The Cotton Queen

by Pamela Morsi

  I slid my butt down onto the upholstery. The entire backseat was swallowed up by my dress.

  With a screech of tires and near whiplash, Stanley headed in the direction of the other convertible. We caught up to them just as they turned onto Loop 5. Somehow, I expected Stanley to follow meekly wherever Brian led. I was completely wrong about that. As soon as we got on the highway, Stanley dangerously sped up and pulled directly alongside the car Brian was driving.

  “What are you doing?” I cried out.

  “This Plymouth has a lot more pickup than that staid, old Caddy,” he said. “The idiot is so used to being Mr. Fastguy in his Cobra, he doesn’t even know he’s in the lesser machine.”

  Brian was beginning to get it now. His laughing grin had dissolved into fierce determination. Both cars were pedal to the metal. The broken lines on the pavement rushing past like dots. My pulse was pounding. My heart was in my throat. My heavily sprayed hair was blowing all around my head. But there was a strange sort of exhilaration, as well. I loved racing against Brian. I especially loved beating him.

  I glanced over at the other car. Nicie was white as a sheet and screaming her head off.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I told Stanley.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he answered. Immediately the Plymouth began pulling away from the Cadillac, leaving him in the dust. We continued barreling down the road at an astonishing clip until Brian and Nicie were completely out of sight.

  I was up on my knees on the backseat, my fists raised high in the air, shouting and celebrating. Stanley pulled off on an unfinished exit ramp. He slowed down significantly when he hit the gravel, but it still stirred a giant cloud of white gyp dust all around us, coating everything, including my fancy dress and the decorated car.

  He turned left underneath the overpass and came to such an abrupt stop that I was practically thrown into the front seat. Lying out nearly flat on the seat back, I caught myself with both hands on the glovebox door. I was still laughing when I rolled over and realized that I was in Stanley’s arms.

  “God, you’re beautiful,” he said.

  And then he kissed me. It wasn’t a tentative kiss or a little peck on the lips, it was a real kiss, full of passion and tenderness and raw sensual longing. It lasted only a moment, but it was somehow caught out of time.

  When we moved apart, we just stared at each other as we tried to catch our breath.

  “Wow,” he whispered finally.

  “Wow, yourself,” I answered.

  I smoothed the hair out of my face and felt suddenly too exposed in my low-cut formal.

  “I’ve never felt like that,” he said. “I mean, I’ve felt, you know, the desire part, but that...that intensity. I mean, I’ve never felt anything like that.”

  “Me, either,” I admitted. “I’ve kissed a lot of guys and I never...it was never like that.”

  “It’s kind of scary,” he said. “I mean, in a way, it’s kind of scary.”

  “Right,” I answered. “It’s scary.”

  “Do you...do you think that it’s us?” he asked. “Is it us, the two of us together that made it like that? Or was it just the car chase?”

  “It had to be the cars,” I said. “I mean, us, you and I, there just isn’t any you and I. We’ve known each other since kindergarten and I don’t think we’ve ever been attracted to each other.”

  He agreed. “Not more than just normal attraction of any guy to a pretty girl,” he said.

  “There is, I guess, chemistry or something like that.”

  Stanley nodded. “But even chemistry requires a catalyst. It had to be racing the car. That maybe reacts with our everyday hormones and makes us suddenly crave one another.”

  “Yeah, that’s probably it.”

  He straightened completely and put his hands on the steering wheel. Slowly he let out a deep breath.

  “It was nice, huh?”

  “Yeah, it was nice.”

  He turned and looked at me. “Do you want to try it again?”

  To be completely honest, I was tempted. But he was Stanley Kuhl, with all the high school nerdiness that his status represented. He was also my mother’s choice as my Cotton Queen companion. It would have been an answer to all her hopes and dreams if I fell in love with a local boy on the day I was crowned queen and lived happily in McKinney ever after.

  My hand was still trembling as I held it out to him.

  “Stanley, I think that we should stay friends forever and spend our future avoiding fast cars.”

  He grinned and accepted my handshake.

  “It’s a deal,” he said.

  BABS

  I WAS SO PROUD to see Laney take her place on the dais as Cotton Queen. It should have been the perfect start to a perfect senior year. But, of course, Laney never liked things perfect. She wasn’t willing to even try out for cheerleader. She wouldn’t use her musical talent for marching band. She wasn’t interested in elevating her social position at school or even being named Most Likely to Succeed. Laney was completely focused on her life after graduation. And all the arguing in the world wasn’t changing her opinion one bit.

  “This is the best year of your life and you’re intent on wasting it,” I told her.

  “If this is the best, I might as well put my head in the oven right now,” she answered.

  She was not overly dramatic. I didn’t worry that she was unhappy. Laney just had no sense of what things could make her life easier. And she was stubbornly unwilling to take advantage of her advantages.

  I had to work all through high school. There was no wiggle room in that. Uncle Warren and Aunt Maxine needed me and I owed it to them to help out.

  Laney, on the other hand, made a choice to work. I could understand helping Uncle Warren after school. But he’d died and the Shoe Shop was sold, so there was no reason why she couldn’t quietly step back from Aunt Maxine’s businesses. But she didn’t. She continued to run errands, keep books, help with taxes and inventories and fill in wherever and whenever she was needed.

