YOU ARE MY CANDY GIRL
“I want a quarter pound of nonpareils!” She was my grandmother’s age. Wore the same cat’s eyeglasses and navy polka-dot dress.
“Milk or dark?”
“Dark.”
I had never heard of nonpareils before I started working at John Wanamaker’s candy counter. They are quarter-sized circular chocolates sprinkled with tiny, white dots, popularly known as a boxed candy called Snowcaps. But ours were somehow better because they were sold by the pound and in a department store. I didn’t understand what the big deal was about nonpareils, though I did find its name intriguing. If these were nonpareils, what was a pareil?
That was a benefit of working in candy. Your knowledge of chocolates expanded. In addition to the nonpareils, I discovered milk or dark chocolate-covered marshmallows, pretzels, almonds, walnuts, and turtles (nuts and caramel), peanut clusters and orange peel. Before then I only knew about chocolate-covered raisins (known by its boxed version, Raisinettes) and peanuts (Goobers). You learned what your favorites were. Milk chocolate-covered pretzels became my favorite.
“Bag or box?” I froze, ready to grab one or the other.
“Bag.”
I grabbed a bag, dropped it on the electronic scale and set the ounces to zero. I slid open the cabinet door and grabbed a handful of nonpareils. The red numbers read .35.
“Not so much!”
Okay, okay! I can read. I pulled out two nonpareils. The numbers read .27.
“That’s enough!”
The old lady visited every Saturday. Wore the same outfit. Scolded me every time. Though I soon had a way with the scale and was able to grab a quarter or a half-pound with one handful, this woman jinxed me. I was off every time, encouraging her, “Not so much!” response.
§
The Barton’s counter in the Candy department represented a new era in merchandising, where companies paid for their own, small section of the store, as if they were concessions. Even though I didn’t think Barton’s tasted as good as the no-name brand we sold by the pound or the Russell Stover in boxes, Barton’s did have state-of-the-art refrigerated cases. The rest of the candy was displayed in old wooden cases with loosely fitted sliding doors. Once I noticed that the dark chocolate pretzels I was about to drop onto the scale right in front of a customer had tiny gnaw marks on them. I had to toss them when the customer wasn’t looking. It took me a long time to eat milk chocolate pretzels again.
“As a Barton’s Girl, you’ll have health insurance,” Walter told me. “Every year you’ll attend the company conference. You’ll learn what the latest candy trends are.” Walter yanked his pants up even higher, swiped a hand across the black, rigid bangs of his toupee.
I felt sorry for Walter. He had been brainwashed into thinking that a company conference on the latest chocolate trends would entice me. But if he wasn’t restocking candy counters in the tristate region, noticing whether dark chocolate turtles or milk chocolate-covered peanuts sold better, what kind of work could someone like Walter do? He and his hiked-up polyester pants and obvious rug. When I first met him, he looked like the kind of weirdo who reeked of the racetrack, beer or, even worse, perverted propositioning when nobody was looking. Thankfully, Walter turned out to be benign. He really did love what he was doing.
“There’s lots of opportunity for advancement. You can go from being behind the counter to a regional manager like me. Travel around the tristate region. All expenses paid. They give you a company car.”
Mary DeSantis, one of the women who worked full-time, asked me repeatedly if I was taking the job when we changed shifts. “It has great benefits,” she said, “much better than the store’s. You should consider it.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her there was no way in hell I wanted to be the Barton’s Girl, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings since she obviously thought the job represented a step up. For her it was. She had two kids in college.
Being the Barton’s Girl was just like Mary Kay. It was really a shitty job, trying to sell makeup to housewives at those stupid home parties, so they had to sweeten the deal with the reward of a pink Cadillac. Just like Walter, those women were brainwashed. Still, I bought some foundation at a Mary Kay party in my neighborhood because the woman, a mother of four, was trying to earn some extra money without leaving home. “I never did learn how to type,” she confessed, when writing up my order.
My mother did know how to type—she worked in the city as an executive secretary before getting married—and that’s what got her temp jobs all over Westchester County. Work got my mother out of her housedress and into blouses, skirts, and panty hose. She even bought herself the entire Mary Kay skincare line, plus makeup. Job wise, I could have easily followed in my mother’s footsteps. It was almost too easy. Clocking in at 92 words a minute, I was the fastest typist in my class, Ms. Levine’s favorite. She even made me the president of the Future Business Leaders of America because she said I was a natural leader. That club never held one meeting, though we were pictured in the yearbook in suits and blouses, sitting on desks with Ms. Levine. In my senior year, I met my counselor for the second time (the first being when I was a freshman), and she recommended that I major in business. “We need more women in business,” she said, “and I don’t mean as secretaries.” I felt like I was joining the cause.
