Ice Cream Sunday
by Carley Doktorski
New York University
Carley Doktorski is part of the Class of 2025 at New York University majoring in English with a minor in Creative Writing. She spent three years working at a local news outlet in her hometown before realizing she'd rather write her own stories than write about real ones. She has been published in Jersey Shore Online and TAPinto East Brunswick. In her free time, she inhales a lot of coffee, pets a lot of dogs, and watches too much 20/20.
Wednesday nights were for Neapolitan ice cream, unless Robert said otherwise. Crystal glass, low-fat whipped cream, and a cherry with the stem picked off. She’d be careful to swipe the scooper all the way across the carton, a half-gallon tub. Right to left, vanilla to strawberry, strawberry to chocolate. It was a seamless maneuver, down to a science. Robert hated when there wasn’t enough chocolate. And so Joan stood, motionless in the glow of the freezer, wondering how to tell him they’d run out of ice cream. He was calling from the TV room as she stared into the empty carton, the white empty tub blinding in the freezer light.
“Joan? What the hell is taking so long? Shut the door of the fridge, you’re going to run up the electricity bill again, dammit.”
Shit. She held her breath, thinking of how to phrase the news.
“I–I think I’ll just have to run to ACME. I shouldn’t be too long, fifteen minutes at most. I was stupid. I just–I suppose I didn’t realize we’d run out of ice cream last Monday.” She shouldn’t have let her voice waver like that, shouldn’t let this grown man-baby scare her. But Robert did.
She’d been cooking Robert’s mother’s dishes for decades, German cuisine she didn’t care for, complete with Neapolitan ice cream for dessert. Joan had grown up in a big family,
Italian-American, living on top of one another in a two-family house in Newark. Sisters in one room, brothers in the other. Cousins in the downstairs apartment. She’d never known a love like the one her parents had for one another, the way they’d taunt and tease with a glimmer in their eyes, arguing over who had fallen first while playing in the sandbox at six and seven years old. She hadn’t made her mother’s pasta in years. Where had she gone wrong? She padded in her slippers to the TV room, where Robert was lounging in the recliner like an Egyptian pharaoh. His eyes narrowed at her.
“Why didn’t you put it on the list on Monday? It’s not like dessert ever changes, Joan. Only you, God. Only you could forget something after doing it the same way for the past, what, fifty something years?”
She waited for him to finish.
“You know what? Forget it, it’s fine,” he said.
Joan watched Robert struggle to push himself out of the cushions, refusing to use his walker again. She rolled her eyes when he looked at her expectantly, but put an arm out anyway for him to lean on. She backed away once he was up, and they stared at one another in the silence, ESPN blaring in the background. Joan broke it.
“Fifty-seven.”
“What?”
“Fifty seven years, Robert. That’s how long we’ve been married. Did you forget about tomorrow?”
He took a step forward, forgetting himself for a moment, and for a second she thought he’d apologize. Pull out a bouquet of roses or something. Hug her. Say he loved her, that of course he wouldn’t forget their anniversary, that he was in a bad mood, that’s all, like a normal married couple. He didn’t.
“And what if I did, Joan? Every goddamn day with you goes the same way. It’s like having a robot instead of a wife!”
Robert was shaking, his voice rising, the red splotches spreading in his pale cheeks. Joan shrunk back, skittering back to the kitchen in her slippers. Robert followed, plopping himself down in the chair at the head of their eat-in set, like always.
“I didn’t mean that Bobbie, I didn’t mean anything. It’s just–it was like—”
“Like what, Joan? Like what? You know what, go to ACME, get the fucking ice cream, and don’t come bac—” Robert stopped as the sound of the front door jiggling open. Their son, Daniel, called into the void they’d created.
“Mom? Dad? Hello?” Joan and Robert blinked at one another. Robert jerked his head toward the door. Say something.
