Sweetbitter (25 page)

“Steve would have our throats. I mean it, I would be sprinting out the door, never look back.”

“The Owner came by.”

“Oh shit—who got fired?”

“No one.” I thought back to the reverence, the hush, and it was as if I saw him pulling his hands together to calm us and I calmed. “He thinks we're wonderful.”

Carlos shook his head. “You drank the Kool-Aid, huh?”

I nodded. Everything. Felt. Better. “I love the Kool-Aid.”

I leaned against the windowsill and sipped my beer. The weather was schizophrenic, appealing one minute, aggressive the next, frenetic, like water breaking from a dam.

“Ohio,” I said. “Thank you for asking.”

“I got cousins there.”

“You don't.”

“Ay, niña, I got cousins everywhere. Speaking of, one of them is picking me up, we got errands. But he's holding some grade-A shit.”

“Enticing. But I think I'm finally becoming happy. I think I mastered life, right here on this windowsill. I don't want to move too much.”

“You sure? Where you meeting your man? We could drop you.”

“My man?”

Jake was quicksand. Hours ago my plan had been to talk to him rationally, he had promised. Maybe he hadn't bought the tickets yet, maybe he wouldn't go for the whole month, maybe I could meet them. But at that moment I didn't want him. The man I was totally and completely devoted to was going away with another woman, and I was so fucking blind and tolerant that they thought I wouldn't have a shred of feeling about it. Or perhaps they simply didn't care. Finally—facts not colored by the weather or the voices and visions in my head. I didn't want anything: not a drink, not a line, not a snack, I didn't even want to fidget. It was the freest I'd felt in months.

The city does sleep, the windows darken and the streets vacate. New York dreams us. Wild, somnambulistic creatures, we move unhurried toward our own disappearance at dawn.

“Tess, that's not your beer.” Will's voice was far away. He was inside the plush noise of the bar and holding a spotless beer in his hand.

“I can't hear you,” I said. I reached my hand out to touch the glass between us. I touched his face instead.

“Are you okay?” He grabbed my hand. The day rushed back to me. I fell backward, slapping the ground.

“I'm fine.” Will's hands, Carlos's hands, lifting me. “No more man hands.”

“Come inside,” Will said. I squirmed but his hand was stuck on my back.

“Carlos, are you going east?”

“You're not going with him,” Will said, and now his hand was stuck to my shoulder. “Are you crazy? You can't get into a car with a drug dealer.”

“Don't be racist Will, now please leave me alone. I'm going east.”

“Donde, niña?”

“Ninth between First and A.” As I said it a black car with tinted windows pulled up. The front window rolled down when Carlos approached. I pulled my purse out of the bar through the window and put my beer inside it.

“Hi Carlos's cousin,” I yelled out. “Simone's house, please.” I opened the door and climbed over the seats with astonishing grace.

T
HROWING UP
mostly water. Throwing up curds in mostly water. Throwing up in your lap. Throwing up in your purse. Men yelling. Red and green blistered lights out the window. Gravitational forces on you instead of a seat belt. Your face smashing into the seat back. You tried to hold on but you were thrown like a doll.

TO THEIR CREDIT,
I was dropped off exactly where I asked to be and given a bump of grade-A shit. The front of my shirt was slick. The sidewalk felt dented. When I tried to stand up out of the car, my knees caved.

“Don't blame yourself, Carlos,” I said. I felt in control as I consoled him. “I made some bad choices, you are not to blame.”

Carlos and his cousin sped off sharply, squealing, and I leaned against a wall. I watched a couple walk out of their way to distance themselves from me and I laughed at how bad my shirt smelled. I dug into my purse and it was soaking wet. I shook beer off my phone and it miraculously clicked on.

Hi, Simone, I texted. It's Tess.

Hi!!!

You said we could talk.

I'm outside actually. If that's ok.

I am going to ring the bell probably cause you're not responding.

Oh look whose bike I see!

Hi Jake!!!

Maybe you can just ask him to talk to me, cause I know he's there.

I'm sorry. I know it's late for you. You're old.

I'm not mad about France. No big d.

We got in a stupid fight, but it wasn't that much.

Simone!!!

I'm going to ring the bell again, I'm warning you.

Ok, no one is answering, I'm going home.

Tell Jake I'm sorry and I hate him, whatever order you want.

I'm sorry that was me again, I know you're home.

I see his motherfucking bike.

France hurts my feelings.

I'm leaving.

Also, I'm sorry the restaurant closed. I care a lot. Too.

Simone, if you're good at this job, what exactly are you good at?

I REMEMBER
the sickly green Heineken light in the window of Sophie's. I remember the bathroom, my hand slipping every time I tried to cut a line. I remember my eyes in the mirror. I remember the coke spilling into the sink. I remember the back of my thigh being pinched between the trash can and the wall when I was pushed against it. I remember someone's tongue, not being able to breathe. I remember my cheek on exfoliated concrete. The rest is a blessed darkness.

