Candy Corn

Tisha grew up in a house that was not her own. She lived with her aunt and younger cousin in a little broken-down cottage situated on the outskirts of suburbia. She was more fortunate than most – she had oval-shaped glasses that kept her from getting migraines and she lived in a neighborhood where it was not uncommon to have dark skin. Although she recognized herself as such, Tisha found little joy in anything aside from stories of her mother and the sweets Auntie brought home after she cashed her paycheck each month.

Tisha knew little about her mother aside from the fact that she shared Tisha’s October birthday, was porcelain-skinned like Auntie, and had ravenous cravings for candy corn while she was pregnant. “That’s why you love sweets so much, T,” Auntie would say over and over again, the same small smile playing across her lips.

For some reason Auntie would never speak about Tisha’s mother outside of her pregnancy. Perhaps this was an effort to keep Tisha from asking about her father, from whom she had inherited her dark skin. But Tisha didn’t care to know anything about him. From what she could tell, her father had chosen to leave her. Her mother hadn’t even had the opportunity to make such a choice.

So Tisha clung to the image of her blue-eyed, angel-haired mother rubbing her large tummy and stuffy honey-flavored candies into her mouth as she watched brown leaves falling from the trees.

 

It was true that Tisha had a sweet tooth. After she had returned from a trip to the dentist with a cavity and warnings of more to follow even at the tender age of seven, Auntie had insisted that she cut back. She stopped bringing any sort of junk food home for a few months. Instead, she brought home carrot chips and fresh fruit. As if those were reasonable substitutes. But soon, Randy, Tisha’s younger cousin, began to complain that he was not the one who had gotten a cavity – why should he have to give up his chocolate milk? And so the sweets slowly but surely returned to the little house.

Auntie still insisted on inspecting Tisha’s tongue each night, to make sure the unnatural flavors hadn’t taken up a permanent residence in her mouth, so Tisha made sure to brush her teeth well after each offense. These tooth-brushing sessions began to grow in number as Tisha consumed more and more candy. Soon, brushing her teeth, feeling the foam lather her tongue, became almost as pleasurable as indulging in candy, as feeling the tiny canker sores that lined up on the tip of that tongue.

It wasn’t just the sensation of brushing her teeth that Tisha liked; it was the routine, the sureness that each morning when she woke up and each evening before she went to sleep, she would have two full minutes of planned cleaning at the very least. There was comfort in the dependable nature of personal hygiene.

Tisha would eat any sweet she could get her hands on, but it was natural that she should love candy corn the best. Auntie would only buy it in October – ”it’s a Halloween treat, not an everyday treat,” she would say – and it was a harbinger of Tisha’s upcoming birthday, as well as her favorite holiday. What’s not to love, Tisha thought, about a night that encourages children to gorge themselves with sweets?

She had an old photograph of her mother at age twelve, wearing a cloth headband and bellbottom jeans, a hint of her thin white stomach peeking through the Halloween costume. In the photo, her mother’s first two fingers formed a peace sign and she was biting her lip. Once, Tisha asked Auntie if she still had this costume in storage, and Auntie pretended not to know what Tisha was talking about.

For Tisha’s eleventh Halloween, however, Auntie encouraged Tisha’s obsession and made her a candy corn costume out of felt and cotton. Although it was a kind gesture, Tisha hated the costume. Auntie had made a mistake and placed the orange, rather than the yellow felt, on the bottom.

Tisha posed stiffly for photographs that year; as her aunt clicked frame after frame, Tisha bit her lip so hard that it started bleeding. She lied to her aunt afterwards, and told her that she would be joining some friends from the neighborhood for trick-or-treating. “Only babies bring their parents with them,” Tisha said. Auntie was so flattered that Tisha had inadvertently called her a “parent,” and later so preoccupied with Randy, who still recognized the word “baby” as the supreme insult, that she let Tisha go without much more questioning.

Tisha left the house with a rather forced bravado, but as soon as Auntie closed the door behind her, Tisha tore off her costume and threw it in the trash bins in the front yard. Feeling considerably more cheerful in her makeshift hippie costume, Tisha ventured out into the night with her empty pillowcase.

When she returned home that night, pillowcase stuffed with candy, headband torn off and sweatshirt hastily thrown over her rainbow-colored top, her aunt asked her where her costume had gone. “Some of the bigger kids, they took it from me,” Tisha replied after only the slightest pause. Auntie pursed her lips, but didn’t say anything. The neighborhood was notoriously rough around the edges, but Tisha didn’t seem hurt. No harm done.

Tisha had successfully avoided hurting her aunt’s feelings, or so she’d thought. A few years later, Randy wanted to be a candy corn for Halloween, “just like T-T,” and when Tisha watched Auntie put the costume over him, she saw that the bottom was still orange. There were even a few brown spots staining the felt. Maybe the trash bins in her front yard hadn’t been the cleverest place to dispose of the costume.

 

As the years went by, Tisha began receiving a small amount of pocket money each month, which meant that she was able to buy her very own bags of candy corn. She became fascinated with the way each color tasted slightly different, and so she used her often freshly-brushed teeth to separate the colors into piles before eating each piece individually.

It felt good to put each color where it belonged. Sometimes Tisha wondered how the yellow pieces, large and clumsily molded to the bottom of the candy, felt being attached to other pieces that were not of its own kind. She thought that putting the yellow pieces together must give them a sense of relief, a sense of camaraderie.

Tisha was fourteen when, while indulging herself in her little separation ritual, she had an overwhelming urge to brush her teeth. So she left the piles of candy corn sitting on the makeshift desk in her room. As she looked in the mirror, she tried to find a reflection of her mother. Instead she saw curly hair, brown eyes, and unattractive black birthmark.

When she returned, she saw Randy pushing and pulling the different pieces into a swirl of fall colors with his sticky hand. All the work she had done, all the little pieces she had created, sat there ruined before her eyes. She felt a surge of anger towards her younger cousin such that she had never allowed herself to feel before.

“What the hell are you doing?” Tisha shouted. Randy turned towards her, blue eyes already beginning to water. “I said, what the hell are you doing?” Tisha couldn’t stand that the wet salt pouring from Randy’s checks was getting all over her already ruined piles of sweets. She stomped over to the desk and pulled him away from it, purposefully using her fingernails to dig into his pale skin. Randy’s screams were like sirens, pitch rising and falling, but almost no pauses separating them.

That’s when Auntie arrived. “Tisha!” she exclaimed. “Let go of him!” Auntie pulled Randy away from Tisha and inspected the scratches on his arms. She looked from Randy, whose tears she was trying in vain to wipe away, to Tisha. There was an inexplicable look of fear in Auntie’s eyes. “What’s gotten into you? You should know better!”

But Tisha didn’t know better. While her aunt admonished her, she stared at her candy corns, unblinking, wondering why, after all that, she couldn’t even have control over this.