Taffy
by Paige Morris
Between the two of us, it was my sister who got the blessed hands. Just like how she gets all the things I haven’t earned—the adoration of island boys, love and kisses from Mum and Daddy, praise from all the folks in our small, coastal town.
She’ll even get the shop one day, I bet. I’m not ashamed to say the family business will be her inheritance and not mine. Even though I was crawlin’ and waddlin’ and runnin’ up and down the aisles in the shop before she could even sit up straight, I know that now, in the summers, it is Gracie the tourists press their faces up against the window to see.
Gracie, her skin like buttercream, pipin’ neat rows of frosted flowers onto cupcakes, sculptin’ the petals with quick, certain squeezes of the pipin’ bag. Young kids come barrelin’ into the shop, laughin’ and trackin’ sand in with their bare feet, but they’d hush up right away when they saw her. Like their lungs had been zipped up, the breath caught in their throats.
Kids who ran wild all day would all of a sudden stop runnin’, all the sand seemin’ to sweep itself up and out of the doorway when they came in. They would watch my sister, tongue between her teeth in concentration, pin the last of the sugar pearls onto a weddin’ cake.
Everyone comes to the coast to marry in late summer. These are the months we make our livin’, my father and sister and me, sellin’ souvenirs and sweets on the boardwalk. The rest of the year, we live in the marshlands, but come summers, we return to the shop our father loves like a third daughter, a fresh coat of teal paint on its face each time we see it so that it never seems to age.
This summer, Gracie’s been handlin’ the cakes and customers, while Daddy gives me what he believes to be the easy tasks. So I sweep the floors, take inventory at the end of each afternoon, and spend most of my days in the kitchen makin’ the saltwater taffy.
Our shop is a favorite spot to get taffy on the shore. Tourists snatch them up in fistfuls, Daddy tells me all the time, scoopin’ up a palm of candies twist-tied in frosty wax paper. Near-collectibles, with their pastel hues and sweet flavors. We sell ’em boxed, so they never have to look as pretty as anythin’ Gracie makes to show off in the glass display. But I still try. I play with the colors, make them in all sorts of sea glass shades.
It is solitary work, just me and this taffy. I stand in the kitchen over a saucepot bubblin’ with sugar. I hum songs to pass the time while I wait for the caramel to almost-burn, for the pink colorin’ to take.
The taffy is comin’ slow today. All mornin’, the local boys on the summer staff—hired only to lift heavy boxes—move back and forth through the doors marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Conversations from the shop float into the kitchen between door swings. At one point, I hear a man with a voice gritty like sand tellin’ my sister she is beautiful. Eyes, green like jellyfish. Translucent.
Gracie is used to men flirtin’ with her from the other side of the counter, buyin’ a keychain or a postcard, even if they’re from the island, just for an excuse to brush her hand as she gives them a handwritten receipt and change.
The latest man asks Gracie, playfully, whether her heart already belongs to some island boy or other, and won’t she come away with him when he returns to the States at the end of the summer?
She laughs. The doors swing shut before I can catch her reply.
When the caramel is done, I pour it into a glass pan to cool. I’m wipin’ my hands clean on my pants when Daddy breezes into the kitchen. He comes by the counter and peers over my shoulder at the candy.
“I made a new batch,” I say, steppin’ back so he can see. “Look. It’s pink, like the inside of a shell.”
He reaches in. Pulls up a small piece to taste.
He clicks his teeth at me and says, “Only thing about this that’s like a shell is this texture. There’s no flavor, Genoveve. No taste.”
I pinch a bit of taffy from the pan and try it. My eyes burn, angry that he’s right.
“Not everybody got the hands for confection,” Daddy says, and I know he is thinkin’ of Gracie, her sugar pearls and frosted roses, and of my taffy, which is hard on the teeth.
+
I guess I’ve always known Gracie would excel in the business of sweetness. Of smilin’ and noddin’ and sayin’ thank you, please visit the beautiful Bermuda Islands again. Even though we both are island girls, raised on precipices, my sister’s always been the kind of wild that tourists love, and me—I’ve always been clumsy hands, too much sea salt and trouble.
