Candy and Me Read online

  Looking back, those two weeks encapsulated the best of both worlds. I had the decadence of a child—an all-candy diet and no need for food, clothing or shelter. And I had the independence of an adult—to choose my proverbial path down the river propelled by my own strength. I wasn’t exactly at the top of my game. It had been muggy and humid, and we hadn’t showered often. My all-sugar diet wasn’t designed for long-term sustenance. But I relished the temporary disorder. When we arrived back in Washington, I was hungry and covered with a layer of filth. It wasn’t until I stepped off the bus that I realized that my parents had no idea when I was coming home. On top of that, I’d forgotten my keys and was locked out. I had to start my summer job in New York two days later. I picked up my backpack and walked toward home. Still no answer. I knocked on Lucy’s door, and her mother hosed me down before she would let me in the house. The dirt ran off me, and I watched a part of my life run off into the ruts of Lucy’s patio. The spray of water was as cold as the Nantahala River, and I didn’t mind.

  Junior Mints

  The summer before I went to college, my former camp counselor Finn called drunk from a bar, announced that he had broken up with his fiancée, and wondered if he could see me. I was staying with my parents in New York City, working a miserable administrative job for a law firm in the World Trade Center. They put me in a windowless file room, sorting the papers on a pro bono case. Every day I would buy a box of Junior Mints for lunch-dessert and eat them all as I read Love in the Time of Cholera. Sometimes I would lock the door of the file room and read into the afternoon. If any of the lawyers came down to look for a file or to check on me, I would tell them that I was afraid to be alone in that deserted part of the office. Their faces said that the room reeked of sugar and deceit.

  The night that Finn visited conveniently happened to be the only night of the summer that my parents were out of town. It was also the night before my last day of work. The map of the city was still a jigsaw puzzle to me—scattered pieces that, with only slight attention, would soon be assembled. I meant to bring Finn to the East Village, but I turned us the wrong way coming out of the subway. We were near Washington Square, but at the time it seemed like a vast residential neighborhood with no restaurants to be found. We went to Dojo’s, a cheap college joint, and drank pitchers of sangria. Finn told me about his failing relationship. He was as I had remembered him: sincere, but enigmatic, handsome, charming and seemingly convinced that I had grown into the woman he had always imagined I would. I was wearing Birkenstocks. The toilet in the women’s room was broken and had overflowed, but I used it anyway, being thankful in my drunken way that the soles of my shoes were thick enough that the flood on the bathroom floor hadn’t reached the level of my bare feet.

  On our way uptown Finn, to my disbelief, bought a six-pack. He sat in the rocking chair in my room, smoked a joint, and drank three beers. I had a shot of whisky and promptly fell asleep on top of the covers of my single bed. Some amount of time later—maybe two minutes, maybe an hour—I awoke with a start and realized that this night, this night that was literally drunk with opportunity, was going to slip away. Finn was sitting exactly where I had left him, drinking the last of the six-pack.

  “I thought we had lost you,” he said, apparently not fazed by the possibility.

  “No,” I said, with the astounding verbal capacity that hits me at two in the morning, on a Thursday night, after several rounds. I walked to the side of the rocking chair to kiss him, but found that I was too tall to do the deed. Had I any experience or innate grace, I might have pulled him to stand. Instead, I found myself kneeling next to the rocking chair. It rocked forward. We kissed.

  “I never would have touched you first,” he said, removing all of my clothes in one gesture.

  “Oh, aren’t you the gentleman,” I said. “You just got me wasted.”

  He stopped and put his hands on my shoulders. “Look,” he said, “I’m trembling. I’m not too drunk to know that I have wanted this for a long time.”

  “Okay,” I sighed into his neck, “but right now I have to sleep.”

  The next morning we walked the family dogs together.

  “In return for your room last night,” I said, “you are the scooper.”

  Back in the house, we sat on the couch. I leaned against his shoulder, falling back asleep. I woke to his fingers creeping up my skirt. He still wanted me, I realized with surprise and delight. It was morning and he still wanted me. Names ran through my head—the names of all the people who wouldn’t believe that this hopeless adolescent love was actually coming to fruition. Years of pining were being rewarded with flesh and blood. My imagined prince, the face that had been my fantasy boy prop for all my adolescence, had come, had let me seduce him, had sobered up, and still wanted me. Jessie, my friend from camp, had to be notified immediately, not to mention the tenth-grade English teacher who had used my case to define “unrequited” to her class.

  As he kissed me, I realized that my half-dry hair was plastered to my head on the side that had been on his shoulder. I would not make a fine impression on my last day of work.

  We eat Junior Mints in the file rooms of the summer jobs that come and go. We eat them with popcorn until we are ill. We cry at movies, or fall asleep, then forget them. Finn had arrived, in impossible fulfillment of every wish that lay buried in the ground I tread on my way to school. The loves of our youth build themselves into elaborate knights in shining armor until their images eclipse life itself. Sometimes they become reality, but then, even if they aren’t the clichéd disappointment, they still fail for the same old reasons. One person moves away, or the other gets bored, or they run out of things to talk about. Our desires start young, are unreasonable, and can’t be trusted. But there’s always another box of Junior Mints.

