Candy and Me Read online

  “I don’t even want to date him,” I sobbed to a doctor friend. “What is wrong with me?” He recommended Xanax.

  Barely holding myself together, I couldn’t eat candy, or ice cream, or any other major food group for that matter. Much as I was willing to eat however much sugar it would take to break this darkness, the idea of sweets had no appeal. My candy battery was dead. This had never happened before. It had always been self-recharging. And now, in the middle of the storm, there was no candy-light to guide me. More than once I stood in front of the drugstore candy counter contemplating a jump-start. Not even a tiny spark of desire. That’s when I knew I was in a seriously bad way. Every morning I bought a Power Bar and took pains to nibble on it, without hunger, as the day passed. “You are disappearing,” Shauna would say with a girly mix of concern and flattery. We both knew it wouldn’t last, and that I should probably appreciate it while I could. I went to the gym and pretended I was in Rocky , or an Ashley Judd movie, where I was building up my strength to take on the adversary. In this case my adversary just happened to take the seemingly harmless form of the back of Luke’s head, and the fight was seeing it every day.

  I wasn’t myself, but I knew it was temporary. After some period of time, my employee told me that she had found another job. I congratulated her and hoped it was an excellent opportunity. On her last day, a colleague came up to us to bid her farewell. He asked her how she felt about saying goodbye.

  “It’s bittersweet,” she said.

  “Well then, I’ll take sweet!” he said jovially.

  “I guess that leaves me with bitter,” I said. She and I made eye contact, and we laughed together.

  Whenever I eat candy I have some level of guilt. I know from reports that sugar is unhealthy. I could still stand to lose a few pounds. But on the Luke diet I dropped a couple pounds a week without even trying. After six weeks, when I looked in the mirror I couldn’t find any weight to lose. In two months I went down three sizes. Shauna took me shopping. I bought size-two leather pants. For the first time, I knew that I could eat whatever I wanted, and I would still fit into those pants. But I couldn’t even manage to go food shopping. I had no appetite, and I had no joy. Except those buttery leather pants. They fit me for that one terrible winter.

  A Heart-Shaped Box of Chocolates

  I am baking cookies on Valentine’s Day. The buzzer buzzes.

  Doorman: There’s a delivery for you coming up.

  Me: Really?

  Doorman: It’s chocolates.

  Me: Really??!!

  Doorman: Oh, um, is this Hilary? I’m sorry. I have the wrong apartment.

  Part Three

  Just Desserts

  Taffy

  I was committed to my job and had no desire to divorce it for emotional hardship. But then, like an angel, the head of a fascinating new company approached me to do business development and asked me to name my price. When he met it, I put myself in the hands of fate and accepted the position. Getting away from Luke was not the reason, but it was certainly a perk. My spirits lifted immediately, and my appetite returned with them. To celebrate, Shauna and I went on a pilgrimage to Economy Candy, an old-school cheap candy store on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. We had heard that it was the penny candy store that we were too young to have experienced.

  “Meet me outside,” Shauna said. “I want to go in together.”

  Beyond the threshold was a pleasantly disordered store with enormous bins of hard candies at low, low prices. Unlike the uniform bins of today’s airport candy stores, the merchandise here was piled and stacked in a few converging systems that ran from floor to ceiling. It was hand-priced, and novelty candies huddled brightly next to gourmet selections.

  I wasn’t terribly selective when it came to candy stores. I liked seeing what a drugstore chose to carry. I was fond of the shops where you could fill a bag with assorted candies by the pound. A corner deli suited me fine. And then there was the fancy candy store on the Upper East Side called Dylan’s. Shauna and I had been there. It was the F.A.O. Schwartz of candy stores. A soundtrack of candy theme songs played on a loop. The scent was an intoxicating olio of candies rare and common, old and cutting edge. A rainbow of colors made the two floors confusing and fantastic—like being lost in the center of a spiral swirled lollipop. The stairs were translucent, inlaid with gummy art. There was a larger-than-me Pez dispenser. They had marshmallow eggs at Easter, Flakes, and any color of M&M’s that might ever exist. There was fresh fudge, imported candies, and even candy gift baskets. Some of it was pricey, but I loved Dylan’s, and once it existed it was hard to believe that it hadn’t been there forever.

