Candy and Me (4 page)

I never got sick from eating too much. I had no cavities. I was a skinny kid. I was built for candy.

One friend, Laura, had a slumber party in her basement that year. I didn’t know by what cultural code the other girls understood which records to buy, or which clothes were cool. So for her birthday gift, I succumbed to the universal urge to get a person what one wants most: I filled an entire large shoebox with candy. A pounder of M&M’s formed a base. Smarties were unwrapped and shaken into the mix. Candy corn heads and tails peeked brightly through the crowd. Nerds poured out of boxes like salt into a stew. Swirls of licorice snaked through the rainbow jubilee. Tart ‘n’ Tinies huddled in clusters. And still-wrapped caramel cubes lumbered heavily to the bottom. As I gazed at my creation, it seemed to me a dream come true.

Later, during the gift opening, I worried that the candy medley wasn’t a significant-enough present. But when Laura unwrapped it, everyone oohed and aahed and dug in. The box was passed around, and it wasn’t depleted for hours. But as we all feasted, I secretly knew that I was the most enthusiastic. For everyone else this indulgence was a novelty that came and went, but I was acutely aware of where the box was in the room, how much candy remained, and how soon it would make its way back to me. I wouldn’t stop eating until it was empty, and feared that someone would notice my single-mindedness. It was the first time I had an inkling that others were easily distracted from sweets by more central events, where for me the distraction of sweets was the main event.

Conversation Hearts

I
t was the winter of eighth grade, and I thought that I was on the cusp of being discovered by boys. Like a Midwest starlet getting off the bus in Hollywood, I knew that being discovered would change the course of my otherwise dull-looking future. I had been at an all-girls school for over three years and hadn’t managed to have any contact with boys. I couldn’t even imagine how a conversation with a boy might proceed. When I pictured my ideal encounter, it consisted of an initial dreamy gaze, filled with a silent understanding of mutual attraction, which led immediately to making out. If the interaction required other skills, like dialogue, I surely wouldn’t make the grade. Even the concept of mutual attraction was for the most part theoretical. It was hard to tell which boys were cute, so I safely agreed with the other girls. Any boy who was socially acceptable would have been fine by me.

The eighth-grade ski trip was coed. It involved a crack-of-dawn bus ride to the nearest ski resort in Pennsylvania, a day pass, and then the bus ride home. The idea of getting onto a coed bus without a pre-established seating partner was inconceivable, so Lucy and I signed up together, and promised to sit next to each other. I brought a large bag of conversation hearts as our bus snack. Even though we had gotten up ridiculously early for a six
A.M.
departure, we started in on the hearts as soon as we reached the highway. Lucy kept pace with me, and by the time we had gotten to the New Jersey Turnpike, the bag was empty. The candy kicked in. I felt good. I was ready to hit the slopes. I was black diamond material. But Lucy didn’t fare as well. In an almost too-perfect delivery, halfway through the sentence “I don’t feel well,” she vomited between her knees, onto the floor of the bus. We looked at each other in utter mortification. We both knew that this wasn’t just about Lucy feeling sick. This was a social fiasco.

“Please don’t tell anyone this happened,” Lucy whispered to me as she got up to go back to the bathroom.

As she went, the smell also made its way through the bus. Kids started to yell disgustedly, “Gross! Who threw up?”

Lucy had vanished, and I was now sitting alone with the incriminating, odorous evidence. I was loyal, so I certainly wasn’t going to make any announcements, and I knew that any false move on my part would give us away. So I sat reading quietly, ignoring the murmur as Lucy was gradually identified as the culprit. I wouldn’t affirm anything. After a while, however, I couldn’t help but notice that Lucy still hadn’t returned. I peered down the aisle and saw that she had managed to find an empty seat. Of course this made sense, but somehow I had expected her to return to her befouled seat—to pretend nothing had happened. Now I was stuck enduring her mess, being a faithful friend, alone. She was riding in relative comfort, but under the unrelenting taunts of the other eighth graders. Our position was precarious. We were seriously outflanked. My greatest fear was that the others would shift their attack to me, figuring that because I was the one dutifully manning our original posts, I must have been the perp. I shrank down into the seat. There was vomit underfoot. I looked back at Lucy, and she looked away. She was angry with me, I could tell. For bringing the candy? For not getting sick? I had no idea what I had done wrong, but I wasn’t surprised. This was eighth grade, and Lucy was frequently angry for unpredictable reasons. I closed my eyes and waited for it all to be over.

