Candy and Me

by Hilary Liftin

  No boy had ever given me conversation hearts, or anything else for that matter, for Valentine’s Day. Ever since the eighth-grade ski trip, conversation hearts were a reminder of the absence of romance, the admirers who never emerged, the flirty conversations that never happened. Now I finally had Neal, a flesh-and-blood boyfriend, and I wanted my Valentine’s Day, dammit. Nothing would better put a nail in the coffin of my past loneliness than a boyfriend-sponsored sugar-coated holiday. When February rolled around, I thought I would spare us both my disappointment.

  “I know you don’t believe in Valentine’s Day,” I started off.

  “I’m Jewish,” he said. “We don’t observe it.”

  “Well, all I’m going to say is I know you think it’s a Hallmark holiday and all, but can’t you just use it as a great excuse to show me you care about me?” I was way out on a limb. Neal’s emotional repertoire did not include gestures of affection. “Actually,” I told him, “Let me put it this way. Do something for me on Valentine’s Day. Candy. Flowers. Lingerie. Candy. Anything. It can be a cliché. I don’t have to like it. You don’t have to enjoy it. It will just make everything a whole lot easier for both of us.”

  Neal rolled his eyes. I could tell he thought I was a victim of society.

  Meanwhile, I wanted Neal to be given things, by me, by anyone, because I thought he deserved more love and affection than he had gotten as a kid. I bought white paper and folded it into a card. On the front I wrote in teacherly cursive, “This is not a valentine.” Above the words I pasted a tiny fluorescent pink heart. The little heart opened to say, “Be mine anyway.” I left the inside completely blank.

  Neal and I rented a movie and ordered in food. He gave me a box of chocolates, dutifully. I gave him the not-valentine.

  “You weren’t supposed to do this,” he said.

  “I know, but it’s not a valentine, see?” I was proud of my surreal workaround. Neal acquiesced. It was okay, then, my secret planning of the perfect valentine that evaded his anti-Hallmark notions. I felt nominal justice for my former love-starved self, eating the requisite chocolates from their requisite heart-shaped box. And the valentine that I made for him stayed on his desk, where weeks of junk mail piled up and overflowed. It stayed there—not thrown away, but not saved. It stayed there, invisible to Neal, and every time I saw it, I felt a piece of myself flutter out into the air, up and up, and away and lost.

  Lipo

  Neal and I didn’t arrange to be together when college ended. We didn’t break up or make any decisions, we just made our separate plans. I moved to Prague to teach English. I sat in a bar with a friend named Ben in early fall. He looked at my expat cheer and said, “Brace yourself for winter.” Ben was right. It was a grim winter. I lived out in the suburbs, in an area of Socialist housing where one tall cement building after another stretched as far as the eye could see. The walk home from the subway was bleak. Most of it formed a wind tunnel that left me breathless as I struggled to pull open the door to Dum Ucitelu (my building was called Teachers’ House). As it happened, I didn’t like teaching English. At night I struggled over the next day’s lesson plans, nauseated by the thought of standing in front of teenage kids, pretending to know what I was doing. I took a hippie approach, bringing in silly songs like “Free to Be You and Me” and sending the kids out into the center of town to collect data from English-speaking tourists. Even so, the responsibility of teaching tortured me.

  In a candy store in the old town square I discovered Lipo. The name, contrary to logical inference, had nothing to do with the treatment that eating it made necessary for your thighs. It actually stood for LIberecké POzivatiny, which pretty much means “food/confectionery from the town of Liberec.” Lipo looked like engorged Smarties, rounder and a bit softer, essentially yet another mutation of sugar pellets. What initially attracted me to Lipo was the packaging. On the front of the little plastic bag was a drawing of an orange dog. It was a rear view, and the dog was looking coyly over his shoulder, back at the candy-eater. The dog’s tail was raised high, and, unbelievably, there was a dot immediately beneath it—the dog’s slightly exaggerated anus. The evident implication was that the candy was dog shit. I loved to think of the worker who was given the task of designing the packaging for Lipo and ascribed this fate to the innocent candy. It was a simple and elegant demonstration of socialism at work. In admiration, I bought at least five packs of Lipo every day.

