Sweetbitter(34)

I leaned into the boy as I reached. I gave him a helpless look and he stacked two far plates on top of his plate and moved them toward me.

“Careful,” the girl said, “or you’ll end up working here.”

It’s never too early for the c-word, I thought. The boy put his hands in his lap.

We weren’t allowed to half clear, everything had to go at once. I took his stack, but they were uneven, since like me, he didn’t understand how to clear. I knew it was too many plates—not for Will or Sasha, but too many for me. My arm started burning. I made a lunge for her bread-and-butter plate. The knife, still buttered, slid onto her lap and she screamed.

“Oh god, I’m so sorry. It’s just butter. I mean, I’m sorry.” She looked at me, mouth open, horrified, as if I had assaulted her.

“It’s silk!” she wailed.

I nodded but thought, Who wears silk while they eat? She threw the knife back up on the bar, and I saw the grease sinking into the fabric. I couldn’t grab it, my hands were fully loaded. The song ended. I swiveled to look for help.

Two plates slid off my stack and hit the floor. The precise, unmitigated snap of breaking. The room halted, no noise, no motion.

Sasha was next to me, smiling like he had found me at a crowded party.

“Pop-tart made a mess,” he said under his breath. “Who taught you how to clear?”

“No one,” I said, and shoved my plates at him. “Where were you?”

He went past me toward the couple, offering her club soda, napkins, a business card, and promising to take care of the dry cleaning. I picked up the pieces of the broken plates. The man in the navy suit who had called me Isabel caught my eye, and I moved my shoulder up in front of my face.

“Butterfingers, huh?” said Scott when I went to the broken-glass bin. “Pick up.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not good at clearing. I told him.”

“Pick up!”

Ariel flew into the kitchen and yelled at the dishwasher, “Papi, vasos, vasos, come on.”

Will came up the stairs from the cellar with flattened boxes, a broom, and a full dustpan.

“Don’t worry about the wine room,” he said to me. He pushed the broom into my hands. “The maid will get it.”

“I was coming back for it,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

My breath jumped hurdles. Each one shook me. My eyeballs vibrated and I couldn’t hold on to an emotion: rage, shame, exhaustion, dehydration, hunger—a cradle of twitching wires in my chest. I kept blinking, not knowing if my eyes had dried out or if they were about to run over. There was a hand on my back and I had a vision. I was going to throw this person up against the pastry cart with superhuman strength. I would hold a knife at their throat and scream, Don’t fucking touch me. It would roar out of me. And everyone would have to listen, and nobody would ever touch me again.

“Breathe,” she whispered. “Your shoulders.”

Simone’s hand smoothed the line from my neck to my shoulders, like she was smoothing out a tablecloth. She squeezed and it shot pain into my elbows.

“Pick up!”

“Will you inhale? And now out.”

When I exhaled I thought I might black out.

She said into my ear, “You need to stop apologizing. Do not say you’re sorry again. Practice. Do you understand?”

“Pick up, are you fucking deaf?”

I ran a bar mop over my face and nodded for Simone. She squeezed again and gently moved me forward. I covered my hands with the bar mop.

“Picking up.”

—

THE DAY I COULD three-plate-carry came and went. It wasn’t some sort of victory. No one congratulated me. We started from zero at the beginning of each service, and wiped the board clean at the end. But movements became sleeker, elongated. I became aware of being onstage. I gave a trail of my fingers as I set down each plate, as if performing magic.

I became aware of the ballet of it. The choreography never rehearsed, always learned midperformance. The reason you felt like everyone was staring at you when you were new is because they were. You were out of sync.

The way Jake used his foot to catch the sliding glass door of the white-wine fridge, or how Nicky tapped the pint glasses apart when they stuck together from the heat of the dishwasher and flipped them in his hand before he started a drink, the way Simone poured from two different bottles of wine into two different glasses and knew when each glass was full, how Heather flew through the Micros screens like she had written the program, the way Chef absentmindedly slapped the silent printer and it burped up a ticket, the way Howard could direct us with his eyes from the top of the stairs, how everyone ducked under the low pipe going into the basement.

“You’ll know you have the job when it becomes automatic,” Nicky said to me early on.

We said, “Behind you,” and the person nodded. They already knew. The “behind you” was more for the guest, a formality. We tracked each other’s movements with touch, all of us all over each other. If I fell out from under the spell, I went with one of Sasha’s tenets that I overheard him declaim to a sixty-year-old woman at table 52.

“I’m sorry about the mess,” she’d said, sweeping bits of food off the table.

Sasha shone down on her. “You and me, darling? We the beautiful people. We don’t never apologize.”