True Confections (22 page)

Sam was rarely disloyal to family members, unlike the subsequent generation, and though he seemed to be on the verge of saying something more to me after this soliloquy, he didn’t. He still had my hand, as if to keep me from writing anything more (I made notes later, in my car before going back to work), so I closed the notebook. And then he said one more thing to me, which I also wrote down right away, so this is definitely accurate.

He said, “I’m not going to live forever, and I need to plan. One thing I didn’t plan so well is that this family is small. If you want to keep a family business going, the smartest thing you can do is have a lot of brothers and sisters and a lot of children. That way you never have to scrape the barrel. You shouldn’t have
anyone doing a job in a family business if you wouldn’t ever think of hiring that person if he wasn’t family. In a big family, you find more qualified employees, you have family members who can find the right job in the business that suits them, and you can have good partnerships and plan your successions.”

He looked at me then, and then he looked away and squeezed my hand very hard, and I could see him fighting tears. In retrospect this was probably as close as he could come to telling me what he knew and I didn’t, but he breathed a long sigh instead, and then he just had one more thing to say:

“I’m counting on you to bring up Jakie and Julie so they know how to work for a living. It’s the most important thing, and I know you won’t let me down. It’s up to you to keep our family going, even if things get complicated. If they know how to work for a living, they’ll always land on their feet.”

Mary the waitress came to clear our plates and drop the check on our table then. God, I miss everything about those lunches at Clark’s with Sam. Ordering BLT’s and grilled cheese sandwiches without a thought about cholesterol. The “plate of ice cream” on the menu. The creamy buzz of the milk-shake machines. Never once in all those years did Mary or Barbara ever ask us if we were “still working on that.”

T
ELL PEOPLE YOUR FAMILY
has a candy business, and soon enough
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
comes into the conversation, the original Roald Dahl book and both movies based on the book, all of which are blended together in most people’s minds as one delightful excursion to a fantasy chocolate factory, maybe one a lot like Zip’s Candies.

Jacob and Julie each received multiple copies of the book when they were born, and subsequently not a birthday has ever passed without another copy turning up, as well as various videos or DVDs of both films over the years. We have probably had fifty copies of various editions of the book pass through this house. I can’t throw them away fast enough. Sometimes I find mysterious copies of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
on a bookshelf, or a videotape of the 1971 movie,
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
(apparently the name “Charlie” had to be avoided in the Vietnam years because that was what we called the Vietcong, Victor Charlie) in with other old tapes. Twice, for no apparent reason, a DVD of the 2005 Johnny Depp film,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
, has arrived erroneously in our Net-flix mailer. Sooner or later, no matter what I do, another version of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
will appear again somewhere in the house like a recurring fungus.

If Howard was more energetic and imaginative, I would suspect him of an elaborate plot to gaslight me. He always found my horror of all things
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
amusing. He was not an attentive reader, and even when I elaborated on the reason for my loathing of this story, he always said it just didn’t bother him. That in itself bothered me.

I regard each manifestation of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
with a white-hot, passionate hatred. I was given a copy of the book when it was first published in 1964, for my sixth birthday. My father read it aloud to me at bedtime, three nights in a row, until we reached the end. It was the only time he ever read to me, and I will never know how it was determined that this was the book for our one and only father-daughter bedtime bonding experience. I was utterly terrified, and hardly dared to go to sleep those nights, so fearful did the story make me.

Why did anyone think this was a suitable bedtime read for a child? (And why did my parents not take my terror seriously, instead of finding it funny?) The gratuitous cruelties, the violence, the casual viciousness—how did this book worm its way into our culture? How did it find its way so quickly to the beloved classics shelf, nestled between
Charlotte’s Web
and
Little Women
in every children’s library in the Western world? I hated it, and yet I couldn’t resist it, and as I became a more proficient reader I would return to it again and again throughout my childhood and adolescence. I was like someone who despises black licorice but keeps coming back for just one more licorice allsort in order to savor her own disgust at the loathed flavor each time.

