Triple Scoop, by Sheila Squillante
1.
He scoops my ice cream into a chipped yellow mug I bought at a thrift store before we met and fell in love. Three scoops dug out of the carton with a warped soup spoon and the same for him. He brings it to my bedroom, which has lately become his bedroom, too, though he has yet to leave behind the basement apartment he rents up the street. He still checks in there from time to time, to grab fresh clothes or check the mail, but mostly he stays here with me now, tucked into the queen-sized bed with an awkward depression where my ex-husband’s body used to be. We’ll buy a new mattress soon. It’s late morning or early afternoon or any time at all because we don’t yet have children around whose vital functions we must schedule our life. We are all decadence and delight, lazing in bed, likely post-sex, watching Gene Kelly movies or Iron Chef on the tiny television set perched on top of my dresser. I wrap both my hands around the cold mug and shiver against the goosebumps that come from temperature and new love. The ice cream ought to taste vague and generic—it’s a store brand because we are graduate students and it’s what we can afford—but instead the chocolate is deep and balanced between sweet and bitter, with a joyous and generous ribbon of salty peanut butter swirled through. It is the perfect ice cream. We savor it and we glut ourselves on it. We are young and life is delicious.
2.
Summer’s heat in Central Pennsylvania is stultifying. We are grouchy. Sick of each other. Where is the breeze? We hide from the sun inside the duplex at mid-day, kids glued to Blue’s Clues but antsy and pining for outside play, for sprinklers and pools we don’t have. Bikes and kites and go, go, go, Mommy, let’s go! Once it cools down a bit, there will be plucked clover tied stem to stem by clumsy fingers in the back yard. Mommy’s so tired, honey, but okay, yes. Hand it to me and we’ll add one more link to your endless blossom chain. She’s not nursing anymore, my milk has finally, finally gone dry, but the constant pulling need of her has me both desiccated from the expectation of continuous presence and swollen with resentment. I want to be alone, I don’t say. I never say, though it’s a chorus screaming from my every cell. I have not yet learned to balance between them and me, between duty and celebration. I don’t know how to ask for what I desperately need. I have all but forgotten delight. Today, though, he must hear something hot in my voice and so herds the children out the back door, singing, See you later, Mommy! We’ll be at Sunset Park. And suddenly there is nobody requiring anything of me. The sweetest silence that cools the anger I hate to feel. There is also, in the freezer, I realize as an hour winds down, a box of Drumstick sundae cones, the kind with peanuts sprinkled on top and the buried treasure of chocolate at the bottom of the sugar cone. When I was a kid, even though I wanted chocolate, I’d always ask for vanilla because I knew it was less popular and so was I and I didn’t want to hurt its feelings. I grab the open box and head to meet my family at the park. There she is, blonde curls flying wild behind her on the purple slide, a circle of clover around her neck. She bounces once at the bottom and then catches sight of me, starts running, open armed and smiling with surprise, Oh! You brought us ice cream, Mommy! Ten years later, she will bring me a chocolate mini cone while I sit on my bed grading papers and tell me that the day in the park, these treats, my smile as I walked toward her, is one of her earliest memories, the taste of which is, for her, pure love.
3.
Kennywood Amusement Park just outside of Pittsburgh is a weird place. It’s nostalgic in ways that I recognize, with an old wooden coaster that I would have thrilled to ride as a kid and was certain it would fly apart and send me to my death in front of horrified parkgoers and my children today. There is a log flume we skipped because my son, whose ninth birthday we are here to celebrate, refuses to get on. In fact, after that first ride—the potentially murderous aforementioned Jackrabbit, which was the first thing we did upon entering the park-- he has declared himself done, entirely, with rides. With this place. No thank you, Mama. I want to go home. Never mind that this was his idea, that he told us he wanted to ride the steel coaster—the Thunderbolt!—and so Grandma arranged four all-day passes as his “big” present and now here we are in the arcade bleeding quarters to try to salvage something fun out of this day. I am frustrated and annoyed. I am quickly going broke on pinball and that racecar game. Somehow, we convince him to consent to enter what is sure to be an easy, inoffensive ride—the Noah’s Ark funhouse. While I’m trying to coax him to enter the mouth of a blue whale at the entrance, I am wondering what sort of “fun” we are in for in a “ride” that follows the Biblical creation story that famously ends in a flood over the entire earth. I don’t want to spoil your fun but why are there skeletons under the walkway! We don’t actually have to walk over them do we, Mommy! Hold my hand! No, this hand! Don’t push! Why are the stairs moving! What’s that scary creaking sound! When can we leave? It’s dark! Where are you! How do we get out of here! Help!
In the daylight, back outside the belly of the whale or whatever that thing just was, my daughter sees the slushie stand. Tumbling cannisters of blue and red liquid summon her hypnotically forward. I hate slushies. I hate sno-cones, popsicles, sorbet--anything cold and crystalline in my mouth. I can feel the icy zap in my teeth and the zing in my temple from the brain freeze that follows. My daughter is already in front of the red tumbler when I turn my back to them and see an ice cream stand just a few feet away. Now we’re talking. I’ll be right back, I tell my husband leaving him to wrangle food dyed sugar on hands and faces. I treat myself to a scoop of Breyer’s Salted Caramel. I expect it to be delicious. I do not expect it to be the most delicious ice cream cone I have ever eaten in my life. But that’s exactly the position it occupies in the snack vault of my memory. Smooth, milky, rich and a little sharp, it’s the perfect translation of the ubiquitous salted caramel craze that gives us everything from cookies and cupcakes to coffee and martinis. Cold and icy I can’t do, but cold and ice-creamy is precisely what makes my junk-food heart beat fast. I’ve loved a lot of ice creams in my life, a lot of ice creams have loved me back, but this exact cone is the archetype of delight. It soothes me as I return to my family and their blue raspberry tongues, smoothing out all the wrinkles of that day that went not at all as we expected it to. Which is life with kids. Which is life.
Cheetos, Churros and Chips Ahoy! An Online Workshop on Writing about (Junk) Food, with Sheila Squillante
Sheila will help you turn your own junk food obsessions into beautiful essays in her new online nonfiction workshop focusing on exploring / interrogating / celebrating the edible realm of “junk” food—however you define that term. Each participant will write and workshop two short essays, one 750 word and one 750-1500 words. The workshop starts on May 22 and runs six weeks, is limited to 9 participants, and costs $250.
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Sheila Squillante is a writer living in Pittsburgh. Her essay collection, ALL THINGS EDIBLE, RANDOM and ODD, is forthcoming from CLASH Books in November, 2023. She is the author of the poetry collections MOSTLY HUMAN and BEAUTIFUL NERVE as well as four chapbooks of poetry. She directs the MFA program in creative writing at Chatham University where she is Executive Editor of The Fourth River literary Journal. She’s an Editor-at-Large for Barrelhouse. Her favorite junk foods are Drumsticks, Oreos and kettle-style potato chips.