Sweetbitter (3 page)

Silence was observed in the kitchen. People entered on tiptoe. The only person allowed to directly address Chef during service was Howard—sometimes the other managers tried to do it and got their heads bitten off. The silence probably helped the cooks, but it made learning anything difficult to impossible.

IN BETWEEN
shifts I went to the Starbucks that smelled like a toilet and drank one cup of coffee. On my evening off, I bought individual Coronas from the bodega and drank them on my mattress. I was so tired I couldn't finish them. Half-empty bottles of warm beer lined my windowsills, looking like urine and filtering sunlight. I put slices of bread from the restaurant into my purse and made myself toast in the mornings. If I had a double I took naps in the park between the shifts. I slept hard, dreaming that I was sinking into the ground, and I felt safe. When I woke I slapped myself to get the grass marks off my cheeks.

NO NAMES.
I didn't know people. I grabbed whatever characteristics I could: crooked or fluorescent teeth, tattoos, accents, lipsticks, I even recognized some people by their gait. It's not that my trailers were withholding information. I was just so stupid that I couldn't learn table numbers and names at the same time.

They explained to me that this restaurant was different—real paychecks first of all, and health benefits, sick days. Some nonsalaried servers even got hourly raises. People owned homes, had children, took vacations.

Everyone had been there years. There were senior servers who would never leave. Debutante-Smile, Guy-with-Clark-Kent-Glasses, Guy-with-Long-Hair-and-Bun, Overweight-Gray-Hair-Guy. Even the backwaiters had been there at least three years. There was Mean-Girl, and Russian-Pouty-Lips, and my first trailer, whom I called Sergeant because of the way he ordered me around.

Simone was Wine-Woman, and a senior server. She and Clark-Kent-Glasses had been there the longest. One of my trailers called her the tree of knowledge. Every preshift the maître d' rearranged the seating chart because regulars demanded to sit in her section. The servers would line up to ask her questions, or they sent her to their VIP tables with a wine list. She never looked at me.

And Sweaty-Boy, Jake? In those weeks of training I didn't see him again. I thought maybe he didn't work there, had just been filling in that day. But then I came in to pick up my first check on a Friday night and he was there. I put my head down when I saw him. He was a bartender.

“SO I HEARD
you're a barista,” drawled Guy-with-Long-Hair-and-Bun. “That makes my training day real easy.”

It was like arriving to a coffee station on another planet. Everything silver, futuristic, elegant. More intelligent than me.

“Ever worked on a Marzocco before?”

“I'm sorry?”

“The machine, the Marzocco. It's the Cadillac of espresso machines.”

All right, all right, I thought. I know how to make fucking coffee. Even a Cadillac was still a car. I picked out the portafilters, saw the grinder, the tamper.

“You know the four Ms? What kind of espresso were you guys using?”

“The kind that got dropped off in big bags,” I said. “It wasn't exactly a gourmet place.”

“Oh shit, okay, I heard you were a barista. No big deal, I'll train you and we'll check in with Howard after—”

“No. No.” I twisted the portafilter out and discharged the spent espresso into the trash can. “Where are your bar mops?” He handed me one and I wiped the basket. “You guys use timers or what?”

“We use our eyes.”

I exhaled. “Okay.” I turned on the grinder, wiped the steamer wand, flushed out the group head. Twenty-five seconds was a perfect shot of espresso. I would count it myself. “One cappuccino, coming right up.”

I STUDIED
the menu, I studied the manual. At the end of every service a manager asked me questions. I found that even if I didn't know what on earth a Lobster Shepherd's Pie was, even if I couldn't imagine it, if I knew it was the Monday night special I was going to pass my trails. Even if I didn't know what the fuck our tenets meant, I repeated back to Zoe perfectly, “The first tenet is to take care of each other.”

“And do you know what makes a fifty-one percenter?”

Zoe was eating the hanger steak at her desk in the office. She swirled a piece of it through mashed potatoes and frizzled leeks. I was so hungry I could have slapped her.

“Um.”

I forgot that the Owner had said to me: “You were hired because you are a fifty-one percenter. That's not something we can train for—you have to be born with it.”

I had no idea what that meant. I looked at the choking sign on the wall. The man asphyxiating in the sign looked calm and I envied him.

FORTY-NINE PERCENT
of the job was the mechanics. Anyone can do this job—that's what I was always told about waitressing. I'm sorry,
serving.

