Ice Cream Associates – Raw Women / Cooked Men

by
K. B. Thomas

The music was the first clue that something was wrong. Harsh and strident, it scratched its way through the front windows though they were closed to the midday heat. Clarissa claimed it was a song from a Broadway show while Rainier said it was from a movie. Rainier was seven years younger than me and eight years younger than the twins but I’d have bet he was right. Rainier didn’t get out any more than the rest of us, but he had an innate sense about such things.

After five minutes of argument Elissa had Rainier in a full head lock and he was forced to concede to her superior power.

“Didn’t need to hear this song one more time in my life,” Dad said, stumping through the kitchen, humming along to the tune under his breath, under his scowl. He threw open the front door and glared out into the yard. A white van lay exposed, hood propped up, menu pasted in full color along the side, listing retail prices, tax included.

The twins crowded the doorway in the same way they crowded every other space in my world. Rainier and I watched from under their armpits.

“’The Entertainer,’” Rainier whispered to me in the space we were allowed to inhabit. He hummed along for a few bars. “Marvin Hamlish.”

“Paul Newman,” breathed Elissa.

“Robert Redford,” sighed Clarissa, almost purring.

“Strawberry Smoosh.” I pinched myself. “Kodiak Island Fudge Cones.”

Dad strode across the front porch and down the three steps into the yard and paused, his thumbs in his belt loops. He walked right up to the figure bent over the manifold, the boy dressed in a white shirt and white pants so bright that we, all of us, scalded our lungs breathing in the July heat at the sight of him.

“Son,” said our father to this shimmering vision, “if you don’t get that noise shut off right now I’ll shoot both you and this van right between the headlights.”

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We fought over which one of us would get him a glass of water. Dad had disconnected the battery of the white van with the grace and dexterity he usually reserved for the twist top of a bottle of bourbon, or the snap-off cap on a bottle of beer. Over the years since our mother had died I’d observed that the finesse is pretty much all in the wrist.

The boy’s name was Conrad. He’d never turned down our lane before, he’d had no idea that from our mailbox on the rural route it was over three miles to our front door, he’d never expected that there was no room on our washed-out gravel road to turn around. Clarissa chipped more ice for him while we listened to his story, and Elissa coaxed another pitcher of water from the pump over the kitchen sink. Rainier and I sat at the table, our hands secretly entwined underneath, hardly daring to hope.

His hair was blond, like an angel’s. His eyes, a deep blue, more beautiful than the July sky above, were brighter than the fake sapphire gemstone in Clarissa’s Avon choker necklace. His skin was bronzed by Nebraska’s summer sun, and underneath his white shirt his chest appeared smooth and silky, hairless and ready for the fingertips of a hapless maiden such as myself. I was fifteen. I’d read the books that Clarissa and Elissa kept hidden in their bedroom, I’d paged through the months-old Cosmopolitan magazines their friends had discarded and given, out of pity, to my sisters.

I was innocent, but not ignorant.

The white van sat under the afternoon sun, next to the bed of peonies, while we plied Conrad with iced water and waited for our father’s verdict.

“Adelaide,” our father said to me, and Rainier’s grip on my hand immediately tightened. Dad took a beer bottle from the refrigerator and flicked the cap across the room.

“Addie, get your toolbox from the small barn. Put on your coveralls first, young lady,” he yelled after me. I was already halfway to the small barn, Rainier trailing behind me like a barking puppy. I blushed at the thought of wearing coveralls before our stranded guest when I knew that my sisters would soon be upstairs, pulling and poking themselves into their most revealing pairs of second hand Levi’s. Clarissa had already placed the curling iron on the stove; I ‘d seen her do it.

“Not that one, stupid,” I said, slapping Rainier’s hand as he reached out for the first toolbox he saw. “Everything in there is standard. I need the grey Stanley box with the Cornhuskers decals. This is a Chevy van but it’s not that old,” I told him as we carried the toolbox between us from the small barn to the front yard. “They changed from imperial in the seventies.”

“French gauge,” he said, smiling up at me.

“Metric,” I agreed, glad to have his help carrying the metal box. Rainier had such strange terms for things, sometimes.

