True Confections (19 page)

Frieda had to have known, maybe not in the beginning, but I am sure she figured it out or Sam told her at some point. She probably hated owing me for keeping her precious son tethered to the family and the business, but my being in the dark all those years must have given her huge satisfaction. Jacob knew for at least three years before I could stop denying the truth to myself. He told Julie a couple of years in, but he couldn’t face confronting me with it.

And so Howard’s betrayal effectively partitioned me off from the people in the world I loved and trusted the most—my kids, Sam. And I could always feel it, just below the surface, but I just wasn’t ready to face the truth. Of course it was always there. Why was I in such denial? I could have dealt with it. I would have been reasonable about Newton. I know I would have been. It happened before Howard and I met. It’s not even clear that he knew about Newton when we decided to get married.

But how am I to forgive Howard for Edison?

When I married Howard, I wrote a note in my journal, “I am being taken in by this wonderful family.” How true was that?

Julie keeps her distance from Newton and Edison. She regards them as problematic strangers who have caused our family much unhappiness. But Jacob, having spent so much time on Madagascar, has a warm and close relationship with his half brothers, who are also his second cousins once removed. I try not to begrudge him it.

When Jacob came back from Madagascar at the end of the summer he was fifteen, he was transformed from a weedy teenage boy into something more masculine. He had turned into the man he is now, though I could still catch a glimpse of his baby face if I peeked in on him when he was sleeping. That autumn, he had a slightly different, somewhat pungent and very pleasant aroma about him for weeks after he returned. He would sense me sniffing his neck and say, Cut that out, Ma! and push me away, but I couldn’t get enough of it.

Yes, I had missed him, but frankly I just loved this new smell. Vanilla, plus something earthy and raw. Was it an oil, a product, something in his diet? He had subsisted mostly on
mofo gasy
, a pancakey bread, and
koba akondro
, a sweet he would buy at the side of the road from old ladies with food stalls who spent their days wrapping a batter of ground peanuts, mashed bananas, honey, and corn flour in banana leaves, which they steamed until the batter formed a small cake. His other favorite from the roadside stalls was
caca pigeon
, literally, “pigeon droppings,” a snack of deep-fried salted dough and steamed manioc over which they poured sweetened condensed milk.

When his Malagasy aroma started to fade, I tried to duplicate these dishes for Jacob in the secret hope that if he ate enough of these foods his spicy odor would return, but he was only slightly polite about my attempts to duplicate the food of rural Madagascar with ingredients from the Stop & Shop, and I gave up.

Jacob kept detailed journals during those summers before he
went to college, and while I would like to say he showed them to me (because I would like to think I am the kind of mother whose son would want to share all of his experiences), he didn’t. But the journals weren’t hidden, either. I never would have read them if he had hidden them out of sight. But Jacob kept them on the shelf over his desk, and so in the course of tidying his room I would always read his latest entries. I have such admiration for his vivid and sensitive writing skills. Reading his journals, I felt as if I had been there with him.

Jacob and Edison worked side by side through those summers, cutting cacao pods, pollinating vanilla orchids, preparing the fragrant and rare Porcelana cacao beans for drying in the sun. “Dancing the cocoa,” they called it, the shuffling of the fermenting beans with their bare feet, turning the beans, kicking and dragging their feet in big sweeping circles. Jacob and Edison would exhaust themselves, slamming together in wild and athletic dances on the flat drying roofs of the cacao-bean sheds.

N
OW OF COURSE
they are both involved in the production of the Zip’s Bao-Bar, and that binds them in some new ways, but theirs is an incredibly complex connection, one they will be sorting out together for many years. Newton is also a partner with Jacob and Edison in the Bao-Bar venture, as is Zip’s Candies (in a cashless exchange for the contract manufacturing on our premises; since the Bao-Bar runs on the Tigermelt line, Zip’s has a 25 percent stake in the Madagascar Bao-Bar Company), and he is the main grower and supplier of the dried baobab pulp that makes this bar so different from all the other energy bars on the market. Dried baobab pulp, which is rich in fiber, has antioxidant properties to beat the band, is loaded with B1, B2, and C vitamins, and also has a stunning amount of calcium. And the
Bao-Bar is the only energy bar on the national market with Madagascar (or any other kind of) baobab.

