While this story is set in the modern day, it has some loose connections to a century earlier, at least here and there. I hope you enjoy it. F.S.
When I came back from the East Coast in Spring, I felt that I wanted the World to be a simpler place. A safer place, away from the riotous emotional trauma that had left me with a heart that was in urgent need of reassembly. That is, assuming that all its pieces could even be located with any surety.
It was the first warm day, and the daffodils and crocuses were beginning to advertise their vibrant arrival. With the Sun bright in a flawless, azure sky, I'd determined to take a trip out to Mezny's. It wasn't far, and everyone who was anyone said that they made the best ice cream in the state. With the crystallIne lens of retrospection, there was also an, at the time barely acknowledged, element of revivifying my younger days. Quite simply, it had been one of my favorite things to do when growing up in the area.
The soulless interstate was quicker, but I opted for the slower, but more picturesque, route. I soon left the tarnished gilt of the city's railroad-era buildings behind, and drove down empty, winding roads laced between sparse houses, scattered woods, and open farmland. The vistas and the buildings were all etched into my mind, evocative of an earlier and more tranquil time.
In not more than twenty minutes, the distinctive dark blue silos of my dairy destination appeared over the newly decked tree-tops. The lot was a turbid tumult of parked and parking vehicles; ones generally suited to the accommodation of families. The good weather had clearly prompted the same idea in others as it had in me. But I nevertheless found a slot and joined the lengthy line in the shop. I must have been the only person not to be accompanied by their kids.
There were two servers behind the counter. Taking orders, filling paper cups, erecting edifices of infeasibly high ice cream based on sturdy conical foundations. The boy - he was obviously a boy, he looked like a highschooler - had curly hair and glasses; his complexion lent weight to my estimation of his age.
The woman? Yes woman, I had hesitated, but it was the appropriate nomenclature, if perhaps a title she had acquired only recently, and wore with some uncertainty. I thought I knew her. It had been three years since I had been in these parts for anything beyond a mandatory and fleeting Christmas visit, and yet I was convinced that it was her.
Her brown hair was threaded through the back of a battered Mezny's baseball cap. Below the peak, her face was round, her friendly smile guileless, and her nose and cheeks smudged with many brown blotches. There was something almost cartoon-like about her appearance. Her features were maybe a little too large, and a little too unbalanced, for classical beauty. But there was an immanent, though intangible, aspect to her; maybe as simple as an all too rare warmth of personality. And she exuded an air of being genuinely pleased to serve her customers.
She wore a pale yellow, chocolate stained T-shirt. But this was not what drew my perhaps overly attentive eye. With an obvious suppression of guilt, it was her black athletic leggings that engaged my attention. Or - trying to live up to my late father's regular exhortations to honesty - what was underneath the tight material. While the featureless flatness of the front of her T-shirt was inconclusive, the curve of her hips and the pertness of her butt spoke loudly of emergent womanhood. And when she bent to select a waffle cone from a low shelf on the rear wall, it was beyond my meager will not to stare.
Many years ago, I had reached an uneasy accommodation with myself upon the subject of scrutinizing the female form. I apprehended that I was a mere man. My sex was, perhaps cruelly, programmed to do just this. The weak justification I made to myself was that this tendency was simply part of being male. My rule was, it is fine to look, to enjoy looking, so long as it never veers into intrusiveness. A convenient rule, I freely admit.
I considered it was when things went beyond simple appreciation that intentions devolved into the macabre and outré. Secure in my rationalization, I looked and I appreciated. And I told myself to guard against any inappropriate escalation. Still, as the line moved forward, I found myself hoping that the curly-haired boy would serve the family of four in front of me.
The patron saint of the recently divorced was smiling on me, and soon so was she. "What can I get you?" my muse said brightly.
"It's Jordan, right? Jordan Becker?" The question had left my too eager lips before I'd even thought about it.
I received an initial look of incomprehension, then her broad smile returned. "Yeah, and you're... Nick..." She paused, her brow furrowed in thought, trying to retrieve a reluctant memory. "Nick Dreieck, right?"
I benefited from an even more expansive smile - which only further emphasized the cartoon-like element of her appearance. But one that spoke unmistakably of a generosity of spirit that was in all too short supply in recent years. My server was clearly pleased at her mental acuity in having retrieved my recherché family name. But her sincere visage never displayed the slightest trace of any vanity.
I nodded, swiftly overwhelmed by sudden shyness, for reasons I didn't fully comprehend. Was it her transition from an object to be observed to a human to be interacted with? Or was I merely overthinking? Perhaps the messy aftermath of a marital schism is more than enough to promote unhealthy self-analysis.
I realized that I'd been mentally wandering, preoccupied by my own thoughts. Jordan still smiled patiently at me, but I was acutely aware of the line behind.
"I... can I have a small peanut butter chocolate in a... a waffle cone please...?" after a pause, whose duration I thought rather too long for comfort, I added, "thank you, Jordan."
Again the smile. Was its extent of greater magnitude than those she had favored on previous customers, or was this just an optimistic artifact of my overactive imagination? "Sure, Mr Dreieck," she said.
"Nick... just Nick," I insisted. It seemed important to do so.
"Sure, Nick," she replied, and again I was enchanted by the sight of her bending to retrieve another cone. My feelings were now increasingly confused and conflicted. I averted my eyes, without - it had to be said - successfully wiping the image of Jordan's appealing derrière entirely from my mind. I don't even like waffle cones, and I began to feel compromised, having ordered one. Had I become the sort of man I cordially disliked? I could only hope not.
As Jordan scooped and then asked if I wanted sprinkles, an older woman tapped her on the shoulder. "You can take your break now, honey."
Her smile at that news rather shattered my daydream that I could be somehow special. What a foolish idea! I should know better. I do know better.
I prepared to pay and take my leave, when Jordan said, "Want me to keep you company while you eat that ice cream, Mr Dreieck... sorry, Nick?"
This time there was no mistaking the breadth of Jordan's grin, and I heard a voice saying, "That would be great." It was a voice with which I was intimately acquainted.
She grabbed a Pepsi from one of the coolers and together we went to find a seat outside.
The roadside tables bore scars of winters past, their white paint cracked and flaking, but the slatted benches of the first five were nevertheless already occupied. The air rang with frustrated parents admonishing cream-smeared offspring, and siblings screaming their insistent accusations of petty misdemeanors at each other. Jordan and I moved further down toward the cow barn, its primal reek meant fewer people, but for me the friendly, bovine aroma evoked pleasant childhood reminiscences.
