True Confections (2 page)

My next interview was for a receptionist position at a big law firm on Church Street, but when I met with the human resources lady, before I could say a word about which job I was applying for, she took one look at me and shook her head, and then she quickly told me the job had been filled and then she started typing really fast and didn’t look at me again. I stood on the sidewalk in front of the building in my dowdy interview outfit feeling waves of shame as office workers on their lunch hour brushed by me. I had just been intercepted attempting to pass myself off as a regular person.

I applied for a job at the bookstore on Whitney Avenue where my family had bought books my entire life, but the formerly friendly owner was abrupt with me and vague about actually needing anyone after all, even though there was a hand-lettered sign on the glass door advertising his need for part-time help. As I turned away I caught him rolling his eyes at one of his employees, a soft-spoken retired music teacher who had always been nice to me and who shared my mother’s passion for Angela Thirkell novels. In the glass of the door, I could see her reflection, shrugging and grimacing in response as I made my way out.

At Helen’s Double Dip out in deepest Milford, nobody asked me anything about whether or not I was going to college, and more significantly nobody seemed to notice or care that they were hiring a renowned pariah with a criminal record to work a daily shift from nine to six. All Freddie, the manager (with his Don Ameche mustache and his terrible acne scars), seemed to care about was my comprehension of the rules, which mandated
showing up on time, thorough hand-washing, correct scooping technique, and the strict limit of three free samples per customer, no exceptions, not even for friends. I assured him I had no friends.

T
HAT MORNING, SITTING
at the counter at Clark’s Dairy, I was drawn to the quaintness of the little “Dat’s Tasty!” ad declaring that Zip’s Candies was seeking a “hardworking and honest individual willing to be dedicated to learning old-fashioned techniques at a world-renowned candy factory.” Like the Clark’s counter itself, the ad seemed to me like something from another era, an era so much simpler and nicer than my own. I wished I could make up a story about the person who applied for this job, to tell my mother while she made our dinner, but my mother wasn’t speaking to me in those grim days, and it wasn’t clear that she would resume speaking to me anytime soon.

Moments later, instead of driving a few exits south on traffic-clogged I-95 and going straight to work, I found myself driving under the highway ramp and navigating the desolate Krazy Kat landscape of the old industrial waterfront of New Haven on the other side of the train tracks, at the edge of the Quinnipiac River. I had gone once with my father to this part of town, years before, to buy a replacement part for the old-fashioned crank-out awning that shaded our backyard patio. Yes, we have no bananas, he would always sing as he cranked, deploying the green-and-white-striped awning to shade the table and chairs on our back terrace. In my memory, voyaging to the awning factory on River Street had been an expedition, far more of an adventure than the five minutes’ drive from downtown that took me to the corner of River and James streets.

Though I had intended, out of pure idle curiosity, only to
take a quick look and keep driving, when I spotted the big, faded “Dat’s Tasty!” ghost lettering embedded in the worn bricks up so high near the roof that you wouldn’t notice them once you got closer, I stopped, and then I parked my car in front of the nondescript three-story factory building with the number on the door corresponding to the address in the ad. Were it not for that “Dat’s Tasty!” declaration in old-fashioned italic lettering, which already felt oddly familiar to me as I gazed at it, I wouldn’t have been at all certain I was in the right place. Was this worn brick building surrounded by boarded-up husks of long-gone industry at the baked edge of nothing really the home of a world-renowned candy factory?

I was not specifically interested in the candies themselves at this point in my life. Sure, I was always happy enough to find Little Sammies or a Tigermelt in my Halloween candy, who wouldn’t be? Mumbo Jumbos were more problematic, as I was rather ambivalent toward licorice in those years, and I was always willing to trade away Mumbo Jumbos for something with chocolate (although my father liked them, so sometimes I would save them for him). And there was a family vacation on the Cape one rainy summer when my father used Mumbo Jumbos to replace some missing backgammon pieces in the set we found in a closet of the rental house.

But I had never gone out of my way to buy any Zip’s candy with my allowance money in my earlier candy-buying years, when I would ride my bike to the newsstand on Whitney Avenue on Saturday afternoons. With my fifty cents I could buy three comic books, a pack of gum, and a candy bar. Frankly, I tended to favor Baby Ruths. I suppose I had a vague awareness that Zip’s Candies was located somewhere in Connecticut, but I had no deep affection for boring and familiar New Haven, and my family was never one of those Chamber of Commerce,
hometown pride kind of families. It certainly never occurred to me that I was destined to spend my life here.