You know, just memorize the table numbers and positions, stack plates up along your arm, know all the menu items and their ingredients, never let the water levels drop, never spill a drop of wine, bus the tables cleanly, mise-en-place, fire orders, know the basic characteristics of the basic grape varieties and basic regions of the entire wine world, know the origins of the tuna, pair a wine with the foie gras, know the type of animal the cheeses come from, know what is pasteurized, what contains gluten, what contains nuts, where the extra straws are, how to count. Know how to show up on time.

“And what's the rest of it?” I asked my trailer, out of breath, dabbing paper towels into my armpits.

“Oh, the fifty-one percent. That's the tricky stuff.”

I FLUNG OFF
my sweated-through work jeans, twisted the top off a Pacifico because they were out of Corona, and sat on my mattress with the manual. I am a fifty-one percenter, I said to myself. This is Me:

I lay back on the bed and laughed. Rarely, but sometimes, I thought about my old coworkers back in nowhere—where our training consisted of learning how to switch on the coffeepot—watching me sweat and run and parrot back this manual, unable to see five feet in front of me. They watched me spend every clocked-in moment blind and terrified, and then we laughed about it.

The corner of South Second and Roebling was crowded with Puerto Rican families in their lawn chairs with adjacent coolers. They played dominoes. Kids screamed through the stream from a detonated hydrant. I watched them and thought back to that coffee shop on Bedford from the first day. I could probably walk in there now. I would say, Yeah I've worked on a Marzocco—oh, you don't know it?

But it wouldn't be enough. Whatever it was, just being a backwaiter, a server, a barista—at this restaurant I wasn't
just
anything. And I wouldn't call it being a fifty-one percenter because that sounded like a robot. But I felt marked. I felt noticed, not just by my coworkers who scorned me, but by the city. And every time a complaint, a moan, or an eye roll rose to the surface, I smiled instead.

A
ND ONE DAY
I ran up the stairs into the locker room and a woman from the office followed me. She carried three hangers hung with stiff, striped Brooks Brothers button-downs. They were the androgynous kind of shirt that straddles the line between the boardroom and a circus.

“Congratulations,” she said in monotone, like her clothes. “These are your stripes.”

I put them in my locker and stared at them. I wasn't training anymore. I had a job. At the most popular restaurant in New York City. I fingered the shirts and it happened: The escape was complete. I put on navy stripes. I thought I felt a breeze. It was as if I were coming out of anesthesia. I saw, I recognized, a person.

SHE STOPPED ME
on my first steps into the dining room, holding a glass of wine in her hand. I had the fleeting impression that she had been waiting for me a long time.

“Open your mouth,” Simone said, her head raised, imperious. Both of us looked at each other. She painted her lips before each service with an unyielding shade of red. She had dark-blond hair, untamable, frizzy, wisped out from her face like a seventies rock goddess. But her face was strict, classical. She held the glass of wine out to me and waited.

I threw it back like a tequila shot, an accident, a habit.

“Open your mouth now,” she commanded me. “The air has to interact with the wine. They flower together.”

I opened my mouth but I had already swallowed.

“Tasting is a farce,” she said with her eyes closed, nose deep in the bowl of the glass. “The only way to get to know a wine is to take a few hours with it. Let it change and then let it change you. That's the only way to learn anything—you have to live with it.”

I HAD
the next day off and wanted to celebrate. I took myself to the Met. The servers were always talking about the shows they saw—music, film, theater, art. I didn't know a single thing they mentioned though I had taken an Intro to Art History course in college. I went because I needed something to contribute during napkin time.

I don't know how long I had been in the city, but when I got off the train at Eighty-Sixth Street I realized how narrowly I had been living. My days were contained to five square blocks in Union Square, the L train, and five square blocks in Williamsburg. When I saw the trees in Central Park I laughed out loud.

The lobby of the Met—that holy labyrinth—appropriately took my breath away. I imagined being interviewed ten years from now. Not like with Howard where I was tested, but interviewed with admiration. My amicable interviewer would ask me about my origins. I would tell him that for so long I thought I would be nothing; that my loneliness had been so total that I was unable to project into the future. And that this changed when I got to the city and my present expanded, and my future skipped out in front of me.

I stuck to the Impressionist galleries. They were paintings I had seen a hundred times reproduced in books. They were the rooms that people dozed in. Your body could go into a kind of coma from the dreamscapes, but if the mind was alert, the paintings galvanized. They were almost confrontational.

“And that confirmed what I had always suspected,” I told my interviewer. “That my life before the city had only been a reproduction.”

After I ran out of rooms I started again. Cézanne, Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Degas, Van Gogh. “This is what I want,” I said, showing my interviewer the painting of Van Gogh's cypresses. “Do you see how, up close, it's blurry and passionate? And from a distance, whole?”