THE FIRST TIME
I woke up was a false alarm. My skin registered clothing, and I reached into my jeans pocket where I kept pills and broke off another piece of the Xanibar and swallowed it. There was a glass of water next to the bed, but I didn't surface enough to reach for it.

When I woke up again it was to a sunset I didn't deserve. Not just me, no one could deserve it except newborns, the untarnished, the language-less. I stayed perfectly still and the ceiling was violet. I searched myself for signs of pain, for the inevitable headache. All seemed calm. I took a bigger breath, preparing my body to sit up. My ceiling pinked and blushed. The windows were wide open. The wind had wrecked every book, shirt, or slip of paper. It was freezing.

I moved my neck first, craned it, looking down. My jeans were on. My Converse were off, but my ankle socks were on, evidence of an outside presence. I didn't remember getting to my bed or to my apartment. I sat up a bit more.

From my tailbone the shame started and with it came prongs of pain up my spine until it hit the base of my skull. I looked reluctantly at my shirt and moaned. The vomit had dried but the blood was still damp in spots on my breasts and at the collar. It had already dried and rusted out on the pillowcases. I touched my nose and flakes of blood came back on my fingers. There was a note safety-pinned to my shirt: “Please text me so I know you're alive, Your Roommate, Jesse.” I patted the bed for my phone. It was dead and there were beer droplets inside the screen. Movement made me ill. I ran to the bathroom, turned on the shower, and threw up. There wasn't much of anything left. Just extraordinarily gratifying dry heaves. My first real thought was, Shit, what time am I in today?

IF I AM QUALIFIED
to give advice on anything, it is probably a hangover. Advil, marijuana, and greasy breakfast sandwiches from the bodegas
do not
work. Don't listen to chefs—they will have you drinking five-day-old beef stock or reheated menudo or pickle brine or wolfing down bags of White Castle burgers at five a.m. Mistakes, all of them.

Xanax, Vicodin, or their opiate/Benzedrine cousins, Gatorade, Tums, and beer
do
work.
Dirty Dancing, The Princess Bride, Clueless.
They work. Bagels sometimes work, but not with anything on them besides cream cheese. You think you want lox, but you don't. You think you want bacon, but you don't. Salt will promote your headache. You think you want Ritalin, Adderall, meth, any kind of speed. You don't. You're fucked for at least six hours, so the goal is to numb out.

Toast works. Before you leave for your night out, leave yourself bread, a big bottle of your preferred color of Gatorade, a handful of prescription drugs, and a note with an emergency contact. I had none of these things.

SOMEWHERE IN
the middle of the night, as I watched old DVDs of
Sex and the City
on my beaten-up laptop, my lids barely qualifying as open, my hangover transitioned into a fever. I was irritated that my computer screen was shaking, until I realized that it was on my stomach—I was so hot that I kept throwing off my sheets, my clothes, but the shaking was me, shivering.

Initially my sheets were stiff, my skin brittle. I touched my forehead and the sweat released. My pillows were wet. Then the heat rose again, chasing me. I couldn't catch my breath. I searched the apartment but there wasn't anything, not even Advil.

I put my winter coat over my pajamas and hid my head under a wool cap. I thought of Mrs. Neely when I was on the stairs, clutching the railing, talking to myself. It wasn't that cold when I got outside. Sweat was running down my sides and from my hairline. The bodega was two doors away, but I couldn't get there standing up straight.

“It's you!” the Pakistani owner said.

“Hello.” I held myself in the door frame. He and I had developed a fondness for each other over the months.

“You remember me last night?” He came out from behind the bulletproof glass.

“No, sir, I do not.”

“You need to be more careful. It's not safe for young girls like you.”

“I'm sick, sir.”

“You're all red in the face.”

“Yes, I'm sick.” I rolled through a wave of nausea. “I need medicine.”

“You need rest. You can't live like this.”

“I have no intention of living like this much longer.” He didn't understand me. “I will rest, I promise, I promise.”

My vision faded, browning. I got scared and sat down on a stack of
New York Times.
I heard myself making sounds like crying, but there were no tears on my face, just sweat at my temples, behind my ears. He had his hand on my back.

“Can I call someone?”

“Please, I just need medicine. I have a fever and I'm alone. I need stuff like what a mom would get.”

He called out into the back and his wife came out. She looked at me like I was a criminal. He talked to her in another language and I took pauses between each breath, reassuring myself that I was still alive. The wife made her way around the store: Advil, water, a box of saltines, two apples, tea, a can of lentil soup. She pulled down a bottle of liquid NyQuil, assessed me, and put it back. She came over with the individually packaged capsules instead.

“Only two,” she said.

