Candy and Me by Hilary Liftin Page B

door closed heavily. I wanted nothing more to do with him.
     
    In the office the next week, Shauna approached me. “Is something wrong?” she asked.
    I looked at her. I had been avoiding humans since Luke had dropped the bomb of his new girlfriend’s identity. In my fraught state, I felt extremely vulnerable. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can be friends with you anymore.”
    “Would you like to take a walk?” she asked.
    “Okay.”
    We headed out to the Hudson, where the melting snow was deep and wet. We were both wearing inappropriate footwear, but I, at least, was numb. On our walk I explained to Shauna that Luke had done something that I found so reprehensible that I couldn’t deal with having any friends in common with him.
    “Hilary, just tell me what happened.”
    So I told her, and she said, “That’s a horrible thing to do. I won’t speak to him again.” And that was that.
     
    Shauna never said another word to Luke. Instead, she spent some amount of every day explaining to me that I was too good for him. “You sparkle,” she would say. “He is Beige, and his new girlfriend is Beigette. You are too fabulous for either of them. I’m glad they have each other.” Mutely appreciative, I turned to her for regular ego boosts as each day overwhelmed me.
    “You’re my savior,” I told her.
    “I think we should send Beige a thank-you note for fortifying our friendship.”
     
    I had nothing against my employee. I was civil to her, acknowledging the situation and expressing hope that it wouldn’t interfere with our work, but I looked through Luke when we passed in the halls. He was dead to me, or at least comatose. They ate lunch together. They talked in murmurs on the phone. They left work together. The only thing that was subtle about them was any effort to be subtle. I went through the motions of my job, but in the evenings I fell to the floor in a heap.
    “I don’t even want to date him,” I sobbed to a doctor friend. “What is wrong with me?” He recommended Xanax.

    Barely holding myself together, I couldn’t eat candy, or ice cream, or any other major food group for that matter. Much as I was willing to eat however much sugar it would take to break this darkness, the idea of sweets had no appeal. My candy battery was dead. This had never happened before. It had always been self-recharging. And now, in the middle of the storm, there was no candy-light to guide me. More than once I stood in front of the drugstore candy counter contemplating a jump-start. Not even a tiny spark of desire. That’s when I knew I was in a seriously bad way. Every morning I bought a Power Bar and took pains to nibble on it, without hunger, as the day passed. “You are disappearing,” Shauna would say with a girly mix of concern and flattery. We both knew it wouldn’t last, and that I should probably appreciate it while I could. I went to the gym and pretended I was in Rocky , or an Ashley Judd movie, where I was building up my strength to take on the adversary. In this case my adversary just happened to take the seemingly harmless form of the back of Luke’s head, and the fight was seeing it every day.
    I wasn’t myself, but I knew it was temporary. After some period of time, my employee told me that she had found another job. I congratulated her and hoped it was an excellent opportunity. On her last day, a colleague came up to us to bid her farewell. He asked her how she felt about saying goodbye.
    “It’s bittersweet,” she said.
    “Well then, I’ll take sweet!” he said jovially.
    “I guess that leaves me with bitter,” I said. She and I made eye contact, and we laughed together.

    Whenever I eat candy I have some level of guilt. I know from reports that sugar is unhealthy. I could still stand to lose a few pounds. But on the Luke diet I dropped a couple pounds a week without even trying. After six weeks, when I looked in the mirror I couldn’t find any weight to lose. In two months I went