Candy and Me (18 page)

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

I
f 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

A
s 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.

But what if our family had approached candy together, as a fun indulgence? On a trip to Dylan’s, I witnessed children holding their own shopping baskets, filling them recklessly. Recklessly! I stared in horror. How could their parents allow them to buy literally ten pounds of candy at one time? Then I stopped myself. Who was I to talk? Maybe these kids were actually on the “Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle diet.” Maybe they would be just fine. Better, even.

When I think of being a parent, I feel confident in my ability to rear a couple people. I can envision reading
Goodnight Moon
several times a night, making up answers to scientific queries, and kissing wounds. I would probably even figure out how to cook. But when I try to think of how to manage their relationship with sweets, well, I think I’ll have to leave that to the other parent.

When all was revealed, it turned out that my mother and I had several candies in common: marshmallow eggs, Smarties, Necco Wafers. When I found out about the Necco Wafers, I knew we were dealing with a genetic inclination. I was proven right a few weeks later.

My mother and I were over at my brother’s, babysitting for my nephew and niece. My three-year-old nephew surprised us by saying, “I want a Necco Wafer.”

My mother and I looked at each other in surprise. How did he know what a Necco Wafer was? His father was a Spree junkie. Maybe in our family it was the most natural sound a toddler could form: Ma-ma. Da-da. Nec-co.

“You have Necco Wafers?” my mother asked her grandson.

“Yes,” said Asher, very serious, “they’re in the pantry. I’ll show you where they are.”

I could see his future. My brother had spent his childhood with a candy thief, losing whatever he saved to my relentless craving. His son had the same tendency. Give the kid five years, and the security of my brother’s candy would be challenged again.

My mother looked at me mischievously. I looked back at her. We both knew that we should let his parents decide if and when Asher could have candy. But it soon became clear to me that my mother had no intention of giving him a Necco Wafer; she wanted to find out where they were kept so that she could help herself after the kids had gone to sleep. She followed him into the pantry. Knowing the extent of her sugar history did make a difference. We were both crazy. But we are not alone. According to Necco, over four billion Wafers are sold each year, which averages out to 120 Wafers consumed every second of every day throughout the year. I wonder how many of them are in Denmark.

Cotton Candy

N
othing had gone wrong yet, but nothing would have. Chris and I were still trying to impress each other.

“I need to go to Centralia,” I told him. He had read about Centralia. It was a town in Pennsylvania where an underground mine fire had been burning since the ‘60s. The government had evacuated most of the town and razed almost all the houses except for those of a few die-hards.

Chris was game to plan an excursion right away. He didn’t have a car, but he would rent one. He would figure out where to go. All I had to do was show up. “You know it’s a bit of a drive. We might want to stay out there and make a weekend of it.”

“I know,” I said. He was psyched, I could tell.

Chris showed up in a large red sports-utility vehicle.

“When you said we were going to stay overnight, I didn’t realize you meant in the car,” I said as I climbed up into the passenger seat. There were maps and a couple guidebooks to Pennsylvania. He had done his research.

Centralia was a town on a grid, with a main strip and streets running in both directions. But all the buildings were gone, and the lots were so overgrown that you could barely see the streets. We turned onto a side road. The grass was up to the car windows. Ghost driveways with mailboxes at the edge led up to nothing. There were a few surviving houses, anomalous mowed lots with cars in the driveways. These owners were dying out, but some of them had taken over the lots on either side. Why not? They were squatters anyway. The town was condemned. Who would complain?

The fire had destroyed part of Route 61, and the official highway now bypassed the danger zone. We walked down the deserted part of Route 61. It was steamy and bare, with a wide, deep, mildly smoky crack in the middle, practically down the yellow line. The side of a deserted highway—a perfect spot for a picnic. We sat on the slope above the shoulder and ate sandwiches, looking down at the empty asphalt as if it were a river. Seeing the premature ruins of contemporary society was creepily post-apocalyptic.