Candy and Me Read online

  But what if our family had approached candy together, as a fun indulgence? On a trip to Dylan’s, I witnessed children holding their own shopping baskets, filling them recklessly. Recklessly! I stared in horror. How could their parents allow them to buy literally ten pounds of candy at one time? Then I stopped myself. Who was I to talk? Maybe these kids were actually on the “Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle diet.” Maybe they would be just fine. Better, even.

  When I think of being a parent, I feel confident in my ability to rear a couple people. I can envision reading Goodnight Moon several times a night, making up answers to scientific queries, and kissing wounds. I would probably even figure out how to cook. But when I try to think of how to manage their relationship with sweets, well, I think I’ll have to leave that to the other parent.

  When all was revealed, it turned out that my mother and I had several candies in common: marshmallow eggs, Smarties, Necco Wafers. When I found out about the Necco Wafers, I knew we were dealing with a genetic inclination. I was proven right a few weeks later.

  My mother and I were over at my brother’s, babysitting for my nephew and niece. My three-year-old nephew surprised us by saying, “I want a Necco Wafer.”

  My mother and I looked at each other in surprise. How did he know what a Necco Wafer was? His father was a Spree junkie. Maybe in our family it was the most natural sound a toddler could form: Ma-ma. Da-da. Nec-co.

  “You have Necco Wafers?” my mother asked her grandson.

  “Yes,” said Asher, very serious, “they’re in the pantry. I’ll show you where they are.”

  I could see his future. My brother had spent his childhood with a candy thief, losing whatever he saved to my relentless craving. His son had the same tendency. Give the kid five years, and the security of my brother’s candy would be challenged again.

  My mother looked at me mischievously. I looked back at her. We both knew that we should let his parents decide if and when Asher could have candy. But it soon became clear to me that my mother had no intention of giving him a Necco Wafer; she wanted to find out where they were kept so that she could help herself after the kids had gone to sleep. She followed him into the pantry. Knowing the extent of her sugar history did make a difference. We were both crazy. But we are not alone. According to Necco, over four billion Wafers are sold each year, which averages out to 120 Wafers consumed every second of every day throughout the year. I wonder how many of them are in Denmark.

  Cotton Candy

  Nothing had gone wrong yet, but nothing would have. Chris and I were still trying to impress each other.

  “I need to go to Centralia,” I told him. He had read about Centralia. It was a town in Pennsylvania where an underground mine fire had been burning since the ‘60s. The government had evacuated most of the town and razed almost all the houses except for those of a few die-hards.

  Chris was game to plan an excursion right away. He didn’t have a car, but he would rent one. He would figure out where to go. All I had to do was show up. “You know it’s a bit of a drive. We might want to stay out there and make a weekend of it.”

  “I know,” I said. He was psyched, I could tell.

  Chris showed up in a large red sports-utility vehicle.

  “When you said we were going to stay overnight, I didn’t realize you meant in the car,” I said as I climbed up into the passenger seat. There were maps and a couple guidebooks to Pennsylvania. He had done his research.

  Centralia was a town on a grid, with a main strip and streets running in both directions. But all the buildings were gone, and the lots were so overgrown that you could barely see the streets. We turned onto a side road. The grass was up to the car windows. Ghost driveways with mailboxes at the edge led up to nothing. There were a few surviving houses, anomalous mowed lots with cars in the driveways. These owners were dying out, but some of them had taken over the lots on either side. Why not? They were squatters anyway. The town was condemned. Who would complain?

  The fire had destroyed part of Route 61, and the official highway now bypassed the danger zone. We walked down the deserted part of Route 61. It was steamy and bare, with a wide, deep, mildly smoky crack in the middle, practically down the yellow line. The side of a deserted highway—a perfect spot for a picnic. We sat on the slope above the shoulder and ate sandwiches, looking down at the empty asphalt as if it were a river. Seeing the premature ruins of contemporary society was creepily post-apocalyptic.

