The Guy Not Taken (5 page)

“Cut that out,” I mouthed. Nicki shrugged and put the knife down.

“Honey, what’s wrong?” demanded the exasperated mother.

“Really, it’s only cherry sauce,” the waitress insisted.

The little boy was unconvinced. “Blood!” he yelled.

“Fine!” said his mother. “No dessert, then.”

This suited the little customer just fine. He bolted from the booth and dashed toward the door, leaving a melting conehead and an inspired Nicki behind him.

•   •   •

For the two weeks that they lasted, Nicki Krystal’s creative coneheads became the talk of the town. Nicki styled herself the artiste of ice cream and, with coneheads as her canvas and a thirty-seven-flavor palette, she was wildly inventive. The specials, which she’d display on hand-lettered cardboard signs affixed to the “Flavors of the Day” list, were increasingly gruesome, which made them, of course, tremendously popular among the town’s teenagers.

There was the Asphyxiated Conehead, made with blueberry
ice cream; and the Apoplectic Conehead, made with strawberry ice cream; and the Conehead with a Skin Condition, made with peppermint stick. A Conehead with Lice had white shots in its whipped-cream hair. The Bloody Conehead featured strawberry ripple ice cream and strawberry sauce; the Drooling Conehead had caramel oozing over its chin.

Nicki’s friends loved it. They’d line up at the counter and cram six or seven to a four-person booth, demanding all manner of diseased, deformed, and dying coneheads: Conehead with a Cold (marshmallow topping dripping from where the nose should have been), Cyclops Conehead (one eye, a Hershey’s Kiss), Nauseous Conehead (gaping chocolate syrup mouth spewing great frothy quantities of Reese’s Pieces and whipped cream). Business was booming. Tips were stellar. The manager, Tim, didn’t know what to do, but he was certain that my sister’s inventions were far from standard Friendly’s procedure.

He sat Nicki down over a late lunch one Friday before her shift began. Tim was having a Big Beef Patty Melt with a double order of fries. Nicki, a picky eater, was having a scoop of tuna fish, a pickle, six olives, a handful of crackers, and a conehead of her own creation for dessert.

She came to the table expecting praise, perhaps even a promotion. “So, Tim,” she said, spearing an olive with her fork, “I hear we’re about to be named Friendly’s of the Month in the Farmington Valley region.”

“Nicki,” said Tim, “just what is going on with the cone-heads?”

Nicki gave a nonchalant shrug.

“Are you making them the way the manual says?”

“I may have taken a few liberties,” she said.

Tim shook his head. “Liberties.” He picked up Nicki’s dessert and turned it slowly in his hands: a Satanic Conehead, with beetling black licorice brows and “666” written out in
chocolate shots underneath its cone hat. For a long, silent moment he perused the conehead, considering its every angle. “This is no dessert for a Christian.”

“I,” Nicki pointed out, snatching her conehead back across the table, “am not a Christian.” She spooned up a big mouthful of ice cream and sauce. “Mmm-mmm good!”

Tim sighed. “Make the coneheads regular, okay? Like they show them in the manual.”

Nicki shook her head. “That would thwart my creativity.”

Tim clasped his hands in an attitude of prayer. “Nicki,” he said, “maybe you should consider looking for a job at a place where your creativity will be more appreciated. For now,” he added, “regular coneheads. I insist.”

Nicki got to her feet, untied her apron, and flung it on the floor. “You know what? I don’t need this crap. I don’t need this job,” she said. “I quit.”

•   •   •

For the last week of summer Nicki spent her afternoons in front of the TV, reacquainting herself with the doings of the denizens of Santa Barbara and Springfield and General Hospital. When the sun set and the temperature dropped, she’d make her way to the kitchen to work on her magnum opus: Portrait of a Family in Coneheads.

When she’d gone to Friendly’s to pick up her final paycheck, she’d taken a few items home with her: a round ice-cream scooper and a whipped-cream dispenser. To this arsenal she had added some new toys: a series of small tubes full of food colorings—red and brown, neon green and electric blue.

Four coneheads were already lined up in the freezer. Jon’s conehead had brown M&M eyes and the hopeful caramel hint of a mustache above its upper lip. My conehead had green LifeSaver glasses and pointy banana chunks for bosoms. The Mom conehead had shredded coconut hair and floated on watery
waves of blue icing, while Nicki’s self-portrait, the Beauty Queen Conehead, had an updo of the glossiest Hershey’s syrup topped with a tiara made of crushed toffee. There was only one conehead left to make, and Nicki took her time as she crafted the glasses and selected the perfect chocolate shavings for the beard.

