Candy and Me (10 page)

We ran through the rain to Tobias’s apartment. There were candles, music, and a noiseless, urgent progression from the couch to the bedroom. His eyes were so close to mine that he had to be about to love me. We were restless, finding new ways to be next to each other. I had never slept in a man’s bed, and every movement he made was like a hand shaping clay. Poor Pygmalion, he had no idea.

Morning broke, and I watched the rise of his breath. I memorized the shape of his body and the flaws in his skin. The blue flannel sheet seemed enchanted. The walls around were lined with books and tokens, small mysteries that I was sure to unravel over time. This room would become familiar. There were distances all over the room, between me and the door, and me and the window, my arm and his arm, my feet and his shelf. I counted the places our bodies were touching. Those distances would open and close. The air between us would change shape and learn the way we moved.

But, as happens, when Tobias awoke, the room filled with him and froze. A narrow path emerged for our departure as he walked me back to my apartment. I had us sharing pancakes; it was barely dawn and we were silent again. This was the beginning and the end, and it happened again with Tobias, and a couple others before I learned. From then on I woke in the morning with my own hard edges, but mine were reactionary, protective. An evening still changed me, but that was for me to mull over in the introspective greenhouse of my 10:30 class.

There are things worth waiting for, my mother told me, and I saved myself for fruit.

Swiss Petite Fruit

L
ater, as fate had it, I moved to that same apartment with the little rainy balcony. My roommates and I rarely went out there, although we did use it to host a keg at one forgettable party. In fact, we rarely spent time in our apartment at all. It was a way station dominated by a long hallway. The refrigerator had scary Saran-hooded bowls from sporadic forays into cooking. Some potatoes were sprouting on the windowsill, and my roommate Kate thought they were interesting, so she refused to throw them away.

Neal became my first real boyfriend. He wooed me over chess. Our first lesson lasted nine hours and ended chastely in my bed. On our second lesson it became clear that I wasn’t going to be a grandmaster anytime soon. Our third lesson was not so chaste. It was winter; we were in the midst of exams. I was supposed to be studying a wall of art history images. Instead I sat in the library watching it snow, and all I wanted to do was go for a walk in it with Neal. He was awkward and romantic. I was dizzy and enthralled. He had shaggy blond hair and one bad tooth. He could play the guitar behind his back, and with his teeth, and he took his academic work very seriously. Neal told me it wasn’t that I needed to absorb more facts, but that I had to learn new ways of thinking. I stopped going to midweek parties and tried to access my inner intellectual.

Neal lived off-campus, over a candy store called Sugar Magnolia. He and his roommate, Pete, had developed an impressive domestic routine. They cooked together most nights, then retired to their rooms to study. The dishes got done right after dinner. Neal slept on a skinny monk’s bed. It was narrower than even a single bed, and we were comfortable there.

We slept embracing each other, and the first time he turned away from me, I cried.

“Face me,” I said, poking his shoulder.

“You’re breathing on me,” he said.

That spring, his work was noticeably more important to him than I was, but still I would walk down Chapel Street on my way to his apartment feeling light-hearted. I wore Salvation Army motorcycle boots that my mother couldn’t abide, jeans, and long-sleeved T-shirts. When it was chilly, I had a fringed suede jacket that I had found at a thrift store. I had never exercised and saw no reason to start. My classes ended by four, and the late afternoon sun promised a long, lazy evening. I knew enough to understand that having nothing to do but read Shakespeare or some other pre-eighteenth-century poet was a luxury that wouldn’t last forever. On my way up to Neal’s apartment I always stopped into Sugar Magnolia. I liked the nutritious-sounding Swiss petite fruit. They were ridiculously expensive at eight dollars a pound, so I would supplement the quantity with some caramels for filler. Then, up until dinner, Neal and I would study together. He would be at his desk, tilting his chair back with gangly limbs akimbo, and I would curl on his plank of a bed, eating petite fruit and reading
The Mysteries of Udolpho
.

Those Sugar Magnolia days overlapped and repeated themselves. They were lazy and simple, and even if I didn’t have as much of Neal’s attention as I wanted, I was finally in a genuine relationship, and I could find comfort there. This is the most satisfying way to eat candy: with a good-size bag—it must be big enough so that you are through with the candy before the candy is through—with a page-turner (the Sunday
New York Times
will do as well), and a boy keeping your feet warm. It is all you need on earth.

Conversation Hearts, the Reclamation

A
person can only take so many conversation hearts. After the third full bag of the season (I prefer the larger hearts to the standard-size Necco brand), they start to taste sickeningly chalky. But they have charm. Their palette is as tied to spring as candy corn’s is to autumn. They are hopeful and convincing. When you are alone, you can use them like a Magic Eight Ball, thinking, If the next one says “true love,” I’m set for the year. I am not alone in my consumption of conversation hearts. They’ve been around (originally as Motto Hearts) since 1866. According to Necco (the New England Confectionery Company), in the Valentine’s season they manufacture more than eight billion hearts, which sell out in the space of six weeks. Once, walking in Cambridge, I stopped in the middle of the street. “Necco is nearby,” I announced, sniffing the air. Tracing the scent, my friend and I turned the corner, and there was the factory. Every year I consumed more than my share of the eight billion, but this year I wanted a change.

No boy had ever given me conversation hearts, or anything else for that matter, for Valentine’s Day. Ever since the eighth-grade ski trip, conversation hearts were a reminder of the absence of romance, the admirers who never emerged, the flirty conversations that never happened. Now I finally had Neal, a flesh-and-blood boyfriend, and I wanted my Valentine’s Day, dammit. Nothing would better put a nail in the coffin of my past loneliness than a boyfriend-sponsored sugar-coated holiday. When February rolled around, I thought I would spare us both my disappointment.

“I know you don’t believe in Valentine’s Day,” I started off.

“I’m Jewish,” he said. “We don’t observe it.”

“Well, all I’m going to say is I know you think it’s a Hallmark holiday and all, but can’t you just use it as a great excuse to show me you care about me?” I was way out on a limb. Neal’s emotional repertoire did not include gestures of affection. “Actually,” I told him, “Let me put it this way. Do something for me on Valentine’s Day. Candy. Flowers. Lingerie. Candy. Anything. It can be a cliché. I don’t have to like it. You don’t have to enjoy it. It will just make everything a whole lot easier for both of us.”

Neal rolled his eyes. I could tell he thought I was a victim of society.

Meanwhile, I wanted Neal to be given things, by me, by anyone, because I thought he deserved more love and affection than he had gotten as a kid. I bought white paper and folded it into a card. On the front I wrote in teacherly cursive, “This is not a valentine.” Above the words I pasted a tiny fluorescent pink heart. The little heart opened to say, “Be mine anyway.” I left the inside completely blank.

Neal and I rented a movie and ordered in food. He gave me a box of chocolates, dutifully. I gave him the not-valentine.

“You weren’t supposed to do this,” he said.

“I know, but it’s not a valentine, see?” I was proud of my surreal workaround. Neal acquiesced. It was okay, then, my secret planning of the perfect valentine that evaded his anti-Hallmark notions. I felt nominal justice for my former love-starved self, eating the requisite chocolates from their requisite heart-shaped box. And the valentine that I made for him stayed on his desk, where weeks of junk mail piled up and overflowed. It stayed there—not thrown away, but not saved. It stayed there, invisible to Neal, and every time I saw it, I felt a piece of myself flutter out into the air, up and up, and away and lost.