“And what about love?” my interviewer asked me, unprompted, as I stared at Cézanne's apples. For a second I saw Simone's red lips asking the question.

“Love?” I looked around the gallery for the answer. I had wandered out of Impressionism, into early Symbolism. Where a moment earlier I could have sworn the room was crowded, it was now nearly empty except for an elderly man who stood with a cane and a younger woman holding his arm in support. When I was driving to the city I had said to myself, I'm not one of those girls who moves to New York to fall in love. Now, in front of a jury of Symbolists, Simone, and the old man, my denial felt thin.

“I don't know anything about it yet,” I said. I moved next to the man and his friend. His huge ears looked like they were carved of wax, and I was sure he was deaf. He was too at peace. We looked at Klimt's woman in white,
Portrait of Serena Lederer,
the title said. She certainly wasn't one of his most daring, and stood in contrast to his later gold-leafed, erotic works. But though she looked like a virginal column, she had in her face a restrained joy. I remembered something about an affair between the artist and the model, rumors that her daughter was actually Klimt's. She stood above the three of us, unconcerned with being stared at. The old man smiled at me before he walked off.

“Show me,” I said to the woman in white. We regarded each other and waited.

I GOT OFF
the train and the streets were glowing. I went to the wine stall in the mini-mall on North Fifth and Bedford. The man behind the counter had long hair and tired, hanging eyes. He turned down the Biggie he'd been blasting when I came in.

I looked at every single bottle, but I didn't recognize anything. Finally, after ten minutes, I asked, “Do you have an affordable Chardonnay?”

He had paint all over him and a cigarette behind his ear. “What kind of Chardonnay do you like?”

“Um,” I swallowed. “France?”

He nodded. “Yeah, that's the only kind, right? None of that Cali shit. How's this? I have one cold.”

I paid him and held the bag to my chest. I ran home, crossing to the opposite side of Grand Street so I wouldn't be contaminated by the demons lounging outside of Clem's. I ran up my four flights of stairs too, ran into the apartment, stole Jesse's wine key and a mug, and ran up the last flight, pushing out onto the roof.

The sky was like the paintings. No, the paintings were trying to represent this sunset. The sky was aflame and throwing sparks, the orange clouds rimmed with purple like ash. The windows in each high-rise in Manhattan were lit up like the buildings were burning down. I was out of breath, overtired from the museum. My heart drummed. A voice said, You have to live with it. Another voice said, You made it, you made it, and at the same time, in a blistering chorus I said,
Made it where? Live with what?

I WALKED IN
on them in the locker room. Simone had been speaking loudly, sitting in a spare chair in her stripes with her legs crossed. He was standing in front of his locker, buttoning his shirt. They both looked at me, startled.

“Sorry. Do you want me to come back?”

“Of course not,” she said. But neither of them said anything else. The silence was accusatory. He dropped his pants, stepped out of them, and turned back to Simone.

“Ignore him,” she said. It sounded like an order, so I obeyed. I looked away.

“PICK UP”
was the call.

“Picking up” was the echo.

“Six and six, table 45, share,” Chef said. His eyes didn't leave the board of tickets in front of him. “Pick up.”

I put my hands in front of me and grabbed. Another sweltering day. Air conditioners all around the city were giving up. As I pushed into the tepid dining room I noticed the ice was melting in the oyster tray in my hands. Pale blue bodies amid sloshing ice chips. It looked disgusting. And six and six meant nothing to me. I had forgotten to check the day's oysters. I forgot the table I was going to. Simone flooded by me and I reached for her.

“Excuse me, Simone, sorry, but which are which oyster? Do you know?”

“Do you remember when you tasted them?” She didn't look at the plate.

I hadn't tasted them when they had been passed around at family meal. I hadn't looked at the menu notes.

“Do you remember tasting them?” she asked again, slowly, like I was dumb. “East Coast oysters are brinier, more mineral. West Coasts are plumper, creamier, sweeter. They're even physically different. One has a flat cup, the other tends to be deeper.”

“Okay, so which are which on this plate?” I held the plate closer to her face but she wouldn't look.

“Those are covered in water. Take them back to Chef.”

I shook my head. Absolutely not.

“You're not going to serve those. Take them back to Chef.”

I shook my head again but sucked in my lips. I saw it all unfolding ahead of me. His anger at me, his yelling about the waste, my embarrassment. But I could look at the menu notes while I waited for the new ones. I could hear the table number again. I could figure it out.

“Okay.”

“Next time look at them but use your tongue.”

