BABY IN THE BARN

ERIN MOON WHITE

Vanessa is doing crunches on the pool table when Annie arrives for the happy hour shift. As Annie dumps maraschino cherries into a small plastic tub, the personal trainer holding down Vanessa’s sneakers asks, “Do all the girls have to look this hot to work in your bar?” Vanessa puffs hard and doesn’t answer. After a final set of abdominal reps, she swings her legs over the side of the table and tells Annie to pour her a seltzer. Annie has never seen her manager in athleisure before. It sort of works. Vanessa’s fit and very pretty for a woman who admits to having done nothing but work in dive bars since before she could drink. On the night Annie was hired, Vanessa retold her own New York City origin story. How she was seventeen when she hitchhiked from Florida and looked like Michelle Pfeiffer. She could have been an actress, she said. But also, you should know, I hate actresses. She’d tossed Annie a bar rag and said she could start the same night. 

After sucking down her drink so the ice rattles, Vanessa announces she’s taking the trainer over to her “other” bar. Annie finishes prepping the cocktail fruit and olives, then shuts herself in the bathroom. She needs to get high. A few months ago, coke had seemed antiquated—but free, Annie had reasoned—and fun. Then Annie started needing more than the amount that came for free. The mirror is smudgy and lit overhead by a dim red bulb. Annie takes a bump from the end of her apartment key. She tilts her head back to see that her nostrils are clear. Sniffs a few times before blowing her nose. After storing her baggie in a toilet paper roll at the back of the restock shelf, she goes to set up the cash register, which is vintage and only takes cash. 

Bar None is a standard dive with Christmas lights strung up year-round and peanut shells littering the floor, a lovable piece of shit like most of its customers. Rory, the most regular regular, arrives every night after his job managing Manhattan’s power lines. He frees his long gray hair from a low ponytail and lets it hang loose over his shoulders. Up close, you can see carefully drawn navy blue eyeliner above his stubby white lashes. Rory’s gout means he limps, and because he’s employed by the city, he’s allowed to carry a concealed firearm. He shares this secret with the girls he decides he can trust. Not even Frank who’s been barbacking there for five years knows about the gun. 

Rory is so regular he keeps his own neoprene koozie behind the bar—like a toothbrush at a lover’s apartment. Annie zips a Bud into its little scuba suit. She feels something like love for Rory who over-tips and finds her a cab on nights when she can’t be trusted to walk. As the bar fills in, the smell of yeast and bleach is replaced with the smell of leather and wet cash. Customers take their usual seats. The guy who does magic and brags about his grandfather’s patented card tricks. Jukebox woman who buys an entire album and listens to it all the way through with her face pressed to the glowing machine, then leaves without ever ordering a drink. Skaters who arrive together for the buy-one-get-one deal. 

Annie finds a rhythm, opening the cooler and bending back bottle caps with a brass mermaid opener. She flicks coasters at new guests. Bodies float and lean around the pool table in the deep red darkness of the bar. Sometimes after Annie closes up, the streaks of unhinged bodies stay shimmering in her mind’s eye like neon lasers. The kind you could choose as a portrait backdrop on school picture day—an upgrade Annie’s mother never paid for. She starts to sketch with a blue ballpoint on a cocktail napkin then crumples her doodle and wipes away a ring of beer. A customer in a Dodgers cap takes the seat directly in front of her, orders two Rolling Rocks at a time.

He looks at her with eyes unfocused from under the brim of his hat and shares about the horror show of his childhood. How he was born in some dark part of Maine no one talks about. How when he was ten, he drowned his babysitter on purpose and his family sent him away to a woodland emotional growth program that fucked him up for life. 

“Shit,” Annie says, taking the twenty from under his coaster and turning to the register to make change. After a final sip of beer, he stands up, sways, and asks in a loud voice how she came to be a broken flower, then. 

“I’m not broken,” she says. 

“So why do you work here,” he asks, leaning on the bar. 