I began to hate her for it early on, the way she could resolve any disagreements with a laugh, a soft kiss on the cheek. She had always been this way with our father, and even with Mum, but when Gracie started senior school at the academy on the island’s northern tip—once her hips had rounded and her dimples had deepened and her skin had browned the tiniest bit from a summer of workin’ on the shore—that was when my teeth started hurtin’ at the sight of her.
I would hear that laugh of hers through the walls each afternoon, in the hours we were home alone while Daddy drove tourists in cabs around the island and our mother washed linens for the hotels on the coast.
I came home right after school most days, lyin’ in bed and readin’ old romance novels to forget the day I’d had. Gracie would always come home an hour or so later, her voice and some stranger’s carryin’ through the whole house and disappearin’ without really disappearin’ into her room.
If I held my breath and focused, I could make the world soundless when she was close by. I could fill my head with an ocean if I wanted.
When Gracie brought home boys, I would call in the tide, inhale and hold the breath as long as I could before my chest started burnin’, all my thoughts floatin’, cloudy, in my head. But without fail, Gracie’s soft chime of a laugh would snatch the breath out of me, and then I could hear all sorts of things happenin’ in the room next door through the walls, thin as wafers.
I heard Gracie whisperin’, Shh. And laughin’, Keep your voice down. And then there was the quiet. The kind of quiet anythin’ could be happenin’ in.
Boys loved my sister. And I don’t mean that they loved to kiss on her and touch on her, though I know they loved those things, too. I mean, the way boys looked at Gracie reminded me of how tourists looked out at the sea. Like it was the most beautiful thing they would ever stand in front of, and they were already mournin’ the loss of it when their vacations ended and they returned home to their duller shores.
I heard soft, clumsy noises through the wall and knew whatever the boy was doin’ to my sister, he was doin’ it in the same desperate way I made taffy, or did anythin’. It hurt to listen to.
I shut my eyes, tight. Callin’ in the tide. When I opened them, sound burst everywhere.
Lightnin’ flashed, bright like a camera’s pop, and the whole house shook with the thunder that rolled out. I heard Gracie shriek and somethin’ thud against the floor before the downpour of rain started up outside, scrapin’ at the windows and floodin’ out all other noise.
I was happy, then. To be swallowed up in the sound of a storm. And I knew Gracie would be in a bad mood later on, once the boy left and the rain stopped and our parents came home for dinner. But right then, I felt comfortable inside that chaos. Wasn’t bothered at all by the thought of what would come after.
That night, Gracie came by my room and climbed into bed, curlin’ herself up like a cat near my feet. I was readin’ a book about time travel, imaginin’ all kinds of ways I could leap into a future somewhere far away from the coast.
“Gen.” When Gracie whispered, her voice reminded me of flour siftin’. “Have you … done it yet?”
I tried to imagine what it was that I might have forgotten to do. And then I remembered Gracie’s laugh. The awful quiet in her room. The boy from earlier. “No,” I said. “I haven’t.”
“You ever thought about it? What it might be like?”
I brought the book up to my face, so close the words crossed into one another and I couldn’t tell what was happenin’ in the story anymore.
“You’ve never had a boyfriend, have you?”
I considered lyin’, but she gave me a knowin’ look. I shook my head.
“Oh, island boys are fun. They’ll give anythin’ for you to pay them some attention. If you learn one of ’em by name, he’ll sneak the keys to his daddy’s car and drive you around the island in it with the windows down so everyone can see you in it, if you ask. Island boys will sneak you into their house even when their parents at home, they’re so needy.” Gracie rolled onto her side to look up at me. “You never been inside a boy’s house either, huh?”
I didn’t say a word.
Gracie sucked her teeth, hard. “It’s no fun talkin’ to you about any of this,” she sighed. “What’s the point of havin’ a big sister when she just acts like a child?”
My chest stung, like my lungs were flooded with saltwater. My throat all dried out, too. It hurt to swallow.
