Candy and Me (8 page)

I would eat the chocolate fudge in my drab room, or in the library, summoning as much inspiration as I could to study for my Shakespeare class. When the tuck-shop ran out of fudge, overwhelmed by the sudden run on their supply, I checked in on a daily basis until they restocked. Alone in my room, I broke off small pieces of fudge with my fingers, staring out at the impeccable summer lawns in disbelief at the untapped romance of my life. Every night I went to pubs with Lauren and others on our program, and after several drinks I would gradually join the conversation. I had a crush on one of the college boys, Tory, who was the stretched-out version of a dashing soap star. After some time Lauren and Tory began to date. This I accepted. Sure, she had a boyfriend at home and I had no one in the world. But a person who couldn’t communicate in daylight hours had no business expecting her friends to honor her crushes. Lauren and Tory were kind to me. They let me entertain them with imitations of the others on the program, then excused themselves for “naps.” More fudge.

While at Oxford I never really saw that I was purposeless and lonely. All I knew was that I was disappointed that drunk young men weren’t climbing through my bedroom window, and that the only men I was friendly with were not romantically interested in me. This was all that mattered at the time.

The details of that trip became irrelevant. A week after Lauren and I flew home, she traveled to a Montana ranch to visit the boyfriend she had left behind. I went to the Maryland shore with a family as a babysitter. Two days before my seventeenth birthday I got a call from a friend. On a highway somewhere in Montana, Lauren had been in a fatal car accident. I stayed calm. There were kids in the room. I called my mother, cried quietly, and made plans to go home for a memorial service. My mother told me that there was a birthday card that Lauren had sent waiting for me at home. That was very like her—to send a card right on time. I was strangely glad to know that it was there, to know that I would receive some last words from her.

The family I was staying with at the beach was going on a boat ride. They convinced me to come along, telling me it would be better than sitting at home alone. On the boat I made a list of every single thing I could remember about Lauren and what we had done together. The significance of the pieces of our trip that were mine alone curled in on themselves like old leaves. There had been no crush on Tory that had evaporated into silence. There had been no long, empty days interrupted only by the short-lived thrill of the tuck-shop. My solitude evaporated into nothing. In my efforts to preserve my lost friend, I polished everything we had shared to its shiniest.

When my senior year of high school started a few weeks later, I was somewhat in the spotlight. A member of our small graduating class was missing, and I had the cachet of having spent half the summer with her. But I was determined to mourn Lauren privately. I wasn’t interested in sharing my memories, or in how much my classmates might miss her, or in anyone’s support. I didn’t want to wear black, slam doors, and have people feel sorry for me. Instead, I felt a surprising lightness. All the trivialities of high school, all my insecurities, self-consciousness, and dread, had dissolved overnight. Not only had I stopped caring what anyone thought of me, but I felt warmly disposed toward all of my classmates. For the first time I understood what it was to feel simply open and friendly without worrying about who my friends were and who they might be the next day. Now, when I thought about the tuck-shop, and those long hours spent eating fudge and pretending to read, the loneliness was insignificant. That was the life before, and now I knew what it was worth.

Snickers

I
t was end of high school, and before I started my summer job I went on a school-organized canoeing trip. We spent two weeks in the Southeast, driving a van from river to river. It rained on and off most of the time, but I got claustrophobic sharing a tent, so instead I would pitch a tarp and pretend I wasn’t getting wet. One of the group leaders, whom we called Muck, shared my dislike for tents. We would lie under the tarp and, as drops of rain angled in under its sides, tell each other that it was just yesterday’s rain shaking down off the trees.

This itinerant interlude suited me. My parents were packing up our house in D.C. and preparing to move to a tiny apartment in New York City, where their marriage would soon unravel. I was starting college in the fall and would spend the rest of the summer earning as much money as I possibly could. Paddling whitewater for two weeks was my last chance to be a kid. I wasn’t strikingly good in a canoe, but I loved it more than any activity I had ever experienced. The rivers were alternately calm and rapid, essing through southern landscapes then dropping precipitously as we paddled for our lives. I was dirty, tired, and jubilant.

