Oreo (10 page)

“So tell me, already, and cut the crap,” said Oreo.

Waverley explained that he was a Kelly Girl, the fastest shift key in the East among office
temporaries. Whenever a big corporation was having a major shake-up anywhere on the eastern
seaboard, Waverley got the call to pack his Remington.

“Yes, but what exactly do you do?” asked Oreo.

“I thought you’d never ask.” He moved closer to Oreo so that their conversation could not
be overheard. “My last job was typical. I get the call from Kelly, right? They say, ‘So-and-so Corporation needs you.’ So-and-so Corporation shall be nameless, because, after all,
a boy can’t tell
everything
he knows.” He paused for the laugh. “But believe me, honey,
this is a biggie. I mean, you can’t fart without their having something to do with it.
Anyway, I show up at the building—one of those all-glass mothers. I flash my special pass
at the guard. I wish I could use that identification card on all my jobs—absolutely
adorable
picture of me. Anyway, I take the back elevator to the fifty-second
floor. The receptionist shows me to my cubicle. A man comes in a minute later with a locked
briefcase. He opens it and explains the job. It’s straight copy work. What I am doing is
typing the termination notices of four hundred top executives. Off with their heads! That’s
why I call myself the traveling executioner. I mean, honey, most of those guys had been with
that company since 1910, and they don’t know
what
the fuck is going to hit them in
their next pay check.” He raised his eyebrows, an intricate maneuver involving a series of
infinitesimal ascensions until the brows reached a plateau that, above all, tokened a pause
for a rhetorical question. “Can you believe that? Well, my
dear
, the work was
so
mechanical and
so
boring that I
insisted
on having a radio the second
day. So while I was decapitating these mothers from Scarsdale and Stamford and Darien, I was
digging Aretha and Tina Turner and James Brown. Talk about ironic! While Tina is doing her
thing on ‘I Want to Take You Higher,’ I’m lowering the boom on these
forty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year men. Made me feel just
terrible!
I really
sympathize with upper-income people, honey. They’re
my
kind of minority.”

While Waverley went to get a drink of water, Oreo stared at the dirty cardboard on the back
of the seat in front of her:

Thanks for riding Penn Central
Have a pleasant trip

She looked out the window as the train passed a small station and saw another sign that,
for an instant, made her think she was in a foreign country, until she realized that some
letters were missing:

TRA

  
OCATION 5

As the train pulled into Trenton, Oreo got hungry. She hauled her backpack from the
overhead rack and was about to start in, when she realized she was being selfish—besides, it
wouldn’t hurt to have a carload of travelers in her debt. Reserving only a few choice
bundles, she enlisted Waverley’s aid and distributed the rest to the other passengers. In a
few minutes, groans and moans were heard amidst all the
fressing
.

Between bites, Waverley kept saying, “Oh my God, it’s so good I’m coming in my pants.”

The whole car broke into applause when Oreo went to get a cup of water. She bowed this way
and that as she came back to her seat. She sat there for a while digesting Louise’s
Apollonian stuffed grape leaves, her revolutionary piroshki. She was trying to decide what
shade of blue the sky was. It was the recycled blue of a pair of fifty-dollar French jeans
(or jeannettes) that had been deliberately faded. She decided that from now on, she would
call that shade jive blue. Douglas Floors would approve.

Waverley was looking over her shoulder. Suddenly he sat back and sighed. “You’re the first
nice person I’ve talked to in a long time. Can I drop my beads?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

He confided that he was not only a traveling executioner, but also a
gay
traveling
executioner.

“
Nu
, so vot else is new?” she said, doing one of her mother’s voices.

He made a stage swishy gesture. “I’m beginning to think the whole world is.” He then gave a
list of movie stars, past and present, who were “that way”; it included everyone except
Rin-Tin-Tin and John Wayne. “Even though the Duke’s real name is Marion and he has that
funny walk, we’re pretty sure he’s straight, but we’re not all
that
definite about
Rinty. Lassie, of course, is a drag queen from
way
back.”

Waverley said that he had been very depressed since he and his last lover had split up. At
first he had just sat around feeling sorry for himself, typing by day and jerking off by
night.