Gracie stood up. I felt her weight disappear from the bed. She said goodnight and slipped out into the hallway. The door shut behind her with a click.
I saw my hands, then, shakin’ at the margins of the book. I set the novel aside, clenchin’ and unclenchin’ my fists to stop the trembles.
Outside the window, I could just make out the soft patter of new rain startin’ up. I shut my eyes. Inhaled, slow, in and out and in again until I fell asleep.
By mornin’, the wind had felled a half-dozen cedars on our street. Split power lines dangled and swayed back and forth like jump ropes, sparks of light spittin’ from their frayed tips.
At breakfast, Gracie shrieked and covered her ears each time the wind ripped through the air in a whistle. Mum consoled her baby girl, pattin’ her on the back. I tried not to laugh each time the thunder pealed and Gracie winced.
Sometimes I pitied her more than I envied her. And other times, I felt like a hurricane tearin’ through my own house. My sister, in her usual way, was just a peaceful island. A still shoreline undeservin’ of the havoc I swept through and wreaked on her.
+
Late in the month, we get a new wave of tourists.
This is unusual for us. The end of August has always meant the quiet comin’ back to the coast, the beach umbrellas foldin’ in and the rusted gates rollin’ down over the shop doors and windows.
But as of this mornin’, a new cruise ship has arrived at the port and the rental houses have filled up again. I know this because Daddy is shoutin’ at the back of my head and we got all four saucepots goin’ on the stove at once.
“Finish this up, Genoveve! We needed more taffy yesterday!”
“I made an extra batch last night—the papaya ones, don’t you remember?”
I ask even though I know he can’t keep track of his own name most days, let alone of me.
One afternoon earlier in the summer when the shop wasn’t so busy, he got around to lookin’ at me as I swept the store aisles.
He frowned. “What’s that there?” he said, waggin’ his finger at my face. “That nasty little scar?”
I gripped the broom in one hand and touched my forehead with the other. I knew he was pointin’ at the puckered kiss of skin where my head had cracked against a rock underwater when I was twelve.
The day it happened, five years before, he’d been the one to pull me out, screamin’, from the sea. He was the one who pressed a towel to the wound, who muttered under his breath about how I was bleedin’ all over the clean floor tiles as I sobbed. But when he saw the scar that afternoon in the shop, he squinted like it was a face he didn’t recognize.
Now, he moves around me, pullin’ down ingredients from the shelf. Sacks hit the ground in succession, like pistons firin’, all the smoke of cornstarch dust risin’ and settlin’ over everythin’. Granules of sugar roll out like tiny marbles across the floor.
“Five hundred pieces of taffy, wrapped and boxed by noon,” Daddy barks at the stove, as though the taffy will cook and cool and stretch itself at his command, without me.
I look up at the tiny clock we keep above the stove, its fogged-up face. It’s slightly past eight in the mornin’. “I don’t know if I can do that,” I start to say, but Daddy’s already movin’ through the doors, and the candy in the saucepots is already comin’ to a boil.
I work through the mornin’. The blisters on my hands burst, skin flowerin’ out on my palms. The taffy comes out hard. I pull on it. The flavor is weak and won’t stay on my tongue. I sugar and salt it, but it won’t give.
Gracie comes by the kitchen later and I’m standin’ over the saucepot, steam makin’ my whole face wet.
Without a word, my sister grabs a pair of oven mitts from one of the drawers, adjusts the heat on the stove and pulls down one of the wooden spoons from the collection of utensils danglin’ like ornaments over our heads. I stand beside her, quiet, while she stirs things back into place.
+
It’s been six summers now that I’ve worked in Daddy’s shop. I remember some of the sweets recipes better than I remember my own face some days. It isn’t difficult to make taffy—it’s almost all sugar, all heat. The difficult thing is Daddy, his mouth that never smiles at me or at the taste of the taffy I make.
At the end of each tourist season, we all return home with tans and one or two of Gracie’s cakes from the display window to share with Mum. We don’t bring back any of my taffy. Sometimes Daddy tosses handfuls of it to the gulls before we leave the shore. We return home, and each summer I vow that the next summer will be when I discover my confectioner’s hands.
