Thank You for Coming In Today

by Francess Archer Dunbar

    The Creamery store that I worked at during the storm was two blocks east of the beach and four blocks north of the crater in the earth that had once been a building and would soon be a building again, but for now stood like a great pit monument to the
structure that had once been there, adorned on the fence by ribbons of remembrance and grief, photos and wilting flowers. I walked past it daily and always thought of tying my own, in memory of a grade school classmate’s grandmother whose pool I had once swum in when the depression had been pool and apartment building-shaped. She had given us ice cream that day, too, nothing artisanal but a nutty chocolate disk from the freezer that left me licking long white trails with my pre-adolescent tongue, recently cut free from its genetic ties by a speech therapist who feared I’d never lose my lisp or please my husband.

  The Creamery’s ice cream was artisanal, made with fresh milk and lavender and black sapote grown on a few trees in the beautiful owner’s property in the farm country on the edge of the world down south. Or the holy flavor Tulsi Basil, blended with saffron to a highlighter yellow, beloved of Krishna and women leaving the small ISCKON temple up the street who offered it in prayer as prasadam. After dancing in circles of devotion on Sunday mornings, they came in their long gold wraps to feed their children milkshakes from the yellow nectar of their cow-herding god before dipping them in the sea. Our flavors were also kosher, and the large Orthodox families came in a rush after temple on Saturday afternoons, and lovers in twos after long walks by the eroding shore in the sunset hours of the week. I offered them samples of Baklava ice cream, cut with buttery phyllo dough and ribbons of gelled rose water, or Sweet Corn, with the after bite of chile and a topping of real caramel corn like that fed to the cows to fatten them up on the idealized Midwestern dairy plain of my imagination.

   By my third week working there, I was beginning to know the ins and outs of things, the little cues of social etiquette that indicated when to offer the yolky traditional Zabaione and when to announce our variety of vegan ices and sorbets. Good customer service was about noticing the yoga mat tucked behind a woman’s bony shoulder, or the thick French accent of a tourist unimpressed by the salty corner of the world I had been born into. I had the gift. I knew when that extra sample of Balsamic Vinegar ice cream would result in the sale of a somewhat forgotten and certainly misbegotten flavor instead of the more obvious Cream Cheese or Triple Chocolate Fuck You Mocha varieties, and when it would be wasted on an inferior palate, who preferred to be insulted by their cacao beans as they blistered walking down the long blocks of Miami Beach.

    That day was my first time opening the store on my own, and it was raining in the tropical way that it does here, a thick hot stream coming down from the sky with the water pressure of a rich man’s shower. My manager’s child was vomiting, or so she
said, and I was happy to pick up the slack; I had no children, and though tips were lean I liked to work during the week so that I could spend my weekends drinking and beating my body against others to forget the indignities of customer service. I left my corset-like apron in my bag so that it wouldn’t get wet and ran up the street past that building-pit of memories to the shop’s thick glass door, inserting the manager’s key and swinging it open as though I had been trusted with this duty for years. It was Monday, a slow day at the store even without a huge storm in the forecast.

    My skin pricked from the cold of the store as the warm breath humidity of the outside air faded to a memory. I turned on the neon windmill in the window and the blue florescent that illuminated the frozen jewel-tone squares behind the glass display. Now, it was time to ready my body. Usually my manager would help lace the milkmaid’s apron uniform each employee wore, crossing the cheap faux leather across my ribcage until the white fabric of the conservative uniforms cinched cleanly around the waist. Today, I did it on my own, my eyes on a portrait of our founder that hung on the wall with a message about the importance of pure, organic ingredients. She wore the same peasant uniform as me, but whiter and with a higher thread
count, and a couple of bug-eyed children were tucked against her side to emphasize the fertile rightness of her body. In a past decade of this life I had been a bar girl at a club sixty blocks south, and the surgical corrections hung heavy on my frame in a way that her artificiality did not. The perfect symmetry of her doughy face was deeply unnatural, and yet I jutted out my chin in a pale imitation of her heart faced symmetry, sucking my stomach deeper and tying the apron around my rounded body in a poor imitation of her slim form.

    With the storm raging, it was a long morning before a customer walked in, but I was so transfixed by her photoshopped stare I forgot to mop the sticky floors or set out the chalkboard sign that advertised the steep Monday discount on sundaes. In the cold air, our bosoms heaved; the child at her side forgotten, I longed to stroke the bleached hair that hung past her sharp collarbones, to be the tiny rings on her finger, twisting so elegantly around the hard realities of her knuckles as they clutched a bottle of Florida-grown milk. How I longed for my neck to be that bottle of milk! To be choked by those hands, meeting around undeserving glass. The bell at the door sounded, indicating a customer had walked in, which worked whether I had the mental acuity to set it up or not, indicating a customer had walked in. 