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I did not change into my coveralls and I did not fix the van. My father sat at the kitchen table and drank beer after beer with our guest while I poked about under the hood. I sent Rainier into the kitchen to get the keys from Conrad, and then to get me a glass of lemonade, and then to bring various rags and scouring pads from under the kitchen sink.

Rainier made a fabulous spy, sometimes.

“Clarissa’s upstairs, but Elissa’s in the kitchen, standing next to the kettle and pretending that she wants a hot cup of tea when they’re really waiting for the curling iron to heat up.”

“And?” I asked from my perch on the frame, just under the propped up hood of the white van. My feet in their blue Keds tapped impatiently on the radiator.

“They say they’ll pay you ten dollars if you can get him to stay overnight. They have egg money, and babysitting money, too.”

“Is that all?” I twisted off the radiator cap.

Rainier was silent for a moment. “What else is there?” he asked, with all the simplicity of a philosopher.

“Three days,” I said, casually wiping the cap with a rag. “Two nights, three days.”

He shook his head, unable to calculate the cost of such a prize.

“Fifty dollars,” I said, as if the money meant anything to me. “They do the dishes for a week, besides.”

Rainier stared at me, unbelieving.

“Plus, we’ll have a freezer full of ice cream. How stupid are you?” I reached over and cuffed him on the side of the head, not without affection.

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I didn’t go in and have supper with them. I stayed out in the front yard and rattled through the toolbox and examined the Chevy’s hoses and traced the wiring. I pulled some daisies from the flower beds and sat under the hood and plucked the petals, one at a time, while reciting the letters of my name and Conrad’s, intertwined like some newspaper word jumble, or the incantation of a Celtic witch. When it got so dark outside that I could no longer pretend to be doing anything useful I slipped into the kitchen through the side door, having first brushed the flower petals from my clothes.

The acidic taste of burned hair hung in the air. They had been talking about me.

“There,” said my father, gesturing with the beer bottle in his hand. “Never seen anything like it before. She was four years old when she took the side yard pump apart, greased it, and put it back together.” He banged the table with his fist and I helped myself to a piece of buttered bread.

“By her seventh birthday, am I right, honey?” he asked, leaning in my general direction, “she’d learned to TIG weld. Good welds, too. Nothing lumpy about them. God damned prodigy, I tell you.”

Conrad, slumped in his chair beneath the weight of the four beers he’d consumed, cocked an eye at me. In a good way.

Elissa moved from the shadows of the pantry doors where she’d been wiping down the shelves and rearranging the canned goods to no purpose at all. Her hair was frizzy and shorter in some places than it should have been; the burned hair smell that clung to her didn’t make her any more charming.

“Did you get the van fixed, honey?” she asked, sliding over to me, patting me on the head like I was her dog.

“Fifteen years old and she can rebuild any model John Deere tractor produced after Lyndon Johnson retired back to Texas,” my father said, though no one seemed to care.

I chewed a bit on the crust of bread and looked at my hands, which would have been a whole lot dirtier if I hadn’t decided to play this game, if I had really tried to fix the van. Wouldn’t have been that hard.

“Just one thing,” I said, speaking directly to Conrad for the first time ever.

It was a cold plate system in the ice cream truck, and the insulated freezer was kept at a frosty thirty below, usually. When the Copeland condensing unit was working, when the Chevy engine was revving at two hundred and forty horsepower. When the battery was fully charged, which was no longer the case.

“What is it, honey?” asked Elissa, bending over me to stroke a few stray hairs from my face, touching me as if she was full of concern, as if she was filled with love for me. As if she was my mother.

“Ice cream’s melting,” I said, swallowing the last bit of bread and butter and then taking a long drink from the beer bottle that sat in front of my father. “Melting fast.”

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It took all six of us over an hour to move the packaged ice cream treats to the basement freezer. We worked in relays, from the front yard into the living room and then down the basement steps off of the kitchen, where the chest freezer sat, mostly empty and humming, barely big enough to hold the snow cones and ice cream sandwiches and chocolate coated swirl ices rolled in almond chips.

Elissa wanted to renegotiate with me as I passed her box after box of Iced Fruit Licks-On-A-Stick. “We barely have fifty dollars between us,” she whined, checking her nails carefully, to make certain the hard manual labor hadn’t chipped off any of her red Devil’s Frost polish.

