Candy and Me (3 page)

We were at an age when believing in Santa and the tooth fairy was long over, but I was still open to spirituality. I clung to a porous hope that some magic or god might be found in daily life. Bound into this was the unconscious idea that if I could believe in some greater power, then life wouldn’t suck so hard. Salvation had a schoolgirl’s definition: I could be self-confident, popular, even a tall, skinny lacrosse player, if only I had faith. As I walked to school, I counted my paces in multiples of seven, and if I arrived at the curb on seven, a dream would come true. Cars passed, leaves fell, I climbed stairs, I counted the letters in words and wishes looking for signs that some force was listening and would heed my pledges of faith-if-only.

One morning on the way to school, Lucy and I found a Bible on the sidewalk. We figured it was a sign, and launched a full week of piety. We would slip into a basement chapel, find the Bible where we had stowed it, and flip through it, feeling Chosen. Our passion was fevered, but directionless. Would it settle on God or academia, boys or poetry (or horses)? Being religious was a possible future identity that we tried on for size before discarding it for the next. That is, as soon as the Bible disappeared from its hiding place in the crypt, we moved on.

I consumed the illicit cocoa with the same fervor with which I wanted to believe that life wasn’t accidental. As we added rituals and volume to our consumption, it seemed that my life might take shape. That is, the sugar elevated my mood and gave me purpose, and if I kept eating it in increasing quantities, then maybe I would be magically transformed into the embodiment of that sugar high. Four packs, five packs, six packs a day. There was no limit to the happiness and fulfillment I might find.

Unlike our fleeting Bible studies, cocoa held our attention for most of that year. We hid out in small chapels, downing dry gulps of the stuff. My secret longing for a sign of hope, for confidence and faith, accompanied each hastened swallow. I may not have found the social grace I craved, but at the height of the obsession cocoa provided an even greater release. When we heard footsteps approaching our hideout, we would burst into laughter, and billows of cocoa would escape out into the air. The sight of each other’s brown-laced mouths and tongues put us over the edge, and there we would be found by one clergyman or another, consoled, enlightened, rapt in ecstasy, rolling on the stone floor of the crypt in silent brown laughter.

Ice Cream

I
ce-cream consumption was a problem in our household. Whenever my mother bought a carton of ice cream, I would eat most of it right away. This wasn’t fair to the other members of the family. My mother didn’t want to increase the quantity of ice cream that I ate, but she wanted everyone to be able to have some. She decided that she would buy three half-gallon cartons at a time. One for me, one for my brother, and one for the parents. She would make this purchase once every three weeks, so I could make my half-gallon last for three weeks, or I could eat it all right away, but that was my ration.

I always got mint chip, and, never one to waste time, I ate my half-gallon in the first two days. My brother made his last, eating a scoop or two every three days. This drove me mad. One afternoon, long after my supply had dried up, I opened his carton. He hadn’t eaten any yet. I figured that if I just ate around the edge, he wouldn’t notice. I traced a light canal around the perimeter of the carton with my spoon. Rocky Road. After three or four laps around the carton I determined that my invasion was still undetectable. I sealed it back up and scurried upstairs.

The next afternoon, I returned to the scene of the crime. Again, I furrowed delicately around the edge of the carton. The ice cream still reached the top; it just had a neat moat around it that was certainly no cause for alarm. But that night my brother opened his ice cream.

“Mom, doesn’t this ice cream look weird?” She agreed that there was something wrong with it. They stood over the carton, trying to figure out what might have happened.

“Maybe it melted in the store?” Eric suggested.

“Maybe,” she said. “I’ll take it back. I don’t think you should eat it. Something is wrong with it.”

Taking it back to the store? I panicked. If they took it back to the store, I would surely be discovered and possibly arrested. When I confessed to my crime, I was cut out of the next few rounds of ice-cream purchasing.

Some months later I came up with a new approach. Again, my mint chip was long gone, leaving me to gaze longingly at my brother’s half-gallon of Oreo, which sat nearly full in the freezer. It was in a rectangular box, which opened at the small top instead of the wide side. My brother had taken a few nibbles, but the rest was intact. I spooned out a bit from the top, but knew I couldn’t go much further without detection. Then I had an idea. I opened the bottom of the box and began a rear-entry sneak attack. It was subtle at first, but as the week passed, I grew bolder until I had eaten about a third of the carton, from the bottom.