One of the significant ingredients in the Bao-Bar is the tiny sprinkle of crushed cacao nibs in the core. These nibs are supplied to Zip’s from the special Czaplinsky production of an exceptionally rare cacao, which otherwise is sold to just three chocolatiers, all of them in France, all of them willing to pay significantly more for these nibs, ounce for ounce, than the going rate for the finest Beluga caviar. Julius was cultivating this unusual cacao at the time of his death. (The time he spent under the mother trees in the humid, insect-infested, tropical environment required for cacao to pollinate and fruit exposed him to the mosquitoes carrying the malaria that killed him.) It’s genetically related to the Porcelana and the Criollo cacao varieties. Julius’s name for the variety in his notes (which he kept in Yiddish) was “Gewurzik Geshmak,” which translates literally to Spicy Tasty. Edison honors this, and calls the cacao Gewurzik. Surely it is the only Yiddish appellation for any cacao production growing today in the fifteen countries in the equatorial belt around the world that grow 98 percent of the world’s cacao. The Gewurzik is a slow-growing and unproductive variety, which limits the commercial possibilities, but the limited yield of cacao from the unusually small and rounded cacao pods is simply exquisite.

Jacob samples each small batch of roasted beans as it arrives, and his intensity gladdens my heart as he sits at his worktable, hunched over his bean guillotine making notes about nice fissuring and deep, even color. Every parent wants her child to find his passion. Not only is the flavor of the cacao nibs spicy and tasty indeed, but they also have an unusually sky-high level of flavonoids and other polyphenols, which have a proven antioxidant, anti-inflammatory effect on the human body, especially the heart. Further, the Gewurzik has loads of anandamide and
tryptophan, both potent brain stimulators, and theobromine, which stimulates the nervous system.

There are lots of technical explanations for how these chemicals affect us, but the simplest way of talking about it is simply to say that the smallest nibble of Gewurzik cacao makes you feel really good. I am opposed to marketing the Bao-Bar as a “neu-traceutical bar.” I don’t like the word. But my preference did not prevail, and I have to admit the success of the bar in these first months has been far beyond any of our most optimistic projections.

I know that Howard has taken charge of the Gewurzik project these days, even though it has never been acknowledged to me, with Jacob, Edison, and Newton running interference so I have no direct dealings with him. I hope it makes him happy. Maybe he imagines he is back in his boyhood, frolicking with his brother, Lewis, under the tangled canopy of the mother trees shading his precious cacao plantings. I am sure he is the Grandest Tiger in the Jungle, with his beautiful family at his side. Presumably he is taking his antimalaria medication.

Between the unusual texture from the dried baobab pulp and the presence of the Gewurzik nibs, the Bao-Bar is a pure and simple bar like no other. It is also chewy and delicious, with just a hint of Czaplinsky Pure Madagascar Vanilla, with neither the cardboardy, fiber-is-good-for-you texture nor the cloying virtuous sweetness of too many energy and protein bars.

Newton is impressively altruistic, a trait he surely inherited from his Malagasy grandmother, Julius’s common-law wife, Lalao, and not from any Czaplinsky or Ziplinsky genes. His choices in life are truly admirable, and it isn’t hard for me to say that. He is dedicated to running a baobab cooperative project in several remote villages on Madagascar, and he is keenly interested in helping the poorest Malagasy people learn how to utilize
every part of the huge, ancient upside-down trees that have loomed over the dry deciduous forests for hundred of years.

The fresh fruit is sweet and chewy, while the white, powdery pulp of the fruit can be mixed into porridge. The leaves can be made into nourishing soups and stews, and the seeds can be pounded and pressed to yield a useful if odd-tasting cooking oil. Even the bark fibers can be woven into ropes and cloth. Jacob has shown me some of his literature, and it’s impressively thoughtful. Utilizing the baobab trees in these ways offers an incentive to these tiny villages to preserve these trees and thus help maintain the soil structure and the whole fragile ecosystem instead of recklessly clear-cutting in order to plant transient cash crops, a chronic temptation. I’m actually quite proud to be associated with Newton, strange as that may sound.

