 The
Candy House of Roscoe, New York
Meagan Cass
They woke in the night, in their childhood homes, with a
strange, mawkish hunger, a sprain in the chest, a clench of
the gut, a small, dull-toothed animal stirring. The girl
lived upstate, the boy lived downstate, and they did not
know each other, had just taken degrees at different
universities. Yet at one, two, three in the morning they
each crept into their parents’ kitchens to find that nothing
edible satisfied them. They took to sampling fistfuls of
dirt from potted plants like pregnant women, to biting at
their own cheeks, to sucking the briny copper of pennies but
still, they could not sleep.
In the murky dark of a Monday morning in August, they
packed up their cars, each headed for the other’s region.
They were hopeful. They had each been making things out of
words for some time. Living in a new place fires the
imagination, they told their parents, who stopped
throwing things at each other just long enough to hug them
too tightly, to press crumpled dollar bills into their
hands, to offer the standard words for separation,
unremarkable and yet vaguely haunting, like a pile of
chicken bones: goodbye, we’ll miss you, take care, best of
luck, be careful.
They drove fast with the windows down, the pastoral scenery
blurred, green ribbons out their windows, the herds of
grazing deer not looking up as they raced past, mosquitoes
hitting their windshields and dying in spindly stars. As the
sun rose and the clouds burned off, the boy and girl were
metallic and in control, cutting across the sleepy, ragged
belly of New York State. Merging onto Scenic Highway 17,
they imagined all the word things they would make in their
new lives, perfect houses of narrative built to the right
proportions, wildly original and yet so hospitable. Gabled
and all that.
Imagine flying above them in an airplane, seeing their toy
cars creeping closer toward one another through the inky
spills of cloud shadows. They believe in their own
independence. They have woven no tenuous threads home. They
have thrown up their isolation quickly and clumsily, like so
much cheap housing. You know it will not hold.
At noon, just as they were about to pass each other, they
were starving again and saw the billboards. Since they were
traveling on opposites sides of the highway the billboards
were facing opposite directions, but they said the same
things. “America’s Only Candy House! So clean you can eat
off the floor…OR THE ROOF!” the first proclaimed, the bubble
letters striped red to look like candy canes. “A Fine
Family Adventure! DESSERT IS ON THE HOUSE!” insisted
another. A third pictured a woman dressed like Nougat Nancy
from the Sugartown board game the boy and girl each played
as children. Only this Nougat Nancy’s skirt was hiked up
above the knees, she was curvaceous, and her turquoise eyes
took up her whole face like two disco balls. She held a
bright yellow lollipop, her other hand held coyly behind her
back, the words “America’s Only Candy House…STOP IN FOR A
LICK!” beneath her.
“Christ,” thought the girl. “It’s either got really good
chocolate or really weird porn.”
“It’s ridiculous enough to be worth a stop,” thought the
boy.
He pulled off at the appropriate exit, onto a service
road and fell in line behind the girl, the two of them
following the pointing hand of an anthropomorphic gummy bear
that served as a road sign. You’re Almost at America’s
Candy House was written across the bear’s wide,
glistening stomach.
Flung deep in the woods several miles from the interstate,
the place had more of the air of a shoddy vacation cabin
than of the roadside extravaganza they had expected. The
gravel driveway was lined with plastic swizzle sticks that
had seen better days, tilting in either direction, and the
mailbox, a giant Pez dispenser with a rabbit head, was
covered in bird shit, one of its vacant black eyes weathered
away. The full, August trees shook with wind, cropping the
noonday sun into shifting rectangles of light. Famished,
they stood blinking at the structure before them, a squat,
brown cottage with a trippy candy cane pattern painted
around the windows. The white roof was black with a few
plastic-looking nonpareils affixed to it like a ruined game
of Othello. The air smelled like sulfur from the refinery
one town over. Someone had graffitied “Fuck You Suzanne”
across the front walk.
