Ice Cream Abstinence is Overrated: Juice Bar
I’ve been a very good girl. I have made my bed every day, cleaned my plate every night, and minded my parents. Don’t I deserve some ice cream?
Last night, I finally ended my arbitrary abstinence from the Juice Bar’s homemade ice cream –- one of the much anticipated delicacies of any Nantucket summer (along with Something Natural cookies and Provisions’ Turkey Terrific sandwiches) –- with a triumphant order: Mint Oreo in a Waffle Cup Cone with Chocolate Sauce. Even though the combo was exactly what I had been craving, I nonetheless found myself rationalizing something about the indulgence vis-à-vis my choice of mint. (Couldn’t you compare mint with that whole thing about spicy foods and heightened metabolism? Or: couldn’t performing the dual task of cooling off and freshening my breath negate the sugar and calories?) But then I just gave in and enjoyed every spoonful.
I get sexual abstinence – for teens and Catholics, I mean. It makes perfect sense, when faced with a consequence like eternal damnation or pregnancy, to hold off on carnal pleasure ‘til you’re in the clear. But c’mon — what’s to come of a little ice cream pleasure, once or twice in a hot summer…eternal FAT-nation? That’s what my mother thinks. On my wedding day, five years ago here on Nantucket, she overheard me on the phone with my friend Steph, who was kindly offering to deliver a celebratory Juice Bar ice cream-as-nuptial-nerve reducer. “Peanut Butter Cup, please!” I said, almost as thrilled for having finished my six-month wedding dress weight loss marathon as for the wedding itself. And then, in a moment that I know now was purely a final, fleeting maternal attempt to warn her youngest child of the evils in the world as she headed off to married life, my mother lovingly screamed, “Don’t get FAT!”
Geez. If Juice Bar ice cream made you immediately, upon ingestion, gain twenty pounds and bust out of your wedding dress, well then, I probably could be convinced to abstain.
But thankfully, it doesn’t. And I didn’t. On my wedding day, or last night.
Whenever I’m waiting in the longer and longer lines at the Juice Bar, I try not to think about my mother’s warning. Instead, I look over the high counter at the racially-harmonized staff of Jamaicans and Bulgarians and White Preppy College Students, prematurely angry and bored (and likely stoned), even though it’s only mid-July, and I think about Dede Welles, a suite-mate of mine my Sophomore year at Yale, who spent her summers scooping ice cream on Martha’s Vineyard. Even though Dede was ridiculously smart, well on her way to graduating Summa Cum Laude and later becoming a lawyer, she eschewed the resume-building New York summer job for her beloved one in the ice cream store. “People are so nice there,” she would say. “I mean, who isn’t happy when they’re eating ice cream?”
Some people on Nantucket, apparently. I witnessed a beaten-down mother-of-three in an incident that could only be described as Rocky Road Rage, when she realized that hers was the only stopped-in-traffic of the parlor’s five stupid separate lines (which we all know in a perfect world would be better organized in a one- or two-line, bank teller-type/“I can help whoever’s next” configuration), and set to dragging her screaming children out of the place altogether. Then, there was the toe tapping and eye rolling that ensued when the guy in front placed a big order, and when I reached the front but couldn’t make up my mind. I’m sorry: when you’ve waited this long, and with a decision of this caloric gravity, sample spoons are of the utmost importance!
But it really IS hard not to be happy when you’re eating the delicious ice cream from the Juice Bar. Besides my minty fresh choice, I highly recommend (and will always go back for): Brownie a la Mode, Peanut Butter Cup, and Coffee Heath Bar Crunch. Do not try to get too gourmet – newfangled flavors like Ginger and Crantucket just aren’t what you’re there for. And DO NOT abstain from the fresh-out-of-the-oven waffle cookie cone. I mean: what of a few more carbs and calories at that point?
Besides, when it comes to ice cream, abstinence is seriously overrated.