  Economy, on the other hand, had actually been there forever, or at least since 1937. It was the faded denim version of Dylan’s ready-to-wear. The corners were musty, and even the bright candy wrappings seemed tempered by sunlight or wisdom. Surrounded by the relics of the Jewish Lower East Side, buying candy there was like traveling back in time. We circled excitedly, murmuring with respect.

  I didn’t want to buy just to buy. I wanted to find something new or something that I couldn’t get elsewhere. Finally, when the guy behind the counter informed us not unkindly that they would close promptly at six, I made my selection. Swiss petite fruit (I confess to some gratitude that a half pound was the minimum quantity allowed), and a strange-looking “Old-Fashioned Taffy” that was appealing because it was large and very flat, like a business envelope. Shauna went for an assorted mix, just because she couldn’t believe how very economical Economy Candy was.

  Out on the street, we walked north. I still felt tender—it was as if my wound had been bandaged, but I was fragile and needed to be handled with care. When the wound healed, the new skin would be like a baby’s, soft and new, but sensitive. Shauna had convinced me to come back out into the world. Economy Candy was just the beginning. I peeled the waxy paper off the taffy and tore off a piece. Shauna was curious. “What is it like?” she asked. I paused while I savored the plastic texture.

  “If everything in the world were made of candy, this is what your desk would taste like.” Then we both started imagining the rest of that world—the chairs, clocks, towels, light bulbs—and we chewed in silent reverie for several blocks.

  Bottle Caps Regained

  Chris and I had been on three partial dates, three evenings that began with us socializing as part of a group and ended with us on my couch, using my restrictions on clothing removal to set the pace of our groping. Chris was already bitter about the couch. It was a smart bachelorette’s love seat. Green velvet, alluring, but short enough to prevent eager boys from moving too fast. Tonight, he had insisted, he wanted to take me on a “date date.” He also wanted to end the evening at his pad. I was curious to see it. A man’s apartment is Cliffs Notes to his life.

  He was early. Not on time. Early.

  “Couldn’t you have walked around the block once or twice?” I asked as I opened the door. He had no head, only flowers. “Chris? Are you back there?”

  “These are for you,” he said. I was already putting them in water. His hair was dark and curly, and he was wearing a severely out-of-style shirt. A man would have to work hard to make me notice a fashion mistake. It wasn’t part of my Date Evaluation Procedure, but what can you do when a man is standing in front of you wearing a button-down shirt with no collar? And yet, it was immediately apparent to me that this relic of the ‘80s was his favorite shirt. It had an ink stain on the pocket, but he had chosen it in hope that it was still wearable. Because it was his very favorite. I smiled at him.

  It was, indeed, a date date. There was a fancy dinner with a bottle of wine. Then there was a rooftop party across the river in Williamsburg. Chris excused himself to talk to a friend, if I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind. I spoke with a fellow who told me all sorts of interesting facts about acoustic warfare until Chris returned. He joined our conversation, then eventually steered me to the side of the roof. We looked out at Manhattan. It was a windy spring night. He
offered me his jacket. He was well trained and his effort was A-plus. Noted.

  “I know I have no right to say this,” he said, “but I’m actually surprised at how jealous I was when I saw you talking to that guy.”

  “Really?” I said. “How jealous were you?”

  “I felt sick to my stomach,” he said. “I can’t remember ever feeling like that.”

  “Are you a creepy stalker type?”

  “Not that I know of,” he said, “but you might want to be careful.”