They were the only ones in the lot, despite the billboards,
and they took a moment to check each other out, the way any
two humans of the same age group will. She did not think him
particularly attractive, though there was something about
his muscular shoulders, his long torso, the thinness of his
black t-shirt that made her uneasy. He did not think her
particularly attractive, with her skinny legs and her cloud
of frizzy blond hair and her fussy cardigan. She had an air
of fidgety aggression in her, in the way she tapped her foot
and squinted her face while looking up at the candy house,
which made him want to elbow her in the stomach.
A wiry man in jeans, purple cowboy boots and a T-shirt that
said “No Fear” burst from the house.
“I would shoot myself in the foot for a cigarette right
now,” he said, crossing his arms over chest, sticking out
his hips. “But I’ve quit. And the gum is not the same,
don’t believe anyone who tells you that.”
His hair was greasy, his sunken face pitted with acne scars,
and he had one of those mustaches that curls up on either
end in a perpetual grin. There was a dark red carnation
pinned to his shirt, as if, as an afterthought, he’d decided
to go and crash someone’s high school prom. He smelled like
hot tar.
“You own this place?” the boy asked.
“Is this the Candy House?” the girl asked.
“I don’t know what you were expecting,” said the man. “A
chocolate river? You’re not in paradise, folks, you’re in
central New York. But we do what we can. Decent selection of
high quality chocolates. Hot chocolate in the winter
months.”
He spoke with the boisterous, theatrical air of a
ringmaster, waving an arm to display each sentence.
“College kids? All of life before you and all that shit?”
The girl smiled, slid her hands in her pockets. The boy
looked down at his feet. They each muttered something about
being on the way to somewhere.
“Well, well, that’s great for you,” said the man. He cut
his small, dark eyes back and forth between them. “This
way, please. We’ll fix you with something good.”
—
Inside the house was unremarkable, boring even. On the
living room floor yellowed copies of Penthouse were stacked
in messy piles like precarious monuments. There was a hokey
display in the vestibule featuring a miniature boy and girl
with rosy cheeks and curly hair standing on a circle of
synthetic grass, giant lollipops clenched in their fleshy
fists. The place smelled like what they thought of as an old
person’s house, a combination of cough syrup and moth balls.
Yet there was something subtly unstable about the living
room walls, which were the color of chapped lips, and the
marshmallow-white leather couches, cartoonishly big for the
space. The lollipop wall art, metal garbage pail lids
painted with clumsy swirls, the decadent crown moldings
around the doors and windows in reds and pinks, the giant
plastic rock candy sticks leaning in the corner like cave
men’s clubs, and the jelly-bean patterned throw rug, created
the lurid, dirty feel of a funhouse at a Fourth of July
carnival in a small town. The wood floor, they noticed, was
sticky, from God knows what.
Still, they were hungry. They looked at each other, decided
that the other was unlikely to cause any serious harm. They
looked at the yellowed postcards on the rack in the corner
showing the Candy House in its glory days, the yard a
flourishing garden of blown glass lollipop ornaments, the
old man standing in front of it, younger looking, his teeth
white and straight, his body muscular, a woman with gallons
of messy hair in his arms smiling widely, the title
“America’s Sweethearts” printed beneath them. The boy and
girl peered into the small kitchen off the living room,
where the old man was puttering in the cabinets. It was a
standard kitchen, blue-tiled with yellow walls.
“Ah ha,” said the man. From deep in one of the cabinets he
pulled a chocolate gift box, the kind of thing given to an
elementary school teacher at the end of the year or to
someone half-loved, and led them back into the living room.
“We don’t get much business at all,” he said. “People have
lost their sense of nostalgia, their sense of wonder. They
only like to stop for fast food.”
A breeze blew through the open window, filling the room with
the spicy musk of cinnamon.
“Is it really?” said the girl.
“Is it stable?” asked the boy.
“Now I have one question for you,” the man said, putting a
hand on each of their knees. “Have you ever been in love?”
The boy and girl laughed, looked at each other. Who was
this guy? What a nut job.
