Candy and Me (15 page)

At the end of my very first week of work, Luke and I broke up. We were watching TV on a Friday night. I was eating a bag of pretty peach gummies. I turned to him and said, “I feel eighty.”

He said, “I think we should break up. I don’t think this is working out.”

“Shouldn’t we try to make it better?” This was happening very quickly. We had never talked about our problems before.

“I already have tried.”

I couldn’t touch gummy anything for at least a week.

At work, Luke and I kept the breakup on the low-down. I had just started the job, and people hadn’t met us as a couple. We figured what they hadn’t known in the first place wouldn’t hurt them. Shauna was one of the few people who knew me as Luke’s girlfriend, but neither Luke nor I had told her it was over. The three of us walked to a bar for a party. At the bar, Shauna made room so that Luke and I could sit next to each other.

“Don’t bother,” I said.

“We broke up,” he added. Shauna was startled, but we all laughed it off. After my first beer I slipped into the bathroom, burst into tears, then came out to order another beer with perfect cheer. I didn’t mind being the crying-jag girl for a bit. I knew it would pass. We would be awkward for a while, but soon work would be work, and our personal lives would go their separate ways.

I made sure not to overcultivate my friendship with Shauna. Luke had few friends, and I thought it would be inconsiderate to encroach on his territory. All this was to change. I had no clue how important Shauna would turn out to be. She was a clever, hardworking girl from the Midwest, but I should have known when I saw how much she liked Circus Peanuts that she had a complexity and humor that she didn’t advertise. Our friendship would grow later, but our shared enthusiasm for candy was undeniable from the start. For her birthday I bought a plain paper bag and filled it with several packs of Circus Peanuts.

“I can’t get over this,” she said when she opened it. She gave me a big Ohio smile. “This is the most thoughtful gift I’ve ever received.”

Mini Bottle Caps, Try Again

W
e had broken up, but we were trying to be friends. Luke went to Toronto for the weekend and came back with a pound of mini Bottle Caps for me. Who could imagine that such a thing existed? Why should those crazy Canadians be selling Bottle Caps in a major East Coast city while New York was a Bottle Cap wasteland? My extensive research of Manhattan and limited research of other boroughs had yielded only two highly inconvenient sources: a now out-of-business candy store on the Upper East Side, and a downtown store called Candy World, which was only worth considering when one (or one’s friend) was on jury duty. But in Canada, in Toronto no less, there were not only bulk Bottle Caps, but also bulk
mini
Bottle Caps.

Candy manufacturers embrace this approach to product extension. They must think, Well, people seem to like it—let’s make it really big or really small. The results are fascinating. Size matters. Conversation hearts taste better big, as do SweeTarts, but the giant Hershey’s Kisses do nothing for me. The big Tootsie Roll saves paper, but the bite-size pieces are ideal. Mini is often a mistake. Nobody wants less, and smallness hardens and neutralizes distinct textures. The best small candies are born small: Tart ‘n’ Tinies, Runts, Sugar Babies, Junior Mints, Chiclets. In truth, the mini Caps didn’t really do it for me. As with jumbo conversation hearts, the larger size gave the candies a tenderness that was lacking in the taut, small version.

First Luke was doling the Caps out to me in daily cupfuls, but after a couple of days I started stealing refills from his drawer in the afternoon. This was awkward, so I made him give me the whole bag. The concentrated scent of sugar wafted from the paper cup.

I knew that Luke meant the gift to be kind. It was a gesture of peace. But I was disturbed by the Bottle Cap offering. Bottle Caps were my favorite candy. For anyone who knew me, they were an easy hit, but hard to find. I had a few friends who had, at one point or another, gone out of their way to track down Bottle Caps for me. All my associations were pure. I didn’t want to have to associate them with a breakup bribe. They were meant for good, uncomplicated times. Accepting them from Luke, with the taste of our separation hovering in their sugary halo, felt dangerous. It was like taking candy from a stranger—a gift with too much intention. Oh, but of course I had to eat them—because they were there. I ate them all day long, and on the way home, and at home, and on the way back to work in the morning.