  His apartment was clean, generic, and functional. The matching wooden furniture appeared to have been purchased in one fell swoop. Some things, like the burgundy and forest green plaid couch, may have been selected by his mother as “masculine.” In fact, forest green was getting more than its fair color share. No art. No girlfriend or girl friends exerting influence. He is a man of simple tastes. He works hard. He reads, but doesn’t have time to bounce against his own walls. I saw my business card on the entrance table. My little mark, staking its territory.

  “I have champagne to celebrate our date date,” he said.

  I shook my head. It was too late for champagne.

  “And I have a little dessert. Don’t ask me why it’s in the freezer.” He pulled out a pack of Bottle Caps.

  “Why is it in the freezer?” I asked.

  “I thought it would be a good hiding place?” Chris wasn’t the first boy to give me Bottle Caps. Even Luke had gone that route. A fellow didn’t need to be a rocket scientist. Nor did the candy have a magical effect on me. I wasn’t Edmund, seduced by the White Witch’s Turkish delight on my first trip to Narnia. I was cautious, but open. What mattered most to me was the spirit in which the gift was given. Chris watched and smiled as I dug in. His eagerness was sweeter than candy. I was impressed.

  “Where did you find Bottle Caps?”

  “I have my sources,” he said.

  Twizzlers

  My friend Shauna was in a grocery store with a guy. “If you could only eat one kind of food for the rest of your life, what kind of food would it be?” she asked him.

  “Easy. Twizzlers,” he responded without pausing to think.

  “I think that’s when I started liking him,” Shauna told me. “You understand.”

  Yes, I understood. Twizzlers have the same twist as a barber’s pole, and likewise seem as if they could go on spiraling forever. What better candy to stock one’s office candy jar? The jar people—that strange breed of workers who are able to keep jars of candy in their offices at all times without going to town on them—the jar people know that the best jars are always full, magically refilling fairy tale candy jars. And the substantive Twizzler, with its endless twizzle, is the candy of choice.

  Steve was our jar person, no holds barred. His office was stocked with a jellybean machine (with a tin of pennies provided by Steve), a bowl of Hershey’s Kisses, and a five-pound canister of Twizzlers. Steve had an instinctive understanding of the need for candy balance. His candy had none of the customary, though unspoken, restrictions on time, frequency, or quantity. I didn’t have to have a meeting with him to go into his office. I could go as many times as I wanted every day. I could take huge handfuls. Steve’s response to any admission of greed or binging was always, “That’s what it’s there for!” And no matter how much I ate, the candy was never depleted.

  If anyone could have dented Steve’s supply, it would have been me. Some days I would get on a Kisses run. I only took four at a time, but I discovered a new way of eating them. Sucking chocolate is usually satisfying, and makes sense because, unlike with hard candies, the flavor emerges at a steady rate. What I discovered was that chewing Hershey’s Kisses offers a whole new sensation. There was basically only one major chew per Kiss, which broke the candy’s integrity immediately. The Kiss, with greater surface area now, dissolved more quickly, so my mouth was instantly full of liquid chocolate. A great new sensation, but the speed of execution triggered a few complications.

  First, I started eating them fast, like popcorn. Then sometimes, just after the bite, the phone would ring. I would take the call, and only then would I realize that I had missed out on the whole Kiss experience. That’s when I would have to go back to Steve’s office. “Serving” became a misnomer for my four Kisses. It was more like there were four “reps” to a “set.”

  But Steve offered more than Kisses. I had hardly ignored Twizzlers previous to Steve’s office, but he really gave them a chance to shine. Once relegated to dark movie theaters, I knew and loved Twizzlers for their unique waxiness. It took a relatively long time for me to finish a Twizzler, which slightly increased their chances of lasting through the previews. Junior Mints were hard to resist. They had more flavor and melted with gentle charm. But Twizzlers had the staying power that is critical for movie candy.

  Now the red ropes emerged to bathe in the fluorescent lighting above my New Media cubicle. Because Steve’s office was open to the entire staff of our small company, Twizzler consumption was heartily public. It was not unusual for me to bring a three-vine dose for sustenance at a meeting, and my preparation frequently inspired the other attendees to similarly fortify themselves.

