The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel

by Susan Jane Gilman

  Yet the lights burst back on and the music stopped abruptly. Now that our time slot had been compressed, we had only forty-five seconds to launch the show. The PA beside the camera leaned forward beside the big oaktag cue card and made a rolling gesture with her index finger: Now. Start. Go!

  “Hello, youngsters! Who wants ice cream?” I shouted.

  “WE DO!”

  “Good morning, Missus Lillian,” Spreckles said in a goofy voice that was not the least bit funny.

  “Good morning, Spreckles. Boys and girls! Are you ready to have some fun today?”

  “YEAH!” the crowd roared.

  “Of course you are,” I said. “After all, you don’t have to go to work in a factory tomorrow, now, do you? No child labor here.”

  The cue-card girl flinched. Please: My one goddamn ad-lib in twenty-three years. Yet I smiled broadly, and the children were with me. My minions. My little, uncomprehending pet twits. Even without the applause sign, they cheered.

  “It’s so marvelous to have all our youngsters here,” I continued, reverting to script. The studio lights felt like ghastly heat lamps at a cafeteria buffet. The air stank of floor cleaner. I felt vertiginous. “Spreckles and I, we have lots of goodies in store for you here this morning. Why don’t you tell everyone about it, Spreckles?”

  Rubbing his hands together with exaggerated relish, Spreckles announced “Dunkle’s Disco Dance-off.” (Yay!) Cartoons. (Yay!) And the grand-finale competition: the ice cream sundae eating contest. (Double yay!) There was no longer a special musical guest, however. Between the show’s diminishing viewership and the rise of this new MTV, it seemed that fewer and fewer recording artists were inclined to wake up at 5:00 A.M. on a Sunday to sing live to a hundred elementary-school children.

  Another love of mine. Gone.

  As we cut for a commercial, I shuffled off into the wings. “Lillian?” the AD called after me. Rifling through my pocketbook, I unscrewed the cap from my Geritol bottle, took a swig, pounded on my chest. “Just need my vitamins.” I hurried back to my mark in time for the makeup girl to attack my face with her powder puff. “Lillian. You okay up there? What’s going on?” the AD said, stepping toward me over the tangle of cables. Yet the director started counting down, “Five…four…”

  A flood of warmth came over me. The lights. The liquor. I felt like sugar dissolving. A pillowy, strawberry pink glove suddenly gripped my forearm. Someone, I realized, was addressing me. Spreckles the Clown.

  “I said, ahem, Missus Lillian, would you like to read the first letter today from one of our youngsters?” he repeated. Blinking around, I realized we were already back on the air and introducing the first segment of our show. “Dear Spreckles” still remained enormously popular. Children, after all, crave guidance. Authority. Moral instruction. All of which, I’d noticed, were in short supply these days. Parents: They were all too busy now “finding themselves.” Getting divorced. Going jogging.

  Meanwhile the problems that children wrote to us about had grown increasingly complex. Whereas their letters used to concern banning girls from tree houses, now, darlings, the children of America were asking Spreckles what to do when they were pressured into taking drugs. Shoplifting. Smoking. How to cope with moving to a new city. Which parent they should choose to live with during a custody battle. Even, occasionally, whether to engage in sex. In a few cases, in fact, the producers felt compelled to contact social services.

  Today’s first dilemma, however, which I read aloud to the children, was benign. “Dear Spreckles. Last week I stole my best friend’s Rubik’s Cube. What should I do? I know it was wrong. Signed, Jeffrey in New Jersey.”

  This letter, I suspected, had been doctored by our staff. Rubik’s Cube, after all, was now a sponsor of Dunkle’s Sundae Morning Funhouse. Nevertheless, the letter provided the children with a typical ethical quandary. Spreckles dove right in, asking the audience, “Hey, kids, what do you think we should advise Jeffrey to do?”

  I sat on my stool in the wings and massaged my leg. It had started aching again. Taking another discreet sip from my Geritol bottle, I waited for my cue.

  The second letter, at least, proved meatier: “Dear Spreckles, Every day when I ride the school bus, this girl tells all the other kids not to let me sit next to them because I’m ‘contaminated.’ She sticks gum in my hair. She calls me ‘Four Eyes’ and pulls up my skirt. She says that if I tattle to anyone, she and all her friends will ‘get me.’ Now I am scared to go to school. What can I do? Signed, Lila in Connecticut.”

