Tips Appreciated

“0627” by EJ Bowman

August at Dairy Dukes sans air conditioning — an irony we’re all too sweaty to appreciate. Oily wisps of hair curl out of French braids like devil horns, neon T-shirts appear tie-dyed from sweat, fudge crusts our forearms, a scaly second skin. Lots of people my age — namely the ones I’ve met recently, four shots deep at Margot’s house, who stumble into summer employment for purely the social aspect — think that if you work in an ice cream shop, you must perpetually smell good. Wrong. These places produce more BO than a middle school locker room. Not to mention the stench of spoiled milk that seeps into your pores, your scalp, your stained shoes. The rusty scent of dirty change that sticks to your fingers no matter how many times you scrub them in hot water until they sting, prune, sliver into sores. Even the smell of freshly rolled waffle cones turns cloying once it’s coated your skin and hair for a week.

Nobody wants ice cream today. It’s too hot for globs of dairy that melt quicker than we can shove them through the take-out window with a friendly smile and an “Anything else today?” asked with the intonation of a question, but the sub-text of a threat. Ever scoop an ice cream cone when it’s ninety-eight degrees out? It’s like trying to pinch water between your thumb and your index finger. I slide a hand-written sign declaring “No cones today, just cups” into the window next to the cash-only decal. Yet another exercise in futility.

“Syd, how long till close?” Eva’s got her head in the ice cream freezer where we keep the specials, and her voice is slightly muffled by the plastic lid resting on her neck like a dull guillotine.

“You don’t want to know,” I say. The clock with cartoon ice cream cones in place of numbers reads quarter-past mint chip. What feels like an hour ago, it was ten-past. Time works differently at Dairy Dukes — it either oozes like unwarmed butterscotch or whiplashes you to the end of your shift in a torrent of frappes, sundaes, and floats, the crush of customers spilling off the patio into the parking lot, the tip jar overflowing with sticky Washingtons.

“How long now?” Eva asks again. Her blonde waves are three shades darker at the hairline from sweat, giving her the look of someone who needs their roots touched up.

I tell her four hours and she tells me to fuck off, though it’s not really me she’s speaking to, but our boss, Doug. Not wanting to pay seven employees to stand around “sampling” ice cream all day, he called everyone off but Eva, Margot, and me. Doug is now holed up in his air-conditioned office, getting intellectually humbled by Sudoku puzzles. Something would have to quite literally be on fire to force him out of his temperature-controlled Eden.

Eva and Margot are my best work friends, meaning that if we didn’t spend upwards of six hours a day, six days a week sharing the same twenty-square feet of space at Dairy Dukes, we probably wouldn’t have ever met. Trauma bonding at its finest.

Eva and I both started this summer, so we trained together, a two-week period in which I learned three things about her. One, Eva’s main goal this summer is to get with a Cape League baseball player (team doesn’t matter, she hasn’t been summering here long enough to develop deep town loyalty). Two, she is conveniently allergic to raisins and can’t be hazed into choking down a spoonful of Frozen Pudding. Three, this is the only job she’s ever had, which became apparent during our first closing shift when she passed me the raggedy grey mop and informed me with an innocent shrug that she “didn’t know how to use it.”

 And no matter how many times I’ve shown her how to fill the bucket with two capfuls of soap and work the wringer (Mopping for Dummies, a memoir), every night I still find myself the designated mop girl while Margot and Eva count the tips and reassure me that the floors always look so much better when I do them. As if mopping is a specialized skill, honed through years and years of practice.

I know I probably should push back, leave the mop propped up by the hardening cabinets and refuse to cross the proverbial picket line. Sometimes — typically after an all-too-frequent duct tape malfunction causes the ancient bucket to let loose a gallon of sludge water onto my sneakers — I imagine an overly dramatized, but personally satisfying confrontation. Depending on how rotten my tips are (and by extension, how rotten my mood is) it goes something like this: me, demanding equal distribution of closing tasks, Margot and Eva, groveling on the grimy tile promising to never take me or my mop proficiency for granted again. To spice things up, a few versions of this fantasy also include me breaking an ankle after doing a slapstick-style slip and fall in the mop water. But night after night, exhausted, sweaty, tottering on throbbing feet, and anxious to clock out, I just never feel it’s worth the fight.

