Candy and Me Read online

  Later, in college, I would inherit a desk from my brother. Eric was always the sane one. His desires were reasonable. The candy he liked was always either tart or sour. Spree were his favorite early on, and he rarely ventured beyond them. I admired his commitment to Spree. It was a candy with good personality. The name was cheerful and energetic. Most admirably, he would make a pack last several days.

  I never bought furniture in college, I only scavenged what I could from the street and friends who were graduating or upgrading. My roommate Kate and I carried my brother’s lightweight desk to our new off-campus pad. I opened the drawers. They were all empty except one, which revealed a secret: hundreds of pristine, but empty, Spree wrappers. They lay there like discarded snakeskins. My brother, it turned out, ate a whole lot of Spree in the course of the year. He had diligently worked his way through a roll at a time, careful not to tear through the paper. Kate began to laugh. “He’s just like you!”

  I could see what she was getting at, but I disagreed entirely. Much as I admired the delicacy and ritual with which he approached his task, I knew full well that our approach to candy was very different. For my brother it was an idle desire that he occasionally fulfilled. For me it was constant. It was interwoven with emotions, with secrecy, with illicitness, and with the ever-present shadow of future weight gain. Once I was an adolescent, my mother gave up on forbidding candy consumption. Instead, she tried to stop it with the only reasoning she thought might have any effect on a teenager. She frowned disapprovingly and reminded me over and over again that I would be fat. Even if I wasn’t now, my metabolism was about to slow down and then I’d see.

  My mother ate nibbles of fat-free matzo for breakfast. I never saw her eat anything else.

  Any year’s assembly of my wrappers would be a far different vision from the orderly collection that Kate and I had found in my brother’s desk. It would be torn, hurried, multicolored, mixed, and spread out. Smarties wrappers would fraternize with Swedish Fish bones. Boxes of Nerds would battle it out with Lemonheads. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup wrappers would linger on the outskirts, scandalized by chocolate’s underrepresentation. The candy detritus of my lifetime would be a sight to see.

  Bottle Caps Nostalgia

  Candy is a food group. Those of us who give candy its due respect as a food understand that it isn’t really possible to have a favorite candy. Hungers vary. One wants something rich, or chewy, or tart, something chalky or plasticky. One has seasonal or on-the-spot cravings. One simply must have a Starburst, and must have it now. But everyone has a front-runner, a desert island candy, the candy that one will never refuse. For me, this is Bottle Caps.

  Bottle Caps are round sugary tablets, like SweeTarts, but they are “the soda pop candy,” coming in cola, root beer, grape soda, orange soda, and cherry soda flavors. Bottle Caps are not easy to come by. They aren’t in most East Coast drugstores or candy stores, although they aren’t above making appearances when you least expect them. The lack of Bottle Caps distribution may be the reason I go overboard when they are available. The rarity gives me an excuse to purchase as much as I might ever want—for the rest of my life!—because who knows when I might find them again.

  This enthusiasm is not exclusively a nostalgic response. Candy nostalgia is easy to identify. Walk into a crowd and say, “Do you remember those candies they used to have when we were kids? My favorite was…” This is always a conversation starter. People are passionate about candies that have disappeared, like the Marathon bar, even though its British twin, the Curly Wurly, is allegedly a fine substitute. For these people candy represents the less-bitter-than-sweet days of ephemeral youth. They reminisce with the same dull choruses that they use to chant the plots of childhood sitcoms, cherished memories whose value comes exclusively from the fact that they are no longer current.

  Still, I confess to feeling some nostalgia for Bottle Caps. Even when I was in junior high school, I located a Bottle Caps source and was excited to learn they were still being produced. One summer in the heady pre-Rollerblade days, my friends and I went crazy for roller skates that had sneakers instead of the classic white ice-skating boot. Who cared that the risk of breaking an ankle increased dramatically when one wore these skates? Carrie, Lucy, and I spent a whole summer on skates, breaking our downhill speed with tree trunks, cars, curbs, pedestrians, or whatever else happened to be there. One day we skated down to the National Zoo. It was a hot day, and we stopped in the deli across the street. To my great delight, they stocked Bottle Caps. They were packaged in theretofore-unseen rolls, the way the long-lost Wacky Wafers (Sigh. I loved them, too.) were sold then and Spree are currently packaged. Thrilled, I bought four rolls on the spot. The zoo—and that deli—quickly became my favorite skating destination. I would buy seven rolls at a time, four for myself and three for my brother. I would finish mine in a day and then start stealing his, which was okay because I had given them to him in the first place.

