Each time our family visited a Howard Johnson’s restaurant, I stared greedily at the thick shiny menu. If I was a dog I would have been drooling. Everything looked so good. Our family only ate at restaurants on special occasions and the chain of orange roofed Howard Johnson restaurants popular in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s was famous for their ice cream, twenty-eight flavors. My usual order was a fried clam roll and a German chocolate almond ice cream. But I’d fantasize ordering more. The dessert section showed photographs of sundaes with their whipped cream and shiny cherry on top and a banana split, which cost as much as a hamburger with French fries.
A banana split was the height of decadence, greed and gluttony. A banana split in half and between those two halves, three scoops of ice cream—your choice, topped with hot fudge, warm butterscotch, or cherry sauce —crowned with a swirl of real whipped cream, nuts and topped with a maraschino cherry. We didn’t worry about red dyes or calories or cholesterol back then. I could eat whatever I wanted, but the opportunity to eat a banana split didn’t present itself.
One evening I was spending the night at my friend Leslie’s, her folks were going out for the evening, and they lived just two street crossings away from Howard Johnson’s. They left fourteen-year-old Leslie and myself in charge of ourselves, her younger sister and brother. But more importantly we were handed a generous amount of money to buy our dinner at Howard Johnsons.
“A banana split party!” all four of us agreed and I imagined the chocolate fudge in my mouth morphing from fluid to sludge as it mixed with a spoonful of rich coffee ice cream, my second favorite flavor, combined with the crunch of chopped walnuts and sweet cream. The bananas, a requirement to authenticate the name of the dessert, would be my least favorite part. But when you ordered a banana split, you had to eat the whole thing. That was the dare—eat the whole thing.
That night I ordered an entire fried clam platter complete with creamy cole slaw and fries. My friend and her twelve-year-old sister did the same. Her little brother Lawrence ordered a cheeseburger. I remember this because Lawrence was the first to finish his banana split. We had a race to see who would finish first.
Our stomachs felt so heavy, so full; we struggled to walk back to the house. Too uncomfortable to sleep, I remember feeling stretched taunt like a balloon, waiting for all that food to work its way through my system. Never again, I told myself, would I eat so much.
Momentarily I’d been seduced by one of the Devil’s seven sins, gluttony, but the pain was too severe to ever consider an encore performance. This is likely why to this day I seldom eat dessert.
INSTANT NOODLES 