The Night Shift, page 1
Praise for Daughters of the Wild
“This is a powerful and exquisite novel, rooted in the mystical vine, which guides everything the characters do.... Magical realism at its finest.”
—Booklist, starred review
“Saturated with magic and mysticism, this novel is a luminous and blisteringly real exploration of the bonds of motherhood, the limits and expansiveness of love, and the possibility of transcendence.”
—Jessie Chaffee, author of Florence in Ecstasy
“Daughters of the Wild is a gorgeous, different, and completely engrossing book. Burian’s writing is transporting—and exactly what I needed right now.”
—Jessica Valenti, author of Sex Object: A Memoir
“A magical, gripping exploration of women’s power and the ties that bind. I won’t forget the complexity and the strength of these characters.”
—Danielle Lazarin, author of Back Talk
“With prose as luminous and transformative as the psychoactive plant at this novel’s core, this is a book about dignity, intuition, and the sustaining vine of friendship. A perennial read.”
—Courtney Maum, author of Costalegre
“Writers like Karen Russell, Joy Williams, and Gabriel García Márquez spring to mind, but Natalka Burian’s voice is her own: lyrical, spunky, and defiantly untamed. It’s a voice we’ll be reading for a long time to come.”
—Adam Wilson, author of Sensation Machines
The Night Shift
Natalka Burian
NATALKA BURIAN is the cofounder of the Freya Project, a nonprofit reading series that supports community-based activism and the work of women and nonbinary writers. She is the author of Welcome to the Slipstream, A Woman’s Drink and Daughters of the Wild. She is the co-owner of two bars, Elsa and Ramona.
www.NatalkaBurian.com
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Contents
Quote
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Acknowledgments
I remember how the darkness doubled.
I recall lightning struck itself.
I was listening, listening to the rain.
I was hearing, hearing something else.
—Television.
One
Waking up late still felt wrong to Jean Smith. She had set her alarm for 6:30 a.m. every weekday—and some Saturdays—since 2001. She took promptness seriously, and the early wake up allowed her plenty of time to get to work a few minutes ahead of time, despite subway delays and dropped contact lenses. Now that her job on the Upper West Side belonged to someone else, Jean thought that her body would continue rising with the dawn. Instead, she had settled into the morning routine of a high school junior on summer break.
She reached for her phone and saw that it was almost eleven. I’m sure my body needs it, she thought, trying to reassure herself and dispel the vague guilt that loomed over a wasted morning. Jean trusted her body above all things.
Her old boss, Dr. Goldstein, had sent an arrangement of lilies earlier in the week. They languished in a corner, browning at the edges, but were still fragrant in a decaying, funeral way. Jean knew she should throw them out, but she couldn’t shake the finality of the gesture; once the flowers were gone, all evidence of her former life would be, too. So much of Jean’s time in New York had been contained in Dr. Goldstein’s office and she wasn’t sure if, all of a sudden, overnight, she could be a completely different kind of person.
She plucked the tiny florist’s card from its plastic fork and read the message for the dozenth time. Dear Jean, I’m so sorry to see you move on, but I wish you nothing but the best in your future endeavors. You will always have a place here if you need it. My best, Myra. Even though the note was written in the bubbly, immature hand of a stranger, Jean could almost hear Dr. Goldstein’s rich, low voice dictating it.
Jean startled and dropped the card when the buzzer rattled through the apartment. She waited a minute; sometimes these things were a mistake—another person’s birthday flowers or udon noodle delivery—but the buzzer was insistent. Jean didn’t live in the kind of building with a buzzer that actually worked the door downstairs, so she walked into her unlaced sneakers by the threshold and descended the three flights of stairs to the street.
Two women stood on the step, their noses to the glass. One was very old, hunched with a face like a creased flour bag. The other was a middle-aged mom in a butter-yellow cardigan, with a heavy gold necklace at her throat. Neither of the women wore coats, and somehow this made them look more like apparitions than anything else. Jean squinted into the cold light of the vestibule, assured that there had been some mistake. These women weren’t here for her. But, as she pulled the door open, their supplicating faces beamed squarely at her.
“Hello,” the middle-aged mom said. “I’m so sorry to bother you. This is going to sound a little strange, but my mother used to live in your apartment, and it would be—gosh, it would be wonderful if she could come up to take a look.” Her vowels were wide and flat, obviously Midwestern.
Jean stood back, like a slapped person. This was the last thing she had expected to hear. She tried to collect herself, looking into the wrinkled, powdery face of the old lady, wrapped neatly in a babushka-style scarf ablaze with poppies.
“I promise we won’t take long. I’m sure you have things to do, but we’re only here for the day...”
“I guess so. Why not?” Jean tried to sound friendly and magnanimous as she motioned them into the vestibule. The daughter was tall—almost as tall as Jean, a shared feature that made Jean simultaneously warmed and suspicious.
