The Half-Life of M&M’s

Judy Bolton-Fasman

When Abuelo shook a shiny brown packet of M&M’s so close to my face that my eyes crossed, it sounded like maracas. The percussion shake-shake sound signaled a complicated transaction of sugar rushes in exchange for illicit kisses.

I remember the commercials in which the Mars company promised M&M’s would only melt in your mouth, not in your hand. Like the grown-ups around me, the company lied to me too; the ones dipped in Red Dye No. 2 stained my palms like stigmata. The range of other M&M’s colors lit up the danger and pleasure centers in my brain. Looking back, I imagined my brain was a switchboard all aglow—the old-fashioned plug-in kind with lines frenetically snaking out of it.

The M&M’s supply chain began at Arthur’s Drugs, next door to Abuelo’s apartment building. In Arthur’s, the neighborhood drug dealers patted my head and scantily dressed women smiled at me. The fluorescent light was bright and artificial like the M&M’s Abuelo bought me. I squirmed when he insisted that I hold his veiny, dry claw of a hand. I held my breath to make myself smaller when he broadcast to the entire store that I, his numero una nieta, his first grandchild, was an Americanita. And then in an English as deformed as his stooped back he declared, Me refoohee Cubano. Mi nieta eshpeake buena Inglés.

Afterward. the two of us rode up in the coffin-like elevator to the apartment Abuela hardly left. This was where Abuelo transformed M&M’s into the currency of his black market—the sinister swapping of candy for kisses.

Abuelo was often toothless, his dentures soaking at the bottom of a glass of dirty water. He pressed his pulpy gums and raw wet mouth hard on my closed mouth. He also frequently followed me to the basement of my house, where he told me Babajiniji lurked—a monster who migrated from his Turkish-Sephardic childhood. “Are you afraid of Babajiniji?” I asked him. He wasn’t, he said proudly. I also wanted to know if Babajiniji, whom Abuelo said resembled Fidel Castro down to the beard and the drab military uniform, lived in Havana with my mother’s family. Claro que estaba en Cuba, Abuelo said. Babajiniji was in Cuba until the real Castro took over the island. Babajiniji then swam the ninety miles to the Florida coast. He emerged from the ocean looking for naughty little girls to scare.

Babajiniji found me.

The half-life of M&M’s: after I gorged on Abuelo’s M&M’s, I went into sugar withdrawal the next day. My father, the Americano, forbade any sweets in our house. In addition to the obvious ones to ban, like candy and soda, his no-sugar policy trickled down to our breakfast cereals with serious, industrial names like Product 19, Total, and Special K.

To stave off my cravings, I copped sugar cubes my mother thought she hid successfully in the back of the cereal cabinet. But white crystalline sugar cubes were not enough for her. She had her own stash of M&M’s. Perennially hungry, she never sat down to a full dinner. Instead, she cobbled a meal for herself from the scraps we left on our plates. Scraps—that was all she deserved, she must have thought. Sometimes, when the door to her bedroom was ajar, I caught her shoving those bright orbs of sugar and chocolate into her mouth. Red Dye No. 2 smeared her lips like a perverse lipstick.

Abuelo added drags of his cigarette to the list of his perverse rewards. His wheezy plea to me: a puff for a kiss. And then another attempt at a bargain: A tweak of my eight-year-old chest for said puff. His cigarette ashed down to the filter and he popped a nitroglycerine pill to jolt his heart back to a life-sustaining rhythm. I fled before he could touch me. Between the red M&M’s and the Marlboros, sharing carcinogens was what passed for love between us.

My father locked up his liquor in our basement, thinking I was safe with Abuelo if he didn’t drink. “Donde esta?” Abuelo shouted for the whiskey and vodka. His raspy promise—you don’t have to give me besos if you find the key to your father’s bebidas alcohólicas.

Boracho viejo—old drunk

I stopped complaining about Abuelo to my mother after she reprimanded me: Spanish grandfathers are muy cariñosos—very affectionate, she said as if she were explaining the situation to herself too. I knew right then never again to confide in her.

My mother was the beautiful daughter of an alcoholic father and a depressed mother. My mother was Abuelo’s numero uno hija. Was she also in that dangerous first place—at the head of the line?

When I was twelve, I took to staring at myself shirtless in the mirror in my bedroom covered wall-to-wall and surface-to-surface in pink shag carpeting and a layer of gray dust. My mirror framed in wood painted white with etched gold lines matched my headboard. It was furniture meant for a princess, which I was never was. My mother caught me in front of the mirror and I was on fire with shame. “I know what you’re doing. Que asco,” my mother screamed and walked away. My mother’s meanness was really her fear over my changing body—fear that crimsoned her cheeks.

As a kid, I loved that M&M’s were emblazoned with a white M.

M is for Mother.

M is for my mother’s name—Matilde.

