Oreo (2 page)

When Frieda Schwartz heard from her Shmuel that he was
(a)
marrying a black girl, the blood soughed and staggered in all her conduits as she
pictured the chiaroscuro of the white-satin
chuppa
and the
shvartze
’s
skin; when he told her that he was
(b)
dropping out of school and would therefore
never become a certified public accountant—
Riboyne Shel O’lem!
—she let out a great
geshrei
and dropped dead of a racist/my-son-the-bum coronary.

When James Clark heard from the sweet lips of Helen (Honeychile) Clark
that she was going to wed a Jew-boy and would soon be Helen (Honeychile) Schwartz, he
managed to croak one anti-Semitic “Goldberg!” before he turned to stone, as it were, in his
straight-backed chair, his body a rigid half swastika

discounting, of course, head, hands, and feet.

Jacob Schwartz, the heroine’s paternal grandfather

Frieda Schwartz, his wife (died in paragraph one but still, in her own quiet
way, a power and a force)

James Clark, the heroine’s maternal grandfather (immobilized in paragraph
two)

Louise Butler Clark, the heroine’s maternal grandmother (two weeks younger
than her husband)

Samuel Schwartz, the heroine’s father

Helen Clark Schwartz, the heroine’s mother

Christine (Oreo), the heroine

Moishe (Jimmie C.), the heroine’s brother

Jacob: He makes boxes (“Jake the Box Man, A Boxeleh for Every
Tchotchkeleh
”). As he often says, “It’s a living. I
mutche
along.”
Translation: “I am,
kayn aynhoreh
, a very rich man.”

James and Louise: In the DNA crapshoot for skin color, when the die was
cast, so was the dye. James came out nearest the color of the pips (on the scale opposite,
he is a 10), his wife the cube. Louise is fair, very fair, an albino
manquée
(a just-off-the-scale –1). James is a shrewd businessman, Louise one of the great
cooks of our time.

Samuel Schwartz: Just another pretty face.

Helen Clark: Singer, pianist, mimic, math freak (a 4 on the color
scale).

There is no weather per se in this book. Passing reference is made to
weather in a few instances. Assume whatever season you like throughout. Summer makes the
most sense in a book of this length. That way, pages do not have to be used up describing
people taking off and putting on overcoats.

In 1919, when they were both five years old, little James and little
Louise moved to Philadelphia with their parents, the Clarks and the Butlers, who were close
friends, from a tiny hamlet outside a small village in Prince Edward County, Virginia. When
they were eighteen, James and Louise married and had their first and only child, Helen, in
the same year.

During World War II, James worked as a welder at Sun Shipyard in Chester, Pennsylvania.
Every morning for three years, he would stop at Zipstein’s Noshery to buy a pickle to take
to work in his lunchbox. He would ask for a sour. Zipstein always gave him a half sour. From
that time on, James hated Jews.

After the war, James had enough money saved to start his own mail-order business. He
purposely cultivated a strictly Jewish clientele, whom he overcharged outrageously. He
researched his market carefully; he studied Torah and Talmud, collected
midrashim
,
quoted Rabbi Akiba—root and herb of all the jive-ass copy he wrote for the
chrain
-storm of flyers he left in Jewish neighborhoods. His first item sold like
latkes
. It was a set of dartboards, featuring (his copy read) “all the men you
love to hate from Haman to Hitler.” No middle-class Philadelphia Jew could show his face in
his basement rec room if those dartboards weren’t hanging there.

With this success as a foundation, James went on to tie-ins with other mail-order houses.
He was able to offer his customers cheese blintzes for Shevuoth, handkerchiefs for Tisha Bov
(“You’ll cry a lot”),
dreidels
for Chanukah,
gragers
and
hamantashen
for Purim, wine goblets for Passover, honey for Rosh Hashanah,
branches for Succoth (“Have the prettiest booth on your block”), and a recording of the Kol
Nidre for Yom Kippur (“as sung by Tony Martin”). Next to each item in his catalog was a
historico-religious paragraph for those who did not know the significance of the feasts and
holidays. “You have to explain everything to these
apikorsim
, ” he told Louise, who
said, “What say?” Over the years, his steadiest seller was the Jewish History Coloring Book
series, including “the ever-popular Queen Esther, Ruth and Naomi, Judah and the Maccabees
(add 50¢ for miniature plastic hammer), the Sanhedrin (the first Supreme Court), and
other all-time Chosen People favorites.” At last, his money worries were over. He was able
to send Helen to college and buy Louise the gift of her dreams: a complete set of Tupperware
(5,481 pieces).