“Then I decided, the hell with that. I did something I’ve never done before. I went out
cruising in all the bars. Did all the things I’ve always wanted to do. I felt justified
because I was tired of living like a vegetable.”

“You wanted to live like a piece of meat,” Oreo said.

Waverley nodded appreciatively. “Oh, you are evil,
e-vil
! Anyway, I had all kinds of guys. In the third week, I had my
first Oriental.”

“Is it true what they say about Oriental men?”

“What?”

“That their balls are like this”—she placed one fist on top of the other—“instead of side
by side?”

Another nod, another “Evil,
e-vil
!” He said he would top that by starting a rumor
that Castilian fags had a double lisp. Then he opened his wallet. “Let me show you some
pictures.” He smiled as he looked at the first one. “These are two of my best friends,
Phyllis and Billie.”

Oreo nodded. “Phyllis looks like Ava Gardner.”

“That’s Billie, with an
i-e
. Phyllis is the one who looks like a truck driver. But
that just goes to show you looks are deceiving. Phyllis doesn’t drive trucks. She fixes
them. My mother got hold of this one—she’s always popping in on me, snooping around, but
that’s another story. Anyway, when she saw this, I had to tell her Phyll was Billie’s
boy
friend. But if you look close, you can see her bra strap through the tee
shirt. I showed it to Phyll’s ex-husband. I thought he would wet his drawers, he laughed so
hard. He’s gay, too. A real swish, honey. He’s Filipino and they were going to send him back
to the islands. He wanted to stay here and he and Phyll were good buddies, so she married
him.” He shook his head, remembering. “You should have seen her at the wedding. She let her
hair grow long and looked pretty good, for her. Joe, that’s the guy she married, had to buy
her a girdle and stockings and show her how to walk in heels. When she walked, it was a
complete panic.” He stood up and did a hoarse, deep-voiced cowhand on stilts. “‘By God,
when I get out of these damn things, I’ll never put them on again.’ This was years ago, when
girls used to wear dresses to work. But old Phyll would always wear her overalls. Of course,
she
was
a mechanic. If her bosses knew she was a girl, they weren’t saying. She was
a damn
good
mechanic.”

‘‘She looks tough,” said Oreo. “Does she give Billie a hard way to go?”

Waverley looked genuinely shocked. “Of
course
not.
Billie
’s the butch. Phyll’s the sweetest
girl you’d ever want to meet. She taught me how to knit. Gives cooking lessons to anyone who
asks her. She didn’t
have
to marry Joe. And then there was the baby—”

“The baby?”

“Sure. Joe said he always wanted one, so Phyll said okay. She made the right decision too.
Joe’s the best mother a baby could want. But that Billie—she’d break your balls as soon as
look at you.”

“Or twist your tits,” Oreo said.

“What?”

“Never mind—a failure of empathy.”

Waverley went on with his adventures. All his talk of cocks he had known and loved reminded
Oreo that she had forgotten to pack the gift she had for her father. It was a plaster of
Paris mold of Jimmie C. ’s uncircumcised penis. Helen had refused to let the hospital take a
hem in her son’s decoration, saying that she considered it mutilation and that when he was
old enough, she would let him decide whether he wanted to have it done. He had not decided
because Helen had not put the question to him. Helen had not brought it out in the open
because she still did not consider Jimmie C. old enough to decide. Jimmie C. brought it out in the open only to go to the bathroom and to conform to Oreo’s special
request—no, threat—for a mold. He conformed to her special request because he loved his
sister and because she threatened to tell him one of the “suppose” lines that she had been
saving up to make him faint. He, in turn, had a special request, which he sang with a
hauntingly sweet melodic line: “Nevertheless and winnie-the-pooh, whatever you do, don’t
paint it green.” For one fiendish moment, Oreo had contemplated doing just that, but she
contented herself with deciding which of two questions she would put to Samuel when she gave
him the mold: “How do you like that
putz
?” or “How do you like
that, putz
?” She had been leaning toward the second, but now all that was
moot, since she had forgotten the
putz
in question.

