True Confections (11 page)

As we approached the Mumbo Jumbo line, Howard put a hand on my arm to steer me across a treacherous spill of red licorice goo, and then he left it there as we stood at the side of the churning machinery watching rows of fragrant red discs tumble out, slide down the sorting chute, and land one by one by one before chugging by on the belt. The heat of his hand was shockingly intimate through the thin sleeve of the simple white cotton button-down shirt I was wearing over loose white cotton pants, an outfit that met the requirements of the factory floor for summer so I didn’t have to wear a hot factory coat. I admit I knew my shirt was very snug and contrasted nicely with my tan, plus I never wore a bra in those days.

I asked as many questions as I could think to ask, as we stood there, but I wasn’t listening to Howard’s answers about the moguls and the cornstarch molds and the politics of red food coloring (Zip’s had recently switched from cochineal extract, which is made from crushed insect carcasses, to Red Number Three, erythrosine, which enhanced shelf stability, plus was not made from insects), and from there he went into an exegesis on the history of the balky molding machine. I was leaning into the pleasant buzz of his voice over the clacking, chugging, and clanking all around us, all the while acutely aware of the radiating warmth of that hand.

“So are the red ones Mumbos and the black ones Jumbos, or are the black ones Mumbos and the red ones Jumbos, or are they red Mumbo Jumbos and black Mumbo Jumbos?” I babbled, truly curious about the answer, but also wanting to prolong the
moment, feeling semimesmerized by the ceaseless flow of candy, candy, candy all around me; I had yet to develop immunity to the chronic thrillingness of that. An infinity of jittering red Mumbo Jumbos slid by. Or were they Mumbos? Or Jumbos? I wasn’t listening. I felt light-headed, having left the house without breakfast. Nobody was near us, and we were momentarily alone in the middle of this candy hive.

Wordlessly, Howard steered me toward the Little Sammies panning area, and we stood over a deep bin filled with penultimate, uncoated Little Sammies awaiting their shiny hard-shell chocolate bath. He leaned over and reached into the bin with both hands and lifted them, letting the Little Sammies sift through his fingers back into the bin (I knew this was not in accord with Zip’s sanitary standards) as he continued to explain the principles of each stage along the line to me. I asked some detailed questions about various mechanisms and adjustment controls, even though I could hardly hear Howard’s answers over the din of the incessant sugary clacking. He had stopped talking, and now he was leaning close and brushing my hair aside to speak into my ear. Any more questions? What? Questions! Sorry, I wasn’t listening! You weren’t what? Listening! His hot breath in my ear was suddenly intimate.

He reached out to touch my chin, to turn my face so he could wipe off the smallest drop of Little Sammies coating chocolate. Like a first raindrop, a single stray chocolate droplet had landed on my cheek, and he dabbed this driblet with his fingertip, and then he put his finger in his mouth, onto the tip of his tongue, without speaking. He just did this and looked at me.

We looked at each other, and we just stood there, so close between the machines. I shivered. I could feel my nipples tingle and harden under my white shirt, and although he didn’t take his eyes from mine, I could see in his face that he noticed. Why
did the man yell “Fire!” when he fell into the chocolate? Howard asked me suddenly. What? Why? Howard leaned in close, his hot breath in my ear again, changing solids to liquids, tempering something deep inside of me, and murmured, Because nobody would come if he yelled “Chocolate!”

Several line workers were drifting back from their brief lunch breaks, and I turned away from him then, feigning curiosity in all the wrapping machines, trying to recover from this vertiginous moment. Howard followed behind me, and a moment later I had accidentally led us into a sort of blind alley formed by a stack of palleted wrapping materials and the back end of the Tigermelt wrapping machine. It was very loud, making a
chug-chug-chug-chug-chug-chug-CHUNK, chug-chug-chug-chug-chug-chug-CHUNK
sound that corresponded to six finished Tigermelt bars at a time reaching the end of the line, where they were each sledded onto a cardboard tray and then sleeved in a wrapper, which was then heat-sealed at both ends.

Howard stood right behind me, close, close but not touching, and he explained into my ear the steps required by the Tigermelt wrapping process, which was fully automated, unlike the semi-automated Little Sammies wrapping process, which required certain manual stages (because there was not yet a machine on the line that could efficiently pack the three Little Sammies together onto the cardboard sleeve all heads up, faceup, with any reliability), while I asked nonsensical questions, all of which he answered very thoroughly. Howard was extremely knowledgeable about the quirks and twists of every machine on the floor.

