True Confections (10 page)

I was dubious that Kay and Edwin Tatnall could possibly see themselves attending a Seder, even one populated by their only child and their only grandchildren, given their reluctance to attend any sort of family get-together. They were remarkably
uninterested in Howard’s family, and in fact I knew it wouldn’t have occurred to either of them to write Frieda a condolence letter if I hadn’t prompted them. It had been impossible to entice them to consider flying up for Grandparents’ Day at the kids’ school the previous autumn. Sam and Frieda, aka Grampa Sam and Nana, had been delighted to attend. (My mother never wanted our kids to call her anything but Kay.) I was relieved when they declined the invitation because it conflicted with an important bridge tournament.

“Would Daddy have to wear a
yar-nol-kee
on his head?” my mother had asked anxiously when I phoned with the invitation (phoning them like that was a deliberate ambush on my part), hedging her reply even before she remembered with obvious relief the conflicting bridge tournament schedule. I wondered if she would deny ever having told me, when I was about ten, that the reason Jews have big noses is because air is free. People are usually themselves, it turns out.

T
WO DAYS BEFORE
the Seder, I phoned Frieda to report that the big pot of chicken broth bubbling on my stove was sort of tasteless, nowhere near as good as hers, what was I doing wrong? Any suggestions? And she said, Tell me what you did, step-by-step, what did you do? So I read the ingredients to her—the bay leaf, the carrots, the flat parsley (not curly), the quartered onions, the whole onion studded with eight cloves, the celery stalk with leaves, the cloves of garlic smashed but not chopped, the boneless, skinless chicken breasts. And she said, “Oh, you used boneless chicken breasts? Skinless too? They don’t have so much flavor.”

And I said, “But Frieda, you told me to use boneless, skinless chicken breasts. I have it written right here.”

And she said, “Well, I suppose if that’s what you want to use, you can. But it’s not as flavorful.”

And I said, “You told me to use boneless, skinless chicken breasts.”

And she said, “If that’s what you want, I’m sure it will be good enough. You didn’t know better.”

“But Frieda, it’s not good enough; this chicken soup is watery and insipid, nothing like yours.”

“Ah! Why would it be? What do you expect when you used the boneless, skinless chicken breasts, dear? Without bones and skin, and flavorful dark meat, you don’t get so much taste. Now you know. I always use a whole fowl. You have to skim, but there’s much more flavor that way. A kosher butcher would tell you what to do. But I’m sure your soup will be fine. You can’t expect to make such good chicken soup from scratch when it’s not in your blood.”

T
HERE WAS A
wild current of attraction between Howard and me from that first moment. I am certain Frieda could feel it too—it was in the air—and she knew I was going to take her golden boy, her beautiful Howdy, the only one she had left. She knew I would take him away from her, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. She didn’t know it quite yet, but I was the answer to her prayers. I would keep him from leaving, but she had to let me have him.

On my third day at work, at the end of that first week, Sam came and watched me on the Tigermelt line for a moment. I reached, shuffled, reached, shuffled those Tigermelts like a pro, as if I was a career Tigermelt-straightener, never missing a single bar, and as the expertly aligned bars clanked past us on their journey to the cooling tunnel and the wrapping machine,
Sam told me I was doing a very good job, and his son Howdy would presently give me a thorough walk-through on all three lines at Zip’s, because I obviously had a good head on my shoulders, and cool hands, which was important, because hot hands smudged the finish on the chocolate, which was why women were traditionally employed on candy lines in positions requiring touching the pieces, because women have cooler hands than men. They should use me for more complex work than this, Sam said, and then he said to me, Kiddo, you’re going to be good for Zip’s, and Zip’s is going to be good for you.

When the first lunch break came, during which time skeleton crews ran the lines slowly, in shifts (if they shut down completely something could harden, cool, or clog, so a few people on staggered shifts kept the tanks swirling, the belts moving, the panners tumbling), Howard beckoned to me, and I followed him. We had scarcely exchanged a word since our first meeting, but since then, several times while I was working I would feel his gaze on me, and I would look up and there he would be, somewhere on the floor, watching me, frankly staring.

Each time, when our eyes met, he would smile without looking away, and one of those times, when he was leaning over a railing up on a catwalk above the chocolate coating tanks, he had leaned over and pointed at me and mouthed, “You.” I didn’t know who the hell he thought he was. Gene Kelly in some cheesy musical number? Or who the hell he thought
I
was. The indifferent ingénue in her first role? I didn’t know whether to be flattered or irritated.

