September 3, 2007
Yesterday’s Orgasmic Flavor


cydytame050.jpgIt was either the spring of 1978 or the spring of 1979. I was seventeen, and I had therapy every Wednesday afternoon after school. I think my friend Anne Marie dropped me off-I can’t really recollect how I traveled from my high school that was a good twenty-plus miles away to my therapist’s office. Maybe Anne Marie drove; maybe I got one of my parents’ cars. I doubt the latter; they were never very forthcoming with the wheels.

At any rate, every Wednesday afternoon, I would go to my therapist. She was trained as an art therapist, though we never did any art projects. We just sat around and talked. Her couches were tan, a color I’ve noticed over the years is much favored by the therapists of the world, or anyway the color unites the ones I’ve been a patient of. Her office had a lot of kid things: tiny desks, floppy dolls, construction paper, heaps of crayons. It had the affect of a hotel lobby having a clandestine tryst with a kindergarten. I found it both a tad disconcerting and a bit soothing both at the same time.

I was going to therapy because I was depressed. At some point in the spring of my Junior year of high school, I saw an article in the Sunday paper’s Parade Magazine on teen suicides accessorized by a helpful list on how to tell if your kid is contemplating suicide in the sidebar. I read the article, scanned the list, and then I proceeded methodically to do everything on it. Surprisingly, my parents noticed. I was then sent to therapy every Wednesday. I suppose it helped.

The really good thing about therapy, though, was not so much the elliptical conversations in that romper room about my childhood; it was that the original Ben & Jerry’s ice cream shop was around the corner from the office. You just walked up this crooked alley and lo! resplendent in an eternal spot of sunshine glowed the white former gas station that housed Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, or so it seemed to me.

This was the late 1970’s. This was the day before you could trot out to your local superstore and buy a pint of superpremium ice cream. This was the day before “gelato” was a common word. This was when your only ice cream option was Breyer’s or Hood or maybe Häagen-Dazs, if you were extraordinarily lucky. These were the days when the dark days of ice cream were just beginning to glimmer with light, and rising effulgent on the crepuscular ice cream horizon was Ben & Jerry’s.

The original Ben & Jerry’s shop formed the blueprint for the happy-shiny-friendly, primary-colored, Woody-Jackson-cow-featuring, round-lettered shop ubiquitous to malls from Tel Aviv to Bogota of today’s ice cream utopia. But the original one, as yet untouched by the taint of public ownership or wide distribution, was funky. It had dark corners and weird big plants and lots of hippy-design touches, including the use of the phrase “Today’s Orgasmic Flavors” over the board listing the ice cream flavors. Now the slogan on the board has been neutered as a pup; go into a Ben & Jerry’s, and you’ll read “Today’s Euphoric Flavors”; there’s still a happy adjective, however it’s a far moan from “orgasmic.”

(In those days, there was no question of the intimate relations between ice cream and sex, or how sometimes one replaces the other, follows it, or augments it. Today, that relationship has been suppressed, like so many other intrinsically sexy things.)

Every Wednesday after my therapeutic fifty minutes with Whatever Her Name Was, I walked the snakey block to Ben & Jerry’s, and I got a little dish of ice cream. My favorite flavor then was White Russian. Sometimes if I was feeling self indulgent, I would get hot fudge on top, and if I was feeling spectacularly so, I would have the ice cream person plop the scoop in a mug of hot chocolate. (To this day, I still crave something sweet after my therapy. Go figure.)

Usually, my ice cream server was a woman, a specific woman. A woman with short brown hair and almond-colored skin. My particular ice cream server seemed kind of, well, old to me, though I doubt now she was much more than twenty-two or so. She would see me walking in through the door, and she would bound toward the counter, appearing to vibrate with energy. She bounced on the soles of her feet. She seemed spring-loaded.

I’d try to order my ice cream. She would barrage me with questions. What was my name? Where did I live? What did I do? Every week she learned something new, something more about me. Every week, I cringed and flushed under her bouncy, bounding barrage. Every week, I found myself unable to not answer. Every week, I felt a sense of relief when I finally walked out the door, ice cream in hand, even when the temperature outside made my breath hang in the air like ghost moss.

Every Wednesday, another therapy appointment, another ice cream, another chance for the dark, vibrating chick behind the counter to ask me more. How old was I? Why always White Russian? What was I doing this weekend? What did I like to do in my spare time?

I like to read, I said. And write. You know, hang out, I said. I was flummoxed.

Did I like movies? Yes, I did.

Did I someday want to come over, eat ice cream, read, write and watch a movie with her? She asked. Her smile spread wide across her face.

I cringed. I blushed. I smiled. I flustered. She was just so…bold. So certain and so unflinching in the face of my obvious pink-twitchy panic. She looked like she liked this-all of it-my inexperience, my discomfort, her power, and my refusal to avoid the one place in the whole universe where I could get Wednesday’s orgasmic flavor. She was safe behind her counter, all white-apron power and galvanized metal ice cream scoop. I was vulnerable, the humble succulent supplicant in this great dairy temple. I stammered something comprised of random consonants and vowels, clutched my ice cream and fled.

The next Wednesday, after therapy, I went back. I thought about not going, but I resolved that no bouncy discomfiting woman was going to stand between me and my cone. I went back, and she tried again, she asked me out, and I stammered no, and left with cone in hand. We repeated this game, this dance, and each time I felt less like the bug on the head of the pin until she stopped, melted, faded away and left only this story’s sticky psychic residue.


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