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My older sister, Sharon, waits until I climb upstairs to bed. I am nine, but in the morning, I will be ten. She and my mother set out the ingredients on the kitchen counter: a long yellow box of Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers, the charcoal rims peeking through the cellophane; a carton of chilled Hood heavy cream; and the tiny bottle of vanilla extract, intoxicating to sniff, bitter on the tongue.
Daddy had been gone since March, and we were marooned on an island, buffeted by grief, submerged rage, and bill collectors haranguing my mother on the phone at all hours and banging on the back door.
She begins with the cream, upended in a mixing bowl, and a flow of the vanilla’s amber drops. We couldn’t afford an electric mixer, but Mom has wrists of steel. No whisk, just a long, wooden spoon that she whirls in a blur until stiff, spiky peaks poke through.
He was forty-six, dark-haired, handsome, and, Mother will say, charismatic. He could halt a cocktail party by walking in the room. But he was doomed by uncontrollable drinking, skyrocketing blood pressure, and refusing to take his pills. He had three strokes, landmines in his brain that he seemed to shrug off, like his hangovers. He lost his job selling brown paper towels dispensed in department store restrooms, which he detested, and had no luck finding another.
Sharon takes over. She spreads a teaspoon of the sweetened cream on each wafer and stacks the sandwiches in a row on a white china plate. It grows late. I sleep in the bedroom I share with my three brothers. There are eight of us: four boys, two girls, Mommy, and Ga, her eighty-year-old mother. We cram a rental with four bedrooms and a single bathroom we compete for. My little brother and I shatter the garage windows with rocks.
They blanket the log with the remaining cream.
He was shaving for a job interview when the fourth stroke struck. Ga found him slumped on the bathroom tiles.
My grandmother calls it an icebox, though there is no block nestled near the top. They slide the cake onto a shelf. Sharon gets to lick the spoon. She is my senior, by eighteen months. We scrap like junkyard dogs; she leaves scarlet fingernail scrapes on my arms. So why this surprise, I will wonder, except to comfort a sad little boy?
They clean up and go to bed.
We buried him on a stinging wintry day huddled under dishwater clouds.
Overnight, the cream soaks into the crackers, turning them soft and moist, chilled and crumbly with each forkful, deliciously bittersweet, like these memories.
My children have grown up with this tale, timeless after six decades. Our eldest maintains the tradition. Each birthday, she presents me with an icebox cake, an alchemy of chocolaty cream and a sister’s love.
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