True Confections (20 page)

It seemed to me like an outstanding time to begin analysis, if all that stuff might bubble up so easily, without my having to strain. Isn’t that what analysis hopes for, previously repressed defenses emerging? I wanted to start right away, the sooner the better. I couldn’t wait to throw myself down on his couch and begin the ambulatory brain surgery.

When not so long after that Irene found out about my analysis from Howard, who, typically, despite his promise, forgot to not tell anyone in his family about it, she was scornful (“Freudian?”) and jealous (“You go four days a week? It costs how much?”), and soon enough she had embarked on her own short-lived analysis, with Andy Seckel, a very nonstandard practitioner with nonstandard credentials. He deemed the analytic couch infantilizing, and so they lay together on an inflatable mattress on the floor in his office over a grocery store on Orange Street. All the real analysts in town had their offices on Trumbull Street or Bradley Street, not to mention that they all sat in comfortable chairs as they presided over their couches with the requisite fresh paper towel laid out each hour for the next neurotic head.

I used to see Andy Seckel around New Haven long after Irene had divorced Arthur and moved to Telluride. Like so many New Haven analysts he had a white beard (I say this from personal observation, since for decades many of them, including Dr. Gibraltar, who had his own white beard, have congregated for their fifty-minute lunch hours at the Clark’s Dairy counter, where there is an unspoken tradition that at lunchtime the doctors go to the right and the patients go to the left), but he often wore a pajama top and a cowboy hat, so he was easy to distinguish. When he died a couple of years ago, I read in the newspaper that he left his entire estate to Thunderbolt, a carved
horse on the carousel at Lighthouse Point Park. Talk about estate nightmares.

On the rare occasions when we are forced together with the rebarbative Irene and her poor son, Ethan—the last time being at Frieda’s funeral a year ago—the cousins have been able to be guardedly friendly with one another without acknowledging the family crisis. Not that it’s relevant, but I think Ethan might be gay. Nature or nurture? Julie came out to us when she was in her junior year at Wesleyan, living in Womanist House, and at that point it didn’t surprise me, but Howard was really thrown. He was more bothered and disappointed by this revelation than was reasonable, and I think he secretly blamed me for it, as if having a lesbian for a daughter was somehow a failure on my part.

Arthur Weiss doesn’t seem like a man who would be thrilled to have a gay son. Well, I suppose not even the most enlightened man is overjoyed to have a homosexual son. I know Arthur has a successful practice and is well regarded, but there is something deeply wrong with that man. He’s phlegmatic and bloodless, the opposite of Irene and her flighty enthusiasms. And why would any sane, normal man marry Irene? As Julie would say, what was up with that?

H
OWARD HAS TOLD
me for years that I could afford to cut Irene some slack. The hell with that! She has been cutting herself miles and miles of slack for years. She has been unstinting in her efforts to provide herself with every possible healing opportunity and alternative treatment, and since her move to Telluride she has become a real process junkie, always on her way to the next retreat or ashram, always flinging herself, checkbook in hand, at one or another guru of the moment.

Sam gave her enough. More than enough. Dayenu! To quote from that wonderful Passover song which everyone in the Ziplinsky family should probably have studied more carefully, because despite the rollicking annual renditions at Seder after Seder, there is no evidence that the meaning of the song has ever really been taken to heart.

As we all know, in his last will and testament, Sam created the Ziplinsky Family Trust, with Frieda as the sole lifetime beneficiary. The trust was funded with several million dollars in equities and bond funds, along with its biggest asset, half ownership of Zip’s Candies. The trustees (Howard, as CEO of Zip’s Candies, Ben Gottesfeld, and Carly August, a peppy banker who was always incredibly patient with Frieda, who made it very clear that she would never have the time of day for goyim), were given a lot of latitude to make distributions to Frieda, but the trust’s interest in the business could not be sold or altered or deeded in any way. Sam’s will named Howard to succeed him as CEO of Zip’s Candies. These are all facts beyond dispute.

By making these plans and provisions as he did, Sam was of course ensuring family loyalty to the business into the next generation. But here is where it gets tricky. His intention regarding the generation after that, his grandchildren, should be just as clear, except that Irene insists it isn’t clear at all.