“Of course,” they said, though neither had been on more
than a few disappointing dates.
“Was it terrible?” asked the man, “Of course not,” the boy
and girl said.
“Then you’ve never been in love,” the man said, rubbing his
hands together, putting more chocolates into their hands.
The boy and girl leaned back on the couch. They were
suddenly very tired from driving. This quaint cottage,
carved into the mountains, its living room windows filled
with the merciless green of the Catskill Mountains, seemed a
wonderful place to rest. They each took more candy. It
tasted like chocolate should, the thin milky casings falling
apart easily to give up tangy cherry centers. They watched
each other’s thin, supple wrists, watched the other’s hands
grab, extend up to mouths. The man stood up so he towered
over them, said it’d be rent-free in exchange for some light
maintenance, keep the candy racks full, the peppermint
sticks polished, the giant gum drop bouncy balls inflated;
pick the fruit and vegetables from the garden out back or
wild animals with sharp teeth will be at your door, grown
arrogant and vicious with plenty. Do not dare eat any more
of the candy.
He showed them the two small upstairs bedrooms, each
furnished with a twin bed, dresser and a child’s size desk,
all done in faux wood. They watched him peel out of the
drive, a cigarette in his mouth, and then the house was
quiet as a cube of glass.
—
For weeks it was a workable life. They spent their days in
their separate rooms kneading paragraphs, mixing index cards
scrawled with ideas. The furniture was small, but they were
able to cram themselves into the desks, bend themselves into
the beds. Sometimes they would pass each other on
the way to and from the bathroom and joke that they were
peeing in America’s Only Candy House.
There were few visitors. In late August pairs of University
students on their way to upstate or downstate schools came
into the Candy House and laughed at all the kitsch and wrote
the name of their universities in the guest book, the
forceful acronyms shouting on the yellowed paper. BU. UB.
NYU. SUNY. The couples fumbled shyly around the copies of
Penthouse. Their bubbly, repetitive curiosity quickly grew
tiresome to the boy and girl. They fell into the habit of
leaving the boxes of chocolate on the coffee table for the
students with a sign that said “eat me.” They had never
claimed to be people persons.
Then there were the lonely, restless people, the divorcees,
the widows and widowers, the worried parents, their children
away fighting the latest war. The boy and girl sat them
down, poured them glasses of the pomegranate juice the old
man had left them in the fridge, listened to their stories,
offered them plates of neatly arranged chocolates. They
never questioned their own prohibition. It made perfect
sense. They were like bartenders, existing around vice but
not engaging in it. Calm. Removed. They nodded with what
they thought was sympathy. If there had been clean, white
gloves they would have worn them.
Labor Day a herd of minivans converged in the parking lot.
From their windows the boy and girl watched boys in
yellow-and-black soccer uniforms spring from the sliding
doors and run toward the Candy House, punching and tripping
each other on the way, their parents and siblings trailing
behind them. The boy and girl stopped making word things
and presented the boxes of chocolates, a large bag of
swizzle sticks, a package of sucking candies and some
licorice. There had never been such a big group and they
were slightly embarrassed of the shape the house was in:
they had left dirty juice glasses on the coffee table, the
television was tuned to a cooking channel, and there were
still the piles of Penthouse.
But the boys did not seem interested in fairy tales, in
witches or magic or Hansel and Gretel. They quickly ate the
chocolates, sucked on the sugar sticks, chewed on the
licorice, their little cleats making sucking noises on the
sticky living room floor. As they ate more sugar they got
more rowdy, kicking at the giant, plastic gumdrops resting
in the corners, passing them back and forth like soccer
balls. They ran up the stairs and looked into the bedrooms,
complaining that nothing was really made of candy and why
were there papers in a candy house. One of them tried to
bite into the purple banister.
