Candy and Me Read online

  Back in the van, after wolfing down two slices, I started looking for the candy, which had somehow immediately disappeared among the reference books, walkie-talkies, and paper that littered the van. Everyone else was onto the next clue, but I secretly kept looking for the dessert. I knew I was looking longer than I should have. All my puzzle-solving skills were gone. I kept my eyes open, but that was the best level of participation I could summon.

  At dawn one of the puzzles led us to the Space Needle itself. It was five in the morning, but a man was waiting there to take us up in the elevator. At the top he opened a door, and we climbed a workman’s ladder up a narrow chute onto the roof of the observation tower. It was windy, and the sun was rising. There was one more ladder, up to the Needle itself. I climbed to the top. I was the tallest person in Seattle at that moment, but I wasn’t looking at the view. There, high in Seattle, was a pile of cassette tapes—our next clue.

  We returned to the van again. Everyone was listening to the cassette, which they thought had a garbled rendition of the Barney Miller theme song. It was then that I finally located the candy under the third row of seats and said in a very modulated tone, so as not to disturb my teammates, “Hey, does anybody want some of this?” There was no response. It was morning and we hadn’t slept at all. This was the fuel I had been craving. I ate two packs of Starburst in quick succession and a Milky Way for dessert. I was back! With new superhuman powers I turned to my teammates and suggested that they stop playing the tape and break it open. They looked at me with curiosity.

  “I’m telling you!” I said, pointing out that the case said, “Books on Tape, Volume 0.”

  “Volume 0. That means we don’t need to listen to the tape,” I told them. Chris was already pulling out a screwdriver. Seconds later we were stretching out the coils of tape, squinting to read the tiny print that we found there.

  At the department store Nordstrom’s for the next clue, our team dashed out of the van, leaving me and Chris, who was driving, alone for the first time in hours. I was sticky and tired. I got out to go help, but Chris pulled me back.

  “Next week,” he said, “can I see you every night?”

  “Yes,” I said, and ran out to find the Nordstrom clue.

  The Truth about Circus Peanuts

  Shauna went home to Hudson, Ohio, for the town’s annual ice-cream social. When she came back, we went to a movie. She brought me back a bag of Circus Peanuts. Our friendship had been founded on the first Circus Peanuts that I gave her, and now they were a token of that friendship. We read the wrapper:

  Ingredients: Sugar, Corn Syrup, Gelatin, Glycerin, Modified Soy Protein, Sodium Hexametaphosphate, Pectin, Artificial Color (FD&C Yellow #6), Artificial Flavor.

  I had never read the ingredients before. Then I noticed, in tiny print at the bottom of the label:

  May contain traces of peanuts/nuts.

  Who knew that Circus Peanuts had any relation whatsoever to nuts?

  Peanut Butter Cups

  It was a summer Saturday and Chris and I were slow getting out of bed. We had no plans; all we wanted was to wake up together without any notion of how the day would be spent. We craved uninterrupted expanses of each other’s company, like any annoyingly self-indulgent couple. I had couples guilt. I had spent so much time as a single girl that I couldn’t stand becoming part of a couple who spent all their time in their own little self-congratulatory universe, watching romantic comedies and playing footsy in last year’s restaurants. So I made plans for us. We went to parties with our single friends. We socialized in groups. We were always booked, out late, exhausted. Hence the craving for empty space.

  After breakfast, the Sunday Times seemed like entertainment enough for the whole day, but we gathered it, a Scrabble board, and a blanket and headed out to the park. At a deli near our destination we stopped for water. Like any good deli, this one had penny candies up by the counter. But it is only the rare deli that stocks miniature white chocolate peanut butter cups. That’s right. White chocolate and peanut butter. The first time I found them, I gazed in wonder. These two were meant to be.

  I pointed them out to Chris, expecting no interest. He raised his eyebrows and licked his lips. I patted his head. Good boy. We bought a handful.