Frank has an ear for this type of shit. He intercepts the creep. “I’m the snowplow, you’re the flower,” he says. “Go be Scarface.” He hands her a tiny bag of powder under the bar. Then he opens the register and takes out the cash, stuffing it into an envelope. He watches so Annie doesn’t fall down the hatch in the floor. Annie knows Frank will make sure broken flower guy is gone before she gets back upstairs. She counts the tangy smelling bills—always badly, according to Vanessa. The money at Annie’s job started off not great and is getting worse. A hundred dollars. After sorting Frank’s tip, she blows a fat line through a rolled up Post-It note. She writes a number on a tiny piece of white cashier’s tape, twisting a rubber band twice around the envelope and locking it in the safe. 

Upstairs, she plays a few rounds of pool with Frank. They measure out torpedoes of powder across the head rail with a MetroCard, shot after shot. The sky is limoncello when Frank lowers the exterior gate. It’s six in the morning. Annie gets on the JMZ aware of her relative filth next to all these well-scrubbed bodies commuting to their day jobs. It’s snowing as she walks to her building on the corner of Bushwick and Grove. Inside the first-floor apartment, she sheds her bag, boots, and clothing into a single pile then falls into bed in her t-shirt. She watches the snow come down through the bars over her bedroom window.

When Annie wakes, it’s close to dusk and raining hard on top of the snow. She’s not dressed for the weather, but she has no food in her refrigerator. The street thickens with gray ponds of slush. At the combo Dunkin Donuts/Baskin Robbins, Annie opens a red Gatorade from the cooler, drinks half of it, then orders a coffee and grilled cheese on Texas toast. Outside in the rain, she protects the paper bag of breakfast under her thin jacket as she jogs across the street to the Save Mart. She stretches out on a vinyl recliner at the back of the store across from a wall mounted in fake aquariums. 

Her hair is soaked. She picks apart the greasy sandwich, watching the light-up fish spin around on their fluorescent backdrops. Annie has never been anywhere tropical, but she closes her eyes and pretends. A clerk asks if they can help her. The lowest price tag on any of the artificial tanks reads $99.99. It’s a mural of slowly panning coral, anemone, and brightly colored sea animals reeling on some kind of celluloid surface. Annie wonders if she could sell a painting that cost as much as the cheapest fake fish tank. She finishes her grilled cheese, unsticking her damp jeans from the chair.

Back in her apartment, David and his boyfriend Eli are in the living room with their computers open talking about stuff on the Internet. They’re clicking through photos of a woman famous for getting cosmetic surgery to look one sixth of her real age, which is ninety-three. The result is impressive.

“Think about what’s happening under all that plastic surgery,” David says. 

“It’s like a pile of dogshit shoved into a Birkin bag,” Eli adds. 

Both Eli and David want to go into fashion. Currently, the fashion seems like some kind of weird hoax. Annie sips her coffee and wrings out her hair into a crispy potted plant. “Cute flannel,” David says when he notices her. “Did you buy it at Rainbow?” Annie shrugs. She has no idea where it came from. David changes the subject to his work. He’s a food photographer. Somebody made him delete a whole series of burgers he’d taken with a macro lens because the cheese was bubbled wrong and now he would have to go back in three weeks, the next time the chef could schedule anything with anyone. “I hate cheeseburgers,” he moans, clutching a velvet throw pillow.

Daphne comes home splashed in black dots. She’s the personal assistant to a curator who has been having her paint the floors of his loft the color of walnut ink. Annie says she’d kill to have a job painting floors for a famous person, but her roommate glares down in silence at her ruined white sneakers, then lights a cigarette. Both Daphne’s parents died when she was young. It’s the only thing anyone ever says behind her back. That and how cute she is. Daphne rests her cigarette on the rim of a white ceramic ashtray on the windowsill. A draft pulls the smoke curling into the room instead of out. Annie once read in a self-help book that children with physically or emotionally unavailable parents develop more left-brain skills, often accompanied by an empathy deficit. Maybe this is why Daphne is cold to her, or maybe she just hates Annie. Daphne dumps a cardboard box of junk onto the floor. “He told me I could keep all this crap,” she says about her boss. 