“I—I think it’s worth mentioning that there isn’t an elevator.”
The middle-aged woman smiled. “Oh, we know! Mom remembered that. Didn’t you?” She patted her mother’s liver-spotted hand and clasped it tight. They scaled the stairs slowly. The daughter watched patiently as the old woman’s sensible orthopedic shoes found the flat and rise each time.
“So, where are you visiting from?” Jean asked, not sure how she was meant to behave. Maybe she should have been solemn and silent, but the daughter, at least, didn’t seem like the solemn, silent type.
“We’re here from Chicago. For a funeral, actually.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Jean said, fidgeting where she paused on the landing, waiting for them to catch up.
“Thank you. Here, Mom? Right here?”
The old woman nodded down the hall, grasping at the railing. Jean held the apartment door open, standing awkwardly beside the COME BACK WITH A WARRANT–emblazoned welcome mat her roommates had purchased at a yard sale.
The old woman looked so tenderly through the doorjamb that Jean was forced to avert her eyes. The visitor maneuvered herself through the apartment by bracing herself against the walls and finally sat at the little kitchen table. She spoke rapidly to her daughter in a gnarled Eastern European dialect.
“Oh, Mom.” The daughter beamed. “She said the bathtub used to be right here.” She pointed to the awkward space where Jean and her roommates had wedged the coffee table. “And she and her three sisters slept in that corner over by the window. Isn’t that just amazing? Mom lived here until she got married.” She turned back to her mother, and they spoke quietly for a while, their language like a zipper—smooth but toothy. In a long pause, they sighed like twins and stared as though counting every wall and window.
“Can I get you something? Water? Or maybe coffee?” Jean asked, wondering if she should make some excuse to leave and give them privacy, but was also about ten percent convinced this could be some kind of scam, and, if she left them alone, she would return to an empty apartment.
“Oh, no thank you, dear. We should get going. Isn’t that right, Mom?” The woman smoothed her mother’s forehead, loving but purposeful.
“Thank you,” the old mother said to Jean, her voice marbled with a heavy accent. Jean nodded deferentially. The woman’s gaze was harsh; Jean felt like she was being poked with a sharpened stick.
“I can’t tell you how much this means to us,” the daughter said, revealing extravagant crow’s feet when she smiled.
“Of course—it was nothing.” Jean tried to force a smile to match, but couldn’t do it after watching the old woman silently catalog her former life in that apartment, under all of the landlord’s cheap fixes and the debris from Jean’s and her roommates’ lives.
“Well, we won’t keep you. Let’s go, Mom, and leave this nice girl alone.” Jean walked them to the
Jean opened her mouth—wanting to demur, to decline the money—but she was in no position to be declining anything. “It was no trouble at all. Have a safe trip home.” Jean locked the door behind them, and felt a pinch of guilt between her eyebrows, worried that maybe she was supposed to do something else for the old mother.
Jean thought about their unexpected visit all day. She thought about the old woman as she scrubbed the dishes and set them on the drying rack. Jean wondered if the old woman had stood in the exact same spot—as a girl—not much younger than Jean, and scrubbed the dishes, too. Jean thought about the old woman when she crossed the street to the Dream Clean. She thought about her when she pulled her clump of wet laundry out of the machine like a birthed lamb from its mother. Where had the old woman washed her clothes? Jean thought about the old woman packing all of her things and leaving the apartment on her wedding day. Jean flinched in the mirror, tweezing her eyebrows.
She had a compulsive thought that the old woman had left something in the apartment, and now, like the pea under the mattress, everything tilted toward discomfort. But the truth was that Jean was off, and not because of her apartment and not because of the old woman. Jean was off because she had blown up her whole life.
She had allowed panic to creep in at Dr. Goldstein’s office and had ruined everything. Dr. Goldstein’s curiosity was perfectly normal—even predictable considering her line of work. But when she asked Jean about her mother, Jean reacted like a person waking up in a tub filled with ice post-organ harvest. She had felt shocked, frozen, violated—all thanks to a few prying questions. Now Jean was dislodged into the great river of New York City with nothing—not a raft, not a door, not a pool float: nothing but a hastily acquired job that she was, on a cellular level, wholly unsuited for. Jean sliced the old woman from her thoughts and dressed for her new, unsuitable job in a haze of self-loathing. She took off in the afternoon, before her roommates came home from work, leaving the drying rack sparkling with clean dishes.
* * *
It was only four hours into her shift at the bar, and Jean had never been so tired. She didn’t really smoke, but she stood outside on the sidewalk, her nose and fingers tingling from the cold, holding a lit cigarette anyway. It had rained earlier that night, and the gingko leaves stuck to the pavement in irregular gold coins. She squinted through the smoke at an alley cat sauntering in and out of the deli across the street. Jean envied that languid animal and its free rent.