  “I feel like we’re the last two people alive in the world,” I told Chris.

  “You know what that means,” he said, not missing a beat.

  “?”

  “We must procreate!” he said.

  No thanks. I didn’t feel like getting sweaty on the post-apocalyptic roadside.

  After our picnic we headed south toward a drive-in. My navigation got us lost. I wanted lunch-dessert. There was a town fair on the side of the road.

  “I have a new rule for us,” Chris said. “All visible fairs must be visited.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, thinking about cotton candy. “You can win me a stuffed animal and then we can go to the drive-in.”

  Cotton candy was invented in 1897 by two guys from Tennessee, who brought their “fairy-floss” to the St. Louis World’s Fair and sold it in wooden boxes. It’s too bad that the name got changed. Fairy-floss suits the sugar that spins from crystals into clouds and then, when the spell is broken by human tongue, back to crystals.

  It was my first cotton candy in a long time, and it was a letdown. When I had gone to the circus as a kid, the performer who inevitably impressed me the most was the person at the cotton candy booth, with his centrifugally whipped sugar clouds. That is what going to the circus meant to me: cotton candy, guaranteed. As soon as I was a teenager, in control of my own destiny, my serving size for cotton candy was three spools at the rare events where it was available.

  Now, ten years later, I still found the art of it appealing. The scent was just as alluring. But when I ate the cotton, what it melted into was, well, unimpressive. Red sugar in my mouth. And the way the last fibers clung to the flimsy paper cone was suddenly unpleasant. Shrug. I couldn’t bring myself to finish. And then there was Chris, proudly displaying a lime green alien that he had won for throwing a basketball into a ridiculously far and tiny hoop. The cotton candy was discarded and forgotten, its memory betrayed. It was all fluff and no substance anyway. Who needed it? Certainly not me. For once I was distracted from the charms of dessert. The images before me were more nuanced than spun sugar, and suddenly more interesting. A town had been on fire below the surface for many decades. The boy beside me had an alien in hand and a heart of gold. And I was off to my very first drive-in.

  This Woman Needs Help

  The shrink I had started seeing when Luke worked me over decided that I had recovered.

  “I think we should talk about terminating,” she said. These were the magic words that I thought New York psychiatrists never actually uttered.

  “You think I’m better?” I was incredulous.

  “Don’t you? You seem very happy to me,” she said. It was true. Things had been going well with Chris for many months. I had no complaints.

  “But…but…are you saying that all it took was the right man to make me happy? That’s terrible!”

  “I think you are a well-adjusted person. Circumstances have converged nicely for you. It might have something to do with Chris, but regardless I don’t see much for us to work on (but if you do, we should address that).”

  Then I remembered. “What about my candy addiction? We were supposed to figure that one out.”

  She stood her ground. “I don’t see that as a psychological problem, although it certainly doesn’t seem very healthy. I recommend that you see a nutritionist.”

  A nutritionist. Now, why hadn’t I thought of that?

  Here’s what I figured a nutritionist would say: “You’re filling up on candy instead of food. If you just ate more fiber, fruit, and vegetables, you would
n’t feel hungry for candy. Also, you have trouble figuring out exactly what to eat, so you turn to something easy and convenient. Here are some simple recipes. Here are some healthy snacks. Here is a detailed analysis of your stool specimen. Follow this all-wheat-gluten menu for a week and let me know how it goes.” Great. I already know that I can buy a banana instead of candy. I’m no junk-food junkie. I’m no stranger to whole grains. Alpha-omegas are my best friends. I already had a nutritionist: me!

  I loved candy. But too much was too much. And sometimes I felt I ate candy not because I wanted a little something sweet, but because I wanted a lot of something sweet, endlessly, in a not-very-healthy way. I wanted eating candy to be a decision instead of a compulsion. Maybe I could enjoy it more if I ate it less. I wanted guilt to disappear. And my metabolism wasn’t getting any younger to boot.