  I had to buy five. When I moved to Prague, it was not my goal to learn the language. Czech was not only difficult; it was exclusively spoken in a single, small republic. I saw no need to learn any more than was necessary to get by. I learned the basics, however, like how to ask for Lipo in stores. I wanted four packs. But the Czech word for four was ctyri. And it was even harder to say than it was to spell. Five was pet. So five packs it was.

  I was often sick in Prague. Maybe it was the candy. I was old enough to have outgrown the thoughtless binge candy eating of my youth. Now, when I binged, I thought about it. I also tried to exhibit more control. It was embarrassing to eat the way I had. As my candy consumption fluctuated, my relationship with candy became more conflicted. I loved it—at least for the first few bites—but then I couldn’t stop. It was bad for me, but I wasn’t overweight, just unhappy with my body in the same old way that all of my friends seemed to be. Sometimes when I ate candy it was delightful; sometimes it was just depressing.

  Candy could be a downer, but that wasn’t my only problem. I could not bring myself to stomach teaching. Almost every day I lacked energy, enthusiasm, or even the ability to fake either one. It wasn’t that I was homesick; I had no idea what was wrong. I went out to a bar with some of my older students, and one of them looked up a word in her Czech-English dictionary. “You’re ‘self-conscious,’” she announced. I felt ashamed and lost. I wanted to quit, but I had never changed my course before. School, summer jobs, college—I had always done what was expected of me. But those months of ingesting the subversive Lipo fueled me with a will to control my own destiny. Finally, near the end of the second term, I lied to my school and told them that a relative was ill and that I had to return home. Maybe they believed me, maybe they didn’t. I felt terrible doing it, but I wasn’t myself. Maybe I missed Neal. Maybe I had taken the wrong job. Maybe I was just enduring post-collegiate strife.

  I didn’t realize how unhappy I had been until I came home to New York City. Then I remembered what it felt like to wake up, stretch, and look forward to the day ahead. Neal and I, through letters, had decided to move in together. The return to my mother’s apartment to job-hunt and find an apartment with Neal was more of a relief than I could have imagined. I knew then that it was worth the lie to the school where I had taught. There was a lightness in daily life that I had forgotten entirely.

  Frosting

  Not long after returning from Prague, I was at a wedding where the cake had the very best variety of frosting. A luxurious white fondant, creamy and sweet, with the faintest shell on the outside. The woman next to me ate her cake right up to the edge of her frosting but left it all there, intact. I stared at it for a while. I tried to let it go. Finally I couldn’t help myself. “Can I have your frosting?” I asked like a three-year-old.

  “Sure,” she said. “You like that? It’s too sweet for me. I like savory.”

  Savory. Ah, yes. I’ve heard this one before. Choose your team: sweet or savory. And if it’s savory, we’re wasting our time. If you’re savory you’ll never understand. Please exit through the door on your left.

  Now, ice cream is universal. It has a solid reputation as a decadent dessert. It’s sweet and fattening, but popular. Candy consumption may be a bit more covert, but it’s out there, in every store and movie theater. Happens all the time. Perhaps my candy consumption is extreme, but it transpires in a relatively socially acceptable manner. I am not visibly aberrant. But frosting is a different matter.

  The desirability of frosting may be the ideal litmus test for the true sugar addict.
What I want to consume is very different from what I actually eat. Believe me, if I did not exert enormous self-restraint on a daily basis, things would go differently in the baking aisle of the grocery store. Oh, the store-bought frosting that I would buy. Oh, how I would eat it at every opportunity. I can see myself now, lifting delicate spoonfuls out of those round plastic tubs. Vanilla. Lemon. Cream cheese.