The world of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
is one in which all children are assumed to be greedy and obsessed with candy, while there is universal admiration for the sadomasochistic proprietor of the Wonka Candy Company. The cooked-up pathos of the poverty in which Charlie Bucket lives with his family as the book begins has always felt to me like a vicious mockery. Consider for comparison the genuinely wrenching
penury of
A Little Princess
or
Oliver Twist
. Dahl is heartless. He is contemptuous of children; Veruca Salt’s first name is the synonym for a kind of wart. There is an underlying contempt for all humanity, really, and an almost obsessive hatred for the innocent joys of childhood, as if all pleasure-seeking is a form of gluttony for which people must be shamed and punished. It’s one big pleasure trap.

There is something obscene about the book, and I really mean that—this tasteless, horrible book feels to me much more like covert S and M pornography than children’s literature. It is a wonder that I wasn’t so scarred by my early exposure to this material that I didn’t have an aversion to Zip’s Candies, though when I got to this very issue in my analysis, Dr. Gibraltar suggested that my love for and attraction to a candy factory—and consequently, the way I have spent my life in the candy businesss—might well be a reaction formation. The blocking of desire by its opposite.

Meanwhile, everyone who has read
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
or seen either movie version believes he knows something about the inner workings of a candy factory. Which brings me to the Oompa-Loompa problem. No, we do not have Oompa-Loompas working at Zip’s Candies. And how very original of you to ask. How amusing is this notion of slave labor, this fun fantasy of workers who never leave the factory? What could be more pleasing than an army of small brown people who don’t require wages working tirelessly in the production of cheap chocolate for the greedy public?

My copy of the book was the original first American edition. In it, the Oompa-Loompas are described as “black pygmies from the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle, where no white man had been before.” Later editions were revised in text and illustration, because of reactions to the blatant racism, so
the Oompa-Loompas mutated into “dwarves” with “golden-brown hair” and “rosy white skin” who come from Loompa-land, a region of Loompa, a small isolated island in the Pacific Ocean. (In the 1971 movie, for which Dahl wrote an early version of the screenplay, they have orange skin and green hair, as if they have now mutated one step further into a tribe of enslaved laborers who match the Irish flag, surely another familiar and very British colonialist fantasy.)

But no matter how complected, we all know what Oompa-Loompas really are, don’t we? Fun, guilt-free slaves! It’s like diet candy, with zero calories! What cultural blindness makes it possible for people to cherish and adore Oompa-Loompas, while simultaneously recognizing the evils of child slavery in certain cacao-producing nations of Africa? How about if instead of a colony of pygmies dwelling in the chocolate factory, these tireless captive workers were diminutive Jews from a remote shtetl in deepest Siberia? Would that be just as charming and fun?

I
RENE HAS NEVER
shown any curiosity about the actual workings of Zip’s, the day-to-day operations, how the raw materials are sourced, how the candy is manufactured and all we do for quality control, the concerns of marketing and sales, not to mention the issues of our hiring and benefit policies, which are so far removed from the employment practices of Willy Wonka. For years, her idea of involvement with the family business was the effort she put into generating an incessant barrage of newspaper clippings and sanctimonious emails.

These communications were always urgent, unrealistic demands related to the cause of the moment, usually a sudden inspiration that Zip’s Candies should only use special biodegradable wrappers made of rice husks and printed with soy ink, or
that we should immediately start using only organic ingredients, or that we should run our machines on used cooking oil instead of electricity, or that we should hire a bunch of displaced Katrina victims right away.

Then there was the unforgettable time she phoned me from her car, sounding desperate, asking me to meet her for coffee at Starbucks on Chapel Street right then, please! I postponed a meeting with a supplier and hopped in my car, worried that she had a health scare, or that there was some equivalently dire crisis that she needed to tell me about. Why me and not Howard? We had never met for coffee before.

