True Confections (5 page)

There were three black people among the guests. One of them was Minnie, the bright shining light of my childhood, maker of perfect tuna sandwiches, affectionate possessor of the only bosom, and an ample one it was, that I had ever been completely comfortable snuggling against. I hadn’t seen her since her retirement a couple of years before. I had glimpsed her wiping her eyes with a big handkerchief as Howard and I walked up the makeshift aisle. I didn’t know the others, a well-dressed couple in their early thirties, who had come in during the ceremony and were standing at the back, near my parents. I am ashamed to say I assumed they were Ziplinsky family past or present household employees, since they weren’t familiar faces. (Zip’s did have several black employees by 1975, but only a few select front-office people had been invited that day.)

As the curiously vile refreshments circulated (a troll in a white uniform kept breaking into groups and thrusting trays of hors d’oeuvres up from below drink level while braying, “Corned beef twist? Miniature knish? The lox on the blinis is very moist!”—I think it’s pretty safe to assume my parents ate nothing that day), the distinguished black couple headed purposefully toward us. I felt Howard stiffen, and then he said quietly, “I’ll be dipped. Darwin and Miriam are here. I didn’t see them. I’m sure my mother didn’t think they were coming.”

I shouldn’t have been so surprised by their skin color. (But then, in retrospect, there is a great deal about which I should have been more observant.
Had I But Known
, the story of my life.) At this time I had heard only a few references, mostly from Sam, about his uncle Julius, Eli’s younger brother, the one who stayed behind in Budapest when Eli and the oldest brother, Morris, came to America. Julius was the one who went to Madagascar
during World War II and then never left. He had an unlikely and prosperous life there, presiding over his cacao and vanilla plantations until a malaria epidemic killed him, a couple of years before Howard was born. Remember, I had only known the family for three months at this point, and all I knew was what I had gleaned in passing, in fragments. Nobody ever tells you the story of a family in a coherent sequence.

I had heard a few stories about how Howard had spent many summers staying with the Madagascar cousins, mostly weeding around cacao trees and performing menial tasks in the pollination and harvesting of vanilla seed pods. Irene had gone just once and never went back, finding the accommodations too primitive and the work too hard, but it was a really important part of Howard’s life growing up. The way this had been described to me in passing made it sound like some sort of fragrant family kibbutz floating out there on that unlikely island in the Indian Ocean.

I gathered that Julius had children, but not until he got to Madagascar, which was why Darwin, his son, was Howard’s contemporary, though Darwin was Sam’s first cousin. I knew the plantations were still in the family, and that Howard had been on Madagascar in the spring of that same year, just three months before we met, though he said more than once that he should have known better than to go in monsoon season. I wasn’t even sure where Madagascar was until Howard told me he had family there, a few weeks into our romance, which prompted me to look it up in the world atlas in my bookshelf at home, where I was still technically living that summer. But until this moment at our wedding, I had simply not considered what these cousins might look like. And so I met Darwin Czaplinsky and his wife, Miriam.

Howard was clearly nonplussed by the sight of them, as their
inclusion on the guest list had really been meant only as a gesture, and nobody had expected any of the Madagascar branch of the family to come on such short notice, especially since none of them had replied to the invitation. Darwin was fierce and uncanny-looking, with dark brown skin and deep-set midnight-blue eyes. Miriam was a true Malagasy, exquisitely beautiful in an unidentifiably exotic sense, with a bearing like one of Gauguin’s Tahitian women. I would learn later that she was from the Merina people, from the highlands, where Julius had settled among his vast estates.

They were dressed perfectly, better than anyone else there, like diplomats among the native peoples at a rural village festival. As they bore down on us, they both arranged their mouths to reveal their beautiful teeth, and they each looked me hard in the eye as we were introduced. After a moment’s hesitation, they each kissed me on both cheeks, French-style. Then they surrounded Howard, pulling him away from me, and I heard Darwin say in his low, precise, accented voice, “Howdy, what have you done?”

Miriam looked at me over Howard’s shoulder and said, “You may have the use of him, my dear, but you must never, ever forget that Howdy is ours.” She showed me her beautiful teeth again. It wasn’t a smile. The bad fairies had come to the wedding party. In a fairy tale, there are warning signs: the sun suddenly goes behind a dark cloud, a chill wind gusts through, frolicking gnomes run away and hide, the tranquil cat puffs herself up and hisses. But this was not a fairy tale, so I didn’t recognize the signs, though I do believe I felt a distinct chill.