  I complained to Aunt Maxine about it.

  “Laney wants to work for me,” she said. “I appreciate the help and I’ll miss her when she goes away to school.”

  “She’s not going away to school,” I told her. “She’ll go to community college here in town.”

  Aunt Maxine laughed and shook her head.

  “You don’t talk to that girl much, do you?”

  “I talk to her every day.”

  “Well, you must not be listening,” Aunt Maxine said. “She’s applied to colleges all over the country. She’s even talked about Harvard and Yale. I didn’t even know that girls went to those schools.”

  “Laney is not going to Harvard or Yale,” I stated with complete conviction. “She’s not leaving home. She’ll get all the education she needs by being a wife and mother right here in town.”

  “I haven’t heard her say anything about wanting to be a wife and mother,” Aunt Maxine said.

  “Young girls will have their silly fantasies,” I explained. “They’ll talk about wanting to be ballerinas or fashion models. But when it comes right down to it, women are still women. And the measure of their success is still the man that they marry.”

  Aunt Maxine shrugged, unconvinced. “That was sure true in my day. And in yours, too. But the world has changed. These gals today, they look at things differently.”

  I shook my head. “All that ‘I Am Woman’ nonsense is just that, nonsense.”

  I’m not sure I convinced my aunt, but at least she didn’t argue with me. My husband maintained no such restraint. He’d sided with Laney numerous times, but our disagreement became serious one weeknight in late January.

  It began, ordinarily enough, at dinner. Laney had, once again, brought up her plans for going off to college. She and Acee discussed the different colleges from across the table as if it were all settled. I tried to just ignore it. They both knew my thoughts on the matter. The last thing I wanted to do was ruin a lovely meal wit
h another huffy tantrum from my daughter. But after listening to her buoyant enthusiasm for nearly twenty minutes, I was strangely reminded of her father. For a moment I felt a warmth in my heart, a remembrance of the foolish, hopeful young love that we’d shared. I had gone out into the world because I had to. Tom had been excited about leaving home. He wanted the adventure of discovering life beyond McKinney. And he’d come home to his parents in a box.

  “Just stop this daydreaming,” I blurted into their conversation abruptly. “Laney, you are not going anywhere. You’re going to attend community college and stay in your very nice room upstairs.”

  “I’m going away to college, Babs,” Laney said. “I’ve already decided that.”

  “You aren’t going anywhere,” I replied.

  “You can’t make me stay here,” she said.

  “I most certainly can,” I answered. “I’m your mother.”

  “I’ll be eighteen this summer. After that, I do what I want, whether you like it or not.”

  “You would go against my wishes?”

  “I am going,” Laney said. “And I’d hope you’d wish me well.”

  She stomped off and I began clearing the table. I hoped that would be the end of it, but Acee followed me into the kitchen.

  “It’s normal for a child, any child, to want to get out from underneath parental wings.”

  “She can be on her own once she marries,” I explained.

  “If she’s married, she won’t be on her own,” Acee replied. “Laney is a smart, responsible, well-adjusted kid. She’s earned the chance to pursue her own goals.”

  “She can pursue whatever she wants,” I assured him. “She’ll just pursue them here, in McKinney.”

  “No, she can’t pursue them here,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because one of the things she wants most to pursue is putting some distance between herself and this town.”

  “What a terrible thing to say!”

  “It’s not terrible. It’s truthful and it’s natural,” Acee said. “You’ve made McKinney a prison for her.”

  “Oh, don’t be so overly dramatic. I have not.”

  “You know you have,” he answered. “She’s been trapped inside these city limits since you moved back here.”

  “That’s silly.”

  “It may be silly,” he said. “But it’s true. You brought her home from Girl Scout camp on the third night away. She’s had to beg for every beach weekend or shopping trip. Even football games are off-limits if the other high school doesn’t come here to play. You never let her go anyplace.”

  “She went to Austin just last week,” I said in my defense.

  “It was a school field trip to see the state capitol and she got to go because she brought the permission slip to me for signature. She was afraid you would come up with some excuse for her not to go.”

  “Well, she was sniffling. She said it was just allergies, but she might have been coming down with a cold.”

  Acee took a deep breath and shook his head, sadly.

  “Babs, some time, sooner or later, we’re going to have to deal with the elephant in the living room.”

  “The what?”

  “The elephant in the living room,” he repeated. “The thing that’s so big, but that we never talk about.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I said, running the hot water in the kitchen sink. “You’re not going to bring up sex again, are you? Do I need to remind you, I’m almost forty years old? I’m approaching the menopause. At this stage of life most couples have stopped anyway.”

  “I’m not talking about sex,” Acee said. “I gave up on that, on us, a long time ago. What I’m talking about is your inexplicable fear of the outside world.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Oh, yes, you do.”

  I tried to walk away, but he followed me back into the dining room.