Finally she called the family into the kitchen, and the four of us stood around the butcher-block island, staring at her final creation.

Mom, in her swimsuit, pronounced it a perfect likeness.

“It’s really good,” I said, picking up discarded chocolate shavings with a fingertip and slipping them into my mouth.

“Not bad,” Jon acknowledged, leaning his tennis racket against the wall.

We considered the conehead until it started to melt.

“We should dump it in the garbage disposal,” I said.

“Send it to the collection agencies,” said Jon.

“Or maybe we could feed it to Milo,” I said.

Nicki smiled as she handed out the spoons. “We can’t let good ice cream go to waste.” She filled her spoon with ice cream and sauce and raised it in a toast. “To us,” she said. Four spoons clinked together over the figure of my father in ice cream. Mom and Nicki and Jon each took a single ceremonial bite before drifting away—my mother back to the pool, Nicki back to the television set, Jon back onto his bike and out into the night. I stayed in the kitchen with my spoon in my hand and the dog hovering hopefully at my feet, and I ate, scooping up ice cream faster and faster as an icepick of pain descended between my eyebrows, spooning through the hair and the eyes and the nose and the mouth, eating until I felt sick, until every bite of it was gone.

T
RAVELS WITH
N
ICKI

I
stood in front of gate C-12 in the Newark airport, waiting for Nicki. I had taken the train from Princeton to Newark. My sister was soon to arrive from Boston, and, after an hour layover, which we’d planned to spend in the frequent-flier lounge, we’d be on our way off for a week in Fort Lauderdale with our grandmother and, eventually, our mother and our brother, Jon.

From my vantage point at the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, I watched my sister’s plane lumber toward the gate. Passengers struggling with luggage or wrangling fussy babies piled out of the walkway. I shifted my backpack from one shoulder to the other and checked my watch. When I looked up, Nicki was stomping into the lounge, dragging her duffel bag, looking mightily displeased.

At nineteen, Nicki could probably still pass for a twelve-year-old, in her ratty canvas sneakers, white overalls, and faded Run-DMC T-shirt, and with an oversize lime-green wind-breaker tied around her waist. Her purse, a little number in black silk and gold sequins, which I recognized as one of our mother’s ancient cast-offs, was slung across her chest, and dangling from a leather cord around her neck was a tiny plastic vase with fake flowers and blue plastic water. Her dark brown curls
were piled haphazardly on her head, and her little mouth was pursed in its customary frown.

I bent down to hug her. “Hi, Nicki.”

She sidestepped my embrace, air-kissed my cheek, and pushed her duffel bag into my arms.

“I have a kidney infection,” she announced by way of hello. She pulled her backpack off her shoulders and shoved it on top of the duffel bag. “Take this, oaf,” she said, and headed off down the hall.

The frequent-flier lounge, a study in tasteful beige carpet and gray couches, was filled with businessmen murmuring into the telephones or talking to one another. It had an open bar that I hastily steered my sister away from, and a number of snacks laid out buffet-style on a table in the center of the room. Nicki plopped down on a couch across from two businessmen in blue suits, while I fixed myself a plate.

Nicki looked at it longingly. “Can I have your plum?” she wheedled.

“Get your own,” I said, sitting down beside her and pointing to the fruit bowl. “Kidney infection!” Nicki said loudly enough to cause the businessmen to stop their conversation and stare at her. She gave them a cordial wave and stared meaningfully at my food. I handed it over. She accepted it with a brief inclination of her head, devoured the plum with noisy relish, then grabbed my hand and spit the pit into my open palm.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” I said. The suits grabbed their briefcases and departed for a quieter couch. Nicki gave them another wave as I tossed the pit and scrubbed my hand with paper napkins. “Bring me some salted almonds, Josie,” she instructed. “I’m sick.”

•   •   •

My mother had never provided me with a plausible explanation as to why Nicki and I were born a scant eleven months
apart. “I loved being pregnant,” she told me when I was fourteen and we were jogging side by side in the swimming pool.

“Ma, nobody likes being pregnant that much.”