I believed these women who had believed in me, yet barely knew me, because I didn’t know what else to do. So, I applied to the nearby commuter college as a business major. My parents, meanwhile, had never told me what to do, what to consider, what to major in. They never asked if I preferred English over Math (I did) or if I considered being a teacher or a nurse (I had), the traditional route for many of my college-bound classmates. My mother would have been happy no matter what I chose, but I noticed a slight sense of awe when I told her I’d be majoring in business. “Aunt Sally was good at the books,” she said, as if there were a bookkeeping gene.
§
Department stores, like other large organizations, have their hierarchies. Once you worked in one you learned right away who stood at the top of the primarily female-dominated work force: Cosmetics.
These were the store’s beautiful people, some of them so pretty and perfectly made up, I sometimes stared, trying to figure out if they were born that way or were simply masters of color and contouring. Some had the cheekbones and bodies of models, with bird-like legs that peeked out from midis with slits. Sometimes it seemed as if their jobs entailed just looking beautiful as they stood, bored, on one hip as customers strolled past.
During promotions they got (relatively) busy and used their rectangular painted nails to slice open the cellophane around makeup boxes. They swept blush across the apples of customers’ cheeks with a flourish and stepped back to admire their work. Like goddesses, or members of a secret sorority, they kept to themselves.
At the close of the day, I’d hear their jingling laughter as they headed up the up escalator, on their way to the bulletproof glass-enclosed counter where we delivered register drawers loaded with cash.
After Cosmetics came Women’s Sportswear, where women wore the latest styles. Many of them were studying fashion merchandising and buying in the city, which came across in their runway swagger, carefully knotted scarves and coordinated colors.
After Women’s Sportswear, the other departments were equal in a giant slush pile of mediocrity.
Costume Jewelry was the poor, distant cousin to Fine Jewelry. Whether Costume or Fine, such women usually had long, manicured nails and acted as handmaidens, retrieving the jewelry a costumer pointed to.
Linens attracted more athletic women who’d spend a lot of time in the stock room, retrieving bedding and pillows from shelves that couldn’t be stored underneath the displays.
Menswear was for men too old to be stock boys or too uppity to be in maintenance, which had a union and paid more, and women who wanted to meet men but had to endure the boredom of suits, ties and wingtips that barely changed from season to season. Toys required patience because at Christmastime you had to work in Santa’s workshop—for children only.
My neighbor from across the street, an elegant Sicilian immigrant who dyed her hair blond, became a fixture in Lamps. When heading upstairs on an errand, I sometimes saw her delicately adjusting the height of a pharmacist’s lamp, then stepping back to see how it looked. She took her job seriously. Her displays were spotless. She must have dusted them.
In Gift Wrap, a Japanese woman likewise presided for decades, creating works of art from ribbons and bows, her slow and careful movements often frustrating customers who were in a rush. In the penthouse cafeteria I saw her eating alone, content with a lack of companionship.
Candy was part of a larger department that included Notions, where women bought rickrack, knitting and crochet needles, yarn, and buttons. Like an afterthought in the middle of the store, Candy pushed up against the escalators, so I had a good view of the comings and goings.
Sometimes my former high-school friends came down the escalator singing my name. If coworkers were around, this could be embarrassing. Some of them were former cheerleaders like me. But they had been the glamorous ones, with ankle bracelets and longtime boyfriends they nevertheless screwed in the backseats of Camaros and Trans Ams.
I did have a boyfriend for a while, but after we broke up, I became the funny one, the one who ate too much at the all-you-can-eat fish place we visited during competitions. When these girls visited, we laughed about our hijinks, but I didn’t give them any free candy.
§
To my surprise, the manager of Women’s Sportswear was not a great dresser or even attractive.
Something about her was off. Karen had eyes so small I wondered if she had a physical impairment. Once she started talking, I realized the only thing wrong with her was an inability to notice how her incessant bragging bored listeners. We became work friends partly because she had a thing for dark chocolate turtles and I was a good listener, but also because I found her bravado intriguing.
I was still used to the alpha females of high school whose power derived from beauty and boyfriends, even if they now had career plans encouraged by the feminists. Even Mary Jo with the Dolly Parton figure, who pretended to be ditzy but had no peer in Advanced Calculus, was going to study accounting at a nearby Catholic college, the same school her ex-football star boyfriend attended. Unlike every young woman I knew, Karen didn’t give a shit about the visuals, which might be why she didn’t have a boyfriend. She never even talked about wanting one. I studied her as if she were a strange, new species.
Karen didn’t wear makeup and styled her hair in a close crop. She favored open-collared shirts or tunics and pants, always pants, because she had thick thighs and her job required some physicality, which came in handy when new shipments had to be hauled onto the selling floor. She let the girls studying fashion get swept up by the fantasies created by latest tunics, Huckapoo shirts or those flimsy DVF wrap dresses that opened up in all the wrong places when I tried them on. To Karen retail was all about the numbers. That’s how she measured her success.