  Part Two

  Sugar and Spice

  Smarties

  In my youth and adolescence, candy was an overindulgence—a mild drug with which I experimented and to which I became addicted. At times it was a substitute for the sweetness and contentedness that I found elusive. It was also a substitute for natural sugars. By the time I got to college, I still wouldn’t eat even the most basic fruits. It was usually the texture that daunted me: oranges were thready and indigestible; apples were too hard for my orthodontia-weakened teeth; bananas had soft spots and strange black bits in the center; peaches were furry; strawberries grainy; others inconceivable. I had never had a grape, I boasted, but I loved the taste of purple.

  On my way to class every day I stopped by the Wawa to buy breakfast. I bought myself a half-pint of orange juice, a bagel with cream cheese, and several Smarties à la carte. The idea was that the Smarties were for later. (This is a generic phrase that is used whenever candy is bought in conjunction with normal meal food. “The raw cookie dough is for later. The ice cream is for dessert. The chocolates are for him, not me.” It is always a lie.) When I got to class the orange juice and bagel would disappear, and then, without pause, I would start in on the Smarties, stacking the empties on the edge of the desk. The early morning energy of a fresh roll of Smarties made them a great stand-in for fruit.

  Smarties (the American variety, not the homonymic British sort, which resemble M&M’s) needed to be eaten in pairs, but the colors, and their mild accompanying flavors, weren’t to be mixed. I would unfurl a roll and sort the Smarties by tint on my desk. Saving the purples for last, I would eat two at a time, making my way through each color. A single bite was all it took for the Smartie to dissolve. It happened quickly. A pack was gone in under a minute, and the next pack was opened immediately.

  There was a moment, in the course of any Smarties experience, where I had to think of Johnson’s baby chewable aspirins, which have a chalky mild orange flavor. Consider: not only are orange Smarties orange-flavored, but according to the company, the white Smarties are “orange cream.” Two orange-flavored colors! Outrageous. I always let the aspirin association enter my mind and then, with meditative skill, I let it go.
I focused instead on the taste of the green Smartie. Was it really strawberry? The mind boggled, but there was no time to waste. Smartie consumption was nonstop. Any attempt to slow it down created an unpleasant sense of deprivation. Once the process began, it was not to be interrupted.

  Every so often I would look around the class and notice that, although it was 10:30 in the morning, and although there were almost 200 students in the class, I was the only one eating breakfast, much less a breakfast-dessert of Smarties. It occurred to me more than once that eating in class might be considered inappropriate, but I reassured myself that most of my classmates got to eat in the college dining halls and had probably had three-egg omelets for breakfast, while I lived off-campus and was responsible for my own meal plan. Perhaps “responsible” wasn’t the best word.

  I knew how I was supposed to feel about my bright college years, but knowing didn’t help. In the back of my mind I wanted to learn something or other, but I desired intellectual growth only in the abstract. The actual acquisition of knowledge was, at that time, unpleasant. I was taking a class called something like “Cultural Criticism: Social, Political and Literary Criticism in Contemporary Culture.” This particular class boasted three cutting-edge professors, each from a different department, battling out their various perspectives of cultural analysis for our benefit. Eating in class, with the stack of Smarties wrappers accumulating, I found reason to let the professors’ words drizzle straight through my brain, not repelled, but unabsorbed, insignificant.

  Rather than engage in academic expansion, I used the morning class to inflate my limited romantic conquests into tales of true love. Much as I practiced on Smarties for future fruit consumption, my love life was sweetened by artificial flavors. Tobias was a swimmer with a hypnotic voice. He talked as if he had overcome a stammer. When I met him for the first time, he handed me a matchbook with a poem in it. That was enough for me. I was new and eager. He called and whispered and appeared in my hallway. But I was too shy to talk. I always thought my real chance would come at an undefined later moment. Now that I had been noticed, next I would be discovered and loved. For months I convinced myself that something was going on, fabricating substance from sweet nothings, when in truth not much really happened. We never ate dinner together, not even in the dining hall. We never had a sustained conversation. I couldn’t speak or make eye contact and would yearn for him to approach me in the mailroom or as we passed each other between classes. Sometimes he noticed me and sometimes, when he must have, he didn’t.

  Finally, when spring was almost visible, I ran into Tobias late, at a keg party. Friends had brought me there, and I had no idea where we were. The keg was romantically situated on a balcony sewn in by trees. The tiny nest floated there, unattached to the rest of the night. As I realized that Tobias was standing next to the keg, rain started to fall heavily on the roof of the balcony. The surrounding leaves were instantly soaked, clumping and weeping, but Tobias and I and our keg centerpiece stayed dry in our treetop hideout. The rain was so loud that we couldn’t hear each other, and all we could do was, finally, kiss. People herded past, refilling cups and departing, but all that mattered was that I was certain that we had broken our own curse and that we were mutually celebrating its lifting.

