Candy and Me Read online

  “This calls for a midnight swim,” Pete announced. We ran down to the lake, stripped, and jumped into the water. I grabbed an inner tube and climbed into it. As I floated there, I looked up at the sky. It was mid-August and the Perseid meteor shower was on fine display. I floated until my fingers were raisins.

  The next night, I called Neal.

  “Today is my birthday,” I told him.

  “Right,” he said. “Happy birthday.”

  Devil’s Candy

  You try to end things with candy. You tell candy it is over, that candy is too much to handle, that you love candy, but you just can’t go on like this. You want candy out of your life, for good. But candy keeps coming back. Candy knows when you are weak, tracks you down at parties, at work, in moments of boredom or celebration. Candy promises to be good, not to come on too strong, to give you some privacy. But sooner or later candy is back to its old ways, and you feel foolish, but you love candy and can’t seem to let it go.

  Fruit

  There was no fanfare when Neal and I broke up. I came home one day and he said, “I don’t think we should live together next year.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I have to be someplace in half an hour.” After four years, our relationship had run its course. As when I eat a large bag of Hugs, I had gone way past my breaking point without realizing until the bag was empty. Neal argued half-heartedly that moving out didn’t mean we had to break up, but I insisted that it did. I found a roommate in Chelsea. He moved to Brooklyn. We became people who had lunch together. I started seeing the guy I’d kissed once while we were taking “time off.” Neal slept with a woman who didn’t inspire jealousy. At a crappy diner on Union Square I said, “I just want to tell you that I’m glad we spent those years together. It was worth it. I like you and it’s good that we’re friends.”

  He said,” Man, I can’t believe you’re making me have a relationship talk.”

  While I was moving on, I figured it was about time I got around to liking fruit. Rumor had it that fruit wasn’t so bad. It was certainly the prettiest food, and it had a reputation for being sweet. The concept of “nature’s candy,” was alluring. Scientists say that we crave sweetness because our ancestors often had to deal with caloric shortages. They evolved to desire, consume, and store as many calories as were available. When I learned this, I realized just how highly evolved I was. I had gone beyond primate fruit craving to crave man-made, tastier products. One of the results of this evolution was that my brain, like everyone else’s, released endorphins when I ate a lot of sugar. Endorphins made me feel good. Ignoring the inevitable crash, sugar was nature’s happy pill. But much as I took pride in my sugar consumption, it did occur to me that the greatest sign of evolution was the ability to make intelligent decisions despite physical desires. I wanted my cravings to be under control. Maybe those endorphins were my nicotine, and maybe eating fruit would be the Patch!

  My breakup gave me a new lease on life. Besides, I had a responsibility to society. Most people tasted fruit when they were so young that it was a forgotten breakthrough. Fruit was something they’d always eaten. As a rare breed—the late-blooming adult fruit taster—I could savor each experience. I had never tasted even the most basic of fruits. I hadn’t had a grape, a pear, an orange, a cherry, an apple, a raspberry, a strawberry, watermelon, and so on. My parents had tried futilely; the closest things to fresh fruit they had gotten me to consume were orange juice, canned pears, and applesauce. Thus I had my first grape at the winery where it was grown. My first cherry was on a picnic in Tuscany. A friend gave me my first wedge of orange on a hot, hot day at a deserted quarry. I had my virgin pear at a party I threw for a friend from out of town. She picked it out at the store. One day on the beach I sampled a melon and a kiwi, cut with a plastic knife.

  The only fruit that I loved at first bite was raspberries. Otherwise, the tastes had an odd, sour familiarity. I came at them backward, having spent years tasting the candy versions. Just because I’d opened my mind and mouth to it, fruit didn’t settle right into my diet. It was still overwhelming. I couldn’t manage whole fruits at first. Small bites, delicate servings, and little by little I was a fruit-eater. The hardest hurdle was the grocery store. Being willing to eat fruit didn’t mean I understood how to buy it. When was it ready? When did it go bad? I didn’t mean to be wasteful. Yet time and time again I would purchase fruit, only to watch it with trepidation as it rotted on the counter. Why eat fruit when there, two aisles over, were bursts of refreshing fruit flavors for me, but sweeter times ten? Could reality really be so cruel?

