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

don’t need your cane. People of all ages are outside: On any park bench, any crosstown bus, you’ve got yourself some vaudeville.
    But after the incident on my television show, some schmucks from the New York Post began camping out in front of my building, harassing the doormen. Photographers, gossip columnists. Geraldo Rivera showed up. The co-op board got all up in arms. Those shysters. Wall Street types, media moguls, all of them. They earn about $16 million apiece; you should see the preening that goes on in the damn elevator: the seven-hundred-dollar oxblood briefcases, the Armani suits, the cars these people drive. They’d sell their own daughters for a mention in Women’s Wear Daily or Town & Country . But suddenly I’m attracting “unwanted attention”? Please.
    Still, I had the staff close up the apartment—the way they used to every winter—and I came to Bedford. The lawyers thought it was best I “lie low” for a while. Tell that to the satellite trucks, I say.
    The gardener, the butler, the pool boy—they tiptoe around me here. Maybe it’s because they’re new employees, but even Sunny kowtows. “You scare them, Ma,” Isaac says.
    Why? Because I made them all sign confidentiality agreements? Because I speak my mind and know exactly what I want? Why should I pretend people are doing me a favor when I’m paying them? I have no use for that sort of nonsense.
    Once you reach a certain age, oh, the world assumes you’re stupid and deaf and irrelevant. Other women my age—darlings, they would make marvelous spies. They could slip in and out of the Soviet Union without anyone giving them a second glance.
    Not me, though. I make sure of it.
    “Sunny!” I yell into the intercom when I spot the Cadillac pull in to the driveway. “More gin!”
    My glass is empty already. From the side window, I can see my Cadillac turning and crunching to a halt. Hector comes around, opens the door, and my grandson unfurls himself.
    Jason.
    As he steps out onto the gravel, he yawns and stretches; he’s gangly, pantherlike, proud and new in his muscles, the way teenage boys so often are. For a moment he can’t resist pausing to glance at his reflection in the tinted windows. I watch him tilt his head and touch his jaw appraisingly. The top of his hair looks like a chrysanthemum, though it’s oddly long in back, clipped into a chevron. Who styles their hair like that? Half girl, half boy, as if the barber couldn’t make up his mind. He’s still got that farkakte safety pin stuck through his earlobe, too, and that ugly spiked dog collar he insists on wearing (Petunia’s is more elegant!). Also, one of those T-shirts he destroys himself. Its sleeves are ripped off, and the front looks clawed. Such a handsome boy, but this he has to do? The last time he paid me a visit, he even wore black eye makeup. His girlfriend put it on him, he said.
    “You’re sure you’re not just a feygeleh ?” I said.
    He’s trying to look tough, I suppose, but a baby face is a baby face. Good luck disguising it. No matter. My grandson’s “look” rankles his mother even more than me, which I suspect is the whole point. Earlier this year Jason changed his major from economics to theater, too. Isaac practically had a heart attack and called me in a panic, but what do I care, really? The kid still has more business sense than his father. Let Isaac sweat it a little.
    Jason fiddles with a pair of sunglasses and drops them into the shopping bag he’s carrying. He lets out a long breath, as if bracing himself. Then he lopes across the gravel to my front door.
    “Hey, uh. How’s it going?” I hear him say to my butler, his voice echoing through the foyer. “Grandma’s upstairs?”
    He bounds up the marble staircase and is standing in the doorway in no time. Ah, youth! “Hey, Grams, what’s up?” he says. Slinging his shopping bag on top of the piano with a thunk! , he comes over to the chair, leans down, and gives me a quick, dry