  But to ascribe my Bottle Cap passion to nostalgia alone would be wrong. People can madeleine away for all I care, but that’s not what’s going on here. Bottle Caps deserve attention on candy merit alone. Most candy is chocolate- or fruit-flavored. Chocolate is a primary flavor, a natural food. Fruit candy is a secondary flavor—candy made to taste like a natural food. But Bottle Caps have neither primary nor secondary flavor. The genius of Bottle Caps is that their flavors are artificial flavors representing artificial flavors. Bottle Caps simulate root beer and cola beverages, which are already weird chemically manufactured flavors. Even the orange and grape Bottle Caps are genuine efforts at creating the taste of orange and grape soda, which are themselves approximations of fruit. Bottle Caps have tertiary flavor. This puts Bottle Caps in a rarified league, keeping company with the likes of bubble gum ice cream; certain Jelly Bellys (there is not only a lemon Jelly Belly, but also a lemon drop Jelly Belly), and some easily dismissed popcorn varieties. In the competitive world of layered flavor allusions, Bottle Caps may not have the biggest market share, but they have a dedicated following of at least one.

  Any Bottle Caps sighting became a reason to rejoice. On a weekend visit to Rhode Island I found a newsstand selling the green packets—this was before the new purple version—and instantly bought twenty at ten cents each. There was always a moment of glad discovery when I first saw the familiar packaging; then I would proceed to purchase a massive quantity, usually in multiples of seven. If I were trying to be moderate: seven. If it had been a while: fourteen. If I knew there was zero chance I would be able to return to the store to stock up: twenty-one. Whether I was a passenger in a car, or at home reading the paper, consumption followed a defined ritual: I poured an entire pack (usually about twelve pieces of candy) out into my hand. The lesser flavors—orange and cherry—went first. Then came the three lead flavors—cola, root beer, and grape—one at a time.

  I do not suck or savor. I chew. I cannot understand those who do not chew. It is all about chewing. There is no flavor in suck. There is no instant and total immersion in the fine taste and texture. Sucking, they say, is about postponing gratification, about accepting less for longer, drawing it out. But if one wants to prolong the ecstasy of candy, it can be done easily not through sucking pieces, but through eating mountains of them. Why savor less when you can just buy more? I like lots of Bottle Caps; I like them all at once; I like to tear through them, fast and furious, and then to collapse in sated exhaustion.

  Bottle Caps, as my premier candy, have nostalgia value; they have candy merit; and they make for a fine ritualistic snack experience. But most potently, as I was to discover, when a good thing comes along, memories have a propensity for attaching themselves to it.

  Tessana’s Butterfly Cake

  When I arrived at summer camp, I was fourteen, my acne was at its worst, and my hair was lumped into four wacky braids, which stayed in place without rubber bands because my hair was so wiry. For the first day of camp, I had chosen to outfit myself in a new red T-shirt with sleeves that rolled up
black. I had a matching black-and-red pin with the Rocky Horror Show lips on it above my (just forming) breast, and a pin-striped jean jacket.

  Jessie was the first person I met. She had auburn hair, a perfect nose, and a dancer’s body. She wore Secret spray-on deodorant and Jean Naté body splash. Taking one look at me and the other two girls with whom she was supposed to live in a platform tent all summer, she told us, “No offense to you guys, but I’m going to ask to be moved. It’s just that I’m older than you all, and I’m not sure this is the right tent for me.”

