Oreo (13 page)

Scott was delighted with Oreo’s skillful mathematical manipulations. It was very curious,
he said, that he himself had no aptitude for such things, yet he could recognize the right
answer when he saw it. He complimented Oreo on her “to know-to do,” which he could see she
had much of. His mother tried to help him as much as she could, but she was involved in her
own creative work. She did not come by her clumsiness naturally, he explained, but had
developed it, through years of diligence and application, into an art form. For a person
with her creative bent, she had been born with a handicap that would have made a lesser woman
give up in despair or change her
métier
: grace. It had taken years of practice to
overcome her inborn agility, dexterity, deftness, and finesse and develop to a point of such
consummate cloddishness, such eye-popping lack of coordination that she could not see out of
both eyes at the same time.

She had not reached the summit of achievement to which she aspired, however, Scott
confided. No, that day was still many vandalized vases, squashed tomatoes (a
mechuleh
medley), and lightly fantastic trippings away. That day would be reached
only when his mother had perfected her art to such a point that she would be able to make
breathing and blinking totally voluntary actions. Then and only then would she be ready to
star in a play she had written for them both,
Clumsy Claudette at the UN
, in which
she played the title role of warmongering
bulbenik
and he played the world’s
greatest pacifist translator. The marquee would read:
SCOTT SCOTT AND SCOTT SCOTT IN
SCOTT SCOTT’S CLUMSY CLAUDETTE AT THE UN
. They had agreed that although she would
give up the stage after the run of the play, she would continue to share in any fame that
accrued to his Scott Scott as though it were her own. It was to him equal, since he was
convinced that the play, a marvelous melding of their unique talents, would probably run for
their lifetime or until one of them was eighty-five, whichever was later.

As his mother exploded from the kitchen with the tray of hors d’oeuvres, Scott rushed over
to her. “Permit me. The outside of works—
me
, I them will carry.” He took the tray
from her. “Rest you on that chair-long there.”

Mrs. Scott must have been tired. She tripped only twice on her way to the couch. Scott
brought the tray over—a farrago of spills and misses, which Oreo tasted only out of an
experimental sense of politeness.

“You said you might have some information about my father?” said Oreo, picking up a plain
cracker whose spread was a blob on the underside of the tray.

“Ah, yes, one moment, if it you pleases.” Scott tore a sheet of paper from his three-ringed
looseleaf notebook and wrote something with a flourish. “There is!” he said, handing it to
Oreo. He explained that she might be able to find her father at either of two sound studios
uptown, one on the East Side, the other in Harlem.

Oreo thanked the Scotts for their hospitality and got up to leave.

“So long. It was nice meeting you,” said Mrs. Scott. She waved good-bye, knocking over a
stool, which set up a vibration, which made a cup fall off a hook on the kitchen wall and
crash to the floor, where she could trip over the shards later.

“To the to see again,” said Scott. He opened the door for Oreo.

“To God,” said Oreo, swinging her walking stick in salute.

No one at the In-the-Groove Sound Studios had seen Samuel Schwartz for
several weeks. As Oreo walked up the street, she saw a pig run squealing out of a doorway, a
bacon’s dozen of pursuers pork-barreling after it. Oreo started running too. As she neared
the building from which the pig had made its exit, she saw that it was a pork butcher’s. In
its attempt at escape, the pig had made a shambles of the shambles. Oreo continued in the
pig pursuit. The porker darted across the street. Oreo flung her walking stick at its legs.
The cane did a double whirl, tripping up the pig. A taxi turning into Second Avenue
screeched on its brakes, but not in time. The cab sideswiped the pig, which tottered a few
feet, then fell dead in front of Temple Shaaray Tefila, directly across from the pork
store.

Unwittingly, Oreo was the indirect cause of the pig’s death, but as she reflected on its
porcine demise, she realized that she could take out her list again. That hashed rasher of
bacon defiling the temple sidewalk—that surely was “Sow.” Yes, that must be so.

Mr. Soundman, Inc., was in a renovated brownstone on Lenox Avenue. Oreo
could hear the strange permutations of words speeded up and slowed down, rushed backward and
whisked forward, the barbaric yawp of words cut off in mid-syllable (the choked consonants,
the disavowed vowels), burdened with excessive volume, affecting elusive portent. Words were
all over the floor. Words and time. What word was that there in the corner, curled up like a
fetus? And this umbilicus of sound, what caesarean intervention had ripped it untimely from
its mother root? Sound boomed off the walls, rocketing around the hallways as it charged out
of an open door marked
Control Room B
.

Reep-warf-shuh, reep-warf-shuh, reep-warf-shuh
, repeated some backward sounds as
Oreo stuck her head in the door. An engineer in a desk chair wheeled among three
machines—two tape decks and a master-control console—his ropy arms whipping about like
licorice twists. Two pencils stuck out at forty-five-degree angles from his hedgelike
natural, pruned to topiary perfection and so bulbous that, along with his dark, chitinous
skin and his sunglasses with huge brown convex lenses, he had the look of an undersized
mock-up of a movie monster—the grasshopper that spritzed on Las Vegas.

