DESCRIPTION OF CANSDOWN, CONNECTICUT (narrated by Rebecca as a child)

 

Joyce and I had grown up in the same suburban town but we’d never met until that day. Cansdown, Connecticut was a place that operated on a strict north-south divide. Northsiders looked down on southsiders, while us southsiders looked down on the people from the city on our border, where there were crack babies, gang wars and regular shootings. On Cansdown’s north side, where Joyce lived, there were wooden fences, lemonade stands run by children, and petunias in the window box. On the south side, yards were surrounded by chain link and we shopped in a strip mall where you could buy donuts, used clothing, liquor, frozen yogurt, and under the counter, illegal fireworks. On the north side people raked their leaves into neat little piles and left pumpkins outside knowing they wouldn’t be smashed in the street overnight. But on the south side, if the wind blew your garbage barrels down the block no one would bring them back for you, and they would rock back and forth in a distant gutter until you finally went out and dragged them back yourself. When I was twelve, I’d just begun adding up all these differences, but I already had a definite sense that I was worse off for being a southsider.

 

Mom sometimes pointed out that on the south we were closer to the beach, and she liked to fill up jars with the sea glass she collected. But the glass, which looked transparent and glossy underwater, had a disappointingly dull finish, as though coated with frost after it had dried and been added to the jar. Every July and August, when I swam in the cold brackish sea and was stung by jellyfish and cut by sharp stones, I thought, ‘Yeah, I’d give up the beach.’ I believed this would be the only drawback to a move that would put us among the rich, cultured northsiders. In reality, Cansdown was a blue-collar town, dependent on a factory that manufactured ball bearings, and the ‘rich’ people I imagined on the north side were probably better described as middle-class. But at the time, I thought of the north as a place where miraculous transformations might occur. My posture would become smooth and straight; when I crossed my legs the fancy way it wouldn’t look stupid; and at night, I’d sleep on a canopied bed with lace curtains draping all around.

©Lauren Frankel 2014