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and grabbed. Another sweltering day. Air conditioners all around the city were giving up. As I pushed into the tepid dining room I noticed the ice was melting in the oyster tray in my hands. Pale blue bodies amid sloshing ice chips. It looked disgusting. And six and six meant nothing to me. I had forgotten to check the day’s oysters. I forgot the table I was going to. Simone flooded by me and I reached for her.
    “Excuse me, Simone, sorry, but which are which oyster? Do you know?”
    “Do you remember when you tasted them?” She didn’t look at the plate.
    I hadn’t tasted them when they had been passed around at family meal. I hadn’t looked at the menu notes.
    “Do you remember tasting them?” she asked again, slowly, like I was dumb. “East Coast oysters are brinier, more mineral. West Coasts are plumper, creamier, sweeter. They’re even physically different. One has a flat cup, the other tends to be deeper.”
    “Okay, so which are which on this plate?” I held the plate closer to her face but she wouldn’t look.
    “Those are covered in water. Take them back to Chef.”
    I shook my head. Absolutely not.
    “You’re not going to serve those. Take them back to Chef.”
    I shook my head again but sucked in my lips. I saw it all unfolding ahead of me. His anger at me, his yelling about the waste, my embarrassment. But I could look at the menu notes while I waited for the new ones. I could hear the table number again. I could figure it out.
    “Okay.”
    “Next time look at them but use your tongue.”
    —
    THE MANAGERS MAINTAINED power by shifting things. They came into a server’s station and moved their dupe pad, moved their checks, rearranged the tickets on the bar. They pulled white wines out of the ice bucket, wiped them down, and reinserted them in a new pattern. They would pause you when you were running, obviously in a hurry, and ask you how you thought you were settling in.
    Simone maintained power by centrifugal force. When she moved, the restaurant was pulled as if by a tailwind. She led the servers by her ability to shift their focus—her own focus was a spotlight. Service unfolded in her parentheses.
    —
    “WHAT’S THAT bartender’s name again? The one who only talks to Simone?” I asked Sasha. I was casual about it.
    Sasha was a backwaiter. He was otherworldly beautiful: broad alien cheekbones, blue eyes, bee-stung, haughty lips. He could have been a model, except he was barely five foot four. His gaze was so cold, you knew he had been everyone: a rich man, a poor man, in love, abandoned, a murderer, and close to death. None of these states impressed him much.
    “That bartender? Jake.”
    He was Russian, and though he was clearly fluent in English, he didn’t bother to adhere to its rules. His accent was both elegant and comical. He rolled his eyes at me while he cut bread.
    “Okay, Pollyanna, let me tell you few truths. You’re too new.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “What you think it means? Jakey will eat you for dinner and spit you out. You even know what I’m speaking of? You’re not bouncing around after that.”
    I shrugged like I didn’t care and filled the bread baskets.
    “Besides. He’s mine. I’ll cut your fucking throat if you touch him and I’m not a joker.”
    “Silence in the kitchen! Pick up.”
    —
    “PICKING UP!”
    The kitchen was a riot of misshapen, ugly tomatoes. They smelled like the green insides of plants, like sap, like dirt.
    There were tomatoes of every color: yellow, green, orange, red-purple, mottled, striped, dotted. They were bursting. “Seaming” is what Chef called it, when the curves and indentations pulled apart from each other, but not completely, like parted lips.
    “Heirloom season,” Ariel sang out. She was also a backwaiter. She always had pounds of eyeliner on, even if it was the morning. She had bangs and dark-brown hair that she twisted up onto her head and held with chopsticks. She was still named Mean-Girl in my head