He was dedicated in those days. I would never say otherwise. For many years, Howard Ziplinsky was as dedicated and loyal to the family business as could be. Everyone saw in him the ideal heir, the future of Zip’s Candies. I didn’t know then that he had not been born to this role, but when his older brother, Lewis,
died in childhood, everything shifted, and Howard, not the heir but the spare, had been moved up the line of succession. The future of the family business had weighed on him from the day Lewis died at fourteen, when Howard was twelve.

Finally I ran out of questions, and I felt Howard moving closer to me, and then, standing right behind me, he put his hands on my breasts, very lightly. Something like an electrical current ran through me, from here to there, and I felt as if parts of me were lighting up. Does that sound completely absurd? It was the single most erotic experience of my life to that moment. Perhaps even to this moment. What does
this
button do, he murmured softly in my ear, mimicking my earlier stream of questions, but not unkindly, touching me gently, so gently.

I rinsed his faint chocolate handprints from my shirt when I saw them in my reflection over the sink in the women’s bathroom a little while later. I had finally detached myself from that intoxicating fermata, thinking I should make some kind of an effort to pull myself together. Had anyone noticed the smudges on my shirt as I emerged from behind the Tigermelt wrapping machine and skibbled to the ladies’ room? My dabbing at the handprints left big wet circular splotches that rendered my shirt almost transparent, so I put a white factory coat on over it until it dried, which it soon did, but with chocolate tide marks bordering the former wet spots. This gave Frieda something to comment on at the end of the day as I clocked out, when she reminded me sourly that I needed to pay stricter attention to the hygiene guidelines for wearing a clean white shirt onto the floor if I wanted to keep my job at Zip’s Candies.

What else can I say about Howard? I am trying to be fair. He was, when I look back now through the
Had I But Known
lens, a bit too pretty (prettier than me), maybe a bit too casual, certainly careless (careless with me). He was reckless. Howard was, after
all, not only ten years older than I was, he was also, in effect, my employer. What about him was so enticing to me? Everything. I had never met anyone remotely like him before. Howard enjoyed privilege, he enjoyed having money, and he radiated a kind of entitlement, an entitlement to do anything, including this, this homing in on me. But his was a generous entitlement, one that invited me along. He made me feel that anything was possible.

At the same time, there was something a little smirky about Howard, something of the obnoxious frat boy. When his DKE brother George W. Bush was elected president in 2000 (if you can call that an election), Howard wanted to send him a case of Little Sammies to celebrate the inauguration, but I objected. Howard insisted that George had been a good guy at college, a lively presence in DKE House on Lake Place, a true friend, all of which seemed like somewhat revised history, a Howard specialty.

“Seriously, Howard?” I was skeptical. Howard had told me about some of the casual nastiness and racism he had witnessed, if not experienced, at Yale. “W. wasn’t one of the anti-Semites you told me about?”

Howard got a look on his face that I know well, a defensive sheepishness, as he tried to find the words to explain what he meant. He was especially proud of his DKE affiliation, and I had heard more than once that the DKE man was in equal proportions the scholar, the gentleman, and the jolly good fellow. “It depends on how you take his sense of humor,” he said, finally. “Once there was a group of us hanging out at Bulldog Pizza after a hockey game, and someone was complaining about this annoying guy we all knew who never put enough money on the table for his share of our beers when the check came, and George said, ‘What do you expect from a Jew?’ So I said ‘Hey, asshole,
I’m a Jew too,’ and W. said, ‘Howdy, you’re different—you’re a white Jew.’”

Howard thought this was funny. I didn’t. I had no sense of humor at all about the election—in fact I was sick about it—and I probably focused all my wrath and disappointment on at least keeping those Little Sammies out of the White House. I really insisted that he not send them. I was belligerent and relentless about it. Finally, Howard agreed that he wouldn’t send them, and the subject was dropped. But then about a month later an envelope from the White House arrived in the mail for Howard. It contained a glossy color photograph of George W. Bush smirking at his desk in the Oval Office, and it was signed in black Sharpie with a scrawled “Thanks, Howdy—Say, Dat’s Tasty! GWB.” That photograph is framed and hanging on the wall in Howard’s office (which is now my office) at this moment. I keep meaning to take it down. I know it’s petty of me, and insignificant in the larger scheme of things, but every time it catches my eye, I am indignant all over again. How could he?

