She puts her head down on the verandah table, feeling its coolness on her cheek, the room spinning. She has a headache again, just a quiet one, but throbbing every few minutes, reminding her of the car accident. Reminding her of her mother. She notices her father is gone. His talk of hospitals and institutions, of the dead in the graveyard, her aunt buried so young — Stella wants to scream and run away. He is making her old before her time. She feels her father isn’t in charge, and if something bad happens, he will be helpless. Worse, he won’t even know something bad is happening.
Later in the day Stella heads back outside, the screen door slamming behind her. She picks some of the soaring purple and orange flowers growing in the weedy old garden at the back of the yard. The sun has moved over in the sky and the yard is in partial shade.
Her father comes to the door and talks to her through the screen. “Old Mrs. Seabury knows a lot about gardening. She and my mother were great friends. They belonged to a women’s club called the Offing Society, a sisterhood, I guess you could call it — a bunch of women who had roots in Ireland and Scotland and Wales, all those old countries, who told each other tales of the sea. I think Aoife, or Granny Scotia, as you girls call her, is the only one left who remembers the Offing, and she isn’t making a lot of sense these days. It was harmless — not that I knew much about it. No men allowed, you know.” Her father giggles as a young boy would.
“My sister — God, she was headstrong. I remember her standing right there with her arms full of flowers, so many they covered her face. Brown-eyed Susans, I think they were.”
Stella doesn’t know why her father is suddenly talking about his sister, apropos of nothing, as her mother would have described this turn in the conversation. For most of her childhood he’s hardly ever talked about his family, Stella’s family, and now he can’t stop.
“She always had to be the centre of attention and then my father would get angry. My mother had to calm him down. We used to fight all the time, you know, my sister and me.”
Her father points to the front of the house. “My mother planted some mountain ash out there. The berries turn red in the autumn. They were purported to keep evil spirits away. My father cut them down. He said it was witchcraft.” He pauses before speaking again. “I’m sorry, Stella. It’s just so strange being home. I don’t mean to babble away.”
Stella thinks about how this isn’t her home. That she has no home. But she doesn’t say this. She can see in her father’s face that he doesn’t want to hear it, the way his lips turn down. He wants her to giggle, to sing and take his hand and lead him outside and show him cloud formations, or just read a book, as she did before the accident.
Her father regroups and lights a cigarette. The smoke blows out through the screen in the door. “Why don’t we go for ice cream? Because I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream,” he chants as he holds the screen door for Stella, who comes in and puts her flowers in a green china vase.
It’s a short walk to the ice cream parlour, which was here when her father was a child, up the street from the diner, near the top of the hill. All the way there her father muses out loud. “Frank bailed me out of numerous childhood escapades. How do you ever repay all that? I don’t know what we would have done without him stepping in, helping me get this job, suggesting we come home, with the house waiting for us. It’s a fresh start for us, Stella. You need a quiet year, to rest and heal.”
“Dad, look, there it is. Right here.” Stella grabs his hand so he won’t stride right by.
Keep It Sweet.
“And so it is. You’d think they’d change the name.”
“What’s wrong with the name?”
“That’s what it was called in the old days.”
“I thought you were all about the old days.”
Stella rubs her temples. He’s hurting her head. He’s floating back and forth between two shores, one of nostalgia and one of reality.
“Parts of the old days, Stella. ‘Keep it sweet’ is what people used to say to the girls, telling them to be ladylike, always smiling, never complaining. It made my sister furious when my father would say that to her . . . I want a double-scoop chocolate!”
Her father opens the door and as a brass bell jingles he stops in the doorway. “Well, would you look at that!”
The ice cream parlour has new owners and is not quite as her father remembers. Old-style fans in the ceiling whirl around, filling the shop with a sweetness of vanilla and peaches. It’s not modernized so much as restored to a more modern version of what it had been when it first opened. Old-time black-and-white photos line the walls — of young girls with bows in their hair eating ice cream and boys in white shirts and bow ties smiling, elderly people sipping milkshakes.
She and her father get ice cream cones to go and head down to the wharf near the diner. Her father holds her hand and weaves through the crowd. Stella feels claustrophobic as they make their way through this flood of tourists holding maps and fancy cameras. A group of women come at them wearing cork-soled wedge sandals, high-waisted shorts and giant sunglasses. They smoke menthol cigarettes and blow dirty mint smoke in front of them. Stella coughs and looks at the bright red
