Candy and Me (6 page)

The lights flashed on, and there was the entire tent unit—the older kids—gathered in my honor. It was a birthday celebration the likes of which hadn’t been seen all summer. In the center of the Pavilion was an enormous cake, shaped like a butterfly and covered with Starbursts, M&M’s, red-hots, and gumdrops. The entire tent unit sighed in wonder. It was a beautiful cake. Tessana, a white-blond, deeply tanned art counselor who had a British accent and thrilled Danny and the other boys by sunbathing topless, had made it for me. I was clearly the unwitting beneficiary of her artistic boredom. But that cake fed the most glorious moment I could imagine. Never, never had I received extra attention like this from my peers and leaders, or felt recognized as being interesting or funny. My camp personality was solid. They knew me, they liked me, and they were rewarding me with a cake-load of candy. It was the best cake I had ever tasted. It was the birthday of my dreams. My fortune had turned. Today was like that butterfly, unimaginably fluttery and sweet.

Later, after the cake, I lingered on the little deck of the male counselors’ tent, listening to somebody play guitar. I sat with my arms around my knees, seeing what my tent looked like from Finn’s perspective. It was cool in the mountains, and my sleeves were pulled over my hands for warmth. Finn was behind me in the tent. I heard him say to another counselor, loud enough for me to hear, “She’s fifteen tonight. Three years. It’s a while to wait, but it’s worth it.” My face didn’t change. I rocked a bit in my curled-up position and chanted his words silently in my head, committing them to memory for future parsing. It was impossible that he had said such a thing, and yet I had heard it. Three years, three years, three years. It was a storybook statement, and I couldn’t believe that it hadn’t emerged from the force of my fantasies, or that he wasn’t saying it to torture me. But there it was. I walked away from the tent, went directly to my journal—the uncensored one—and wrote it down. In code. I both knew exactly what it meant, and couldn’t allow myself to believe it had been said. I asked my journal, “He says he’s waiting for me, but what could that mean? Could it mean that he loves me?” If I’d had one grain of guts I would have turned to him and said, “What do you mean—are you talking about me?” But I was fifteen. My capacity was limited.

When I went back to high school in the fall, I was still the same caterpillar—a short girl with frizzy hair and unfortunate clothing. Instead of transforming me into the popular butterfly I so desperately wanted to be, the magic of summer camp taught me how to dream the impossible dream. I pined for Finn. He consumed my consciousness. Whatever interest he had taken in me was far outweighed by the volume of my obsession with him. I fed myself the hope that he would love me the same way I gorged myself on sweets. I copied love sonnets out of books into my journals. The small pieces of him that I remembered were magnified into my taste and personality: If he had mentioned an album or a book, I bought every work in the creator’s oeuvre. When I first kissed (a friend’s forgettable cousin visiting from New York) all I thought was, Now I will be ready for him. I drank whisky thinking, When I am with him I will have to throw it back and smile. The mailbox was a silent, open mouth. I sent thousands of letters to him and counted the words in whatever occasional notes he sent me back. Every day I walked out the door to my house expecting to see him there, because I knew that when the call of true love telegrammed itself across distances, it was eventually heard and heeded. As I walked to school, I chanted our names, one letter for every pace, driving them into the ground like curses. On each typewriter my fingers would find his keys, hurtling dense telegrams onto the bare platen. If once I had been open to the notion of spirituality and hopeful that a higher power might notice my plight (lonely teenage girl among other lonely teenage girls), now all my elevated passion was devoted to feeding my secret love for Finn. Had I not been at an all-girls’ school, had I not still been so shy and self-conscious, maybe real life would have interrupted this sustained fantasy. But it didn’t, and I would go on like that for years, until three years had passed, and Finn determined that my metamorphosis was complete and made good on his insinuations of our future.

Mints

M
ints are not necessarily candy. In fact, the most critical defining factor for a mint is where it falls on the mint-candy/mint-but-not-a-candy continuum.

The qualities that determine placement on the continuum are: whether they are better chewed or sucked, whether they can be consumed in bulk quantities or are delicately savored, concentration of flavor, and whether their primary life goal is to improve breath or to bring joy to the consumer.

As far as this consumer is concerned, why ever dip south of Mentos?