“My accounting class is only thirty percent female,” she told me one night, chewing the dark chocolate turtles with her mouth open.
“That’s cool.”
“Yeah. We’re gettin’ there. But I have better grades than the men. In fact, I’m number-one in the class.”
“That’s great, Karen.”
§
When I worked Saturdays, I sometimes met my friend Val, who worked at Burger King at the other end of the shopping center. She had a steady boyfriend, a nice guy, while I was dating someone who spent most of our “dates” on a barstool. Val’s boyfriend took her to the movies, to rock concerts, to bars in the city. Mine must have thought that the drinks he bought me every Friday and Saturday night were gifts.
At lunchtime I’d bring Val a bag of chocolate covered peanuts and she’d come outside with Whoppers, fries, and sodas. We sat on the low concrete wall surrounding landscaped gardens in the middle of the shopping center’s “streets.”
Val looked good in her double-knit polyester uniform: a brown tunic with a collar and orangey-red and yellow stripes down the side and brown pants. She tucked her long auburn hair into an exaggerated newsboy cap that made her look like a member of a funk band. Her hair matched the color of the hat’s orangey sections.
In the beginning of the summer, we laughed at our good fortune. I had always wanted to work in Wanamaker’s. Out of the two department stores that anchored the shopping center, Wanamaker’s, from Philly, evoked a foreign Waspy-ness and staid, old money. Gimbel’s, a New York stalwart with stores all over the suburbs, was about new money and trends. Adding to Wanamaker’s cache, it was reached by walking outside the shopping center grid and down a promenade flanked at the end by two enormous concrete Chinese lions. Gimbel’s, in contrast, lay caddy-corner to Burger King, not far from the scent of fry oil.
As a child pulled along by my mother’s hand, I marveled at the glamorous women of retail who carried their wallets and keys in see-through plastic clutches designed to deter stealing. I had imagined myself one day in a department like Women’s Sportswear, but when the job in Candy opened, I didn’t hesitate. It was not glamorous, and I did love chocolate. If I wanted to move up, I could. Besides, this was a part-time job. It was temporary. I’d probably get another job in the fall, closer to my school.
Like me, Val had a favorite food she ended up broiling for customers and, if requested, topping them with a slice of orange cheese. Both of our jobs had an unofficial, all-you-can-eat perk. We soon paid for the effects of our dream-food jobs with our bodies. I gained five pounds and Val, who already had acne, saw her cheeks erupt from all the grease. Then Val showed me “the worst thing about it” one July afternoon, as we ate Whoppers on the concrete wall. “I can’t scrub off the color,” she said as she turned her hands over, revealing orange-stained palms.
§
He said he was going to call me at work.
The Saturday before I left my drunken boyfriend on a barstool at the old man’s bar where we usually hung out, a crooked place where the owners had an “in” with the cops, knowing that many of us were underage. I was turning eighteen that night and wanted to bust out of that dingy place and celebrate in high style, in an English pub in the neighboring city.
When my friends showed up to meet at the old man’s bar, my boyfriend was already slurring his words and saying something nasty about my parents buying me my first car (it wasn’t true—I earned the money from working in candy). Val looked at me, then at the floor. Anger rose in me like a thermometer plunged into an oven. He was not going to ruin my 18th birthday. I didn’t even break up with him. Just took off with my friends.
At the English pub we were joined by a newcomer in an Irish fisherman’s sweater and jeans. He had dark brown curls, white skin and a permanent five o’clock shadow I found rugged and sexy. He was friends with Val’s boyfriend, a couple of years older, already out of college and working in the city.
We were drinking Black Russians. The fourth one slipped out of my hand, exploding on the oak floor like a bomb. The pub fell silent. I looked down at the split glass and brown liquid, unable to do anything but laugh. He did, too, and his crow’s feet crinkled. I imagined how handsome he must look in a suit.
“You work in a candy department?” he asked. His eyes widened, as if my job were some Willy Wonka fantasy. I said it was fun to eat anything you wanted, but that was starting to get old. I slapped my hips and let out a drunken guffaw. I flashed to an image of him coming down the escalator while I stood behind the counter, waiting on old ladies, and cringed. No, that was not going to happen.
The bars closed at four. My friends kissed me goodbye on the sidewalk, leaving me with the newcomer. He didn’t have his car. So, I offered to take him home. On the way, I pulled over and showed him how his seat could recline. I climbed on top and pulled off his fisherman’s sweater. A tuft of chest hair edged his white undershirt. Afterward, he asked, “What are you doing next Saturday?”
“Working until 9:30.”
