Sweetbitter(56)

He looked at me and I knew he was thinking about disciplining me.

“Do people tend to underestimate you?”

“I have no idea. I’m too busy trying not to fuck up.”

He was still looking at me, my shoulders, my breasts, into my lap. To be turned over by his eyes was like being paralyzed.

“You know,” he said, and leaned forward. Our knees touched. I could see his pores, the tiny blackheads around his nose and I remembered his up-close face. “I get this sense that you are extremely…powerful. I felt it when we kissed, I felt it when you were speaking just then. Like I had tapped into an electrical current. But then I watch you and you spend most of your sober hours holding it back. Maybe you don’t have to compromise yet, but you’re going to have to choose between your mind and your looks. If you don’t, the choices will become narrower and narrower, until they are hardly even choices and you’ll have to take what you can get. At some point you decided it was safer to be pretty. You sit on men’s laps and listen to their idiotic jokes and giggle. You let them give you back rubs, let them buy your drugs and your drinks, let them make you special meals in the kitchen. Don’t you see when you do that, all the while you’re…” He reached out and wrapped his hand around my throat. I stopped breathing. “…choking.”

I held my head as still as a vase, something breakable that had a crack, and the crack was spreading. I said, “I felt it too. When we…”

His phone rang. It was the most intrusive sound I could imagine. Even Jake looked annoyed, but he looked at the number and jumped off his stool and walked to the bathroom and I continued to hold perfectly still.

The waitress came to clear the plates. She stacked them in the most disordered, haphazard stack I’d ever seen. Even I could do better. She threw them roughly in the bus tub. The plates landed with a crack and the silverware slipped with a slight splash into the juices that lived in the bottom of bus tubs. I had pitied her when we came in, but now I realized that we had the same job.

“Debbie,” he called out to the waitress. “Nancy? Sandra?” He didn’t sit back down on the stool, he was leaning against the counter now, and I knew our night was over. “I have to go,” he said, “I was supposed to meet someone twenty minutes ago.”

I nodded, perfunctorily. But I heard this: It wasn’t some undeclared rule that kept him from taking me home all those nights I was practically begging for it. He was interested. It was that I wasn’t living up to my potential.

“This is my treat. A belated holiday dinner. I heard you had a wild Thanksgiving. I’m sorry I missed it.”

He pulled cash out of his wallet. He sent off a text while he drank his beer. I spun around on my stool, watched people duck into doorways out of the fluorescent rain.

“I’m different,” I said, not caring about how simpleminded I sounded. I knew how he saw me—grasping, lost. I didn’t know yet in which ways he was right or wrong.

But what he didn’t know was that I had escaped. That I had gotten myself here. I helped myself to his beer. “I don’t have to choose between my looks or whatever. I’m going to have everything. Didn’t you say that the aesthetic and the ethical must coexist?”

I hit him with my knees. “Now. Where the fuck am I and how do I get home?”





III


“DID YOU KNOW fish have a four-second memory?” Terry asked me. I was pretending to read an old New Yorker in the candlelight, my eyes scanning the same lines of a poem over and over again—what will unleash itself in you when your storm comes—but really thinking about the coke in my purse, how there was a nice weight to it there, with an entire evening ahead. I thought briefly about leaving before everyone got there, but the night was muddy and I couldn’t see past it or through it or even to the next five minutes. The bar was empty so it meant that Terry was talking to me.

“Huh?”

“I always think of that when you guys come in here after your shift. Get it?”

“Yeah, Terry, I get it. We are the fish. And this is the fucking water.”

—

THIS ONE HAD BEEN Mrs. Neely’s mother’s: it was a wine-purple velvet cloche, with gold embroidery that was nearly worn away. It hugged her tiny skull and lifted slightly so she could bat her eyes at me. Her mother, she told us, had been a legendary beauty. She attended all the art salons, held her own in conversation with W.E.B. DuBois and Langston Hughes. Quite progressive. She didn’t have time to make art, supporting her children as a seamstress after her husband died, but she had an artistic flair for living.

“I don’t understand it now,” she said, taking both my hands in hers emphatically. “You didn’t leave the house without a hat. We were not fancy people, my mother made dresses out of curtains, but I would have been indecent without my hats. My mama would have slapped a girl like you silly, the way you dress.”

“I know,” I said. I encouraged her to admonish me, and she loved to dole it out. “Girls now, they wear leggings. As pants. It’s embarrassing.”

“Just parading their coochies around town.”

“Jesus! But yes. They actually do that.”

“Where are the standards? How is a man going to know what to do with you?” She slapped the back of my hand. “You dressing like a boy, hiding your figure. You still hitting them on the playground so they’ll look at you.”