I deduced from family lore that Abuela happily dodged marriage until she was twenty-eight years old. She cared for her ailing parents and then made her way in the world as a seamstress. But then, just as she was relieved that no one was left in her small Sephardic community in Havana to marry her, my grandfather came along. More family lore has it the first time Abuelo and Abuela met, he forced a kiss on her. I imagined she shut her mouth as I did and then pushed him away.

My mother was born a week after her parents’ first wedding anniversary. According to Abuela, my mother’s difficult birth ruined Abuela’s health forever. It went with my mother’s lifelong refrain: “My mother was a sick woman—she was in and out of hospitals all of my life, and it was my fault.”

My mother was Abuela’s rejected child.

Abuela’s labor with my mother lasted a hallucinatory and biblically epic seven days and nights. The ghosts of Abuela’s parents and sister came to her during that time. Bargaining with one of those fantastic fantasmas to survive, Abuela entered into a swirling, dream-laden agreement with her dead sister, Matilde, to give my mother the same name.

M is for Abuela’s dead sister, Matilde, who died of pneumonia when she was seven months pregnant. Family myth says the baby could not be saved, so a midwife beat it to death while still in utero. I told my mother when I was an adult that that couldn’t be. Cesareans go back to Julius Caesar. Not in Cuba, she said. Savagery is my mother’s heritage.

Nevertheless, my mother has blazed through a lifetime of firsts that le costó—that cost her. She was the first to come to the United States from Havana. I was so lonely, she whispered every time she told me the story. She was the first person in her family to marry an American. The first female to have her own checking account. The first to live with a lawn at her doorstep—although that lawn was not her property.

My mother had the American husband, which gave her a foothold in the American Dream, but she never attained the ultimate achievement of owning a house. Instead, the house sat on my father’s corner lot of pride and ownership. He refused to put my mother’s name on the deed, afraid she would abscond with his only asset if they got divorced. Abuela’s accursed child became my father’s—her husband’s—angry tenant.

On a gray Connecticut winter day, I had been home from school for over a week. I missed acting out stories in reading group and the satisfying calculations for math modules; I missed breathing easily. My mother was sick too and we languished together in her double bed. We burned with fever. Por favor Mamá, venga a cuidarme, my mother cried to Abuela over the phone. Abuela did not come to take care of her. Abuela was never an affectionate mother like I am, my mother said. I had never seen her so sad.

In the end, Abuela sent Abuelo with his glossy packets of M&M’s to care for us. Did Abuela know what she had deployed? Neither my mother nor I looked at him.

Spanish grandfathers were demasiado cariñosos. These grandfathers were much too affectionate. Demasiado—too much. The word is heavy. The word evokes emergency.

Dulces, sweets. Sabrosas, delicious. Una dulce por un beso, a sweet for a kiss. Dulce is a feminine noun in Spanish. The smooth ending of the short “e” confers a sweetness that lights up a switchboard brain with dopamine.

Of course, beso is a masculine noun. The hard “b” and the long “o” leave me short of breath, like the days my mother and I were sick together.

Those fucking M&M’s transactions—most of them went through until I discovered my magical strength: I had the power to outrun Abuelo, who shuffled—and smoked as he paced in front of my house.

Abuelo begged me for a kiss until the day his heart stopped beating forever. The last time I saw him, I was fourteen and safe enough to be disgusted with him. It had been a long time since he dragged me to Arthur’s Drugs—and now a lifetime since the nitroglycerine pill under his tongue did not jumpstart his heart on that February night.

In 1976, the Mars company stopped making red M&M’s out of “confusion and concern” over studies linking Red Dye No. 2 to tumors in rats. No, no, no. The red ones were my favorites—and poof, they vanished with my grandfather, who died that bicentennial year. Finally, all poisonous business was off the table.

“Cada loca con su tema,” my mother used to say. Every crazy woman has her theme. Who says we’re crazy, Mamá? I need to amend that to say every woman necessarily has her theme, her pride, her secrets, the narrative she controls. What are our themes, Mamá? Stolen childhoods—the childhoods that you and I should have had? Here, there, and everywhere, the bearded Fidel monsters lurked in our ancestral homes bedeviling us little girls. Mamá, don’t you now see you and I were tricked into believing those monsters existed. More lies the adults disguised as grim fairytales.  

Oh my God: Abuelo, not Fidel, was Babajiniji!

Red Dye No. 2 was never actually used to color M&M’s. To avoid panic, Mars withdrew the red candies from its mix of colors. Orange stood in for its banished red cousin. Unlike the “red” events in my mother’s querida Cuba, the M&M’s scare of the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s came to naught. Red M&M’s were back in circulation by 1986 without comment. I know all too well the undue and awkward silence tagged on to trauma and danger. And somewhere in that long silence, I lost track of how many years Abuelo had been dead.

Judy Bolton-Fasman is the author of ASYLUM: A Memoir of Family Secrets from Mandel Vilar Press (2021). Her essays and reviews have appeared in major newspapers, essay anthologies, and literary magazines. She is the recipient of numerous writing fellowships and a two-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee.