True Confections (3 page)

M
Y FUTURE MOTHER-IN-LAW
gave no indication of having any kind of good feeling about me whatsoever. Pearl Anastasio, Sam’s secretary, a Zip’s stalwart who had started at Zip’s as a Little Sammies summer wrapper when she was in high school and Eli ran the place (in the era before he rigged up the first wrapping machine on the Little Sammies line), someone who would turn out to be a true friend to me as the years passed, though I hardly made eye contact with her that day, led me down a corridor. We reached a windowless office, where Frieda Ziplinsky sat at a desk piled high with stacks of envelopes she was stuffing with what looked like order forms. She would stuff a dozen, then seal a dozen. Stuff, seal, stuff, seal. Her hands were a blur. We stood in the doorway waiting for her to stop and look up, but she didn’t stop and she didn’t look up. She was a stuffing and sealing pro, a stuffing and sealing maniac. Finally
Pearl announced loudly, Hey, Mrs. Z. Mr. Z said to say to you we’ve got our new hire. Okay, Mrs. Z.? Frieda finally glanced up and gave me a sour look. Pearl abandoned me with a friendly pat on the shoulder that was combined with a little push so I would step into that room.

You’re not twenty-three, you look fourteen! You ever even worked on a line? You got line experience? You got another job? Frieda asked me, eyeing my absurd and too-short lime-green Helen’s Double Dip uniform. I shrugged and shook my head apologetically, furtively yanked on my hem with one hand, and mumbled No, I had no line experience, and No, I was through with Helen’s Double Dip, and today was my last day. She scowled. Not the racker and stacker from Entenmann’s, from West Haven? I thought that girl was supposed to come in this morning first thing. I thought that was you. Sam maybe thought so too. He hired you? You have any idea what the job is? He say what the pay is? You know this isn’t a summer job? You ready to train right now, while I have the time?

I shook my head again, and then again, and then I nodded, feeling as if anything I said or did would further the degree to which I had inadvertently taken Sam’s side in an ongoing argument and was now allied with him against her forever. Which was true.

Sighing heavily, clearly having already reached the conclusion that asking me any more questions would be useless, Frieda got up, went over to a white metal cabinet, and rummaged around on the shelves, and without looking in my direction she handed me a hairnet, which I put on, and then a white factory coat, which I also put on. As I buttoned it, she gave me a look that suggested that covering myself more modestly from now on would be a good idea in general, regardless of hygiene requirements. The lightweight white coat was a foot longer than the
hem of the uniform I would never wear again after this day. I stepped out of my sneakers and pulled on, over my little pompom tennis socks, the pair of too-big, white, galoshy go-go boots apparently required before a civilian could set foot on the Zip’s Candies factory floor, as Frieda wordlessly handed them to me, first one, then the other, with a look on her face as if I was putting them on incorrectly. She herself wore Keds.

She walked out of the room, and I waded down the hallway behind her, sloshing along in the boots, mimicking her when she paused to glove up with latex gloves from the wall dispenser by the big swinging double doors to the factory floor which have always made me feel as if I am about to enter an operating room, and then I followed her into the chaotic din and clatter of the sweet mechanical ballet of the Zip’s Candies factory for the first time.

Even before my Tigermelt-handling indoctrination, I already knew I belonged at Zip’s Candies. I knew it out on the sidewalk when I breathed in that burnt sugar and chocolate aroma. I knew that being here—hairnet, white coat, rubber boots, and all, forfeiting my job at Helen’s Double Dip (along with my second and final paycheck, which I never had the nerve to go pick up), even as I was scornfully instructed on the nuances of straightening Tigermelts as they dropped onto the belt—was deeply, essentially right. Perhaps some people would call this destiny. Zip’s Candies needed me, and I needed Zip’s Candies. An inexplicable joy welled up in me as I realized that I knew that my life could start again from here, from this moment.