She didn’t know the two most common problems with mid nineteen eighties Chevy six cylinder economy-priced vans, and she certainly didn’t know how to prevent them from being fixed.

I stuck my tongue out at her. For the first time, ever, she didn’t dare hit me for it.

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In the morning Dad took Conrad with him into the northeast field to stack hay. The baler could have used some oiling but Dad told me not to worry about it. They left after breakfast, driving the small blue pickup, Conrad’s borrowed straw cowboy hat bouncing and jostling in tandem with the ruts in the road.

I put my cereal dish in the sink for my sisters to wash, grabbed Rainier’s hand and headed to the stream that cut through our cottonwood grove.

Rainier lay in the tall grass and shut his eyes. “Couldn’t sleep last night,” he said. “The twins were up until three, whispering, laughing like fools.”

“I heard ‘em.”

“Dad thinks you’ll have the van fixed by noon dinner. ‘Genius’ he keeps calling you.”

“I know.”

Rainier shaded his eyes from the sun to better see me. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

“Fix the van.”

Rainier was smart enough not to ask any more questions. We watched the sun travel west and the shadows of the cottonwoods move through the grass and then I pulled him up by the straps of his coveralls and said, “Come on then, you can help.”

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When they came in from the pasture at noon I was thoroughly coated with engine grease, almost unrecognizable under the smears and daubs of oil. My hair was twisted into a knot at the base of my skull to keep it out of my eyes and I was sweating enough to make the whole scene convincing.

Rainier stood by my side, adjustable wrench in hand, his face and hands artfully streaked with grease for maximum visual effect.

I lowered the van’s hood with a gentle hand and wiped my fingerprints from the paint.

“We’ll be done here right quick,” I said, smiling at Conrad. The dirt and dust of the hayfield had only made him more handsome.

“I’ll be able to leave?” he asked.

“Just as soon as we’re done eating,” I said, looking at the sky above his head, at the tree tops swaying in the gentle breeze, rather than lying to him directly.

“Genius,” Dad said, patting me on the back. “Didn’t I tell you?” he asked, of no one in particular, and held open the kitchen door.

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We feasted that afternoon, for my sisters had fried two chickens, baked a bushel’s worth of buttermilk rolls, a peach cobbler, and six rutabaga tarts. Rainier could hardly swallow fast enough; usually our dinner was a bologna sandwich and a glass of milk.

When dessert was served Conrad went down into the basement and came back with individual cups of vanilla ice cream for all of us, each cup complete with its own flat wooden spoon.

“You’ve all been so kind,” he said, smiling at me as I scooped vanilla ice cream onto a slab of peach cobbler.

“What’s happening?” asked Clarissa, as if she was waking from a hundred years’ sleep. All through dinner she had watched only Conrad, counting the number of servings he took from each plate, matching his every mouthful to an imaginary declaration of love.

“Adelaide’s fixed the truck,” said Conrad.

Elissa, who had planned on taking him out in the blue pickup just before dark and playing her Best of Van Morrison tape, dropped her fork. It hit the linoleum of the kitchen floor with a hollow thud.

“It’s been good having you here, son,” Dad said. He’d liked having help in the northeast field, help that was tall and strong enough to make it a very productive morning. Rainier wasn’t much at baling hay. The twins were even worse.

“Shall we load up the ice cream after the dishes are done?” asked Conrad, now the most buoyant of any of us at the table.

“Best take her for a test, first,” I said, casually, after swallowing a spoonful of cobbler smothered in ice cream, but no one listened to me.

How Dare You? Mouthed Elissa, who didn’t even bother to retrieve her fork from where it had landed. Had it been in her hand, she would have poked me with it. Hard.

“What do you think we’ll have tonight for supper?” Rainier whispered to me, his eyes wide in anticipation, for he hadn’t caught up in the conversation to the rest of us. Not yet.

Conrad waved goodbye from the window of his van, “The Entertainer” sounding from the megaphone perched on the roof and scaring the birds. We stood together on the front porch and watched and listened and Rainier even ran down into the yard, his right arm flailing madly in salute, yelling: “Goodbye, goodbye!”