He gave me a long lip kiss like the ones you saw in a 1940s movie, sweet and old-fashioned, like a butterscotch hard candy. The kind old ladies put in a cut crystal candy dish. The kind of quaint candy that, even if you graduated to sophisticated chocolates, surprised you because it tasted so good.
“I’ll call you.”
Yeah, sure. Guys said that so they could get one last kiss and alleviate the guilt that they felt for an instant and then shook off, knowing that they would not call, that they had already gotten the milk from the cow, that they wanted to make themselves look like good guys, but were really just horny and selfish dumb asses who only cared about their dicks. This guy was no one-night stand. I couldn’t believe I blew it.
That Saturday was especially slow. Karen swung by for her quarter pound of turtles and talked at me about how quarterly earnings were up six percent in Women’s Sportswear. I thought about broaching the subject with her, but she’d probably say, “the hell with him,” in between open-mouthed bites, or change the subject. So, I just listened and nodded until she was done.
Jody, who worked Notions on weekends, sauntered over and asked if she could slip out 15 minutes early. She had a date. “Sure. I’ll take your drawer up and punch you out.” I could always ring up Notions in Candy if I had to. She had a date. That really made me feel pathetic.
Though it was called Candy, my department also sold nuts at the opposite end of the Barton’s counter. Something about the case reminded me of the circus. Made from white enameled metal, it had a heat lamp inside to keep the nuts warm. The cashews, peanuts, and mixed nuts each had its own white enamel tray. An old-timey sign shouted “NUTS!” in primary-colored, askew letters. As part of my closing routine, I wiped the greasy glass inside with a paper towel and returned errant nuts to their trays. My head was deep inside when I heard the wall phone ringing in Notions. I wiped my hands and ran to get it.
“Good evening. I’d like to order a hundred thousand M&Ms.” I said nothing for a few seconds then recognized his laugh.
“That is funny, but we don’t actually sell M&Ms, and I’m not in Candy right now. I’m in Notions.”
“Oh! I asked for Candy.”
“We’re one number off. I guess it was a mistake.”
“Hey…What are you doing after work?”
§
After months of nonstop pestering, I finally told Walter, “It sounds like a great job, but you know I’m going to college in the fall.” A few days later Mary DeSantis became the full-time Barton’s Girl. When I saw her arranging the chocolates and wiping down the new temperature-controlled Barton’s cases with the same enthusiasm Walter had, I felt bad that he had never considered her. She had wanted that job from the get-go. Like a faithful understudy, she had waited in the wings waiting to see if I was going to take the job. She had put me first. But when I told her I wasn’t interested, she presented the idea to Jenny, our manager, and then to Walter. He seemed disappointed that a woman old enough to be my mother became the face of New York’s first Barton’s Girl, but Mary was happy for a full-time job with benefits better than the store’s. I felt lucky—at least I had a choice.
The next week I’d be giving Jenny two weeks’ notice. I found another part-time job at a women’s boutique that had a branch in 30 Rock. When I told Karen about it, she raised her eyebrows. “That’s cool!” she said. “I just read in Women’s Wear Daily that their revenues are up 15 percent!”
§
I saw her coming down the down escalator, holding on to the moving black handrail with a shaky hand. She surveyed the place as if she had great plans for Cosmetics, Women’s Sportswear, Linens, Menswear.
“A quarter pound of nonpareils.”
“Dark?”
“Yes.”
“Bag or box?”
“I’d like a box!”
I took a flattened box, popped it into a three-dimensions, and grabbed a piece of wax paper. Before bending over, I glimpsed an inchworm hanging on a thread off the left side of her glasses. I flinched, ready to alert her, when she shouted, “A quarter pound! Didn’t you hear me?”
I put the box on the scale and set the red numbers to zero. She turned her head to look at the scale, arms folded across her chest, and the inchworm followed, swinging on its thread. I dropped my head below the counter and retrieved a handful of nonpareils. I glanced at her again as the worm headed for her glasses. I dropped the nonpareils into the box: .25 on the nose.
She pulled out the worn, black leather change purse I knew so well. In it she kept folded dollars, as well as change. She had the annoying customer habit of placing coins on the counter one at a time, a time-consuming method I tried to avoid by extending a cupped hand. But she insisted, counting out $1.37 slowly on the counter, the click of each coin slowing time. When she was done, and I was ready to slide the change across the counter, she stopped me.
“Oh, here’s a nickel and five pennies instead of a dime.” She changed out the coins one at a time as I watched the inchworm squeeze its body together and apart, together and apart. It stopped at the corner of her glasses, leaned on its back set of legs and circled its front body around, deciding where to go next. I slid the change off the counter and turned toward the register.
“Thank you,” I told her one last time, “and have a nice day.”