Instead of smoothing things over, as it was meant to, eating the Bottle Caps that Luke gave me reminded me of what had been wrong. In the course of our relationship, he had given me tokens of his affection, but his heart had been missing. And now, too late, here was the shrunken assertion that I was in his thoughts. I knew the candies were a miserable little representation of sorrow, not genuine attachment. The sweetness tasted artificial. Well, it had always been artificial, but this time it was up to no good. I didn’t want this miniature version of affection to woo me falsely. So I resolved that as soon as the mini Caps were gone, I would stop caring entirely. I couldn’t eat them fast enough.

Swiss Chocolate Ice Cream

T
here were days when mint chip reigned. Then the ice-cream industry began to permute its flavors endlessly, adding candy, cookie dough, swirls of caramel and fudge, and so on. I was quickly seduced by the strangely named hybrids that gave candy a refreshing new context. But sometimes the classics were still the best.

My grandparents lived on a hill, at the top of a long driveway bordered by azaleas. My grandmother’s pantry was not to be rivaled. She always stocked chocolate soda, multiple flavors of ice cream, large Cadbury chocolate bars, and a full drawer of grocery store penny candy by the pound. Every Halloween she laboriously composed bags of assorted candies, tied with orange ribbons. No one ever ventured up her treacherous driveway to claim their prizes: One banner year she had a total of two trick-or-treaters. The remaining bags lasted through months of our visits.

My grandmother also stocked my father’s favorite ice-cream flavor. It was called Swiss Chocolate, and it was made by a local ice-cream store called Giffords. Even among ice-cream eaters who didn’t favor chocolate or had been seduced by the new variations, Swiss Chocolate was widely heralded. Sometimes my grandmother lost track of the store because it moved more than once. There were periodic rumors that it was going out of business. But every so often, as the years passed, my grandmother would pull out a new carton.

My grandmother was a pack rat. There were two refrigerators, both overflowing with more food than she and my grandfather could possibly consume in a year. It never occurred to me that this was a fallible system until my grandmother died. One morning she got up early to let the dogs out, went back to bed, and there her heart stopped. In the days after the funeral, we started cautiously getting rid of some of the clutter in the kitchen. There were giant plastic bags assembling a lifetime supply of rubber bands. There was an enormous collection of bottles that I packed up for recycling. One freezer was full of undated meat packages, all of which I threw away. My father found a preserved piece of his bar mitzvah cake. A can of Coke had exploded in the spare refrigerator.

“Was it like this the whole time, or do you think she was letting things go?” I asked my father. He just shrugged. He was disposing of a ream of brown paper bags. High on a shelf I saw an unopened box of chocolates, individually wrapped and packaged in clear plastic. I took it down hopefully, then dropped it to the table with a start—it was teeming with maggots. My grandfather was watching me. I silently put it in the trash.

I was itching to organize the place, and could tell that my father felt the same, but we didn’t want to upset my grandfather further by changing too much too fast.

“Save it!” he barked when I ventured to dispose of the extensive jam jar collection. He hadn’t entered a grocery store, much less prepared his own food, in over sixty years. We didn’t know if he was capable of making himself dinner, much less whether he would need to store leftovers in a jam jar. And yet we were all going back to work in two days, leaving him to fend for himself. It didn’t seem right.

My grandmother’s house was loaded with sweets, but I never saw her touch any of it. She had a soft, grandmotherly body. She must have been a closet candy eater—keeping it openly but opening it secretly. This was true for my other grandmother too. She kept Andes mints in a little bowl on her table for years. But my parents, with second generation (at least) sugar genes, kept a candy-free house. I never learned to live with it. The result was that, with household candy stocking on both sides of the family, I was quite the opposite. Nothing lingered on my shelves. Shelves? My candy never even made it to shelves. When I bought candy, I came directly home to eat it. The idea of keeping it in the house was utterly absurd. It would never work. My purchase size was my serving size, without fail.

My father opened my grandmother’s freezer and scanned its contents. Pulling a quart of ice cream out of the freezer, he sniffed it.

“Want some?” he asked. I ate mine on the step down into the garage, figuring it was the last Swiss Chocolate I would taste.