  We ran through the rain to Tobias’s apartment. There were candles, music, and a noiseless, urgent progression from the couch to the bedroom. His eyes were so close to mine that he had to be about to love me. We were restless, finding new ways to be next to each other. I had never slept in a man’s bed, and every movement he made was like a hand shaping clay. Poor Pygmalion, he had no idea.

  Morning broke, and I watched the rise of his breath. I memorized the shape of his body and the flaws in his skin. The blue flannel sheet seemed enchanted. The walls around were lined with books and tokens, small mysteries that I was sure to unravel over time. This room would become familiar. There were distances all over the room, between me and the door, and me and the window, my arm and his arm, my feet and his shelf. I counted the places our bodies were touching. Those distances would open and close. The air between us would change shape and learn the way we moved.

  But, as happens, when Tobias awoke, the room filled with him and froze. A narrow path emerged for our departure as he walked me back to my apartment. I had us sharing pancakes; it was barely dawn and we were silent again. This was the beginning and the end, and it happened again with Tobias, and a couple others before I learned. From then on I woke in the morning with my own hard edges, but mine were reactionary, protective. An evening still changed me, but that was for me to mull over in the introspective greenhouse of my 10:30 class.

  There are things worth waiting for, my mother told me, and I saved myself for fruit.

  Swiss Petite Fruit

  Later, as fate had it, I moved to that same apartment with the little rainy balcony. My roommates and I rarely went out there, although we did use it to host a keg at one forgettable party. In fact, we rarely spent time in our apartment at all. It was a way station dominated by a long hallway. The refrigerator had scary Saran-hooded bowls from sporadic forays into cooking. Some potatoes were sprouting on the windowsill, and my roommate Kate thought they were interesting, so she refused to throw them away.

  Neal became my first real boyfriend. He wooed me over chess. Our first lesson lasted nine hours and ended chastely in my bed. On our second lesson it became clear that I wasn’t going to be a grandmaster anytime soon. Our third lesson was not so chaste. It was winter; we were in the midst of exams. I was supposed to be studying a wall of art history images. Instead I sat in the library watching it snow, and all I wanted to do was go for a walk in it with Neal. He was awkward and romantic. I was dizzy and enthralled. He had shaggy blond hair and one bad tooth. He could play the guitar behind his back, and with his teeth, and he took his academic work very seriously. Neal told me it wasn’t that I needed to absorb more facts, but that I had to learn new ways of thinking. I stopped going to midweek parties and tried to access my inner intellectual.

  Neal lived off-campus, over a candy store called Sugar Magnolia. He and his roommate, Pete, had developed an impressive domestic routine. They cooked together most nights, then retired to their rooms to study. The dishes got done right after dinner. Neal slept on a skinny monk’s bed. It was narrower than even a single bed, and we were comfortable there.

  We slept embracing each other, and the first time he turned away from me, I cried.

  “Face me,” I said, poking his shoulder.

  “You’re breathing on me,” he said.

  That spring, his work was noticeably more important to him than I was, but still I would walk down Chapel Street on my way to his apartment feeling light-hearted. I wore Salvation Army motorcycle boots that my mother couldn’t abide, jeans, and long-sleeved T-shirts. When it was chilly, I had a fringed suede jacket that I had found at a thrift store. I had never exercised and saw no reason to start. My classes ended by four, and the late afternoon sun promised a long, lazy evening. I knew enough to understand that having nothing to do but read Shakespeare or some other pre-eighteenth-century poet was a luxury that wouldn’t last forever. On my way up to Neal’s apartment I always stopped into Sugar Magnolia. I liked the nutritious-sounding Swiss petite fruit. They were ridiculously expensive at eight dollars a pound, so I would supplement the quantity with some caramels for filler. Then, up until dinner, Neal and I would study together. He would be at his desk, tilting his chair back with gangly limbs akimbo, and I would curl on his plank of a bed, eating petite fruit and reading The Mysteries of Udolpho.

  Those Sugar Magnolia days overlapped and repeated themselves. They were lazy and simple, and even if I didn’t have as much of Neal’s attention as I wanted, I was finally in a genuine relationship, and I could find comfort there. This is the most satisfying way to eat candy: with a good-size bag—it must be big enough so that you are through with the candy before the candy is through—with a page-turner (the Sunday New York Times will do as wel
l), and a boy keeping your feet warm. It is all you need on earth.

  Conversation Hearts, the Reclamation

  A person can only take so many conversation hearts. After the third full bag of the season (I prefer the larger hearts to the standard-size Necco brand), they start to taste sickeningly chalky. But they have charm. Their palette is as tied to spring as candy corn’s is to autumn. They are hopeful and convincing. When you are alone, you can use them like a Magic Eight Ball, thinking, If the next one says “true love,” I’m set for the year. I am not alone in my consumption of conversation hearts. They’ve been around (originally as Motto Hearts) since 1866. According to Necco (the New England Confectionery Company), in the Valentine’s season they manufacture more than eight billion hearts, which sell out in the space of six weeks. Once, walking in Cambridge, I stopped in the middle of the street. “Necco is nearby,” I announced, sniffing the air. Tracing the scent, my friend and I turned the corner, and there was the factory. Every year I consumed more than my share of the eight billion, but this year I wanted a change.