True Confections (6 page)

I was immensely proud of our son, proud of the way he presided over the situation with an appropriately respectful grace and authority that would have completely eluded Howard. Seeing Jacob take over at that moment, seeing his tender gallantry with the devout Diaz sisters, who hovered anxiously over the operation, I had a sudden revelation about just how corrosive Howard’s behavior had been for Zip’s. His perpetual undermining wisecracking, which I had tolerated and excused for so long, was demoralizing for everyone. I realized that I was glad Howard wasn’t there, and at that moment I knew Zip’s Candies would survive, that the business would be okay, better than okay, without him.

We had sufficient Tigermelt stock on hand. Let’s face it, Tigermelts are a very small and stable line, which at Zip’s is code for stagnant, with an ever-dwindling market share. Because of that one catastrophic new product failure at Zip’s, Howard has been especially reluctant to mess with the Tigermelt line in any significant way for years now, even though he knows perfectly well that the only way Zip’s can hope to hold our place in our little niche (since we can’t possibly compete with the big companies and their multimillion-dollar advertising budgets and endlessly deep pockets for slotting fees) would be with modest forays into brand extensions. And of course, while we hardly
like to admit it, and don’t reveal this publicly as a matter of both corporate pride and industry confidentiality, it is the contract manufacturing of those two energy bars that has kept our lights burning these past few years.

So the briefly suspended Tigermelt line didn’t hurt us. It would have been a very different story if this had occurred in the run-up to Halloween, but June isn’t a big candy season, though God knows we need a few more occasions and holidays in the year that trigger candy consumption the way Halloween and Easter do. I am convinced there has got to be some way to penetrate the Fourth of July market much more deeply, for example. Consider what you buy at the grocery store for the Fourth of July: hot dogs and hamburgers, buns, ketchup, mustard, pickles, chips, soda and beer, ice cream and cookies, maybe watermelon—but where’s the candy? There’s no specific tradition for it. So that’s a lost opportunity. There is an enviable reflex to reach for a Hershey’s bar when you buy s’mores ingredients, but that’s about it. Tootsie Roll, among others, does a Fourth of July wrapper, but I’m not sure that in itself is sufficient to create an association for the consumer.

We do well enough with theater box sales for summer movies, but it’s diffuse, not pegged to a specific holiday. Oddly enough, we also do really well with the back-to-school season, especially if the heat of summer doesn’t linger. Something about autumn leaves and crisp new notebooks and sharpened pencils seems to inspire the purchasing of Tigermelts and Little Sammies. Possibly it is a strong season for all the older brands, like ours, like Mary Jane, like Baby Ruth, because of a semiconscious nostalgia for their own childhood experiences on the part of parents. Or perhaps candy sweetens the loss of summer’s freedom. In any case, it didn’t hurt us to shut down the Tigermelt line for a few days.

Who knows, the Blessed Chocolate Virgin could have been the trigger for a whole new market for Tigermelts among the Central American immigrant population, if the company had ever been willing to spend more than a few begrudging nickels on promotions of any kind (you have to go back to the 1960s to see good Zip’s merchandising), let alone creative marketing. “Strike while the iron is hot” are words that might as well be in Esperanto when it comes to our small-minded distributors, who are both satisfied with the status quo for accounts like ours and at the same time have bigger fish to fry, so to speak.

That reminds me of how desirable I have long thought it would be if we could find a way to inspire, to incentivize (as we say in the business, with apologies to Miss Solomon, who hated vulgar words like
finalize
and
incentivize)
country fairs and carnivals to feature fried Tigermelts along with all those fried Milky Way and Three Musketeers bars. I’ve done a little testing with Tigermelts, and as is true for Milky Way and Three Musketeers, the bars have to go into the batter frozen, and then they should be fried for no longer than two and a half minutes or you end up with fried goo. In Scotland the big thing is fried Mars bars, sometimes offered in chip shops, dessert to go with your fish and chips, and I am certain they freeze them as well, given that nougat and caramel core.