Then the soccer player parents were there in khakis and
jeans and white sneakers, yelling that it was still soccer
season and the boys had signed contracts not to eat any junk
food and they were just here to see the Candy House
and have a little snack. The soccer player boys threw their
candies into the garbage in the kitchen one by one, their
faces assuming the guilty seriousness of baseball players
caught taking steroids. Their older siblings hung back
around the postcards, signed their names in the
jellybean-patterned guest book. An overweight teenage boy
in a T-shirt with a giant, grinning skull on it explained
that they were a select soccer team from Rochester, The
Yellow Jackets, and that they had been eliminated in the
early round of a prestigious tournament on Long Island.
“It’s been a hard trip home,” he said, picking at one of his
cuticles, then letting his large hands drop to his sides. “I
got one of the mothers to give me a blow job in the hotel
elevator, though,” he whispered, glancing quickly over his
shoulder at a trim woman in tight jeans, heeled boots, and a
blazer, wiping chocolate from a small boy’s face with a
handy-wipe.
“Liar,” the boy and girl laughed when the teenager and the
rest of the caravan were gone.
—
That night they met in the kitchen, poured glasses of the
pomegranate juice. They had come to love drinking it in
small doses from the tall, thin glasses in the cabinet,
sucking it up like nectar. They drank the juice and talked
word things for hours, each unimpressed with the other’s
conversation but nonetheless content. They noticed that the
pitcher of juice kept refilling itself in the refrigerator.
This odd abundance made them uneasy, but it was good to
talk, to forget about the mocking green out their windows
and the small, neat boxes of their rooms. “I am happy,” they
told their family and friends over the phone.
In September they came together most evenings to cook
dinner. The vegetable garden was bountiful—zucchini,
tomatoes, pumpkins and squashes hung heavily from the
plants—and the old man had left them a well stocked spice
rack and a good black pot. They got adventurous in their
cooking, bungling soups and stews, making their own stock,
laughing at each other’s foibles, sometimes moving out to
the front stoop afterwards to sit in the cool night, their
new world cupped in darkened hills, verdant and mysterious
and claustrophobic. Horizonless.
After a particularly successful dinner, they moved to the
couch, paged through the guest book, read and chuckled over
its fading travelers’ messages. “Your candy is simplistic
and your décor is overwrought,” Eric and Melanie from
Manhattan had written in July 2005. In 2000 Mark from Troy,
New York said, “Down with the man, down with corporate
candy, Vote Nader.”
Then there were a spree of messages from the Reagan era
about the value of such a wholesome family rest-stop. “What
sweet kids! We’ll never forget the fruit punch fountain!”
said Constance and Thomas of Elmira, New York, 1981.
The ’60s and ’70s were more ambivalent about the Candy
House. “How come there weren’t any Gobstoppers?” complained
Bruce from Ohio, 1979. “Gone to Canada, not coming back to
this Godforsaken country. You can have your candy,” wrote
Anonymous, 1968. The last entry: “Free candy free country.
And keep putting whatever you’re putting in the
marshmallows!” wrote Steve from Port Washington, Long
Island, June 1967.
The boy and girl took long sips of their juice, sighed with
the easy melancholy of people who have suffered but have
fallen, inexplicably, into a kind of bounty. They did not
notice that the house was changing shape with each new thing
shared. The roof was leavening. The wooden beams in the
living room, the house’s skeleton, took on the shiny, red
gleam of hard candy. The boy and girl in the vestibule were
awakening, bringing their lollipops up to their mouths over
and over again, their acorn shaped heads swiveling back and
forth,
“This has been a productive day,” said the boy, on his
fourth glass of juice. He looked at the girl’s buttoned up
cardigan.
“We have an amazing setup here,” said the girl. She looked
at the boy’s T-shirt, could almost feel the thin fabric in
her hands.
Afterward they thanked each other politely, dressed
quickly, slipped into the small, cramped, separate beds,
giddy with the easiness of it. Satisfied.
—
The next day, moving about their chores, working on word
things, each avoiding the other, they noticed a change in
the light in the house. The panes of glass in all
the windows were tinted red and green and yellow. They
wondered if they should call the old man, but they figured
it must have something to do with the new fall cool. They
sprayed the windows with a bottle marked “saccharine
preserve” they’d found under the sink and went on with their
work, which was taking odd turns. Ideas like strange
vegetables—cucuzza, mirliton, celery root—bulged and then
went bad on their pages. They looked out their stained
windows. At night they crept back towards each other again.
