be in at three p.m., although I imagined him coming in closer to three thirty. I couldn’t find a rational reason to show up at work, but I felt calm for the first time in weeks, the wasted nights of their absence firmly behind me.

I masturbated, thinking of him on top of me, suffocating me, and every time I got close to coming he grabbed my face and said, Pay attention. Then my own body felt like a bag filled with sand and I fell back asleep.

When I finally got out of bed most of the shops were closing. The pavement was slick as I ran down Bedford and into the vintage shop. I bought the first one I tried on — the girl sized me up perfectly. It was mint condition, a black leather motorcycle jacket. When I saw myself in it, I thought, I want to be friends with her. I zipped it to my throat when a wind from the river shook rain from the branches. As I walked — I swear it — strangers looked at me differently.

—

WHO KNEW WINTER meant vegetables? Chef. No asparagus shipped in from Peru, no avocados from Mexico, no eggplants from Asia. What I assumed would be a season of root vegetables and onions was actually the season of chicories. Chef had his sources, which he guarded. Scott walked through the restaurant in the morning with unmarked brown paper bags, sometimes crates.

He told me that the chicories would really brighten when the first freezes came. It sweetened their natural bitterness. I could barely keep track of them. The curly tangle of frisée didn’t seem the same species as the heliotrope balls of radicchio, or the whitened lobes of endive. Their familial trait was a bite — I thought of them as lettuces that bit back. Scott agreed. He said we should be hard on them. Eggs, anchovies, cream, a streak of citrus.

“Don’t trust the French with your vegetables,” Scott said. “The Italians know how to let something breathe.” I helped him wash frisée, my hands stiff and frozen. The salad spinner was an appliance nearly my size, and Scott let me sit on top of it while it ricocheted around. I was nearly positive we had made out, but he seemed uninterested in reliving it. My pride was stunned, but I was relieved to have a friendship with a man. I knew he was dating a bartender in Williamsburg, had just broken something off with a hostess, and had his eye on the new Asian pastry girl.

“What’s this one?”

“The best one.” He peeled off battered dark-green outer leaves and gave me a leaf from the inside. I used it as a scoop for the tapenade.

“Escarole,” he said.

“And those outside leaves.”

“Soup. Just wait.”

Her distracted, concerned expression inspecting the server kit behind the bar. Those red lips. She seemed surprised to see me when I ran out to family meal. I hugged her.

I wanted to say, I missed you. Instead I said, “Hi.”

“Hello, little one.” Reserved, but a satisfaction somewhere. I felt it. She missed me too. “Did you hold down the fort while I was gone?”

“Oh, Simone, it was awful, there are fruit flies and Zoe didn’t listen to me and everyone got so drunk.”

“Brown food, winter food, peasant food,” she said, eyeing the soup. She only took one bowl — I knew he wasn’t coming. I was watching her like she knew more than the schedule. “A soup made with the bitter scraps and bits, where the sum is always greater than the parts.”

“Yes, whatever you say,” I said. White beans, escarole, chicken stock skimmed until it was velvet, studded with sausage. I went back for seconds, then thirds.

—

I BECAME TERRIFIED of drains. I skipped my eyes over them in the dishwashing station, I wouldn’t look down in my own bathroom, I didn’t even want to see the pipes. I thought I would see a break in them, an air gap, where everything from the underworld would crawl up into the open air, where they could teem, thrive.

—

IT WASN’T EASY to catch Ariel outside of work. She seemed to have an expansive network within the city that went beyond the restaurant, probably because she was an NYU kid who’d never left. I often asked her about college in the city — when I tried to imagine it, I thought, But wait, where do you move when school is over?

When she said I could maybe, one day, come with her to a show, I didn’t get my hopes up. When she said, Do you want to come to a show this Thursday? I corralled my excitement.

But I found myself in a closed-up office building on the West Side below Fourteenth Street and from the bleak gray exterior I was ready to be underwhelmed. Ariel and I doused in green and red light, making our way into a basement, where the drums tapped like a switch, echoes and duplicates colliding with the walls. A ragged-looking middle-aged guy with gray hair paced the stage. He took lines of coke off a record that a little pixie held in the air like a serving platter. Whenever I heard electronic music I thought of a man locked up in a room with computers, never of musicians — but I was watching it, with instruments, with a band that traded chemistry between themselves and the crowd. They released a song like a tidal wave.

New York in the seventies it was not. No disco decadence, drag queens, nudity, or androgyny. But even with this basement’s lack of glamour, I was aware of being truly relevant — within my time and of my time. Plain-faced kids with outsized glasses, girls in gritty fur vests and boots, deep, unmovable veins of apathy and inattention that made them care more about the next ten minutes than the next ten years. They — I guess it was “we” now — wanted dance music with a knife’s edge, ironic lyrics that crossed accidentally into sincere, like they crossed into the sincere, accidentally but every so often. Everyone was stripped down in the awkward peridot light, unself-conscious as they pogo-ed around.

Ariel wore a tiny crop top under her sweater, highlighting her pale ribs. It read Disco for Assholes, and I wondered if I could wear something like that. She was confetti, all over the room. People kept coming up to her, kissing her and screaming. A waifish, anemic blond girl kissed her on the lips and Ariel bit her and hissed. She smiled at me and I yelled, “That’s not how you kissed me.”

“ ’Cause you’re a baby, baby!” She spun. “Amazing?”

“Amazing!” I yelled back. Self-deprecating, sentimental, sarcastic music and I felt like I was breaking out of a corset. I was going to dance all night.

The crowd diffused my sixth sense for Jake. He was there, next to me, he was the person Ariel jumped on, the person holding her hair off her neck while they spoke. This intimacy was surprising, but not as surprising as just him. Jake in the real world. He was supposed to be tethered to the restaurant where I imagined him when I wasn’t at work. Ariel cupped her hands over her mouth and tunneled words into his ear. Jake had his eyes on me and he nodded. I stopped dancing. She took his hand and pulled him away, but not before he gave me a tiny, condescending wave with his fingers. He was back.