Cotton Candy

Cotton Candy

Trigger warning: inexplicit reference to past child sexual abuse

Mostly to avoid dusting her studio apartment, Jean pulls her high school yearbook from a shelf and thumbs absently through its pages, shakes her head and mumbles to the cat, “Can’t believe it’s been forty years.” She traces her finger over the title: Pinnacle 1985. She finds her own senior portrait and snorts over the ‘most likely to succeed’ caption. She looks for Carly Jenkins’s picture and tells the cat while she scratches its chin, “I wonder if Carly ever made it out of that trailer park.”

Jean could still see so vividly the sagging shutters on the rickety manager’s house that Carly occupied with her boar of a father, gnome of a mother, and creepy Uncle Herby. Mr. Jenkins stomping around the property. Mrs. Jenkins, perched timidly in the shabby wicker rocker on the decaying back porch, shelling peas or something. Grumbling and tsk-ing over what the latest tenants stored on their cramped lots.

Jean still got shivers remembering her terror being on the sidelines of the Jenkins’s screaming fights over baskets of fried clams at Beebe’s Drive-in. Her disgust at being around Uncle Herby who’d stolen into Carly’s room from when she was nine until she got her first period at twelve. When Carly told Jean about Uncle Herby, the summer they were sixteen and their friendship bloomed, she’d spoken so matter-of-factly.

Carly was a sweet girl and a hard worker. According to Jean’s mother, this made up some for Carly’s reputation of being a little loose. They had one of those magical friendships that made Jean wonder for years if the shitheads in the cafeteria clusters were right to call them lesbos. Except that Carly was stuck to James (much older at nineteen and not even from town), and Jean had spent the last month of tenth grade walking back and forth past Mickey Parker’s house on lovely Grove Street where all the doctors’ families lived. She believed that Mickey would notice her and come out of the house and invite her for lemonade up onto the wrap-around porch painted that elegant beach-house gray. One thing would lead to another and his arm would naturally drape over her shoulder while they lazed on the swing. She would nestle into his embrace, inhale deeply of his soft cotton shirt hung lovingly on the line to dry in the sweet New England sunshine, and look into his sky-blue eyes. She would.

One July weekend, Jean got off from work bussing tables at the Greek restaurant in one-horse Erlton to go to the summer camp with the Jenkinses. It was going to be a blast. The girls would help with the garden and fixing up the camp, visit Carly’s Grandma Mazy in the big house, and read in the screenhouse. (Carly was reading Anna Karenina and not even for school, and Jean’s copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn awaited her.) They would ride rusty sting-ray bikes at reckless speeds through the woods, walk to the store to get ice cream sandwiches, work on the giant jigsaw puzzle. So much freedom!

James was to pick them up at night, and they would sneak off to Keers Beach and have cotton candy, play skee-ball and whack-a-mole, go roller skating, and walk romantically along the moonlit beach in a cozy cove of the great Winnipesaukee.

Carly’s mother came out to the screenhouse in the middle of the afternoon to tell the girls to pull their noses out of their books long enough to pick and snap green beans for dinner.

“Ya like lamb?” she asked Jean, brushing limp bangs behind an ear, wearing her crooked smile, and shifting a basket of corn from one hip to the other.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had it,” said Jean after a pause. “But I’m sure I’ll like it.” Always had to clean her plate. She grew up feeling guilty about eating—feeling guilty about not eating—a gut reaction to the starving Biafrans.

“Mazy prepares it nice—leg of lamb with mint jelly,” announced Carly, pulling her wispy hair into a ponytail. She grabbed a burlap bag for the beans and took Jean’s hand. Off they raced to the garden, passing by Carly’s father who was grunting and sweating in the shed, cursing the tractor and banging under the hood with some heavy tool.

In truth, Jean was a little afraid to try the lamb, just like she was a little afraid of that night when James would pick them up. Carly had convinced Jean that she should have a boyfriend, and James had a friend named George who was coming along to keep Jean company while Carly and James went off into the woods.