There was a reason for the anonymity of the building, I would learn. Zip’s had deliberately kept a low profile for a while at that point, although years earlier, especially in the 1950s, there had been a great deal of effort put into maintaining a very visible hometown identity, with local radio and television spots, sponsored parade floats, and lots of giveaways (rare Zip’s memorabilia is avidly sought by collectors, especially the Zip’s green umbrellas from the early fifties, a prize awarded to those willing to amass immense qualifying quantities of Zip’s wrappers and mail them in, with a dollar for postage and handling; these occasionally show up on eBay for ridiculous sums).

Factory visits had never been permitted by Zip’s, for reasons having to do partly with hygiene but mostly with keeping secret the specific manufacturing techniques for each line because of a not-unreasonable family paranoia about the potential loss of trade secrets. Plus, Frieda just never wanted to deal with groups of children. That woman didn’t like people in general, and she really didn’t like children, preferring to keep her distance unless she had a specific reason (like, if they were her own grandchildren) to tolerate them.

So, in my school years, I had experienced no class trips to the Zip’s factory to see Little Sammies and Tigermelts and Mumbo Jumbos whizzing along the lines on their journey from raw ingredients to finished candies to wrapped products tightly packed into boxes for shipping. This is in distinct contrast to the way I had been marched through Lender’s Bagels on three occasions by the time I was in sixth grade. In 1975, Zip’s Candies was so low profile that there wasn’t even an air of mystery about Zip’s, unlike the fog of rumor and innuendo that has surrounded the legendary fortress that is the PEZ factory in
Orange, which no civilians have been permitted to penetrate since PEZ began American operations there in 1973. I fail to comprehend the allure of PEZ, I have to say. Even as a child, I was PEZ-resistant, more interested in the PEZ logo and the word itself,
PEZ
being a sort of Austrian shorthand for the word
Pfefferminze
, than I was in the cheesy dispensers or the actual candy (where’s the charm in a stack of compressed, tooth-pastey chalk bricks?). How many PEZ bricks in the PEZ logo? Forty-four.

The Zip’s building had no sign. The original sign was in storage, I would discover later that summer when I was taking a smoke break out back by the loading area and spotted it beside a bin of old wooden shipping pallets. Not that the official company history would tell you this, but the truth, according to Pete Zagorski, the old-timer on the loading dock, was that it had been removed in 1969, in haste (by Pete Zagorski himself, who had been rousted out of a deep sleep before the sun was up by a call from Sam, asking him to hustle down to James Street and take down the sign, which is why he was so authoritative on the subject), on the first of May, because of a tip-off by a friendly detective with the New Haven Police Department. He’d heard a rumor that the charged-up mob on the Green protesting the Black Panther trial in the Elm Street courthouse was planning a march across town to the Zip’s Candies factory, to protest a certain candy inspired by Little Black Sambo, even if the company had for a while tried to revise history with statements about how in fact the myth that Little Sammies were named for Little Black Sambo is just one of those erroneous beliefs that circulate, because the truth is that the candy was really inspired by the birth of the owner’s son, Little Sammy Ziplinsky, born the same year Zip’s Candies started production.

In 1921, the Curtiss Candy Company in Chicago changed
their Kandy Kake bar into the Baby Ruth, claiming former president Grover Cleveland’s dead daughter Ruth had somehow inspired the name. This was implausible at best, and it is most likely that the Baby Ruth bar was an unauthorized attempt to cash in on the popularity of baseball great Babe Ruth. It hardly seems fair that in 1931 Curtiss won their case to shut down Babe Ruth’s own licensed candy bar on grounds that it was too close to their bestselling product.

Nothing happened to Zip’s Candies during the Black Panther trial. There was no angry march from the New Haven Green across the railroad tracks, even in that season of turmoil when anything was possible. The whole city of New Haven seemed to be one spark away from a great big Black Panther conflagration. It was a potentially threatening time for a company known for making small, chewy, Negroid candies, no matter what the explanation for the name might be, no question. All it meant to me at the time, a couple of miles up leafy Whitney Avenue (named for that other ambitious and inventive Eli, whose ingenuity gave the world the cotton gin, which led to a vast expansion of cotton production in the American south, which of course increased the demand for the slave labor necessary to pick all that cotton), was that my parents watched the news on television compulsively and I wasn’t allowed to leave our block on my bicycle.

