Ice Cream

Ice Cream is the Branch family’s dog, whose comic stubbornness and place in Bee’s family memories make her more than a passing household detail. She appears in scenes of shared excitement and everyday inconvenience, then returns in Bee’s recollection of the family as a band: Bernadette as John, Elgin as Paul, Bee as George, and Ice Cream as Ringo. The comparison gives the dog a place within the family’s private mythology, while the repeated joke about her captures the tenderness and unease in Bee’s memories.

Identity and Domestic Life

Ice Cream belongs to the household of Bernadette Fox and Elgin Branch, and Bee’s account presents her through observable habits rather than any imagined inner life. At school pickup, she regularly gets into the front seat of Bernadette’s car. Once there, she resists being moved by going completely rigid and staring straight ahead. Bee objects that Bernadette should not let her take the front, but Bernadette replies that the dog simply jumped in. Mother and daughter have to pull Ice Cream by her collar and shove her from the seat; after much grunting, they get her into the back.

Even then, Ice Cream does not settle like a conventional passenger. She stands on the floor behind the front seat, squeezed into the space, with Bee describing her as looking miserable—as though she were reproaching the people who had forced her to move. The scene turns a small negotiation over car seating into a family comedy: Ice Cream does not need to speak to make her preference unmistakable, and Bee supplies the expressive interpretation that completes the joke.

Comic Disruptions at Home

Ice Cream’s misadventures also draw attention to the Branch house itself. On one occasion, Bernadette tells Bee that the dog has entered her closet, the door has shut behind her, and Bernadette cannot open it. Bee explains that the old house cracks and groans, absorbs a great deal of water when it rains, and sometimes settles around a door so that it will no longer open. This has happened before, but this time Ice Cream is trapped behind one of the doors in the couple’s bedroom, where a row of pointed, rounded confessionals serves as closets.

Bernadette and Bee race home, and Bee runs upstairs calling for the dog. From behind the closet door comes barking. Bee distinguishes it from a frightened whimper: the bark sounds playful, and she imagines that Ice Cream is laughing at the people trying to rescue her. The episode gives the house’s physical instability an immediate, domestic consequence, while Ice Cream’s response turns a potentially worrying confinement into another shared joke. Her presence links the old building’s quirks to the family’s everyday life without making her merely a prop in the description of the house.

Shared Excitement and Family Language

Ice Cream is also part of the family’s expressions of joy. When Bee realizes that Bernadette has agreed to something she had hoped for, she jumps out of her chair and repeats that the answer is yes. Her excitement is so infectious that Ice Cream wakes up, begins barking, and runs victory laps around the kitchen table. The dog’s reaction is described as part of the scene’s physical exuberance: Bee celebrates in words and movement, and Ice Cream answers with barking and circling.

Later, while talking with Elgin, Bee casts the family as the Beatles. She assigns Bernadette to John, Elgin to Paul, herself to George, and Ice Cream to Ringo. Elgin laughs at the dog’s inclusion. Bee then explains that Bernadette had read a book about Ringo Starr, whose present-day outlook was described as being “Resentful of the past, fearful of the future.” Bernadette had laughed especially hard at this, and the family adopted the line for moments when Ice Cream sat with her mouth open, calling her “Poor Ice Cream, resentful of the past, fearful of the future.”

The refrain is affectionate precisely because it is knowingly borrowed and applied to a dog in an ordinary pose. Ice Cream becomes the subject of a joke that Bee recalls as a sign of Bernadette’s laughter and of the family’s shared habit of turning a small observation into a repeated saying. The Beatles analogy, meanwhile, places her inside Bee’s image of the family as a unit rather than outside it as a pet merely belonging to the household.

Narrative Role

Ice Cream’s appearances are brief, but their variety gives her a distinct function in Bee’s recollections. At pickup, she creates friction over the front seat; in the closet, she is caught up in the house’s physical oddities; at the kitchen table, she joins Bee’s celebration; and in the Beatles story, she becomes part of a family joke that lasts beyond the moment that inspired it. These scenes make her a recurring presence in the Branches’ domestic world without claiming more about her than the evidence shows.

The dog also helps convey Bee’s changing vantage on family life. The earlier episodes dwell on immediate comedy—the dog’s rigid refusal to leave a seat, or her apparently playful barking behind a stuck door—while the later Beatles recollection gives those comic details the shape of a shared past. Ice Cream’s repeated place in that language offers Bee a concrete way to remember the family’s warmth: not through a grand declaration, but through a dog assigned a band role and a familiar line whenever she sits with her mouth open.