Last week, I had some time to kill before an appointment, so I stopped at a newsstand and bought a paper. I have a special fondness for that particular newsstand, which is set into the side of a slope of Murray Hill and occupied most days by the vendor’s entire little family: husband, wife, and grade-school-age daughter, all crammed companionably into a five-by-three-foot space with a Tupperware of snacks and some math homework. It puts me in mind of the earthen cave the Ingallses lived in, in either Little House on the Prairie or Little House on Plum Creek — I think it’s whichever book also had that David Lynchian fever-and-ague sequence where everyone’s shivering across the floor to the water bucket on their hands and knees. I know for sure that the dugout house sounded like a pretty neato way to live…just another item in a long list of neato concepts from the Little House books that I begged my parents to let me try, including but not limited to calling them “Ma” and “Pa” (my mother went along, my dad would have none of it); falling into a snowbank and chilling in an air pocket for a couple of days; and pouring maple syrup on snow to make frozen candy. (Which did not work. Damn you, thin and unfreezy Camp’s syrup; damn you, Ma, for refusing to buy a nice thick fakey syrup like Mrs. Butterworth’s.)

So I’d already returned to a Proustian place at the newsstand, that strange land where a parent asks what you’re doing, or what you think you’re doing, and you explain very reasonably that you don’t “think” you’re doing anything, you’re quite obviously making candy out of maple syrup, at which time you are told not to be a wisenheimer and then asked why you are making candy out of maple syrup, which is also kind of a stupid question, in your opinion, but you answer (as affectlessly as possible, so as not to be accused of the giving of lip) that you read it in a book, and this answer is pretty much the end of the discussion as far as you’re concerned, but no, you are then asked whether the book in question also advised you to ask permission before using half a bottle of syrup, or did the book just think the family could put tomato paste on their Sunday pancakes for a nice change of pace, and you think to yourself that if anyone is a wisenheimer in this backyard right now, it is not you, so you confine yourself to remarking that there’s another whole bottle in the cabinet, and aren’t you always being told to play outside?

There is a silence. The parent regards you with exasperation, because while you have a point, it is not the point, and what she really wants to know — not what you are doing, which, unfortunately, she can see, but why a nine-year-old who reads a lot is so often found doing something obdurately weird in the backyard on a Saturday afternoon — she cannot ask you until you get older. So she sighs and orders you to ask next time and slams the door, and you whisper to yourself, “It’s not even working, so,” but she’s being mean so you don’t ask for help, you just keep pouring, hopefully, and fifteen minutes later the parent comes out and not-unkindly plops a hat onto your head, and says she’s sure you have a plan, with the book and whatnot, but maybe you could try moving some of the snow to the freezer inside, just to speed things along. Or is that cheating? Well, you don’t see any harm in trying it, just to see, of course. She hands you a cookie sheet, and the two of you scoop snow onto it and pour some designs and dash into the house all “coming through!” And it works, sort of. A few hours later, you have blobby, icy pieces of syrup candy, and it’s not what you envisioned, but at least you tried.

I don’t know why it meant so much to me, getting swirls of candy out of syrup and snow. Candy meant more to me back then, I guess, just generally, and a significant portion of my allowance got spent on it — now, although I’ll eat it if it’s there, I don’t tend to buy it or crave it, but back then, it figured heavily, and I have strong associations with certain brands of candy. Standing at the newsstand, waiting for change, my eye fell on a package of Spree. Spree! I probably haven’t had a Spree in twenty years, and even then, I didn’t like them much, but Red ate them all the time, every day, and she didn’t just eat them; she announced them. She would appear in a doorway, holding the tube aloft like a torch, and shout, “Spreeeeeeee!” and she would keep doing it until you aloha-ed her back with a “Spreeeeeeee!” of your own. It served as a warning, also: “Spreeeeeeee!” meant we had sixty seconds to clear the lounge before Red and Pin K started winging Sprees at each other, trying to catch them in their mouths, and Troop would get Spreed in the head while trying to write up a bio lab and she would lose it on them. Better to just sit in the hall…unless a candy fight breaks out because Tray comes in to say hi and Pin K clips her in the ear by mistake, at which time I start laughing and Tray goes, “Oh, I see,” and stomps out, and Troop’s all, “Every time. Nice one, you guys,” and Pin K’s all, “Whatever, she’s a sophomore,” and J Dub’s all, “‘Whatever’ whatever, she’s an all-county defender,” and then we hear footsteps pounding down the hall from the sophomore lounge and J Dub is like, “Awwwww shit,” and she’s scrambling towards her backpack to grab the box of Tic-Tacs one of us always has when Tray appears in the doorway with a handful of candy corn, drops to her knees, and starts strafing us at knee level while Cay provides covering fire with Starlight Mints, piff, pock, bink, Troop is purple with rage all “OH, NICE ONE, YOU GUYS” and candy is pinging off the walls and the windows and then it’s quiet except for the sound of Pin K unwrapping a Starlight Mint.

