Cold Comfort

   Haagen Dazs does not, I repeat, does not make it through the night at my house. It croons to me, sounding, for some reason, like Billy Dee Williams with a Swedish accent, as I’m trying to fall asleep.

   I do, however, have the best of intentions when I buy it. Sometimes I buy the No-Fat Haagen Dazs Ice Cream, which they should really call No Taste And Shit Your Brains Out Coffee or the Eat Whatever the Hell You Want Because It’s Leaving Your Body Real Quick Anyway Vanilla Fudge. But when I’m a “bad girl” (and I say this with infinite sarcasm) I buy Vanilla Swiss Almond or Bavarian Chocolate. (We won’t discuss Ben & Jerry’s Wavy Gravy here; that stuff would require twenty more pages.) Then I go to town: take the phone off the hook, get me a big ole’ spoon, put on the rattiest tee shirt I own and shove in a video of twenty Taxi episodes. That’s livin’, my friend.

   You know those “bad girl” days. When someone pisses you off, or disappoints you. When everything stinks. When you’re waiting for a cab and your panty house gives up on your stomach and rolls down, wraps around your ankles, making you trip and fall, mooning a bunch of Koreans as you do. Or when the blind date who swore he was handsome turns out to have a big pock mark in his face, and you spend the whole date fantasizing about spackling it. Or when you decide to change your eating habits to healthy ones and you find Nabisco cookie samples in your mailbox. Any one of these scenarios call for a nice big helping of Haagen Dazs.

   But those guys at Haagen Dazs must be insane. They say a pint is four servings. Four. For who? Four anorexics? Four diabetics? Four dead people? I say Haagen Dazs is two servings if you’re “good”, one if you’re not, if you feel like a “bad” girl. (Really “bad” girls get two pints at least, but that’s another story altogether.)

   In my house, Haagen Dazs has history. It was the ice cream for guests as well as for secret binges. It was the ice cream for good times; recession ice cream was Breyer’s or (yuk) Sealtest. My mother knew I had problems with ice cream; when company was expected, there was no place to hide the Haagen Dazs from my prying eyes. Even as a child, it called to me.

   One time she brought the family into the kitchen for an announcement. Important guests were coming, she said. It was very important that she serve ice cream with the special pecan pie she had baked. (“That’s hidden,” she said slyly, looking straight at me.) So the Haagen Dazs singing away in the freezer, was, she announced, strictly off-limits. To everyone.

   I tried to put it out of my head. Went outside and played. Gave my Barbie Dolls some vicious haircuts. Kept myself busy. Ahhh…but at night, when everyone was asleep, that voice kept me awake, and when I could stand it no longer, I snuk downstairs like a thief in the night and brought it back to my room. Of course, I ate the whole pint. I remember my bedroom was so dark that a few times I accidentally jabbed the mattress with my spoon.

   My belly full, I panicked. My mother would kill me. Then I got inspired with a brilliant idea: I filled the empty pint up with water and put it back in the freezer. I figured it would be heavy when the ice got hard. That would buy me a little time.

   The next day I watched my mother carefully as she started serving the pie. When she finally removed the Haagen Dazs lid (after what I considered hours of agony), her face scrunched up and she looked bewildered.
   “Look at this,” she said to my father. “What do you think this is?” One by one, we all went over to look at the hardened ice. I held my breath. Finally, my brother said, “you should really bring this back, Ma. You were ripped off.” There were general murmurs of agreement.

   I could have kissed him.

   The pie, by the way, was really good. A la mode would have made it great, but who was I to complain?