True Confections (12 page)

Julie and Jacob could never hear enough about those ghostly candy bars such as Old Nick, Fat Emma, Whiz, Candy Salad, Chump, Big Dearo, Denver Sandwich, Zep, Vegetable Sandwich, Lindy, Roasty Toasty, Vanilla Jitney, Doctor’s Orders, Baffle, Coconut Grove, Cherry Hump (tragically discontinued in the 1980s because of a chronic leakage problem), Pierce Arrow, Poor Prune, the Bolster bar, and let’s not forget the Amos ’n’ Andy bar, which had the slogan “Um-Um! Ain’t Dat Sumpin!”

This bar came out several years after Little Sammies, and Zip’s Candies actually contemplated legal action against the Williamson Candy Company over that slogan. Eli engaged in correspondence with a Philadelphia law firm specializing in copyrights and patents, which advised him that although he had several valid points, and they were sympathetic to his situation, they couldn’t agree that he could prove a sufficient influence, given that the Amos ’n’ Andy bar was a chocolate-covered, crisp-honeycomb-centered, two-piece product, and in any case they didn’t think a court would find merit in Zip’s Candies proprietary claim on the word “Dat” in a candy-bar slogan.

Jacob and Julie would make up bars, too, the sillier the better: the Mint Chipmunk Chunk bar (“Save One for Winter!”), the Thunder Thigh bar (“From Your Lips to Your Hips!”), and let us not forget their answer to the Mars bar, the Uranus bar (“The Protein Bar for Colonic Health!”).

T
HAT FIRST SUMMER
, sometimes I didn’t get home for three or four days at a time, spending most nights at Howard’s Chapel Street apartment over the head shop called Group W Bench. The back stairs of the building always had a faint but persistent patchouli and marijuana vapor that seemed to float up from the shop, which was nicer than the building’s top notes of litter box and frying.

Although Howard was twenty-eight when we met, and I was, in his words, barely legal (which definitely seemed to appeal to him), Sam told me years later that he had told Howard, soon after it had become evident that we were together (and in retrospect I am embarrassed at how transparent we must have been, rutting around the factory floor), that I might be the one who was too old. Sam observed a few times over the years that I had an old soul, which I took as a compliment, and I am inclined to agree. That’s a perfect example of the kind of thing a Ziplinsky might say to you that no Tatnall would ever think to mention.

My parents had nothing to say to me about my new life, no questions, no opinions, though they must have noticed how absent I was that summer, and, when our paths did happen to cross, how inexplicably happy I must have seemed. Though it was my habit to feign indifference around them, if they were paying any kind of attention, you would think they might have wanted to check in with me. Also, my mother might have thought to offer a little chat about birth control. But she probably assumed I had taken care of all that on my own. (This was correct; my first experience at the Planned Parenthood clinic on Whitney Avenue, soon after I started working at Zip’s Candies and long before I was to serve on the state board, was as a patient
whose chart had a “Do Not Contact” sticker at the top.) It would have been a radical departure for her to get that personal. I might as well wish for her to have been more interested in my lonely independent life all along, more than she was interested in, say, her collection of vintage Nantucket Lightship Basket handbags. It wasn’t in Kay’s and Edwin Tatnall’s natures to feel anything but relief that I was going, going, gone.

O
NE DESULTORY
S
UNDAY
afternoon that summer, on our way to dinner at Frieda and Sam’s, perhaps the third time I had been there, Howard took me to the Jewish Home to meet his grandmother, Sam’s mother, the legendary Lillian. For the first few weeks, even when I had begun to sort out the Ziplinsky family history a little bit, I hadn’t realized she was still alive, because she had only been spoken of in the past tense whenever anyone mentioned her at Zip’s.

But there she was, cheerfully demented and quite frail, and though she was only seventy-two, she seemed to me like someone in her nineties. (As it turned out, this was to be the only time I ever met her, because she died soon after that, on the last day of summer, in her sleep.) When we got to Lillian’s room, she wasn’t in it, but Howard knew where to look, and we found her down the corridor, in a wheelchair parked beside the piano in the day-room, where a volunteer was earnestly plinking out “Willow, Weep for Me.” The sour old spinet was missing some of the ivory veneers on certain keys and had a number of bad strings. There is a piano like this in every nursing-home dayroom.

Lillian smiled at us both in a warm and familiar way. Howard introduced me as if she could understand what he was saying. I loved how respectful and devoted he was to his grandmother. He said I was his girlfriend. Of course this is what I was
by that time, but it hadn’t ever been said before. She seemed delighted to hear it, and delighted to shake my hand, though she didn’t speak, and then she seemed equally delighted to shake Howard’s hand next, though he had called her Nana and told her he was Howdy as he kissed her hello only a minute earlier.

Howard told me that he was the only one in the family who still went to see her with any regularity, because it pained Sam too much that she no longer recognized him. Howard’s sister, Irene, whom I had met only once at that point, was too busy to get there very often, though when she did show up, she tormented the staff by lecturing them on nutrition and the elderly, and she had apparently seriously offended the food service staff by demanding that they remove all aluminum pots from their kitchen. Frieda and Lillian had never really gotten along, each feeling crowded by the other for so many years. Howard told me that his mother’s last visit, a definite disincentive for future visits, had concluded with Lillian’s looking at Frieda with a sudden glimmer of recognition before she exclaimed, “Oh it’s you! When did you get so fat?”