None of our distributors is willing to think through any of the possibilities for increasing the numbers on Little Sammies, Mumbo Jumbos, and Tigermelts with imaginative promotions. If I could clone myself, this was one of the times I would have worked the phones, to make the most of the Blessed Chocolate Virgin, and if I had felt more comfortable in my de facto role as head of the business at that time, I might have tried to get going with a fast production of a Limited-Edition Zip’s Blessed Chocolate Virgin, using the Little Sammies production line,
with a molded figure replicating that holy object sent by God to Zip’s Candies, here on Earth, in New Haven, Connecticut, at the edge of the Quinnipiac River, to blorp out of that striping nozzle onto the Tigermelt belt.

We are long overdue, to the point of real negligence, to find some room in the budget for a Spanish-language campaign with print ads, bus cards, urban street-level billboards—and this would have been our golden opportunity. But we were just treading water as it was at that time, and that was before Channel 8’s ambush, so there was really no chance for Zip’s to cash in on the Blessed Chocolate Virgin.

And so, Zip’s being Zip’s, the whole Blessed Chocolate Virgin moment was only good for some meaningless local color news coverage and temporary fodder for those lunatics who apparently sit at their computers all day long and post constantly in the comments area on the strange fan blog devoted to Little Sammies that Julie monitors (she tells me the bloggers call themselves a community), and we got no bump, not even a discern-able blip, on our Tigermelt numbers for that quarter.

And we probably lost any chance we had for Tigermelt traction from the Chocolate Blessed Virgin not just because of our trademark inertia (there’s an idea—we really should make a Zip’s Inertia bar, a glucose-saturated bar guaranteed to zap your glycemic index and keep you sedentary, unproductive, and ambition-free, and market it to the burnt-out middle management worker), but also because of what happened with Frieda when the busload of Guatemalan nuns from Queens arrived to see the Blessed Chocolate Virgin.

I was supervising the floor, with two lines running, and Jacob was trying to cover both the front office and Receiving. Jacob was on the loading dock arguing with the delivery guy for our sugar
supplier about some ripped bags and consequent moisture damage and waste in the previous delivery. Julie had called in to say she was working from her apartment, which is code for too depressed and disorganized to get up and get dressed, I am sorry to say.

It was one of Frieda’s good days, so instead of being at home expressing her contempt for one of the extraordinarily patient home health aides we employed in thankless eight-hour shifts to keep her out of trouble and to make it possible for her to keep living in the house she and Sam shared for the last forty years of their fifty-two years together, she was on the premises, in the old, little-used bookkeeper’s office down at the end near the factory door. There she could spend an hour or two zealously date-stamping stacks of old, now-meaningless invoices from the 1980s in a kinetic parody of the actual work she did at Zip’s for so many decades before that well-tempered mind grew softer and duller, losing its snap and gloss. I have a mental picture of what happened to Frieda’s brain as it gradually lost its deep crenellations and became smoother and smoother and duller and duller, like what happens to the Tigermelts when there’s a pileup on the belt running through the enrober and some bars get stalled under the nozzles and become heavily overcoated.

Five years ago, Frieda’s loosening grasp of reality forced us to maneuver her gradual withdrawal from any genuine responsibilities at Zip’s. Irene knew about this shift, and she certainly knew about her mother’s faltering mental state, so it is hardly legitimate for her now to characterize the way her mother was treated as a power grab on my part. Irene knew what we were dealing with. It was very clear at the time that the only interest she had in the management issues at Zip’s was her uninterrupted income. Those who did all the work continued to
do all the work. Those who sat back and cashed checks continued to sit back and cash checks.

We carefully eased Frieda out of the daily workings of the business inch by inch. It helped with the transition to set her up on her good days with something familiar to do, though the tasks grew smaller and smaller until they were only gestures, and then finally they had no meaning at all. At times it took a lot of effort to make her feel useful, but it was the right thing to do. Even with Howard AWOL, I wanted to do everything I could to see to it that she was welcome to come in when she was up to it, no matter how much energy it took to accommodate her, until the incident with the nuns. Are these the actions of a gold digger?

On those good days, after checking in with her keeper to see what kind of night it had been, Jake would go pick her up at her house in Westville (he carried a milk crate in the back of his Jeep so she could step up to climb into the seat), drive her to Zip’s, park in the visitor’s lot, and walk her in the front entrance (instead of parking out back and going in through the loading dock area as he would otherwise begin his workday). Then he and I would arrange everything for her, the way you would organize a busywork activity to harness the energies of a competent toddler visiting an office, with a few tall stacks of old useless paperwork that had been set aside for recycling and the big, heavy chrome date stamp we used to use for logging invoices, and she would go to work.

