Candy and Me (11 page)

Lipo

N
eal and I didn’t arrange to be together when college ended. We didn’t break up or make any decisions, we just made our separate plans. I moved to Prague to teach English. I sat in a bar with a friend named Ben in early fall. He looked at my expat cheer and said, “Brace yourself for winter.” Ben was right. It was a grim winter. I lived out in the suburbs, in an area of Socialist housing where one tall cement building after another stretched as far as the eye could see. The walk home from the subway was bleak. Most of it formed a wind tunnel that left me breathless as I struggled to pull open the door to Dum Ucitelu (my building was called Teachers’ House). As it happened, I didn’t like teaching English. At night I struggled over the next day’s lesson plans, nauseated by the thought of standing in front of teenage kids, pretending to know what I was doing. I took a hippie approach, bringing in silly songs like “Free to Be You and Me” and sending the kids out into the center of town to collect data from English-speaking tourists. Even so, the responsibility of teaching tortured me.

In a candy store in the old town square I discovered Lipo. The name, contrary to logical inference, had nothing to do with the treatment that eating it made necessary for your thighs. It actually stood for LIberecké POzivatiny, which pretty much means “food/confectionery from the town of Liberec.” Lipo looked like engorged Smarties, rounder and a bit softer, essentially yet another mutation of sugar pellets. What initially attracted me to Lipo was the packaging. On the front of the little plastic bag was a drawing of an orange dog. It was a rear view, and the dog was looking coyly over his shoulder, back at the candy-eater. The dog’s tail was raised high, and, unbelievably, there was a dot immediately beneath it—the dog’s slightly exaggerated anus. The evident implication was that the candy was dog shit. I loved to think of the worker who was given the task of designing the packaging for Lipo and ascribed this fate to the innocent candy. It was a simple and elegant demonstration of socialism at work. In admiration, I bought at least five packs of Lipo every day.

I had to buy five. When I moved to Prague, it was not my goal to learn the language. Czech was not only difficult; it was exclusively spoken in a single, small republic. I saw no need to learn any more than was necessary to get by. I learned the basics, however, like how to ask for Lipo in stores. I wanted four packs. But the Czech word for four was
ctyri.
And it was even harder to say than it was to spell. Five was
pet.
So five packs it was.

I was often sick in Prague. Maybe it was the candy. I was old enough to have outgrown the thoughtless binge candy eating of my youth. Now, when I binged, I thought about it. I also tried to exhibit more control. It was embarrassing to eat the way I had. As my candy consumption fluctuated, my relationship with candy became more conflicted. I loved it—at least for the first few bites—but then I couldn’t stop. It was bad for me, but I wasn’t overweight, just unhappy with my body in the same old way that all of my friends seemed to be. Sometimes when I ate candy it was delightful; sometimes it was just depressing.

Candy could be a downer, but that wasn’t my only problem. I could not bring myself to stomach teaching. Almost every day I lacked energy, enthusiasm, or even the ability to fake either one. It wasn’t that I was homesick; I had no idea what was wrong. I went out to a bar with some of my older students, and one of them looked up a word in her Czech-English dictionary. “You’re ‘self-conscious,’” she announced. I felt ashamed and lost. I wanted to quit, but I had never changed my course before. School, summer jobs, college—I had always done what was expected of me. But those months of ingesting the subversive Lipo fueled me with a will to control my own destiny. Finally, near the end of the second term, I lied to my school and told them that a relative was ill and that I had to return home. Maybe they believed me, maybe they didn’t. I felt terrible doing it, but I wasn’t myself. Maybe I missed Neal. Maybe I had taken the wrong job. Maybe I was just enduring post-collegiate strife.

I didn’t realize how unhappy I had been until I came home to New York City. Then I remembered what it felt like to wake up, stretch, and look forward to the day ahead. Neal and I, through letters, had decided to move in together. The return to my mother’s apartment to job-hunt and find an apartment with Neal was more of a relief than I could have imagined. I knew then that it was worth the lie to the school where I had taught. There was a lightness in daily life that I had forgotten entirely.

Frosting

N
ot long after returning from Prague, I was at a wedding where the cake had the very best variety of frosting. A luxurious white fondant, creamy and sweet, with the faintest shell on the outside. The woman next to me ate her cake right up to the edge of her frosting but left it all there, intact. I stared at it for a while. I tried to let it go. Finally I couldn’t help myself. “Can I have your frosting?” I asked like a three-year-old.

“Sure,” she said. “You like that? It’s too sweet for me. I like savory.”

Savory. Ah, yes. I’ve heard this one before. Choose your team: sweet or savory. And if it’s savory, we’re wasting our time. If you’re savory you’ll never understand. Please exit through the door on your left.