I practice in our kitchen durin’ the year, with the ingredients I sneak back in my suitcase from the shop and special flavors I collect as the summer goes on. Once, I tried to make taffy that tasted like a day at the shore, crushed seaweed and shards of shell I had plucked right out of the sand rolled into the candy, to taste. I tried to make taffy that reminded me of the sky over the beach at the end of August, a candy as gray as a thundercloud and the flavor dark as rain, so I used rainwater instead of tap, but the taste always came out different than I’d hoped. I think this is where I went wrong with the taffy, tryin’ so hard to capture somethin’ in the small, wrapped candies that just wasn’t meant to be contained.
And in the end, all of the taffy I tried to make seized up or fell bland, like the thing I’d tried to capture had evaporated, leavin’ not a single trace of flavor behind.
+
The tourists are havin’ a bonfire on the beach. Daddy closes the shop early for the evenin’ so that he and Gracie can join them, laugh their big laughs and roast marshmallows on skewers with the families here on their holidays. The laughter and bonfire smoke finds me all the way in the shop’s kitchen, where I am workin’ on a batch of taffy the color of the sea. I stir and scrape and stretch the taffy, hopin’ that it gives.
The kitchen is still choked with steam from earlier, so I take the taffy outside to chill. The sun has set and everythin’ on the shore is blue-gray like an old bruise. Like the scar on my forehead—a reminder that I, too, can break open like a sky.
I hold a bundle of taffy in my hands. I’m so blistered I can’t even feel my skin anymore.
I see Gracie down by the bonfire, her curls swayin’ like cattails in the breeze. I carry the taffy down the boardwalk, onto the beach, followin’ the sound of her laughter all the way down.
“Gracie.”
One of the tourist girls sittin’ beside her stops mid-word and looks up, wide-eyed. Gracie turns to me, too. Her smile is hard as rock candy.
“I need help,” I say.
Gracie leans in and whispers somethin’ to her new friends, thin girls in patterned bikinis who throw their heads back when they laugh.
My sister stands, brushin’ sand off her shorts. I follow her down the shore, away from everyone.
When we get far enough out that I can’t even see the light from the fire, she says, “Okay. What is it?”
“It’s the taffy.”
“What about the taffy?”
“I can’t get it perfect like you do. Daddy says I make it too hard.” I remember his word for it, heavy in my mouth. “Inedible.”
“It’s hard because you don’t stretch it, Gen.”
“I do stretch it,” I insist. I pull it out between my hands like an accordion as proof.
“Taffy needs to be stretched farther than that, and for a longer time.”
The taffy droops between my hands. “My arms only open so wide.”
Gracie sighs. She grabs some taffy in her two fists, diggin’ her nails into the gum of it, and she starts to pull. I grip what’s left in my hands as she takes more and more of it down the shoreline with her.
Two long highway lanes of the stuff hang taut as tightropes between us. The cords, thick and strainin’. A soft sky blue.
Gracie is about ten or fifteen houses down now and still pullin’. Her feet sink into the sand with every step backward. She drags her fistfuls down the shore, testin’ the strength of the strings like she’s fixin’ up a flimsy kite to fly.
A drop of water lands on my nose. The air has some of the same stick and taste as the taffy. Behind my sister, a flash of light cuts the sky in half.
“Keep goin’,” I shout. I don’t know if she can hear me. All the shutters on the beach houses rattle in the storm winds.
Thunder claps.
This time, when the sky flashes, I can’t even see her, she’s so far out. I only know she’s still movin’ from the tug I feel on my hands.
I can’t make her out at all. Can’t hear a word over the wind. So I close my eyes and I hope she keeps on walkin’. Away. Far from me. Down the shore. Past more rental houses. Alongside the wind. Keep goin’ and goin’ and goin’. Walk right into a slice of lightnin’.