  So a while after my shrink hour became my own again, I decided to try going to a hypnotist. I couldn’t stomach the nutritionist, but a hypnotist might charm me out of my addiction. The hypnotist lady was instantly more analytic than I wanted her to be.

  “You don’t understand,” I told her. “I passed therapy with flying colors. I’m done. Now I just have this pesky little addiction to eradicate.” I looked around for the pendulum. No pendulum, but a few cats, which were a good sign. Maybe she was a witch.

  Then she explained that hypnotism is widely misunderstood. I wasn’t going to abracadabra stop eating candy, but through the power of suggestion I could remind myself that it was not a healthy choice, and that I was a healthy person, and that I make my own decisions about what I want to eat. It all sounded very reasonable. I was disappointed. But I took the tape that she made for me—a sort of peptalk slash guided meditation that reminded me how important I was and how in control of my own destiny I could be. Listening to the tape was a nice, feel-good experience, although I still harbored hope that it would help me do a back handspring or play Rachmaninoff.

  The hypnotist lady suggested that I listen to the tape every day. I was good at first: I listened to the tape in the morning, ate healthy food all day, and exercised regularly. Then I discovered that if I didn’t listen to the tape, I wouldn’t let myself eat candy, because then I would be in trouble (with me) for not listening to the tape. That worked extremely well for a while. And then I sort of forgot about it entirely. That’s when I realized that I was becoming a fad diet type person. I was turning into the kind of person whose strategy for changing part of herself was the only thing that ever changed, but who never actually summoned enough willpower to make the change.

  I didn’t need a tape. My head was a broken record anyway. Every time I wanted candy, I could just have an argument with myself. Good luck , my health-nut side told my sweets side. May the best self win. Then the argument began:

  Sweets: Mmm. How about a 99-cent bag of gumdrops?

  Nuts: Nah. We’re not doing that anymore.

  Sweets: But we were good yesterday, and we went to the gym today.

  Nuts: Exactly. You want to ruin the benefits of the gym by consuming empty calories?

  Sweets: Well, yes.

  Nuts: See that skinny girl by the counter?

  Sweets: Barely.

  Nuts: I bet she hasn’t had a Smartie in a year.

  Sweets: I bet she’s dumb as a tree.

  Nuts: Don’t you want to fit into last year’s pants?

  Sweets: I guess so, but Smarties have no fat.

  Nuts: Empty calories convert to fat. Why don’t you pretend that you already ate the Smarties?

  Sweets: You suck.

  Nuts: Don’t you have some raspberries at home?

  Sweets: Oh, hush.

  Here’s how the argument went the rest of the time:

  Sweets: Hey! Get those Zotz! You won’t find them again soon.

  Nuts: Great idea!

  I am always going to have this fight with myself. I know it, because it is the same argument my mother described having with herself staring at those marshmallow eggs. I think of those internal voices as my willpower. Much as I want my candy consumption to dwindle holistically, I recognize that my situation calls for some level of self-conscious restraint. If Nuts, over time, gets a little faster, and wins slightly more often, then at least if my head isn’t normal, my intake may get close.

  No, Thank You

  Aging is about refining one’s taste, while respecting the taste of others. If one takes things too far, one becomes a crank. I can honestly say that as a guest in someone’s house, office, or ladies’ lounge, I would gratefully accept any of the below, but these are a few of the candies I never buy:

  1. Velamints: Try eating an entire pack of Velamints in one sitting. You will never, ever do it again.

  2. Tropical Skittles: As a casual Skittles consumer, I have to say, with due respect, that certain of the tropical flavors clash with each other. How hard can that be to avoid?