“Your girls are good girls. He's so proud of them,” I said to her. He had shown me photos of them many times. The eldest was in high school in Queens, applying to Ivy League colleges. I couldn't take her pity when she handed me the bag of items with no charge. I accepted because I hadn't brought my wallet.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “There's no excuse.”

I don't know how long it took me to get home. I thought about falling down and waiting for the police to come and take me to the hospital. I thought about screaming out, Someone please take care of me. I pressed against a rolled-down steel gate, spitting onto the concrete. The streets were empty. It was just me. So I said, Fuck, it's just you. I climbed the stairs cursing, dry heaving. I made the mint tea they had given me. I wrapped an ice pack in paper towels and put it on my forehead and when it got warm I put it back in the freezer. I shook, I sweat, I cried, I held myself, I mumbled in and out of sleep. It went on like that, more or less, for two days.

Do you know what I was, how I lived?
That refrain ran through my head as I took the train into work. I was a gaunt reflection in the spotty windows, but possessed of a sparkling sense of clarity. That was a line from a poem I couldn't remember. I don't know when I'd started quoting poems. I don't know when I'd started ignoring the flowers as I walked through the Greenmarket.

I stopped in front of the large window on Sixteenth Street, wanting to see if it looked different. Flower-Girl was conducting her botanic orchestra and behind her they were pulling down the chairs. The servers were congregated at the end of the bar, where Parker was making espressos. How much I had taken for granted: being excited to walk through the door every day, making rounds to say hello to everyone, even in the days when no one responded. Flower-Girl singled out a branch of lilac. I had smelled them since I'd come up from the train: cloying, heavy, human—but unripe, like a cold-climate Sauvignon Blanc. That was the full circle, wasn't it? Learn how to identify the flowers and the fruits so I could talk about the wine. Learn how to smell the wine so I could talk about the flowers. Had I learned anything besides endless reference points? What did I know about the thing itself? Wasn't it spring? Hadn't the trees shaken out their greens to applause? Isn't this what you dreamed of, Tess, when you got in your car and drove? Didn't you run away to find a world worth falling in love with, saying you wouldn't care if it loved you back?

The lilacs smelled like brevity. They knew how to arrive, and how to exit.

“EVERYONE WAS WORRIED,”
Ariel said.

“I came by and rang the buzzer,” Will said.

“I told them we speed-dial police if you don't show today,” Sasha said.

Whatever changes they had made to the restaurant were barely noticeable. We did have new sinks behind the bar. It was a lunch shift and I didn't talk much. My head was still in the isolation of my rancid bedroom. I was unshakable.

They did not arrive together, though I suppose they never did. Simone came in first. I went to the locker room and sat on a chair in the corner. I had no plan, but when she came in she was not surprised to see me. We were following a script that I hadn't seen yet.

“I'm relieved you're all right,” she said.

“I'm alive.”

She fiddled with her locker combination. I saw her go through it twice.

“I did not receive your texts until much later,” she said, maybe the first time in her life she had been the one to break a silence. “I don't check my phone at that hour.”

“Of course.”

“I was very worried.”

“Of course. I could tell.”

“I texted you back.”

“My phone is broken.”

“Tess.” She faced me. She buttoned up her stripes and slipped out of her jeans. She looked clownish in that giant shirt.

“There is so much I don't know. I accepted it. That's life, right? I mean, what do you guys even really know about me? But I am an honest person. What you see is what you get.”

“Do you think someone has been dishonest?”

“I think you people are so far gone you don't know what honest means.”

“The idealism of my youth—”

“Stop.” I stood up. “Stop. I see you.”

“Do you?”

“You're a cripple.” I was surprised at how accurate it felt. “You don't care about anyone but yourself. You certainly don't care about him.”

She paused.

“Perhaps,” she said. She went back to dressing.

“Perhaps! You think I'm stupid. I'm not. I was just hopeful.”

She moved to the mirror and took out her cosmetics bag. I watched the concealer go onto the dark circles under her eyes. She pressed the matte paste against her crow's-feet. She dropped her chin while she put on mascara. How had I never seen how morose her eyes were? She wore the lipstick to distract from them.

“You are blessed with a rare sensitivity,” she said. “It's what makes people artists, winemakers, poets—this porous nature. However.” She paused and blinked her mascara into place. “You lack self-control. Discipline. And that is what separates art from emotion. I do not think you have the intelligence yet to interpret your feelings. But I do not think you are stupid.”

“Jesus, that's lovely.”

“It's the truth. You can take it.”

“You both enjoy saying that. You love the truth as it applies to everyone else.”

“I never lied to you, Tess. I kept him away from you for as long as I could. I was explicit about what you were dealing with.”

“It's not normal, Simone, you both going away like this, not even bothering to tell me. It's not right.”

“Jake and I haven't traveled together in ages, it's overdue.”

“Was I really so threatening?”

“Don't flatter yourself.”

“Why don't you just take him?” I said. “Just take him, have him.”