“So, why’d you decide to work at Dairy Dukes then?” I asked Eva in May during our third straight hour of training. We were scooping small cups and throwing them on the scale until we got twenty perfect ones in a row. I was on number fifteen. Eva had been knocked back to start for the tenth time.

She shrugged, pressing a cap onto another overly large scoop. “Margot said it was chill here. No early mornings and it’s easy to meet cute guys.”

She and Margot went to the same high school in Connecticut and the same yacht club on the Cape, got bi-monthly manicures together, and spent ten minutes at the start of every shift wearing oversized shades and debriefing the previous night’s kiss-and-tells. When our shifts were over, they’d hop in their BMWs, crank up Doja Cat, and speed off to parties where girls wore Free People, boys had watch tans, and all the alcohol was pilfered from parents’ bar carts. Most nights, I’d bike home down the windy, unlit backroads, every cent of the night’s tips jingling in tune with my pedal strokes. Others, I’d sip warm Nattys in someone’s basement while Soundcloud remixes crackled out of speakers and a handful of us recent graduates played flip cup while pretending that twelve years in the Harwich school system hadn’t made us thoroughly sick of each other.

Every so often I’d get lassoed into Margot and Eva’s parties, drink a few too many White Claws, and get into a few too many arguments about lung health with their vape-addicted friends. The first time they invited me, it was early in the season — one of those “classic” chilly Cape nights that has unsuspecting tourists dropping $45 on Cuffy’s sweatshirts and squealing over the fog-bathed beaches. We were hefting trash bags that strained with Styrofoam cups and gutted fudge cans into the dumpster, the sleeves on our DD’s crewnecks shoved up past our elbows. When Margot asked if I wanted to swing by her place later, my first instinct was to say no. My forearms ached from hand-packing quarts for a family barbecue, and I had no interest in playing Margot and Eva’s pet local all night, interjecting “wicked” into every other sentence and explaining, ad nauseum, why living on the Cape past Labor Day sucks.

But a part of me was curious, enticed by stories of “who kissed whom,” and more so by the prospect of hanging out with people who weren’t resigned to rot in their hometowns after a four-year stint at some college in Massachusetts. People who saw the Cape as a pitstop rather than a final destination — a place to escape reality rather than a stifling reality to escape. The type of people you know are going to leave some mark on the world, whether it’s by being the bitchiest PTA soccer mom in their affluent suburb, or by clawing their way onto a 30 Under 30 list right out of college. Which was how I found myself in Margot’s cottage-sized living room, watching strangers do body shots of Grey Goose, compare the quality of their Arizona fakes, and gossip about the latest yacht club drama. Once it became clear that I’d never witnessed a shark attack and didn’t know anybody who could sneak them into the Beachcomber for Reggae Night, the summer kids treated me with the same cordial-yet-distant attitude shown to friends-once-removed whom you know you’ll never see more than ten times. Margot and Eva sought me out a fair amount — usually bearing half-spilled shots — but socializing with their Wychmere friends would always be more appealing than babysitting their coworker. 

 At first, the pervasive sense of not belonging was nearly enough to make me cease all forays into summer-kid nightlife. It was hard to ignore the fact that everything about their glitzy vacations — the private sailing lessons, the beach-front cocktails, their Main Street Chatham shopping sprees — was provided by the people I’d grown up with. And sure, the seventy kids I went to high school with sucked in the way that close-minded, cliquey people always do, but at least nobody gave a shit about whether you were going to an Ivy, a so-called “little Ivy,” or heaven-forbid a safety school (which, according to Eva, was their catch-all term for any school with an acceptance rate higher than 15 percent). Yet almost every time Margot and Eva invited me during closing, or messaged “Margot’s tonight???” in the group chat full of unknown 203-numbers, I’d still say yes.

