Candy and Me (9 page)

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

I
n 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.