Candy and Me (12 page)

A few days after telling me of Laura’s disappearance, Lucy called again. In that same house in suburban Maryland, she told me, a horrifying event had taken place. Upstairs from where our circle of sleeping bags had been, Laura, the birthday girl, who had just graduated from Harvard, was murdered while she slept in her childhood bed.

In my head the two events continue to happen, at the same time. From my perspective on the middle floor of the split-level house, I see down into the rec room, where we are seventh graders, giggling and passing around a box of assorted candy. At the same time I see up into Laura’s bedroom, the dark shape of an intruder heading in toward her. The innocent memory battles the dark, sad outcome, as if both truths can’t exist, and it feels like the darkness had to be there at the time, that we knew in some way that our innocence would be ruined. While we sampled candy stew, and listened to horrid LPs, we had a sense, not in our minds but in our souls, that life would not be simple, that tragedies of varying degrees would befall us as individuals and as a group. Parents would divorce, planes would crash, hearts would break, our health and happiness would fall away in pieces. And much as we tried, we could not bring enough sweetness into our world to prevent the worst from happening.

White Chocolate Breakup

M
y relationship with Neal, having endured my Eastern European hiatus, was petering out, but we didn’t know it yet. I took my job very seriously, and my boss, Sam, took the term “full-time” literally. When I wasn’t on the phone with Sam, who worked from exotic vacation spots around the country, I went to industry events. I was reserved at work, but I had a strange, increasing feeling that I wanted to meet people and understand what they did. I later identified this feeling as the first glimmerings of ambition.

Neal was a hard-core musician: he claimed that his skill level was such that if he did not practice for at least six hours every day, his ability would decline. He stayed home, teaching lessons, fending off the landlady’s noise complaints, and cooking himself discount chicken. We were probably too young for cohabitation. We were more like roommates. We didn’t own a vacuum cleaner. While we spoke to each other on the phone most days, I don’t remember ever coordinating grocery shopping or evening activities. After we broke up, Neal would tell me that we had had a serious cockroach problem that he successfully hid from me.

Pete was Neal’s former roommate. It wasn’t strange that I went to visit Pete and his family in Wisconsin for a week without Neal. In fact, Neal and I had never taken a vacation together. What money he did earn he spent on musical equipment and on his half of the rent. Besides, travel cut into practice time. By the time I went to Wisconsin, I had been dating Neal for so long that it seemed perfectly normal to me that we never took trips, much less went out to dinner or to the movies. I did those things with my friends instead.

Pete’s place in Door County was on a flat, clear lake. Every day we ran down to the water and Pete plunged straight into it, yelling, “I’m the fastest swimmer in the lake.” He was the only swimmer in the lake. On the second night Pete took me to the Confectionery. It was a candy Shangri-la—an enormous, octagonal store with every imaginable species of candy. I focused on white chocolate breakup: When you took a bite, the flavor wasn’t immediately apparent. It emerged slowly, sweeter than brown chocolate and not as rich. Of course, white chocolate isn’t officially chocolate, since it is made with cocoa butter, not cocoa beans. But who am I to quibble? The full, wholesome flavor went well with the clear Wisconsin air. It felt healthy and revitalizing. I also stocked up on Pixy Stix and other miscellany. But by the next day my whole stash was gone. Pete’s car was a stick shift, which I couldn’t drive. I wasn’t about to demand that we make a daily trip to the Confectionery. It didn’t seem right. But everytime we went to a bar, or out to dinner, Pete knew enough to swing by.

The night before my birthday, another friend of ours was meant to arrive. After dinner, Pete and I set up a cribbage board at the picnic table near the driveway and decided to play until her car rounded the corner. The evening was so quiet and still that we couldn’t feel the temperature of the air around us. There were no bugs out, only the faint sound of crickets. All this in combination with a well-positioned outdoor light made the picnic table feel like a stage set. I ate white chocolate, Pete drank beer, and we dealt game after game. Our friend was late. We kept on. The phone rang. She was an hour away. Finally, close to midnight, the high beams of our friend’s parents’ station wagon announced her arrival.

“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

Y
ou 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

T
here 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

N
o 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.