Generally, the caller was not.
“Wherein a large collection agency was sued for the sum of seven jillion dollars for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, after they made the poor child feel so guilty about not knowing his father’s telephone number that he turned to a sordid life of crime . . . yes, that’s correct . . . and don’t call back!” Nicki would slam the receiver down in its cradle.
“My pride wins again!” she proclaimed, breaking into an exuberant boogie, bony elbows akimbo, skinny legs bopping over the floor.
“Nicki,” Mom would say sternly, “those people are just doing their job.”
“And I,” said Nicki airily as she strutted up the stairs in her ruffled miniskirt, with her Friendly’s uniform hanging over her arm, “am just doing mine.”
• • •
By the middle of August, the dry spell showed no signs of breaking. Heat lightning crackled through the sky every night, and we’d wake up to the sound of thunder, but the rain never came. One Monday night, Nicki and Mike, her boyfriend of two weeks, were in the family room with the videotape of Jaws II. I was huddled in my customary corner of the couch, curled up near the glow of the reading lamp with a scholarship application that had come in the mail that morning, trying to figure out how I could spin my father’s six months in ROTC in a manner that would convince the Veterans of Foreign Wars to pay for my books sophomore year.
“Look, Miguel, the shark’s coming!” Nicki pointed at the screen as violins screeched in the background. She shook her head and spooned up a mouthful of Swiss Miss pudding from a plastic cup. “I don’t know why those people went waterskiing on that beach in the first place. Didn’t they see the first movie?”
Jaws surfaced and made quick work of the pyramid of scantily clad lady waterskiiers. Milo rested his snout against my bare leg, and Mike, whose summer job in construction started at six a.m., let his spiky blond head fall back on a stack of pillows. His lips parted and he began, almost imperceptibly, to snore. Nicki gazed at the carnage, face lit by the blue glow from the screen, her spoon in her hand, the pudding forgotten.
“Wow,” she breathed as blood clouded the water. She grabbed the remote, rewound the tape, and replayed the massacre in slow motion, scrutinizing each shriek and severed limb.
“Fake,” she concluded in disgust. “Josie, look . . . you can see that the blood was just painted on that leg there. . . . Hey!” she barked as she noticed that my eyes were on my application. “You’re not watching!”
I acknowledged that the scene is, if anything, too realistic for my tastes, and pointed out that her boyfriend was asleep.
“No, he isn’t,” Nicki proclaimed. She leaned back until her head reclined on Mike’s chest and began to prod his midsection vigorously with her elbow. His eyes flew open, and his hands went first to his carefully gelled hair, then to Nicki’s shoulders.
“Ow, quit it!” he begged.
Nicki beamed at him angelically. “Wake up,” she coaxed, “or I’ll get the dog to lick your face. You,” she said, pointing at me. “Wimpy. Make us popcorn.”
Mom entered the room wearing a swimsuit, wrapped in a towel, frowning and smelling of chlorine. She had a stack of mail in her hands and a letter pinched between her fingers. “Nicki,” she said, peering at the letter. “Did you tell someone from Chase that Dad was in the hospital, dying of testicular cancer?”
“Perhaps,” Nicki allowed.
“You can’t lie,” Mom said.
“They lie,” said Nicki.
“Well, don’t you want to be better than a bunch of underpaid collection agents?” my mother asked.
Nicki scowled, then turned back to the screen, where a handsome man was lying on the beach beside a woman in a bikini, caressing her arm. Mike couldn’t resist teasing my sister, who loathed skin-on-skin contact above almost everything else. “Look, Nicki. Unnecessary touch!”
“She gets eaten soon,” Nicki snapped. She pointed at me again. “Popcorn!” I hurried to go make it as Mom drifted out the back door. I’d gathered the popcorn and the big red bowl when Jon’s bike came crunching up the driveway. He walked through the garage door, loped into the kitchen, and stood in front of the refrigerator, considering his options.
“I heard Mom on the phone today,” he said. He pulled a stick of butter out of the refrigerator and tossed it to me. I unwrapped it, put it in a bowl and then into the microwave to melt. Mom had left the lights in the pool on, and the greenish glow of the water filtered through the window over the sink. The Hendersons two doors down had one of those electronic bug zappers, and its sizzling sound punctuated the hot, still night.