Technically, Margot is in charge today since she started at Dairy Dukes last year, but all that means is she’s our “Scoop Supervisor.” The hierarchy of double Ds appears to have been modeled after an MLM or even a retail rewards system. You’ve got a ladder of empty titles to climb — scoop supervisor, cone curator, ice cream inspector, pint principal, quart coordinator — before you can grab any real power as an assistant manager. “Promotions” are purely political, handed out at the Doug’s discretion. When Doug thinks a friend group is getting too close, he’ll bump someone up a rank just to screw with the power dynamics. Unfortunately for him, Margot cares less about upward mobility than she does about getting caught slipping Absolut nips into her Hydro Flask, which is to say, not at all.

Eventually, Margot returns from the walk-in where she’s been “checking the expiration dates” on heavy cream cartons for nearly ten minutes. We spend the next hour listlessly watching SUVs stuffed with lounge chairs and coolers trundle down Route 28 on their way to the beach. Margot and Eva clamber onto the counters in search of a lone bar of LTE and compare dorm inspo boards on Pinterest. They’re shocked to hear I don’t have my own curated collection of neutral bedding ideas and gallery walls.

Going to college isn’t really an aesthetic for me. Mainly a reason to be somewhere else in September. I wouldn’t say I have any delusions about Providence being some miraculous utopia where my skin clears up, I’m instantly (and effortlessly) surrounded by a group of friends who are also fascinated by postmodern literature, and I meet my soulmate tossing a frisbee on the sun-dappled quad. But it does provide an opportunity to veer off the fast-track to becoming those Cape adults who’ve never been anywhere, never seen anything but eroding dunes and manicured cul-de-sacs. The ones who aren’t joking when they refer to Hyannis as “the big city.” Maybe it’s an oversimplification, but I like to think of college as the difference-maker between forward motion and stagnation.

More cars speed past Dairy Dukes. We’re cranky when they don’t stop, crankier when one finally does — a Buick with New York plates, naturally.

“All you, Sydney,” Margot says, clocking the beefy boiled lobster of a father hauling his five-year-old son up to the take-out window. She “doesn’t do kids,” which is a slight problem to have when you’re in the ice cream business.

The man’s gray “Beaches Be Crazy” shirt bares massive sweat stains, the kid is dusted in a fine layer of sand, but the car looks like generational wealth, so in a beat I’m poking my head through the window asking how I can help them today.

“Small twist with rainbow sprinkles.” The man’s voice is strained, and I can tell from the tear tracks streaking down the kid’s zinc-smeared cheeks that this trip to Dairy Dukes is the byproduct of a tantrum. Never a good sign.

Already uneasy, remembering a feral four-year-old who threw his Legos at my head when I said we didn’t have soft serve — the mother only chuckled and commented on his bright future in Pop Warner — I break the bad news.

“What do you mean you don’t have twist?” the father asks as though I’ve told him the sky is magenta.

“All our ice cream is homemade. Means it’s hard-packed,” I say. Sometimes if you catch me in the right mood, I’ll crack a joke about it being so hot that if you wait five minutes, every cone becomes soft serve. But with Dairy Dukes doing its best impersonation of a broiler today, my capacity for humor is negligible.

The father stares at his son who’s working himself into a heat stroke screaming and flopping around on the patio in a three-foot ball of irrational rage. “Fine. Do you have Oreo?”

“I’m sorry, we’re out.”

“Cookie monster?”

“That’s a rotating special so I don’t have it right now.”

“Cotton Candy?” I can hear his voice approach boiling point. Eva pops her head out of the freezer and Margot quits fanning herself with the souvenir paper hats we’re supposed to give out for “branding.” The man’s face is so close to mine I can see the cloudy beads of sweat bejeweling his receding hairline, smell his Budweiser-and-burger breath.