She’ll even get the shop one day, I bet. I’m not ashamed to say the family business will be her inheritance and not mine. Even though I was crawlin’ and waddlin’ and runnin’ up and down the aisles in the shop before she could even sit up straight, I know that now, in the summers, it is Gracie the tourists press their faces up against the window to see.
Gracie, her skin like buttercream, pipin’ neat rows of frosted flowers onto cupcakes, sculptin’ the petals with quick, certain squeezes of the pipin’ bag. Young kids come barrelin’ into the shop, laughin’ and trackin’ sand in with their bare feet, but they’d hush up right away when they saw her. Like their lungs had been zipped up, the breath caught in their throats.
Kids who ran wild all day would all of a sudden stop runnin’, all the sand seemin’ to sweep itself up and out of the doorway when they came in. They would watch my sister, tongue between her teeth in concentration, pin the last of the sugar pearls onto a weddin’ cake.
Everyone comes to the coast to marry in late summer. These are the months we make our livin’, my father and sister and me, sellin’ souvenirs and sweets on the boardwalk. The rest of the year, we live in the marshlands, but come summers, we return to the shop our father loves like a third daughter, a fresh coat of teal paint on its face each time we see it so that it never seems to age.
This summer, Gracie’s been handlin’ the cakes and customers, while Daddy gives me what he believes to be the easy tasks. So I sweep the floors, take inventory at the end of each afternoon, and spend most of my days in the kitchen makin’ the saltwater taffy.
Our shop is a favorite spot to get taffy on the shore. Tourists snatch them up in fistfuls, Daddy tells me all the time, scoopin’ up a palm of candies twist-tied in frosty wax paper. Near-collectibles, with their pastel hues and sweet flavors. We sell ’em boxed, so they never have to look as pretty as anythin’ Gracie makes to show off in the glass display. But I still try. I play with the colors, make them in all sorts of sea glass shades.
It is solitary work, just me and this taffy. I stand in the kitchen over a saucepot bubblin’ with sugar. I hum songs to pass the time while I wait for the caramel to almost-burn, for the pink colorin’ to take.
The taffy is comin’ slow today. All mornin’, the local boys on the summer staff—hired only to lift heavy boxes—move back and forth through the doors marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Conversations from the shop float into the kitchen between door swings. At one point, I hear a man with a voice gritty like sand tellin’ my sister she is beautiful. Eyes, green like jellyfish. Translucent.
Gracie is used to men flirtin’ with her from the other side of the counter, buyin’ a keychain or a postcard, even if they’re from the island, just for an excuse to brush her hand as she gives them a handwritten receipt and change.
The latest man asks Gracie, playfully, whether her heart already belongs to some island boy or other, and won’t she come away with him when he returns to the States at the end of the summer?
She laughs. The doors swing shut before I can catch her reply.
When the caramel is done, I pour it into a glass pan to cool. I’m wipin’ my hands clean on my pants when Daddy breezes into the kitchen. He comes by the counter and peers over my shoulder at the candy.
“I made a new batch,” I say, steppin’ back so he can see. “Look. It’s pink, like the inside of a shell.”
He reaches in. Pulls up a small piece to taste.
He clicks his teeth at me and says, “Only thing about this that’s like a shell is this texture. There’s no flavor, Genoveve. No taste.”
I pinch a bit of taffy from the pan and try it. My eyes burn, angry that he’s right.
“Not everybody got the hands for confection,” Daddy says, and I know he is thinkin’ of Gracie, her sugar pearls and frosted roses, and of my taffy, which is hard on the teeth.
+
I guess I’ve always known Gracie would excel in the business of sweetness. Of smilin’ and noddin’ and sayin’ thank you, please visit the beautiful Bermuda Islands again. Even though we both are island girls, raised on precipices, my sister’s always been the kind of wild that tourists love, and me—I’ve always been clumsy hands, too much sea salt and trouble.
I began to hate her for it early on, the way she could resolve any disagreements with a laugh, a soft kiss on the cheek. She had always been this way with our father, and even with Mum, but when Gracie started senior school at the academy on the island’s northern tip—once her hips had rounded and her dimples had deepened and her skin had browned the tiniest bit from a summer of workin’ on the shore—that was when my teeth started hurtin’ at the sight of her.