I
COULD SEE
through the big mullioned windows on the first two floors that the factory lights were on. I turned off my Subaru before the engine could overheat, which it tended to do, which was why my mother was driving her new Volkswagen and I was driving this old wreck, and I sat there. I knew I needed to backtrack to the highway entrance I had passed on my way. I could
get to work on time if I left now. Something kept me sitting there in the still car. I don’t know what, beyond a general reluctance to face the day, to face the rest of the summer, and after that, to face the rest of my doomed life stretching out in front of me.

I harbored a hopeless vision of spending all eternity at Helen’s Double Dip, where I would turn into an aging spinster furiously scooping triple Nutty Buddy cones with my by-then crippled arm while life passed me by. There’s poor old Alice, people would say. The sad one, with the mustache. (I would have let myself go completely. Doomed felons don’t pluck.) They say she’s worked at Helen’s Double Dip all her life.

The truth is, that summer, that day, that moment, I had come to the end of something. I had lost my place.

Sweat trickled down my neck in the suddenly stifling car. I opened my window. A certain burnt sugar and chocolate aroma hung in the air, that marvelous, inevitable, ineffable, just-right aura of Zip’s Candies, that unique blend of sweetness and pleasure and something else, a deep note of something rich and exotic and familiar that makes you nostalgic for its flavor even though you may never have tasted it before. I have loved that smell every day of my life from then to now. Some days, I go to work for that smell. When I travel, I miss it, I long for it. On Mumbo Jumbo days there is an added spice in the air, a dark hint of cherry and anise that adds a top note of danger. In retrospect, I believe this was a Mumbo Jumbo day. The aroma wafting through my car told me what I already knew I had to do. I went in and applied for the job.

M
Y FUTURE FATHER-IN-LAW
, Sam Ziplinsky, appraised me with a sidelong glance from behind his messy desk, never taking
the unlit, moist stub of a cigar out of his mouth (he couldn’t smoke on the premises, so he nursed a disgusting half-smoked cigar all day long instead) while barraging me with questions about my education, about my experience, about my family, about where I lived and what I wanted to do with my life.

He didn’t seem to hear my hesitant, evasive, contradictory answers at all as he rooted through untidy heaps of papers and threw out more questions, one on top of the next—Why did I think I deserved to work here, did I know it was like joining a family, am I someone who gets sick a lot, am I reliable, where do I live, am I good with my hands, am I in college, why not, do I want to marry and have children, am I a team player, do I like licorice? Red and black, or did I prefer red and hate black? Which do I like better, Little Sammies or Tigermelts? Until finally he interrupted me to exclaim in triumph, Found the sucker! as he extracted a ledger book from beneath a pile of folders.

I stopped trying to cook up plausible and attractive answers to each question, in order, since I was about three questions behind and I seemed to be talking to myself anyway, so finally I just stopped speaking altogether and waited to see what would come next. Was he listening at all to my replies? Was this a conversation, or a job interview, or what was it? I was now late for my shift at Helen’s Double Dip. Freddie would be seriously disturbed that I was not there to start the morning flavor batches of the day and complete the daily inventory checklist before the lines started to form. Was I reliable?

Sam sat back in his creaking desk chair, holding the formerly misplaced ledger book in his lap, and then he looked me in the face for the first time, for a long moment. There was a metal bowl of deformed, uncoated Little Sammies on his desk, some of them undersized and missing parts, some of them all stuck
together in a blob of limbs and torsos. He ate a clump absent-mindedly while looking at me, and then he held out the bowl and I took a three-headed triplet cluster and nibbled on their heads while waiting for whatever came next. At last he said, with a wry smile, all at once, not pausing for my replies, the cigar still firmly planted in the corner of his mouth, You want to work here, kid? You’re what, sixteen? Eighteen? You want a job at Zip’s? You want to work? You a hard worker? Sister, this isn’t just a summer job. It’s hard work. You like candy, kiddo? What we make here are three great candy lines, true confections, that’s what my father, Eli—he founded the company—that’s what he called them, true confections. You like Little Sammies? That’s me, you’re looking at him, I’m the original Little Sammy. I used to be little, now I’m not so little. So what do you think? You know what? You’re hired. I got a good feeling.