So much for being noticed by the boy creatures. The romantic promise of the conversation hearts was a complete flop. There would be no conversations with boys, not even polite ones—not even any eye contact. There would be no cartoon hearts sketching themselves between my profile and that of a young lad. Discovery was elusive.

In spite of my success rate, which hovered constantly at zero, I was to stick with my fervently silent strategy for meeting boys for all the remaining years of high school. In fact, that morning, when I sat for hours trying to hunch into invisibility, was probably the closest I ever came to being discovered.

Spree

I
was going to be fat. I was going to be sick. I was going to get cavities. I was already getting fat (I wasn’t). My mother tried all tactics to curb my habit. No matter, I may have had to be home by curfew, but I could eat whatever candy I wanted. A teenager can make her own decisions. Nonetheless, the quantity I consumed was often so vast, so embarrassingly inhuman, that I could not bring myself to eat it out in the open. During October, I ate an entire pound bag of candy corn, or miniature pumpkins, on a daily basis. In February it was a pound bag of conversation hearts. By March there was Easter candy. In those months of heavy consumption, I would spend hours reading in bed and plowing mindlessly through acres of sugar.

Bulk consumption of candy was not all it was cracked up to be. There was an initial thrill, as the candy delivered on its promise of immediate, unqualified sweetness. Then, after the first few bites, came the secondary pleasure of indulgence. This was combined appreciation for the texture of the candy and recognition that the supply was good—there was plenty more. Finally, I would succumb to mechanical consumption. Taste lost relevance. The rapture receded, and I just kept going. When I had eaten so much that my mouth grew thick with sugar and I couldn’t swallow, I would drink glasses of water or milk—skim, ha!—and then return to the task at hand. By the end of a bag, I would slip into a sugar coma, a hallucinogenic slumber as my insulin spiked and sugar level crashed.

Somehow I could not bring myself to throw incriminating wrapper after incriminating wrapper in the small yellow wastebasket that matched my desk. Instead, I pushed the evidence between my bed and the wall, down where trouble disappeared. But this was a time when my mother changed our sheets every week. In the course of doing so, she would move the bed out from the wall to tuck in the sheets, discover my trash trove, and express her disgust. She had given up on disciplining the candy habit. All she did in response was to say, with weary disappointment in her eyes, “Hilary, please use the trashcan. I’m not going to throw away your wrappers every week.”

But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I always hid the candy. When I read, I propped myself up against my headboard, with my knees crossed and the book leaning against them. I kept the candy under the covers. When I went down for dinner, I would leave the book splayed out with the candy huddled beneath it.

One time I was eating a Cadbury egg. These eggs were new discoveries, and I loved the sugary goo that was meant to represent raw egg. (I wouldn’t discover the beneficial effects of refrigerating Cadbury eggs until much later.) I generally ate three at a sitting. On this particular day I was relishing the first egg of the season with such focus that my ever-present book was upside down against my knees. My mother came in without knocking, saw the upside-down book and the heightened look on my face and apologized for her intrusion. I could tell that she thought I had been reading a dirty book that was hidden behind the upside-down one, or otherwise exploring my adolescent sexuality. I let her believe what she would. It was better than the truth.

Later, in college, I would inherit a desk from my brother. Eric was always the sane one. His desires were reasonable. The candy he liked was always either tart or sour. Spree were his favorite early on, and he rarely ventured beyond them. I admired his commitment to Spree. It was a candy with good personality. The name was cheerful and energetic. Most admirably, he would make a pack last several days.

I never bought furniture in college, I only scavenged what I could from the street and friends who were graduating or upgrading. My roommate Kate and I carried my brother’s lightweight desk to our new off-campus pad. I opened the drawers. They were all empty except one, which revealed a secret: hundreds of pristine, but empty, Spree wrappers. They lay there like discarded snakeskins. My brother, it turned out, ate a whole lot of Spree in the course of the year. He had diligently worked his way through a roll at a time, careful not to tear through the paper. Kate began to laugh. “He’s just like you!”

I could see what she was getting at, but I disagreed entirely. Much as I admired the delicacy and ritual with which he approached his task, I knew full well that our approach to candy was very different. For my brother it was an idle desire that he occasionally fulfilled. For me it was constant. It was interwoven with emotions, with secrecy, with illicitness, and with the ever-present shadow of future weight gain. Once I was an adolescent, my mother gave up on forbidding candy consumption. Instead, she tried to stop it with the only reasoning she thought might have any effect on a teenager. She frowned disapprovingly and reminded me over and over again that I would be fat. Even if I wasn’t now, my metabolism was about to slow down and then I’d see.