“What’d she say?”
“That she’s going to have to put the house on the market in the fall. She can’t afford to keep it.”
I pulled the steaming butter out of the microwave. I’d known that things were bad from the creditors’ ceaseless calling, from the absence of the lawn service and the pool guys and the cleaning ladies. Late at night, I’d woken up from bad dreams listening to the sound of my mother walking downstairs, from room to room, past the painting my father had bought for their tenth anniversary, past the kitchen table where we’d all had hundreds of meals together, up to that fateful Thanksgiving feast, and past the photographs on the wall: Jon in his high chair and Nicki and me on the swing set, and Milo dressed in a baby bonnet for Halloween.
“It’ll be okay,” I said. It sounded like a lie even to my ears. Jon glared at me. He’d gotten taller that summer, and tanned from all the time on the farm, but at that moment he looked like he was five years old and we’d just dropped him off at summer camp and he was trying not to cry.
“It’s okay for you, you know. You get to leave. Nicki’s going to leave, too. You don’t have to live here with . . .” He cut his eyes toward the staircase, lowered his face, and shook his head. “I’m out of here,” he muttered, and slammed the back door hard enough to make the cabinets rattle.
When I came back to the darkened family room with the bowl of popcorn, Mike was asleep again, sprawled on the couch. Nicki was standing in front of the television set in a short denim skirt and halter top, her finger on the fast-forward button and an angry look on her face. “I want some blood!” she said as scenes whipped by. “This is ridiculous. Where’s the damn shark?”
As if in response to her words, the image of a shark filled the screen. “Yeah!” Nicki cheered. “Finally!” But the shark swam away to the strains of the familiar danger theme without doing any damage. Nicki hit the fast-forward button again. “Rip-off,” she muttered. I handed her the popcorn. Mike betrayed his somnolence with a rasping snore. Nicki whipped her head around and glared.
“Well, I warned him,” she said. She dipped into the bowl of steamy, buttery popcorn and began to delicately apply kernels to Mike’s slack lips. “Milo!” she called softly. Milo trotted over, his truncated tail making vigorous circles and saliva dripping from his wrinkled jowls. He propped his stubby legs on the edge of the couch, then, with a grunt, heaved his entire body up, gave a few noisy snuffles, and began licking Mike’s lips. Mike woke up, spluttering, to find Milo’s muzzle poised as if for a kiss.
“Gross!” was all he managed before dashing to the bathroom. Milo gazed after him sadly. Mom walked into the family room dressed in a faded pink bathrobe with ripped lace on the collar, holding the telephone.
“What’s going on in here?”
“Shh,” Nicki hissed. “We’re watching the shark.”
Mom squinted into the darkened room, peering at Nicki. “Did you unplug the phone?” she demanded.
Nicki fluffed her perm, stretched her bare feet on the coffee table, and ignored her.
“Nicki?”
“Bug off,” my sister grunted.
“Look,” Mom said, “I don’t like these calls any more than you do. But we can’t unplug the phone.” She looked at Nicki sternly. “What if there’d been an emergency? What if someone was trying to call?”
“He never calls,”
said Nicki, her eyes on the screen.
Our mother sighed as if she were being deflated. “Plug it back in,” she said.
“Fine!” said Nicki. “Miguel!”
Mike scrambled out of the bathroom. “Sorry, Mrs. Krystal, but . . .”
“She told you to,” Mom finished. “Nicki . . .” she began.
“Bug off,” Nicki repeated. On screen, the giant white shark was in the process of devouring what looked like the entire populace of a New England beach. The camera angled in for a closeup and the shark’s eye, obviously plastic, gleamed in the wavery underwater light. I slumped back onto the couch, with my pen and my application. The truth of our situation was so obvious it might as well have been engraved over the fireplace. Dad was never coming back. Mom was going to have to sell the house. I was never going to lose the twenty-five pounds I’d gained from too many late-night pizzas and bowls of cafeteria ice cream, and the cute guy in philosophy class was never going to see me as anything more than a girl who’d lent him a pen once, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to get a VFW scholarship. My family was falling apart, and all the good intentions and State of Israel bonds in the world would not be enough to save it.
