Stephanie Danler - Sweetbitter

The inspector sat at bar 1 as the guests shuffled past. He stared placidly at a midpoint on the wall. Mr. Clausen, old enough to be the inspector’s father, rapped on the bar until the inspector met his eyes and said, “This is appalling. You’re as punitive and pointless as the damn meter maid.”

We held the door open and the air was supple. It may have been the first true day of spring.

—

WE SAT in the empty dining room, streetlight laminating the windows. An oxidized edge in light that came from routine being disrupted beyond repair. The Owner was all smooth surfaces when he strode in and shook the inspector’s hand. I was still waiting for the explosion — a punch, a copper pan flying, a gasp. When the Owner looked out at us, I knew that would never happen.

“First of all,” he said, putting his hands together, pulling our focus to him, “I want to thank you all for your dedication and patience tonight. What has happened here is not a reflection of how hard you work, but a reflection of an outdated system, a reflection of an outdated structure. This is an old building, an old restaurant. And we are proud of that. But in keeping up with the DOH, we have a lot working against us. We still keep the cleanest restaurant below Twenty-Third Street. And that’s a testament to you — to Chef, to Howard. I want to apologize for this upheaval. A lot of you don’t know what exactly I do. I sit at a desk in corporate across the street, I give interviews, my photo is in the paper, I open new restaurants. But my only real function here — and this has been from day one — is to make sure that you guys can do your jobs perfectly. That’s all I do. I put structures in place so that you — the blood and guts and heart of this restaurant — can shine. So you can excel. Today I’ve let you down and I’m sorry.”

He put his head down. When he raised his head again, he acknowledged each of us as his equals. “We expect to be closed for three days tops while we do some restructuring in the basement and behind the bar. We will reach out to the regulars and explain. Each of you will be compensated if you were scheduled to work….”

He went on. I felt pinned to my chair. So it was true. I glanced at Simone and her cheeks were wet, Jake standing guard behind her. For the first time in twenty-some years, the restaurant was closing.

—

I HAVE FORGOTTEN exactly what Howard sent me up there to retrieve. I want to say a blue binder containing checklists, phone numbers, policies.

I remember climbing the mezz stairs with a sense of purpose and privilege. I remember that I had on my gold hoop earrings. I remember pushing papers to one side of the desk. And I remember her handwriting. I had seen it nightly — on her dupe pad when she took orders, on the whiteboards marking the counts on specials and wine, in the margins of the wine notes we kept in a folder behind the bar. The extravagant script, cursive that looked engraved, slanting deeply to the left as if it had been lured across the page.

I saw “Simone,” I saw “Jake,” I saw “sabbatical,” “France,” and “month of June.”

I absorbed the words but not their meaning. I picked up the paper. It slipped out of my hands. My finger pads couldn’t grip it, my nails couldn’t get the edges up. I heard breathing but I couldn’t get any air. Valves shut in me, first behind my eyes, then in my throat, then in my chest, then in my stomach.

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.

It was a Vacation Request Form, the kind of dreary printout that Zoe spent all her hours creating and filing. It was in the handbook: all vacation requests had to be approved by Howard at least a month out. The restaurant was so carefully staffed that it couldn’t accommodate spontaneous absences — every service was designed around all the servers’ strengths and weaknesses. To take an extended vacation required a radical reworking of the schedule. But Howard liked to retain his staff and hold their jobs for them. He encouraged us to take what he called sabbaticals.

My mind caught up: Simone was requesting a sabbatical to France for the entire month of June and she was requesting it for her and Jake. It had been given to Howard three days before my birthday dinner. I saw the tendrils of smoke off the candles when I blew them out, I saw dozens of burning plates in the pass, rushed drinks on the bar, subway rides, Jake’s sleeping face, Simone’s satisfied face — the weeks since that night reeled in front of me. I sat down in Howard’s chair. The request had been approved two days ago. When I tried to remember what I was doing two days ago it was like running my face into a wall.

—

I TOLD MYSELF to be calm, gather my information, hold very still. Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe I had misunderstood.

“Hey,” I said, touching Simone on the shoulder as I passed to my locker. “Can I talk to you?”

“I’m changing,” she said distantly. Her mascara leached into the lines around her eyes. The changing room was crowded, the whole herd of us in there at once. People were talking about going to Old Town for burgers since it was still early. Then everyone would head to Park Bar. My sense of hearing was off, I heard the overlapping tenors of voices I knew so well, but at a dim, fuzzy volume. Overriding all of it was the ringing of the lightbulbs. I looked at Simone. She was holding her stripes to her chest over her bra and I inadvertently looked for her tattoo, like it was going to explain something, like it was a message written to me that I had missed. And it was. They were marked, weren’t they? I reached for my locker to steady myself.

Whenever I’d asked him about that key: “It’s nothing, it’s not the key to anything, a tattoo is just a tattoo, only as permanent as the body.” How I swooned when he spoke to me in that vaguely Buddhist, vaguely nihilist accent. In reality it was a shitty tattoo that was a warning to anyone who looked at them that they were not available.

I kept blinking, my lashes sticking together, my eyes dusty. “Simone, can I borrow your makeup? I forgot my things.”

I stood in line behind Heather in the mirror, thinking about setting fire to the restaurant. So what? I asked my reflection. It’s just a month in France. It’s just matching tattoos. It’s just that they grew up together. How many times had I used the word just to explain away something that so clearly needed my attention? My eyes said, Stop. This is something.

Everything I had ever learned about the two of them bound them more securely, squeezing out all the air, all the light. Why was I the last one to learn anything, and why when I thought I learned something did the bottom drop out of it?

Simone observed me in the mirror. She was attuned to my shifts in mood. No, she was never blind. I put on mascara. I took out her lipstick and it smelled like roses and plastic and was cold when I dragged it into place. My reflection said to her reflection, Yes, I make you look old.

I handed her the cosmetics bag.

“Can I talk to you?” I asked again.

“Can it wait?” She walked away without waiting for my response.

“No,” I whispered.

The key, the key, a month, a month. Some white-trash tattoo parlor. He had probably been underage and she had probably been his consenting adult. I wondered how she covered her breasts while the needle hit her, whether she and Jake had locked eyes or if he’d turned politely away. A series of men touching it on her and asking, What’s this about? She would say, It’s nothing. And a series of women all over his body, ending with my idiotic face, asking, Why a key? Never an answer, never a clue.