Somehow I had missed the critical piece of information that food was not included in the trip. I just assumed that we would be camping out, cooking spaghetti and eating gorp. Instead, we were alternately camping and eating fast food wherever we could grab it on the road. I had about forty dollars with me, which I made last a week, but then I was broke. My fast-food choices had been less than nutritious before I ran out of money (milkshakes and cheeseburgers—in that order), but they fell even further when I started to borrow money.

Snickers was the answer. I skipped breakfast. Lunch was usually a group-sponsored carbohydrate-heavy picnic on the riverbank. But after we came off the river, when I was starving from a full day of canoeing, Snickers fulfilled the promise of its ads. It was the candy that ate like a meal. Strong enough for a man but made for a woman. Now, I am not overly fond of nuts in chocolate. Nuts are a whole other food. But Snickers gets it right. Nougat is a staple. Just as bread rounds out any meal, nougat softens the impact of the peanuts in Snickers. Caramel moistens the nougat. The chocolate coating pulls it all together. In Texas, in 2000, a jury sentenced a man named Kenneth Payne to jail for sixteen years. His crime: the theft of one Snickers bar. Apparently, it was a king-size Snickers. Oh, and also the guy was a previously convicted felon. I was glad when I heard that his conviction had been overturned and he would only face a maximum of two years at retrial. Still, Kenneth, my heart goes out to you.

Looking back, those two weeks encapsulated the best of both worlds. I had the decadence of a child—an all-candy diet and no need for food, clothing or shelter. And I had the independence of an adult—to choose my proverbial path down the river propelled by my own strength. I wasn’t exactly at the top of my game. It had been muggy and humid, and we hadn’t showered often. My all-sugar diet wasn’t designed for long-term sustenance. But I relished the temporary disorder. When we arrived back in Washington, I was hungry and covered with a layer of filth. It wasn’t until I stepped off the bus that I realized that my parents had no idea when I was coming home. On top of that, I’d forgotten my keys and was locked out. I had to start my summer job in New York two days later. I picked up my backpack and walked toward home. Still no answer. I knocked on Lucy’s door, and her mother hosed me down before she would let me in the house. The dirt ran off me, and I watched a part of my life run off into the ruts of Lucy’s patio. The spray of water was as cold as the Nantahala River, and I didn’t mind.

Junior Mints

T
he summer before I went to college, my former camp counselor Finn called drunk from a bar, announced that he had broken up with his fiancée, and wondered if he could see me. I was staying with my parents in New York City, working a miserable administrative job for a law firm in the World Trade Center. They put me in a windowless file room, sorting the papers on a pro bono case. Every day I would buy a box of Junior Mints for lunch-dessert and eat them all as I read
Love in the Time of Cholera
. Sometimes I would lock the door of the file room and read into the afternoon. If any of the lawyers came down to look for a file or to check on me, I would tell them that I was afraid to be alone in that deserted part of the office. Their faces said that the room reeked of sugar and deceit.

The night that Finn visited conveniently happened to be the only night of the summer that my parents were out of town. It was also the night before my last day of work. The map of the city was still a jigsaw puzzle to me—scattered pieces that, with only slight attention, would soon be assembled. I meant to bring Finn to the East Village, but I turned us the wrong way coming out of the subway. We were near Washington Square, but at the time it seemed like a vast residential neighborhood with no restaurants to be found. We went to Dojo’s, a cheap college joint, and drank pitchers of sangria. Finn told me about his failing relationship. He was as I had remembered him: sincere, but enigmatic, handsome, charming and seemingly convinced that I had grown into the woman he had always imagined I would. I was wearing Birkenstocks. The toilet in the women’s room was broken and had overflowed, but I used it anyway, being thankful in my drunken way that the soles of my shoes were thick enough that the flood on the bathroom floor hadn’t reached the level of my bare feet.