Candy and Me Read online

  Also by Hilary Liftin

  Dear Exile: The True Story of Two Friends

  Separated (for a Year) by an Ocean

  (with Kate Montgomery)

  FREE PRESS

  A Division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2003 by Hilary Liftin

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  FREE PRESSand colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Book design by Ellen R. Sasahara

  Illustrations copyright © 2003 by Patrick Barth

  Excerpt from “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf. Certain candy product names mentioned in this book are trademarks of their respective owners. Simon & Schuster is not affiliated with these owners.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Liftin, Hilary.

  Candy and me: a love story / Hilary Liftin.

  p. cm.

  1. Liftin, Hilary––Biography. 2. Candy. I. Title.

  TX783..L53 2003

  641.3—dc21 2002192871

  ISBN 0-7432-4953-4

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  WARNING:

  The experiences described in this book are not recommended by dentists to their patients who chew gum. Please do not try this at home.

  For Chris, my everything

  Call the roller of big cigars,

  The muscular one, and bid him whip

  In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

  Let the wenches dawdle in such dress

  As they are used to wear, and let the boys

  Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.

  Let be be finale of seem.

  The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

  From “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” by Wallace Stevens

  Contents

  Introduction Bubble Burgers

  Part One Sweet Tooth

  Sugar

  Trix

  Candy Corn

  Cocoa

  Ice Cream

  Flake

  The Assortment

  Conversation Hearts

  Spree

  Bottle Caps Nostalgia

  Tessana’s Butterfly Cake

  Mints

  Nonpareils

  Skor

  Jelly Belly Jellybeans

  I Know What You’re Thinking…

  Fruit Slices

  Fudge

  Snickers

  Junior Mints

  Part Two Sugar and Spice

  Smarties

  Swiss Petite Fruit

  Conversation Hearts, the Reclamation

  Lipo

  Frosting

  The Assortment, Revisited

  White Chocolate Breakup

  Devil’s Candy

  Fruit

  Lemonheads

  Fireballs

  Feeding the Habit

  Bull’s-Eyes

  Old-Fashioned Marshmallow Eggs

  Skittles

  Circus Peanuts

  Mini Bottle Caps, Try Again

  Swiss Chocolate Ice Cream

  Sugar-Free

  A Heart-Shaped Box of Chocolates

  Part Three Just Desserts

  Taffy

  Bottle Caps Regained

  Twizzlers

  Icing Off the Cake

  Necco Wafers

  Cotton Candy

  This Woman Needs Help

  No, Thank You

  Starburst

  The Truth about Circus Peanuts

  Peanut Butter Cups

  Tootsie Rolls

  Name Your Candy

  Old-Fashioned Marshmallow Eggs: Drawing the Line

  With This Bottle Cap…

  Meltaways

  Epilogue: Candy West

  Resources

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Bubble Burgers

  It all began when my brother entered the fourth grade. His new school let out too late for our carpool to the suburbs, so he had to take the city bus. One day he came home carrying a Bubble Burger. The Bubble Burger was a pioneer in the less-than-inspiring category of bubble gum shaped like real-world objects. I was still in the third grade, and I looked at Eric’s Bubble Burger with wonder.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “In a little store called Alban Towers,” he said nonchalantly, as if we’d had the freedom to buy whatever candy we wanted every day of our lives.

  “How much did i t cost?”

  “A quarter,” he said with his mouth stuffed.

  “Will you get me one?”

  “Sure.”

  The next day Eric brought me my first Bubble Burger. I chewed it, probably swallowed it (I always found the concept of gum frustrating), and plopped six allowance quarters down on his rug.

  “You want six?”

  “Yes,” I said. Eric shrugged. It wasn’t a total surprise. I had been stealing his Halloween candy for years.

  I continued to supply Eric with money for Bubble Burgers until a thought occurred to me.

  “At Alban Towers,” I asked him, “do they have other kinds of candy?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Of course they do.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Everything,” he said. I had no idea what everything was. I racked my brain to remember the kinds of candy I had seen at the grocery store. Finally, I dumped eight quarters on the rug.

  “Just get me anything.”

  Candy is almost pure sugar. It is empty of nutritional value. It is an extravagance. It dissolves in water. It melts in your mouth, not in your hands. It’s the icing on the cake. Candy is so impossibly sweet and good that eating it should be the simplest thing in the world. So how can there be anything of substance to say about it?

  And yet, candy’s meaning has more subtlety than its taste. It affords a fleeting spike of pleasure, sometimes guilty or elusive or bittersweet, like an impossible love affair. I’ve thought myself addicted and tried to quit. I’ve embraced my candy-lover identity and championed the cause. I’ve eaten it for joy, to relax, to celebrate, and out of boredom. I’ve eaten it through thick and thin and not-fat-but-not-thin. I love it, I hate it, and it’s always been there, through childhood, adolescence, and into my adult life. Candy, and its erratic, delightful, fattening, odd rainbow presence, is an obsession that has fueled and flavored my life. When I walk into a candy store, the shelf of assorted treats evokes a series of individually wrapped memories, ready for the tasting.