  “Hm.” Spreckles made an outsize frown and plopped down on the edge of the stage with his chin in his hands. “That sure sounds like a problem, doesn’t it, boys and girls? What do you think we should tell Lila to do?”

  Several hands sprang up.

  Maybe she should tell her teacher, a little girl offered.

  She should wear contact lenses so the kids won’t tease her about her glasses anymore, said a boy.

  I think she should call the mean girl names right back, another boy suggested. This, to me, was the first bright idea I’d heard all goddamn morning. Yet Spreckles looked at him dubiously. “Hm. Well, that’s not very nice, now, is it?” he said. “Two wrongs don’t make a right, you know.”

  He regarded the audience bathetically. “You know, sometimes when people act like bullies, it’s just because deep inside they feel really bad about themselves. Maybe Lila should try to talk to this girl in private and ask her why she acts so mean. What do you think, youngsters?”

  The children considered this. Sensing this was the answer Spreckles was most likely to reward, they began to nod.

  “Do you think that’s the best solution?” he encouraged. The applause sign must have flashed on overhead then, because the children suddenly clapped riotously. “Well, okay!” Spreckles leaped up. “Who’s going to help show Lila in Connecticut how she might talk to this girl?”

  My legs, darlings, they felt rubbery by now. I took another sip from my drink as Spreckles selected a little girl named Tara from the audience to play Lila. She was a tiny slip of a child with a small, trembling mouth and dark, black, doe eyes that seemed to consume half her face.

  “Here,” Spreckles said. Taking her by the wrist, he positioned Tara front and center, across from Kaitlyn, an older, bigger girl with ponytails, whom he had selected to play the bully. “Can you be mean?” he said to Kaitlyn. She shrugged.

  “Just call her ‘Four Eyes,’” he instructed.

  “Hey, Four Eyes,” Kaitlyn parroted.

  “Good, good.” Spreckles crouched before the two girls. “Now—”

  “Four Eyes. Brace Face,” Kaitlyn added, clearly warming to her role. She looked over to Spreckles for approval.

  “Okay,” said Spreckles. “Good. Now, Tara, what should you, as Lila, say to this girl who is being mean to you?”

  Tara shrugged shyly, miserably, twisting one little leg behind the other. She was wearing a brown-and-orange dress with an orange bow at the neckline and tiny red Keds sneakers. She glanced over at the audience. She seemed to be deliberating whether to dash back to her seat. Beneath me, my stool seemed to undulate. My neck lolled and cracked.

  “You’re Four Eyes and you’re stupid!” Kaitlyn goaded.

  “Stop it!” Tara cried, whirling to face her. And suddenly Tara did look as if she were truly about to cry.

  “Okay. Okay, now, Tara. Remember, this is just a game,” Spreckles said quickly, giving her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “We’re trying to show a little girl at home how to talk to this other child. Why don’t you ask her why she is teasing you?”

  Tara looked at him uncertainly, then at Kaitlyn. “Why are you teasing me?” she said in a soft voice.

  Kaitlyn placed her hands on her hips. “Because you’re Four Eyes and you’re ugly.” The kid was clearly a natural. No surprise there. From overhead the buzz of the gel lights was relentless.

  “Now, Tara,” Spreckles guided, “maybe you want to tell her how hurtful it is t
o say something like that, right? And ask her why she has to be so mean—”

  “Oh, for Chrissakes!” I hollered. My pulse was pounding so furiously, it echoed like a backbeat. I was in my body yet hovering outside it. I felt myself rising from the sidelines and heaving my leg as quickly as I could across the stage. “What kind of nonsense is this? You think that’s any way to deal with a bully, you shmendrik?” I barked at Spreckles. “What on earth is the matter with you?”

  From somewhere, children giggled. Perhaps some panicked looks darted across the studio—no doubt the producer and the control room were suddenly on alert. What on earth? I heard somebody murmur. Tossing aside my peppermint-striped cane, I knelt beside little Tara with great difficulty and shooed Kaitlyn away.

  “Well, hello, Missus Lillian,” Spreckles said in an artificially cheerful voice as he stood up, flustered, and looked over the children’s heads toward the director with alarm. “I see you’d like to join in our discussion today?”