I would hear that laugh of hers through the walls each afternoon, in the hours we were home alone while Daddy drove tourists in cabs around the island and our mother washed linens for the hotels on the coast.
I came home right after school most days, lyin’ in bed and readin’ old romance novels to forget the day I’d had. Gracie would always come home an hour or so later, her voice and some stranger’s carryin’ through the whole house and disappearin’ without really disappearin’ into her room.
If I held my breath and focused, I could make the world soundless when she was close by. I could fill my head with an ocean if I wanted.
When Gracie brought home boys, I would call in the tide, inhale and hold the breath as long as I could before my chest started burnin’, all my thoughts floatin’, cloudy, in my head. But without fail, Gracie’s soft chime of a laugh would snatch the breath out of me, and then I could hear all sorts of things happenin’ in the room next door through the walls, thin as wafers.
I heard Gracie whisperin’, Shh. And laughin’, Keep your voice down. And then there was the quiet. The kind of quiet anythin’ could be happenin’ in.
Boys loved my sister. And I don’t mean that they loved to kiss on her and touch on her, though I know they loved those things, too. I mean, the way boys looked at Gracie reminded me of how tourists looked out at the sea. Like it was the most beautiful thing they would ever stand in front of, and they were already mournin’ the loss of it when their vacations ended and they returned home to their duller shores.
I heard soft, clumsy noises through the wall and knew whatever the boy was doin’ to my sister, he was doin’ it in the same desperate way I made taffy, or did anythin’. It hurt to listen to.
I shut my eyes, tight. Callin’ in the tide. When I opened them, sound burst everywhere.
Lightnin’ flashed, bright like a camera’s pop, and the whole house shook with the thunder that rolled out. I heard Gracie shriek and somethin’ thud against the floor before the downpour of rain started up outside, scrapin’ at the windows and floodin’ out all other noise.
I was happy, then. To be swallowed up in the sound of a storm. And I knew Gracie would be in a bad mood later on, once the boy left and the rain stopped and our parents came home for dinner. But right then, I felt comfortable inside that chaos. Wasn’t bothered at all by the thought of what would come after.
That night, Gracie came by my room and climbed into bed, curlin’ herself up like a cat near my feet. I was readin’ a book about time travel, imaginin’ all kinds of ways I could leap into a future somewhere far away from the coast.
“Gen.” When Gracie whispered, her voice reminded me of flour siftin’. “Have you … done it yet?”
I tried to imagine what it was that I might have forgotten to do. And then I remembered Gracie’s laugh. The awful quiet in her room. The boy from earlier. “No,” I said. “I haven’t.”
“You ever thought about it? What it might be like?”
I brought the book up to my face, so close the words crossed into one another and I couldn’t tell what was happenin’ in the story anymore.
“You’ve never had a boyfriend, have you?”
I considered lyin’, but she gave me a knowin’ look. I shook my head.
“Oh, island boys are fun. They’ll give anythin’ for you to pay them some attention. If you learn one of ’em by name, he’ll sneak the keys to his daddy’s car and drive you around the island in it with the windows down so everyone can see you in it, if you ask. Island boys will sneak you into their house even when their parents at home, they’re so needy.” Gracie rolled onto her side to look up at me. “You never been inside a boy’s house either, huh?”
I didn’t say a word.
Gracie sucked her teeth, hard. “It’s no fun talkin’ to you about any of this,” she sighed. “What’s the point of havin’ a big sister when she just acts like a child?”
My chest stung, like my lungs were flooded with saltwater. My throat all dried out, too. It hurt to swallow.
Gracie stood up. I felt her weight disappear from the bed. She said goodnight and slipped out into the hallway. The door shut behind her with a click.
I saw my hands, then, shakin’ at the margins of the book. I set the novel aside, clenchin’ and unclenchin’ my fists to stop the trembles.