The ten-year age difference between Howard and me has vanished with time, but it did signify then, I suppose, especially to some of his friends. At eighteen, I was still a teenager. Howard and I had grown up in slightly different times as well as worlds. When we first started spending time together, there
were all sorts of gaps. I didn’t know how to play golf and had never imagined that I would want to learn, any more than I would want to learn how to play bridge. Howard had never smoked pot, preferring beer or Dewar’s White Label, the official beverages of DKE House, while I had never been drunk, but I had inhaled passed joints at a few concerts and parties, not that it ever did much for me. I listened to the Beatles; the Everly Brothers’s “Wake Up, Little Susie” was Howard’s favorite song. Howard often referred to various girlfriends he had dated in high school and college. Until we met, I had only hung out in groups, but had never gone out with one specific person on an actual date. I had only ever kissed a boy during party games. The merciless teasing from Andy Ottenberg my senior year was the most attention I’d ever had from anyone, but it’s hard to look back on his cruelty and see it as a flirtation, though maybe it was, for him. The truth is, when I met Howard, though I let him think otherwise when he made a remark about my previous high school boyfriends, I had only ever been with one man, and that wasn’t a date.

E
RIC
H
ONIG WROTE
to me two days after the fire. I had no idea how old he was, or where he lived, or why he was writing to me. My parents simply weren’t curious about what came through the mail slot in our front door, beyond their anxiety about legal papers and money. Arson Girl received quite a number of hate letters in those days, which my mother left for me on the front hall table next to the bowl of keys and loose change. A lot of strangers were compelled to tell me they thought I should go to jail, starting the day after the fire, when there were so many crank phone calls we finally had to leave the phone off the hook.

The day Eric Honig’s first letter came, there were several
other letters, including a really nasty one from someone who called herself “The Cat Lady of East Haven,” telling me I deserved to die for what I had done to Debbie Livingston’s cat. I felt horrible enough about poor old Homer as it was, and her letter had made me cry. I was grateful to read Eric’s letter, because it wasn’t like the others. It was a fan letter. His note was friendly and encouraging. He said I had a nice smile and he hoped I was getting some sleep because I looked tired.

After that, just about every day, right up to my last court appearance, I received a greeting card from Eric containing the most recent newspaper story on my case, clipped with pinking shears from the
New Haven Register
and festooned with his ballpoint-pen remarks, punctuated by multiple exclamation points cascading down the margins, about how unfair to me their coverage was. He mixed upper-and lowercase with abandon, and he drew smiley faces with word balloons saying things like, “ChEEr UP, SweET AliCe! YoUR’re GReaT!”

There was never a return address on anything he mailed to me, so I had no way to reply, but as the days passed, his little notes and cards grew more intense and personal, as if we were corresponding. I looked him up in the New Haven phone book, but there was no Eric Honig listed, though his envelopes were all postmarked locally. He sent a greeting card with bluebirds sitting together in a nest, on the back of which he had scribbled “CAn’T WAiT Till Our SPECIAL Day!!!” The next week, though it was late June, a Valentine with lace trim arrived, signed, “Love you always, my sweetheart. Eric.”

I never mentioned Eric Honig to my parents. Perhaps it sounds pathetic, but I was lonely, and whoever Eric Honig was, he was my friend, which was more than I could say for my former actual friends. (I never heard from any of my teachers, either, not even Miss Solomon.) The weekend after my regrettable
guilty plea and sentence, on a hot, still Sunday afternoon, when I was home alone in front of the television, my parents having gone into New York for a bridge tournament, Eric Honig came to the door. I know I shouldn’t have let him in, but it was hard not to, once he said he was Eric Honig. My first thought when I saw him was that he wanted to use our telephone because he had a flat tire. My second thought, when he said his name, was that I had been expecting just this moment, and I knew he had watched my parents drive away and leave me alone.

The next thing he said to me after identifying himself was that I was more beautiful in person than he had imagined, though I hadn’t washed my hair in days and I was squinting through the screen door at him and wearing a frayed, blue button-down oxford shirt of my father’s and cut-off jeans with denim shreds hanging down one leg, and I had a jar of Nutella in one hand and a spoon in the other.