T
HE FIRST
P
ASSOVER
after Jacob was born, I was so anxious to do everything right, to fit in with these people who had become my people, when we were all together around the table at Sam and Frieda’s house on Marvel Road in Westville, the house where Howard and Irene grew up, the house where Howard and I were married. Ethan was born two years ahead of Jacob (and so he was at the table whining and threatening harm to Frieda’s precious Pesach dishes), and I didn’t like the way Irene was so triumphant about pointing that out repetitively, as if she had won a competition I didn’t know we were having.

I was holding infant Jacob on my lap, and he was squirming and hungry, but I was worried that nursing him at the table, no matter how discreetly I did it, could be a conflict with the rules because it was a meat meal. I know this sounds really stupid, but at the time it was a serious worry for me. How was I to know how to make sense of these rules? Nobody could ever really
explain any of the kosher laws to me very clearly, let alone how this family did and did not choose to follow them. There seemed to be no such thing as information, only interpretation. Three Ziplinskys, five opinions.

Whenever I asked questions at moments like this they would all start giving me conflicting answers, and then they would argue with one another, and then the disagreements and corrections would begin (I know this is a clichéd outsider’s perception of Jews, but there it is) and there would be escalation until sometimes somebody would withdraw in aggrieved silence, or even storm out in a huff, and somebody else would have taken umbrage. For a while I believed
umbrage
must be a Yiddish word, having never heard it used before I met these umbrageous people. Meanwhile I could never get a straight answer to my questions about things like why shellfish is forbidden in the home but it is permissible to order Kung Pao shrimp at the House of Chao on Whalley Avenue, or the House of Chaos as we always call it, ever since Julie misread their sign when she was little and a precocious reader.

Sam was carving the standing rib roast Frieda had just brought to the table, but I couldn’t catch Howard’s eye to check with him about the breast-feeding question, because he was having a testy conversation with his mother about whether or not Princess Diana was an idiot. They both thought she was, so I have no idea what they found to argue about, but their perpetual mutual belligerence, their need to trump each other with superior credentials for holding shared opinions, this was a ritual of Ziplinsky family occasions as traditional as the lighting of the Sabbath candles.

The things Howard and Frieda found to agree about while arguing in this way! That evening alone, following the Princess Diana idiocy analysis, came the designated hitter rule and
whether it did or did not ruin baseball (it did), the spelling of the word
ketchup
(they agreed that only the insane prefer
catsup)
, the way most people don’t use the term “hoi polloi” correctly (the hoi polloi themselves being the biggest abusers), and whether or not what John F. Kennedy said in 1962 when he was awarded his honorary degree—“It might be said now that I have the best of both worlds, a Harvard education and a Yale degree”—was a deliberate insult to Yale (it was, but in a good way).

The prayers, the narration about the symbols, and all the singing had occurred, and the Haggadahs had been put aside. Arthur, with whom I had a superficial sort of alliance in those early years simply because we were the two non–blood family members at the table, having silently watched the Ziplinskys being Ziplinskys with his slightly contemptuous gaze, leaned over and told me apropos of nothing that he had decided to specialize in anesthesiology because he preferred patients who were mostly unconscious so he would hardly ever have to talk to them. He was in a cardiology rotation at the time, which he complained about. He couldn’t wait to get away from the needy patients who always wanted reassurance from him with each encounter.

“Then you might consider psychoanalysis, where you also would never speak and would be dealing mostly with the unconscious,” I replied, and everyone around the table looked at me blankly. It was not the time to announce to the collective Ziplinskys that I had embarked on my analysis just a few months before, when I was pregnant with Jacob, although Dr. Gibraltar had warned me that it was a highly dubious time to begin an analysis, when the analysand is pregnant, and previously repressed female castration fantasies and phallic defenses might emerge. (He really talked like that, when he spoke at all. It was always very dry, but at the same time it made me feel like a respected colleague.)