After five minutes Clarissa broke down and ran to her room to cry. Elissa followed, but I could tell that she was happy not to have to pay me the fifty dollars. Dad, his arms and shoulders sore after a morning spent baling hay and the afternoon spent lifting boxes of ice cream out of the freezer and carrying them upstairs, went into the back bedroom for a rest.

I watched as the sun moved even further west, as the shadows lengthened over the side yard and covered the flower beds. Not much after four I took the keys to the blue pickup from their hook next to the kitchen door and backed down the drive.

Rainier came flying through the yard and flung himself against the passenger side. He pulled at the handle but I had locked the door.

“Scram,” I said, hating to break his heart, hating myself for saying it. “You can’t come.”

He cried then, the tears washing along his face and dropping onto the front of his shirt. I wanted to stop, wanted to yell at him to jump in the truck bed and come along anyway, but I didn’t. I wanted something I couldn’t yet define, didn’t even understand, but I knew enough about what I was after to leave Rainier in our front yard, sobbing and alone.

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I saw Conrad through the pickup’s rear window. I saw everything through the rear window, as I was backing the blue pickup down the three miles of gravel road that led from our house to the rural route, the paved highway that cut with a knife-like precision through our acres of cultivated fields, and those that were lying fallow.

I backed the pickup to the rear of the Chevy van and then jumped out. Conrad watched as I hitched the two vehicles together with the tow strap and made certain it was secure.

“Come on, then,” I said, climbing back into the pickup. I reached over and unlocked the passenger door. Conrad got in, and he was no longer the Conrad that had sat at our table that afternoon, handing out vanilla ice cream. He was tired now, and coated with the gray dust of the road. His hands were greasy, as if he’d been fiddling with the Chevy engine, and he’d wiped them against his white cotton pants.

I reached behind the seat and found a rag. “Clean up a bit,” I said, handing it to him. “I’ll take you home.”

I drove as slow as I could, the Chevy in tow behind. I kept both hands on the wheel as Conrad spoke. He was tired, and thirsty, and discouraged.

“I’m going away to school in a few weeks,” he said, wiping at his hands and face with the rag. “I only took this job with Ice Cream Associates for spending money, money for textbooks and such. They said that I could make over fifty dollars a day, if I stocked the top selling ice cream and found a high school game to sell at, or an antique car show. I was looking for a community swimming pool yesterday, when I drove down your lane and the Chevy conked out.”

“Going to State?” I asked. Everyone went to State.

“No. I’m not in any agricultural program, and it’s no use for me to take the machining courses. You, though, your father says that you’re certain to get in, on scholarship. He says that you’ve got talent.”

“I see things. Drawings, kind of. Blueprints. Dad calls them ‘schematics.’ When I touch an engine, or a pump or wiring harness or hydraulic system it just sort of pops into my head.”

“Weird,” he said.

“I guess.”

“No, I mean it’s weird that you can’t get this stupid van to work. I mean, it did, at first. Then it started coughing and wheezing and maybe I was giving it too much gas, or not enough, and then it stopped dead.”

“Yep,” I said, “sorry about that.” I’d fixed the van, all right, but then I had watered down the gas in the Chevy’s tank and sent Conrad on his way, knowing all along where I could find him when I wanted to.

“You’re prettier than your sisters, you know,” he said, putting his left arm across the back of the pickup’s bench seat. “Adelaide. That’s a nice name. Have you ever kissed a boy?” he asked. “What I mean is, would you like to?”

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We were late for supper. Not that it consisted of much; the twins had outdone themselves at dinner earlier and even Rainier wasn’t all that hungry. I slid into my chair beside him at the table but he wouldn’t talk to me. He didn’t even swipe the sweet pickles off my plate when he thought I wasn’t paying attention. He was that mad.

Clarissa and Elissa draped themselves in their chairs on either side of Conrad.

“It’s Friday night,” Elissa said. “What do you think we should do?”

“If you don’t mind, I’m going to move the ice cream back into your freezer,” Conrad said.

Clarissa pushed her chair back from the table. “We’ll help.”

“I’m going to rebuild the carburetor,” I said. “Should take an hour or two.”

“What do you usually do on Friday nights?” asked Conrad as he helped the twins clear the table.