Nicki froze the frame and snatched the bowl of popcorn away from Milo’s questing nose.
“Fake,” she said, holding the bowl against the scant curve of her hip. “Fake, fake, fake.”
• • •
It wasn’t the fake names and bad attitude that eventually spelled the end of Nicki’s tenure at Friendly’s. It was the satanic coneheads.
Nicki never liked the coneheads to begin with. “They’re very hard to make,” she complained of the children’s dessert made of a scoop of ice cream with whipped cream and an inverted cone on top. She’d describe to anyone who would listen how painstakingly she had to squirt the whipped cream so that it looked like hair, and dig through the bin until she found two matching M&M’s to serve as eyes, and how gently the cone had to be placed on top of the whole affair to simulate a witch’s hat. “My cones always slip,” she fretted, “so they look like sloppy witches. Or else I put too much hot fudge at the bottom and it winds up looking like its face is melting.”
But the kids of the Farmington Valley loved coneheads, so Nicki was compelled to make them by the dozen. Or at least, the kids loved coneheads until the last two weeks of August 1988.
It started innocently enough. Temporarily out of hot fudge, Nicki decided to improvise and place the head of the conehead in a pool of cherry sauce.
“And what shall I say this . . . item is?” asked the waitress, who was in her thirties with two kids and not much patience for the summertime help.
Nicki thought fast on her feet. “Conehead with severed neck,” she proposed. “Maybe you could call it a be-head?”
The waitress shrugged, ambled off to the table, and plunked the conehead down in front of a five-year-old dining with his mother.
The mother stared at the dessert, then at the waitress. “Miss,” she said, “this dessert doesn’t look the way it did in the picture.”
“It’s bleeding!” her son said.
“Oh, it is not,” said the mother sharply. As if to prove the conehead’s innocence, she dug in with her long silver spoon and took a big bite of vanilla ice cream and cherry sauce. “Tastes fine!” she proclaimed with a cheerful smile. The boy began to cry . . . perhaps because, unbeknownst to both waitress and mother, Nicki had picked up the large, lethal-looking knife used to slice bananas and was capering behind the counter with a crazed grin. No one could see her but my mother and Jon and me, seated at our customary booth, and the little boy with the be-head, whose wails pierced the restaurant.
“Cut that out,” I mouthed. Nicki shrugged and put the knife down.
“Honey, what’s wrong?” demanded the exasperated mother.
“Really, it’s only cherry sauce,” the waitress insisted.
The little boy was unconvinced. “Blood!” he yelled.
“Fine!” said his mother. “No dessert, then.”
This suited the little customer just fine. He bolted from the booth and dashed toward the door, leaving a melting conehead and an inspired Nicki behind him.
• • •
For the two weeks that they lasted, Nicki Krystal’s creative coneheads became the talk of the town. Nicki styled herself the artiste of ice cream and, with coneheads as her canvas and a thirty-seven-flavor palette, she was wildly inventive. The specials, which she’d display on hand-lettered cardboard signs affixed to the “Flavors of the Day” list, were increasingly gruesome, which made them, of course, tremendously popular among the town’s teenagers.
There was the Asphyxiated Conehead, made with blueberry ice cream; and the Apoplectic Conehead, made with strawberry ice cream; and the Conehead with a Skin Condition, made with peppermint stick. A Conehead with Lice had white shots in its whipped-cream hair. The Bloody Conehead featured strawberry ripple ice cream and strawberry sauce; the Drooling Conehead had caramel oozing over its chin.
Nicki’s friends loved it. They’d line up at the counter and cram six or seven to a four-person booth, demanding all manner of diseased, deformed, and dying coneheads: Conehead with a Cold (marshmallow topping dripping from where the nose should have been), Cyclops Conehead (one eye, a Hershey’s Kiss), Nauseous Conehead (gaping chocolate syrup mouth spewing great frothy quantities of Reese’s Pieces and whipped cream). Business was booming. Tips were stellar. The manager, Tim, didn’t know what to do, but he was certain that my sister’s inventions were far from standard Friendly’s procedure.