As the train approached the next stop, Waverley said, “Well, this is it. Today Newark,
tomorrow Rahway. Could
you
stand such excitement?” They exchanged addresses, and he pulled
his black case down from the overhead rack. “Ooo, do I have to pee—the first bar I come to
gets the gold,” he said piss elegantly.

“Any pot in the storm,” said Oreo. She had no shame. She watched Honor bound for a tearoom.

She opened the Manhattan directory. There were twenty-six Samuel
Schwartzes and twenty-two S. Schwartzes. She made a list of likely Schwartzes, leaving out
businesses and other obvious wrong leads. She picked her first try at random.

Oreo checked her backpack in a locker and bought a booklet of New York maps. The maps told
her she should take the IRT subway, then switch to the number 5 bus.

Oreo wondered about the relative funk quotient after three-quarters of
play of the New York Jets as compared with the New York Knicks. Was football basically
smellier than basketball? On the one hand, basketball uniforms did not have sleeves and the
players therefore got a chance to air their pits during the game. Football players, on the
other hand, were padded and wrapped. No chance for pit airing there. But—and it was a
considerable but—they played outdoors. There were no proximate brick-and-mortar barriers to
funk dissipation. Another consideration: although football involved intense periodic effort,
it was so specialized that every mother’s son got a chance to rest between bits. Oreo
doubted whether dedicated linebackers dared risk their concentration by taking time out to
apply spray, cream, or roll-on deodorant during their rest periods. Basketball, with its
continual stampede up and down the court—and with its big stars playing virtually the full
forty-eight minutes—seemed to offer little chance for deodorant application, even in the
face (or pit) of desire or necessity. And what of hockey? Did ice absorb funk? The
parameters were tricky.

Picture this, sports fans. It is the Super Bowl. A woman in full football
gear (custom-made) runs onto the field. (Some spectators at first think that the shoulder
pads of a demented 120-pound lad have slipped to the front.) This poor woman loves football
with a doomed and touching passion. Every man who has longed for the field as he sat rooted
to the stands was at least informed with
possibility
, however faint. If he were but
fifty pounds heavier, but five seconds fleeter . . . But this is a woman. Imagine what
astrodomes of nature and nurture she has had to friedan in order to test that artificial
turf. She has reached the line of scrimmage. She ducks under a ham-haunched center and
scoops up the ball. She starts to run a down-and-out pattern. What happens next? This is the
Super
Bowl, folks.
Bon appétit!
They Eat Her. Yes, fans, one crackback
block and opposing players join in the gorge. They tear that cheeky female apart, devour
her, uniform and all. Watch as a tattered leftover (part of the lower dexter curve of the
number 8, the hip of that most feminine number, the number she wore in all her fantasy
games) escapes and skitters across the field toward the tumescence-red first-down marker,
one of the many totems of the male klan that kuklux the field. (The marker is a circle with
a center pee/sperm-hole bullet above a vertex-down isosceles triangle, representing the
penis in cross section above a Lindau wedge, or vagina—the missionary position.) Back home
at setside, male viewers lick their lips and burp. Nielsen women feel a
frisson
of
fear, shame, and guilt. The President’s eyes glaze over. And the game resumes with a
ferocity and joy unequaled in the history of sports. The next day, the newspapers insist
that a high-school student (male) ran onto the field and was escorted off. Everyone,
especially the players (who all have a touch of salmonella), agrees that that is what
happened. The text of the President’s ecstatic telephone calls to both coaches and each and
every player is released to the public. He has proclaimed football henceforth and
forevermore the national sport (and diet).

Within a few minutes after she got on, Oreo realized she was riding the
famed crazy ladies’ bus. She had heard about it in Philadelphia. She was in luck. There were
two
meshuggenes
aboard. One was tall, sharp-boned, and sharp-tongued. Her dark-blue
dress with white polka dots snagged on her like a rag on a splinter, tail ends of sentences
shredded from her mouth. “. . . away from me! . . . shit hell alone!” she raged as she
pushed her way to the back, where she stood blocking the aisle. To Oreo, she looked like a
Penelope.