“I’m sorry—” the words droop in the humidity.

“Jesus Christ!” He rips off his Maui Jim sunglasses and jams them back on his peeling nose.

A collective flinch from the three of us, reflex more than anything. By now we’ve all come to realize how ridiculous grownups can get about their favorite ice cream flavors. “We all scream for ice cream” is more than a cutesy playground rhyme.

I want to slam the take-out window screen closed — my mother’s voice in my head reprimanding six-year-old Sydney that “girls who throw temper tantrums at the dinner table don’t get dessert.” Rarely does the cash in the tip jar decorated with the Sharpied names of our colleges — Dartmouth for Eva, B.C. for Margot, Providence College for me — compensate for the verbal abuse we endure to get it.

Three days ago, a mother of two Little Leaguers asked me if I was “some kind of an idiot” for serving her a frappe with mocha chunk instead of sugar-free coffee. She wasn’t my customer. It wasn’t her drink. Doug made me re-scoop it anyway, crank up my customer service voice to a ten, and apologize for any inconvenience I might have caused her. Free souvenir hats for all. Pursing her overly lined lips, the woman flicked a twenty through the window, told me to keep the change (which came out to forty-three cents), and tossed her straw wrapper in the tip jar. Margot told me to chuck the handful of dimes and pennies back at the woman, but I dropped my profit in my apron pocket with the loose change I’ve been collecting there all summer. Always do.

On the patio, the father is trying to get a grip on his kid who’s lying face-to-brick and making demonic noises. I hear him hiss “What do you want” in his son’s ear. I wish they’d just leave. Cruise three minutes down the road to Dairy Queen and its haven of perfectly swirled, sprinkle-encrusted twist cones. The fistful of quarters and dimes I realistically stand to get out of this encounter are no longer worth the argument.

If Doug were up here, he’d be sweating buckets about the incoming furious Yelp review (as if anyone but him monitors the Dairy Dukes page), but Margot only slurps from her Hydro Flask and flicks through her future roommate’s Instagram profile, searching for evidence that she’s “normal” and won’t try to strangle her with a flat iron cord. This is all above her paygrade and therefore, beneath her notice.

“He’ll get chocolate then. Kiddie size. If you even have that, of course.” The man slaps his gold AmEx on the sticky teal countertop. He’s breathing heavily as though he just got pulled back from a bar fight and I’m hesitant to point out the four “Cash Only, Please” signs posted at eye level around the window.

“Be right back with that,” I say, prolonging the inevitable.

When I was small — five, maybe six — my mom’s then-boyfriend, Bucky, used to wake me up at night with his yelling. I can’t quite remember what he’d say to my mom. A part of me doubts it was always even words. But I’ll never forget the way it felt to have so much raw anger cannon-balled into my ears. Never forget the granite mask that slipped over my mom’s face when, over a decade later, she stood on the porch and told my then-boyfriend to get the hell off her property after he blew up at me in the driveway for shutting his passenger door a little too hard. Or the earnestness in her voice when she said I should never, ever, ever allow a man to raise his voice at me. Back then, bawling, embarrassed, anxious that I wouldn’t have a prom date, I told her I hated her. Watching his taillights rip down our cul-de-sac, she replied that I wouldn’t always.

With my back to the windows, I mechanically plop a scoop of chocolate into a waxy cup. Dump it back into the tub and scoop another. Eva’s got her head in the freezer again and Margot’s slunk back to the walk-in. Scoop, dump. Scoop, dump. None of us want to be a part of what comes next — only rant about it later when the whole affair is reduced to a crumpled cup in the trash. Scoop, dump. Scoop, dump. I know the delay will only make everything worse, make him think I’m slow and incompetent. Scoop, dump. The ice cream is soft now, the consistency of Greek yogurt. I root around in the edge of the tub and manage to form a lump that at least holds its shape. Throw a Joy cake cone on top because kids love that shit — a habit rather than a conscious action. The kid shrieking on the patio isn’t giving me my tip.