The soundman noticed Oreo on one of his whirls and motioned her into a chair. He stopped
the two tape machines. Then he deftly unreeled a three-foot length of tape from one end of a
reel, pulled it back and forth between the sound heads (
Raugh-vooff-skunge,
raugh-vooff-skunge
, it went as it sawed between the heads), found the spot he wanted,
and made a quick slice with a razor. The piece fell to the floor amidst the curly riot of
words previously dispatched. How many
reep-warf-shuhs
and
raugh-vooff-skunges
that piece represented, Oreo couldn’t guess. The engineer
then laid a loose end of the tape still on the reel in a groove at the front of his machine,
stripped in a piece of white leader from another reel with Scotch tape and a razor, whirled
the gray reels of his tape deck a few times, then stopped. He walked out of the control
room, motioning Oreo to follow him.

They walked down the hall to a small office. So far neither of them had said a word. The
engineer pointed to a chair next to a desk piled with a stack of oddly shaped cardboards.
Oreo sat down. Since the man didn’t say anything but merely looked at her expectantly—or,
rather, his glasses were turned toward her—she said, “I’m Christine Clark. Is Slim Jackson
around?”

The man pointed to himself, then shuffled through the pile of cardboards next to him on the
desk. He held one up. It was shaped like a cartoon balloon, and the message read:
YOU’RE LOOKING AT HIM
.

“Can’t you talk?” Oreo asked. He shook his head. After establishing that Slim was neither
antisocial nor laryngitic but mute, Oreo asked permission to look through his balloons so
that she would know the range of answers he was prepared to give. She found the usual:

She saw that he had translated the typical cartoon asterisk-spiral-star-exclamation
point-scribble as a straightforward
FUCK YOU, YOU MUTHA.
He had a pile of
blank balloons and a stack of balloons with drawings: a cocktail glass with an olive
followed by a question mark; a Star of David followed by a question mark; an egg-shaped
cartoon character with a surprised look on its face (the “That’s funny—you don’t look
Jewish” follow-up to the Star of David? Oreo wondered); an inverted pyramid of three dots
and an upcurving line; the three dots again with a downcurving line; a clenched fist with
the middle finger raised in the “up yours” position. These last Oreo thought redundant,
since Slim could easily pantomime them or use an available word balloon. True, the drawings
gave him shades of translation that might be lost in the original gesture. Besides, his
blank cards indicated that he was not unaware of the limitations of form balloons. Oreo
conceded her argument with herself to herself. Yes, both the words and the drawings had a
place.

“I was told I might be able to find Sam Schwartz here,” Oreo said.

Slim pulled one of his pencil antennas out of his hair, printed something on a balloon, and
held it up:
TRY NEXT DOOR TONIGHT.

“What’s next door?”

He wrote and crossed out, wrote and crossed out. Then held up his cardboard voice: A
         A 
        
A HOUSE OF JOY
.

“Oh, a whorehouse,” said Oreo.

Slim looked at her appraisingly. He shuffled through his standard balloons and pulled out a
cartoon of a bibbed man with his tongue hanging out, knife and fork at the ready over a
turkey drumstick.

“Likes women with big legs?” Oreo guessed.

Slim looked disappointed. He shook his head as he printed and held up:
LIKES DARK
MEAT
.

So, dear old Dad is already two-timing his second wife. “Do you know where I could find him
now? Do you have his address?”

Slim shook his head.
I DON’T TRY TO KEEP TRACK OF WHITEY
, he ballooned. She
started to get up, but Slim held up his hand,
SAY SOMETHING,
another balloon
demanded.

“Like what?”

He shrugged.

“Jack Sprat could eat no fat. His wife could eat no lean.”

Slim rotated his wrists, his hands indicating “keep going.”

Oreo switched to something more appropriate for a soundman. “Though I speak with the
tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, I am become as a sounding brass or a
tinkling cymbal.”

Slim held up his hand,
COULD YOU RECORD A FEW LINES FOR ME?
he printed.

Oreo shrugged. “I guess so.”

He beckoned her as he went out of the office and back into Control Room B. He did his Shiva
routine with the reels of tape on his machines, taking some off, putting some on, twirling
his dials. He had her go through a door into the soundproof studio. He disappeared for a few
minutes and came back carrying some sheets of paper and a stack of his balloons. He put the
papers down on the table in front of her, adjusted her mike, then went back into the control
room. She watched him through the glass partition. He held up a balloon that said:
GIVE ME A LEVEL, PLEASE
. He pointed to the script he had left with her.

In a loud voice, she read what was written at the top of the sheet. “Mr. Soundman,
Incorporated. Account Number 3051478.”

Slim held one finger to his lips. Oreo read the same thing in a normal voice. Slim made the
“okay” sign with thumb and index finger and gestured for her to continue reading.