“Well, I did.” She pumped her arms up and down over her head. Her breasts, restrained by her thick-strapped, practical tank suit, heaved in the water, churning up miniature whirlpools. I tried not to look, knowing that mine were doing the exact same thing. “I loved being pregnant, I loved being a mother.” She smiled dreamily. “After you were born I couldn’t wait to have more kids.”

I kept my mouth shut without observing that there were almost four years between Nicki and Jon. Whatever mother lust she’d had, however she’d enjoyed her pregnancies and her newborns, it seemed that Nicki’s childhood had cured her but good.

My sister and I shared a bedroom until I left for college, which should have at least given us a shot at friendship. In fact, we were nothing alike. I was quiet, bookish, and so shy I once rode the school bus all the way to the terminal because I couldn’t work up the courage to tell the driver he’d missed my stop. Most of my friends were imaginary. I’d been that way since I was a baby. “You slept through the night at two weeks,” my mother told me. “Instead of giving you midnight feedings, we’d wake you up every two hours to make sure you were still alive. You weren’t really into interaction,” she concluded. “You just liked your mobile a lot.”

Nicki, in contrast, clawed the mobile off the ceiling before her six-month birthday, and flung herself out of her crib before she turned one. She was into interaction: the more violent, energetic, and potentially painful, the better. Family myth had it that her first word was not “Mommy” or “Daddy” but “gimme.” Our vinyl-covered photo albums show a delicately built girl with long lashes and dimples, usually in motion. The strained,
weary expression of whichever parent or relative was in the picture with her told the story better.

•   •   •

Nicki and I found our seats in the back of the plane. I fastened my seat belt low and tight around my hips and pulled
Madame Bovary
out of my backpack. Nicki slapped it out of my hands. “Vacation!” she said, handing me a copy of
People.
“I can’t wait to see Jon.”

“And terrorize him,” I muttered, bending to retrieve my book. The passengers in the row ahead of us took their seats: a mother with a flushed, cranky toddler in her arms. The child had a phenomenally wet, deep cough, and within minutes of takeoff Nicki dubbed him the Exorcist Baby. Every time he coughed, she shuddered, then giggled. The mother looked at us with a tired smile. “I bet you’re waiting for something to come flying out of his mouth,” she said.

“No,” Nicki whispered to me, “I’m actually waiting for his head to spin around.”

I shoved my book into her hands. “Here,” I said. “Improve yourself.”

Nicki tucked the book in the seatback pocket and adjusted her snug shirt, then the straps of her overalls. “I don’t need improving,” she said. I sighed and pulled
Heart of Darkness
out of my backpack. Five pages later, Nicki was slumped on my shoulder, her mouth open, her eyelids a dark fringe against her cheek. When the flight attendant zipped down the aisle, I asked her for a blanket, and when it came, I pulled it around my sister’s shoulders and clicked off the light over her head.

•   •   •

Nicki woke up with a start as soon as we’d started our descent, rubbed her eyes briskly, and opened the window shade to peer down at the cars inching along the highway. “Check it
out,” she said. “You can see how bad they drive from all the way up here. Also, the stewardess did not offer me the beverage of my choice.”

“I think we’re supposed to call them flight attendants. And you were asleep,” I pointed out. “I got you a Diet Coke.”

“Well, that’s the beverage of your choice. Not mine. I wanted Chardonnay.” She rummaged around in the seat pocket and finally found an evaluation form. Under the section on “flight attendants,” she checked off “poor.” In the comment section, she scribbled, “Was not provided with drink.” A picture of the founder of Northwest Airlines appeared on the form’s front page. Nicki drew horns and a beard on it and a balloon coming out of his mouth with a statement urging the reader to perform an anatomically impossible act. “Nicki,” I said, “I don’t think they’ll take that seriously.” She scowled at me, lips pursed, plucked eyebrows drawn, and jabbed one pink-tipped finger at the call button so she could hand the flight attendant her form.

Nanna, our mother’s mother, greeted us beside the baggage claim. At seventy-six, she was small and trim, with carefully styled frosted hair, wearing one of her array of pantsuits that spanned the spectrum from pale yellow to beige and back again. She tucked her purse carefully under her arm—a precaution against the thieves she believed roamed the world outside of her gated retirement community—and gave us a quick once-over. “How are you?” she asked, kissing us each once on the cheek. “How’s Mother?”