Whitehead Colson - Sag Harbor

They pointed through the glass and ordered us around. C-list celebrities visiting the houses of their B-list friends, hovering impatiently at the counter as they tried to juggle condescension and confusion at the same time. Old ladies with oddball things on their heads: turbans, pillbox hats fresh out of mothballs, floppy wicker creations that drooped over their big dark sunglasses. Weekend houseguests full of love and ideas and fretful talk of schedules, the train on Sunday that would take them away too soon. Weekenders, weekenders of every disposition, saying, Look at this, Check this out, Isn't that the cutest, the quaintest, dawdling before window displays while the ice cream melted in sweet rivulets over their fingers, Isn't this the kind of thing we can display in our houses and have a little story about if anyone should ask, and we hope they ask, because if they don't there is this great abyss of us we must navigate. Young enthusiasts of fudge. The smeared, the daubed, the ugly eaters out for their favorite treat.

They wanted ice cream and we served them. We scooped and scooped. For crumbling entities held together only by the energy of their fierce disdain, who were often, paradoxically, nice tippers, go figure. Heiresses tugging dour poodles from place to place—“It's good to have someone to talk to”—and grizzled he-men who worked with their hands, sneering at and ripping off their clients, those pampered city infants whom they overcharged for wood and nails and spackle so that they could afford a special oil to rub into their calluses. The kept, the models and rent boys and sundry amenable, as if we were not all kept by this place in some way, so who were we to sneer. The strange cheerleaders and the weirdly smiling, the victims who just bobbed along on the current one time too many. Wasted clubbers drifting over from Bayside with eyes the color of raspberry sherbet, who pressed their noses up to the glass to view the stark majesty of the vats and shuddered at the plenty.

They handed us money and dropped coins into the tip cup from time to time. Scrabbling creatures with power of attorney, swaggering instigators who would emerge unscathed from impending savings-and-loan disasters, cagey VP's of inscrutably named corporate divisions who skipped into the store half levitating on their own magnificence and sneered with impotent disdain at the numbers on the paper tickets. Renters whose thin complaints echoed in the halls of awesome mansions, renters in shabby clapboard shares that didn't have enough bathrooms, renters of total dud houses with overburdened septic tanks and serious drainage issues. Weekend hoboes without a place to stay, who hitched a ride on the five o'clock from Penn, jumped off and prowled after fun, caroused, fucked or did not fuck, found a bed or sofa or floor or slept on the beach and miraculously did not get molested in any way, dozed late and started again on Saturday, with more or less success in their adventures, and took the early train back Sunday morning reeking of their ills and hopes, nodding off in bliss.

And there must have been creatures of such affluence that I cannot even speculate about their day-to-day, outside the fact of their sweet tooths. They lived over in South Hampton somewhere, on estates guarded by solemn hedges, an army of little green petals repelling all invading eyes. I imagine steaming mud and hairless reptilian creatures swooping down low from between fanlike prehistoric leaves. Beings emerge from the gray muck, raising their great eye-domes above the silt, flicking tongues. The exact shape of their bodies, the number of gills in their neck and suckers on their mottled digits, I cannot say, because in order to mingle with Earth people they needed to wear human-flesh costumes, for only then could they walk among us, and of course eventually they came through the doors of Jonni Waffle like all the rest, like all of us, and I served them ice cream.

But not that night.

The lights went out at 8:30, just when things were getting good and horrible in their familiar way. The pink paper tickets fluttered to the floor, stuck fast to melted goo. The hands received the cones. A stray boob collapsed against my elbow and I felt a tiny flutter in my groin. Sorry, sorry. Another sensory organ piped up: my nose. The smell of burned waffle turned the air acrid. NP was on the grills, displaying his customary pride in his job. I looked up and saw him toss a charred Frisbee into the trash — it dissolved into a black vapor as it flew through the air.

Choppy waters. Bert performed a course correction, putting me on the grills to head off disaster — peril, thy name is waffle shortage. I traded places with NP. He handed me the apron. I put on the apron. He handed me the gloves. I put on the gloves. As I reached for the ladle, I glanced to my right, into the twinkling eyes of a towheaded urchin who looked up at me in wonder, a flying buttress of clear mucous attaching his nostril to the plastic barrier — and the lights went out.

The only illumination was the crimson eye of the power indicator on Nick's radio. They wailed — inside the store, the evening strollers out on the Promenade and the wharf, the mid-amble folks on Main Street. Bert grumbled in the dark and appeared with some flashlights and we finished out our orders, on the house since the registers were out of commission. We banished the rest of the unfortunates from the premises. They milled around in the corridor outside, clutching their numbers as the news sunk in.

“Thank God,” Meg said.

“It was starting to get crazy in here,” Nick said. “Look at them …” Headlights washed over their bodies, producing scary silhouettes.

“We're closed! It's a BLACKOUT, shit,” NP shouted.

Keep your voices down, I murmured to myself — the living dead will know we're inside. Bert locked the front doors for added protection and told us he was going to try to get Martine on the phone.

“Maybe we're going to close early,” I said.

Nick fiddled with his radio and found WLNG. “The power's out in the Town of South Hampton, and we're getting reports that the lights are out everywhere from Quogue to Amagansett…” It hadn't started raining yet, but obviously the storm was doing some damage up-island.

“Martine must be freaking out,” NP said. “Blackout on a hot night like this — all this ice cream is going to be puddles, yo.”

“Sucks for him,” Meg said.

All of it was going to be soup if the lights took too long to come back on. That was a lot of money.

Bert returned, flashlight under his chin to give his face a ghoulish cast, and told us that Martine wanted us to give it an hour to see if the electricity returned. Then we'd call it a night. Even if the lights came back on in a few hours, the night was a wash. Everybody was going to stay home in case the juice went out again.

Who knew what was going on out there? It sounded wild. People whooping, cars honking at things that darted past in the night. The DJ was excited. Nothing ever happened, now this to savor: “We have a report from Eric of Watermill, who's standing outside the Candy Kitchen, and he says all of Main Street Bridgehampton is dark.” Bert told us of the last time he was in a blackout, a story that involved two Swedish exchange students, a borrowed Volvo, and two bottles of Jose Cuervo. “We didn't need lemons, if you know what I mean,” he said. I didn't. Outside the windows and beyond the glass doors of the store, the figures loped in the darkness, caught by random slashes of illumination. We heard their voices as they ran into comrades and shared info, trading disappointments. All in it together.

The phone rang a bit later. “That's it, we're done,” Bert said as he came back out.

“Shift over?” Nick said.

“Our master has spoken.”