Sweetbitter(67)
—
VESELKA, three a.m. I was slowly but surely falling in love with the food of the Eastern Bloc, partly because I finally awoke to the fact that I was living in a city that once housed immigrants from non-Asian countries, countries of endless cold. Mostly though because the food was cheap and Jake hated spending money on food.
Bowls of borscht in front of us, nothing thin about them, a muscular, magenta soup, sticking to the spoon. Pierogi, boiled, piled with sour cream and horseradish, stuffed cabbage leaking juice into tomato broth. That was how the winter soul was fed.
When I called Jake a Marxist he said I didn’t understand the word. When I called him a proletariat, he laughed. When I fingered the holes in his wool coat that hung shapelessly to his ankles, when I pointed to the peeling soles of his boots, he laughed. Hours of my life I never got back, in the most acerbic, unsweetened days of winter, trying to make him laugh.
“I’m buying you a burka,” I told him, and he laughed again.
Initially, I didn’t bring her up. It was as if I were protecting his feelings, wanting him to think that I thought only of him when we were together. But whenever I saw a new twist in his body, a new tilt to his brows, it felt like I was being shown something that was Simone’s. It was a perverse pleasure, but the bonds between them and me were so new I just wanted to reinforce them. And eventually, one of those nights, he sat next to me and said Simone had been driving him fucking crazy, nagging him about his close. He was testing me out, and I said, “Your close is the least of your problems. Do you think Howard knows you’ve been late for every shift for six years?” He laughed. Then she was with us, invisible, benign.
“And then she tells me, ‘All you need is a knack for understanding light and shade.’ Um, what?”
“Keats again!” He shoved a pierogi into his mouth. “She can’t help it, you know. She spent so many years with these poets, she doesn’t know what’s hers anymore.”
“Her what?”
“Her words. Her thoughts. She was a poet—is a poet. I don’t know. She graduated high school at sixteen. Had a full ride to Columbia.”
“She went to Columbia?”
“She didn’t.”
“Where did she go?”
“Cape Cod Community.”
My food stuck in my throat. “No. Fucking. Way.”
“Yes, you little elitist bitch. Swallow your food.”
I swallowed. “You’re being serious.” Simone at community college, collecting her straight As, bored, silent, serious. “But why?”
“Not everyone gets the privilege of running away.” He glanced at me and relented. “Besides, she had to take care of me.”
“Simone turned down Columbia to take care of you?”
“I’ve given up plenty for her. It goes both ways. I take care of her too.”
“What if one of you wants to take care of someone else?” The words came out before I could stop them, and I thought, Please don’t answer that. He ignored me. “What are her parents like?”
He leaned back in his chair. “They’re nothing like her.”
“How did she get like that?”
“She likes to think she sprang from the head of Zeus fully formed.”
“But in fact…”
“Her dad owned a bar. And her mom was an elementary school teacher with a ditzy, girlish obsession with France, but she never even owned a passport.”
I realized that I had my spoon full and lifted halfway to my face. I would have sooner believed that Simone had sprung from a skull in full armor than believed a woman who had never left the country raised her. I put my spoon down, laughing uncomfortably.
“How old is she?” It was something I had been curious about since the first day. I had no idea about the gradation of years, what thirty or thirty-three or forty-two looked like.
“She’s thirty-seven. How old are you?”
“Twenty-two. You knew that,” I said. I smiled at him but I was doing numbers in my head. “That’s kind of old, right? It doesn’t make sense. Didn’t she start at the restaurant when she was twenty-two? I thought she said she’s only been there twelve years, that makes her thirty-four, right? When was she in France? What did you do when she left?”
“I call those my wilderness years.”
“How long were you guys apart?”
“A few years, Jesus, I’m bored with this.”
“Do you think she’s happy? Just working at the restaurant? She seems happy, right? Her life is so full.”
“You’re really smitten, huh?” Jake tackled crusts of rye toast. “What do you think happiness is? It’s a mode of consumption. It’s not a fixed state, somewhere you can take a cab to. Simone’s dad had a brain aneurysm at one a.m. while he was counting the drop. He wasn’t unhappy. Simone has been bar-backing since she was nine years old. I don’t think she has any illusions about happiness.”
I tried to see her as a little girl, busing glasses, watchful. When I was nine the most palpable interactions I had were with my dolls. I played Family with them, but the games always turned out badly, ended violently. Those dolls had to accept the full gamut of my fledgling emotions. They were stuck with me, and they always forgave me when we started over the next day. Which from what I saw of other families wasn’t an inaccurate representation. But I was fully isolated from the adult world. I wasn’t seen, heard, or acknowledged. It made sense that Simone had been born into it, adapting to the adult rules for conduct, how to be sincere and duplicitous, how to evade, before she realized that technically she wasn’t one of them.