Candy and Me (13 page)

“Your enamel is strong, or your mouth does a good job of cleaning away bacteria. Some people are just lucky,” she said.

“I had really bad acne,” I told her. “Believe me, I get my share.”

Fireballs

A
fter Neal, a few contenders and cads came and went. Then I was fixed up with Dylan. In the spirit of the tech boom, we were set up by email. He was a lawyer appealing murder convictions on the West Coast. Our correspondence, tentative at first, quickly swelled to meaningful proportions. Every day I hurried to work in eagerness to see his name in my inbox. I didn’t drink coffee. Instead, I had Dylan’s increasingly flirtatious correspondence. His favorite candy was the fireball. He wrote:

The candy itself requires little introduction, or praise, to cast into the pantheon of great sweets. It begins with a gentle ruse:
Yes, I am a candy, I taste good, don’t worry about the whole “fireball” moniker, no fire here
. No matter how many you’ve had in the past, for the first thirty seconds you think, Not bad, I can handle this. Then slowly the spice kicks in, and whether you are watching a movie or driving or swimming in a cold Maine saltwater pool, there is nothing that can save you. The spice has laid itself into your gums, into your tongue, into your sinuses, and you’re a goner. But what makes the fireball a perfect candy, instead of simply a mean, nasty, artful candy, is that in the end it says,
Hey, just kidding. I’m really a candy
. The sweet white center emerges, and you forget all about the spice, and wonder what possibly could have been the big deal. I’ve eaten a lot of candy in my time, dear H, but in the end, you would have a hard time convincing me that there’s ever been a greater expression of candy genius than the deceptively simple, elegant fireball.

No question. I had a crush on Dylan. How could I not? Our correspondence was a little like a fireball—growing increasingly intense, although it never got too spicy to bear. We were cautious and overly aware of the deceptive nature of email. The images we projected were selective and our readings of each other were unreliable. We stayed away from presumptions about what might exist between us and instead entertained each other with stories.

But we couldn’t help imagining, and finally he decided a trip to New York was in order. In the week before he came to town I looked at every man who passed me on the street and imposed his looks on Dylan’s email personality. Would I like him if he looked like the doughy man on the bicycle, or the scrawny waiter at the diner? Would I like him if he were him, or him, or (heaven forbid) him? By the time the day of his visit arrived, I needed him to like me, because if he didn’t like me after all that correspondence, then it had to be my looks. We went out to dinner. We talked easily and with the familiarity of old friends. He was fine: on the short side with blond hair in a ponytail. But in actual daylight the cinnamon intensity of our fast and furious emails faded into a sweet, sustained after-flavor. It was not traumatic and did not feel like a loss. I didn’t know exactly why (maybe because he was a candy-sucker, not a biter), but we were meant to be friends, and only friends. It was simple, it was elegant, and it was destined to last far longer than a single fireball.

Feeding the Habit

O
f course I wanted to lose weight. I’d wanted to lose weight for as long as I could remember. I wanted to lose weight like I want to find a twenty-dollar bill on the street. Who wouldn’t? It was an idle concept. I never did anything about it for years. Then, as my twenties passed, a sad new truth dawned on me. I would have to exercise. I would have to do it not to lose weight, but to avoid gaining weight every year while indulging my sugar habit. Going to the gym would buy me candy calories.

My gym had a TV at every cardio machine. I guess they were merely demonstrating the sponsorship potential, because their ads didn’t promote any particular product. Instead, the ads showed something really tasty—a cupcake or a chocolate bar or a doughnut, shiny and fresh. Then the calorie count would flash on the screen. The next shot would say how many hours of hell you would have to endure in the gym to burn off all those calories, and then the taunting slogan would appear, “Doesn’t it taste good?” It played over and over: doughnut, calories, hours, “Doesn’t it taste good?” I chugged forward like a hamster on the elliptical crosstrainer, wondering if the ad was my mantra or my curse.

Going to the gym and eating candy. It’s all about math. You eat. You burn. You eat. You burn. If you’re lucky, you sculpt attractive muscles, and these muscles require extra blood or something, so you burn bonus calories when you’re not even trying. I didn’t want to count calories—math was never my strongest subject—so I figured I’d just go to the gym like everyone else and log some negative calories.

Needless to say, I was in denial about a critical component of the equation. Even if I was going to the gym like lots of other working girls, I wasn’t quite eating like them. In 1998 candy consumption in the U.S. was at a per capita average of 25.20 pounds, but I don’t think those people at the gym were doing their share of the consumption. They were doing a lot of salad munching, I could tell. As for me, I was more than making up for their below-average performance. I figure that my candy serving size is about a quarter pound. It would take me only 100 servings to get to 25 pounds a year, which would mean I was eating candy only every third day. Three-quarters of a pound per week, now that’s more like it. Let’s see, that’s…39 pounds per year. Certainly this is on the high end. However, Denmark, a clean, well-respected country with lots of castles and other attractions, consumes a per capita average of 36.85 pounds per year.
^*
I’m normal in Denmark! I need to live there! With my people!

I keep going to the gym, dreaming of Denmark. I never lose a single pound, but working out makes candy consumption feel less like a downhill slide to obesity. Instead, I climb stairs, climb endlessly upward toward that doughnut, inspired and hopeful.

* Source for statistics on previous page: candyusa.org, citing
CAOBISCO IOCCC Statistical Bulletin
, Brussels, summer 1999. U.S.A. figures are based on the Commerce Dept. MA20D figures.

Bull’s-Eyes

W
hen I started talking to Lydia about candy over lunch one day she looked bewildered. It didn’t seem like she had ever given it much thought. Did it really deserve our attention? Then she got a distant look on her face.

“You know,” she said, “I used to love bull’s-eyes.” Bull’s-eyes, aka caramel creams, are caramels with white cream in the middle. For some reason the cream is always cool, like the mint of a Peppermint Pattie.

Caramel creams were invented in the early 1900s by R. Melvin Goetze, Sr., the son of the guy who founded The Baltimore Chewing Gum Company. Now that’s my kind of family!

I looked at Lydia. Always stylish, she was wearing camel suede pants and a crisp white shirt. Her skin had a honey glow, and her hair was a nearly platinum blond.

And they say that people look like their dogs.

Old-Fashioned Marshmallow Eggs

T
he old-fashioned marshmallow egg is rare. But rare as it is, rarer still is the old-fashioned marshmallow egg lover. The only other fan I have ever met is my mother.

Perhaps you will recall: at Easter there used to emerge a particular variety of marshmallow egg. It was a bit shorter than my thumb. There was a candy coating that was more opaque than the outside of a jellybean, and inside was the marshmallow filling—a dense white sugary nougat, not as sticky as Peeps, with no gummy pull to it, but closer to that than anything else. These eggs often came individually wrapped within a larger plastic bag for egg hunt purposes. They were incredibly sweet, and entirely addictive. The outside shell of each egg gave it a distinctive flavor. Purples, whites, and pinks were the best. Green, which in candy’s attempt to replicate lime often tastes like cleanser, again did so here. Far superior to Peeps, which have had a surprising surge of popularity, these eggs are now made by Sweet’s Quality Candies of Salt Lake City. They admit to having few accounts in the East. Perhaps it’s for the best. How different my life would be if they were readily available.