By ELIZA BECKER
On Sundays I work the eleven to seven shift and see Louie, beyond an intersection of stopping-and-starting cars, standing in the door. Several Scoops Ice Cream has an all glass wall, all glass doors, so Danny, the tall, hooked-nose shop owner stalks into the store to yell and tell us to wipe them down. So the glass poses work for me: I am not tall, so I only clear sixty percent of the smudges. When I get to the top, it’s an experience of humiliation, the stretching of my whole body.
I wonder if Louie can ever see this from across the way. I come in late in the morning, angry at the way I’m visible to the world, unwrap the hot fudge and sprinkles and the caramel and cones, and then turn around to face glass and lean over the service bar, squinting to look for something in the hundred-foot-far shadows of Louie’s eyes. He’s perched there, always, on his building’s stoop, hands in oversized dress pants’ pockets, overhanging belly in button down, and black tie on top. His brimmed hat tilts up on his bald head. I want to know: are his eyebrows turned down, or is he hiding his anger? Or does he like the way his belly fills out his sides so evenly and straight?
At two o’clock, Louie turns his back and crosses the threshold of the embroidered iron door and vanishes. In ten minutes, he crosses our intersection to find me, the sun beaming off his spotted head. His bellman’s hat is at rest, inside. Lunchtime for the doorman.
And while I believe adults aren’t innocent, the way he walks—alone, with his hands in his pockets and shoulders scrunched—he looks like he might be. He looks innocent. And I like this very much about Louie.
Eventually he enters and I feel like I’ve been waiting all day, waiting for him to see me—I want him to see me—and he says Ro!, and smiles. Now I can see his face. He says, Como estás, your day is good?
I can’t let him down so I say, ¡Sí! Better now! The second part feels true. I ask him as always: The Marshmallow Mack Daddy?
He says Ah! You know me! But I only know that he is from Venezuela, has a wife and no kids, and has an addiction to marshmallow.
My mind blankens momentarily as I construct the monstrosity: I picture an empty, infinite field of snow. The first Marshmallow Mack Daddy I served was to Louie, when I’d just moved to New York and gotten the job, exactly one week after my loving parents kicked me out of the house, as my “deviance and volatility had reached a point of intolerance.” By this, they meant my transness and my decisions regarding this fact.
I turn back around and hand the ice cream to Louie, punching in 50% off Several Scoops’ friend discount to the digitized register. Louie takes the cone, hands me a five dollar bill, and then outstretches his hand. I take it and shake it, looking him in the eyes. He smiles and says quietly, Gracias, Ro, as if his house burned down and I’ve just offered him a place to stay.
And when he turns to leave, I try to think of something to say. I want him to turn around and look at me and tell me something: that he’s proud of me, and that I’m doing just fine, and that I am so, so strong. This I can all tell to myself, and I do, but it doesn’t mean the same. I wait for next week, when he’ll come back and shake my hand, and make me feel again like a child whose first colored-inside-the-lines drawing’s just gotten taped up to the refrigerator.
This interaction—or variations of it—has occurred once a week for two years. But today, when I arrive for my Sunday shift, Louie is not standing in the door. It’s the young doorman who stands inside the lobby, hiding away from the rushing city. My eyebrows furrow and stay this way while I silently feed strangers who flow in and out and don’t know my name.
At four, Lyla, the only other employee under thirty comes in to help me with the afternoon rush. I’m always curious how she would dress, how she would wear her hair, if she weren’t wearing her Several Scoops baseball hat and T-shirt.
When the last of seven children waddle out the clear doors, Lyla says abruptly: “So did you hear about the doorman?”
“What? What doorman?”
“The doorman from that building,” She points through the windows, across the intersection, to Louie’s stoop, “He had a heart attack and died late Sunday night while I was working.”
I feel my lunch sundae gurgle in my stomach and throb in my throat. I look to Louie’s empty corner and imagine him standing there serenely with his hands tucked in his pockets. Then this figment in my mind clutches his chest, opens his mouth into a dark ‘O’ and cries out, and drops to the concrete. He’s lying there, I hope face-up, with his dress shirt creased and sweat-stained and untucked from his belt, exposing the bottom few inches of his belly to the moon and the pigeons and the people of New York.
The day moves on and I hand people their ice cream without seeing their face, still staring at Louie’s empty stoop. I wonder if he mentioned me to his wife; I wonder if he tried to have kids, or never wanted them. I wonder if the years I work in this store, staring at a vacant door, longing for a dead man to validate my life, will outnumber the years I stared at the real man himself, waiting each shift for the same. I suppose the dollop of Marshmallow, the last one I fed him, was still in Louie’s stomach as they put his body to the coffin.
Writer | Eliza Becker ’26 | ebcker26@amherst.edu
Editor | Bea Agbi ’26 | bagbi26@amherst.edu