They dig through corporate merch and bespoke trinkets, letterpressed escort cards and party invitations. A New Year’s Eve greeting from a famous movie director surfaces. It’s a staged family portrait taken with one of those lifelike baby dolls, only it doesn’t actually look alive in the photo, which makes it scary. “Too much blue toner,” David says. Eli picks it up and takes it into the kitchen. David begs him not to put the card on the fridge but he does anyway, using a magnet that reads, If You Met My Family, You Would Understand. Everyone thinks the magnet with the card is hilarious and when they calm down they decide to order from the Peruvian place again. 

Annie asks for dirty rice with extra green sauce and leaves ten dollars on the coffee table. She’ll probably eat it cold, standing in front of the fridge tomorrow. In her bedroom, she swallows the last of her coffee and retrieves a tackle box of almost used-up acrylic paint from under her bed. There’s a cheap wooden nightstand she’s been meaning to put together in pieces underneath, too, and she digs out the panels. She opens a tube of white paint and smears it on her breasts, pressing them into one of the shiny particle boards. My art looks basically like the way my soul feels, she once told a guy at a fashion opening. He’d laughed so hard he spit his drink on her chest. 

In college, Annie studied painting in a conceptual curriculum, earning a self-styled degree in Autobiographical Art. Which is to say, she studied herself. The university didn’t try to sell careers, except to the graphic design majors, who got their own job fair. The president of the School of Arts even offered her own seminar, Life After BFA, exploring all arts professions—especially administration—except for artmaking. Annie initially felt certain that if she found and stood in the right places long enough, her time would come. But she couldn’t afford canvas or paint or studio space after rent and food and bills. Becoming a working artist was a life goal so abstract it rivaled her thesis exhibition. She’d been warned. And so, here she was. 

Annie hears Mahin rustling around in the bedroom next to hers, the chimes of her metal bracelets bouncing off the walls of the railroad hallway. Annie’s best friend is all eyeliner, too-loud laughter, and enameled bangles stacked to the elbow. Everyone is in love with her. She knocks on the door and enters, naked, wrapped in her fleece blanket, smoking. Annie is topless except for the white paint on her chest and searching through piles of unwashed shirts. 

“Vanessa said I had to stop wearing a bra to work,” Annie explains.

“I never wear a bra,” Mahin says, sitting on the mattress. 

“You only ever wear a blanket,” Annie says. 

Annie finds a passable shirt and asks for a drag. Mahin has full wet lips and always sogs the filter, which is familiar and comforting but always sort of nauseating to Annie. Dewy lips. Mahin’s only flaw. “What did you tell her?” she asks, laughing still.

“I told her it was too cold and I didn’t want to nip out. So then she pulled one of those lip gloss wands out of her bag. Like pink with glitter. She said it was one or the other so I took off my bra and hung it on that mirror that has all the garland and Yankees shit on it. I forgot it there.”

“Amazing,” she says, tugging the blanket around her and shivering. “So what’s going on with that dude you met?”

“Dinner, like now,” Annie says, looking helplessly at her dirty laundry.

“I need an Aloe juice from the store. I’ll walk you out,” Mahin says. “Let me get dressed.”

Annie texts Mateo that she’s running behind, then pulls on ripped jeans and a fake leather jacket. The paint on her chest is dry, and since she doesn’t have time, she’ll have to shower later. She French braids her hair. Adds burgundy lipstick and no other makeup but then decides on mascara because the lipstick is so dark. She Googles Argentina before Mahin is in her doorway again wearing the real leather jacket Annie let her borrow.  

 “You look good. Like a hot dude,” Mahin says. 

 “Totally my intention. You look good too,” Annie says back. They walk outside. Mahin lights another cigarette, kisses her on the cheek. 

