True Confections

O
N MY FIRST DAY
of work at Zip’s Candies, it took five minutes for me to learn the two-handed method for separating and straightening the Tigermelts as they were extruded eight at a time onto the belt that carried them toward the finishing chocolate-striping applicator tunnel. The necessary reach-shuffle-reach-shuffle Tigermelt-straightening gesture was demonstrated for me with condescending efficiency, with the belt running at half speed, by the irritable Frieda Ziplinsky, whose husband, Sam, had just hired me that morning, an impulsive act on his part that she would regret audibly every few weeks for the next thirty-three years. In the sixth minute, I had my first glimpse of my future ex-husband.

Across the whirring, clanking, chugging, sugar-caked Zip’s Candies factory floor, there appeared Howard Ziplinsky, emerging feetfirst from the large, rotating drum used to tumble the Little Sammies in the thin hard-shell chocolate coating, just a little more brittle than a Raisinet’s, that gave them their signature sheen.

That Little Sammies panning drum was one of the original machines still running on the Zip’s lines that hot summer of 1975. It finally wore out beyond repair six years later, in late August 1981, an unforgettable time for me personally as well as a notable event in the history of Zip’s Candies. I had just begun to be plagued with morning sickness, but Howard and I hadn’t yet revealed to anyone that I was pregnant with our first child,
Jacob. I was working long, exhausting, split-shift days that summer, supervising the first and third shifts to meet Halloween orders, when the Little Sammies panning drum seized up for the last time. We had shut down the line twice that week because of fruit-fly infestations (the eggs probably came in with a contaminated batch of peanuts for the Tigermelts), which had required cleaning every piece of equipment on the line, including internal mechanisms. The gear shaft on the drum motor was probably insufficiently relubricated when the line started up yet again, and it broke down irreparably on that last Thursday night of August, just as the third shift was starting, causing the disastrous Little Sammies shortage of Halloween 1981.

Replacement parts for that panning drum had been fabricated as needed for thirty years, but by 1981, the very last known functioning machine capable of making those parts had become obsolete and worn out as well. The fabricator—Bud Becker, an elderly retired machinist who operated out of his Hamden basement (by then he was the last living member of the original startup crew on the Zip’s lines when Eli Czaplinsky opened his doors in 1924)—had thrown in the towel when he couldn’t get the parts for his machine that made the parts for our machine. He was eighty-three, and for fourteen years Zip’s had been his only customer.

A new panning drum, the one that still runs on the Little Sammies line today, was rush-ordered from Holland, making it the first-ever custom-built mechanism to grace the Zip’s floor. (It would remain the most expensive single production-line element for several years, until the cost was surpassed by the overdue replacement of the entire Tigermelt line, from batch tables to wrapping machines, with some slightly newer used equipment, in 1989.) Those lost seven weeks before the new Little Sammies panning drum was installed on the line were a disaster.
We even tried hand-dipping on jury-rigged enrobing frames in finishing trays, the way Little Sammies were manufactured at the very beginning, in 1924, in those first months when Eli was still developing and refining his cherished candy inventions, well before Little Sammies were distributed beyond New Haven. But there was no chance we could duplicate the finish and gloss of the panned Little Sammies, and all we did was waste product and man-hours, because it is, of course, impossible to get that thin, hard, chocolate-shell coating onto Little Sammies any other way.

Imagine trying to finish M&M’s or Reese’s Pieces by hand. What we produced was perfectly good candy, but they were just little fudgy chocolate-covered figures, probably a lot like the earliest versions of Zip’s signature candy. So it was useless. They weren’t remotely like what people expect when they open a pack of Little Sammies.

I don’t know if it is obvious even now just how catastrophic this was for Zip’s at the time. Little Sammies sales have carried more than half of Zip’s annual gross for decades, and almost three quarters of annual Little Sammies sales occur in that all-important zenith of candy-selling seasons, from back-to-school through Halloween. It was only the advent of the protein-bar contract work that changed Zip’s dependence on Little Sammies. The Detox bar and Index bar lines have grown ever more significant for us in recent years. Every time I look at our balanced books I thank God for our nation’s ongoing glycemic-index obsession.

That interruption on the Little Sammies line was a true crisis. Howard and I had been married for six years by then, and I had never before seen him cry, not even when his grandmother died just ten days before our wedding. We got through it, and I thought at the time that if we could survive the Little Sammies
Halloween shortage of 1981, we could survive anything, but I was wrong.

