INTERLUDE
THE CANDY HOUSE
Wham.
Her mother drops a cardboard box on the ground in front of her. CD cases rattle within—Social Distortion, Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails. Above the CDs: comic books. Batman stares from the top, with Killer Croc in a headlock. Beneath that, a glimpse of Jean Grey from the X-Men. Miriam spies the bindings of paperback books she nabbed from the used-books store down in Sunbury: Poppy Brite, Stephen King, Robert McCammon, Catcher in the Rye, Slaughterhouse-Five.
“This is trash,” her mother says. Thumbs laced together. Worrying a piece of butterscotch candy between her teeth, rattling it from molar to molar. Worrying being the operative term: She only eats sweets when she’s agitated.
Miriam doesn’t know what to say. She can only swallow hard and ask, “How did you find them?”
“The smartest girl in the room is never the one who thinks she’s the smartest girl in the room,” her mother says. “Thought you were clever. Didn’t you? You know what I found? I was walking underneath the attic and saw something on the pull-down cord. A little smudge of something red, something sticky. Jam. Strawberry jam. And I said to myself, ‘Well, who is it that eats toast with jam every morning before school?’ It’s not me. I don’t like sweet things. And there’s only one other person in the house. So I wondered, ‘What would my little Miriam be doing up in the attic?’ And I found these. Under a box of old clothes.”
“I’m sorry, Mother.”
“You’ve been hiding things from me, Miriam. You’ve been lying to cover up this filth. This is not God’s work in this box. This is not how your mother raised you.” She picks up a pile of pop culture, lets it fall back through her hands into the box with a thump and clamor. “Sex and perversion and horror. All of it.”
Miriam wants to stand up and say none of it is hurting her, none of it calls her stupid or fat or questions whether or not she’s going to go to Heaven. Each song of an album, each page of a book, every panel of every comic, they’re all doorways, little escape hatches where Miriam can flee the sad shadows of this life.
She wants to say worse things, too—mean things, sharp words, insults like little knives. Cunt, whore, bitch, fuck you, fuck everything, her mouth brimming with foulness the way a soup can bulges with botulism. A little voice inside asks, What would Uncle Jack say?
But that thought and all the others die back like dead vines.
She’s not the type to talk back. She’s a quiet girl. A well-mannered mouse who dreams of being a rat.
“I really don’t know anymore,” her mother says, shaking her head, the candy clicking against her teeth, the cloying butterscotch breath turning Miriam’s stomach. “I don’t know how you’re going to turn out. I don’t think well. I think you’re a bad girl destined for bad things. A worthless girl. Bringing nothing to God’s creation but misery and mayhem. What do you say?”
“I’ll be better. I’ll get better.”
“We’ll start tonight. Bring that box. Take it outside to the stone circle. I’ll meet you out there.”
And an hour later, the box sits in the circle of stones— an old planter her mother has forsaken in order to make it a fire pit during fall and winter, and that’s how it’s used tonight. Her mother empties a can of lighter fluid. Flings a match.
Bright light. Hot wave. A plume of fire that dies back.
It burns. Black smoke from melting plastic. It reeks. Words and images caught on the heat waves, lost and gone but not forgotten.
Miriam thinks idly about shoving her mother into the fire. Like shoving a witch into her own oven inside the kitchen of a candy house.
But she doesn’t. Instead, she just cries, feeling worthless like her mother says, and she goes inside to pray for God to make her a better girl.