Candy and Me (2 page)

B
efore there was candy, there was sugar. My brother and I started staying without a babysitter when I was seven and he was eight. We had a barter/bribe relationship: for every serving of sugar I ate, Eric could stay up an extra hour. We pledged not to tell on each other to our parents. As soon as they walked out the door, I would pour several tablespoons of confectioner’s powdered sugar into a Dixie cup. I eventually figured out that if I ran a few drops of water or milk into the cup and mixed it up, semi-soft pellets formed. The texture of these pellets was dreamy. Sometimes I would add a drop of vanilla extract and a bit of butter. Then, in front of the (also forbidden) TV, I would dip a spoon into the sugar and feed myself.

Our suburban Maryland family room had a pale brick fireplace, wall-to-wall shag carpeting, and psychedelic pillows. Eric reclined on the couch and I sat on the velour lounge chair. We watched the Osmonds,
Rhoda, The Wonderful World of Disney.
On any night that I started eating sugar, which was every night my parents didn’t hire a babysitter, I would have refill after refill. I ate it furtively, afraid that my parents would walk in unexpectedly. I loved the way the sugar became sweeter just before it dissolved on my tongue. Watching illicit TV while eating sugar became a habit. The combined relaxation, indulgence, and jolt of forbidden sweetness that I found in my candy-leisure moments were forever established as sensations to pursue. If Charles Schulz had created a comic-strip version of me at seven, I would have been surrounded by a cloud, but unlike Pigpen’s dirty cumulus, my cloud would have been a pure, refined puff of powdered sugar.

At some point Eric stopped calculating the late night hours he was accumulating and threw up his hands.

“I can’t believe you’re eating all that sugar,” he said. “You’ll be sick.” But I didn’t feel sick. Rather, I was astounded that Eric had no apparent interest in the bounty I had discovered. I don’t remember ever getting caught or in trouble, although I know my mother must have had some idea that this was going on. I also never wondered why there was always powdered sugar in the house—even though my mother never baked. It was only later that I discovered that she herself had a secret habit. But eventually she decided not to stock sugar in the pantry anymore, and I had to move on.

Trix

In 1954, Trix breakfast cereal was introduced by General Mills. The new cereal, a huge hit with kids, was 46.6 percent sugar.

—UselessKnowledge.com

I
loved Trix.

Candy Corn

T
he earliest candy corn memory I have is of my mother carefully spreading several bags of the product across the kitchen table. She was teaching herself to be a painter and was arranging a candy corn still life. Eric and I were instructed not to touch or eat a single kernel. Our mother acted as if this were a perfectly reasonable request, as if she were painting a still life of spinach, or pork lard. One comes into the kitchen, one is young, one is hungry, and one sees a table covered with one’s favorite candy. She couldn’t have painted a fruit basket? It was a cruel world, mismanaged by adults who knew their own power too well.

Candy corn may seem timeless, but it was born at the Wunderle Candy company in the 1880s. That whole school of candy—mellocremes—was already in full swing, in various agriculturally inspired shapes and sizes. Then in 1898 Goelitz Confectionery Company took candy corn into the big leagues, associating the confection with Halloween. It was, needless to say, a big hit. And why shouldn’t it have been? Candy corn was made for stardom. Those shiny, waxy yellow ends demand to be clutched by the handful and eaten, top, middle, bottom, top, middle, bottom, in a compulsive rhythm until they are gone. Chocolate gets all the fanzines, but it is the clay of candy. Matte, endlessly shapeable, chocolate is all about taste. Candy corn gets by on looks alone. Odes should be written to its waxy gleam, its whimsical design, its autumnal shades.

I fell for candy corn hard. It was the first candy for which I had a specific desire rather than a generic sugarlust. I loved how it returned, Halloween after Halloween. We trick-or-treated on the overly lit cul-de-sacs of suburban Maryland, compromising our store-bought costumes by donning coats. We ran from house to house, suffocating plastic masks pulled up onto the tops of our heads. One popular house distributed full-size Three Musketeers bars. Candy corn came in slender, oblong boxes or little plastic bags cherishing only four or five kernels. At the end of the night our brown paper bags were awkwardly heavy. It was never enough. I usually ate all of my candy by the next evening, and then started in on my brother’s. When I got tired of the sugary candies in our bags, I switched to chocolate, then back again.