Outside the window, I could just make out the soft patter of new rain startin’ up. I shut my eyes. Inhaled, slow, in and out and in again until I fell asleep.
By mornin’, the wind had felled a half-dozen cedars on our street. Split power lines dangled and swayed back and forth like jump ropes, sparks of light spittin’ from their frayed tips.
At breakfast, Gracie shrieked and covered her ears each time the wind ripped through the air in a whistle. Mum consoled her baby girl, pattin’ her on the back. I tried not to laugh each time the thunder pealed and Gracie winced.
Sometimes I pitied her more than I envied her. And other times, I felt like a hurricane tearin’ through my own house. My sister, in her usual way, was just a peaceful island. A still shoreline undeservin’ of the havoc I swept through and wreaked on her.
+
Late in the month, we get a new wave of tourists.
This is unusual for us. The end of August has always meant the quiet comin’ back to the coast, the beach umbrellas foldin’ in and the rusted gates rollin’ down over the shop doors and windows.
But as of this mornin’, a new cruise ship has arrived at the port and the rental houses have filled up again. I know this because Daddy is shoutin’ at the back of my head and we got all four saucepots goin’ on the stove at once.
“Finish this up, Genoveve! We needed more taffy yesterday!”
“I made an extra batch last night—the papaya ones, don’t you remember?”
I ask even though I know he can’t keep track of his own name most days, let alone of me.
One afternoon earlier in the summer when the shop wasn’t so busy, he got around to lookin’ at me as I swept the store aisles.
He frowned. “What’s that there?” he said, waggin’ his finger at my face. “That nasty little scar?”
I gripped the broom in one hand and touched my forehead with the other. I knew he was pointin’ at the puckered kiss of skin where my head had cracked against a rock underwater when I was twelve.
The day it happened, five years before, he’d been the one to pull me out, screamin’, from the sea. He was the one who pressed a towel to the wound, who muttered under his breath about how I was bleedin’ all over the clean floor tiles as I sobbed. But when he saw the scar that afternoon in the shop, he squinted like it was a face he didn’t recognize.
Now, he moves around me, pullin’ down ingredients from the shelf. Sacks hit the ground in succession, like pistons firin’, all the smoke of cornstarch dust risin’ and settlin’ over everythin’. Granules of sugar roll out like tiny marbles across the floor.
“Five hundred pieces of taffy, wrapped and boxed by noon,” Daddy barks at the stove, as though the taffy will cook and cool and stretch itself at his command, without me.
I look up at the tiny clock we keep above the stove, its fogged-up face. It’s slightly past eight in the mornin’. “I don’t know if I can do that,” I start to say, but Daddy’s already movin’ through the doors, and the candy in the saucepots is already comin’ to a boil.
I work through the mornin’. The blisters on my hands burst, skin flowerin’ out on my palms. The taffy comes out hard. I pull on it. The flavor is weak and won’t stay on my tongue. I sugar and salt it, but it won’t give.
Gracie comes by the kitchen later and I’m standin’ over the saucepot, steam makin’ my whole face wet.
Without a word, my sister grabs a pair of oven mitts from one of the drawers, adjusts the heat on the stove and pulls down one of the wooden spoons from the collection of utensils danglin’ like ornaments over our heads. I stand beside her, quiet, while she stirs things back into place.
+
It’s been six summers now that I’ve worked in Daddy’s shop. I remember some of the sweets recipes better than I remember my own face some days. It isn’t difficult to make taffy—it’s almost all sugar, all heat. The difficult thing is Daddy, his mouth that never smiles at me or at the taste of the taffy I make.
At the end of each tourist season, we all return home with tans and one or two of Gracie’s cakes from the display window to share with Mum. We don’t bring back any of my taffy. Sometimes Daddy tosses handfuls of it to the gulls before we leave the shore. We return home, and each summer I vow that the next summer will be when I discover my confectioner’s hands.