Now, ice cream is universal. It has a solid reputation as a decadent dessert. It’s sweet and fattening, but popular. Candy consumption may be a bit more covert, but it’s out there, in every store and movie theater. Happens all the time. Perhaps my candy consumption is extreme, but it transpires in a relatively socially acceptable manner. I am not visibly aberrant. But frosting is a different matter.

The desirability of frosting may be the ideal litmus test for the true sugar addict. What I want to consume is very different from what I actually eat. Believe me, if I did not exert enormous self-restraint on a daily basis, things would go differently in the baking aisle of the grocery store. Oh, the store-bought frosting that I would buy. Oh, how I would eat it at every opportunity. I can see myself now, lifting delicate spoonfuls out of those round plastic tubs. Vanilla. Lemon. Cream cheese.

How will I ever know what a life of uninhibited consumption would be like? What if, instead of exercising willpower every single time I enter a grocery store, I just went for it? I never do. Instead, I fill my cart with vegetables that may or may not get consumed, cereal, yogurt, cheese, and often a single indulgence (such as the aforementioned ice cream).

Frosting represents all the temptation I’ve left to languish on the shelf, day after day, week after week, year after year. If only my body knew about everything I didn’t eat. If only I could get credit for it. Where is the reward for all that frosting, inevitably wasted on cakes instead of properly enjoyed from spoon to mouth? What do I get for resisting the bags of butterscotch or white chocolate chips? The brownie mix, the tubes of decorative icing? And in other aisles, the miles of never-purchased cookies, the enormous Cadbury bars, and the lifetime supplies of caramel topping? I want all of it, always. I never buy any of it. And what’s my reward? Alas. Nothing.

Willpower is not black and white. I exercise willpower on every trip to the grocery store, but no checkout person watching my selections bump down the conveyor belt would believe it. What I hope for, one day, is to be free of the need for willpower. I didn’t need willpower to avoid heroin. I had no natural desire for it. I didn’t need willpower to avoid meat. I ate it when I wanted, in whatever quantity I desired. Willpower is a denial of desire. It can be partial (“I’m not having dessert today”) or absolute (“I’m not having dessert ever”), but it is always self-denial. I don’t want to curb desire. I want either to indulge it or to eradicate it.

I wish I’d indulged the frosting fantasy as a girl. Rather, I’ve only purchased pre-made frosting twice, ever. A remarkable show of control, but it would be wrong to go to my grave like this. On the other hand, I would like to live to a ripe old age, which probably means that this foolish self-torture must go on. There is only one clear solution. I’m going to establish an assisted-living residence called Home Sweet Home, where we’ll ice our frosting and top our toppings. Children will look longingly through the windows as we play Jelly Belly bingo. We’ll provide custom candy bouquets to our residents. We hope you’ll join us for the nightly ice-cream social. And the onsite dentist will provide daily plaque removal. We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams. Willy Wonka, eat your heart out.

The Assortment, Revisited

N
eal and I set up a bite-size apartment in Manhattan’s Murray Hill. It was a miracle that the bed fit in the bedroom. He taught guitar, and I found a job as an entry-level assistant. We earned just enough to pay rent. We had been there for almost a year when Lucy called me. We hadn’t talked often since high school, but she was phoning to tell me that one of her closest friends, a woman who had gone to school with us, was missing. It was Laura, at whose basement birthday party I had first become self-conscious about my unwavering focus on candy.

The candy tones of that night are forever singed in my memory. I was an insecure seventh grader. My teeth were crooked, but not yet mature enough for braces. My hair was better than it would ever be, enjoying a final year of being long and wavy before it went to frizz, but I didn’t know that. What I knew was bad enough: I had a squawky voice and bug eyes. I was not tall, blond, or properly attired. Knickers were riding an appropriately brief wave of popularity, but my mother had refused to buy me a pair. After opening presents that night, we went to a knickers-dominated dance where I didn’t dance, only stood stiffly in the corner holding one wrist with the other hand so as to have something to do with my hands. There were rumors that the seventh-grade boys had beer in the courtyard; only the girls who apparently had something to say to boys went out to investigate. I lay low, harboring no hopes of actually having fun. I preferred to set achievable goals: my aim was to be
perceived
as a person who was having fun. Our birthday party crowd stuck together until it was time to head back to Laura’s basement in Bethesda. There we sucked in helium and sang in high voices. We stayed up late, trading bracelets and loyalties. Balancing with invisible desperation on whatever footholds I thought I had achieved, I was afraid that the winds of friendship would shift at any moment and I would plummet, rejected and alone. But through the insecurity I also almost believed that it would all pass, that I would blossom into a beautiful, smart, popular girl, that we all would, and that this night would be buried among many fun, miserable pre-teen parties.