Annie puts in her earbuds for the train ride. She gets off after ten stops and walks to the restaurant. It’s loud inside. Annie can hardly understand Mateo’s English in the first place. He’s talking about his childhood. The words shush out in a Rioplatense Castilian accent that he tried explaining once. It has something to do with Italy but she still can’t understand him. She catches enough to construct a sequence of images that render his childhood. Polo ponies. Winters in Uruguay. Architecture and surfing. His family. They’re Catholic, he explains, especially around the holidays. His mother paints. His father owns buildings. He tells her he wishes she could visit his holidays some year. She wishes the same but doesn’t say so. 

Annie was aware growing up of very wealthy families in her suburb. Sometimes they invited her over but not often. They had pool houses in addition to main houses, and summer homes on top of those. One girl’s father delivered a brand-new Land Rover topped with a big red bow to the student parking lot on her sixteenth birthday. But the rich kids Annie knew came from automobile and aerosol empires in the Midwest with fortunes that drained thinner with each new generation. They didn’t leave their countries of origin to get business certificates at Ivy League schools. 

Mateo’s wealth is immune to the blight of the post-industrial complex. A guaranteed luxurious existence backed ten generations over, probably more. He doesn’t have to say much about his parents for Annie to understand that he has been cared for judiciously since birth. Thoughts of Mateo have begun to strain Annie’s psyche, pulling her toward an alternate and implausible reality as his wife. She dreams up the details of their life in a consumerist way that shames her. Mateo’s father wearing a linen suit tailored down to the millimeter as he greets their pink and glowing new baby girl, Annie’s daughter. Annie’s mother-in-law in a studio filled with natural light and expensive tools and creamy oil paints, or the two of them teaching a toddler watercolor on the beach. Family emeralds and opals handed down to her at wedding anniversaries and birthdays. 

“What are you thinking of?” Mateo asks, interrupting the mirage. Annie corrects herself easily—one thing that recommends her for bartending. She asks to know more about Mateo’s mom’s painting. He says she’s been a painter his whole life that he can remember. She makes landscapes of the sea and portraits of Mateo and his sister. Acrylic, not oil. Annie’s liquid fantasy hardens into plasticky peaks and waves. Nobody cared about art where Annie grew up, at least, nobody she knew was ever trying to make any. Not even as a stay-at-home mom hobby. Her own mother made Easter baskets for the hospital. 

“I used to paint,” Annie tells Mateo.

“I think I will like to see your paintings one of this days,” Mateo says. 

“I think you probably will like to, too,” she agrees, gently. “I mostly paint tits.”

She looks at his lips and wants to fall in love with him. No, she wanted the reverse. Annie finishes her wine and tells Mateo she needs to get to work. When the finger-licked plates have been cleared, Mateo pays the bill. Then he helps her with her coat, holding it out by the shoulders so Annie can slide her arms in behind her. The temperature has dropped and it’s windy, door gusting open on their way out. Snow stings Annie’s face. She leans into Mateo. When he bends to kiss her, she slides her bare hand up the wrist of his bunny-soft cashmere sleeve. 

Annie helps Megan wrap up after her shift, wiping down the bartop and washing pint glasses. Mateo sits for a drink. Yellow lights from a snowplow outside send blinking shadows over the bar’s dark walls. It comes down harder. Mateo’s parents are coming in for his winter break to tour a number of major U.S. cities and also Palm Springs. “I think I will be missing you,” he says. He leans toward her face with his. Annie isn’t allowed to bring dates to the bar. Vanessa’s rule. Mateo’s brown eyes are close together, warm and sane and reading her face. 

“Don’t miss me yet,” she says. “Bring your parents from the airport.”

“They will think that sounds funny,” Mateo says. The German exchange student Annie’s family hosted for a year used to say funny when she meant fun. Annie isn’t certain what Mateo means and is too harried by customers to ask. Mateo pays for his drink and over-tips. He leaves to meet his friends from school and wait for his parents. The skaters are playing the Smiths on the jukebox again. On top of the cash register there are short wooden stumps with pine trimmings stuck into the tops, and one of the trees has an M carved into it. Annie picks it up and turns it slowly in her hand. It smells like an entire forest. She wipes sap on the rough, damp towel hanging from the back pocket of her jeans. 