I practice in our kitchen durin’ the year, with the ingredients I sneak back in my suitcase from the shop and special flavors I collect as the summer goes on. Once, I tried to make taffy that tasted like a day at the shore, crushed seaweed and shards of shell I had plucked right out of the sand rolled into the candy, to taste. I tried to make taffy that reminded me of the sky over the beach at the end of August, a candy as gray as a thundercloud and the flavor dark as rain, so I used rainwater instead of tap, but the taste always came out different than I’d hoped. I think this is where I went wrong with the taffy, tryin’ so hard to capture somethin’ in the small, wrapped candies that just wasn’t meant to be contained.
And in the end, all of the taffy I tried to make seized up or fell bland, like the thing I’d tried to capture had evaporated, leavin’ not a single trace of flavor behind.
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The tourists are havin’ a bonfire on the beach. Daddy closes the shop early for the evenin’ so that he and Gracie can join them, laugh their big laughs and roast marshmallows on skewers with the families here on their holidays. The laughter and bonfire smoke finds me all the way in the shop’s kitchen, where I am workin’ on a batch of taffy the color of the sea. I stir and scrape and stretch the taffy, hopin’ that it gives.
The kitchen is still choked with steam from earlier, so I take the taffy outside to chill. The sun has set and everythin’ on the shore is blue-gray like an old bruise. Like the scar on my forehead—a reminder that I, too, can break open like a sky.
I hold a bundle of taffy in my hands. I’m so blistered I can’t even feel my skin anymore.
I see Gracie down by the bonfire, her curls swayin’ like cattails in the breeze. I carry the taffy down the boardwalk, onto the beach, followin’ the sound of her laughter all the way down.
“Gracie.”
One of the tourist girls sittin’ beside her stops mid-word and looks up, wide-eyed. Gracie turns to me, too. Her smile is hard as rock candy.
“I need help,” I say.
Gracie leans in and whispers somethin’ to her new friends, thin girls in patterned bikinis who throw their heads back when they laugh.
My sister stands, brushin’ sand off her shorts. I follow her down the shore, away from everyone.
When we get far enough out that I can’t even see the light from the fire, she says, “Okay. What is it?”
“It’s the taffy.”
“What about the taffy?”
“I can’t get it perfect like you do. Daddy says I make it too hard.” I remember his word for it, heavy in my mouth. “Inedible.”
“It’s hard because you don’t stretch it, Gen.”
“I do stretch it,” I insist. I pull it out between my hands like an accordion as proof.
“Taffy needs to be stretched farther than that, and for a longer time.”
The taffy droops between my hands. “My arms only open so wide.”
Gracie sighs. She grabs some taffy in her two fists, diggin’ her nails into the gum of it, and she starts to pull. I grip what’s left in my hands as she takes more and more of it down the shoreline with her.
Two long highway lanes of the stuff hang taut as tightropes between us. The cords, thick and strainin’. A soft sky blue.
Gracie is about ten or fifteen houses down now and still pullin’. Her feet sink into the sand with every step backward. She drags her fistfuls down the shore, testin’ the strength of the strings like she’s fixin’ up a flimsy kite to fly.
A drop of water lands on my nose. The air has some of the same stick and taste as the taffy. Behind my sister, a flash of light cuts the sky in half.
“Keep goin’,” I shout. I don’t know if she can hear me. All the shutters on the beach houses rattle in the storm winds.
Thunder claps.
This time, when the sky flashes, I can’t even see her, she’s so far out. I only know she’s still movin’ from the tug I feel on my hands.
I can’t make her out at all. Can’t hear a word over the wind. So I close my eyes and I hope she keeps on walkin’. Away. Far from me. Down the shore. Past more rental houses. Alongside the wind. Keep goin’ and goin’ and goin’. Walk right into a slice of lightnin’.
Paige Morris is an English language teacher with Fulbright Korea. She is a Brown graduate who is passionate about fiction, spoken word poetry, teaching, and, most importantly, the power of these disciplines in working towards a socially equitable world. She is the recipient of the 2016 Feldman Prize in Fiction from the Brown University Department of Literary Arts and Casey Shearer Memorial Award for Excellence in Creative Nonfiction from the Brown University Department of English.