Everything I Know About Ice Cream

I always finished my ice cream first. Sometimes she’d share hers, chocolate or mint chip maybe, claiming she couldn’t eat it all herself. The subtlest smile on her plain lips. Other times I would scrape the plastic spoon along the bottom of my paper cup and slurp up the last remaining bead of strawberry, cinnamon or peanut butter chunk. As I'd sit there watching her poke along, savoring her ice cream in a way I could never master, my mind would wander and I’d think about which joke to tell during an uncomfortable silence or what movie we'd see later. 

Once we went to a place on Grand Avenue and sat alone in a small yellow-painted room behind the counter. It was winter and an employee pushed at a salty gray puddle with a mop, and a heavy rug by the door sopped the mess. An oatmeal-colored scarf hung about her shoulders and her skin was flushed. We sat near a large cooler and it belched warm exhaust along the wall and across our necks. Between bites of hard gummy bears and spoonfuls of caramel swirl, I dumped a dollar in the jukebox and picked three songs. I don’t remember what the first two were, probably they were Lynyrd Skynyrd and Guns N' Roses, but I remember choosing a Sheryl Crow song for her that I don’t remember any longer. It was a piano ballad and within two beats she smiled with recognition. “This is my favorite song!” she said. “How did you know?” I admitted it was a lucky guess, and I really did feel lucky. The song went on as she talked about a movie she’d just seen, something starring Kevin Spacey, and she offered me a dime-sized chunk of Oreo. I asked if she’d ever thought about the type of house she wanted to live in. Would it have hardwood floors, a fireplace bordered by bookshelves? It seemed like a very important question at the time, but in reply she told me about her roommates and the off-campus place they'd share the next fall.

Another time, on her birthday, she chose an ice cream joint that was brightly lit, white-tiled and excessively clean. We stood in a line that went out the door, winding our way through a rope maze with a Saturday night crowd of college kids. "They make their own ice cream and waffle cones right back there," she said, pointing at a kitchen behind buckets and buckets of bliss. We knew from experience that these kinds of operations were always the best. "This is my favorite ice cream anywhere," she said, and she preferred their cookies and cream above all others. And among all the sweetness, for some unknown reason I felt jealous right then. I wondered how often she went there. I wanted to ask whom she ate ice cream with when she came to this place. Wasn't ice cream something that only she and I really understood? I wanted to know what it was like with someone else. Did it taste the same?

One summer when she was home from school, we stood in her parents' kitchen and I kept my sunglasses on and the keys to my truck clicked in my hand. She'd just returned a few books to me, and we held a Tupperware container of quickly melting, homemade vanilla between us, standing closely, hips almost touching but never quite, our spoons dripping a sticky mess on our bare feet. Her family came and went around us, off to work, to pickup basketball games or to play with the badminton set in the backyard, and although I had nowhere to go, I found myself rushing to finish the ice cream and excuse myself because it was gone and there was maybe nothing to talk about. Even though I wanted fixings and seconds and to be close to her, I left.

Instead of taking her cue and eating more slowly, instead of taking walks and driving the long way home after a late movie – instead of savoring – I remained scared of watching Neapolitan go to soup. Two scoops were not enough for me, and our appetites were not the same. I didn't know that it didn't have to be finished right then; it could have gone in the freezer, covered in tinfoil or plastic wrap, anticipated and then, later, taken out again with a fresh appetite. It could have lasted a while longer, maybe, because we both liked to try new flavors and parlors, and we loved ice cream more than anybody in the world loved anything.