  What she meant was that we weren’t cool enough for her. I was not surprised. Girls like Jessie weren’t friends with girls like me. Jessie had a boyfriend, Danny. She was the kind of girl who managed to put a camp boyfriend on hold for an entire school year and then to return to camp with her summer romance pre-packaged. The coed sleeping arrangements of our camp were such that Danny, who was blond and friendly, slept in a platform tent twenty yards away. That first night, Jessie wanted to let Danny sneak into our tent. My bed blocked the back flaps, which would be his most discreet entrance. My cooperation was essential. Soon enough, Jessie was stationed on my bed, and we were hurling rocks and tree bark into the night to get Danny’s attention. By the next morning, I had two new friends, a silly nickname, and Jessie had decided to stay in our tent.

  Jessie thought I was hilarious. She told me so, and she made it clear to everyone else. This was unprecedented. Here was the prettiest girl in camp, with the cutest boyfriend, the girl whose wardrobe most closely resembled that of Jennifer Beals in Flashdance , and she had chosen me. I lay awake while Danny and Jessie fooled around in the darkness of the tent, our other tentmates oblivious or silently furious. Sure, they were making out between talking to me, but I was content to be their chosen third.

  “Should I go all the way with Danny?” Jessie asked me one day. I had never kissed a boy.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Aren’t we too young?”

  I, too, was in love. Our counselor, Finn, who was a crazily ancient nineteen, had taken an interest in the journal that I kept religiously. I let him read what I wrote, starved myself (or pretended to), and did anything else I could think of to get his attention. Actually, there were two journals that I kept simultaneously: my regular journal, and a censored version of it for his perusal. We took silent walks together, and he issued cryptic statements that might have meant that he thought I was fascinating and/or nubile. He had a counselor girlfriend. My love for him was forbidden. It was a great secret that I harbored and nourished with every ounce of fantasy I could summon.

  My fifteenth birthday fell in the middle of August. By then I had fully asserted a brand-new personality. Back in high school I might have been an awkward loser. Not so at camp. At camp I was outgoing and silly, with a private dark poetic side that no one could possibly understand. Things were going very, very well.

  Early on my birthday a boy I had scarcely noticed came up to me. “I hear it’s your birthday,” he said, handing me a plain Hershey bar. He was on kitchen duty, and he had stolen it for me. It dawned on me that this boy, Rob, had a crush on me. I was not interested. I had bigger fish to fry, utterly preoccupied with the nineteen-year-old Finn.

  That night, the evening activity for the older kids was a ghost story being told in the Tent Pavilion. I was told I had received a phone call and made my way across camp to the telephone in the office, but when I got there the line was dead. We were in the hills of New Hampshire. These things happened. I was late to evening activity. When I approached the Tent Pavilion, it had gone dark and utterly silent. This, I figured, was the warmup for the ghost story. I found my way down the path without a flashlight, and the door creaked open.

  The lights flashed on, and there was the entire tent unit—the older kids—gathered in my honor. It was a birthday celebration the likes of which hadn’t been seen all summer. In the center of the Pavilion was an enormous cake, shaped like a butterfly and covered with Starbursts, M&M’s, red-hots, and gumdrops. The entire tent unit sighed in wonder. It was a beautiful cake. Tessana, a white-blond, deeply tanned art counselor who had a British accent and thrilled Danny and the other boys by sunbathing topless, had made it for me. I was clearly the unwitting beneficiary of her artistic boredom. But that cake fed the most glorious moment I could imagine. Never, never had I received extra attention like this from my peers and leaders, or felt recognized as being interesting or funny. My camp personality was solid. They knew me, they liked me, and they were rewarding me with a cake-load of candy. It was the best cake I had ever tasted. It was the birthday of my dreams. My fortune had turned. Today was like that butterfly, unimaginably fluttery and sweet.

  Later, after the cake, I lingered on the little deck of the male counselors’ tent, listening to somebody play guitar. I sat with my arms around my knees, seeing what my tent looked like from Finn’s perspective. It was cool in the mountains, and my sleeves were pulled over my hands for warmth. Finn was behind me in the tent. I heard him say to another counselor, loud enough for me to hear, “She’s fifteen tonight. Three years. It’s a while to wait, but it’s worth it.” My face didn’t change. I rocked a bit in my curled-up position and chanted his words silently in my head, committing them to memory for future parsing. It was impossible that he had said such a thing, and yet I had heard it. Three years, three years, three years. It was a storybook statement, and I couldn’t believe that it hadn’t emerged from the force of my fantasies, or that he wasn’t saying it to torture me. But there it was. I walked away from the tent, went directly to my journal—the uncensored one—and wrote it down. In code. I both knew exactly what it meant, and couldn’t allow myself to believe it had been said. I asked my journal, “He says he’s waiting for me, but what could that mean? Could it mean that he loves me?” If I’d had one grain of guts I would have turned to him and said, “What do you mean—are you talking about me?” But I was fifteen. My capacity was limited.