“Yes hon, in the kitchen. You can talk to your father, I was just about to—” Joan glanced over at Robert, whose face had gone slack, having sunk down deeper into the chair. “Go to ACME.”
Robert had begun to tremble, his hands traveling up to his chest. She grabbed her purse from where it was hanging on the end of her chair as Daniel strode past her.
“Be back in fifteen,” she called.
“Mom, wait! What’s wrong with him?” She turned around to a blue-faced Robert, who had begun gurgling, choking, as if trying to suck the life out of her had taken it all out of him. She shuffled back into the kitchen.
“Not sure,” she said, and picked up the plate of leftover grilled chicken.
She’d have to put it in a tupperware before she left anyway. Robert would be furious if she let all that go to waste. She heard a crash behind her, but it sounded far away, as if she and Robert were on different planes of existence, one where they’d never made this life together. She turned around to Daniel doing chest compressions, tears running down his cheeks as she stood there with her back to the cabinets. After a while, she slid down, knees against chest, his plate of grilled chicken still in her hands, watching, until she remembered she was supposed to put it in the tupperware. So she stood up, she always stood up, and laid a cutting board on the counter, and began to cut the chicken into smaller and smaller pieces, ones she imagined sliding down his throat, no jaw muscles required. He seemed to be struggling with those, at the moment.
“Mom! Did you hear me? What the hell are you doing? Get the fucking phone, for Christ’s sake.” Daniel had finally acknowledged her, or perhaps it was the other way around. He was still doing compressions, glancing back at her over his shoulder. She stared at him, eyes blank. What had he asked?
“You know, forget it, I’ve got it,” Daniel said, and began dialing 911 on his cell.
And it occurred to Joan that she hadn’t thought of that at all, and the sound of her husband choking on air faded further into the background, and it was just her and Daniel, who was so much taller than she remembered, who had stopped by to visit, who was yelling at the woman who used to tie his shoes in the morning to save his father’s life.
She stared at him blankly, into those murky brown eyes that resembled Robert’s far more than hers, which were more a light honey--she pondered this.
“Oh,” she murmured. “I just, I think— I think if he wants to go, Dan, we should let him.”
Her words hung in the air as Daniel took them in, brows knitted in disbelief.
“What the actual hell, Mom?”
Daniel’s screams reverberated through her spine, up and down, and the scene came back into focus. Robert, on the ground, wheezing, his presence filling the room again like it always did, even while dying. Destroying the vacuum of peace she’d felt at long last.
1, 2, 3. Clear.
She had never ridden in the back of an ambulance before.
Clear.
A small bump on the monitor. Then another. We got something. A woman in scrubs, holding her hand in the waiting room. The smell of rubbing alcohol sticking to her apron. A ride back home. Get some rest, it’ll do you good.
She never did get the ice cream.
~
The scooper clattered across the linoleum as Joan’s gut clenched. It had slipped from her fingers, she supposed. She peered at them, flexing, as if she could stretch the arthritis out with sheer force. Robert’s heart monitor was still pinging, reverberating through her skull. Front to back, back to front. Her granddaughter, Madeline, was supposed to take her back to Liberty Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit today. She wasn’t so sure that she wanted to.
She’d been thinking about making herself a sundae while she did the grocery list, until she forgot about the reason they’d fought last night in the first place.
It was almost eleven thirty, when she and Robert would be leaving to go grocery shopping tomorrow. Robert liked to be there on off-hours, and the aisles were quiet on Mondays. It had always been off-putting to Joan. She slammed the freezer shut, sighing.
It didn’t matter if she finished the list. She supposed she didn’t need to keep Robert’s schedule anymore, not until he came home again. She had nothing, no one, to wait on but herself. All she had were memories, floating around her house like a phantom.