The other was a short, gray-haired woman sitting near the front of the bus. She showed one
broken middle tooth when she smiled (a curable smile). There was an unremitting smell of
aluminum chlorhydroxide about her. Oreo guessed that the woman always washed and dressed as
if she were going for a thorough physical after which she would be run over by a car and
strangers would see her underwear. If true, she was as normal as the rest of the people on
the bus, and there was no hope—except, of course, for the smile. She wore a crisp dress of
green, white, and blue stripes and had elastic bands on her wrists. Her shoes were white,
with a small bas-relief floral design in pale green and pink on the toe. A Sophie, perhaps?
The conversation piece of her outfit was her shopping bag. It was kraft with five thin red
wave-design lines across the top. On it floated a message printed neatly in red crayon, beginning on the top wave:

She seemed generally in good spirits, but occasionally she would clutch her wrists and cry,
“Ow, ow,” or look as if she were about to weep. But the cry of pain, the mask of sorrow were
momentary. An instant later, she was smiling again. She had a well-developed social
consciousness. She talked to the air space in front of her about poor people, Vietnam, and
unemployment.

Between Sophie and Penelope the bus passengers did not know where not to look. Some tried
surreptitious eyeball rolls from side to side, most stared straight ahead and pretended the
two women were not there. Penelope was too involved with extending her sovereignty to be
aware of the effect she was having on the socially conscious Sophie, who was amused by
Penelope’s preoccupation with manifest destiny, particularly whenever Pen delivered herself
of a choice piece of verbal territorial incursion. Sophie had obviously diagnosed Penelope’s
trouble as fallen arches. Several times Sophie obliquely addressed her with the same words.
“I didn’t work today,” she would say to the air space. “I just rode around the city. You can
have my seat.”

“. . . out of here!” said Penelope. “. . . off me!”

At which, Sophie would cut short a giggle to renew her comments on society’s unfortunates.
“The hoi polloi,” she said. (Oh, Oreo thought, sympathetically noting the repetition of the
article, she just stammered in two languages.) “All that education, and what good is it? Now
they can’t find jobs.” She clucked in sympathy. “I don’t give to churches, but if I have a
spare dollar, I give to veterans’ organizations.” She read aloud a headline across the aisle
about a bank robbery, then said, “They weren’t educated, but they had their omens and their
voodoo. They had the right answers. They knew, they knew. Tea leaves. Believe me, I hit four
seventy-eight for a couple hundred dollars. They knew, they knew. Ben Franklin said, ‘Early
to bed, early to rise.’ They don’t even know how to say that today.”

As the bus passed Sixty-second and Broadway, someone said approvingly, “Look at that. The
Jewish Guild for the Blind doesn’t have to wash its windows—nobody has to see out.”

The man to Oreo’s left was reading the front page of the
Daily News
. When he flipped the
paper to scan the back sports page, Sophie read the front-page banner headline aloud. Oreo
remembered that the headline had been set up like this:

To Oreo, this headline was a comment on itself. Sophie seemed reluctant to add anything to
her reading of the banner head. It was not one of her subjects. More to her taste was the
headline over a story about two starved, skull-fractured children whose mother was under
observation at Bellevue:

Oreo had read this story over the shoulder of the woman to her right. Porno panel or no
porno panel, Oreo considered the use of “Tots” and “Mom,” in the circumstances, particularly
obscene, the space limitations of tabloids notwithstanding.

“Poor woman,” began Sophie. But before she was well into her desultory views on battered
children, mental illness, and exorbitant hospital rates, she had to break off to watch
Penelope spear her way through the crowd and get off by the back door.

“. . . out of here! . . . off me!” said Penelope. Oreo watched as she posted herself in front
of the post office (Ansonia station), then abandoned her post just in time to board a bus
that had been tailgating the number 5 for several blocks.

The people at the back of the bus were noticeably relieved at Penelope’s departure. They
talked among themselves, survivors after rescue. The people at the front of the bus stared
enviously toward the rear. They still had Sophie. But with Penelope gone, Sophie quieted
down. She stopped reading headlines and was content with clutching her wrists several times
for a few modulated “Ow’s” and tapping lightly on her shopping bag.

As the bus skirted a park—which Oreo’s booklet told her was Riverside—Sophie got up to leave. She went to the
back door, and with a sedate “Out, please,” she was gone.