  What amazed me most was how much fortification a five-pound canister of Twizzlers truly provided. I, and my simpatico co-workers, indulged on a daily basis, but Steve’s well never ran dry. The stability was compelling. I finally had a job where I was happy; I had met a nice fellow; I wanted my new life to string on and on with sustained flavor-release. But in candy format, long-term commitment had its drawbacks. The Twizzlers were a constant presence, and I was used to eating whatever candy was available until it was all gone. Like a baby bird, I was quite willing to go until I exploded. Sometimes I begged Steve to save me from myself.

  “Please,” I would tell him, “take me out of my misery.” But he would just laugh, shrug as if it were out of his control, and say, “That’s what it’s there for!”

  Icing Off the Cake

  If my parents had been like Steve, so relaxed and giving about candy instead of concerned about the effects of my sugar intake on my health, would candy have been a childhood passion that faded into disinterest?

  My father recently said, “You remember the sugar and butter experiment, don’t you?”

  I didn’t remember.

  “Well, you must have been about nine. Somehow your mother got it into her head that perhaps you were obsessed with sugar because it was forbidden. So we decided to give you as much as you wanted. You don’t remember this?” It was Father’s Day. We were eating our prix fixe desserts.

  “No, not at all.”

  “Well, we gave you a cup of sugar and a stick of butter—”

  “Was it confectioner’s or granulated sugar?” I asked.

  “Granulated, I think,” he said. “We put the sugar and the butter on the table and told you to have at it. You sat there, mixed them together, and ate the whole thing. Then you got up from the table, said, ‘Thanks, guys,’ and walked away.”

  “That’s a beautiful story, Dad,” I said.

  My parents were trying the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle approach. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is a character in kids’ books whose cures for tattletales, bad table manners, interrupters, et cetera, often involve giving the offender a taste of his own medicine. But Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle would have taken it a whole lot farther than a cup of sugar and butter. She would have given me all the candy I wanted, and more. Much more. For weeks until I had had enough and was demanding a salad. Who knows how the experiment might have paid off had my parents seen it through.

  Before I hit adolescence, my parents only gave sporadic attention to my sweet tooth. Sometimes they thought that making a big deal about it would only make it worse. Sometimes they thought that if they could convince me to try fruits and vegetables, I might not need the candy. And much of the time, it was more worrisome that I wasn’t at the top of my class, that I didn’t seem to be popular, and that I spent most of my time reading in bed. So they sort of let
me get away with it, and it wasn’t until later that I found out about the candy gene.

  Necco Wafers

  As an adult, I asked my mother what she thought about my sugar habit. She said, “You came by it honestly.” It was only then that she revealed, for the first time, that she had spent my youth hiding her own predilection for candy from my brother and me.

  “Did you eat sugar out of the box?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you eat spoonfuls of cocoa powder?” That too. She revealed that even now, as a middle-aged woman, she would go into a candy store and stare at marshmallow eggs, arguing with herself about buying them.

  “I love Smarties,” she confessed, “but I never buy more than a few packs.” My whole youth was littered with the wrappers of candy I had eaten in secret, feeling alien and disobedient and that if I were normal I would be eating fruit. And here was my mother describing a familiar dynamic.

  “Mom, did you ever consider that maybe if you’d come out of the closet, I wouldn’t have been so crazy about candy?”

  “You wish.”

  Again I contemplated whether, if it had been handled differently, my passion for candy would behave itself. Was it all a forbidden fruit syndrome? Prevention magazine touts a book called The Ice Cream Diet , by Holly McCord. Describing the benefits of the diet, one expert says, “When we tell ourselves we can’t have something, we immediately focus our attention on what’s forbidden, which increases our desire and chances of losing control.” There was no question that my attention was focused on sweets. On the other hand, I indulged my desire so regularly that I couldn’t exactly call it forbidden.