As Helen sang her part in the chorale chorus
Jesu, Joy of Man’s
Desiring
, she constructed one of her typical head equations, based on the music’s
modalities and hers:

where
B
= Bach

T
= time

U
= weight of uric acid, ml

Simple, she conceded, compared with the overlapping fugal
subject-answer-countersubject head equations that were her favorites—elegant, in fact, but
not quite absorbing enough to keep her mind off the fact that she was perspiring and wanted
desperately to pee.

Samuel, passing through the rehearsal hall, caught a glimpse of Helen’s face and, mistaking
her expression of barely controlled anguish for religious fervor, was himself seized with an
emotion that mystics have often erroneously identified as ecstasy-
cum
-epiphany
(
vide
Saul on the road to Damascus, Theresa of Ávila every time you turn
around): the hots. His accounting books fell to the floor.

After much soul- and
neshoma
-searching, respectively, Helen and
Samuel decided to marry and live in his hometown, New York City. Samuel wanted to be an
actor. Furthermore, because Helen was a math freak, obviously gifted, Samuel wanted to have
Helen’s child—or, rather, he wanted
her
to have her/their child. Helen did not
mind. Pregnancy, she felt, would give her time to sit and play the piano and do her head
equations while Samuel was studying Intermediate Walking and Talking at drama school.

A secret cauled Christine’s birth. This is her story—let her discover it.
Helen named the baby girl in a moment of pique after a fight with Samuel in the hospital.
They made up before the ink was dry on the birth certificate. Although Samuel was a
nonobserving Jew and did not give a fig that his daughter was named after Christ, he
playfully extracted a promise from Helen that he could name the next child.

Later that year, Samuel stroked Helen’s thigh and joked, “Now let’s try
for the Messiah.”

They fought Mondays and Thursdays. Finally, Samuel said, “When Christine
is old enough to decipher the clues written on this piece of paper, send her to me and I
will reveal to her the secret of her birth.” He handed Helen the paper, adding a lot of
farchadat
instructions it is not necessary to go into here. “I still hope to see
you from time to time,” he said.

“Later for you,
shmendrick
,” said Helen.

Samuel left to work on a scene in drama class in which he was to play Aegeus.

After the breakup but before the divorce, Helen moved back to
Philadelphia. She was with child again. In the fullness of time, a son was born, in
circumstances neither more nor less unusual than those that attended the advent of
Christine. Samuel sent Helen a one-word telegram: “
MOISHE
.” He thought it was
funny to name a black kid Moishe. It was the name on the birth certificate, but everyone
called the child Jimmie C., after his maternal grandfather and, inadvertently, after his
paternal grandfather (James = Jacob).

Jacob lived on the Upper West Side of New York City. The first thing you
noticed about him was that his upper middle incisors did not line up with the center of his
face. A line drawn through the interstice of the two teeth would bisect not the septum but
his left nostril. This gave the impression either that his face was off-center or that his
false teeth had not quite settled around his gums. But his teeth were his own. Had they been
false, he would have had a better set made. All his life, everybody and his brother had
driven him
meshugge
cocking their heads this way and that whenever they talked to
him. Everybody, that is, except his Frieda, rest in peace, whose neck and therefore head had
been permanently set at an angle on her shoulders ever since her Uncle Yussel, klutz, had
missed when he was playing upsy-daisy with her when she was six months old.

“Another year, another
yahrzeit
, ” he sighed. “Two years already have passed and
still I can’t bring myself to go into my Frieda’s room. In there are all her plants. She
loved plants.” He gestured helplessly to his neighbor, Pinsky, apartment 5-E. “Pinsky, she
would talk to them, what can I tell you, like she was having a
shmooz
with her
friends.” He wept yet again when he thought of his wife’s devotion to her greenery.

An hour later Bessie, the cleaning woman, came in to do her daily chores. She decided to
take care of the dead lady’s plants first, before her corns started tom-tomming (“Sit
down—
bam!
—’fore you—double
wham!
—fall down —
boom!
Would
I—
boom-boom!
—treat you this way?—
wham-boom-bam
?”). “Lord have mercy,
that woman do have some plants,” she said as she took out her feather duster and opened the
door on one of the largest collections of plastic plants in America.

Louise Clark’s southern accent was as thick as hominy grits. No one else
in the Philadelphia branch of the family had such an accent. Her mother and father had
dropped theirs as soon as they crossed the Pennsylvania state line. Her husband could have
been an announcer for WCAU had they been hiring 10’s when he was coming up. While all about
her sounded eastern-seaboard neutral, why did she persist in sounding like a mush-mouth?
One reason: most of the time her mouth was full of mush or some other comestible rare or
common to humankind.