And so here we are. At Frieda’s death last year, the Ziplinsky Family Trust, in its entirety, with all those cannily invested millions (which have grown nicely despite the roller-coaster market, and despite the endless generous distributions), plus the half interest in Zip’s Candies, became the property of the remainder Beneficiaries, per stirpes and not per capita, to be shared equally among them, with all administrative decisions concerning distributions of principle as well as income, up to and including the sale or division of any and all assets of the
trust, including dissolution of the trust itself, to be determined by a simple majority vote among the beneficiaries. And in his will Sam identified the beneficiaries of the Ziplinsky Family Trust with this language: “my grandchildren who survive me, the issue of my son Howard and my daughter, Irene.”

And there it is—that one simple, seemingly straightforward phrase that has put us in the soup.

A
S A NATURALIZED
Z
IPLINSKY
, I probably know and understand far more Ziplinsky family lore than anyone else alive. Unlike any natural-born Ziplinsky (my own two children excepted), I am completely interested in the inner workings and unique sensibilities of the family, and have been from that first hot afternoon when I crossed the threshold of Zip’s Candies. I would also like to point out my clear and objective ability to put all of these facts into this narrative. I have been accused of exaggeration, of embellishment, of adding and subtracting meaning, but it should be abundantly clear that I am in fact a very reliable and coherent source of valuable insight. My memory is flawless.

I have always been a quick study, too. During my two-week home stay with a rural family in Burgundy, the summer I was fifteen, I picked up more French than anyone else in my group (we were assigned to families scattered throughout the village), despite, or perhaps because of, the unpleasantness of my host family, who were not at all interested in me, and were unabashed about being in the home stay student hosting business entirely for the money. Contrary to all the clichés about the French,
la famille
Lagache, who had a dry cleaning establishment in the village, were unattractively lumpen, unstylish, and very dependent on frozen food. I quickly learned how best to feign incomprehension while deciphering their mumbled, insulting, unkind observations about me
(Même le chien ne l’aime
pas!
—Even the dog doesn’t like her!) as we ate our depressingly identical portions of freezer-burned
dinde à la crème
in the flickering glow of Eurosport News.

Immersion in a culture helps you learn a language quickly, and I certainly had a Ziplinsky immersion that first summer working on the Tigermelt line, packing Little Sammies into boxes, cleaning the vibrator mechanism and the pre-extruder on the Tigermelt line, cleaning whatever else anybody told me to clean, simply learning by personal experience the intricate entropy of all three lines.

On that first afternoon, I pitched myself with headlong velocity into the Zip’s machine, into a lonely exile from my own sad family. I was desperate to escape my Arson Girl fate, and I was captivated by every aspect of this stirring, sugary world of Zip’s Candies and these lively, exotic Ziplinskys. I loved the roar and din of mechanical productivity. I inhaled that sugary, life-giving air with gratitude every morning when I walked through those factory doors, filling myself up with it, letting it sweeten and soothe every corner of my scorched, empty self.

I fell instantly into a rhythm with the routine at Zip’s, and with my sense of having a place in that routine, my feeling of being a useful cog among many other cogs turning the gears of this vast machine devoted to simple pleasure, to the making of true confections. I was enthralled, utterly dazzled, to discover that every minute of every hour of every working day, the vast mechanism of Zip’s Candies was chugging away, churning out row after row, box after box, stacked pallet after stacked pallet, hundreds and thousands of chewy, salty, sugary, nutty contributions to that quintessentially American privilege, the pursuit of happiness at the candy counter.

There was an old national distribution map of the forty-eight states, stuck with color-coded pushpins representing sales
of Little Sammies, Tigermelts, and Mumbo Jumbos, which hung for many years on the side wall in Sam’s office. This map was actually a bit grandiose, because until the resurgent interest in Little Sammies, sparked in 1999 with the “Say, Dat’s Tasty!” phenomenon (and then bolstered by all the expanding sales opportunities with online candy sellers like
OldTimeCandy.com
,
SweetNostalgia.com
,
CandyWarehouse.com
, and
GroovyCandies.com
, to name just a few of our best vendors), Zip’s penetration west of the Rockies was actually very small. Zip’s has always really been a regional brand more than it could be called a true national brand, with most sales clustered on the East Coast, from Florida to Maine. But I have always loved the Zip’s sales map and all the optimism it represented. The business of America is business! And the territory of Zip’s is America! That map offered me an America that felt far more vivid and authentic than did the desiccated world of the Pilgrim Fathers and Original Signers and all those Patriots of the American Revolution from whom my family proudly descended on both sides.