O
NCE
H
OWARD AND
I were married, my parents evidently stopped feeling at risk for further liability consequent to whatever
disastrous thing I might do next, which made them much nicer, though there was never more between us than an occasional tiny flicker of fondness. As the years passed my father grew very deaf, and my mother’s arthritis worsened, and then when Jacob and Julie were still in grade school my parents retired and moved to a well-regarded continuing-care community in Chapel Hill, south of snowy winters. It was a sensible alternative to Florida, of which they shared an unreasonable horror.

We made a few awkward visits so Julie and Jacob would continue to know their other grandparents, but then came my father’s stroke, and then my mother had a heart attack, and they ended up spending their final years in separate wings of the nursing facility at Woodfield Farms, each of them unwilling to make any further effort to deal with the other. According to the social worker there, this turn of events is not entirely uncommon.

And then they died, a few months apart, nine years ago. They left their modest estate to my kids, their grandchildren, in equal shares, which was as it should be, but I have to say I would have liked to have been left some specific personal object by either one of them. When I went through their few and tidy papers, I hoped to find a letter addressed to me. Something, anything, personal. But there was nothing like that, just all the very impersonal and efficient legal documents. The year they both died, people who heard my news would try to comfort me with the trite observation that so often in the case of couples who have been married for so many years, when one dies, the other one loses the will to keep living on alone. Usually, I didn’t have the heart to disagree. So that’s my
mishpochah
of origin, as the Tatnalls never used to say.

It’s not the meek who shall inherit the earth. It’s the ambitious, the passionate! How much love could I be expected to feel
for these ungenerous people as the years went by? I don’t believe it’s just my life among the door-slamming, bellowing Ziplinskys that led me to hope for more, more of anything, from those chilly, murmuring WASPs. Dr. Gibraltar told me I had displaced my unfulfilled desire for their approval (even before they were dead, but especially since their deaths, as after that it was concretely too late for them to come through), onto the living, breathing Ziplinsky family. Is that really what I wanted most of all, Ziplinsky approval? Good luck to me.

M
ISTAKES WERE MADE
, as Nixon would say. Starting with my guilty plea to the felony arson charge. This was all consequent to the biggest mistake of all, which was my having been represented by Lou Popkin in the first place. Lou was the attorney who handled closings for my father. He had no experience with criminal cases, or much of anything else that didn’t have to do with real estate, and had hardly ever appeared in front of a judge. He told me the only way I could stay out of jail for having burned down Debbie Livingston’s house was if I just said yes to everything the judge asked me, and he would take care of everything else and not to worry, it was all set, I should just say yes. So that’s what I did, I said Yes, and Yes, and Yes, Your Honor, and the next thing I knew I had agreed that I understood the charges, I had admitted to arson, and I had asserted that I felt extreme remorse. Moments later, I was found guilty of third-degree arson, with a suspended sentence and probation. I was a convicted felon. I was Arson Girl. And so I want to take this opportunity to set the record straight about that first fire, before I refute the allegation against me concerning the Zip’s fire.

Once again I am involved in an accidental fire. People are so unimaginative. Inevitably, everyone smirks and says, Uh-huh,
okay, we see, another fire, another accidental fire like the one that burned down Debbie Livingston’s house, what an interesting coincidence,
Arson Girl
. Because only in novels do people accept wild coincidences without comment, let alone skepticism. Maybe it’s the fault of all those plotlines on television and in movies (the same ones with music sound tracks that tell you how you’re supposed to feel) that depend on coincidences always having a huge amount of meaning, and this makes the audience feel smart and insightful. The truth nobody likes to accept, out of a fear of missing something and being exposed as naive, is that sometimes a coincidence is only one of life’s strange repetitions, only a coincidence. It’s a funny thing about human nature, the way we resist genuine patterns and meanings, but when events form random patterns, we insist on seeing relationships and adding meanings that aren’t really there at all.