The only acceptable kind of break from her new job at the bar, Red and Gold, was the smoking kind, so Jean took it. She had to get outside, at least for as long as it took for the cigarette to burn to its end. It was only her first week, and though she was getting used to being on her feet and smiling a lot more than she ever had before, she couldn’t get used to the feeling of being entirely, bodily, wrung out. The flow of work, though, that feeling of jumping onto a moving train, was addictive.
The door creaked open, and the sound of the Stooges thundered out into the street. Her co-worker Omar pressed the door back into the jamb with the bottom of his foot, sealing the sounds of the bar inside. He was slight, sharp-jawed, handsome—and he was much better at his job than she was at hers. Omar nodded in her direction but didn’t look her in the eye. “Hey, you’re up,” he said, lighting a cigarette of his own.
“Already?”
“Already. The clock stops for no one, newbie.”
Jean dropped her cigarette in the ash can and bent to stretch her calves the way she had when she ran high school track. In one way, it was nice to be reminded of her physicality, to be reminded that her body could hurt because of something she had decided to do. It was evidence of a choice she had made. If Jean knew anything, she knew the value of making her own choices.
“I’m going to get a coffee. You want one?” Omar’s voice was soft, the voice people used when they were approached by a dog in a stranger’s yard. Jean winced, remembering when Omar told her he had to change the way he talked to everyone since September 11.
“No thanks, I’m okay. See you in there, I guess.” She pulled open the misaligned front door, face-to-face with a paper turkey printed in autumnal colors, the kind of decoration elementary school teachers tacked up in their classrooms.
The decaying interior of the bar was the opposite of her last job. Her old office had smelled like vanilla Glade Lasting Mist. Red and Gold just smelled. It was soon enough after the mayor’s nonsmoking ban for people to remember when bars smelled like smoke. The regulars still talked about it, still grumbled about having to go outside to smoke. “Fuck that guy,” everyone said, as they shouldered out into the weather. But not Jean—she was grateful for that ban, for those precious minutes in the cold night air.
Jean slipped beneath the pass and scanned the room, satisfied that no one was watching her, and then inspected her ragged nails. Her palms were chapped from the constant dishwashing, and she wondered if the cuts and creases from all of the bottle caps she pried open would scar her skin forever. She wondered how permanently, in general, this particular job would mark her.
A large group of friends had coalesced around the pool table in the back, all skinny jeans and T-shirts from Goodwill emblazoned with commemorative text from Bar Mitzvahs and family reunions. It was somebody’s birthday, and the group had contracted and expanded throughout the night. Jean knew they would be hard to get rid of at closing, but they made the room feel lively in a way she was grateful for.
Jean turned her focus to the row of customers seated at the bar. The first lesson she learned in Dr. Goldstein’s office was just as—if not more—relevant at Red and Gold. “Everyone you meet is wearing an invisible sign that says ‘Make me feel important!’” her former boss had said. The more important you made someone feel, the easier they were to manage in Dr. Goldstein’s office; the more important you made someone feel at Red and Gold, the more they tipped. It was a skill Jean had sharpened to an almost involuntary degree. In the same way some people were natural athletes, or good at learning other languages, Jean was good at making people feel important.
“Can I get you all something else?” she asked the drooping couple seated in front of her, her tone equal parts sympathetic and commiserating.
“I got it.” Mitch, the other bartender, elbowed her aside. Jean slunk back, suppressing a spike of anger. He still didn’t trust her to do the job, didn’t believe that she could secure the tips that he could.
After three nights in a row, Jean had begun to understand the tides of custom on her shifts. Red and Gold was settling into a lull—when people went to shows at the venue around the corner—but they could expect one more frantic rush before closing.
“Listen, I shouldn’t have done that,” Mitch said, putting a hand on her shoulder. He had the waxen complexion of a person whose skin rarely saw the light of day, and this vampiric pallor still shocked Jean a little every time he stood too close.
“I really don’t care. It’s fine.” Jean tried not to shrug off his touch. Instead, she pushed her hair behind her ears—hair the texture and color of tree bark, her mother used to say.
“No, it’s not fine. You’re new, and I should let you learn.” Mitch looked down at her; it was no small feat, since Jean was tall, too. He wore a tiny black vest over a white T-shirt that settled tightly over his impressive potbelly.
“Thanks,” Jean said. “That’s very generous of you.”
“Ha! You’re making fun of me, right?” Mitch slapped her on the back, like a cartoon dad.
“Right.” Jean forced another smile, adding it to the parade of forced smiles she had produced that night. Jean hated that a young woman smiling was a cue that everyone understood. She hated, even more, that it was one she had to rely on so heavily in order to pay her rent.
Mitch cracked open a line of PBR cans and pushed them across the bar. “You’re sweet, but not fast enough for the weekends. You’ll get the hang of it. Nobody’s new forever.”
“That’s the truth,” Omar said, dropping a tub of used glassware in front of her. Jean hauled it to the sink and sank the glasses into the steamy dishwater.