“Kiddie Chocolate,” I say, staring at the clumps of sprinkles crusted in the track of the take-out window.

The man grunts in response and all but throws the cup at his son, telling him to go wait in the car. Tantrum over, goods secured, the kid takes a bite out of the bottom of the cone — wrapper and all — and explodes. Apparently, he only likes sugar cones.

“Knock it off and go to the car.” The father snatches the offending cone out of his son’s fist, which is already sticky with rivulets of chocolate. When he turns back to me, he doesn’t apologize, just demands, “how much?” and pushes the AmEx across the counter.

For nearly two weeks in the second grade, I let a couple of fifth graders, Conner and Ben, steal my lunch money. The first few times, they pulled the stereotypical bully schtick — corner me behind the twisty slide and threaten to punch my lights out. By the fourth day (which found me huddled in the usual spot, holding out a shaking hand with two crumpled dollars and some quarters), they realized that I was so anxious to avoid confrontation, I’d go total possum. I’d let them take all my money and fruit scented erasers for good measure.  

The bullying should’ve stopped when I removed the element of torture. Yet, lunch after lunch I watched Connor and Ben gorge themselves on extra Drumsticks, chocolate milks, and squares of pizza. Meanwhile, I ate mints I nicked from the main office, sucking them into wafer-thin discs I snapped with my molars. When my teacher, Ms. O’Reilly, found out, she seemed angry. Staring at the pile of cellophane wrappers she’d made me dump out of my coat pockets, she demanded to know why I would let them get away with that. Why I didn’t stand up for myself. Why?

When it became clear I didn’t have an answer — that the only thing she was going to extract from me was a steady stream of tears Pollocking the scratched tile floors — she let the issue drop. Connor and Ben each got a few days of study hall, and I was sent home with the note that prompted my mom to start waking up ten minutes earlier to make me ham and cheese sandwiches before work.

Earlier this summer, Connor and Ben came into Dairy Dukes for Oreo frappes. Seeing their faces in the takeout window, I half-expected to have some Hollywood moment where they begged for my forgiveness and showered me in sun-softened twenties to atone for their actions. Truthfully, I’m not sure they even recognized me, eyes panning right over my face to fixate on Margot who had one of her lean, fake-tanned legs propped up on the counter to examine the previous night’s mystery bruise. Feigning a tampon emergency, I scurried to the back and allowed her to take their order (and subsequently Connor’s number).

“Three ninety-five,” I tell the man at the window quickly. “Plus tax.” There’s a chance this guy will put the card away and pull out a five or even a wad of ones, relieved to know the price is lower here than at the other ice cream shops clustering along Route 28. Tourists usually have cash stuffed away, warned on Trip Advisor that a lot of Cape businesses like to preserve their quaint charm with clunky old-timey registers that ding when you open the drawer. For once, I find myself wishing he was one of those old people who mutter that they have the change and spend three minutes painstakingly counting out eighty-four cents in nickels and pennies while the line behind them bloats beyond the patio’s edge.

The man raps his card on the edge of the window, impatient, distracted by his son who’s shuffling back to the Buick with his shoulders hunched up to his ears. A spring about to uncoil and go zinging off the walls.

For a beat, I see myself doing it — taking the card while the man is distracted, fiddling with the register so it spits out a receipt, which I’ll hand to him with his card and a “have a nice day” that’s sweet as sorbet. Sure, the shift’s been slow, but there’s enough in the tip jar to cover it, to balance out the drawer so Margot doesn’t come under fire. I could pull it off too. Eva isn’t a narc and nobody else is around. Four dollars isn’t that steep a price to pay to avoid another tirade.

“I’m sorry, sir, but we’re cash only.” The words come out on instinct, a Pavlovian response to the sight of credit cards. “But there’s an ATM to your left.”