As I opened the door, I realized that I was afraid of him (I wasn’t an idiot), but how could I refuse him? This was Eric Honig, who liked me. And now he was inside the house, in the gloom of our front hall, and then we were on the couch together, while the 4:30 movie with which I had been wasting the afternoon,
Gidget Gets Married
, continued to flicker soundlessly on the television across the room, and then he was kissing me and telling me over and over how beautiful I was.

I can’t remember what he looked like, other than in a general way. He was an ordinary middle-aged man. He wore a short-sleeved yellow shirt and khaki pants, and he had on bright new running shoes. I think his hair was wet. He smelled of cloves. He took a red and white tin of cloves from his pants pocket, and he put it on the coffee table in front of us as he sat down beside me, explaining that he was trying to quit smoking,
and the strong taste of cloves helped him fight his cravings. He offered me a clove but I didn’t want one, and then he started kissing me, and the clove taste on his thrusting tongue was as strange and inevitable as everything else about this moment.

He unbuttoned my shirt and rummaged for my breasts with one hand, while seizing my wrist with the other hand and pressing my palm down on the lengthening hardness trapped in his pants, sliding my hand rhythmically up and down on the hot lump under the thin khaki for a moment before shifting to unzip his pants while murmuring into my mouth, Oh yes, oh yes, babydoll, you light my fire, yes you do.

He really said that.

It wasn’t rape, because I never asked him to stop. I never spoke at all. The clovey smell, the way he looked at me and spoke to me and touched me, the way he seemed to be reaching through me and speaking past me, that is what has lingered in my mind all these years, if I think about it at all, not the actual sensations, not what his face or his body looked like. (A week later, I wouldn’t have known him on the street.) It must have hurt, but I have no memory of that either, though I spent half an hour scrubbing the bloodstain from the cushion of our faded chintz couch so when my parents returned they would notice nothing. The faint maroon wisp of the stain, twined through the vines and leaves of the pale green and pink floral pattern, was visible only to me, and then only when I looked for it, which I did from time to time when I was in need of a reality check.

What has stayed with me is the pounding, insistent weight of him as I sank into the soft, familiar cushions, pinned under his frenzied thrusting, my shorts bunched at my ankles. I grew more and more transparent until I was entirely invisible, doing everything I could to remove myself so he could penetrate to the core the exquisite object of his desire, which had nothing at all to
do with me. It was over in a few minutes. He left in a hurry, his 1.25-ounce tin of Schilling whole cloves, packed in Baltimore, MD, USA, forgotten. I kept that tin in the back of my underwear drawer for years, until the contents were nothing more than a jumble of tiny, knotted twigs with no discernable aroma. He never wrote to me again.

The lesson of the story? Have sex with your stalker if you want him to leave you alone forever.

So here I was, not quite a month later, the once and future Arson Girl, grateful to be dwelling in the new, sweet, fragrant world of Zip’s Candies, with Howard Ziplinsky walking me through the lines, machine by machine. I was perplexed by how powerfully attracted to Howard I was. On the face of it, he wasn’t my type, if someone in my circumstances could be said to have a type. There was something a little too polished yet incomplete about him, even then, when he was still quite lean and had not yet developed that pampered, slumpy, too-tanned, executive-on-the-golf-course softness of recent years.

As I followed Howard across the factory floor, I stopped to glove up at the first dispenser we passed, and he waved in my direction impatiently for me to catch up. I noticed his beautiful hands for the first time. Howard’s wrists are graceful and perfectly proportioned. For years, before he started wearing that ridiculous fancy watch the size of a Reese’s peanut butter cup, every glimpse of his wrists made me inexplicably happy. Howard has always possessed an astonishing number of magnificent shirts, more than Gatsby, and I was attracted to that, too (my father wore only blue or white oxford cloth button-downs), to Howard’s confidence and pleasure in having those shirts to choose from every morning. On that third day of my Zip’s employment, the sight of his blue-and-white-striped shirt cuffs grazing the thick dark hair sprouting from those elegant wrists
was almost embarrassingly thrilling, like a foreshadowing glimpse of his naked torso under a bedsheet. He was utterly unself-conscious as I followed those beautiful hands. I was mesmerized by each gesture as he pointed at the various Tigermelt wrapping machinery components and explained their functions.