I
HAVE BEEN
instructed by Charlie Cooper, my attorney, to tell my story in as clear and detailed a way as possible, from the beginning, though what a lawyer means by “clear and detailed” and “from the beginning” is probably very different from what I prefer to make of those requirements for this account. So my recollection of events begins on the humid summer day that was the twelfth of July, 1975, when I applied for the job at Zip’s out of the blue.

I say “out of the blue” because it really was just that, the consequence of picking up a discarded section of the
New Haven Register
to leaf through while I dawdled over my toasted corn muffin and coffee at the counter at Clark’s Dairy, on Whitney Avenue, where I had taken to lingering each morning after I fled my family’s house, my hair still wet from the shower. A classified ad with the heading “Dat’s Tasty!” in the “Help Wanted” pages jumped out at me.

I had just been graduated from Wilbur Cross High School, where Miss Grace Solomon, my favorite English teacher, had instructed me in correct usage, which is why I just wrote “been graduated” instead of “graduated.” Because whether or not I have a college degree, I consider myself to be a perfectly well-read and educated person with as good a command of language as any college graduate I know, including a certain member of the Ziplinsky family who considers herself to be quite educated indeed after those four years in Providence at that university named for those slave-trading Brown brothers.

It is a deeply ingrained Ziplinsky family trait to place a little too much confidence in what it says on the label without full
regard for quality control. Trust me, no Ivy League diploma on the wall confers an automatic ability to discern the correct uses of the words
lay
and
lie
, nor is it an antidote to chronic split infinitives and dangling modifiers. Let us not dwell too long on the habitual incorrect deployment of the word
myself
, the use of which is apparently believed to connote superiority and classiness. Out of that smug Ziplinsky mouth often comes the cringe-worthy phrase, “On behalf of myself,” revealing, with those four inapt words, the truth of the matter to all literate people, whether or not they possess an Ivy League degree. I consider myself to be an autodidact. One definition of an autodidact is someone who knows what
autodidact
means.

I
WAS IN
the top tenth percentile of my class at Wilbur Cross, I was the winner of the Senior English Prize, and I had already picked my courses for my first semester at Middlebury College, which had been my first choice. But I had screwed up so badly a few weeks before my first day at Zip’s Candies that I wasn’t going to be heading off to college after all, though Middlebury was willing to consider deferring my admission to the following year, their inevitable letter rescinding my admission concluded (with a certain calculated and smug coldness that was meant to discourage me from pursuing the option while simultaneously conveying a superficial gesture in the direction of fairness), with my deferred admission depending on a demonstration of “sufficient growth of character in the interim, given the circumstances.”

I already had a summer job, so there was no reason for me to be reading the classifieds section of the
Register
. But there was nothing else left to read in that particular lone, abandoned newspaper section after the horoscopes and advice columns and
used-car ads, all of which I studied with a deep and pointless concentration each morning. (Plus, I had always enjoyed reading the want ads, starting in about third grade, when I would read them aloud to my mother while she made dinner, and together we would create stories about the people who applied for those jobs.)

I was at the end of my third week scooping cones at Helen’s Double Dip out on the Boston Post Road in Milford, and I had come to dread putting on the claustrophobic, short, lime-green polyester uniform with its lumpy zipper and attached apron. I washed and dried my uniform every night, and it had already begun to pill. I dreaded everything about Helen’s Double Dip. I dreaded the sugary slime of curdled cream underfoot, which had impregnated the soles of my bright new JCPenney sneakers. I dreaded the daily din of bratty children whining at their irritably indulgent parents, who rarely thought to tip as I labored to fill their orders while enduring a twinge in my elbow that was a direct consequence of scooping nut-infested flavors at an awkward angle with a bad scoop.

I took the job at Helen’s Double Dip after three humiliating interviews for much nicer jobs had left me feeling that I would never do better and probably deserved exactly this punishment for everything that had happened. I had aimed much higher at first, when I applied for an entry-level editorial assistant position at Yale University Press. But when I sat down with an editor (a balding, middle-aged man with a stammer, whose scrawny polka-dotted bow tie heralded a vast collection of variously patterned bow ties, one of which he no doubt wore each and every day) and he leaned back in his chair and cocked one seersuckered leg over the other (exposing some hairless shin above a droopy sock) and asked me in a falsely avuncular fashion why I wasn’t going to college in the fall, given that I had just finished
high school, and I started to explain about the fire and the sentence and my family’s money issues, he closed the file folder and stood up abruptly, even though I had been there only a few minutes and we hadn’t yet discussed anything at all about the job.