  When I went back to high school in the fall, I was still the same caterpillar—a short girl with frizzy hair and unfortunate clothing. Instead of transforming me into the popular butterfly I so desperately wanted to be, the magic of summer camp taught me how to dream the impossible dream. I pined for Finn. He consumed my consciousness. Whatever interest he had taken in me was far outweighed by the volume of my obsession with him. I fed myself the hope that he would love me the same way I gorged myself on sweets. I copied love sonnets out of books into my journals. The small pieces of him that I remembered were magnified into my taste and personality: If he had mentioned an album or a book, I bought every work in the creator’s oeuvre. When I first kissed (a friend’s forgettable cousin visiting from New York) all I thought was, Now I will be ready for him. I drank whisky thinking, When I am with him I will have to throw it back and smile. The mailbox was a silent, open mouth. I sent thousands of letters to him and counted the words in whatever occasional notes he sent me back. Every day I walked out the door to my house expecting to see him there, because I knew that when the call of true love telegrammed itself across distances, it was eventually heard and heeded. As I walked to school, I chanted our names, one letter for every pace, driving them into the ground like curses. On each typewriter my fingers would find his keys, hurtling dense telegrams onto the bare platen. If once I had been open to the notion of spirituality and hopeful that a higher power might notice my plight (lonely teenage girl among other lonely teenage girls), now all my elevated passion was devoted to feeding my secret love for Finn. Had I not been at an all-girls’ school, had I not still been so shy and self-conscious, maybe real life would have interrupted this sustained fantasy. But it didn’t, and I would go on like that for years, until three years had passed, and Finn determined that my metamorphosis was complete and made good on his insinuations of our future.

  Mints

  Mints are not necessarily candy. In fact, the most critical defining factor for a mint is where it falls on the mint-candy/mint-but-not-a-candy continuum.


  The qualities that determine placement on the continuum are: whether they are better chewed or sucked, whether they can be consumed in bulk quantities or are delicately savored, concentration of flavor, and whether their primary life goal is to improve breath or to bring joy to the consumer.

  As far as this consumer is concerned, why ever dip south of Mentos?

  Nonpareils

  Halfway through high school I joined the track team. It was the only team that a person without any skill or talent could join and receive varsity credit. I did it because it would look good on my transcript for college. There was an arduous price to pay. We ran up to five miles a day. I brought nothing in ability to the team, so I tried to entertain them. I figured out shortcuts for those who didn’t want to do complete runs, and calculated the time it should have taken to run the full distance. I kept an eye out for the coach while smokers sneaked cigarettes between races. I brought sweets to meets.

  The meets were always far away in the suburbs of Virginia or Maryland, and we were stuck there for hours on Saturdays. My race was the 880. It wasn’t long distance, and it certainly wasn’t a sprint. It was a good race for people who were bound to lose. On one sunny spring morning we arrived at a meet around noon. It was hot. I brought a large bag of mint nonpareils. They came in pink, green, and yellow kisses, and tasted like white chocolate, with just the right tinge of mint and a light crunch from the delicate white sprinkles. I usually waited until after I ran to indulge, but this time I couldn’t resist. And once I started, I couldn’t stop. Mint is no marathon candy. It has a point of exhaustion, and I jogged right through mine. As a sluggish sugar low descended upon me, my race came up. In a fog, I plowed through the half-mile, hating those mints every step of the way. It is hard to say if my performance was worse than usual—I was in the middle of the pack, as always. But afterward I lay down on the bleachers with an unpleasant thickness in my mouth. It would be years before I ate another mint nonpareil.