  At Battery Park we spread our blanket under a tree. When we had exhausted the paper, we pinned it down with shoes and turned our attention to Scrabble. I have no argument with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. They are a topnotch candy. H. B. Reese, a former Hershey employee, set off to make his fortune with peanut butter cups. He really got the “peanut butter” right with his ultra-sweetened, crumbly filling. (So right, in fact, that in the 1960s, twenty years after launching his company, Reese sold it to Hershey for over twenty million dollars.) Somehow Reese, by playing with the formula, removed peanut butter’s thirst-inducing density. The cups have a light, perfect balance of chocolate and peanut butter. Natural, homemade peanut butter cups don’t compare.

  Reese’s familiar orange, yellow, and brown branding is so ugly that it’s endearing. That packaging is part of Reese’s extremely impressive brand extension. Reese’s Pieces were stunningly good when they were first released. We finally got to taste the refined version of peanut butter without letting chocolate steal its thunder. It stood alone. Chocolate makes the cups too filling. I can eat Reese’s Pieces forever. The candy coating gives the Pieces the delightful crunch of M&M’s, but with superlative filling. Their ubiquity has diminished their appeal, but whenever I run into them, I am reminded of their lasting goodness. Especially in movie theaters. Recently the less-than-memorably named Reese’s FastBreak hit the market. FastBreak adds chocolate and peanut butter nougat to the mix, with excellent results. The FastBreak is a dangerous path for me. I feel that if I went down it, I might never come back.

  But white chocolate takes peanut butter cups in a brilliant direction. They are much sweeter than the milk chocolate sort; one can almost taste grains of sugar in the white coating. I like to eat three in rapid succession, and they are so sweet that I occasionally actually have the feeling that I don’t want any more. I don’t worry, though; it passes quickly. (As I’ve said, satisfaction isn’t the right word. Candy does not offer satisfaction, only saturation.)

  “I can’t believe these exist,” Chris said. “Who knew?”

  I knew. And since they’re near cash registers in delis around the city and I’ve witnessed fluctuating supply in certain of those delis, I know I’m not the only devotee. But it is a stealth candy. I have never, ever seen another person pick one up.

  We ate the cups, I won Scrabble, the sun was well behaved. It’s too many good things all at once, I told Chris, and he made that into a little song.

  Tootsie Rolls

  I called my sister-in-law, and my nephew answered the phone. His telephone conversation abilities were blossoming at an astounding rate.

  “Who is this, please?” Asher asked.

  “It’s Hilary,” I said. “How are you, Asher?”

  “I…I…I had a cookie!” he said, clearly pleased to have come up with big news to communicate.

  “That’s good,” I said. “I had some candy.”

  “What kind of candy?” Asher asked.

  “Tootsie Rolls,” I said. There was silence at the other end of the line. Asher was stumped. “Have you ever had a Tootsie Roll?”

  “No,” he said sadly. “My mother says they’re bad for me.”

  “She’s right,” I said.

  Staleness is the plague of the Tootsie Roll. It most often affects the candy bar–size Tootsie Rolls, which may languish on the shelf longer than the finger-size penny candy or the inch-long nuggets. I was on a Tootsie roll and I had been lucking out. The ones at my corner bodega were always soft and fudgy. This newly reliable freshness matched the ongoing ease of my life, now that Chris was in it. No matter how I feared a sudden change—a souring or staleness—the time we spent together was consistently satisfying.

  A fresh Tootsie Roll is always better
than one remembers them to be. This has to do with the attempt to flavor them like fudge, instead of straightforward chocolate. But it has mostly to do with their unique, compelling texture. They chew, offering a level of resistance that is both enduring and conquerable. None of that annoying passive-aggressive persistence of flavorless gum. What are you supposed to do when gum flavoring is gone? Keep chewing like a stupid cow? You have to decide when the gum is over. And then you have to choose whether to toss, swallow, or simply add another flavorful stick to your wad. It’s too much responsibility. Tootsie Rolls have a natural ending. They chew for a good long time, releasing intense flavor consistently. When they go, it is because they must. They have integrity.

