Candy and Candy

I have two sisters. My youngest sister, Lindsay is 11 years younger than me and my sister, Lauren is 9 years younger. As I grew older, I didn't get to experience much with my sisters, especially with the youngest. When she was 6, I was already out of the house, albeit I did have a few stints back at home, periodically. I regret not being closer to home to experience more with them. I remember so much about when they were very, very young and how much fun we had. I also think how much I must have missed in their lives when they were getting into middle school and high school.

Lindsay was a very unique and very funny little kid. She had her own personality and style. She was in extreme control of what she was wearing and how she needed her hair to look. She was very attached to my Mom and they always seemed to be best friends from very early on. In fact, there were times when I was babysitting and she would not let me pour her a drink. She would continually tell me she was thirsty, but would insist that Mom had to pour her the drink. If Mom was not returning for several hours, Lindsay would wait.

She was also sometimes a lot smarter than the rest of us gave her credit for, really. She could be quite manipulative and get away with it flawlessly. If she was waiting for Mom to come home to pour a drink, during those hours of waiting, she would concoct a story that could have been written into a Lifetime TV movie starring Shannen Doherty. Mom would walk in and Lindsay would start the fake cry. The fake cry was harder to detect with her, it actually sounded real and you could tell that she spent a lot of time practicing and polishing her crying skills. I also became very skilled in detecting the fake cry. I wasn't always accurate with my assessment, but I got better as time went on. I had heard a lot of fake crying and real crying with my brother and sister, before Lindsay was born, so I am pretty good at determining what is real and what is fake, but Lindsay could actually stump me.

Mom would run to her, totally falling for the fake cry (obviously unable to detect the fake cry) and Lindsay would run to her with open arms. They would meet halfway and hug, as Mom picked her up and they would go sit on the sofa. Lindsay would take as much Mom time as she needed. She did not need the time to stop crying as that had miraculously stopped when she got Mom all to herself. She would use this time wisely. She would tell a story about something that did not happen and she would manage to write each of us into the story, in a guilty role and we would wait for the verdict. It was a cross between Clue and Judge Judy. Mom would yell at us as Lindsay stood behind her smiling real big and we would exchange "squinty" eyes at each other.

There was always a way to get revenge with her.

She never, ever that I can remember, had a day without candy. Mom would always buy her candy at the checkout stands because Lindsay was a lot of times, the only one with Mom. We didn't want to go to the grocery and Lindsay did. She wanted to go because she knew she could get more candy. She never saved the candy. Ever. On holidays, she consumed as much candy as she could handle before getting sick. She never had a spare Cadbury Cream Egg or Candy Cane. It was gone and she needed more.

Her other obsession was gum. We always had to keep a pack or two of gum around because even when she was very little, she would just walk around saying, "Gum. Gum! Gum!!!!" and would demand that we get her a piece.

My only revenge with her was when the candy she got was something like M&M's. She would put them out on the table and start eating them one by one. Then she would get up to go to the restroom or she would go get something to drink. I would take a handful quickly. She always noticed when some of her candy was missing. I think she must have counted how much she had left. She probably knew that I took 3 orange, 1 yellow and 2 light browns.

Eventually, I could not get revenge anymore because if she got up from the table, she took her candy with her. One of the benefits of having three older siblings, I suppose, is that you learn every trick in the book. And my sister did. She realized that you could not leave candy lying around, so she either quickly ate all of it or carried it with her wherever she went. I remember seeing her outside riding her bike with an M&M's bag in hand. Or being in the pool with her Skittles on the edge of the pool in perfect view. If Mom had candy in her purse, she would do periodic checks throughout the day to be sure the candy was still there, inspecting it to be sure we didn't open it and take a piece out.

At some point, I nicknamed my sister "Candy" and the name has stuck. When speaking of her, I refer to her as Candy and most of my friends who have not met her, probably don't even know that her real name is Lindsay. She has always been Candy to me, as far back as I can remember. One thing my sister and I have in common is the love of candy. Now that we are older, we no longer give each other the "squinty" eyes behind my Mom's back, but we might take Mom's candy when she's not looking!