  As I look back on my candy life, what has been most thrilling was to discover I haven’t been alone. Sure, there are people I’ve encountered who shrug off candy and go back to eating their pretzels. Others think that I’m a bit sick. But far more often, the mention of candy triggers long, enthusiastic exchanges about top candies, addictions and repulsions, flavors and habits. On occasion, with more people than I could have imagined, conversation turns to the emotional resonance that grows from a lifetime of candy eating.

  Candy is important, and it’s about time it got its just “desserts.”

  Part One

  Sweet Tooth

  Sugar

  Before there was candy, there was sugar. My brother and I started staying without a babysitter when I was seven and he was eight. We had a barter/bribe relationship: for every serving of sugar I ate, Eric could stay up an extra hour. We pledged not to tell on each other to our parents. As soon as they walked out the door, I would pour several tablespoons of confectioner�
��s powdered sugar into a Dixie cup. I eventually figured out that if I ran a few drops of water or milk into the cup and mixed it up, semi-soft pellets formed. The texture of these pellets was dreamy. Sometimes I would add a drop of vanilla extract and a bit of butter. Then, in front of the (also forbidden) TV, I would dip a spoon into the sugar and feed myself.

  Our suburban Maryland family room had a pale brick fireplace, wall-to-wall shag carpeting, and psychedelic pillows. Eric reclined on the couch and I sat on the velour lounge chair. We watched the Osmonds, Rhoda, The Wonderful World of Disney. On any night that I started eating sugar, which was every night my parents didn’t hire a babysitter, I would have refill after refill. I ate it furtively, afraid that my parents would walk in unexpectedly. I loved the way the sugar became sweeter just before it dissolved on my tongue. Watching illicit TV while eating sugar became a habit. The combined relaxation, indulgence, and jolt of forbidden sweetness that I found in my candy-leisure moments were forever established as sensations to pursue. If Charles Schulz had created a comic-strip version of me at seven, I would have been surrounded by a cloud, but unlike Pigpen’s dirty cumulus, my cloud would have been a pure, refined puff of powdered sugar.

  At some point Eric stopped calculating the late night hours he was accumulating and threw up his hands.

  “I can’t believe you’re eating all that sugar,” he said. “You’ll be sick.” But I didn’t feel sick. Rather, I was astounded that Eric had no apparent interest in the bounty I had discovered. I don’t remember ever getting caught or in trouble, although I know my mother must have had some idea that this was going on. I also never wondered why there was always powdered sugar in the house—even though my mother never baked. It was only later that I discovered that she herself had a secret habit. But eventually she decided not to stock sugar in the pantry anymore, and I had to move on.

  Trix

  In 1954, Trix breakfast cereal was introduced by General Mills. The new cereal, a huge hit with kids, was 46.6 percent sugar.

  —UselessKnowledge.com

  I loved Trix.

  Candy Corn

  The earliest candy corn memory I have is of my mother carefully spreading several bags of the product across the kitchen table. She was teaching herself to be a painter and was arranging a candy corn still life. Eric and I were instructed not to touch or eat a single kernel. Our mother acted as if this were a perfectly reasonable request, as if she were painting a still life of spinach, or pork lard. One comes into the kitchen, one is young, one is hungry, and one sees a table covered with one’s favorite candy. She couldn’t have painted a fruit basket? It was a cruel world, mismanaged by adults who knew their own power too well.

  Candy corn may seem timeless, but it was born at the Wunderle Candy company in the 1880s. That whole school of candy—mellocremes—was already in full swing, in various agriculturally inspired shapes and sizes. Then in 1898 Goelitz Confectionery Company took candy corn into the big leagues, associating the confection with Halloween. It was, needless to say, a big hit. And why shouldn’t it have been? Candy corn was made for stardom. Those shiny, waxy yellow ends demand to be clutched by the handful and eaten, top, middle, bottom, top, middle, bottom, in a compulsive rhythm until they are gone. Chocolate gets all the fanzines, but it is the clay of candy. Matte, endlessly shapeable, chocolate is all about taste. Candy corn gets by on looks alone. Odes should be written to its waxy gleam, its whimsical design, its autumnal shades.