Then my poor brother, in the ordinary course of scooping his ice cream, broke through to the gaping vortex that should have been the remainder of his supply. This time there were no mysteries. My gall astounded my mother. My brother was genuinely curious.

“Did you truly believe that I wouldn’t figure it out?”

I kind of did. Actually, I had hoped that the ice cream might slide down to fill the void as he served himself, the way it creeps further into an ice-cream cone as you eat it. But that was the end of ice cream in our household. From then on, when we wanted ice cream, we went out to the parlor. One scoop each, no thievery, no plotting, no fun.

The ice cream in my adult life comes in pint-size cartons and is oozing with various forms of caramel, fudge, and peanut butter. (Whether it is labeled low-fat or frozen yogurt—I have spent whole years limiting myself to one or the other—makes no difference in my weight.) At first the pint seemed like a curse—it had to be polished off regardless of whether there was help from a lover’s spoon. But remembering the struggles I had had with the half-gallons of my youth, I became grateful for the pint. The size is right. To my delight, finishing a pint by myself is a bit too difficult. I can do it on occasion, but it takes hunger, time, and determination. Leftover ice cream always makes me proud. But the pint is also just enough to share without sparking competitive consumption. It feels like one-and-a-half servings each. The only challenge is the rush for whatever buried candy nuggets must be unearthed. This is a real test of character: What better way to display true love than to mine a luscious peanut butter cup, only to offer it to your mate? Believe me, it took me a long time to get there.

Flake

M
y father kept coffee nips in his den, but I couldn’t stand the taste of coffee. The only other time I saw him eat candy was when he was skiing. Then he would keep a gourmet chocolate bar in his jacket. On the ski lift, he would eat a single square at a time and offer us as much. He had no idea of how it tortured me. My father worked long hours and then came home to work more. My mother painted in her studio, reared us, and learned to cook elaborate dinners, which wilted on the stove while my father ran late at work. He took frequent business trips to England, or to even farther countries with stopovers at Heathrow Airport. Whenever he went through Heathrow, he brought us Cadbury Flakes. These were stubby chocolate sticks made of compressed flakes of chocolate, invented by a machine operator who watched the excess chocolate gather in ripples at the edge of a chocolate machine. I imagine him fingering those tasty leftovers, dreaming his way out of the chocolate factory. The Flake TV advertisements, which started in the late 1950s, always showed “The Flake Girl” in some exotic locale. My father fed that escapist theme, returning home with Flakes from distant lands where they were common.

My Flake would crumble into its yellow wrapper as I ate it, and when it was gone I would lick up every last crumb. We didn’t see my father much, but we loved those Flakes.

The Assortment

C
andyland was full of suitors—I had to interview many before committing to relationships. When I was twelve, I would go to W. C. Murphy’s, a vast convenience store on Wisconsin Avenue. My experimentation called for variety, so when I bought candy, I always spent a dollar and bought four different kinds. As candy’s would-be bride, I devised my own tradition of something chocolaty, something sugary, something fruity, and something new—to eat too much of one kind made my tongue go raw. I brought home combinations such as Three Musketeers (chocolaty), Lik-m-Aid Fun Dip (sugary), Starburst (fruity), and caramel creams (new). I had it down to a science.

My brother and I agreed that purples were the best. Purple SweeTarts (Giant Chewy), purple Bubble Yum, purple Volcano Rocks, purple Zotz, purple gumdrops (not to be confused with spice drops)—purple was the alpha candy of any phylum. We considered saving all the purples of all the candies into one big purple collection, but it was clear to both of us that I would just eat it in a single day regardless. Still, I loved the idea of so much purple, the best of the best. Strange as it may seem, I never associated the concept of purple candy with the fruit it was designed to imitate: grapes. I despised any and all fruit and refused to eat a bite of it.

During this affair with the assorted candy meal, three friends and I started creating candy cornucopias for each other. I was, naturally, the ringleader. We would each buy collections of candy, sort them, and bundle them in napkins for delivery the next morning to the others. The surprise of unwrapping someone else’s composition far surpassed the humdrum purchase of the same selections in the store. It also gave me reason to buy far more candy than I could have justified for myself alone. As I created the gift bundles, I would sample liberally. Then I would place the laboriously balanced napkin lumps into my backpack, where they emitted an intoxicating scent. Often I was compelled to sneak a piece or ten out of one of the designated gifts and then (rats!) I would have to eat from the others to even it out. The next morning, during our first classes of the day, we would devour the goods while our classmates looked on with envy.