D
ESPITE
H
OWARD’S EXTRAORDINARY
self-regard and sense of entitlement, which has always made him capable of behaving so badly, there was for so many years something very gentle and loving about him that always redeemed him in my eyes. Something genuinely sweet, too. I thought I saw in him more Sam’s son than Frieda’s. More kindness. I was mistaken. Like everyone else in this story, I have always seen only what I wanted to see. In 1975, our thrilling mutual attraction felt like a surprising yet inevitable part of my sudden immersion in Zip’s Candies, my pleasurable slide into that warm chocolate vat.

We spent almost every night of the rest of that hot summer
together, and it was an exceptionally hot summer. Every evening after work we would drive around in Howard’s old chocolate-brown Fiat Spider, making out at red lights, going for fried clams and lobster rolls at the beach in Madison. Top down, radio up! Sometimes we would cruise the Wooster Square neighborhood for a parking place so we could get a white clam pizza at Sally’s. Often we would go to the last showing of a movie, it didn’t matter what, for the air-conditioning. I loved freezing myself at the movies after baking myself at the beach.

Howard always lingered at the refreshment counter, scrutinizing the candy assortment with an appraising professional eye. He was genuinely annoyed with my fondness for Milk Duds to the point where I didn’t dare choose them, opting instead for the safety of off-brand malted milk balls, even though they were inevitably stale, which pleased Howard. He would murmur a stream of candy talk in my ear while I chomped my way through the box as we waited for the lights to go down, feeling the heat of my sunburned skin glowing in the frigid air, my sunburned legs soothed by the worn velvet of the theater seats, knowing we would go back to his apartment and make love with all that frantic urgency we had for each other. It was a sweet time.

Whoppers, I learned, avid student that I was, started out being sold individually, two for a penny, but they were bigger than standard malted milk balls today, real gobstoppers, and when cellophane wrapping machines were introduced, a smaller-sized Whopper was packaged in “fivesomes,” which sold for a penny a pack. I loved the way Howard cared so much about all this.

And it’s a worthy passion, one the family has perpetuated. When the kids were growing up, we could talk all through dinner about candy bars of the past, and it was always fun to get
Howard started on candy-bar trivia. We would name any letter of the alphabet or any state in the country and Howard could name an obscure bar that started with that letter or was manufactured in that state, or he could bluff persuasively. The weirder the bar, the more certain we were that he was bluffing, but usually, such a bar had actually once existed and Howard not only knew its name, but he also knew the slogan for it and the makeup of the bar. When Jacob saw
Rain Man
, Dustin Hoffman’s Raymond reminded him of Howard’s encyclopedic candy-bar knowledge, and for a while that’s what he called his father, Rain Man, whenever Howard started talking candy.

Jacob and Julie never tired of hearing about the Chicken Dinner bar (a pioneering concept, since it was in some ways one of the first protein bars, the succulent roast chicken on the wrapper suggesting as it did that one could have something equal to a nourishing dinner for a nickel, though it was an ordinary candy bar, and chicken was not an ingredient). First introduced in the 1920s by the Sperry Candy Company, possibly inspired by President Hoover’s campaign promise of a chicken in every pot, the bar grew in popularity during the Depression, when many people couldn’t afford a real chicken dinner.

Prohibition, which began in 1920 and ended thirteen years later, was great for the candy business, and it is not a coincidence that those dry years were the heyday for candy bars, a convenient and cheap replacement for a quick pick-me-up. Never before had candy been consumed in such quantities. Never before was candy so conveniently packaged and available, the candy bar offering an experience distinctly different from selecting a single morsel from a gift box of bonbons.

Candy bars were a playful gratification that could be enjoyed by men, women, and children equally. In 1927, Lucky Strike cigarettes aimed a daring campaign at women, encouraging
them to smoke. Eating a lot of candy bars could lead to weight gain, and here was a healthful alternative: “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.” Sugar and nicotine were legal stimulating habits when alcohol wasn’t, and even after the Volstead Act was repealed in 1933, America continued to smoke and eat candy as never before, though some of the stranger bars that had flourished in those golden years didn’t survive past World War II.