Robert was everywhere, she’d begun to realize. The food in the pantry, the kitchen’s peeling wallpaper, the Lincoln in the driveway she wasn’t allowed to take out. Taking up space, boxing her in. Where she ended and Robert began, she wasn’t sure. All she knew was that she wasn’t sure how to live without him. She was still standing in front of the refrigerator, searching for some revelation she’d been missing. Perhaps the doctor was wrong. The thought of her recent diagnosis seemed absurd, now. Dementia. It seemed so far-fetched. All Joan could do was remember.
In approximately six hours and thirty two minutes, Robert would have been home from work, had he still been working. Joan’s hair would have been a bit blonder, her stature a bit taller, her now tattered apron still crisp.
She would have held her breath as his car pulled into the driveway, counting to six before the exhale, because she hated odd numbers. She still did. She would have smoothed her curls down in the reflection of the bay window.How long since she had had her roots done?
Her temple would get shiny with sweat, and she’d panic, because he wouldn’t like that. So she’d cuss under her breath, careful not to let the kids hear her upstairs, stalking over to her purse on those low pumps she could still wear back then, breaking out the compact he’d brought her back from a Paris business trip, dabbing away at her nerves under 9x magnification. He had said he had liked the smell of that compact.
She’d pour his Sam Adams into a pint glass next, three quarters of the way. At this time of year, it’d be the Winter Ale. She’d set it on the table beside his reading chair, flick his banker’s lamp on, then off again--along with the family room overheads. It would come back to bite her on the electricity bill. But that was years ago.
Joan was pacing now, remembering, remembering, walking back and forth through a house that remained a testament to the world they married into. Children of the Great Depression, kids really. She was twenty. Their furniture would remain second hand, their house an eclectic disarray of decades. Joan’s feet padded silently through the fully carpeted living room before circling back to the kitchen.
“Gram?”
Joan whipped her head around. She hadn’t even noticed Madeline walk in. Her granddaughter stopped in her tracks.
“I was driving up to Liberty to see Gramps--I thought…”
Joan’s granddaughter, nineteen now, was standing in the middle of the kitchen, eyes glassy, hands hanging limply at her sides. The irises were honey, like hers. Funny how that worked. She had no idea what to say, Joan could tell. No concept, no frame of reference for how to deal with a delirious elderly woman. She hadn’t been raised to know how to play nurse when necessary, thank God. She hoped Madeline never became a nurse, in all honesty. Or worse yet, a wife to a perpetual patient. Her granddaughter's mouth opened, then closed again like a guppy. Tentatively, she scooted into the seat in the corner, the one where Joan used to feed her grilled cheese sandwiches and milk with Chips Ahoys as a baby. Joan sat in the chair beside her. They stared at one another in the mid-morning light.
“Robert hasn’t come home for dinner yet,” Joan said. “Should I call the office, do you think? I better, just to make sure he left on time. I already accounted for traffic. But stay awhile, Maddie. Let me take your coat.”
Madeline gazed at Joan as if she were an apparition of a grandma, or one that already had one foot in her husband’s grave. Joan realized her mistake.
“God, sorry, I have no idea what got to me, there. I’d just been taking a trip down memory lane, I suppose, and got caught up in it. Are you still going to the hospital, Maddie?”
Madeline said nothing for a few moments, and Joan remembered when she would sit on the couch with her granddaughter perched on the bay window, watching the headlights of her parents’ car disappear down Orchard Drive. Maddie used to hate when Daniel and his wife, Janie, went out to eat. She’d stare out into the darkness, a hand to the glass, reaching out for something she was afraid of never getting back.
It was this exact look Madeline was giving her now. Like someone was disappearing. This look was a guaranteed precursor to tantrums, back in the day. But Madeline just grabbed Joan's hand from across the table. Her fingers were long and freshly manicured, and very much not sticky anymore. She was squeezing too hard.
“Gram, you remember right? Gramps--” she paused. “Robert…”
“Yes, of course. Ouch Mads,” she released her hand from the iron grip of her granddaughter and shook it out. “Too tight.”
“He’s at Liberty, remember? And he retired, well I guess he retired 15 years ago now, you’d know better than me.”