Today, after all these years as a Ziplinsky, I feel quite disconnected from my family of origin, as Ellie Quest-Greenspan insisted on calling my parents whenever they came up, which was generally only when she brought them up. (Dr. Gibraltar brought up issues of billing and scheduling but otherwise initiated topics very rarely.) Yet of course I am not a
true
Ziplinsky, and so my Ziplinsky credential is deemed insufficient on the one hand and irrelevant on the other by those eager to discredit my standing. But I have pretty much left behind all my Tatnall and Dorr loyalties. So who am I?

“Family of origin” is such an odd sort of biological concept. “Origin” is a term used by the snobbiest of those self-important dark-chocolate connoisseurs, those irritating bean-to-bar obsessives for whom no dark chocolate is dark enough, the ones who
carry their own little supplies for after-dinner duels of I’ll see your 70 percent Ecuadorian Trinitario and raise you fifteen, as they deal out their precious little 85 percent, five-gram tasting squares of Indonesian Criollo, woody yet floral, with a heady nose and a long finish on the palate. Not that many of them would know in a blind test the difference between a decent Trinitario from Tobago and a square of that shoe polish Godiva calls chocolate.

The truth of the matter is, the percentage doesn’t tell the whole story—what
does
ever tell the whole story?—and the question they usually don’t know to ask is what percentage of cocoa butter and what percentage of chocolate liquor make up that precious little square. It’s all about the balance and the mouthfeel, not just the straight numbers. Most of the boutique chocolatiers have started to cater to those so-called connoisseurs, forced to oblige them with ever higher numbers in order to stay competitive. But to preserve mouthfeel they are adding in more cocoa butter proportionately, otherwise the result of an 85 or 90 percent cacao chocolate would be about as appealing as dirt on your tongue. Seventy can be the perfect balance for a really good dark chocolate, and I see no reason to aim higher simply for the sake of number snobbery. But foodies (and my God, how much do I despise that twee term “chocoholic”?) love to follow trends, even as they love to deny that they do. Just ask the merlot people how they feel about the movie
Sideways
.

I think I have more than sufficiently explained how my years among the Ziplinskys have left me feeling untethered from the polite and chilly WASPy dynamic of my family of origin. Thirty years among door-slamming confrontational Jews will do that. Not that I am a door-slammer. I dwell in a kind of no-man’s-land these days. Only my Jewish relatives think I am Protestant, and only my Protestant relatives think I am Jewish. I
know the correct way to light the candles on the menorah for all the nights of Chanukah, and I know how to wrap a string of Christmas lights on a fragrant balsam fir in such a way as to get the lights to nestle deep in the innermost branches so the wires don’t show and the lights aren’t just flung haphazardly around the tips of the branches.

I am certainly the first Ziplinsky eligible for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution. Julie is as well, given that she too has the requisite “direct lineal blood line descent from an ancestor who aided in achieving American independence.” Though I can just imagine a chapter admissions committee casting its collective milky blue DAR gaze upon Julie Ziplinsky. At a glance, surely all they would see are the manifestations of those hardscrabble, entrepreneurial Ziplinsky and Liebashevsky genes. Next to the pale, prim, politely Episcopal, tiny-nosed Tatnalls and Dorrs, Ziplinskys look like gypsies. (The fur-selling Liebashevskys, who hail from Pinsk, tend toward potatohead shtetl faces; they all wear an invisible babushka. Let’s just say they are also far from classic DAR material.)

Julie has her father’s beaky nose and his dark, kinky hair (yes, all the clichés, but what should I do, pretend this is not so?), which she wears in what she persists in calling a Jewfro, just as she calls herself a Jewnitarian, while her girlfriend (her lover, her “primary dyadic partner,” as they call each other, as if each is the other’s case study for some ongoing anthropological research), the somewhat worrisome Kelly Harper, calls herself a Lesbyterian. They are affiliated with a group of people who call themselves “polyamory,” and they claim to be comfortable having “multiple intimate, nonexclusive sexual and emotional relationships” (I’m quoting from the polyamory website they asked me to “visit,” a term that in itself reveals such a disconnect between our generations, since they meant me to read some text
on a screen while sitting at my own desk, and they were not actually inviting me to go anywhere).