“Go to the movies, sometimes.”

“Rebuild carburetors,” I said.

Conrad laughed but the twins scowled at me as they led him out of the kitchen. “It’s so sad,” Elissa told him as they stepped into the living room. “She’s not joking.”

I ran an extension cord from the kitchen window and plugged in a shop light so I wouldn’t have to quit working when the sun went down. Dad came out onto the front porch and sat for a bit while he smoked a pipe.

“Adelaide,” he said after half an hour or so of silence, “you’ve got to quit playing with this boy.”

I looked down at the carburetor bits and pieces laid out so neatly on the folded newspaper and said nothing.

“You’ve got a reputation to think of,” he continued. “Do you want folks saying that you were bested by a GM product? That you couldn’t figure this one out? I’ve already got two girls who can’t even curl their own hair without burning themselves bald. So I say stop playing around.”

He knocked his pipe out against the heel of his boot and walked off to check the outbuildings and barns before going to bed.

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I suppose I didn’t want the fifty dollars all that bad. I’d liked having the twins do the dishes, though, and after fitting the carburetor together and flushing out the fuel lines I woke Rainier and sent him to renegotiate the deal.

“Thirty-five dollars,” I said, perched on the edge of Rainier’s bed as he shrugged off sleep. “Conrad leaves at eleven tomorrow morning.”

“Fine,” said Rainier, throwing back the sheet and crossing the floor in his pajamas. “They weren’t doing all that well with him, anyway.”

“Do you like him, Rainier?” I asked, swinging my feet through the air, the very picture of an unconcerned female.

“S’ok, I guess,” he answered, yawning.

“I guess,” I echoed, because although I had liked kissing him, there was something that wasn’t quite right about a person dumb enough to turn down our lane, thinking he would find a community pool at the end of it.

Conrad gave each of us an ice cream treat of our choice before he left in the morning. Rainier chose a Vanilla Cookie Sandwich, while the twins both took a Strawberry Sorbet Twisted Cup. I looked down at my freshly dirtied hands and said that I didn’t need any ice cream, but Conrad insisted on putting a whole half dozen Mini Crème Sitx in our freezer, just for me.

“You’re very sweet, “ he said, kissing me on the cheek in front of everyone.

“Good luck!” yelled Rainier from the front porch.

“Goodbye!” called the twins, sighing at the sight of him getting into the driver’s seat of the Chevy van.

“Godspeed!” said my father, watching me rather than the Chevy.

We stood together on the porch, waving, until the sound of tires on gravel faded and all we could hear were the birds singing in the trees, and the soft whoosh of the sprinkler in the garden that Clarissa had forgotten to shut off.

“He’s so cute,” squealed the twins, and then they ran upstairs to paste the ice cream wrappers in their scrapbooks.

“Come on, then,” Dad said, loading Rainier into the blue pickup, “there’s work to do.”

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It was about four o’clock that afternoon and I was on the porch, husking ears of corn for supper, when the pickup drove into the yard, Rainier whooping like an Indian from the truck bed, waving his arms above his head and yelling into the sky.

“It’s a plane!” he said, jumping from the truck and running across the front yard, trampling the daisies and black-eyed Susans. “In our north field, it landed, and now you’ve got to fix it,” he panted, skidding to a stop in front of the porch.

The figure that stepped from the passenger side of our pickup was clothed in rough brown leather pants, white tee shirt, and sunglasses so dark that looking into them was merely seeing a reflection of myself.

“You must be Adelaide,” he said, sweeping off the glasses and offering me his hand. “I wonder if you’d be kind enough to take a look at my plane? She’s riding a bit rough today.”

He had green eyes flecked with gold. I took his hand and could see the Curtiss CW-A-22 Falcon that waited for me in our north field. It was lovely, slim and silver. The hydraulics, the fuel line and pump, the rotor and pistons of the Whirlwind engine; it was all drawn for me in my head, drawn down to the smallest detail.

“Addie, better go to the small barn and get your tools,” Dad said, stepping from the driver’s side of the pickup. Rainier tore a handful of flowers from the garden bed and threw them high in the air and danced as they showered down on him, singing a song he had just made up, a song called ‘We Get To Ride In An Airplane.’