Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [33]
In addition to its celebrity meats, the park offers a wide array of discomfiting confections. Sprouted along the park’s asphalt paths like strange outcrop-pings of mushrooms, Lunapark’s vendors offer sugar in an alarming array of forms, which they display from booths constructed from metal pipes, wooden tables, and tarps. The sheer number of vendors seems insupportable in a park this size. The booths practically line the walkways, making it clear that sugar is second only to electricity in keeping the park running. Children stand before the tables with the eyes of wolves, their mouths sticky with something just eaten or half-sucked; teenage boys purchase cookies for their girlfriends; exhausted mothers buy themselves a bag of something to make it through another hour of insistent hand-tugging, something to prevent them from collapsing where they stand.
The sweets are divided into three food groups: cookies, cakes, and candies. The cookies and candies are piled across tables in a standing Technicolor invitation to sugar coma, with additional cookies hanging from clotheslines strung along the inside of the tarp. To anyone who once or still possesses a sugar tooth it is difficult not to look at these booths without getting very excited. The sheer variety of options causes the heart to pound. The booths are beautiful despite their rough construction. The various species of sugar are displayed with the care of museum specimens, everything immaculately stacked and arranged by sugar curators, men and women wearing down vests to stave off the lingering cold of winter, presiding over their wares with a bored, proprietary air.
The candies come in cellophane bags and on sticks. There are candied nuts and caramels and foot-long suckers shaped like horns and round red lollipops the size of an infant’s head. There are chocolates, and nougats, and obscure objects dusted with sugar bearing indecipherable Czech names on their labels, candies that demand to be tasted to be understood. Though the cookies are invariably iced gingerbread, the gingerbread assumes such an array of sizes and shapes that it’s difficult not to believe a heart-shaped cookie the size of a kitchen plate will taste different from a cell phone cookie, which will differ distinctly from a gangsta Tweety Bird cookie, or one bearing a message to Mom or Grandma, Radka or Petr.
The cakes are less pervasive and more alarming. Like the cookies, the type of cake doesn’t vary. Each is a small sponge cake covered in colored marzipan. Some of these take the innocuous forms of apples and bananas and pears, and that’s fine—these are shapes marzipan is permitted to assume. It is possible when walking by the cake stands to see nothing amiss among these Old World innocents, marzipan being one of those delicacies that—along with hazelnuts and decent chocolate—has for some strange reason not found equal footing across the Atlantic. But on closer inspection, the oblong brown cakes beside the apples are revealed to be hedgehogs, the pink ones pigs. Beside the pigs are cakes that have been made to resemble cauliflowers, and beside the cauliflowers are light blue, ovular marzipan cakes that have been individually printed with the word VIAGRA. Part of the shock of these objects is that they are handmade. It’s one thing to imagine a machine spitting these things out and another to picture a hot kitchen filled with pink-skinned ladies shaping each individual marzipan Viagra pill with thick, fleshy fingers. The allure of a hedgehog or a piglet to a cake-hungry child is understandable, but cauliflowers and Viagra