     “Welcome to The Creamery,” I said breathlessly, still staring at the freckles that spoke in a language I longed to understand across the peaks of shoulder and bosom that were printed in front of me. With deep regret, I tore my eyes away. 

      “Would you like to try one of our artisanal flavors, or are you looking for an affogato this morning?” I snuck a peak at the clock, which had just passed noon. I noticed then that the man had wild eyes, and grime caked into the once-grey hoodie around his shoulders. He was wet and seemed unhappy I had addressed him directly. 

     “I was wondering,” he started. “I was wondering if I could sit here. I was wondering if I could sit here until the rain stopped.”

      I looked at the hourglass frame of the owner on the wall, and the dozens of flavors in front of me, whipped into tall flavorful peaks that had yet to be disturbed at mid-day. 

      “Do you have any money to buy anything?”

      “No,” he said quickly.

       My phone let out a mournful buzz as my manager texted me.

      “i don’t think im coming in,” she said, to begin. The messages continued: “the news says the streets are flooding on the beach.”

     I looked at the knowing smile of our founder, surrounded by the puckered lips of a half dozen unruly offspring looking to suckle at her heavy teat.

  “I can offer you a sample and you can sit for a while,” I said to the man in front of me.

    He carefully considered his options. “Could I. Could I try the Blueberry Thyme Fig Bee Butter Algae?”

     I made him a child-sized portion of our Blueberry Thyme Fig Bee Butter Algae ice cream, and he took a single bite, curled in on himself at a corner table and promptly fell asleep to the steady roar of the rain falling thick on the plastic overhang outside.
The milkmaid smiled at me again. Outside, the cars split the water into tall waves which obscured the forms of the vehicles, turning them into pale ghosts moving cautiously through the filtered blur of the storm. I went to the window to turn the sign just in time to see the sky flash and hear the crash above me. My phone buzzed in my pocket. I hadn’t responded earlier. Now she used capital letters. 

    “How are you doing at the store?”

      I glanced at the homeless man asleep in the corner and responded. “I’m okay. it’s quiet. not a lot of customers.”

     My mother texted too about the rain. I thought of my manager, at home over the causeway with a sick child, and looked at the long list of “Slow Tasks” above the register. Right now I could be whipping extra cream, grinding bags of espresso, or sweeping the corners for long-legged spiders growing fat off a steady diet of sugary flies and caramel-footed ants. On a day like today, I could be scrubbing the bathroom of unidentifiable puddles or even bleaching the inner workings of the soft serve machine, a dense network of leaky tubes that was always producing a sweet-smelling black sludge that trapped more bugs than even the cleverest and most insatiable members of our resident spider colony. The bottom of the machine was that society’s La Brea tar pit; at night, eight-legged families would descend to gawk at the fossilized remains of generations of roaches and pests, native Palmetto bugs mixing with exotic imports from Latin America that had come to this sweet-smelling mirage of vanilla-chocolate slime to die in slow agony.

      It felt like a shame to ruin their fun. I fixed myself a child sized cup of the Green Grape Champagne Sorbet, tasting of a tart victory, and opened my phone to the app that had been designed in a laboratory to fill moments of creative uncertainty. I scrolled past a crazed woman asking me to get ready with her, a block of slime shaped like a man’s genitalia slowly being smushed by a red-nailed fist, and a cutting political analysis that would have only added to my certainty that life was getting worse. Then I saw her: the milkmaid of my dreams, blond and beaming and somehow still a card-carrying citizen of the uncanny valley even as she moved across a very real sun-dappled beach at sunset with a gaggle of white-linen clad duckling children following in tow. “Today, Gretta, Europa, Zelph, Delilah, Samson, Alice and I went to the beach,” her voiceover said. “William was too busy with work, and Fern had a recital, but I think it’s important to take these moments for our—”

       I swiped onto her page: @kayleigh.bryan.familly. Owner of The Creamery Ice Cream Shops. Her voice was more nasal than I had expected, but still I wanted to listen. I clicked on another video. “I just wanted to tell you guys about this organic
makeup that I have been loving recently,” she swiped a bronze line over her nose. Two children watched the camera with wide eyes from the corner of the screen; in the background, a wave crashed on cue outside the window. “It just adds this extra touch of sun, like, I’ve been outside all afternoon, and I forgot my sunscreen and my husband is going to kill me, but it’s okay—”

    An ad popped up in the corner, and I instinctively swiped up to the next.