  3. Chunky: When Chunky was released, the TV ads, whatever they were, were salivatingly good. Imagine my disappointment when I found out about the raisins. As far as I, a non-fruit-eater at the time, was concerned, this was a serious error in judgment. Cheeseburgers are good. Reese’s work. But when fruit and chocolate are together, one is melting and the other is resisting. You need two mouths to handle the conflicting processes. The only fruit that I can handle in chocolate is the liquidy center of a gift chocolate. I’m told there are plain Chunkys, but my trust has been violated. Chunky will never earn it back.

  4. Black licorice: People either are or aren’t. I’m not. But I think it’s very classy.

  5. Dark chocolate: Again, a sophisticated choice. If I were a dark chocolate eater, my whole life and personality would be different. I would know how to dress “office casual.” I would be better at wearing hats. I would be able to tie a cherry stem in a knot with my tongue. I would not find self-deprecating humor funny; instead, I would find it puzzling. And I would certainly have better cooking skills.

  6. Mary Janes: The bane of piñatas. Mary Janes are simply too, too much of a challenge for my teeth.

  7. Whoppers: The Whopper is a decent stand-in for a Milk Dud, but I would never seek one out.

  8. Anything crunchy: Nestlé White, Krackel, Crunch, Kit Kat, Reese’s Sticks, Snickers Crunch, Whatchamacallit. Crunch brings too much air with it. I realize that the crunch is very trendy. It’s a favorite in product extension. I’m not going to argue with the crunch market, but I’m not buying. Except, for some reason, Twix. (Rice Krispies Treats tiptoe the border between candy and pastry. So long as the chef doesn’t skimp on the marshmallows, they are another exception.)

  9. Hard candies: I like to believe that the inventor of hard candies said, “Let’s produce a cheap candy that people buy in order to give away.” Hard candies are for banks, retail outlets, real estate agencies. They make good sense anywhere you want to give away candy, but you don’t want people to be greedy. Go ahead, put out Hershey’s Hugs. They’ll last a day. But line your lobby with bowls of lemon drops and you’ll refill once a month. Exceptions: butterscotches and root beer barrels.

  10. Coffee and coconut: I don’t look good in gray or salmon. I think I might be an Autumn. Coffee doesn’t work for me, not even coffee ice cream. And Mounds taste like shredded paper. Not my thing.

  11. Razzles: What is annoying about Razzles is not so much the candy itself, although the “hidden gum” notion is more successful in Blow Pops and I take issue with gum anyway. The annoying reality is that many people think they are absolutely alone and original in their Razzles nostalgia. This is also true for those pretty candy buttons that can’t be eaten without trails of their paper backing. These are the candies that everyone loves to remember, but no one truly loved to eat.

  12. Redundant candy bars: Oh Henry and Pay Day. There must be loyal followers, but if I’m going to have nuts in my candy, which is a big if, I’m going to get a Snickers.

  Starburst

  Chris was a geek. The primary symptom was his predilection for elaborate 24-hour ro
ad races that were occasionally held around the country. In these informally organized rallies, vans full of technology-laden nerds solved complex puzzles to get from one clue to the next. The biggest of all these games was a charity event to be held in Seattle, and Chris wanted me to join him.

  There were six of us in a van. We found one of the first clues in a fake newscast being broadcast on the TV screen of an electronics store. Another clue gave us tickets to the Mariners game, and another required us to buy a dozen eggs and figure out why they had been injected with different colors of dye. It went on like this. Chris was very good at solving clues. I was, well, a beginner. Hours into the game, we had to find homonyms in the menu of a restaurant, swim out to a dinghy in the middle of a lake, and go into a house party to retrieve a clue from kids who were staging a knife fight.

  At three in the morning, just as we were starting to fade, a clue brought us to a large building near the airport. We were led to a simulation flight chamber, suspended in the middle of an enormous room. Under the instruction of a pilot we had to take off, fly around the Space Needle, and land. Needless to say, this was a complete surprise at three in the morning. We couldn’t believe it. We were beside ourselves with amazement. As we ran out of the building, having completed the task, we were given a pizza and a bag of candy and chocolate bars for a post-midnight snack.