Melted Reese’s Cups

“Do you want ice cream? Because I want good ice cream… and when I say good I mean good ice cream,” my mom asks me while resting in a cocoon of blankets on her queen sized bed. This isn’t even a question. Yes, I want ice cream.

My mom is an ice cream snob. I guess I am too, by association. She loves Michigan-made, full fat, simply crafted ice cream. Usually that meant from brands like Oberweis or Guernsey. She only likes vanilla with chocolate chips from Guernsey. None of this “Vanilla Bean” crap, she says. From Oberweis, simple chocolate is her fix. So she loves this $6 a pop ice cream, but just as easily will eat a Big Mac. I’m so much like her in that way. Tiramisu does it for me just as well as Little Debbie Swiss Rolls most days. My mom taught me that there aren’t many problems that food can’t make better.

People around me keep dying, and when someone gets sick or dies, you send them casseroles. Or if you are my mom, you send casseroles or brownies and eat expensive ice cream in your bed. She showed me how to bake our love (or heartache… or guilt) at 350 degrees before neatly covering it in tin foil. When we didn’t have time to make things from scratch, or from the box to be quite honest, we bought things from Meijer. We made sure it looked homemade, mostly through how we packaged them. We did the same thing one year for Christmas, putting stacks of fancy Meijer Bakery treats in Mason jars with delicate ribbon, done assembly-line style with me, my youngest brother, Mike, and my mom. The food was so thoughtful, but in the same stroke utterly thought-less. I mean, casseroles don’t have the power to end world hunger, to find my love, or to fix my family. It’s all just food. A casserole is a casserole is a casserole.

But the gesture still means something. I remember we sent cut-n-bake cookies to our neighbor across the street when his wife died. Well, my mom put them on a nice plate and wrapped it up with the shiny aluminum foil before telling me to give it to him. I don’t remember how old I was, but I felt so small. We sent brownies to Mrs. Garra when she fell, maybe ten years back. We sent her some more when she fell for again. I guess we like routine. It gives us something to do.    

We want ice cream, so I bike to Meijer with Michael. He is fourteen and has a fade. He has a shoe collection like no other and thinks he is cool because he rides a penny board. He is cool, but not because of the penny board. Mike snapchats a girl named Rachel a lot, but swears they aren’t anything special. After a 10 minute walk, or five minute bike ride from our house, we find ourselves in downtown Birmingham, yet another affluent part of Southeast Michigan. Affluent meaning an overwhelming amount of rich, white folk. We are not rich, white folk. We see moms in Lulu Lemon yoga pants with designer handbags and Chanel sunglasses buying things like fresh fruits and organic, gluten-free waffles.

I wonder where the real people are. I want to see a mom with no makeup and a lopsided ponytail plus three kids being jerks to each other. I want to see a dad freaking out in front of the tampons with his fourteen year old daughter on the phone. I want to see a kid wandering the aisles eating a bag of chips they ripped open. I want to see my old middle school Spanish teacher, Professora Snyder, buying cheap wine in her sweatpants. She seemed like the type to have boxed wine in her desk at school. We were the problem class.

I remember the house we had when I was in middle school, before we moved here. I lived there for fourteen years of my life, in our old house on Kingsmill Drive. It was me, my mom, my four brothers and my dog living together. My dad was there, too, before we moved. That house, the one with the overgrown bushes and the chipped blushing pink brick, saw a lot of decay. My brothers would always leave their pumpkins out long after Halloween, back when they had enough care to carve them. They said they were feeding the squirrels, but the jack-o-lantern faces caved in and turned to mush on our front stoop. These waning gourds sat for weeks and weeks, crumpling into itself and turning from orange to brown to black, all before the snow came. We always kept the seeds, telling ourselves we’d bake them to eat later. We never baked them to eat later.

 They’d end up thrown somewhere in our backyard to waste. I dreamt of a pumpkin patch taking root under the swing set by the abandoned baseballs and knee-high weeds. Our house wasn’t taken care of the way suburban homes are supposed to, or so I gathered. We got a lot of urgent letters from the Homeowners Association, but we didn’t have time to deal with any of it. Our weeds were hard to tame, the grass liked to play dead, and our address numbers were not-quite centered by the doorbell. My brothers and I hated gardening. When our mom told us to get gloves and pull weeds, I tended to help out for maybe twenty minutes before coming inside to make lemonade for my brothers. That’s what good sisters did. Good sisters who also hated yard work, I mean.

The glass pitcher felt heavy in my hands. Then again my hands always seemed too small. Our family didn’t keep fresh fruit usually, so Country Time Lemonade was our go-to. I filled the pitcher three quarters of the way high with cold water, then dumped in four and a half, sometimes five spoons full of the pastel yellow powder. Our wooden mixing spoon was a little short. I felt cool water on my fingers as I mixed up the drink, the wood turning a deeper tan with the water. I added sugar to taste. Puckered lips told me it was too bitter, so I added a spoonful of sugar. We’d have to water it down, it was sickly sweet. I can’t tell anymore which is worse. 

         

You know, maybe this life is really just one big casserole: full of flavor but sometimes just too much to consume, made up of indistinguishable chaos. But you can find comfort here, amid all the crazy. And most times, even bad casseroles are still good. Hard lives are still lived. And life is supposedly a gift. Like the Reese’s cups my mom put in my backpack before school: even melted ones are still good.