“Don’t do it, Pin, those are nasty.”
“They’re mints, how bad could they b– [spaff]. Ew.”
“Told you.”
“Nice one, you guys. Reeeeeeally nice one.”
“They couldn’t have thrown some Kraft caramels?”
“Kraft caaaaaaaaaaramels. I love those things!”
“We need to get some of those things, does anyone have a free next period?”
“J Dub has a free.”
“…Where is J Dub?”

It is soon evident from the faint squawking and rat-a-tat-tatting coming from down the hall that J Dub has gone all Mad Anthony Wayne on the sophomore lounge. …Oh, wait, now she’s Dopplering back towards us.

“Oh, shit.”
“You guys. Nice one.”
“War is hell, Troop, now shut up and unwrap some Smarties.”

The Tenth-Grade Airborne Division is armed with not only Tray’s weaponized field-hockey wrists but also, for some reason, a fearsome glut of Necco hearts left over from Valentine’s Day, and is about to accomplish a decisive rout when Schmerks makes her appearance and demands the unconditional surrender of both sides. Schmerks is the school nurse, and compared to other authority figures is relatively tolerant of these sunspots of boredom and estrogen (and that we call her “Schmerks,” which, looking back on it, I think she knows about), but she and Red have a Hatfield/McCoy relationship whose origins remain obscure, and if someone else doesn’t leap in and take the blame for this donnybrook in the next ten seconds, Schmerks is going to sting Red with a detention, and based on the way Troop is angrily digging a Lifesaver fragment out of her ear, we cannot count on her to fall on the grenade. Finally, Pin K admits sweetly that she started it and she’s very sorry, and we get down to the business of cleaning up, which means eating the candies we like and building a small Starlight-Mint-and-Necco-heart ziggurat out of the rest.

Why do the candy moments stay so sharp? My eighth-grade graduation, the day Mr. S came home from the hospital, the first day of school in the grade I’d skipped into — I remember that stuff, but it’s the sort of “remembering” where you think you probably put it together from pictures you’ve seen instead of really recalling it. Meanwhile, I can reproduce an afternoon at the pool with Agent Weiss, lying on our semi-soaked towels on the hot crunchy concrete, each of us enjoying a well-earned Ring Pop, in almost forensic detail, or discovering that Sholly shared my irrational, lonely love for Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews. “Oh my God I LOVE THOSE!” “Oh my God YOU DO?! Do you WANT ONE OF MINE?!” “TOTALLY!” Or when Whatchamacallits first came out (…yeah, I “actually remember that” — sigh), and JT got to try them before any of us did, and we all circled around her on the playground like reporters on the courthouse steps, yelling questions. About a candy bar! It was so important to us to know about the Whatchamacallit. So important. And I still remember what she said, too. “Not as good as Twix,” she said. And we analyzed that, Red and Pip and I. We had a discussion, on the swings, about how Red thought it wasn’t that good, then, because Twix aren’t that good, and Pip said, well, but JT loves Twix the best of all the kinds of candy, so if it’s not as good as Twix, it’s still pretty good, maybe, and I said no, she used to love Twix best but she loves Chunky best now.

We knew these things about each other, who liked Bubble Yum and who liked Bubblicious, who ate cupcakes top first and who saved the top for last, who didn’t like chocolate (poor Pip…if there’s any “difference” other kids aren’t going to understand, it’s that one. “I just don’t, okay?” “But…why not, again?”).

I haven’t talked to Supersize in a while, but every time I see a Three Musketeers, I think of her, because we had a bag of the minis in our room one time, and the vacuum seal on those bad boys is formidable anyway but I think she’d twonked her hand during practice or something as well, and she just could not seem to get one open, and she pulled and yanked and tore at it with her teeth, and I could have just offered to open a couple for her but clearly this was about to get good, so I just sat there, and Supersize got up, marched into the bedroom, came out with a Norton under her arm, put the Three Musketeers mini on the windowseat, and just started whaling on it with the Norton, like, full-wind-up boof boof boof boof. Not a frail lady, Supersize. Played ice hockey on boys’ teams. She wafered that thing but good. Then she called it a fucker, threw it victoriously in the trash, took another one out of the bag and handed it to me, and asked would I mind. I didn’t. I still don’t, remembering that cracks me up every time.

All these things went through my mind all Jacob’s Ladder, and then I took my change and went to a Starbucks and did the crossword.

January 16, 2006

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