It was this way for several weeks. During the day they
would forget about the head resting in the crook of the
other’s shoulder, the plate of the bed, the salty,
warm bread of each other. They would pretend that the teeth
marks, sprinklings of paprika on each other’s necks, then
hands, then arms, were from some central New York insect
they didn’t know the name of yet.
In October the hills pulsed with fall color, and busloads of
fall foliage tours arrived, moving hesitantly through the
house, the men in flannel shirts jammed into worn jeans, the
women in those seasonal-themed sweat suits with pumpkins on
them.
“Aren’t you two darling,” a middle aged woman from Pensacola
said one day, smoothing down her hair.
They were all in the living room, the boy and girl passing
out candy.
“You two married?” the woman asked.
“No, of course not,” said the girl, quickly, wanting to
punch the woman right in the pumpkin.
“This thing sound?” her husband asked, pressing at the
walls, staring up at the ceiling.
“It’s fine,” said the boy, though in the nights now, when
the northern winds blew down from Canada, they could hear
the joints of the place creaking, could sense its imminent
collapse.
Despite the early winter frosts the back garden continued to
thrive, grew monstrous in its thick vines and bulging
offerings, but by November they had lost their appetite for
vegetables, preferring mainly to suck and lick at the
house’s exposed beams, which were all red now, like they
were living inside a flawed, tinker toy heart. At night
they could hear deer and rabbits rustling amongst the
tomatoes and squashes, biting down on the soft fruit with
coarse teeth, scratching at the door of the house. All the
beige walls smelled of vanilla and the crown moldings around
the doorways and windows became almond-flavored toffees.
When they were hungry and in the middle of unwieldy word
things, the boy and girl liked to reach out and break some
off, tonguing the stringy pieces into knots. The windows
thickened to hard candy like jolly ranchers, making it
harder to see the outside world, the trees rendered vague,
underwater forms, the sun a blurry, glowing ball. They did
not mind. It was so warm in here .They could almost believe
they had imagined love this way. They listened to the sound
of the children downstairs, crawling around, sometimes
answering the door and offering food to visitors, sometimes
speaking with their parents on the telephone, telling
everyone how very happy they were. At night our boy and
girl slept fitfully, their lips lined with sugar. One by one
they lost their teeth.
In the nights he would imagine folding himself up and
slipping into the freezer amongst the cut vegetables, the
slow drain of blood from the limbs, the gradual ebbing of
desire. In the nights she would imagine him in a cage,
imagine closing her eyes and believing he was the twig, the
denial of love he thrust out, a thing she could break over
her knee and walk away from. In the days, in the slow,
stock-taking hours, they still worked index cards into word
things, hoping that their ideas would become plenty for the
whole of them in the nights when they lay, curled like
beans, wanting dreams of a candy house with walls made of
words and no oven.
The night the roof came down they went to the basement,
ducked into the musty dark of it, sat down on the cool
concrete and turned on the lights. It was here, in the
solid gray, that they noticed the loss of mass. They were
like stick figures woven of blood red licorice ropes. And
then they knew that the man and the woman in the postcard
had slowly claimed parts of each other, had whittled each
other away. And they understood the nature of the haunting
here. And they could leave then, could help each other back
up the stairs, could return to their dusty cars and, in new
cities, relearn how to eat cream of wheat, to bite the hard,
tart flesh of apples. They would not sneer at other people’s
desperation.
But every once in a while, in the evenings, their husband
and wife sleeping beside them in good beds, in brick houses,
they might lick their lips. They might sit up, go to the
kitchen for a bowl of sugary kids’ cereal, and think how
some nights they had so enjoyed it, the sweet, tangy taste
of their own disappearance.
Return
to Winter 2008 issue
|