T
HE NUNS WERE
just two hours too late. Renee Cohen, the front-office manager (she’s my age and has been with us seventeen years, and for just one small example of the way we treat our employees like family, I’ll mention that in 1996 Zip’s helped
her with a low-interest loan for the down payment on her little Cape in Short Beach), politely told them they had missed it, and explained that the Blessed Chocolate Virgin had left with Father Asturias and was by now presumably ensconced in the church in Bridgeport, where they could go see it. The nuns just milled around uncomprehendingly in our dingy reception area, though the ones with sufficient English were tearful. You would think that the Blessed Chocolate Virgin had been scraped into the trash instead of transported to Bridgeport to be worshipped and venerated, but apparently they had their hearts set on seeing the miracle in the place where it had occurred.

Renee had wisely paged me off the floor, and I had just invited them into the factory for a quick, consoling glimpse of the actual Tigermelt striping apparatus from which the holy object had been extruded, when Frieda, having either completed or lost interest in her morning’s task, came shuffling down the hall. She got one look at the nuns and began shouting that they couldn’t set foot in her factory, it would violate hygiene regulations, those dirty habits could catch on the machinery or spread germs, she would call the health department herself, they all had to leave, no tours, no tours, no exceptions, get out of here, all of you, go in your
schvartze shmattas
, vamoose!

As I signaled to them to disregard her and keep following me, she became agitated and yelled at them, Ignore her! That woman is not family! She has no authority here; she is just summer help! Then she ran out of steam and just stood there in the doorway to Howard’s office, panting and looking pitiful, trying to catch her breath after her strenuous shouting. Sam, where is Sam? Sam? Howdy? Where’s Dad? Howdy! She kept calling out, looking around in a new kind of panicky confusion that was the herald of further deterioration. This was the last day we ever had her come in to “work” at Zip’s.

Frieda wouldn’t let me touch her, let alone steer her to a chair, and fortunately her beloved Jakie arrived on the scene at this point. I tried to coax the nuns past her and down the hall to the factory doors while he strong-armed his grandmother into Howard’s office, but they were frightened and confused, and clearly troubled by her indignant muffled cries, so they fled in the opposite direction, to the sidewalk out front. I followed them to their bus and gave their driver directions to the church in Bridgeport, and the driver waited while I ran back in so I could fill a bag with Tigermelts, Mumbo Jumbos, and Little Sammies to sweeten their disappointment.

A
LL OF THIS
is to say that the Zip’s Blessed Chocolate Virgin story would have played out quickly, if not for that damned producer at Channel 8, who apparently had a mother who recognized me—Arson Girl!—in the Channel 3 report for which I was taped out in front of Zip’s (we don’t allow photographs of anything on the floor, because, no joke, this is how the competition can figure out how you do what you do), unwrapping a Tigermelt and explaining to that idiot reporter, whatever her name is, the one who looks like a guppy and dresses like a flight attendant, who kept calling me Alice Zip instead of Alice Ziplinsky and then she overcorrected and referred to Ziplinsky’s Candies instead of Zip’s as she ended the interview, so they had to do the whole segment over again, twice, which was surely not my fault (she got very irritable with me), and I had to unwrap two more Tigermelts while explaining each time in the same way how a combination bar is made and how the Tigermelt bar gets that final signature dark-chocolate tiger stripe from the nozzles from which dripped the little chocolate miracle.

The producer’s mother had lived on that same block on
Canner Street and had been friendly with Mrs. Livingston. And so, when Channel 8 ran their catch-up story the next evening, featuring Father Asturias entering his Bridgeport church in a solemn procession with the Blessed Chocolate Virgin carried aloft behind him, it was heralded by a teaser promising an exclusive shocking surprise revelation about how a member of the prominent (in New Haven, maybe) Zip’s Candies family, Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky, had a dark history (those were the words,
dark history
, which sound now, as I write them, almost pleasingly bitter, like dark chocolate) and a criminal record.