Free L.A.WOMAN by Eve Babitz

Savers.
    â€œYou mean your father really has some candy?” Helen asked. “God do I need some.”
    I was about thirteen and Helen was babysitting for us that night, having come down from San Francisco to scratch our backs. (Helen was the gossamer wings of angel kisses when it came to erotic back rubs for her nieces since we were five.)
    I returned with the Life Savers.
    â€œThis isn’t candy!” Helen burst out.
    â€œIt isn’t?” I asked. All my life adults had been trying to convince me Life Savers were candy, and although I myself didn’t think so and was sure only chocolate was even remotely candy, I had never met an adult until Aunt Helen that day who refused to even look at a Life Saver as though it were candy.
    â€œNo,” Helen went on, “doesn’t your father have any chocolate? I want chocolate. I’ve got to have chocolate. Where does your mother keep the chocolate?”
    â€œWe don’t have any chocolate,” I meekly confessed.
    â€œYou must have some chocolate!”
    â€œBut we don’t,” I said.
    â€œLet’s look,” Helen decided, “where do they usually keep it?”
    â€œThey usually hide it,” I said. “But I always find it. And when I do, I eat every last one.”
    â€œOh,” Helen said.
    â€œI can’t help it,” I said. “I love chocolate.”
    â€œLet’s look anyway,” Helen said.
    I knew, however, that there wasn’t any chocolate in the bottom of my father’s socks drawer, the box where my mother kept her chinchilla stole (which, she always said, she got “the hard way—by buying it myself”), the toolbox, the space behind the bookshelf at the foot of the stairs, inside the fireplace, upstairs underneath the paperbacks where I discovered a book by Jean-Paul Sartre called Intimacy which was actually so dirty it made me suddenly realize what they meant by orgasm one day when I was twelve, and that orgasms were why adults were so different from normal people was at once abundantly obvious. Suddenly adults became much more complicated than the fools I imagined they were.
    Helen and I, however, turned my parents’ house upsidedown looking for a single M&M but there wasn’t one because I had eaten the last one two hours before.
    â€œThe only kind of chocolate we have at all is that Mexican.”
    â€œWhere!” Helen suddenly lit up.
    In my mother’s cooking shelves was always this package of Mexican chocolate which if you chipped it off and went to extravagant lengths to doctor it up in a hot chocolate kind of way still didn’t taste worth a red cent.
    When Helen ate a chip off it, her face despaired.
    â€œLet’s walk to the store and get M&Ms,” she said.
    â€œThe stores are all closed, it’s eight P.M .,” I said.
    â€œOhhhhhhhh.” Helen at last nearly wept.
    The next morning Helen went back to San Francisco but before she left she confronted Mort, her brother.
    â€œMort, you ought to have some candy here, what kind of a place is this!” she demanded.
    â€œAren’t there any Life Savers in the—”
    â€œThat isn’t candy!”
    â€œWell, but—”
    â€œChocolate, I mean chocolate,” Helen demanded. “Sophie darling, this morning before I go back to San Francisco, I’ll take you to See’s.”
    â€œSee’s!” I cried, See’s Candy being L.A.’s most luscious chocolate.
    â€œYes, darling,” she said, looking toward me with a smile. I was a niece after her own heart and not, like my sister, some vapid child with wispy tastes who you’d expect springing from her brother’s loins since his tastes were so peppermint too.
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    (“. . . always buy those plums . . . ,” she’d said.)
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    In those days, when I was only thirteen and my parents were both in their early forties, my