“Are you kidding me?” he asks under his breath, frustrated but not entirely enraged. Snatching the card back with one hand, he uses the other to root around in his cracked leather wallet. A picture of his son wrangled into a prep school uniform is tucked into the plastic pocket. I release a breath I didn’t know I was holding when his meaty fingers emerge from the main flap, victorious, with a five that looks like it’s been through a few wash cycles.

“Keep the damn change,” he says, slapping the bill onto the counter before stalking off through the parking lot. I don’t wish him a nice day. Instead, I stand by the window, hyper aware of my heart beating out a drum solo, beads of sweat collecting in the waistband of my mesh shorts, the patch of raw skin on the inside of my lip I’d been gnawing at for the entire interaction. The hot breeze tickles the edges of the five and I reach for it mechanically. I’m surprised to see that when the man backs the Buick out, he does so carefully, pausing to check for non-existent pedestrians. There isn’t even a hint of a tire peel when he makes the left out of the lot. Bucky’s exits were never so non-descript.

“Damn, what an asshole.” Eva emerges from the freezer. She’s got a splotch of Grasshopper near the neckline of her baby blue tee, but I don’t point it out. “How much did he tip you?”

I press “Enter Sale” and the drawer pops out with a cheerful bing. In goes the five, tucked beneath a clamp with the other bills that have gone limp from sweating hands and humidity. Out comes two quarters, a dime, three pennies.

“Ugh, jackass,” Eva says, watching me line the coins up next to the register in size order. My sixty-three-cent profit. “Like, that’s just insulting.”

“What’s insulting?” Margot rounds the corner, retying her dark brown hair into a cheerleader pony.

“A sixty-three-cent tip.”

“Jesus, who did that?” Margot pulls the “gee” sound extra long.

“Just some guy,” I say. “Tourist, for sure.”

That gets a knowing laugh. It always amuses me how summer people rag on weekenders as though they themselves don’t take flight after the first fifty-degree September morning. Summer people hate tourists. Tourists slide along a spectrum of hating to viciously envying locals. Locals hate that you can’t make a left turn between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

“Sorry, dude, that’s shitty.” Margot joins Eva by the freezers, plastic spoon in hand. “Just leave it in the drawer, that’s literally not even worth it.”

I eye the tip jar in the window, the name of my college scrawled on there in cramped, uneven letters. Behind me, Margot and Eva “sample” the half-melted ice creams, giggling about some beach bonfire they’re going to later — which they’ll likely drag me to so I can recount the soft-serve stand-off to the Chads and Beckys who have likely never considered what would be an appropriate tip to leave an ice cream scooper. Who probably haven’t touched a nickel since their lunch money days. Confident that nobody’s looking, that nobody cares, I slip the loose change into my apron pocket and watch the heat billow off the pavement.

About the author

Kristen Siegel (she/her) was born and raised on (never 'in') Cape Cod, Massachusetts. She graduated with a BA in English from Duke University and is currently pursuing her MFA at Emerson College where she teaches in the First Year Writing Program. She was awarded the 2021 Gish Jen Fiction Fellowship from the Writers’ Room of Boston and also received the top prize in fiction for the 2021 Emerson Graduate Awards for her short story, "Gratitude Journal?". This summer, her short story “Just Leaving" was shortlisted for The Master’s Review 2021 Winter Short Story Award. Her short fiction also appears in After the Pause, Five on the Fifth, Tiny Molecules, and The Headlight Review.

about the artist

E.J. Bowman teaches music and English, and is the author of several curricula for high school literature. She was a finalist for both the DeBiase Poetry Prize and the Florida Review Editor’s Choice Award; she was also longlisted for the Exeter Short Story Award. Other publications include Literatus, The Comstock Review, Anthrow Circus, and Humans of the World. She is moving to NYC this summer to pursue her MFA in Non-Fiction at Columbia University, and her photography recently won the London Photo Festival.