Oreo cleared her throat and read. “In these busy days of rush, rush, rush, it’s nice to
have friends you can depend on when you need them. We at Tante Ruchel’s Kosher Kitchens want
you to know you can depend on us. I was saying to my
tante
just the other day—and
my
tante
is your
tante
—I said to her, ‘What won’t you think of next?’
And she told me. I want to share with you the wisdom of this marvelous woman. You know her
by her prizewinning
tchulent
, you’ve marveled over her
kasha varnishkes
,
and thrilled to her
kugel.
Now she has outdone even herself. Now Tante Ruchel
brings you a product that will revolutionize your holiday dinners. So sit down, pull up a
chair, and be the first to hear over the miracle of the airwaves about a miracle of a
product—”

Slim waved her to a stop.
YOU’RE POPPING YOUR P’s
.

Oreo quickly looked over what she had read. She saw a “prizewinning,” a couple of
“products,” and a “pull.” She said these aloud tentatively. They all popped. She could not
figure out how to get her mouth around a
p
without a little explosion of air.
Behind the glass, Slim moved his lips in what Oreo assumed was a non-
p
-popping
demonstration. Of course
his p’s
didn’t pop. Besides, it seemed to her he was
mouthing
m
’s, not
p
’s. She’d sound pretty silly talking about “mroducts,”
“mull,” and “mrizewinning.” She tried again, imitating Slim’s lip movements. After a little
practice, she noticed that even to her ears there were fewer rags of breath catching at the
grille as she pushed the pesky words past the microphone, which Slim had placed slightly to
her left.

She did another take. This time the
p
’s were popless, but Slim ballooned:
A
LITTLE MORE JEWISH, PLEASE
.

Oreo tried to think of how her mother would do this. She pretended she
was
Tante
Ruchel’s niece, as the copy said. She got to the punchline again. “. . . be the first to hear
over the miracle of the airwaves about a miracle of a product: Tante Ruchel’s Frozen
Passover TV Seder.” Oreo laughed to herself. If her grandfather had thought of this, he
could have sold a million of them as fast as Louise could cook them.

She consulted Slim about two apparent typographical errors in the next paragraph and was
assured that the client did indeed want the copy read as the soundman instructed.

YAHWEH,
he explained.

Oreo shrugged and continued. “Passover is a celebration of freedom, gee-dash-dee’s gift to
our people. So why spend precious holiday time shopping and preparing? The ell-dash-are-dee
has seen fit to provide you with Tante Ruchel, a real
bren.
Let her do it for you.
When it’s time for Seder, you’ll be able to sit back, calm and cool, and say, ‘It’s such a
mechaieh
to have Tante Ruchel for a friend.’ Have you ever been so
farchadat
on the holiday that when your youngest starts in with the
Fier
Kashehs
, you say, ‘Don’t ask so many questions?’ Pesach is such an important
holiday—a happy
yontiff
, as we say—you wouldn’t want to forget anything and slight
the traditions of our people. Don’t worry, Tante Ruchel has thought of everything. No one
will be able to point the accusing finger at you and say, ‘See, she forgot the parsley.’
Parsley-shmarsley—have we got a meal for you! First of all, Tante Ruchel’s Frozen Passover
TV Seder comes in special foil trays—kosherized for the occasion. Use them once and throw
them away. No worry come next Pesach about did your Uncle Louie forget and mix up the
special china for Passover week with the everyday. Tante Ruchel would not make a move
without our own
mashgiach
by her side to see that everything is strictly strictly.
In fact, our
mashgiach
is so strict, he’s known in the FAM—the Federation of
American Mashgiachs—as Murray the
yenta.
And it goes without saying that each and
every lamb is led to the slaughter by our own
shochet
, who, if he didn’t work for
us, would be a world-famous surgeon. For that reason, we call him Dr. Jacobs. It’s only his
due.”

Oreo paused to say that she needed some water. Slim stopped his tape and went out of the
control room. He came back to the studio a few seconds later with a paper cup of water. He
winked, patted Oreo on the shoulder, and went back to start his machine again.

Oreo cleared her throat and went on. ‘‘By now, you’re all ears. ‘What is Tante Ruchel
serving for Passover?’ you query. I’m glad you asked. This Seder meal was tested in our
kosher kitchens for an entire year until we came up with just the right amount of
everything—so you should feel nice and full but not so stuffed you could
plotz.
Each individual tray has eight sections—get the symbolism?—and in each section a gem of a
dish. To start, Tante Ruchel has improved on her famous matzo-ball soup. She found an old
family recipe in a trunk in the attic just the other day. It’s the same delicious soup Tante
Ruchel has always made—but with one new secret ingredient that makes it divine, an
ingredient that if we told you, you’d say, ‘Of course.’ But we can’t tell you, dear
customers, because our competitors have ears also. Suffice it to say that such delicious
broth, such secret-ingredient matzo balls you have never in your life tasted. You could
strap a pair of Tante Ruchel’s matzos to your shoulders and fly—that’s how light they are.
As Tante Ruchel was joking just the other day when she taste-tested her latest batch of
matzos, ‘Let’s try and work out a deal with Pan Am.’