   “Friends!” Now she was wearing cowboy boots and clutching the bridle of a well-groomed heifer. “Welcome to Crème de la Crème farms. All of the milk for our ice cream comes from girls like Aphrodite, here, while many of our mix-ins come from the fields behind me or local farmers,” We cut to a field, where she was licking the seasonal Lavender and Black Sapote flavor next to a north Florida spring, surrounded by potted lavender plants with the store tags still attached. “I’m here on this farm up north today to invite you to try something new—”

    In the next video, by far the most popular, she was crying. We were both a little over thirty, but her surgeries and treatments had generally made her look younger; here, she seemed much, much older than me. “I get so overwhelmed,” she said, hiccupping. The adoring children had been sent to their rooms off screen. “It’s like,William’s looking at me, the kids are looking at me, you’re all looking at me. Everyone’s looking at me. For something. What if I don’t want to be looked at?” She let out a deep sob, never once breaking eye contact with the dark iris of the camera. “I just want a moment to myself where nobody is watching.” The ring light behind the camera cast her shadow as a giant hunched figure on the wall, so that she was dwarfed by even her own form.

     Indulging her wish for privacy, I swiped on. On and on. She danced for me, and told me her secrets, and briefly sold me on the importance of regular trips to Disney for my imaginary brood. Finally, I came upon a video where she was standing on the exact tile where I stood, wearing the exact same little corset-apron, and smiling at the camera with the tight benevolence of a fifth or sixth take. 

     “Hi my friends! I brought Fern and Gretta down from Palm Beach today so that they could help open our new location of The Creamery in Miami.” Her oldest, Fern, looked to be fourteen or fifteen. The girls did a bit where they took orders from the line of smiling customers. When it wasn’t raining so hard, my days looked just the same; scooping and smiling and wondering why I was here as an endless barrage of voices took no pause in asking of me exactly what they wanted. In the suspended adolescence of the ice cream shop with the green champagne ice cream dripping a stain onto my polyester corset, I felt a bit like Kayleigh and a bit like Fern, and nothing like myself. At this point, should I be a mother or a daughter? Should I be tending to a sick child over the causeway, or at least visiting my mother in her home? Instead I felt like that great collapsed pit down the block; the empty space where something had once stood, and perhaps something would someday again, but now left empty as a monument to the collective grief that lived so personally and painfully at the core of me, too. Fern rolled her eyes as her mother pushed gigantic piles of ice cream toward her two daughters and a few other teenage girls. 

       “Now, we’re going to have an ice cream eating contest,” she said, and I watched blankly as they began to devour the feast before them. It felt a little sinister, like most of what my phone wants me to see when I let it choose the adventure. I clicked on the comments. “Gretta’s growing up so fast!” one person said. “omg her face at :47 ” said another. “good memories, mama,” a commenter known as MountainMotherEarth85 reassured us. It had a few hundred thousand views, far more than most of the rest of her videos, and even more saves. “More of this please,” an account named anthonydubfuck69 had responded. “I have to. I have to go.” 

        The man who had been sleeping in the corner was standing in front of me, teetering back and forth slightly. I looked out the window, where the rain had lightened only slightly. But who was I to insist otherwise? 

         “Here,” I said, scooping a pint of the low-selling summer special Basil Burrata Balsamic Vinegar for his many troubles. “Take some of this with you.” I gave him the prop $5 from the tip jar, too, and he stumbled down the street into the roaring water toward the Big Daddy’s Liquors down the street to find a proper wine pairing. I picked up my phone again to find another text from my manager. 

        “i talked to kaye and you can go home. we are going to post something about the weather to tell people we’re closed.”

     When I opened my phone fully, her page had already reloaded, and the post joined with the store account was already up. Her children were running around a tropical yard in small bathing suits, super soakers aimed toward the sky, followed by a couple of dogs that actually looked like Lassie. “The team has decided to take the rest of the day off due to the weather,” Kayleigh announced. “Our West Palm, Boca Raton, Surfside, South Beach, Wynwood, and Coral Gables locations will be closed until the storm passes and our state’s beautiful blue skies return.” I didn’t need to be told twice. I turned off the neon milkmaid and windmill, packed myself a pint of Triple Chocolate Fuck You Mocha to go, and braced myself to face the blocks of rain and wind that separated me from my car. The streets were flooded, but not biblically, not yet, not in the way that I would see further down the road. My manager sent me a final text: “thank you for coming in today get home safe.” But when I walked past the great crater in the earth where the building had once stood, the rainwater had filled it, and the chemicals in the ground had turned it the bright aquamarine that I remembered from the pool that stood there when I had been but a child eating ice cream unobserved on the beach.