  Asher is a sugarhead like me. When he enters a room, he is immediately aware of any candy or desserts that are present in the room. His focus is intense. I look at him and know that my mother is right. This is nature, not nurture.

  Name Your Candy

  Gobstoppers, Nerds, Laffy Taffy, Pixy Stix: Willy Wonka (owned by Nestlé) has some of the finest candy names. My favorites are the silly, whimsical ones. Why complicate matters? But I also respect some of the older names, from the premarketing days when candy bars were named after the families who invented them. Tootsie (1896) was the nickname of the inventor’s five-year-old daughter. Snickers (1930) was named after the Mars family horse. Reese’s and M&M’s (Mars and Murrie) were both named after the company founders. Junior Mints (1949) was named after the Broadway show Junior Miss. The much-contested Baby Ruth (1920) was named after either the company president’s granddaughter, Grover Cleveland’s daughter, or the Yankee slugger who tried and failed to get royalties for the use of his name.

  Then there are the literal names: Tart ‘n’ Tinies, Almond Joy, Gummy Bears, SweeTarts. Rolo is the best of this lot. It’s slightly descriptive, but isn’t silly or straight. It just works. I have grown so accustomed to Hershey’s Kisses that I forget they have nothing to do with the shape of an actual kiss. (There is no record of the origins of the name, but Hersheys.com suggests that it may have come from “the sound or motion of the chocolate being deposited during the manufacturing process.”)

  Whatchamacallit, Krackel, FastBreak, and Kit Kat don’t do anything for me. Maybe after years of popularity, FastBreak will have the same cachet as Good & Plenty. For now, its flip-flop of “breakfast” sounds like a subliminal attempt to promote itself as a new fun food. Too clever. (Although: yum.) If it were mine to name, I’d choose something with more personality. Reese’s Folly? Reese’s Anytime? I’d need lots of branding meetings and focus groups to get it straight, and yet FastBreak seems like the unfortunate result of too many focus groups.

  One day Chris brought a can of Comet back to his apartment with the groceries. He found me looking at it. When I said, “Too bad Mars didn’t trademark this name in time. It’d make a good white chocolate bar,” he gave me a funny look. (Chris wavers between indulging my love for sugar and helping me control it. All he wants is for me to be happy, but it is no simple trick to balance my desire before and my regret afterward.)

  “You’d better be careful,” he said. “Lots of those household products sound like candies. Stay away from my Swiffer wipes.” He was right. Ajax. Snuggles. It had to be a poison control center nightmare. The next day I came home to find that Chris had left me a note that said “Clarification Chart” at the top. I think he was concerned that in a moment of desperation I might consume a detergent with a lime-fresh scent. I didn’t need the clarification, but it made for a good shopping list.

  Is it a delicious candy or a household cleanser?

  Old-Fashioned Marshmallow Eggs: Drawing the Line

  When Chris and I moved in together, I made it a rule never to hide sugar consumption from him. It wasn’t going to be my dirty little secret. Besides, sugar was losing its status with me. I was happy, in love, and demoting sugar was the next step to a balanced existence. My goal was to see candy as an occasional snack, with no greater meaning and with no guilt. Also, I was tired of going to the gym all the time. My metabolism was over thirty years old, and it wasn’t getting any younger. Candy was just candy, I told myself. Minimizing its presence almost felt natural. Most of the time.

  But when I discovered that the marshmallow eggs that so elude me were readily available online, I was delighted. I hadn’t seen them since Luke stowed them under my pillow, and that seemed like a lifetime ago. One slight drawback to the online candy store—the eggs had to be ordered in bulk. Que sera, sera, I thought, and ordered the five-pound box. When I tried to check out, however, I discovered that I hadn’t met the website’s minimum order. So without blinking I added a five-pound box of Swiss petite fruit to my order. Minimum satisfied. Customer satisfied.

  When I mentioned my success to Chris, he looked a little shocked.

  “You know, ten pounds is really a lot of candy,” he said.

  “I know,” I admitted. “I’m thinking I might get you to take it to work and then bring me installments.”