T
HAT FIRST TIME
I saw Howard, thin and dark, handsome like a foreign doctor in his white lab coat (despite the stray, uncoated Little Sammies clinging to a sleeve), his face and eyebrows were
freckled with a fine spray of chocolate droplets. This was the thin, glossy chocolate used to apply the final coat to Little Sammies in the panning drum from which he had just emerged, having reamed a clogged nozzle with a pipe cleaner. He had been working on the Mumbo Jumbos blending unit just before that (it was one of those days when the summer humidity soaked into everything, despite the chugging air-conditioning system; it was overdue for upgrading, but Frieda didn’t want to spend the money, which was foolish, as the humidity affected every piece of antiquated equipment on the floor), and he was already dusted with the powdered sugar that had caked and clogged the feed tubes on the big licorice-blending pot. I thought he looked confectionary, like a sugared angel, and I could feel Frieda glaring at me, wanting to keep her beautiful son all to herself. And so we met.

Howdy, he said, coming toward me, not in greeting but introducing himself, because that’s what he was called, Howdy Ziplinsky, and this confused me for a moment, as I sensed that nobody in the Ziplinsky family was likely to be from someplace where people said “Howdy” to one another, so I thought perhaps this was a Yiddish word I couldn’t quite hear over the factory din, but at the same moment, through my confusion, I felt something completely new and profound stir in me, and I had to resist my unexpected impulse, as we shook hands for the first time, to lick him.

I
DIDN’T MEAN TO
burn down Debbie Livingston’s house. Despite all the ridiculous stories that most people believed, the way people love to believe ridiculous stories, it is important to recognize that the events of that night were never fairly represented by the newspapers or the local television stations. At least the Internet didn’t exist in those days. That fire took place long ago, on May 7, 1975, to be precise, and the facts of that case obviously have no specific bearing on the current matters at hand, but establishing the truth is important to me. Howard has told me more than once that I am obsessed with the truth. He himself could have a little more respect for it. But Dr. Gibraltar, my psychoanalyst, always said that the truth is overrated. Dr. Gibraltar never did say much in all the years of my analysis, but when he spoke, it was usually to utter a little koan like that.

Ellie Quest-Greenspan, my other therapist, who was supposed to be Howard’s and my marriage counselor, talked a great deal, and often spoke about how I was on a quest toward finding my truth and how I was always learning how to stand in my truth. And Charlie Cooper has more than once advised me, as we walk through the door for this or that deposition or hearing, that answering questions truthfully isn’t the same thing as saying everything I know. In other words, speak the truth in as few words as possible (which, apologies to Charlie, is not really my style). Apparently everybody is obsessed with the truth, one way or another. Anyway, given that my qualifications to provide
information about the business of Zip’s Candies are being called into question by a certain greedy member of the Ziplinsky family who has no idea what she is talking about, it seems important to explain about that fire now.

I know that many people in the Greater New Haven area believe things about me that are untrue. Some of them will always think of me as Arson Girl. I am bitter about that. Why wouldn’t I be? I didn’t mean to burn down that house. It isn’t arson if there is no intent. It’s just an accidental fire. Call me Accidental Fire Girl.

My one-year sentence for third-degree arson was suspended and I was given two years’ probation. I didn’t realize that when I agreed to a guilty plea (which I did because I was a distraught teenager, and also because I caused the fire), I was agreeing to a charge of arson. That was a mistake.

My parents had to pay the Livingstons a huge amount of money as part of the deal. This bankrupted my family, and my father had to close his real-estate business, because he had not incorporated, and so his personal liabilities sank Tatnall Realty. Plus, being the father of Arson Girl probably wasn’t exactly good for business. By the end of the year, my father had gone to work for the Martha Rivers Agency, headed by the calculating and rapacious Martha Rivers (whom he had always mocked), the most underhanded and manipulative high-pressure real-estate agent in town. Martha was the only one who made him an offer, and that may well have been prompted by a perverse attraction to our pariah status, given how loathed she herself was by so many people in the community. She represented everything my father hated in the business, and now he was her employee, and it was my fault.