  How will I ever know what a life of uninhibited consumption would be like? What if, instead of exercising willpower every single time I enter a grocery store, I just went for it? I never do. Instead, I fill my cart with vegetables that may or may not get consumed, cereal, yogurt, cheese, and often a single indulgence (such as the aforementioned ice cream).

  Frosting represents all the temptation I’ve left to languish on the shelf, day after day, week after week, year after year. If only my body knew about everything I didn’t eat. If only I could get credit for it. Where is the reward for all that frosting, inevitably wasted on cakes instead of properly enjoyed from spoon to mouth? What do I get for resisting the bags of butterscotch or white chocolate chips? The brownie mix, the tubes of decorative icing? And in other aisles, the miles of never-purchased cookies, the enormous Cadbury bars, and the lifetime supplies of caramel topping? I want all of it, always. I never buy any of it. And what’s my reward? Alas. Nothing.

  Willpower is not black and white. I exercise willpower on every trip to the grocery store, but no checkout person watching my selections bump down the conveyor belt would believe it. What I hope for, one day, is to be free of the need for willpower. I didn’t need willpower to avoid heroin. I had no natural desire for it. I didn’t need willpower to avoid meat. I ate it when I wanted, in whatever quantity I desired. Willpower is a denial of desire. It can be partial (“I’m not having dessert today”) or absolute (“I’m not having dessert ever”), but it is always self-denial. I don’t want to curb desire. I want either to indulge it or to eradicate it.

  I wish I’d indulged the frosting fantasy as a girl. Rather, I’ve only purchased pre-made frosting twice, ever. A remarkable show of control, but it would be wrong to go to my grave like this. On the other hand, I would like to live to a ripe old age, which probably means that this foolish self-torture must go on. There is only one clear solution. I’m going to establish an assisted-living residence called Home Sweet Home, where we’ll ice our frosting and top our toppings. Children will look longingly through the windows as we play Jelly Belly bingo. We’ll provide custom candy bouquets to our residents. We hope you’ll join us for the nightly ice-cream social. And the onsite dentist will provide daily plaque removal. We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams. Willy Wonka, eat your heart out.

  The Assortment, Revisited

  Neal and I set up a bite-size apartment in Manhattan’s Murray Hill. It was a miracle that the bed fit in the bedroom. He taught guitar, and I found a job as an entry-level assistant. We earned just enough to pay rent. We had been there for almost a year when Lucy called me. We hadn’t talked often since high school, but she was phoning to tell me that one of her closest friends, a woman who had gone to school with us, was missing. It was Laura, at whose basement birthday party I had first become self-conscious about my unwavering focus on candy.

  The candy tones of that night are forever singed in my memory. I was an insecure seventh grader. My teeth were crooked, but not yet mature enough for braces. My hair was better than it would ever be, enjoying a final year of being long and wavy before it went to frizz, but I didn’t know that. What I knew was bad enough: I had a squawky voice and bug eyes. I was not tall, blond, or properly attired. Knickers were riding an appropriately brief wave of popularity, but my mother had refused to buy me a pair. After opening presents that night, we went to a knickers-dominated dance where I didn’t dance, only stood stiffly in the corner holding one wrist with the other hand so as to have something to do with my hands. There were rumors that the seventh-grade boys had beer in the courtyard; only the girls who apparently had something to say to boys went out to investigate. I lay low, harboring no hopes of actually having fun. I preferred to set achievable goals: my aim was to be perceived as a person who was having fun. Our birthday party crowd stuck together until it was time to head back to Laura’s basement in Bethesda. There we sucked in helium and sang in high voices. We stayed up late, trading bracelets and loyalties. Balancing with invisible desperation on whatever footholds I thought I had achieved, I was afraid that the winds of friendship would shift at any moment and I would plummet, rejected and alone. But through the insecurity I also almost believed that it would all pass, that I would blossom into a beautiful, smart, popular girl, that we all would, and that this night would be buried among many fun, miserable pre-teen parties.

