Free The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel by Susan Jane Gilman Page B

the English so good. No Hebrew.”
    Hearing his voice, I sat up as best I could. I studied his face, the grandfatherly folds of it.
    “You remember me?” he asked.
    Without his apron and his cap, he looked smaller somehow, older.
    Slowly, I nodded. “The ices man?”
    Mr. Dinello smiled sheepishly. “How you are feeling? Your leg? Is she no good?”
    “My foot is better.” My voice was shattered again, barely above a whisper. I was so happy to see him, though, to have a visitor—someone I vaguely knew—that I tried to be on my best possible behavior. Pulling aside the sheet, I showed him my unbandaged foot, bright pink and inverted slightly. “My sides are better. My leg still hurts.” I showed him my brace. “Look.” I knocked against it. The hollow sound appealed to me. I’d taken to amusing myself by beating out little tunes on it and seeing how long it took to annoy people.
    “Have you seen my mama?” I asked.
    Mr. Dinello got an uncomfortable look on his face. He glanced around the ward. In the bed nearest mine, a little girl sang in a small, plaintive voice, “Turn Off Your Light, Mr. Moon Man.” Another lay facing the wall, sniffling. Perspiration soaked into Mr. Dinello’s collar where it rubbed against his neck. He put his hands on his knees, drew in a deep breath, and arranged his face into a smile.
    He said, “You come with me, ninella , yes?”
    *  *  *
    My son, he brings me a new television, a Sony Trinitron thirty-four-inch color, along with one of those brand-new gadgets they have now that can record any show you want on a large cassette. “It’s called a VCR, Ma,” he says. He tells me I can tape Dynasty and Dallas and watch them whenever I want with this VCR. But I don’t care for it. It has a separate remote control that has nothing to do with the controls for the television, and to program it you need an adviser from NASA. “For this you paid good money?” I say.
    Yet now that I’m often confined to my house in Bedford, I do find myself sitting in Bert’s antique wing chair—the one I had reupholstered in lilac last year—in front of the big new Sony. This , I like. At four o’clock every afternoon, I order my domestic to bring me a little something sweet for the mouth—a gin and tonic, a bowl of our premium Rocky Road and vanilla fudge—plus the cold sliced sirloin for Petunia. Then Petunia and I settle in together to watch Donahue . Such a handsome man! His show is quite the theater. All these confessions—forbidden love affairs, children secretly put up for adoption, grown men telling their mothers they’re feygelehs on national TV. Surely it can’t be worse than anything I ever did. But what strikes me most is that it’s clearly entertainment for people who have grown up with privacy.
    The day I arrived on Mulberry Street, everybody already knew. Mrs. DiPietro, the widow with the orthopedic shoes and a different-colored rosary for every day of the week. Mrs. Ferrendino, who never stopped perspiring and whose enormous forearms flapped as she fanned herself in her housedress. Mrs. Salucci, the cadaverous, slit-eyed lacemaker who offered vicious opinions on everything whether you asked for them or not. Every neighborhood has its yentas. They arranged themselves around the front stoop like the three Furies, watching as Mr. Dinello carried me up the stairs as if I were a tiny bride, my arms clutching his neck, my right leg jutting out in its brace. I had never been stared at so in my life. Their faces pressed in so close to me I could see their enormous pores, their errant eyebrows, their stained, dilapidated teeth. “ Ai, ai, ai! ” they exclaimed, running their hands over the wood of my crutches as we passed them.
    The whole neighborhood had heard about the accident, of course. Some of them had even witnessed my mother stomping down the street afterward on her way home from the dispensary. They claimed she had actually kicked Mr. Dinello’s horse in revenge, then