  I gave fruit a try. I just wasn’t very good at it.

  Lemonheads

  No cavities. Susan, my dental hygienist, congratulated me on my teeth. My gums were healthy; not too much tartar; no cavities this time.

  “Why don’t I get cavities?” I asked her.

  “Why should you?”

  “You’re not going to like this, but I eat a lot of candy.”

  Susan smiled at me. “I love candy,” she said. “When I was a girl I used to hide Lemonheads between my mattress and box spring. Every morning, when my mother called me down to breakfast, I’d shove a handful in my mouth.” She opened her mouth. She had fillings from front to back.

  “So how come I don’t have fillings?” The truth was that I had three, in my back molars.

  “Your enamel is strong, or your mouth does a good job of cleaning away bacteria. Some people are just lucky,” she said.

  “I had really bad acne,” I told her. “Believe me, I get my share.”

  Fireballs

  After Neal, a few contenders and cads came and went. Then I was fixed up with Dylan. In the spirit of the tech boom, we were set up by email. He was a lawyer appealing murder convictions on the West Coast. Our correspondence, tentative at first, quickly swelled to meaningful proportions. Every day I hurried to work in eagerness to see his name in my inbox. I didn’t drink coffee. Instead, I had Dylan’s increasingly flirtatious correspondence. His favorite candy was the fireball. He wrote:

  The candy itself requires little introduction, or praise, to cast into the pantheon of great sweets. It begins with a gentle ruse: Yes, I am a candy, I taste good, don’t worry about the whole “fireball” moniker, no fire here. No matter how many you’ve had in the past, for the first thirty seconds you think, Not bad, I can handle this. Then slowly the spice kicks in, and whether you are watching a movie or driving or swimming in a cold Maine saltwater pool, there is nothing that can save you. The spice has laid itself into your gums, into your tongue, into your sinuses, and you’re a goner. But what makes the fireball a perfect candy, instead of simply a mean, nasty, artful candy, is that in the end it says, Hey, just kidding. I’m really a candy. The sweet white center emerges, and you forget all about the spice, and wonder what possibly could have been the big deal. I’ve eaten a lot of candy in my time, dear H, but in the end, you would have a hard time convincing me that there’s ever been a greater expression of candy genius than the deceptively simple, elegant fireball.

  No question. I had a crush on Dylan. How could I not? Our correspondence was a little like a fireball—growing increasingly intense, although it never got too spicy to bear. We were cautious and overly aware of the deceptive nature of email. The images we projected were selective and our readings of each other were unreliable. We stayed away from presumptions about what might exist between us and instead entertained each other with stories.

  But we couldn’t help imagining, and finally he decided a trip to New York was in order. In the week before he came to town I looked at every man who passed me on the street and imposed his looks on Dylan’s email personality. Would I like him if he looked like the doughy man on the bicycle, or the scrawny waiter at the diner? Would I like him if he were him, or him, or (heaven forbid) him? By the time the day of his visit arrived, I needed him to like me, because if he didn’t like me after all that correspondence, then it had to be my looks. We went out to dinner. We talked easily an
d with the familiarity of old friends. He was fine: on the short side with blond hair in a ponytail. But in actual daylight the cinnamon intensity of our fast and furious emails faded into a sweet, sustained after-flavor. It was not traumatic and did not feel like a loss. I didn’t know exactly why (maybe because he was a candy-sucker, not a biter), but we were meant to be friends, and only friends. It was simple, it was elegant, and it was destined to last far longer than a single fireball.