“This yours?” Annie asks Megan. 

“From the Christmas tree guy, yeah. He whittles them. Carves? Whatever.”

“What Christmas tree guy?” Annie asks. 

“Out there. I think he’s underage but he’s Canadian so I’ve been serving him,” Megan says, pointing at the window. Annie looks outside and sees the long row of evergreens lined up for sale. Two men—one who looks in his twenties and one who could be his grandfather—take turns collecting cash from holiday shoppers and pushing trees through the baler so that they’re swaddled in red and white netting. Annie watches a customer select her tree while feeding treats to a Pomsky on a skinny sparkling leash. Then she goes back to the bathroom and finishes her drugs. 

Back behind the bar, she replaces the Budweiser in Rory’s koozie. The Christmas tree kid has taken a seat near the register. His short brown beard is flecked in snowflakes. She offers him a beer and he asks for water instead. 

“I’ll be too tired if I have one now,” he explains, straightening his back. 

“Sure. I get it. I don’t sleep,” says Annie. He looks at her with real concern.

“I paint,” she explains. 

“Can you make money painting?” he asks. Annie shakes her head, gesturing around the room. 

“I’m Chris,” he says, removing a shearling lined canvas glove to shake her hand. As she sips the top of her beer, a regular named Grayson bumps the tree salesman from behind and ham-hands his shoulder. “Hey! It’s Christmas Makin’.”

“Chris. McMahon.” Chris’ correction sounds painfully Canadian. 

“You’re making Christmas, all I know, Mick!” Grayson bawls for everyone in the bar. “Get your fucking fir trees, people!” 

Annie’s phone vibrates in her back pocket. A text from Mateo. 

At mcsorleys now together with family and going to bed/early church straight from JFK. hope tonight is a good night $$$$$$…ja! Xx 

Chris excuses himself to Annie, puts some cash on the bar and thanks her again for the water. He returns out to the rows of Carolina-grown conifers. 

“Gray, do you have any blow?” Annie whispers to Grayson, pulling the lid from a Budweiser and sliding the sweaty bottle toward him, free of charge. He digs into a pocket, mumbles Namaste, and drops a tiny square from his prayer hands into her cupped palm. Then he goes to the jukebox and puts on Bob Marley, a relief after all the Morrissey. 

Annie texts Mateo back. He doesn’t reply. She refills drinks for the leftover men who stay after the women have gone off to better bars. When Annie turns from the taps, she takes a few sloppy bumps off of her building key while crouched under the sink, pretending to be organizing the bottles of cleaning solution. By early morning, Annie is as high as she’s ever been. Her skin feels itchy, like she could peel back the top layer to release tiny flocks of birds. After three rounds of pool, she needs a religious experience, something to lift her brain right out of its dome. She tells Frank they have to go. She’s going to St. Patrick’s for the early mass. Annie locks the metal gate, and Frank hails her a cab using a red balloon-sword given to him by a clown who came in at last call. He reaches into the front window to bop the driver’s head for emphasis, giving directions to the church. The driver swats him away and cusses, pulling forward.

“I’ll pray for your soul, Frank!” she yells as the car takes off. God she loves cocaine. It makes her feel like murder. 

The sun is coming up. She asks the driver to stop so she can walk the rest of the way. St. Patrick’s is only a few blocks ahead. Unnamed need rips through Annie’s blood as she approaches the stone arches and stained glass of the cathedral. It’s beautiful and terrifying—like stepping into the skull of a massive gargoyle. She finds a pew close to the front then zones out through the gospel and homily. She stands when everyone stands and sits when they sit and sways in the organ music, some of which she remembers from grade school. Jesus, come to us, lead us to your light, everyone sings.