THE MANAGERS MAINTAINED
power by shifting things. They came into a server's station and moved their dupe pad, moved their checks, rearranged the tickets on the bar. They pulled white wines out of the ice bucket, wiped them down, and reinserted them in a new pattern. They would pause you when you were running, obviously in a hurry, and ask you how you thought you were settling in.

Simone maintained power by centrifugal force. When she moved, the restaurant was pulled as if by a tailwind. She led the servers by her ability to shift their focus—her own focus was a spotlight. Service unfolded in her parentheses.

“WHAT'S THAT
bartender's name again? The one who only talks to Simone?” I asked Sasha. I was casual about it.

Sasha was a backwaiter. He was otherworldly beautiful: broad alien cheekbones, blue eyes, bee-stung, haughty lips. He could have been a model, except he was barely five foot four. His gaze was so cold, you knew he had been everyone: a rich man, a poor man, in love, abandoned, a murderer, and close to death. None of these states impressed him much.

“That bartender? Jake.”

He was Russian, and though he was clearly fluent in English, he didn't bother to adhere to its rules. His accent was both elegant and comical. He rolled his eyes at me while he cut bread.

“Okay, Pollyanna, let me tell you few truths. You're too new.”

“What does that mean?”

“What you think it means? Jakey will eat you for dinner and spit you out. You even know what I'm speaking of? You're not bouncing around after that.”

I shrugged like I didn't care and filled the bread baskets.

“Besides. He's mine. I'll cut your fucking throat if you touch him and I'm not a joker.”

“Silence in the kitchen! Pick up.”

“PICKING UP!”

The kitchen was a riot of misshapen, ugly tomatoes. They smelled like the green insides of plants, like sap, like dirt.

There were tomatoes of every color: yellow, green, orange, red-purple, mottled, striped, dotted. They were bursting. “Seaming” is what Chef called it, when the curves and indentations pulled apart from each other, but not completely, like parted lips.

“Heirloom season,” Ariel sang out. She was also a backwaiter. She always had pounds of eyeliner on, even if it was the morning. She had bangs and dark-brown hair that she twisted up onto her head and held with chopsticks. She was still named Mean-Girl in my head because she wouldn't speak to me during training, only pointed and gave exasperated sighs. But today she was passing out dripping bar mops to the line cooks from a bucket of ice water. They wrapped them around their heads like bandanas or slung them over the backs of their necks. That didn't seem like something a Mean-Girl would do. In fact, I hadn't seen anyone do something that compassionate with their bar mop stash. I heard from my own head, Our first tenet is to take care of each other.

She handed me a bar mop. I put it on the back of my neck and it felt like rising out of a soggy cloud into clean air.

“Pick up.”

“Picking up,” I said. I looked expectantly to the window but there were no plates lined up. Instead Scott, the young, tattooed sous chef, passed me a sliver of tomato. The insides were tie-dyed pink and red.

“A Marvel-Striped from Blooming Hill Farm,” he said, as if I had asked him a question.

I cupped it while it dripped. He pinched up flakes of sea salt from a plastic tub and flicked it on the slice.

“When they're like this don't fuck with them. Just a little salt.”

“Wow,” I said. And I meant it. I had never thought of a tomato as a fruit—the ones I had known were mostly white in the center and rock hard. But this was so luscious, so tart I thought it victorious. So—some tomatoes tasted like water, and some tasted like summer lightning.

“WHAT ARE HEIRLOOMS?”
I asked Simone as I ran to get behind her in line for family meal. She had two white plates in her hand and I felt a shiver of expectation looking at that second plate. I noted how she made her own—a generous tongful of green salad and a cup of the vichyssoise.

“Exciting, isn't it? The season? They're rare or unique breeds of plants and animals. Once all our tomatoes were like that. Before preservatives and supermarkets and this commercial food production hell we're living in. Breeds evolved in places based on one evolutionary principle: they tasted better. The point is not longevity or flawlessness. All of our vegetables were biologically diverse, pungent with the nuances of their breed. They reflected their specific time and space—their terroir.”

On the second plate she took the biggest pork chop on the bone, a scoop of the rice salad, and a wedge of gratin potatoes. She said, “Now everything tastes like nothing.”

THEY CONJOINED
in my mind. It wasn't that they were always together. Theirs was an oblique connection, not always direct. If I saw one, my eyes started to move, looking for the other. Simone was easy to find, ubiquitous, directing everyone—she seemed to have some sort of system where she divided her attention between the servers equally. But I had a harder time tracking him, his alliances, his rhythms.