My mother went back to substitute teaching in the New Haven and Hamden public school systems the following autumn. My parents stopped talking about their dreams of certain trips or
their wish to build a vacation house in Vermont. Both my parents pretty much stopped talking to me altogether that summer, without admitting that they weren’t talking to me, and the pretense that they were talking to me was much worse than out-and-out silence. I was an only child, there were no cousins for hundreds of miles, and I was really marooned. Only when Jacob was born was there anything like a thaw, and even then, they never really opened their hearts to me again. I don’t know how you turn away from your child the way they turned away from me. But it’s something people do.

W
HEN
H
OWARD AND
I were married in early October, only three months after we met, my parents never questioned our plan, having little curiosity about this huge, possibly disastrous, and certainly reckless leap I was making just a few weeks before my nineteenth birthday. Working at Zip’s Candies and then falling in love with Howard, a Jewish man ten years my senior, were for them just the latest two things I had gotten myself into. I like to think they were preoccupied with their bankruptcy. Under other circumstances, perhaps they might have been more concerned about me. But the fire changed them as much as it changed me, and I will never know what it would have been like to have parents who would question my choices instead of just being relieved that whatever I might do next, now it wouldn’t be their problem.

At our wedding, they acted like guests, or remote relatives, the sort of people who tell you they remember when you were a baby because they have nothing else to say. We were married in the backyard of Frieda and Sam’s house on Marvel Road on a beautiful Sunday afternoon by a groovy rabbi known throughout the tristate area for marrying couples like us.

I had grown up attending the First Unitarian Universalist Society on Whitney Avenue a few times a year; it was a compromise place of not quite worship chosen by my Episcopal mother to mollify my atheist father (he was raised a nominal Congregationalist). It was important to my mother that we belong to a church of some kind, with services in at least a vaguely Christian format, and this was the best she could do with my father, this church for atheists. I am sure my mother was drawn to the Unitarian philosophy offering a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, which allows each person an opportunity to find an individual path. She was always really big on individual paths.

When I was about ten, my mother took up a sort of spiritual meditation habit she called “discerning,” and although she never instructed me about anything remotely religious, sometimes she offered to let me sit with her in silence so we could discern together. But it made me itchy to sit with her like that, and it felt like something too private, and I didn’t believe she really wanted me right there next to her when she was doing it. Sometimes she and my father discerned together, and I would walk into their room and they would be sitting in silence and I would feel as if I had walked in on something so intimate the door should have been bolted to save us all from my embarrassing intrusion.

When we did go to church, services were led by members of the congregation, and as a child I couldn’t differentiate those services from the earnest political meetings that took place in the same rows of chairs at other times of the day.

Jacob and Julie attended the progressive, cooperative preschool located in the carriage house behind the Unitarian Society, a pleasant continuity for me, though by the time they went to preschool there I hadn’t set foot inside the church (really just a house) since high school. The preschool didn’t exist when I was a
child. I didn’t go to nursery school at all, though I think it probably would have been a good idea if I had spent more time with children when I was little, as I was a solitary only child who was always more comfortable around adults than I was around other children. But my parents didn’t think I “needed” to go, as if nursery school was some sort of remedial treatment.

When I got to kindergarten, instead of rushing to play with the other children, I preferred to spend recess chatting with the teacher, if she would let me. And if she gently suggested that I go play with the other children, that always made me feel such shame, because I was exposed for having wanted something from her—adult friendship—which she certainly wasn’t going to provide, no matter how much of a serious little savant I made myself.

When I was invited to play at someone’s house after school, my playmate would become irritable when I lingered at the kitchen table long after the snack had been consumed, deep in conversation with an impressed mother. I was that child your mother always suggested for playdates until you explained to her that she liked me better than you did.

I don’t really know why it never occurred to me at the height of the fire crisis to seek solace or wise counsel from anyone connected to the Unitarians, but I didn’t, and as far as I know neither of my parents turned to anyone in the church either, possibly out of embarrassment. At certain times in my life I have wished with all my heart that I had a rabbi or a priest to whom I could have turned. I truly envy those with genuine faith. Their lives must be so much easier to bear.