“Yes, Maddie, I know.”
“Gram I—I have to take you to Liberty, I’m sorry, I know, I mean...you know I can’t stand hospitals either, but Dad is there, and they’re worried, and I--”
“Maddie.”
Madison stopped rambling, and Joan grabbed her hand this time, gently.
“Would you take me to church first?” Joan asked.
Madeline glanced at the clock. They’d missed noon mass, but Joan didn’t care. Maddie grabbed her keys without answering. Joan knew she would.
~
Joan processed up the aisle of St. Thomas the Apostle Church as the chapel emptied out, wondering if she’d need a funeral outfit soon. She wanted to sit in the front row.
She could go old Italian widow, with an ankle length potato bag of a dress, but she didn’t want to feel trapped by Robert’s death, couldn’t fathom spending the next twenty years with that wearing black. No, she would go Jackie Kennedy. She wondered if it was too soon to get a pill cap. She’d have to ask Maddie to do her Amazon order. Then she could start stitching the tulle veil over the front.
She could hear Maddie’s quiet pacing in the vestibule, soft and purposeful, keeping the beat of a clock she wished would hurry up and give her a time of death already. She needed to brace herself, or remember why she stayed for him, or maybe why she loved him--probably all three. The slow march of Maddie’s sneakers slapping the tile was ruining the moment.
“Mads, why don’t you come sit in one of the pews? It’s too quiet in here for that.”
The clomping slowed to small echoes that bounced off the chapel ceilings. She could still feel her granddaughter’s eyes, seering into Joan from a distance. She had big doe eyes, Madeline. More alien-ish, when she thought about it. She got the shape from Daniel’s wife, Janie. Dan had married a Wall Street woman with a French accent and outfits that had consistently made Joan feel frumpy for the past two decades. She had a steely bluegaze that never sat right with her. Robert had loved Janie, of course. She and Daniel were practically leading a conquest of Corporate America together. Dan had climbed up the ranks at Apple quickly while Janie lorded over stocks at Goldman Sachs. It was always business casual in that household. And Robert had come to a conclusion that there was no better person for Daniel to marry than a woman who could Swiffer while managing hedge funds. Joan was glad Maddie’s eyes were honey.
“Sorry, it’s just hard to feel, you know, at peace or anything here for—” Maddie said.
But Maddie’s words faded into the background as Joan reached the front row of pews. She remembered when Robert had stood here beside her fifty eight years ago today. It was their anniversary. She remembered the way he had squeezed her wrists for shaking so hard, how she had rubbed Vaseline over the red welts on their honeymoon night. It had marked the start of an already growing symbiosis. She had been bred to sleep and breathe homemaking. And Robert? Well, he’d been waiting for that armchair his whole life. She remembered their first date at the drive in.
“Should we get some popcorn?” Joan had asked.
“Sure thanks, just a medium bucket and a coke.”
She settled into the front pew as the church grew quiet, closing her eyes. Perhaps she had opened the door to a lifetime of giving him sodas.
~
July 3rd, 1967
They had painted his room sage, the color of summer, to match his name. August. Robert had stuck his palm in the paint tray to make a handprint on her overalls. Her laughter had filled the empty nursery when she did the same, their imprints forming a heart on the denim. The sage and the summer cloaked them in something, something that finally felt like happiness. They’d been married two years, but it was like having a crush on him all over again. When he kissed her goodnight, then kissed his hand and pressed it to her belly. Whispers in the early morning, instead of crickets.
“I like you like this.”
Hands clasped on the front porch of their ranch, the floorboards creaking under the weight of their bodies. She smiled up at him. She’d have to get the boards checked out.
“Like what?” He replied. He was looking right at her.
They were eye level on the stoopJoan had no other words for it, and let the balmy breezes and distant barbecues encapsulate them in heat and hotdogs. It felt fleeting, whatever this was, a dimension destined to slip away into another lifetime. Like every August, she supposed.
It was the high of that summer she’d spend forty-five years chasing. She'd cling to it, in a hospital room two months later, in a support group she’d never spoken out loud in, with her back to the door of an empty bedroom with sage walls she never got to paint dragonflies on. When Robert was God knows where in the early morning hours, as the tears fell onto the belly of a girl she hoped would make him happy, but wouldn’t.
And Robert was having none of Joan’s defense that really, it was his job to give the Y chromosome anyway. And no amount of praying he did could get rid of the imagined scars on her wrists from the wedding day. And he never could reconcile that the son he wanted first came second--Danny. And the only things he ever really gave her were those memories and a wedding band.
How could she even have said it, with their knees touching under the porch light, his hand in her hair, in bottled moments tucked away with the cicadas.
“Like you’re in love with me.”
~
“Joan, is that you?”
It was Cathy. Cathy knew it was Joan. Joan slowly turned her head to watch the woman click-clacking down the aisle, with the ferocity of a flower girl determined to get to the altar without falling in her new patent leather heels.
“I was just about to run over to the hospital myself. How’s he doing? God, do we go back. I was going to pick him up something on the way--we can bring it to him together. Godivas maybe?”
“Cathy, he’s unconscious.”
“Don’t worry about it Joan, I’ll pay. Give me three minutes and we can leave together, I was just dropping off the ironed church linens and saw you here, and I wasn’t sure if I should, well...” she looked down at Joan, who was now sitting cross-legged on a pew. “Disturb. But I couldn’t take it. I just...I can’t stop thinking about Rob.”
Cathy took every possible opportunity to flaunt her status as head of the Altar Linen ministry. Joan sighed—audibly. Cathy continued.
“We were friends in grade school, you know. Until I went to St. Thomas Aquinas and he went to play football at St. Joes. Did he ever show you a tape? God, never seen a high-school receiver so damn fast as Bobbie.”
Robert had never picked up a ball of any kind again after high school. Wouldn’t play with Daniel in the backyard, wouldn’t coach his Little League baseball team when there was an open slot. As far as Joan was concerned, he wouldn’t even look at his own. Robert walked a good walk, she’d give him that. The Robert Cathy knew sure as hell held a lot more intrigue than the adult diaper-wearing man she tended to.
“Yes, well, we all have our moments.” She attempted to sidestep Cathy, who was blocking her escape from the pew. That’s when the emerald tennis bracelet on her left wrist flashed under the lights. Joan sucked in her breath.
It wasn’t like she hadn’t seen the charge from Kay Jewelers in her and Roberts’ joint account, the dumbass. She’d looked up the bracelet he’d bought with the return number and everything. It was gorgeous, more expensive than anything Robert would allow her to have. She’d known there was a woman for a year, had suspected since she opened the bill last December, right before Christmas. The only thing she didn’t realize was that the lucky woman was so close to home.
Joan supposed Robert had met his match in the dumbass department with Cathy.
“Well, I’ll just grab my jacket from the rectory and we can get—” Cathy turned abruptly, eyes bright, after noticing a poster on her way out of the chapel.
“By the way Joanie, have you seen the pilgrimage trip to the Vatican this fall?”
Joan continued to walk down the aisle to collect Madeline, but Cathy scuttled over toward Joan again on those grotesque-looking kitten heels, leaning close.
“When Robert recovers, you know, you may need some time away. You can, well, relax, and all of us St. Thomas' women will be there to support him...both of you.”
Joan blinked into the skylight, watching the dust above the tabernacle shimmer in a faint sunbeam, if only to block the tears in her eyes from reaching her cheeks. She sat back down in a pew.
“Yes,” she said, glancing at the emeralds once more before meeting Cathy’s green eyes. Tasteful, Robert. She forced a tight smile, choking back whatever was making her throat close, her lip quiver. “I’ll certainly think about it.”
Joan, who wanted nothing more than to see Italy. Robert, who was afraid of flying after shitting himself on army planes during his tour. Joan, who’d never been on a plane as a result. And Cathy, fucking Cathy, presuming Joan’s fragile state would render her blind enough to not notice that she was a widowed vulture of a woman.
She turned her back again and continued down the aisle with slow, measured steps before pausing, as if absentmindedly—Joan wanted her to know she saw it.
“That’s such a lovely bracelet by the way, Cath. You’ll have to tell me your jeweler.”
And with that, she left Cathy at the altar.
Joan looked down at the rosary beads in the church parking lot. Maddie tooted the horn lightly, but Joan waved her off. The beads felt safe there, weighing down the same palm he’d squeezed under that flickering porchlight. She brushed a thumb over the crucifix, gazing up at the church bells chiming. She hoped that meant someone was listening. Our Father, Who art in heaven, she whispered. I hope by tomorrow he’s dead.
~
“You’re sure you don’t want me to drop you off? Dad says he’s stable now, nothing to worry about, but…”
“I’m fine, Maddie, really.”
“I’m sure he’d like to see you, though. I could—”
“I’m ok. Thanks though, honey.”
Joan hugged Madeline, who always stiffened at the thought of being touched before sinking into the embrace. She understood the feeling. Joan scooped the groceries they’d bought for her on the way home from the back seat. She walked up the steps, digging a heel into the loose board they’d never fixed. She heard a satisfying crack.
This time it was Joan’s hand at the window, pulling back the curtains as Madeline’s Hyundai haphazardly backed out of the driveway. Joan dropped the groceries on the kitchen table, putting the perishables in the fridge. She turned on each and every light then, methodically, walking from room to room like the phantom the world supposed her to be. She saved the banker's lamp for last before stepping into the kitchen.
The scooper was still on the floor as the cuckoo clock they’d never fixed began to chime…10. That’s how many clots he had. It was only 1 pm, though. She opened the drawer for utensils. He liked the small spoon for ice cream. She grabbed the big one. The freezer was beckoning to her, drawing her out of herself and into that carton of Neopolitan she’d bought for him, and it occurred to Joan right then and there that she also needed whipped cream. She grabbed both, and left the door of the fridge and the freezer open. She hated cherries.
Joan sat in Robert’s seat at the table. The phone began ringing, but she wasn’t getting it. He’d been trying to make it back to the TV room from this seat when he crashed. Away from her. The cushions were molded to his body, and the carton was cold, and she hated chocolate, and the vanilla had those little black flecks in it that she loved, and how did she never notice? And then she was climbing in, in, in, carving her way to the bottom of the vanilla section, and she didn’t really mind strawberry, and she’d forgotten the whipped cream and God, she’d also forgotten how good it felt to put it right on her tongue and the phone was ringing, but she wouldn’t answer this time. And the cherries were still in the fridge and dammit, she hated cherries. Mom,what the actual hell? She yanked open the fridge door and smashed the glass jar, red ooze spilling over white tile, leaving the chocolate to melt in the carton on the table. And the phone was still ringing, ringing, and Robert was screaming at her, she could hear him from the hospital, yelling at Joan to grab the receiver from the family room, to stop being rude, but Joan hated being the one to pick it up, and he couldn’t touch her from here. If he wants to go, Dan, we should let him. So she let it go to voicemail, listening to the dial tone, luxuriating in the stillness the sound brought about inside her. Hello Mrs. David, I’m calling on behalf of Liberty Hospital regarding your husb—Joan pressed the red button on the landline. The heart monitor in the back of her head flatlined, thank goodness. It was getting quite annoying. She couldn’t think before. And the bells of Saint Peter’s Basilica began to chime with the cuckoo, and she could hear them, she felt so close. Eyes to the crack in the ceiling, to wherever he was. She wondered if the Sistine Chapel would smell like freedom too. This time, grabbing the grocery list from the counter, she didn’t hesitate. Joan put vanilla ice cream at the top.