Louise was once challenged to name a food she did not like. She paused to consider. That
pause was now in its fifteenth year. During that time, she spoke of other things, lived her
life, paid attention to what was going on, to all appearances; but all the while—simmering
on a back burner, as it were—she was trying to bring to the boil of consciousness the
category of food she had once tasted at Ida Ledbetter’s second child’s husband’s cousin’s
wake after Ida Ledbetter’s second child’s husband’s cousin’s mother had collapsed after
dishing out the potato salad. She would go to her reward without putting a name to that
food, which was not food at all but a frying pan full of Oxydol. Why the Oxydol was in the
frying pan in the first place is beyond the scope of this work, but when Louise had walked
by the stove, she had hand-hunked a taste. Her judgment was that, whatever it was, someone
had been a mite too heavy-handed with the salt. Thus, this was not truly her first antifood
opinion but, rather, her first (and only) anti
seasoning
decision, an important
subcategory.

She always looked with perfect incomprehension on those finicky eaters who said that
so-and-so’s spaghetti sauce was too spicy, her greens too bland, her sweet potatoes too
stringy. For Louise, nothing to eat was ever too sour, salty, sweet, or bitter, too well
done or too rare, too hot or too cold. Anything that could be subsumed under the general
classification “Food” was exempt from criticism and was endued with all the attributes of
pleasure. Consequently, anything Louise liked was compared, in one way or another, with
food. A free translation of what she said on her wedding night after James went into his act
would be: “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.”

From time to time, her dialogue will be rendered in ordinary English, which Louise does not
speak. To do full justice to her speech would require a ladder of footnotes and glosses, a
tic of apostrophes (aphaeresis, hyphaeresis, apocope), and a Louise-ese/English dictionary
of phonetic spellings. A compromise has been struck. Since Louise can work miracles of
compression through syncope, it is only fair that a few such condensations be shared with
the reader. However, the substitution of an apostrophe for every dropped
g
, missing
r
, and
absent
t
would be tantamount to
tic douloureux
of movable type. To avoid
this, some sentences in Louise-ese have been disguised so that they are indistinguishable
from English. In other cases, guides to pronunciation and/or variant spellings are given
parenthetically whenever absolutely necessary to preserve the flavor and integrity of the
Louise-ese or, antithetically, translations are provided for relict English words, phrases,
or sentences that survive her mangle-mouth.

Fortunately for her family, who did not share her universal palate, Louise was a cook for
the ages, adept at unnumbered ethnic and international cuisines, her shrewd
saucisson-en-croûte
surviving even her attempts to pronounce it to take its place on the
dining-room table, in due course, beside her butter-blinded
pommes de terre Savoyard
, her
brave corn pudding, untouchable beef curry, toe-tapping hopping john,
auto-da-fé
paella
, operatic
vitello tonnato
, and soulful hog maws.

One of Helen’s earliest memories was of sitting on her mother’s lap and being urged to
“tayce dis yere tornado Bernice” (taste this here
tournedos Béarnaise
) as she
looked over her mother’s shoulder to compare Louise’s startlingly white face with the
portrait of her grandfather, a 1 if there ever was one. The portrait hung in an oval frame
in the dining room. Helen’s grandfather had been the offspring of an enterprising African
woman who had immigrated to New York in 1869 and had had a hand in the somewhat unfortunate
attempt to corner the gold market (“Black Friday” was named after her) and a Richmond bugler
who had been a turncoat during the Civil War and was vamping in the Bronx until he felt it
was safe to tootle back to Virginia. Her grandmother was said to be half Cherokee and half
French—hence the influence of French cuisine in the family, the oldest
handed-down-from-generation-to-generation recipe being a providential dish called
rabbit-on-the-run
suprême
, in commemoration of the French and Indian Wars. The
last joke James Clark heard before his immobilization was his daughter’s rather feeble “Just
think. Daddy, now I can call myself Hélène Sun-See-A-Ray Schwartz.”

Louise went gray at thirty-two trying to understand what her husband and child were saying
when they talked that foolish talk they talked sometimes. (“You’re
draying
me
such a
kop
with that racket, Honeychile,” said the father. “
Kvetch
,
kvetch
,”
said the daughter under her breath.) She had her “good” hair dyed auburn, a color and
texture that she never failed to compare favorably with the dull black kinks of her
neighbors as she waited her turn while the beautician straightened their nappy heads with
the hot comb (or “cum,” as Louise pronounced it, with the
u
of “put”). “I thank
you, Father,” she would pray, “fo’ gib’m me de gray hairs, but I
truly
thank you
fo’ gib’m folks de knowledge so I don’ hafta hab’m. I’d look like a
f
-double
o-l
walkin’ ’round yere wif a gray head, young’s I am.”

