Article and Art by Maya Rosen
The sun is white hot. I stand there, inches away from the shade of the big tent. It’s meant for the guests in their knees-out, only-for-Friday kind of business casual. The people in the all black, full-length aprons don’t deserve shade, of course. Come back when you're making six figures.
The company has spared no expense. Each guest gets four drinks, free food, and unlimited axe-throwing (they all signed waivers). It’s a hot Wednesday afternoon, but I can hardly tell what day it is. As they order, they add a scoop of rainbow sprinkles. It’s to celebrate, they are finally “over the hump!” and then they laugh and laugh. Their hump is over, but not for my kind of job; my weekends only mean more work, longer hours. I laugh with them.
Sweat pools on my uniform, outlining the embarrassing slogan embossed across the back. If I were to turn around, it would read: “Science Geek. Ice Cream Freak.” I don’t turn around much. That’s the sort of advertising my boss decided to go for when she left her job marketing pills to people who don’t need them to open a liquid nitrogen ice cream franchise. Now she’s 100k in debt, standing embarrassed outside the tent, waving to people who don’t remember her. And so, eyes squinting for five hours, I watch the loafers mill around the asphalt.
When they walk over, I offer them a free scoop, free in the sense that it’s paid for by the company that pays for their salary, and health insurance, and eye insurance, and phone. It's another thing paid for, but they don’t want it. They’re all on diets. But they’ll take just a little bit. I scoop them a sliver, and they say, “Oh! That’s too much!” But they come back every hour for more.
Still, these slivers I’m handing away don’t make a dent in the vat of ice cream we brought. The rest forms a puddle. I try my best to keep it off the tablecloth. I re-freeze it bare-handed in the Liquid nitrogen at -321 degrees (I’m supposed to know that fact). I normally don’t like that step, but it’s sort of nice today. The fog cools me down, keeps me smiling. They watch me do it and say, “Gosh, isn’t that dangerous?” I shake my head. It’s perfectly safe, as long as you don’t get it on your skin. But, they don’t give us gloves, of course (I signed a waiver).
This kind of ice cream is riddled with options, nauseatingly so. As my boss always says, there were over 1 billion options (whether this is actually true, or just marketing, I’m not sure). It's all 99% corn syrup flavors that we add 2 pumps to 8 oz of unflavored cream. We have 50 of these syrups, and you can add as many different flavors to one ice cream as you want. Then you can mix in whatever you want. So you can make Strawberry, Banana, cookie-dough ice cream, for example. Half of the $8 ice creams I shell out are plain vanilla.
One rule we always have to follow, though, is we can’t interfere. If they order something that sounds like it will taste like a poop-vomit sandwich, I have to make it, and serve it. Sometimes it feels like I’m shooting a nature documentary, watching my star penguin get mauled to death by a sea lion. I just have to let it happen. So I hand them their diarrhea colored peanut butter, pumpkin, orange, blueberry, mint with gummy bears, and watch them take a bite. Then they'll hand it back to me and ask me to remake it. It doesn’t taste right. When the line is long, sometimes I really think I’ll lose it. I want to scream: “YOU MADE THIS!" Instead, I just remake it, and push the tip jar real close when I hand it over.
A man stands at the table. No order, just speaks to me about his new baby, and with the tip jar empty, I care.
“We’ve got another on the way. Can you believe it?”
I don’t respond.
“A boy!” he says, grinning.
“Oh, how far along?” I say, looking past him at the growing line.
“We’re only trying, I mean,” he says.
Ew. I don’t say that aloud.
“So you're hoping for a boy then?” I say this aloud.
“Oh, more than hoping. IVF! We can do those things now. We can pick,”
A silence.
“So we’re having all boys! Thank God!”
The irony of thanking God doesn’t quite hit him.
He explains the exact IVF process for the next 10 minutes. He isn’t wrong in assuming that I wouldn’t know anything about in-vitro-fertilization, but he is wrong in his assumption that I care for his special male-baby recipe. He gives it to me anyways.
I’m not sure why I thought this parking lot full of pharmaceutical execs would have any sort of moral integrity, but I’m still surprised at his mention of casual eugenics. I guess in this job, though, all I deal with is choice. I give them one billion options, and then I judge when they pick vanilla, or peanut butter (it’s for dogs), or something too creative. Still, it feels a bit different to me to be ordering your unconceived fetus's XY chromosomes off a menu. But what do I know? I’m just a Mad Scientist (this is my official job title), and I’m standing here serving people something that probably shouldn’t be FDA-approved.
I hand him a sliver of vanilla ice cream.
“Actually, I wanted chocolate,” he says.
I tell him we’re out, as a full vat sits on the table. He doesn’t question it. I feel a sort of superior moral calling to teach this man a lesson: sometimes, we don’t always get what we want.
Then I spit in his ice cream and tell him he’s a eugenististic-misogynistic-pig, and he should never procreate.
Except I don’t actually do any of that; what actually happens is I smile, I laugh, and I let him explain to me about the incredible feats of modern medicine that prevent him from ever having to experience the horrors of having a daughter. I let him tell me about how he couldn’t handle the “drama” of it all, and now he’ll never have to. I laugh at this, then I congratulate him on all the sex he’s about to have with his wife (not quite in those words), and then I give him a big fat scoop of chocolate. Worst of all, I give him more sprinkles than I’m supposed to give out. He calls them “Jimmies,” though, and I’m really not surprised.
I give him an extra scoop to bring home to his not-pregnant wife, and I wonder if she’s real.
Another man comes up to me after the first one leaves, he just stood at the table watching me. He liked my smile, he said. I smile more for him. He says he likes the necklace that sits atop the vague outline of my bra. My necklace is a broken, once-gold chain. I’m fairly certain that that’s not quite what he was looking at. I offer him a bright thank you.
And then, what happens is the sun gets hotter, and unshaded from the tent, I melt into the logo-embossed tablecloth and hot pavement. I am a puddle of chocolate syrup, and sweat is stuck like glue to that spot. All that’s left of me is a wide smile floating at the center. It’s okay, though, I don’t need my arms — no one is really ordering ice cream anyway.
I make $100 in tips that day. More than I ever make. All for scooping just five collective icecreams or so.
“Corporate money isn’t real,” my boss tells me, as she plops the check down in my pile of goo. “You’ll learn that one day.”
Then, she scoops me off the asphalt into a to-go cup and blasts me with a shot of liquid nitrogen, so I stay in one piece. She stacks me on top of 5 boxes of family-sized Chipotle leftovers that they let her take home to her kids. We walk out past the empty bounce house, and the smiling faces return to their cars, spirits almost as high as their BAC.
I’m loaded into the front seat of the catering truck. It’s hot in there still, she rolls the windows down. I am whole again. At -321 degrees, I am refrozen. She buckles me in, and I’m repacked tight with a lid so I don’t spill onto the car seats. She has to be careful. It’s a lease.
As the car jostles in the hour-long ride back to the store, the check floats to my surface. It’s covered in my chocolate goo, but I think it should still clear. By the time we get back, I must unmelt enough to lift the tanks of nitrogen and load them back into the store, and pack our unused bags of milk away. They can’t be good anymore, sitting out in the hot sun like that; it makes things expire fast. My boss has me put them in the freezer again; she can’t afford to believe in “expiration dates” right now.
I add my $100 together with my six hours of wages. It’s a good job as far as things go. I scoop ice cream, and I eat ice cream, and I sit on my phone in the backroom. It’s a good job. Even though that parking lot turned me into a freezing heap of dairy-slop, I know I'll be back again tomorrow.