  “You want to know how to deal with a bully?” I said to Tara. “Like this.” To demonstrate I positioned myself, one knee forward for balance, bracing. I clamped my own hand over hers and molded them into tiny fists. “Bring your arm in. No, not at your side. Close to your chest, guarding yourself. And the other at chin level. Farther up. Like this. See?”

  Lifting her tiny, rubbery arms, I cocked them just so, modeling them after my own. “Now I want you to thrust from here, not the elbow, so that when you punch, you get the whole, big force of your shoulder behind it, you see?”

  Suddenly the Sundae Funhouse theme music blasted on—an attempt, I supposed, to terminate the segment. Yet just as abruptly, it was yanked off. I thumped around on my knees to face Tara, frozen in her position. Around me the garish spray-paint colors of our new stage set—cobalt blue, egg-yolk yellow, mandarin orange, delineated in thick black lines, comic book style—began to throb and pulse like a migraine. The stage pinwheeled around me.

  What the hell was I doing here, cloaked in this ridiculous cape with a plastic crown digging into my temples? The racks of lights overhead, the barricades of the audience, they formed an elaborate cage. Cameras were trained on me like guns from a watchtower. Look at me with this trembling little girl here, the two of us served up to the television viewing audience like trained monkeys. The nurses back at the Beth Israel Dispensary all those years ago, their snide speculations about my future. They were prophecies, darlings. They were exactly right. I had become a freak in a sideshow.

  “Draw your arm back, draw your arm back!” I hollered at Tara, holding up my hands before her like two punching bags. Suddenly I was no longer on a sound stage at NBC studios in New York City at all, but in the men’s dormitory at the Hilfsverein’s refugee detention center back in Hamburg, Germany, with its tobacco-and-boiled-cabbage stench, surrounded by émigré men in soiled undershirts and black felt hats, smoking, jeering, hooting encouragement in the sickly yellow light, passing a flask as Papa grinned and crouched before me, circling me like a panther, coaching and barking, “Right, left! Right, left, kindeleh!”

  Hesitantly, Tara punched my open palm as I instructed. “That’s it!” I cried. “That’s it. Again. Harder!” From the audience a few plaintive cheers went up. “Harder!” some of the children began to shout.

  From somewhere I heard my director shouting, “Cut to a commercial! Cut to a commercial, damn it!” Yet the cameramen were glued to the spot. None of them, it seemed, could tear themselves away. This, darlings, was real. This was live television. “Hit me harder!” I barked. “Don’t just stand there. Fight that bully. Fight back hard! Show ’em who’s boss! Right! Left!” Unprompted by any applause sign, the children in the audience began to cheer Tara on. Buoyed by their encouragement—and mine—she began to punch my hands more confidently, more rhythmically, right, then left, just as I had once punched Papa’s so many years ago. I knew exactly what she was experiencing in this very moment, that flush of unexpected strength, that awakening sense of power and dominion. “That’s it! More!” I cried. “Punch! Punch that bully!” In their excitement the children in the audience began to chant along with me, “Right! Left! Right! Left!”

  “Lillian, please! Stop!” Spreckles cried hoarsely behind me. “Children, this is no way to solve a problem.”

  “That’s it! Harder!” I cried. “You’ve got it. Right! Left! Right! Punch that bully square in the mouth!”

  Tara was a tiny child, yet by now she had committed her whole little body. Her eyes were wide, her legs braced in their little red sneakers, her face burning with concentration as she swung. Right, left. Right, left. She punched my hands harder and harder, until you could actually hear the soft thwacking sounds against my palms—the satisfying kiss of the blows, and perhaps if my hands were not so icy and numb, I might even have felt some pain—as the children chanted gleefully “Right! Left! Right! Left!” and a few even began jumping up and down now, waving their hands, pleading, “Can I try next? Can I go, please?”

  “You see? You see, you Buddhist nincompoop,” I growled over my shoulder. “This is how you fight.” As I glanced back at Spreckles defiantly, however, I lowered my hands slightly. Just for an instant. Just as Papa had all those years ago back in the dormitory in Hamburg. And now, as then, with my guard down, Tara’s next blow hit me square on my jaw, just as mine had hit Papa. For a split second, the riot of noxious colors all around me exploded into searing white. I lurched backward on my knees, and a bolt of pain shot up my right leg. There was no breath, no noise, only stillness. From somewhere at the end of a long wind tunnel, I heard a collective gasp. A man shouted, “Oh, Jesus Christ!” Yet then I steadied myself, regaining my balance. Blinking, my jaw throbbing, I gulped down a huge mouthful of air and gave out an ungainly howl.