  He looked unconvinced. “But what about before I get home from work, on the day it arrives? What if you eat it all?”

  “I couldn’t possibly eat ten pounds of candy!” I said.

  “That may be true,” he said, “but I’m afraid you might try.”

  “I would probably end up giving a lot of it away,” I suggested.

  He looked at me skeptically.

  “You know,” I said, “I think I might try to cancel that order.”

  “That sounds like a great idea,” he said.

  With This Bottle Cap…

  I got laid off soon after September 11. It was the first time since college that I had been unemployed, and I was glad to be alive, so I took it in stride. Chris and I wanted to take a vacation around New Year’s, but with all that had happened, we couldn’t bring ourselves to go very far. So we went to Florida, where his parents had a condo. The notion of having hours together by the sea was heavenly.

  The only other vacation we had taken together had been to Mexico. We had gone on a twelve-hour bus ride over the Oaxaca mountains during which the bus driver never stopped at a single dusty town to allow us to go to the bathroom. I had a bladder infection the instant I stepped off the bus, and the over-the-counter antibiotics I bought made me nauseated for the rest of the trip. We went to a pizza place overlooking the beach with hammock-chairs that in any other circumstance would have delighted me. Instead, I was immediately ill. I read thrillers in the shade and watched Chris run in and out of the surf, making sure he didn’t go too close to the rocks where, we were told, 100 people a year met their makers.

  This time would be different. We would be in Florida, where we controlled our own pit stops. What we had forgotten was that the east coast of Florida is not necessarily hot in December. In fact, as we learned, it can be quite cold. I wore a sweater and jeans on the plane, and every day thereafter. In the dank cold, my hair curled into ringlets close to my head.

  “Do you like this purple sweater?” I asked Chris. “You’ll be seeing it a lot.” The condo had windows looking out on the ocean. We planted ourselves as close to the windows as we could, playing Scrabble, then cribbage. We ate a Carvel ice-cream cake until I told Chris that if I was only allowing myself one sweet thing per day, I didn’t want it to be a Carvel ice-cream cake.

  On New Year’s Eve it was too cold for the short black dress I had brought. No, I would have to wear the jeans again. In a cheap beach shop I found a sparkly black shirt for ten dollars. It was the best I could do. That, my purple sweater, and a pink jean jacket. Sultry. We went to a hotel down the street, where they promised a prime rib dinner, a band, dancing, and champagne toasts. We sat with eight geriatric strangers who managed to represent a cross-section of retirement clichés. They weren’t charmed by, or even much interested in, our youth. We drank but didn’t get drunk, danced to the terrible band as they reduced Lionel Ritchie, Jimmy Buffet, the Beatles, and anyone else on the classic rock play list to the same dull whine, and did
everything we could to avoid kissing our tablemates at midnight.

  “I love you and everything,” I told Chris, “but this is still boring. Do you think we should be able to have fun under these conditions?”

  “Only a little,” he said. “Did you enjoy your prime rib?”

  “Oh yes!” It was true. I rarely ate meat, and prime rib always did it for me.

  “Well, then,” he shrugged. “You’ve done very well.”

  The next day, New Year’s Day, was as cold and overcast as every day before it. Chris had a cold that he couldn’t shake, but he went for a run down the beach anyway. I watched the news in the exercise room.

  Later that afternoon we decided to go for a walk. I put the champagne we had brought—some Dom Pérignon that Chris had gotten as a gift—into a bag. I washed some local strawberries.

  “Should I bring glasses or paper cups?” I asked Chris.

  “Whatever,” he said. I packed the glasses. We walked down the beach to a little gazebo Chris had seen on his run.

  “Is this good?” he asked.

  “Too many people coming and going,” I said. It was more private farther down the beach, so we found a driftwood tree resting parallel to the shoreline. It was white as the sand and smooth with contour lines. We sat and drank our champagne and ate our strawberries. Because the sky was overcast, there was a silvery gleam to the ocean. We huddled for warmth.