Stephanie Danler - Sweetbitter

—

THE LILACS SHED as I walked the bridge. My phone buzzed twice and I turned it off. The city was radiant and I felt untouchable. I experienced the boundlessness that ships cut from their moorings must feel. I experienced again that feeling of having money, paying the tolls, of being allowed to enter the race. Yes, I felt the freedom again, even if I couldn’t quite recapture the hope. I could have walked all night. All the times I’d been denied entrance, all the times I’d asked permission — but it was my city too.

SO WHAT IF the gold had rubbed off the feather pin she had in her periwinkle fedora? A lot of important people ate at our restaurant: former presidents and mayors, actors, writers who defined generations, financiers you could recognize by their hair. We had plenty of special-needs diners who weren’t famous at all: a blind woman who had the specials read out loud to her, men with boyfriends on Fridays and wives on Sundays, eccentric art-collecting men who sat at the bar, ordered a martini, and then drank an entire bottle of red wine for their lunch. Why did I love Mrs. Neely so much?

She was fragile. A rare, endangered species of bird the way she fluttered in and out with her hats and stockings and kitten heels. Sometimes I would watch her from across the room and she would be staring at nothing. I wondered if I would be a woman content to stare into space remembering her misses and near misses, her history.

“Hey Nick, can I grab the Fleurie?”

“Don’t top her off, Fluff.”

“Come on…”

“She’s gonna pass out.”

I sighed. “So she passes out. Isn’t that the privilege of old age? You can sleep whenever and wherever you want?”

He winked and passed the bottle.

“Thank you,” Mrs. Neely said, smoothing a pin curl next to her ear. “That bastard at the bar pours me short. He thinks I don’t know, but I know.”

“Nicky’s all right. He just takes some reminding every now and then. Are you enjoying the Fleurie? It’s my favorite of all the crus right now.”

“Why?”

The only question Mrs. Neely had ever asked me before was why I didn’t have a boyfriend. Her tawny apple cheeks were high in a smile and her eyes were lucid. This was a good day for her and I believed she would keep visiting us forever. I picked up her glass and smelled it.

“So Beaujolais is like this hybrid — a red that drinks like a white, we even put a chill on it. Maybe that’s why it has trouble, it doesn’t quite fit. No one takes Gamay seriously — too light, too simple, lacks structure. But…” I swirled the glass and it was so…optimistic. “I like to think it’s pure. Fleurie sounds like flowers doesn’t it?”

“Girls love flowers,” she said judiciously.

“They do.” I put her wine down, then moved it two inches closer to her, where I knew the field of her focus began. “None of that means anything. It just speaks to me. I feel invited to enjoy it. I get roses.”

“Child, what is wrong with you? There’s no roses in the damn wine. Wine is wine and it makes you loose and helps you dance. That’s it. The way you kids talk, like everything is life or death.”

“It’s not?”

“You ain’t even learned about living yet!”

I thought about buying wine. About how I would scan the different Beaujolais crus at the liquor store — the Morgon, the Côte de Brouilly, the Fleurie would be telling me a story. I would see different flowers when I looked at the labels. I thought about the wild strawberries dropped off from Mountain Sweet Berry Farm just that afternoon and how the cooks laid out paper towels and sheet trays in the kitchen, none of them touching, as if they would disintegrate, their fragrance euphoric. They were completely different from the strawberries in the grocery store, they were as puckered and pruned as my nipples the one time that Jake had made me come just from touching them. I thought about how I would never again buy tomatoes out of season.

“Can I call you a cab this evening, Mrs. Neely?”

“A cab? Goodness no, I will ride the bus as I have every day since I was old enough to walk.”

“But it’s dark!”

She waved me off. She was peaceful, but I noticed that her lids were getting heavy, that her head dove slightly each time she blinked. “How will I know you got home okay?”

Something in my voice gave it away, that I was scared I would never see her again. What if she stopped coming? No alarms would go off in the restaurant. How many Sundays would it take before we noticed?

“Tess, don’t you worry about old Mrs. Neely. If you ever reach my age you’ll find that death becomes a need, just like sleep.”

—

I KNOCKED ON his office door at ten p.m. after tracking his movements all night. Howard was such a minor element of service for me but I had unconsciously memorized his habits. I realized that he always came to the coffee station at seven and then spent two hours on the floor and then by nine, barring any emergencies, went back up to his office in order to get out by eleven. Two hours on the floor felt like nothing, a cushy job by our standards, but then I thought about all my lunch shifts, and how he was always here before we got in, and nine a.m. to eleven p.m. on a good night sounded awful. It never showed on him.

“Come in,” he said. Howard was settled back in his chair, reading glasses on his head, a stack of papers in front of a desktop computer from the Paleolithic era.

“Tess!” He sat up. “What a surprise.”

“I know I should have made an appointment, I’m sorry, I just saw that you were still here—”

“My door is always open.”

I took a seat and I looked at him. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, but I knew that I had exhausted my resources downstairs. The phase in which I had existed so happily was over. Howard had put me in stripes, and I needed him to tell me what was next.

“I’m curious. About opportunities. In the company.” I was hesitating. With the door closed I felt oddly vulnerable even though the dinner crew was still finishing up. “I’m sorry, I didn’t plan a speech.” I saw a bottle of Four Roses on his bookshelf. “Can I have some of that?”

He took his glasses off his head and retrieved the bottle without standing up. His eyes never left me. On his desk were random samples of glassware, some of them quite dusty. He picked up a rocks glass and used his blue-checkered tie to wipe it out.

“I don’t have ice,” he said as he passed it to me. He didn’t pour himself one.

“No need,” I said, and took a big sip. “You said that I could be a server.”

He nodded.

“So. I want to be one. I’m really good at this job. I’m better than all the other backwaiters, and most of the servers.”

“You are gifted. That’s why I have you first in line.” He hedged, not sure where I was going. I wasn’t sure where I was going. “Tess, we are totally transparent at this company. You see the server schedule, you know how it works. There’s no space available right now.”

“Okay,” I said. I drained my drink. “Maybe you can make space. Or maybe you can place me.”

He raised his eyebrows and reopened the Four Roses. He poured more for me and some for himself.

“I’ve made a considerable investment in you. I’d like to see you grow with us.”

“I would too. Honestly, I don’t want to leave, even when I am so fucking sick of this place I could die. It’s my home. But I also know that you don’t really run this place. Simone does. And she would never allow me to be on her level.”

“Don’t pass that along to the Owner.” He wasn’t insulted. He was interested. “You and Simone…don’t tell me this is a story about a boy.”