He sat Nicki down over a late lunch one Friday before her shift began. Tim was having a Big Beef Patty Melt with a double order of fries. Nicki, a picky eater, was having a scoop of tuna fish, a pickle, six olives, a handful of crackers, and a conehead of her own creation for dessert.
She came to the table expecting praise, perhaps even a promotion. “So, Tim,” she said, spearing an olive with her fork, “I hear we’re about to be named Friendly’s of the Month in the Farmington Valley region.”
“Nicki,” said Tim, “just what is going on with the cone-heads?”
Nicki gave a nonchalant shrug.
“Are you making them the way the manual says?”
“I may have taken a few liberties,” she said.
Tim shook his head. “Liberties.” He picked up Nicki’s dessert and turned it slowly in his hands: a Satanic Conehead, with beetling black licorice brows and “666” written out in chocolate shots underneath its cone hat. For a long, silent moment he perused the conehead, considering its every angle. “This is no dessert for a Christian.”
“I,” Nicki pointed out, snatching her conehead back across the table, “am not a Christian.” She spooned up a big mouthful of ice cream and sauce. “Mmm-mmm good!”
Tim sighed. “Make the coneheads regular, okay? Like they show them in the manual.”
Nicki shook her head. “That would thwart my creativity.”
Tim clasped his hands in an attitude of prayer. “Nicki,” he said, “maybe you should consider looking for a job at a place where your creativity will be more appreciated. For now,” he added, “regular coneheads. I insist.”
Nicki got to her feet, untied her apron, and flung it on the floor. “You know what? I don’t need this crap. I don’t need this job,” she said. “I quit.”
• • •
For the last week of summer Nicki spent her afternoons in front of the TV, reacquainting herself with the doings of the denizens of Santa Barbara and Springfield and General Hospital. When the sun set and the temperature dropped, she’d make her way to the kitchen to work on her magnum opus: Portrait of a Family in Coneheads.
When she’d gone to Friendly’s to pick up her final paycheck, she’d taken a few items home with her: a round ice-cream scooper and a whipped-cream dispenser. To this arsenal she had added some new toys: a series of small tubes full of food colorings—red and brown, neon green and electric blue.
Four c
oneheads were already lined up in the freezer. Jon’s conehead had brown M&M eyes and the hopeful caramel hint of a mustache above its upper lip. My conehead had green LifeSaver glasses and pointy banana chunks for bosoms. The Mom conehead had shredded coconut hair and floated on watery waves of blue icing, while Nicki’s self-portrait, the Beauty Queen Conehead, had an updo of the glossiest Hershey’s syrup topped with a tiara made of crushed toffee. There was only one conehead left to make, and Nicki took her time as she crafted the glasses and selected the perfect chocolate shavings for the beard.
Finally she called the family into the kitchen, and the four of us stood around the butcher-block island, staring at her final creation.
Mom, in her swimsuit, pronounced it a perfect likeness.
“It’s really good,” I said, picking up discarded chocolate shavings with a fingertip and slipping them into my mouth.
“Not bad,” Jon acknowledged, leaning his tennis racket against the wall.
We considered the conehead until it started to melt.
“We should dump it in the garbage disposal,” I said.
“Send it to the collection agencies,” said Jon.
“Or maybe we could feed it to Milo,” I said.
Nicki smiled as she handed out the spoons. “We can’t let good ice cream go to waste.” She filled her spoon with ice cream and sauce and raised it in a toast. “To us,” she said. Four spoons clinked together over the figure of my father in ice cream. Mom and Nicki and Jon each took a single ceremonial bite before drifting away—my mother back to the pool, Nicki back to the television set, Jon back onto his bike and out into the night. I stayed in the kitchen with my spoon in my hand and the dog hovering hopefully at my feet, and I ate, scooping up ice cream faster and faster as an icepick of pain descended between my eyebrows, spooning through the hair and the eyes and the nose and the mouth, eating until I felt sick, until every bite of it was gone.
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