  A few days after telling me of Laura’s disappearance, Lucy called again. In that same house in suburban Maryland, she told me, a horrifying event had taken place. Upstairs from where our circle of sleeping bags had been, Laura, the birthday girl, who had just graduated from Harvard, was murdered while she slept in her childhood bed.

  In my head the two events continue to happen, at the same time. From my perspective on the middle floor of the split-level house, I see down into the rec room, where we are seventh graders, giggling and passing around a box of assorted candy. At the same time I see up into Laura’s bedroom, the dark shape of an intruder heading in toward her. The innocent memory battles the dark, sad outcome, as if both truths can’t exist, and it feels like the darkness had to be there at the time, that we knew in some way that our innocence would be ruined. While we sampled candy stew, and listened to horrid LPs, we had a sense, not in our minds but in our souls, that life would not be simple, that tragedies of varying degrees would befall us as individuals and as a group. Parents would divorce, planes would crash, hearts would break, our health and happiness would fall away in pieces. And much as we tried, we could not bring enough sweetness into our world to prevent the worst from happening.

  White Chocolate Breakup

  My relationship with Neal, having endured my Eastern European hiatus, was petering out, but we didn’t know it yet. I took my job very seriously, and my boss, Sam, took the term “full-time” literally. When I wasn’t on the phone with Sam, who worked from exotic vacation spots around the country, I went to industry events. I was reserved at work, but I had a strange, increasing feeling that I wanted to meet people and understand what they did. I later identified this feeling as the first glimmerings of ambition.

  Neal was a hard-core musician: he claimed that his skill level was such that if he did not practice for at least six hours every day, his ability would decline. He stayed home, teaching lessons, fending off the landlady’s noise complaints, and cooking himself discount chicken. We were probably too young for cohabitation. We were more like roommates. We didn’t own a vacuum cleaner. While we spoke to each other on the phone most days, I don’t remember ever coordinating grocery shopping or evening activities. After we broke up, Neal would tell me that we had had a serious cockroach problem that he successfully hid from me.

  Pete was Neal’s former roommate. It wasn’t strange that I went to visit Pete and his family in Wisconsin for a week without Neal. In fact, Neal and I had never taken a vacation together. What money he did earn he spent on musical equipment and on his half of the rent. Besides, travel cut into practice time. By the time I went to Wisconsin, I had been dating Neal for so long that it seemed perfectly normal to me that we never took trips, much less went out to dinner or to the movies. I did those things with my friends instead.

  Pete’s place in Door County was on a flat, clear lake. Every day we ran down to the water and Pete plunged straight into it, yelling, “I’m the fastest swimmer in the lake.” He was the only swimmer in the lake. On the second night Pete took me to the Confectionery. It was a candy Shangri-la—an enormous, octagonal store with every imaginable species of candy. I focused on white chocolate breakup: When you took a bite, the flavor wasn’t immediately apparent. It emer
ged slowly, sweeter than brown chocolate and not as rich. Of course, white chocolate isn’t officially chocolate, since it is made with cocoa butter, not cocoa beans. But who am I to quibble? The full, wholesome flavor went well with the clear Wisconsin air. It felt healthy and revitalizing. I also stocked up on Pixy Stix and other miscellany. But by the next day my whole stash was gone. Pete’s car was a stick shift, which I couldn’t drive. I wasn’t about to demand that we make a daily trip to the Confectionery. It didn’t seem right. But everytime we went to a bar, or out to dinner, Pete knew enough to swing by.

  The night before my birthday, another friend of ours was meant to arrive. After dinner, Pete and I set up a cribbage board at the picnic table near the driveway and decided to play until her car rounded the corner. The evening was so quiet and still that we couldn’t feel the temperature of the air around us. There were no bugs out, only the faint sound of crickets. All this in combination with a well-positioned outdoor light made the picnic table feel like a stage set. I ate white chocolate, Pete drank beer, and we dealt game after game. Our friend was late. We kept on. The phone rang. She was an hour away. Finally, close to midnight, the high beams of our friend’s parents’ station wagon announced her arrival.