All was quiet for a few more blocks. Then an elderly gentleman with one bad eye got up to
leave. Oreo was sure it was Mr. Sammler. Her hunch was confirmed when he was followed off
the bus by a dapper young man in a camel’s hair coat.

A few blocks later, Oreo herself got off the bus. She walked to West End Avenue, found the
address she had written down, and told the doorman she wanted to see Schwartz.

“Schwartz? In four-B?” asked the doorman.

“Is that the only Schwartz in the building?”

“Yeah.”

Then, of course, dummy, thought Oreo. “Say Christine is on her way up.”

The doorman buzzed 4-B and gave his message.

“Send her up,” said a deep voice over the intercom as Oreo got into the elevator.

A few minutes later, Oreo was back downstairs. The Schwartz in 4-B was too young to be her
father. Besides, she was Chinese.

She stopped when she came to a bar. She went in, walked straight to the
back, went to the ladies’ room, peed, and walked out. She was always disconcerted when she
had to do this—walk into a place where she was considered a minor. Fortunately, because of
her constant bullshit, she was often disguised as an adult. On the occasions when she was
challenged and had to admit that she was a minor, Oreo was deeply embarrassed. She did not
scruple going into a bar and not ordering anything. She drank only fine wines and Pepsi on
the rocks. What is more, she was basically tight. She did not mind relieving herself when all around her knew
that that was all she was going to do. Any pot in the storm—the chestnut she had trotted out
for Waverley—was her motto for these occasions. She had other, even worse puns for other
occasions. But to call Oreo a minor was, slowly and caerphilly, to drive a shaft into the
pits of her cheeseparing soul. She did not consider herself a minor at or of or in
anything.

She was hungry. Now she was sorry that she had given Louise’s fine food
to a bunch of pig-eyed strangers. And Waverley Honor had eaten like a mother, the faggot.
Oreo was getting testy. She had a lot of money with her, but she did not want to spend it if
she could help it. Cheap. Hunger finally forced her to buy a Blimpie, a vicious imitation of
a hoagie. Her refined palate, trained and coddled
chez
Louise, still had blotches
and patches that brooked nothing but junk foods. Thus she could within hours savor her
grandmother’s thrifty, piping haggis and the rotten potato salad from Murray’s delicatessen;
Louise’s holey, many-tongued fondue and the galosh pizza from Rosa’s Trattoria; a
blanc
de blancs
champagne and a blankety-blank Pepsi, which she now washed the Blimpie
down with. Her testiness was disappearing.

She decided to take a walk through the park the bus had passed and make
up her mind about what she was going to do next. She used her walking stick as a piton for
climbing rocks and hillocks in the park. It was not necessary, considering the modesty of
Riverside’s ups and downs, but it made Oreo feel more like an adventurer.

When she stopped to rest, she looked up the addresses on her list in her book of maps.
There were several S. or Samuel Schwartzes in the immediate neighborhood. She could make a
few quick runs to check them out, using the park as an R and R base.

Oreo was exhausted. None of the S.’s or Sams belonged to her, but they
had been diverting. There was the Sam on Eighty-ninth Street who wanted to adopt her; the
Samuel on Columbus Avenue who saw voices (“Stick your fingers in your nose,” Oreo advised
him, “and they’ll go away”); the S. on Cathedral Parkway who refused to say what the S.
stood for (when Oreo guessed Snicklefritz on her second try, he turned blue, and she had to
call an ambulance); the S. on Seventy-fifth Street who turned out to be a Shirley who had
changed the name to an initial in the directory listing because of obscene phone calls (“My
wife was very put off, psychologically and actually speaking, by heavy breathers who asked
for me,” he explained). There was the Samuel on Broadway who, along with his wife, was in
jail awaiting trial for the murder of his son Melvin. Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz had learned of
their son’s plot to smother them in their beds and throw himself on the mercy of the court
as an orphan, so they got him first. A neighbor told Oreo what the accused couple had said
as they were dragged away: “Imagine the
chutzpah
on that kid—to think of a plot
like that!” Sympathy in the building was running heavily in favor of the alleged murderers.
Melvin had been known on the block as Smart Ass.