“The one thing Nana always seems to recognize is the Little Sammies jingle,” Howard whispered to me, after I whispered to him about her obvious love of the labored piano music that was holding us captive. “You know the jingle? You must know it!” Howard was certain I knew it. How could anyone not know the Little Sammies jingle? He shook his head in mock exasperation. This was an example of the vast cultural gulf those ten years between us could suddenly open up at certain moments.

I didn’t think I knew it at all, but I nodded that I did, feigning a sudden recollection, Oh yes, of course. Maybe it was one of those little riffs like “I’ll fly to the moon for a Lorna Doone.” In fact, when Howard sang it for Lillian (once the volunteer had finally concluded her self-important, community
service–inflected performance and gotten up from the piano, releasing us from our respectful audience mode), it was familiar.

I had a fleeting recollection of the cartoony line drawings that went with the jingle for the television commercial for Little Sammies I must have seen in my earliest childhood, when the commercial was still running. Zip’s sponsored a local children’s television program on Saturday mornings from 1958 to 1962, so I would have been four, at most, when I saw it.

As Howard sang it again, and Lillian beamed and conducted with an age-spotted claw, I had a sudden, vivid, kinetic memory of sitting on the living room floor in front of our big console television, watching Larry, Barry, and Harry, three clown brothers who starred in the weird and creepy
Happy Playtime!
(“What time is it, kids? It’s Happy Playtime! And who’s here to play with you? Larry, Barry, and Harry! And what do they want Mom to give you for a treat? Their favorite Little Sammies! Be sure to ask Mom to get you some!”)

So I hadn’t told a lie after all. As Howard sang it a third time, I joined him, but I had only gotten to “One, two, three!” when Lillian cocked her head to one side with a troubled look, not sure she liked my harmony at all. She waved her hand in a correcting gesture in my direction, and I stopped, leaving Howard to finish, solo.

Howard has a nice baritone. He sang the “Don’t be hasty” lines in an increasingly sped-up and admirably unself-conscious sort of Mighty Mouse voice, before dropping down into a stagy basso profundo for the interrupting “Say, Dat’s Tasty!” tagline.

“You know Jimmy Ray in shipping?” Howard asked me as we were pulling out of the Jewish Home parking lot. Lillian had been rolled into the dining room for her five o’clock evening meal, and though she accepted our hugs and kisses warmly, our departure had been of no consequence to her.

“Is he the old guy, the bald one who whistles?”

“That’s Eddie Sohovik. No, Jimmy Ray, the black guy.”

“Okay—”

“That was his voice. He’s the ‘Say, Dat’s Tasty’ guy,” Howard said, blatantly running a red light at the corner of Winthrop Avenue as we traversed that desolate stretch of the abandoned urban renewal project that still bisects New Haven. This was the site of the old Jewish neighborhood, where Frieda grew up (though I didn’t know it that day); it was destroyed in the early 1960s to make way for a new city plan that never materialized when funding vanished. The pointless destruction of their Legion Avenue home and the loss of that community was a bitter subject for Frieda in those years when I first knew her. The forced Oak Street diaspora had taken place the decade before, but she never got over her resentment, even though Sam told me her childhood block was in the heart of a slum that wasn’t quite as golden as she now recalled it to have been, with rats the size of cats darting between parked cars on hot summer nights.

T
HE SCATTERED
L
IEBASHEVSKYS
have kept that proprietary blend of nostalgia and resentment simmering to this day. At Frieda’s funeral, I overheard some of her cousins from Valley Stream and Great Neck criticizing the pastries from the Westville Bakery that I had obtained at the last minute for the post-funeral gathering, because Irene had promised to help with the food and then had changed her mind the night before. She had agreed only because she was under too much stress to refuse when we spoke about it, she told me, and her new therapist in Telluride had helped her to see that it was time she learned to stand in her Wise Adult and say No! to me, the competitive sister-in-law who has no right to steal her power, and so she stood in her Wise Adult and took her power back. The night before the funeral she phoned me just before midnight from Frieda’s house, where she was presumably sifting through all the family treasures she was worried I might try to claim, to say, No, Alice! No! I cannot and will not help you with that! Furthermore, this was going to be her answer from now on whenever I tried to control her or place unfair demands on her. Listen, America! Irene Ziplinsky Weiss has hereby declared that she will no longer accommodate the needs of others at the expense of her own integrity! So I had to get the damned pastries myself.

The Liebashevsky cousins were like-minded about the Westville Bakery schnecken; both the raspberry and the apricot were very ordinary, nothing to write home about. (But what do you expect, from
her?
Julie told me she heard one of the Great Neck gargoyles say, pointing at me while helping herself to another of the offending pastries.) But then they began arguing with bitter urgency about which had been the best in the old Legion Avenue neighborhood, the transcendent strudel from
Rosenberg’s Bakery or the miraculous poppy-seed cake from Cohen’s Bakery or the astonishing babka from Ticotsky’s Bakery, as if a determination had to be made here and now, though all three of these establishments vanished some fifty years ago.

“W
HAT DO YOU
mean, that’s his voice?” I asked Howard as we headed toward his parents’ Westville neighborhood. Three ghetto kids on raggedy banana-seat bikes cut in front of us repeatedly, zigzagging for sport while we kept pace behind them for two blocks, before Howard gunned the motor to show he meant business and nosed past them.