With a long stroke she licked the ice cream along the edge of the sugar cone. She drove west on a county road alongside farmhouses and pastures spotted with oak and birch, a trip she only afforded herself on Fridays. She adhered to a strict diet most days, but every Friday when it was warm enough she would take the back way home and get a vanilla cone from the farm stand to celebrate the end of her work week. Completion, the cone said to her, as she drove past straw spirals.
Autumn had appeared in recent days, but it had proven noncommittal. The ice cream demanded constant attention. She managed a hard bend, turning the wheel with her palm, and on the other side a doe stood just ahead looking peaceful and serene. Eyes focused and cone in hand, she swung the car into the left lane, the doe standing there looking peaceful and hollow and hollowly watching the car as it whipped past and on down the road.
She felt the ice cream on her hand. A couple drips of vanilla slid off the base of her pinkie and landed on the black skirt she had worn to work.
***
Her grandmother died when she was six, and at the funeral she wore a black dress that was laced all around with silk ribbons. She remembered the funeral sometimes while driving—her mother telling her that grandma was happy now, her uncle Rob, rubbing her shoulder in the parlor, that scary and disgusting place, her aunt Jodi telling her to go play with the other children outside. Since she didn't cry she took aunt Jodi’s advice and ran around with the other kids. Late that night, in grandma’s backyard, her and Robby hid behind the big willow together during a game of hide and seek. Robby said to her, “We’re not really cousins, right?” She could not recall a reply, but she remembered her black dress all muddy.
***
“Shoot...shit,” she said. She licked the dripping cone, wiped her skirt with fast food napkins, and kept the wheel steady with her knee. She planned on stopping at Friday’s before going home so she wanted to keep neat, but since her skirt was ruined she would have to stop home and change. She felt perturbed and somewhat swindled by fate or coincidence or whatever it was about having to stop home before her Friday wine. She considered going straight home and staying there, foregoing the Friday’s venture entirely since she wasn’t meeting anyone anyway, but she decided that instead she would go straight there, ice cream stain and all.
She reapplied lipstick in the parking lot. Her face was attractive though a bit round and she wore on it most times an utter seriousness akin to a goaltender before a penalty shot, eyes peering, lips pursed. Her large dark eyes were appealing enough—a handful would call them hypnotic and some would say seductive, but her appearance was not to go on trial for the crime of her loneliness. She thought it was the side of her that she inherited from her mother, her stubbornness, her boldness, her frightful honesty, that nudged the men away, but it was rather something else, something she’d developed on her own.
At Friday’s, she sat alone. She read the subtitles of CNN and The Weather Channel and sipped on her house Merlot, and felt a sharp aversion toward the three men across the bar. Why did they have to be so loud with everything they say? Probably couldn’t pull off the stupid algebra it takes to run a simple mortgage. Probably, they wander around bar to bar all night laughing too loud showing off how close of friends they are and how great a time they can have. Deep down they hate each other. There is no man in existence even remotely like Dad. One wearing a Red Bull polo shirt made his way around the bar toward her.
“What’s on your dress?” he asked, smiling. He pointed to her necklace.
“It’s not ice cream and it’s not Red Bull either. I keep a strict diet,” she said. Neither of them spoke. She thought she might have been harsh on him, so not knowing what to do, she continued. “Don’t you think it’s impolite to point out the imperfections on a woman’s clothes? Why must you assail these meager rags?” She tossed her left hand with a Victorian flourish, which surprised her. She felt like she was a character from a book she had read. She downed her Merlot.
He said nothing, but continued to stand in front of her, holding his pint. He looked perplexed, idiotic. The name ‘MARC’ was embroidered on his shirt, below the insignia.
“May I help you?” she said. Nothing. “I need a drink.”
***
That night she knelt behind the big willow with Marc and they both had ice cream cones and they kept melting all over her dress. She sat on a soccer ball. Marc held his cone over the dress too and they spelled out both their names in ice cream, and using the ribbons of her dress they created a makeshift calligraphy and they made out special letters and had a special language that they used to convey secrets to one another, secrets too secret for normal words, symbols with no sound and only sense, symbols that pounded feelings directly into the heart, foregoing mind entirely, symbols that stripped a layer of culture from between them, and all the other people laid outside their circle, their system. From their vantage behind the tree, they saw the source of the smoke they’d been smelling all night. Grampa emptied his pipe, banging it rhythmically, one, two, one, against a hickory tree. They heard a rustling branch and saw Grampa point left. The night was darker. She looked at her dress and became disgusted with herself. She felt her face contorting, squeezing into knots. She looked at Marc and Marc saw her face turn blacker than coal. “I keep a strict diet,” she said, repeated, emphasized, screamed—and awoke Saturday morning.
“Mnmmm...wha?”
