Banana Split Deluxe
Two giant men came in and asked for quarts of strawberry. My hands were split from constant washing, from the soaped rag I used to wipe down counters. I opened the freezer. I nicked my knuckle on the tub holding the strawberry, the edge chewed up from overuse. The blood seeped from the scrape as I muscled into the scooping. The ice cream was hard, frostbitten. Pale pink with red swirls. The blood dripped down my thumb into the scoops. The men were leaning against the window watching me pack the quarts. The radio was loud commercials. They took the quarts outside and ate them in the bed of their pickup, legs dangling.
We wore Soffe cheerleading shorts and Crocs. We wore little T-shirts with the store’s name on them. When I first started, Dale came up behind me and pulled the back of my collar, peeking in. He asked what size my shirt was. Small, I said. The front hit tight against my throat. He came around to face me and looked. Hmm, he said. We should probably get you a medium.
Sometimes we lied on our timecards. Dale had this thing called the midnight rule. The shop closed at eleven, but if the front wasn’t restocked and sparkling by midnight, we’d get reamed. We’d heard he had cameras everywhere and watched us from his house. There were rumors of firings. Girls sent home crying. So we punched out early and stayed to clean.
Once a man ordered a banana split deluxe. It’s a big boat of ice cream with bananas on the sides and this thing we called fruit salad and four scoops of ice cream and fudge and caramel and three dry toppings. I started filling it up. The customer held a palm up at me—no no no, he said. I’d just split the bananas and ladled the fruit salad. You’re doing it wrong. I wasn’t doing it wrong. Okay, I said. Do it over, he said. I wanted to ask why, but instead I stared at him and thought about the steps to make a banana split deluxe. The fruit salad goes on top of all of it, over the ice cream, he said. It didn’t. Throw it away, he said. I held the heavy thing in my hands and looked at the overflowing garbage near the sink. I walked over and stuffed it in, the red juice from the salad dripping over the lip of the can. I took another plastic clamshell. Okay, I said. Can you tell me how you want it.
On Friday nights Josh and them would come in high and ask for things. Carrie would give it to them for a dollar. She said she felt less bad that way, not giving it away for free. Josh and Trevor and Eric would eat their cherry dips and cookie sandwiches and skate in the parking lot. The front of the store was all big windows, and we watched the boys as the sky turned pink.
My car was always broken so I had to use my boyfriend’s, which was broken too but drivable. Since he lived at home and his parents gave him money, he didn’t need to have a job. I was trying to save to go to school. We had tip cups on the counter, but we had to split the cash. Saturdays we could make a decent amount, plus the days we had buy-one-get-one sundaes. Even though they were busy, I liked those days—and not because of the money. We were like a machine. No time to think. All the girls working together, the shuffle of Crocs on tile, the heat of the freezers at our ankles. Someone comforting someone in the walk-in.
We were allowed to take home almost-expired things so one time I brought my boyfriend a whole ice cream cake. I wrote happy whatever on it. He said it tasted freezer burnt, but he ate all of it.
The only time Dale made me cry was when I made a milkshake without milk. We were all out, and I thought the liquid soft-serve mix was a close enough swap. I called him after to see if he could drop off a gallon or two. We have no milk? he asked. Zero milk? I said, Yeah, zero milk. He told me how dumb we all were, that we never thought ahead. This phone call should’ve happened when you were down to half a gallon, he said. I wanted to say that it was the first milkshake I’d made all day, that it was Carrie or Michelle or one of the new girls who must’ve used the last of it, but instead I just said I was sorry. I didn’t even cry, really, just felt stinging under my eyes.
One night Dale came to pick up cash from the drawer. He left his SUV running and the headlights were shining into the window. Carrie was in the front seat, her hand shielding her eyes. I almost waved.
There was a hot dog place next door. A mean Greek man owned it too. Sometimes we would trade food. We’d bring over cups of vanilla, and this really nice kid, Chris, would sneak us steak fries. But then he hit a deer while he was out making a delivery and crashed into a guard rail. I was pretty sad. I wanted to go to his funeral, but I felt weird because I didn’t know him except for the fries.
One thing we liked doing when it was slow was fantasizing about how we’d destroy the place. I was really good at it. We talked about knocking all the cups and lids and quarts and pints off the top of the old hard-churning machine. We talked about ripping the hot fudge and caramel canisters from their outlets, pouring out the contents, watching the steam rise from the slow ooze. We talked about dumping the toppings trays all over the tile, throwing the strawberries in a smooth arc, scattering the crunched Oreos like ashes. We talked about holding down the soft-serve levers, thick tubes of cream creeping from the star nozzles, coiling snakes. But the thing was, I could never picture Dale on his hands and knees cleaning it all up. I could only picture us.
Emily Costa (@emilylauracosta) is the author of Until It Feels Right (Autofocus Books). Her work can be found in X-R-A-Y, Pithead Chapel, Barrelhouse, Wigleaf, and elsewhere.