I should have known. After I circled the block twice looking for a parking space, which were especially scarce because some recent heavy snows had left ugly scraped piles of dirty snow and ice along the narrow side streets around the Yale campus, I gave up and parked in a loading zone on Chapel Street (for which I got a parking ticket). Irene was at the front of the line, so I joined her and we gave our orders. I asked for a tall red-eye, and Irene ordered one of those narcissistic coffee drinks requiring modifications and extra shots of this and that, and the foam this way and not that way in relation to the caramel, and a venti cup for a grande drink. I could tell by the look on the face of the barista, a distracted high school girl who clearly hated everyone that afternoon as she listened to Irene’s order, that she was going to give Irene real espresso despite the emphatic instruction about the three decaffeinated espresso shots.

When we had settled at a table, Irene pulled out a book from one of her many virtuous tote bags from do-good organizations and held it to her bosom before placing it reverently on the table between us. This system of understanding personalities would change everything at Zip’s, she explained. It was the key to our future success. We needed to find out every employee’s type
right away so as to assign them to the tasks best suited to their personalities. We?

“You’re a One, and I’m a Two,” she said, “and this is why we haven’t always gotten along very well.” She seemed to think she was speaking rationally. I saw that the book was an introduction to Enneagrams. This was the emergency? “Twos are helpers,” she explained. “Helpers are nurturers, focused on giving and receiving love.”

I lost my temper, I admit. I told Irene that Zip’s wasn’t going to embark on a damned Enneagram management policy now or ever. And anyway, why not bring this to Howard if she thought it was so essential? Did she know I had canceled a meeting to rush here, because she had made it sound as if she had a personal emergency? What was
wrong
with her?

“Maybe you’re not a One.” She frowned, taking her book off the table and thrusting it protectively into a National Wildlife Federation tote. “Maybe you’re an Eight. Ones are reformers and ideal-seekers, but maybe you’re really more of an aggressive power-seeker than I had realized.”

M
OST URGENTLY, AND
most repetitively and problematically, Irene was always badgering Howard and me with variations on the obviousness of the necessity for us to agree immediately to source all our chocolate from suppliers who guarantee that they only do business with cacao dealers who only do business with fair trade cacao buyers who only do business with organic cacao plantations. First of all, I think it is worth pointing out that the only thing the words “Fair Trade” on the label can ever really guarantee with certainty is that earnest crunchy people will pay a lot of money for any product so labeled. Fair trade is a nice idea, but the fact is that if you seek the best cacao beans and the
best coffee beans, they are simply not going to be fair trade. And it’s a system that has the potential to cheat farmers and workers, because it locks in buyer and seller relationships, but at the same time the prices can drop and the seller is closed out of the free market, while the buyer doesn’t lose anything.

Second, organic shmorganic. I just don’t see an adulteration problem with cacao and sugar, our two biggest ingredients. (But, by the way, do I get any credit at all for resisting the pressure from our brokers in recent years to buy cheap Chinese imports, from nuts to flavorings to condensed milk solids to enrobing chocolate? I have always had concerns about quality control, and I had several fights with Howard about this, the last one just a few weeks before the shocking news of melamine-tainted pet food broke. Only because of my caution did the worldwide melamine crisis of 2008 have no effect on us. Cadbury had to pull eleven different types of melamine-tainted chocolate made in their Beijing plant for the Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Australian markets. And tainted White Rabbit Creamy Candy from China was on shelves right here in Connecticut and across the country. But Zip’s Candies were safe.)

I do worry a great deal about aflatoxins, which could be catastrophic in our peanut supplies, and so we really cannot risk sourcing organic peanuts. This means there is no point in sourcing any other organics at this time, because we wouldn’t be able to capitalize on it; we wouldn’t be able to put a designation on the label, since there is little value in a “Somewhat Organic” label, and if we can’t profit from the extra expense by appealing to the crunchy upscale people, then it’s a pure loss.