Candy and Me (20 page)

12.
Redundant candy bars: Oh Henry and Pay Day. There must be loyal followers, but if I’m going to have nuts in my candy, which is a big if, I’m going to get a Snickers.

Starburst

C
hris was a geek. The primary symptom was his predilection for elaborate 24-hour road races that were occasionally held around the country. In these informally organized rallies, vans full of technology-laden nerds solved complex puzzles to get from one clue to the next. The biggest of all these games was a charity event to be held in Seattle, and Chris wanted me to join him.

There were six of us in a van. We found one of the first clues in a fake newscast being broadcast on the TV screen of an electronics store. Another clue gave us tickets to the Mariners game, and another required us to buy a dozen eggs and figure out why they had been injected with different colors of dye. It went on like this. Chris was very good at solving clues. I was, well, a beginner. Hours into the game, we had to find homonyms in the menu of a restaurant, swim out to a dinghy in the middle of a lake, and go into a house party to retrieve a clue from kids who were staging a knife fight.

At three in the morning, just as we were starting to fade, a clue brought us to a large building near the airport. We were led to a simulation flight chamber, suspended in the middle of an enormous room. Under the instruction of a pilot we had to take off, fly around the Space Needle, and land. Needless to say, this was a complete surprise at three in the morning. We couldn’t believe it. We were beside ourselves with amazement. As we ran out of the building, having completed the task, we were given a pizza and a bag of candy and chocolate bars for a post-midnight snack.

Back in the van, after wolfing down two slices, I started looking for the candy, which had somehow immediately disappeared among the reference books, walkie-talkies, and paper that littered the van. Everyone else was onto the next clue, but I secretly kept looking for the dessert. I knew I was looking longer than I should have. All my puzzle-solving skills were gone. I kept my eyes open, but that was the best level of participation I could summon.

At dawn one of the puzzles led us to the Space Needle itself. It was five in the morning, but a man was waiting there to take us up in the elevator. At the top he opened a door, and we climbed a workman’s ladder up a narrow chute onto the roof of the observation tower. It was windy, and the sun was rising. There was one more ladder, up to the Needle itself. I climbed to the top. I was the tallest person in Seattle at that moment, but I wasn’t looking at the view. There, high in Seattle, was a pile of cassette tapes—our next clue.

We returned to the van again. Everyone was listening to the cassette, which they thought had a garbled rendition of the
Barney Miller
theme song. It was then that I finally located the candy under the third row of seats and said in a very modulated tone, so as not to disturb my teammates, “Hey, does anybody want some of this?” There was no response. It was morning and we hadn’t slept at all. This was the fuel I had been craving. I ate two packs of Starburst in quick succession and a Milky Way for dessert. I was back! With new superhuman powers I turned to my teammates and suggested that they stop playing the tape and break it open. They looked at me with curiosity.

“I’m telling you!” I said, pointing out that the case said, “Books on Tape, Volume 0.”

“Volume 0. That means we don’t need to listen to the tape,” I told them. Chris was already pulling out a screwdriver. Seconds later we were stretching out the coils of tape, squinting to read the tiny print that we found there.

At the department store Nordstrom’s for the next clue, our team dashed out of the van, leaving me and Chris, who was driving, alone for the first time in hours. I was sticky and tired. I got out to go help, but Chris pulled me back.

“Next week,” he said, “can I see you every night?”

“Yes,” I said, and ran out to find the Nordstrom clue.

The Truth about Circus Peanuts

S
hauna went home to Hudson, Ohio, for the town’s annual ice-cream social. When she came back, we went to a movie. She brought me back a bag of Circus Peanuts. Our friendship had been founded on the first Circus Peanuts that I gave her, and now they were a token of that friendship. We read the wrapper:

Ingredients: Sugar, Corn Syrup, Gelatin, Glycerin, Modified Soy Protein, Sodium Hexametaphosphate, Pectin, Artificial Color (FD&C Yellow #6), Artificial Flavor.

I had never read the ingredients before. Then I noticed, in tiny print at the bottom of the label:

May contain traces of peanuts/nuts.

Who knew that Circus Peanuts had any relation whatsoever to nuts?

Peanut Butter Cups

I
t was a summer Saturday and Chris and I were slow getting out of bed. We had no plans; all we wanted was to wake up together without any notion of how the day would be spent. We craved uninterrupted expanses of each other’s company, like any annoyingly self-indulgent couple. I had couples guilt. I had spent so much time as a single girl that I couldn’t stand becoming part of a couple who spent all their time in their own little self-congratulatory universe, watching romantic comedies and playing footsy in last year’s restaurants. So I made plans for us. We went to parties with our single friends. We socialized in groups. We were always booked, out late, exhausted. Hence the craving for empty space.

After breakfast, the Sunday
Times
seemed like entertainment enough for the whole day, but we gathered it, a Scrabble board, and a blanket and headed out to the park. At a deli near our destination we stopped for water. Like any good deli, this one had penny candies up by the counter. But it is only the rare deli that stocks miniature white chocolate peanut butter cups. That’s right. White chocolate and peanut butter. The first time I found them, I gazed in wonder. These two were meant to be.

I pointed them out to Chris, expecting no interest. He raised his eyebrows and licked his lips. I patted his head. Good boy. We bought a handful.

At Battery Park we spread our blanket under a tree. When we had exhausted the paper, we pinned it down with shoes and turned our attention to Scrabble. I have no argument with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. They are a topnotch candy. H. B. Reese, a former Hershey employee, set off to make his fortune with peanut butter cups. He really got the “peanut butter” right with his ultra-sweetened, crumbly filling. (So right, in fact, that in the 1960s, twenty years after launching his company, Reese sold it to Hershey for over twenty million dollars.) Somehow Reese, by playing with the formula, removed peanut butter’s thirst-inducing density. The cups have a light, perfect balance of chocolate and peanut butter. Natural, homemade peanut butter cups don’t compare.

Reese’s familiar orange, yellow, and brown branding is so ugly that it’s endearing. That packaging is part of Reese’s extremely impressive brand extension. Reese’s Pieces were stunningly good when they were first released. We finally got to taste the refined version of peanut butter without letting chocolate steal its thunder. It stood alone. Chocolate makes the cups too filling. I can eat Reese’s Pieces forever. The candy coating gives the Pieces the delightful crunch of M&M’s, but with superlative filling. Their ubiquity has diminished their appeal, but whenever I run into them, I am reminded of their lasting goodness. Especially in movie theaters. Recently the less-than-memorably named Reese’s FastBreak hit the market. FastBreak adds chocolate and peanut butter nougat to the mix, with excellent results. The FastBreak is a dangerous path for me. I feel that if I went down it, I might never come back.

But white chocolate takes peanut butter cups in a brilliant direction. They are much sweeter than the milk chocolate sort; one can almost taste grains of sugar in the white coating. I like to eat three in rapid succession, and they are so sweet that I occasionally actually have the feeling that I don’t want any more. I don’t worry, though; it passes quickly. (As I’ve said, satisfaction isn’t the right word. Candy does not offer satisfaction, only saturation.)

“I can’t believe these exist,” Chris said. “Who knew?”

I knew. And since they’re near cash registers in delis around the city and I’ve witnessed fluctuating supply in certain of those delis, I know I’m not the only devotee. But it is a stealth candy. I have never, ever seen another person pick one up.

We ate the cups, I won Scrabble, the sun was well behaved. It’s too many good things all at once, I told Chris, and he made that into a little song.

Tootsie Rolls