It turned out that Jean did not care for lamb, though she choked it down to be polite, the same as she tried at first to be polite with George. She also had to pretend, as she and Carly linked pinkies and giggled in bed later that night, that she understood the feelings Carly had for James. How amazing sex was. Nothing at all like what Uncle Herby made her do. Months later, Carly said it had to be on that trip that she conceived the baby.

They finished cleaning up from dinner, brushed their hair a hundred strokes, put on too much mascara, and snuck off with flashlights to meet the guys at the end of the driveway. Carly kept ahead by a half step. Jean was puzzled by her own heavy feet because she’d had been full of anticipation for so long and horny enough to surreptitiously rub against her own heel sitting cross-legged in the back of the station wagon on the long drive to camp the day before.

James’s truck was already waiting around the bend, and a denim sleeve appeared out of the passenger side to help the girls up from the roadside ditch. There were arms and legs all over the place as Carly wedged herself between George and the stick shift to sit beside James. George excused himself politely and reached over Jean to shut the door, doing a quick check that she was all the way in. The glitter of the lake soon appeared as they crested the hill, with James taking the rise so fast that Jean almost lost the lamb that continued its struggle down her esophagus.

Carly and James vanished. George and Jean got to know all there was to know about each other after ten minutes of roller skating. He was in a hurry to stroll all fifty yards of the boardwalk. Janice Ian’s “Seventeen” spilled from the arcade as they walked past, and George kept bending to hums strains and broken phrases of it into Jean’s ear as he piloted her onto the beach and over toward a lifeguard shack.

Jean made a show of finding a trash can for her wand of pink cotton candy that had lost its fluff. She sat hard on the nearest bench. George stood awkwardly for a minute then folded his bony six-foot frame down next to her.

“It’s pretty how the boardwalk lights float on the ripples,” she said at last.

“Yup.”

“This is a huge lake,” she said.

“Yup.”

He abruptly took her hand, and she looked at it like it was a stranger’s. She felt a sensation of suffocating and could not keep her smile. She pulled away, pushed off, and hurried toward the lights of the boardwalk.

“You’re so pretty,” George croaked, trailing after her, draping a tentative arm over her shoulder. He reached to brush her hair back from her face. His shirt smelled of diesel and sweat.

She managed to spit out, “Just take me back to camp.”

George stopped short and utterly softened. “James has the keys,” he finally whispered hoarsely, looking all around.

As the sky let loose a summer rain, Jean sidled under the far end of a half-overturned rowboat. George stood in the downpour, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like it was desperate to find a way out.

Time stalled. The rain hit the boat like gravel hurled against a tin shed. At long last, James and Carly, soggy and glowing, came trotting toward the miserable pair on the beach. Sopping wet clothes defined them all by the time they reached the truck. The tension put only the smallest damper on the spark between James and Carly. Jean counted every click of the odometer all the way back to camp.

Carly finished school that year. She was out for a bit in April to deliver the baby, and kids said horrible and untrue things about her. But she was sweet and smart, so the nicer teachers helped her keep up and said encouraging things to her all the time. Her own family, who had sat with her at picnic tables and birthday parties her whole life, who had countenanced Uncle Herby, turned from her. Carly’s mother let everyone who’d listen know that she had no choice but to help Carly take care of the baby, but after a few months of her mother’s tsk-tsk-ing, Carly told Jean she had to move into her own trailer or lose her mind.

********

Jean shakes her head and looks around like she’s trying to orient herself, swipes her dust rag over the yearbook and puts it back on the shelf. “I feel like I’ve just sat through a movie,” she says to the cat’s retreating tail end. “I wonder if Carly has gotten as old-looking and lumpy as me. I remember holding baby Jimmy—the earthy scent of his little head—Hm! He’d be in his forties now—I remember how I walked the four miles home the days James would come home on leave because I was suddenly quite in the way. Carly kinda disappeared on me. Her eyes changed, always looking after Jimmy, looking at the clock, searching for James, looking through me and beyond.”

“Pinnacle, indeed,” she says to no one, and gives up on dusting for another day.