Free Candy and Me by Hilary Liftin Page B

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.
    “This calls for a midnight swim,” Pete announced. We ran down to the lake, stripped, and jumped into the water. I grabbed an inner tube and climbed into it. As I floated there, I looked up at the sky. It was mid-August and the Perseid meteor shower was on fine display. I floated until my fingers were raisins.
     
    The next night, I called Neal.
    “Today is my birthday,” I told him.
    “Right,” he said. “Happy birthday.”

Devil’s Candy

    Y ou try to end things with candy. You tell candy it is over, that candy is too much to handle, that you love candy, but you just can’t go on like this. You want candy out of your life, for good. But candy keeps coming back. Candy knows when you are weak, tracks you down at parties, at work, in moments of boredom or celebration. Candy promises to be good, not to come on too strong, to give you some privacy. But sooner or later candy is back to its old ways, and you feel foolish, but you love candy and can’t seem to let it go.

Fruit

    T here was no fanfare when Neal and I broke up. I came home one day and he said, “I don’t think we should live together next year.”
    “Okay,” I said. “I have to be someplace in half an hour.” After four years, our relationship had run its course. As when I eat a large bag of Hugs, I had gone way past my breaking point without realizing until the bag was empty. Neal argued half-heartedly that moving out didn’t mean we had to break up, but I insisted that it did. I found a roommate in Chelsea. He moved to Brooklyn. We became people who had lunch together. I started seeing the guy I’d kissed once while we were taking “time off.” Neal slept with a woman who didn’t inspire jealousy. At a crappy diner on Union Square I said, “I just want to tell you that I’m glad we spent those years together. It was worth it. I like you and it’s good that we’re friends.”
    He said,” Man, I can’t believe you’re making me have a relationship talk.”
    While I was moving on, I figured it was about time I got around to liking fruit. Rumor had it that fruit wasn’t so bad. It was certainly the prettiest food, and it had a reputation for being sweet. The concept of “nature’s candy,” was alluring. Scientists say that we crave sweetness because our ancestors often had to deal with caloric shortages. They evolved to desire, consume, and store as many calories as were available. When I learned this, I realized just how highly evolved I was. I had gone beyond primate fruit craving to crave man-made, tastier products. One of the results of this evolution was that my brain, like everyone else’s, released endorphins when I ate a lot of sugar. Endorphins made me feel good. Ignoring the inevitable crash, sugar was nature’s happy pill. But much as I took pride in my sugar consumption, it did occur to me that the greatest sign of evolution was the ability to make intelligent decisions despite physical desires. I wanted my cravings to be under control. Maybe those endorphins were my nicotine, and maybe eating fruit would be the Patch!
     
    My breakup gave me a new lease on life. Besides, I had a responsibility to society. Most people tasted fruit when they were so young that it was a forgotten breakthrough. Fruit was something they’d always eaten. As a rare breed—the late-blooming adult fruit taster—I could savor each experience. I had never tasted even the most basic of fruits. I hadn’t had a