T
HE FIRE THAT
burned down Debbie Livingston’s house in 1975 is not just old news, it’s also new news, and not just because of the Zip’s fire last month, but also because two years ago those television news clips were dredged up and aired, when Zip’s made the news in the middle of June 2007. That was when Guadalupe and Hilaria Diaz, two Guatemalan sisters on our night cleaning crew (we have found Guatemalans to be very dependable workers in various capacities at Zip’s, though when each was hired in the last few years we did not anticipate the collective impact of their religious devotion, which around certain obscure saints’ days has required us to plan ahead so as not to disrupt our production schedules, as we were far more focused on issues of counterfeit green cards and false Social Security numbers, and we had to define a benevolent “Don’t ask, don’t tell” hiring policy for Zip’s), attracted a lot of attention when
they perceived the Virgin Mary in a concretion of hardened chocolate drippings that had formed under one of the Tigermelt striping nozzles after the line had been shut down for the night.

First Guadalupe sees a dazzling, bright ray of light beaming down on this inexplicable dark object on the belt that she immediately knows in her heart is the Blessed Virgin Mother, and then Hilaria swears on her sainted grandmother’s soul that she sees it move, and then they both see a blob of chocolate drip from the nozzle and land perfectly on the Virgin Mary’s head, like a halo, which is, of course, a clear sign. (Indeed—a clear sign that someone hasn’t emptied and cleaned the striping applicator tank and nozzles per standard operating procedure when the line was shut down for the night. And that celestial ray? Probably a flaring high-intensity ceiling-fixture bulb in the security night-lighting system on the verge of burning out.)

Channel 3 ran the story the next day, a perfectly charming little human-interest segment to cap their six o’clock local news broadcast, the final feature before the local station switches over to the network national newscast, which was certainly a solid hit for Zip’s public relations at the community level. We couldn’t run the Tigermelt line for three days, not until the Blessed Chocolate Virgin (who looked to me more like a six-inch, poorly tempered chocolate version of the Incredible Hulk than like a divine manifestation, but I did not grow up in a culture that conditioned me to see images of Our Lord Jesus or the Blessed Virgin in every burnt taco or chocolate stalagmite) had hardened sufficiently so she could be carefully sliced off the Tigermelt enrobing belt and moved to a suitable place for preservation and worship. This was done two days later, with much ceremony, under the supervision of Father Carlos Asturias, the elderly priest from the church in Bridgeport to which the Diaz family belongs.

Jacob used a cutting wire to slice the Blessed Chocolate Virgin off the belt cleanly, and I was proud of him and the way he was suitably serious and professional throughout the procedure, maintaining a steady hand and a respectful mien that his father would probably not have been able to muster without cracking wise or smirking in my direction.

For more than thirty years, when things were good between us, I had a huge tolerance for Howard’s unwillingness, or constitutional inability, whichever it was, to play the part of a grownup without breaking character. I don’t think Howard has ever appreciated the degree to which the way he behaves has so often undercut his authority at Zip’s. I knew this about him before I married him, but I suppose I hoped he would outgrow it. He has that particular form of arrogance that can afflict those who have had all their good fortune handed to them. In inverse proportion to actual achievement, people like Howard crave credit and admiration for having reached the summit. It’s definitely caused resentment among some of the most loyal employees over the years. Why would they enjoy taking orders from an idiot prince?

For years, I would have reminded myself at such a moment that Howard was essentially a good man with a good heart, and I would have had myself convinced that his clowning bid for my attention was a harmless signal in our secret code, a symptom of our closeness as a married couple, in the Mrs. Miniver sense of there being always an eye to catch.

But Howard wasn’t there that June day two years ago on the floor at Zip’s to swagger around his candy kingdom before deftly and casually slicing the Blessed Chocolate Virgin off the Tigermelt belt with his unique blend of competence and irresponsible insouciance, while cracking some joke about how he was just the right man for this job because innate skills for slicing
halvah and lox were in his blood. Instead, Zip’s was in a secret management crisis, Howard having been in Madagascar for two months at that point, living his true authentic life while a lot of urgent issues gathered like storm clouds over the business. I did all I could, with Jacob shouldering a lot of responsibility, to carry on the day-to-day business without letting anyone know how long Howard had been gone or how unclear it was when, if ever, he would be back. Instead, Jacob, dignified and authoritative at twenty-five, stepped up that day.