Candy corn marked the passage of time. Every year autumn brought a Pavlovian desire for it. I counted the years by Halloweens rather than birthdays, and the taste of candy corn meant a new costume, a new year of school. All summer I looked forward to October 31. I thought that it was my favorite day of the year. But, as is the way with candy, I was never satisfied. I was always waiting for more to happen, or for something to change, although I had no idea what. The day after Halloween I was inevitably sad and disappointed, and would begin planning how the next time my costume would be better, how I would stay out later and collect enough candy to last longer. That cyclic disappointment clawed at me. Every passing year, though I thought candy corn delighted me, it was the constant, stealthy reminder that satisfaction was out of reach. It would be a long while before I would see how alienated and uncomfortable I was in the world, and how young I was when I started hoping that sugar would sweeten the deal.

Cocoa

W
hen a child is a misfit, it isn’t always easy to pinpoint why. I may have had two or three friends, but I had the awkwardness of an adolescent four years too early. Making friends and going to school were, for me, an exercise in pretending to be normal. I was overwhelmed with self-consciousness. Not only was I prematurely uncool, but there was no end in sight. I had no idea what was wrong with me, but I was certain that I was and would always be a loser. This inevitable future was not obvious to everyone else, but I knew that with one false move I would be revealed.

In the fourth grade at the National Cathedral School for Girls our uniforms were see-through striped dresses, which became a problem for some of the girls almost immediately. We wore the juvenile outfits with knee socks, cardigan sweaters, and Sperry Topsiders. Unable to base itself on the traditional criteria of clothing and fashion, popularity thus became contingent on the puffy sticker trading market. For some reason my parents couldn’t manage to let me purchase the right style of stickers in the necessary quantities—it was just the beginning of my social undoing.

The school served a hot lunch in the cafeteria every day, before which we had to stand and sing a hymn. Every day I supplemented my meal with chocolate milk, dessert, and hot chocolate. We were allowed one serving of each. But one day after school, my best friend Lucy and I ventured back into the closed cafeteria. It was miraculously unlocked. There we discovered the packets of Ready-Mix cocoa in their plastic bowl, left out under a paper doily for the next day. We each grabbed three and hurried out.

By then my family had moved from Bethesda, Maryland, into Washington, D.C. Our new house was close to my school, and Lucy lived next door. As we walked home, we dipped our index fingers into packets of the cocoa, scooping sloping peaks of it into our mouths. Our fingers turned brown and soggy, and it grew difficult to summon enough saliva to dissolve the cocoa crystals, but we were determined. We started with three packs each, but soon I was up to seven a day. Even I was amazed at how my capacity skyrocketed. I would eat a few as I walked home, and then would go directly to my room, lie on the carpet, and eat the rest as I read my textbooks. Before long my cocoa thievery gained me a bit of a reputation. I had been seen eating it in class, and let a few others in on my strategy. But no one embraced it quite as I did. For the other girls it was a lark, but for me it was no novelty. It was a covert way of life.

Our school was on the Close of the Washington National Cathedral, which was still under construction then. Carved stones that would complete the western door were laid out like grave markers near the stonecutter’s cottage. The periodically vanishing stones made it seem as if life were moving backward, a creepy resurrection. Lucy and I walked home through this reverse graveyard daily. From our religion class and the mandatory weekly services at the cathedral, we knew the basic map of its cruciform well. We also knew that there were places we hadn’t fully explored: a sub-crypt, and a bell tower, and we were certain that somewhere there were damp, dark, forgotten chapels where monks and ascetics were starving and chanting. Made bold by the dry cocoa, we frequently wandered into the cathedral. Looking devout as we slipped down into the lower floors, we peeked behind tapestries and found dark stairways that curved toward locked wooden doors.