Nonpareils

H
alfway through high school I joined the track team. It was the only team that a person without any skill or talent could join and receive varsity credit. I did it because it would look good on my transcript for college. There was an arduous price to pay. We ran up to five miles a day. I brought nothing in ability to the team, so I tried to entertain them. I figured out shortcuts for those who didn’t want to do complete runs, and calculated the time it should have taken to run the full distance. I kept an eye out for the coach while smokers sneaked cigarettes between races. I brought sweets to meets.

The meets were always far away in the suburbs of Virginia or Maryland, and we were stuck there for hours on Saturdays. My race was the 880. It wasn’t long distance, and it certainly wasn’t a sprint. It was a good race for people who were bound to lose. On one sunny spring morning we arrived at a meet around noon. It was hot. I brought a large bag of mint nonpareils. They came in pink, green, and yellow kisses, and tasted like white chocolate, with just the right tinge of mint and a light crunch from the delicate white sprinkles. I usually waited until after I ran to indulge, but this time I couldn’t resist. And once I started, I couldn’t stop. Mint is no marathon candy. It has a point of exhaustion, and I jogged right through mine. As a sluggish sugar low descended upon me, my race came up. In a fog, I plowed through the half-mile, hating those mints every step of the way. It is hard to say if my performance was worse than usual—I was in the middle of the pack, as always. But afterward I lay down on the bleachers with an unpleasant thickness in my mouth. It would be years before I ate another mint nonpareil.

As my love-hate relationship with candy has evolved, I have contemplated whether my insatiable desire comes from sugar’s nefarious insulin game—the energy-jolt-and-crash that demands more fuel—or from a misplaced urge for the missing “sweetness” in life. If it is the latter, then the greater satisfaction I find in life, the less I should desire candy. But if I am simply under sugar’s spell, there is some hope that eating enough candy will lead to permanent disgust—the way people say, “I can’t drink tequila. I had a very bad night in Cancún.” If I could just have my last hurrah with candy after candy, I could eliminate them one by one until all hunger for sugar was gone. Then the battle between health and desire would be resolved, not through deprivation but through exhaustion.

I never see those pastel mints without remembering that track meet. One down, hundreds to go.

Skor

I
t was a short affair, and no one ever knew about it. I have no idea how we were introduced. One day you were just there. We met every day for three brief months after school, in private. You didn’t last long, but I didn’t expect you to.

Jelly Belly Jellybeans

I
have a fondness for cheap drugstore jellybeans, the kind that come in two-for-a-dollar bags alongside butterscotch disks and spice drops. The sugar shell of the cheap beans is thicker, so there’s a better ratio of shell to bean. But Jelly Belly jellybeans have their merits, particularly the freedom they give you to select from fifty official flavors plus new “rookie” flavors. The Goelitz Confectionery Company, which survived two world wars on its candy corn business, renamed itself Jelly Belly after striking it rich with the flavored beans. At last count, they were manufacturing about 40 million beans per day.

When I was a junior in high school, Lucy invited me to join her family on a trip to Hilton Head, South Carolina. We hadn’t had a falling out exactly, but I had recently made some new friends, and so had she, and we were spending less time together. The exclusivity (whether by fate or design) of our earlier friendship was eroding, and there was some tension because of it. But there hadn’t been any grand teenage scene, with accusations and tears, so it looked like we might weather the change. Hilton Head sounded fun, and I liked her family too, so I said yes.

The whole island was a resort, or maybe this was only true as far as we explored. For some reason there were few people around. Maybe we were in a private area of the island; maybe it was always like that. Small alligators lumbered across our paths as we biked down narrow walkways. We went to the beach every day in glorious beach weather. We lay on towels to bake ourselves, determined to get as dark as we could. I listened to “Born in the U.S.A.” on my Walkman, again and again, and every time I flipped from one side of the cassette to the next, I rolled over on my beach towel, keeping an even tan. After some hours of this we would go to the ice-cream store. I would buy a scoop of mint chip and a quarter pound of Jelly Belly beans. At first, we bought assorted flavors. But after a day or two we knew what we liked and were selective. I only bought root beer and lime. Lucy chose pink grapefruit and cherry. As we biked home, I kept the bag crunched in my hand, eating two or three at a time when we stopped at street corners.