A child and her parents rise to light the third Advent candle on a huge wreath displayed near the nativity scene. Three purple pillars and one pink. Why the pink candle on the third week? Annie can’t remember. She feels agitated as the drugs stop working. A line forms for Communion. She steps out of her row, inching closer to the bronze canopy pulsating over the altar. The top of the baldacchino is like a picket fence made of flashing gold swords. Annie pictures the blades cutting through her flesh, and when she reaches the priest, her last link to reality dissolves. 

She grabs the priest by his cassock and begs for a confession. He’s a large man who steps back to free himself from Annie’s grip. “Please let go,” he says, flushed. She tells him that this is her right, she’s a confirmed Catholic. “Then you’ve lost your way,” he says. 

Her existence feels thinner than the wafer in the priest’s white hand. She takes it from him, then drops it on the marble floor. Back in her seat, she sends another text to find out how long her next bag will be and watches the procession go by. The bulk are clearly tourists, well dressed and neatly coiffed. An attractive family walking down the aisle draws her eye. Mateo’s family. Annie suddenly feels sick and dehydrated. She puts on the scratched-up plastic sunglasses she keeps in her purse and shrinks into the collar of her pleather coat. 

Mateo is wearing the same sweater and jeans from their date the night before. His sister has smooth brown hair that stops near her tailbone. She pushes a hand through it, then re-ties her camel wool belt, tugging it more tightly around her waist. Mateo stands behind his sister in line and places his palms on her shoulders. She turns her head slowly, and Annie sees that like Mateo, she has perfect bone structure. Cheeks like a boomerang. Tapered, aquiline nose. She lifts her pointed chin and Mateo gives her a little kiss on the mouth.

 It’s not a brotherly kiss, or else something is badly wrong. Annie turns her back in her boyfriend’s direction, heart slamming against her guts, then slips past the knees in her pew toward another set of doors in the cathedral’s wings. The sky is clear and turning light blue. She hurries down the sidewalk filling with tourists and rushes down into the subway tunnel. Pushing through the turnstile, she gets on the first train. The bag guy has texted back that he’s at the pizza place by the bar and asks does Annie still want it. She doesn’t and she doesn’t reply. She switches trains and gets off at Delancey, cold air a relief on her burning face. Annie takes her time walking back toward work. It’s eight in the morning and the bar is closed, but she doesn’t feel like going home. 

When she comes to the van parked on the curb at her job, she knocks on its rear window and only has to wait a beat before Chris slides open the door. “Paul is at the Y for a shower,” he says, reading her mind. “You can sleep if you want.” Chris hands Annie a scratchy wool blanket and makes a space for her. He tells her about his fiancée back in Vancouver who is a schoolteacher and his plans for the future. It will be his last winter selling trees before he can become a carpenter—a rite of passage for men like him, Chris says—at least, in order to work at his father’s construction company. 

“Like Jesus,” Annie says. 

“And like you,” he says. He points at the fluorescent sign bubbling BAR N. The O-N-E had burnt out before Annie’s time. “The baby in the barn,” Annie thinks she hears him say, but she isn’t certain. Still, it’s a nice thought. She nods off in the pile of packing felt and old quilts.

The light arrives in bright slashes through frost on the windshield. She’s alone. Both of the tree salesmen stand outside the van with steaming paper cups, leather hats with earflaps framing their rough, rosy faces. She watches them help their customers. The Canadians came from a place where trees and children and furniture-making could be a matrix for happiness, Annie thought. That was not the kind of world she was from. She reads her new texts. A few are from Mahin—the first a blurry photo of their roommates sculpting bestial snowbodies engaged in the Kama Sutra. The rest were:

daph quit her job today

cum play

need u to sculpt tha tts thx 

xo now pls

Can I have it? Annie texts back. 

what her job? 

Yes 

d says yes for real take it

For real?

yes yes cum 

need u here

Annie gathers her things and gets out of the van. It’s freezing. She thanks Chris and zips her jacket. Maybe she didn’t need art anymore. Or faith. Or even faith in art. At the very least she didn’t need this job. She texts Vanessa and quits. Walking away from the bar, Annie can see her breath in front of her face, and for now, that’s enough. 

 *