  Feeding the Habit

  Of course I wanted to lose weight. I’d wanted to lose weight for as long as I could remember. I wanted to lose weight like I want to find a twenty-dollar bill on the street. Who wouldn’t? It was an idle concept. I never did anything about it for years. Then, as my twenties passed, a sad new truth dawned on me. I would have to exercise. I would have to do it not to lose weight, but to avoid gaining weight every year while indulging my sugar habit. Going to the gym would buy me candy calories.

  My gym had a TV at every cardio machine. I guess they were merely demonstrating the sponsorship potential, because their ads didn’t promote any particular product. Instead, the ads showed something really tasty—a cupcake or a chocolate bar or a doughnut, shiny and fresh. Then the calorie count would flash on the screen. The next shot would say how many hours of hell you would have to endure in the gym to burn off all those calories, and then the taunting slogan would appear, “Doesn’t it taste good?” It played over and over: doughnut, calories, hours, “Doesn’t it taste good?” I chugged forward like a hamster on the elliptical crosstrainer, wondering if the ad was my mantra or my curse.

  Going to the gym and eating candy. It’s all about math. You eat. You burn. You eat. You burn. If you’re lucky, you sculpt attractive muscles, and these muscles require extra blood or something, so you burn bonus calories when you’re not even trying. I didn’t want to count calories—math was never my strongest subject—so I figured I’d just go to the gym like everyone else and log some negative calories.

  Needless to say, I was in denial about a critical component of the equation. Even if I was going to the gym like lots of other working girls, I wasn’t quite eating like them. In 1998 candy consumption in the U.S. was at a per capita average of 25.20 pounds, but I don’t think those people at the gym were doing their share of the consumption. They were doing a lot of salad munching, I could tell. As for me, I was more than making up for their below-average performance. I figure that my candy serving size is about a quarter pound. It would take me only 100 servings to get to 25 pounds a year, which would mean I was eating candy only every third day. Three-quarters of a pound per week, now that’s more like it. Let’s see, that’s…39 pounds per year. Certainly this is on the high end. However, Denmark, a clean, well-respected country with lots of castles and other attractions, consumes a per capita average of 36.85 pounds per year.*I’m normal in Denmark! I need to live there! With my people!

  I keep going to the gym, dreaming of Denmark. I never lose a single pound, but working out makes candy consumption feel less like a downhill slide to obesity. Instead, I climb stairs, climb endlessly upward toward that doughnut, inspired and hopeful.

  * Source for statistics on previous page: candyusa.org, citing CAOBISCO IOCCC Statistical Bulletin , Brussels, summer 1999. U.S.A. figures are based on the Commerce Dept. MA20D figures.

  Bull’s-Eyes

  When I started talking to Lydia about candy over lunch one day she looked bewildered. It didn’t seem like she had ever given it much thought. Did it really deserve our attention? Then she got a distant look on her face.

  “You know,” she said, “I used to love bull’s-eyes.” Bull’s-eyes, aka caramel creams, are caramels with white cream in the middle. For some reason the cream is always cool, like the mint of a Peppermint Pattie.

  Caramel creams were invented in the early 1900s by R. Melvin Goetze, Sr., the son of the guy who founded The Baltimore Chewing Gum Company. Now that’s my kind of family!

  I looked at Lydia. Always stylish, she was wearing camel suede pants and a crisp white shirt. Her skin had a honey glow, and her hair was a nearly platinum blond.

  And they say that people look like their dogs.

  Old-Fashioned Marshmallow Eggs

  The old-fashioned marshmallow egg is rare. But rare as it is, rarer still is the old-fashioned marshmallow egg lover. The only other fan I have ever met is my mother.

  Perhaps you will recall: at Easter there used to emerge a particular variety of marshmallow egg. It was a bit shorter than my thumb. There was a candy coating that was more opaque than the outside of a jellybean, and inside was the marshmallow filling—a dense white sugary nougat, not as sticky as Peeps, with no gummy pull to it, but closer to that than anything else. These eggs often came individually wrapped within a larger plastic bag for egg hunt purposes. They were incredibly sweet, and entirely addictive. The outside shell of each egg gave it a distinctive flavor. Purples, whites, and pinks were the best. Green, which in candy’s attempt to replicate lime often tastes like cleanser, again did so here. Far superior to Peeps, which have had a surprising surge of popularity, these eggs are now made by Sweet’s Quality Candies of Salt Lake City. They admit to having few accounts in the East. Perhaps it’s for the best. How different my life would be if they were readily available.

