April 1990: A week after Easter, the basket’s largely depleted – tulle bedding (my mother having declared Easter grass tacky, perhaps her worst epithet, reserved for such atrocities as colored Christmas lights, My Little Ponies, and being called “mom” instead of “mama”) squashed and chocolate-smudged. Jellybean count: one red and one green (lime and cherry being held in high esteem), a couple of purple (okay, but redolent of Dimetapp), and about seventeen black (the dreaded black licorice jellybeans). I wonder if I can trick my little brother into trading for something – anything! – by claiming I was saving them because they were the best sort.
August 1993: The Dodge minivan makes its way home from the summer cabin on Lake Michigan, and as my father refuels, Mom offers a rare treat: non-special-occasion candy. I request licorice, looking forward to testing out for how many mile markers I can suck on a Twizzler before the empty core loses structural integrity and collapses into sugar-slime on my tongue. She comes out of the gas station, beaming, and hands me a packet of black licorice. “It’s your favorite, right?” Twenty years later, one of my greatest regrets is still the way her smile collapsed when I fixed her with a scowl and shrilled “It’s the one I HATE, MOM.”
October 1997: I’m fourteen – way too old for trick-or-treating – but I agreed to accompany my little brother so that my parents wouldn’t escort him (social suicide) and put on some tights, bought at the Spencer’s Gifts at the mall. They’re red with flames picked out in glitter running down the sides, so I figure that if anyone asks I can sullenly say “I’m supposed to be a devil.” Mostly I’m too embarrassed even to ask for candy, even at the house that gives out full-size bars, and anyway, at fourteen I’m Snackwells-terrified of fat. I accept a couple of mini chocolate bars and a waxy sleeve of Necco wafers and scarf them down, later, on the stairs to the deck behind the house. The Neccos’ pastel color scheme disguises the black licorice ones – they’re a kind of lilac-grey – until it’s too late.
June 2001: The condo in Ocean City feels impossibly grown-up, and Jeni’s raiding her parents’ liquor cabinet before we go out. We were on the cheerleading squad together in high school, but she seemed to slink around effortlessly, with parties and boyfriends while I joined the chemistry team and dated a guy who wouldn’t even eat a liqueur-filled chocolate before he turned 21. But we’re both in college now, and all that’s there is Sambuca. We both throw back a shot and are hilariously indignant that it tastes like the worst kind of licorice. We shove the mouth of the bottle under the tap and fill it back up a half-inch, just in case.
July 2005: I fancy myself in love with a man in my grad program who already has a girlfriend. One night, I wear green seersucker and almost kiss him while he’s cooking dinner. Squid ink pasta with garlic and fennel: it’s good. That same night, I have a dream that I’m tied to a chair and somebody in a Saw mask is slowly cutting slivers, crescents, fronds of fennel, and I somehow know that they are going to shove them into my mouth and down my throat until I drown in that black licorice scent. I wake up; he goes away to a summer workshop; neither of us ever speak again.
September 2007: The metaphorical allure of absinthe comes before my taste for it, but I’d already taught myself to like goat cheese so I figure I can do it again. My boyfriend’s birthday is coming up and I conceive of a clever bag — black velvet on the outside and shifty green taffeta on the inside — to store the absinthe spoon with a skull on that I’ve Ebay’ed for the occasion. Except I can’t sew at all, so he receives some gnarled, frayed little kidney of a sack, but the drink itself is surprisingly okay. It’s difficult, to separate out who I want to be from who I am, but I’m pretty sure I actually like it. I’m just not sure I actually still like the boyfriend.
March 2012: The wind sweeps cold through the Rhone valley, past the white horses of the Camargue. I’d stupidly expected it to be warmer by now, and the French I’d whispered lover-like to Michel Thomas on the L train has abandoned me – we argue like alcoholic toddlers at le tabac about how we want Gauloises Blondes! No! je ne veux pas le nouveau boîte gris bizarre! But fumble-tongue aside, the Marseille harbor looks like a postcard, and when I read and sip pastis on the balcony and the pigeons shit on me and my book with so much more panache than regular old American pigeons, I am overcome with a sudden reckless joy that tastes rather like licorice.
August 2013: I let the Ricard louche into the tap water, add ice, open my laptop and start to type: A History of a Woman’s Attitude About Licorice.