  “First it was just Dallas,” he said. “You didn’t like the traffic, you didn’t like the lonely stretch of highway. Okay, I thought, she doesn’t like going to Dallas alone, that’s fine. But then, you didn’t like going with me, either. And it wasn’t just Dallas. It was Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, Houston, New Orleans. We haven’t been on a vacation in ten years, because you’re afraid to leave town.”

  “You never said anything about wanting to go on vacation,” I pointed out.

  “This is not about vacation.” Acee raised his voice. “It’s about some craziness within you that’s getting worse and worse.”

  “I am not going back to counseling,” I stated flatly.

  “I’m not asking you to,” he said. “But I am insisting that you do not limit your daughter’s life based on your own irrational fear.”

  “Irrational?” I was suddenly angry. Acee thought he had something to be mad about. Well, I was mad, too. “You think my fear is irrational. Do you have any idea what’s going on out there?”

  “Out where?”

  “Out there. In the places outside of McKinney, do you have any idea what that’s like,” I said.

  “I think I know more about it than you do,” he said.

  I shook my head. “Out there people are getting kidnapped and killed every day, Acee. There’s guns and drugs and young people who are totally insane. Charlie Manson is out there.”

  “Charlie Manson is in jail,” Acee said.

  “Well, there are plenty more just like him, I’m sure,” I said. “You just don’t know, Acee. There are men, terrible men, that would take advantage of a sweet, young girl like Laney.”

  “There are men that would take advantage of her right here in McKinney,” he answered. “She’s just smart enough not to let that happen.”

  “So you think that sort of thing only happens to stupid women?” I screamed at him.

  “I didn’t say that,” he yelled back. “I said that it could happen anywhere and you can’t keep someone, anyone, but certainly not someone you love, locked up for their protection.”

  “Well, you can try. Laney is my daughter. You don’t understand that. She’s not yours. You don’t love her the way I love her.”

  Acee flinched as if I’d struck him. “She’s not my flesh and blood,” he admitted. “But how dare you suggest that I don’t love her. Laney is my daughter, the only child I ever expect to have.”

  “I know you care about her. You’re a good provider. But you’re still just a stepfather.”

  “No, I’m more. I’ve given my heart, my life, to raising that little girl. I didn’t just buy the food she eats and the clothes on her back. I’ve listened to her stories, sympathized with her little childhood heartbreaks. I’ve been the one who she’s been able to talk to. The one she’s felt safe enough to share her dreams with. Don’t you dare suggest that my commitment to her is casual or superficial. The only reason I’m still here, living this dead, miserable marriage with you is because of her. She’s lost one daddy already. I just couldn’t have her feel abandoned a second time.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about leaving you,” he said. “I wasn’t going to bring it up until after Laney left home. But now that I’ve started you might as well know my plan.”

  I just stared at him. My brain was incapable of connecting the dots.

  “I’ve been making arrangements to divide our assets,” he said with a calmness that could only be described as matter-of-fact. “I have no illusions about your ability to support yourself financially. I realize that I’ll have to continue that and I fully intend to. But I’m convinced that the only chance of happiness that either of us has will come with permanent separation.”

  “What do you mean by permanent separation?”

  “Divorce.”

  That word certainly cleared up the fog in my head.

  “I’m not giving you a divorce,” I stated adamantly.

  He just stood there looking at me for a moment and then he chuckled. “Do you think that surprises me? You
’ve always been about as selfish and self-centered as a wife could be. You wouldn’t give me a drop of water if I was burning in hellfire. But I’m getting a divorce.”

  “Selfish? Self-centered?” I was astounded at the suggestion. “I’ve done everything for you. I’ve cooked a million meals, washed tons of dirty clothes, I’ve made your home a showcase and your name respected all over the community.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “You’re absolutely right. You’ve done all that and I’m sure there are plenty of people in this town who think that I’m a lucky man. But I never asked for those things, Babs. I never asked for them, I never wanted them. All I ever wanted was for you to love me. Can you say you gave me that, Babs? Can you say that you ever loved me?”

  “I married you, didn’t I.”

  “Oh, yes, oh, yes, you married me,” he said. “Have you forgotten why? I haven’t forgotten. I haven’t forgotten that tiny helpless little baby.”

  “Stop it.”

  “I haven’t forgotten that precious little child,” Acee said. “He wasn’t my seed, he wasn’t my blood. But I couldn’t help but love him. My name is on his gravestone. Have you ever even been out to the cemetery to see it? It reads Marley Barstow Clifton.”

  “Don’t talk about that!”

  “Don’t talk about what? I thought you’d forgotten he even existed.”

  “It was a long time ago,” I said.

  “Yes, it was. And you’ve put it behind you, haven’t you, Babs,” he said. “You put it behind you and you never think about him. You do that because if you thought about him, it might hurt and you’re not willing to be hurt. You’re not willing to be hurt by anyone.”

  “You don’t know that!” I screeched at him. “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “That’s right, I don’t,” Acee said. “I only know about myself. I know about the kind of man that I am. I am the kind of man who likes small animals and remembers to feed the birds in the winter. I’m the kind of man who loves children, even little children who are not my own. I’m the kind of man who would stay married to a cold, heartless bitch for twelve long years because at one time, oh so very long ago, she needed me for one small moment of her life.”