  Then, reflexively, without a moment’s thought, I threw a punch back.

  Chapter 18

  Over fifty years of my life I have dedicated to ice cream. And truly, darlings, to the United States of America. With the cartoon characters and “fun flavors” I’ve created, I have injected joy, whimsy, and sweetness into a brutal and treacherous world. I contributed to our efforts in World War II, brought the comforts of home to boys fighting in Korea and Vietnam, and helped countless veterans start their own businesses. And need I remind you, it was me, Lillian Dunkle, who helped advance the cure for polio. Who promoted popular music. Who was instrumental, too, in the rise of car culture, television, and that great, democratic institution: the fast-food franchise. Oh, people turn up their noses at McDonald’s and suchlike now. Suddenly affordable, mass-produced food is “junky,” suddenly, it’s “cheap.” Yet thanks to Yours Truly, average Americans today can now purchase their own ready-made businesses, knowing that the model is tried and tested. And where else in the world can people rest assured that they can stop on a roadside anywhere, anytime, and buy something for the mouth at a reasonable price that will taste just as good whether they are in San Diego or Toledo or Atlanta? When I was a starving child on Orchard Street, I could not have imagined such possibilities! It is no small accomplishment, darlings. I have helped feed and transform America. And for twenty-three years, I have even baby-sat the nation’s children for three goddamn hours every Sunday morning so that their parents can sleep late. Don’t tell me this isn’t something!

  Yet just once, just once, I accidentally punch a small child on live television. And suddenly, that is all people care to know.

  And so I believe this is why, on June 22, 1983, a jury finds me guilty on three counts of tax evasion. The federal case against me is not at all related to the accident on my television show. The charges are separate. And yet. And yet.

  So sue me: It is deeply disturbing. The injustice of it all! The ingratitude! And so, just moments before my appearance in the state supreme court for my civil case with Tara Newhouse, I perhaps deign to take a little extra time for myself in the ladies’ room.

  The court officer, the enormous Negro lady with the painted-on eyebrows—she c
laims she smells marijuana moments after I limp out. She finds a scorched little flake of cigarette still burning on the windowsill. Dipping the end in water, she places it on a torn piece of paper towel to present to the court. Everybody in the building is such a goddamned goody-goody. Now, they all look from this little browned bit of ash to me: Judge Kuklinsky. Mr. Beecham and Miss Slocum in their taut gray suits. The Newhouses’ lawyer, pockmarked Mr. Tottle. (What is it about pitted skin that makes you want to file it down with sandpaper?) Jason takes my elbow, steadying me before the judge. I suddenly notice my grandson is wearing a metal padlock around his neck on a chain. Another one of his “statements,” no doubt.

  “Well.” Judge Kuklinsky exhales, not to me or the lawyers but to the court officer. “This is certainly a first.”

  “But my grandmother isn’t stoned,” Jason blurts. “She’s just, like, old.”

  In unison Miss Slocum and Mr. Beecham say admonishingly, “Jason.”

  “Excuse me?” says the judge.

  I suppose I do not help my case, because at that very instant, darlings, I stifle a giggle. I cannot help it. Really, it is so absurd. All of it. I feel so overwhelmingly giddy and tickled all of a sudden—as I have not felt in years, if ever in my entire life. Giggles are rising up in me, threatening to spray out like water constricted in a garden hose.

  The court officer raises her eyebrows and crosses her arms smugly. “Mm-hm,” she says in a cadence that translates distinctly into, I told you so.

  Turning away, I put my fist to my mouth and harrumph as if I am trying to cover a cough. My eyes catch the Newhouses sitting at the plaintiffs’ table. The father with his Germanic, clipped beard, eyes like two bullets; the harried mother deliberately scrubbed of makeup, her lips pinched tight. Little Tara Newhouse sits between them with the enormous rectangle of gauze taped over her left eye. She swings her legs shyly and glances around with bewilderment, as if she is not quite sure where she is. Yet when I fix my gaze on her, her face clouds with recognition and her uncovered eye blinks furiously. She knows who I am, all right. That child is not blind at all. Do they have any idea whom they are dealing with?