  I fell for candy corn hard. It was the first candy for which I had a specific desire rather than a generic sugarlust. I loved how it returned, Halloween after Halloween. We trick-or-treated on the overly lit cul-de-sacs of suburban Maryland, compromising our store-bought costumes by donning coats. We ran from house to house, suffocating plastic masks pulled up onto the tops of our heads. One popular house distributed full-size Three Musketeers bars. Candy corn came in slender, oblong boxes or little plastic bags cherishing only four or five kernels. At the end of the night our brown paper bags were awkwardly heavy. It was never enough. I usually ate all of my candy by the next evening, and then started in on my brother’s. When I got tired of the sugary candies in our bags, I switched to chocolate, then back again.

  Candy corn marked the passage of time. Every year autumn brought a Pavlovian desire for it. I counted the years by Halloweens rather than birthdays, and the taste of candy corn meant a new costume, a new year of school. All summer I looked forward to October 31. I thought that it was my favorite day of the year. But, as is the way with candy, I was never satisfied. I was always waiting for more to happen, or for something to change, although I had no idea what. The day after Halloween I was inevitably sad and disappointed, and would begin planning how the next time my costume would be better, how I would stay out later and collect enough candy to last longer. That cyclic disappointment clawed at me. Every passing year, though I thought candy corn delighted me, it was the constant, stealthy reminder that satisfaction was out of reach. It would be a long while before I would see how alienated and uncomfortable I was in the world, and how young I was when I started hoping that sugar would sweeten the deal.

  Cocoa

  When a child is a misfit, it isn’t always easy to pinpoint why. I may have had two or three friends, but I had the awkwardness of an adolescent four years too early. Making friends and going to school were, for me, an exercise in pretending to be normal. I was overwhelmed with self-consciousness. Not only was I prematurely uncool, but there was no end in sight. I had no idea what was wrong with me, but I was certain that I was and would always be a loser. This inevitable future was not obvious to everyone else, but I knew that with one false move I would be revealed.

  In the fourth grade at the National Cathedral School for Girls our uniforms were see-through striped dresses, which became a problem for some of the girls almost immediately. We wore the juvenile outfits with knee socks, cardigan sweaters, and Sperry Topsiders. Unable to base itself on the traditional criteria of clothing and fashion, popularity thus became contingent on the puffy sticker trading market. For some reason my parents couldn’t manage to let me purchase the right style of stickers in the necessary quantities—it was just the beginning of my social undoing.

  The school served a hot lunch in the cafeteria every day, before which we had to stand and sing a hymn. Every day I supplemented my meal with chocolate milk, dessert, and hot chocolate. We were allowed one serving of each. But one day after school, my best friend Lucy and I ventured back into the closed cafeteria. It was miraculously unlocked. There we discovered the packets of Ready-Mix cocoa in their plastic bowl, left out under a paper doily for the next day. We each grabbed three and hurried out.

  By then my family had moved from Bethesda, Maryland, into Washington, D.C. Our new house was close to my school, and Lucy lived next door. As we walked home, we dipped our index fingers into packets of the cocoa, scooping sloping peaks of it into our mouths. Our fingers turned brown and soggy, and it grew difficult to summon enough saliva to dissolve the cocoa crystals, but we were determined. We started with three packs each, but soon I was up to seven a day. Even I was amazed at how my capacity skyrocketed. I would eat a few as I walked home, and then would go directly to my room, lie on the carpet, and eat the rest as I read my textbooks. Before long my cocoa thievery gained me a bit of a reputation. I had been seen eating it in class, and let a few others in on my strategy. But no one embraced it quite as I did. For the other girls it was a lark, but for me it was no novelty. It was a covert way of life.

  Our school was on the Close of the Washington National Cathedral, which was still under construction then. Carved stones that would complete the western door were laid out like grave markers near the stonecutter’s cottage. The periodically vanishing stones made it seem as if life were moving backward, a creepy resurrection. Lucy and I walked home through this reverse graveyard daily. From our religion class and the mandatory weekly services at the cathedral, we knew the basic map of its cruciform well. We also knew th
at there were places we hadn’t fully explored: a sub-crypt, and a bell tower, and we were certain that somewhere there were damp, dark, forgotten chapels where monks and ascetics were starving and chanting. Made bold by the dry cocoa, we frequently wandered into the cathedral. Looking devout as we slipped down into the lower floors, we peeked behind tapestries and found dark stairways that curved toward locked wooden doors.

  We were at an age when believing in Santa and the tooth fairy was long over, but I was still open to spirituality. I clung to a porous hope that some magic or god might be found in daily life. Bound into this was the unconscious idea that if I could believe in some greater power, then life wouldn’t suck so hard. Salvation had a schoolgirl’s definition: I could be self-confident, popular, even a tall, skinny lacrosse player, if only I had faith. As I walked to school, I counted my paces in multiples of seven, and if I arrived at the curb on seven, a dream would come true. Cars passed, leaves fell, I climbed stairs, I counted the letters in words and wishes looking for signs that some force was listening and would heed my pledges of faith-if-only.