  Luke became my boyfriend reluctantly. We had been friends for years. Then one day, on my incorrigibly romantic rooftop, we got involved. Not long into our unofficial relationship, I opened an email from him innocently, suspecting nothing. He had seen this movie; he had gone to a park; he had talked to his best friend in Seattle. Oh yes, and on Monday he had gone out with Catherine. They had fooled around. In fact, Luke called to my attention, he seemed to recall being with Catherine last week as well. My stomach rolled over and I thought there was some kind of white heat in or outside of my head. I was at work in an office outside the city. I went to the bathroom and refilled my glass of water, then wrote back to Luke in a flash, not angry, not accusatory, but certain.

  “What you did doesn’t break the boundaries of our relationship, but I feel sick and we’ll have to stop our dalliance now,” I told him. Send Mail.

  He wrote back quickly, sounding worried that I was upset but determined to stay friends.

  “We’ll be okay,” I wrote back curtly.

  The next night we met in a bar. We had known each other for a long time. When I found him, his freckles and round eyes were so familiar that I felt perfectly friendly toward him. He was wearing the orange sweater that I’d given him. I could easily imagine that nothing disturbing had happened.

  “I know I was clear with you about what’s going on with me…. I’m not ready for another serious relationship,” he told me.

  “Yes, I know,” I admitted. “You’re an ethical slut.”

  “But we’ve been spending a fair amount of time together, and I like it. Most of all I don’t want to lose you as a friend. I would rather keep our friendship than risk it by being in a relationship.”

  “Right,” I said, “but it’s too late for that.”

  “I don’t really feel that way,” he said, “but I realized that I like being with you and your friends as more than your friend.”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s not like we have to decide anything right now.”

  Luke agreed. Another fifteen minutes passed; then he said, “So I think this is going well, don’t you?”

  “I’m still miserable,” I said. He wanted to know why. “Because you haven’t made up your mind. We are so easy together. I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want to keep being this happy.”

  Luke took a sip of beer and began to speak. Did he say he couldn’t bear to lose me? No. Did he say that he was in love with me? No. But he did say, “I have made up my mind. I want to try being in a relationship with you.”

  I did a double-take. “Um, don’t you want to take some time to think about that?”

  “No,” he said. “No, I’ve thought about it.”

  “You just want t
o get laid tonight,” I said.

  “It would be nice.”

  It wasn’t the healthiest launch, but I was used to finding flavor and satisfaction in less-than-nutritious morsels. A few months passed, and we found ourselves on steadier ground. My father was getting married, and Luke was my date. For the Sunday after the wedding, I invited my grandparents and some other relatives to tea at my apartment. While I was at the wedding brunch, Luke prepared my apartment for the tea. He sliced fruit and made a platter. He set the table and arranged the flowers. The stereo was cued up to appropriate music. And under the pillow in the bedroom was a bag of old-fashioned marshmallow eggs for me. He had done all the prep work and then slipped out the door. No sooner had the last relative exited than I called Luke to thank him.

  “Did you find the surprise?” He meant the eggs.

  “I did! I’m eating them as we speak. Where did you buy them?”

  “In your local grocery, if you can believe it.”

  “And you bought them for me, even though you called them vile?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I want to make you happy.”

  Luke was generous like that. He did me favors. He helped out. And he was like the gifts he gave—hidden treats that I always loved to find, but which added up to about six thousand empty calories. The more he made me search for him, the more I wanted us to stay home, watching TV and cooking dinner together. If I just had him alone, maybe the hunt would end.