At ten in the morning, the day was gathering steam, the sun blazing with indifference, exposing wounds with its heat. The whisper of a salty breeze fluttered across the dark pavement and tickled our cheeks, meager relief as we marched from Pearl Street Market to our ocean-block motel. The walkway shone bleach white, difficult to gaze at directly.
The children and I had secured our gain: two coffees snug in a cardboard crate and a paper bag rustling with four bagels and cream cheese (two sesame, two plain) and two croissants laced with chocolate. We radiated self-satisfaction, having conquered the morning; we had obtained the food and were marching back to our temporary beach home where Alice snored in a dark, musty bedroom.
That breakfast foray in the summer of 2008 should have been easily forgotten. It was a minuscule tile set in the middle of the ten-thousand-piece, abstract mosaic of our annual, one-week summer vacations in Beach Haven, New Jersey.
Except, as we approached the intersection of Pearl and South Beach, they crossed our path. Two strong-jawed men in their thirties wearing skin-hugging black shorts and tight, red-and-white polyester shirts. Helmets. Sleek bicycles, humming along. Their whizzing machines forced us to halt on the northwest corner.
They whooshed up.
We caught a snippet of what one said to the other: “Of course, they hold the ice cream until you sing.”
They whooshed by.
The comment emerged from the void, and the three of us laughed.
“What did he mean?” squeaked Amelia.
“Maybe he was talking about aliens. The E.T.s wanna use our diddly-do voices to power their ship. And they’re holding our chocolate cones hostage until we go la-di-da,” mused Aaron.
“I think it’s mermaids with desserts.” (Little Amelia was on a serious mermaid kick.) “They lure sailors onto the rocks with singing ice cream.”
What?
I chuckled and kept the truth to myself for the moment.
“Ohhhhh,” the children said in synchrony when I explained to them later that, of course, I knew what the cyclist meant: At the Show Tunes Ice Cream Parlour in downtown Beach Haven, the servers held onto the ice cream until the patrons sang for their sweets. Alice always suggested we should venture inside the place, but we never did. Not once. I was a terrible singer, and I was too timid to unveil my failings. None of us Housemans wanted to sing for our ice cream. Well, anyway, I didn’t want to sing.
As we crashed into the motel room with our spoils, the children were carrying on, warbling, “Of course, they hold the ice cream until you sing.” Laughing. Alice, auburn hair cinched in a ponytail, sat at the tiny kitchen table, the window AC unit blasting arctic air into the dim outer room. She cocked her head but didn’t ask them what was funny. You had to be there.
Eventually, I told her.
The phrase became a family mantra. We would speak it when something struck us as random or absurd. We would repeat it for no reason, whenever and wherever. We didn’t need an excuse to suggest, ‘of course, they hold the ice cream until you sing.’ That singular, strange saying helped paste my family and me together until the end of us.
Until Amelia’s cancer diagnosis, remission, and recurrence. As if mermaids, concealing razor teeth, had lured our little girl to their watery home.
Until the day Alice told me her teacher co-worker was more than a friend. You had to be there.
Until that hazy day, over a decade later, when Aaron went missing. Like aliens plucked him off the earth, whisking him to a better world. Aaron had the loveliest singing voice of us all.
***
So now, I sit here alone. Waiting. It’s a dozen years removed from our final vacation, and they are all gone: my delicate, whimsical girl whose body betrayed her, the fiery-haired, shivery-skinned woman I never loved well enough, and my beautiful boy with the crooked smile and haunting vibrato. I imagine in some alternate, kinder universe they are all alright. Here, they have vanished, and I am waiting. I am waiting because this server is, indeed, holding that damned ice cream until I sing.
The waitress waits, holding the ice cream, because it is her purpose. My purpose is to sing and eat it. Afterward, I will drive home to Perkasie, Pennsylvania, where vast fields stretch silently beneath empty skies. Along the way, no cyclists will cross my path, whipping stray aphorisms into the breeze. The roads will be quiet on the way to my empty apartment.
I don’t remember singing, although I am sure I do.
***
My shoulders shake as I weep in my car, engine rumbling. I press play on a recording on my phone, a voice memo from long ago. Amelia’s tiny voice pipes up. She trills: “They hold the ice cream until you sing! They hold the ice cream! La-la-la, they hold it until you sing.” Aaron chimes in: “Of course… of course, of course. Until you sing-a-ling-a-ling. La-di-da.” I’m laughing through my tears now. I’m replaying that voice memo ad nauseam, and I’m singing along each time. My voice cracks, heart squeezed into a small stone. I wish I could remember when and how they made this recording. I wish I had sung much sooner.
Richard Shifman is an author and a part-time market research contractor residing with his wife near Doylestown, Pennsylvania. His science-fiction short story, “Accumulation,” was published in 2019 in Eunoia Review, an online magazine. His weird-fiction short story, “Mayo Monday,” headlined Cosmic Horror Monthly’s October 2023 issue. His YA historical fiction novel, set in Fort Lauderdale in 1980, was recently acquired for publication.
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