Louise talked in generalities that required the listener to fill in the who, what, where,
when, why, and how. She rarely bothered to remember names (“Dere go Miz What-cha-cawm an’
her daughter”), or she made two or three tentative tries at capture before the killing
pounce (“Yoo-hoo, Jenkins . . . I mean, Mabel . . . I say,
George!
”) or substituted
names that were close (the “Jolly” of “Go to de sto’ and git me some-a dat dere Jolly” meant
Joy dishwashing liquid). She was vague about time. She never gave you the hour or the
minute. It was always “ha’p pas’,” “quart’ to,” or “quart’ afta.” Thus any time from 3:01
P.M.
to 3:24
P.M.
was merely “quart’ pas’.” No one knew from whom she had expropriated the
southern expressions that seasoned her speech. When Helen was growing up, Louise would tell
her that as long as she had two holes in her nose, she would “be John Brown” if she would
ever understand “why de ham-fat” a daughter of hers was so “slub’m” (slovenly), that her
hair looked like a “fodder stack,” her room like a “debbil’s hurrah’s nest,” that she lacked
“mother wit,” acted sometimes like a “fyce dog,” was a “heathen” because she refused to go
to Calvary Baptist Church, and, as for her day-to-day actions, well, everybody knew that
“God don’ like ugly.”

In her later, more corpulent years, Louise liked to sit on the front porch rocking in her
rocker or gliding in her glider. She sat and rocked and glided and judged. Of a woman
wearing a riotous flower print: “Look at dat gal goin’ by. Dere she. Look like any Dolly
Vahd’n [Varden]. And she in the fam’ly way fo’ sho.” Of a prosperous dentist: “His money’s
awright, but he sho-god is
ugly!
” She covered her face. Every once in a while, she
would open her fingers, peek at Dr. Bruce, shudder, and close them again, gliding,
gliding.

Louise was very lucky. Forget the odds against hitting the numbers; she hit them virtually
at will. Two of her regular numbers were 595 (her brother Herbert’s old standby) and 830
(given to her by Helen when she was just a toddler and babbling anything that came into her
head), which seemed to come out every August.

After James was afflicted, whenever Louise wanted his tip on a number, she would first
adjust the asafetida bag she had put around his neck. (Asafetida headed her list of
panaceas. The others sounded like ingredients in a you-are-what-you-eat recipe/cure for a
constipated, sickly child with rickets and a chest cold: mustard plasters, Epsom salts,
cod-liver oil, castor oil, cambric tea.) Then she would point to the numbers she had written
down that morning after consulting her dream book. When her husband grinned like a “Chessy
ket” (Cheshire cat), she would play that number—in the box, to be on the safe side. On the
very day after he was stricken, she had played 421, the number for paralysis, and hit for
three hundred dollars.

What she did not know was that James was not paralyzed. When Honeychile had broken the news
about Samuel and called herself Hélène Sun-See-A-Ray Schwartz, she had also broken a blood
vessel in her father’s brain. James’s affliction was a bad case of retrograde amnesia. As
Louise would have said, he remembered the past like white on rice, but he could not hold on
to the present for more than a few seconds at a time. He would start to get up, for example,
then forget what he was doing before he had moved perceptibly. He could have talked, but he
just had not tried.

For years, Louise had commandeered any help she could get from passersby, neighbors,
relatives, and friends to help her carry James into the back yard for exercise and hosing
off. The exercise consisted in pushing his head toward his knees and pulling his legs out in
front of his body, but he always snapped back into his half-swastika pattern. James’s
clothes mildewed after the first few months, and there was always the danger of his catching
a chill after the hosing. Louise solved that problem by making him a line of stylish ponchos
(different materials, patterns, and colors to change with the seasons), which she could just
whip off and on whenever he had to be hosed. Louise’s brother Herbert had devised a
jar-and-bucket contraption for James’s waste, and she herself fed him her latest recipes.
According to her readings of his facial twitches, veal stuffed with ham mousse barely beat
out
lamb bobotie
as his postaffliction favorite.

To Louise, a Jamesian grin meant “yes,” and she consulted her husband on all household
matters. She was not far off, since James grinned only when he was having a particularly
pleasant memory of the past or had thought of a new way to run a game on Jews. He was, of
course, unaware that he kept thinking of the same swindles over and over again and would
forget them before he had had time to stand up and get the shells moving. One of his
schemes, which recurred every time Louise asked him to give her a tip on the number, was of
somehow revising dream books and palming his product off on ignorant Jews as gematria. “Did
you dream about a visit from your cousin Sarah?” his copy would read. “Turn to
SARAH
in the
list of names at the back of this numerology book. The number next to that name is G 18-6,
which means Genesis 18:6. This verse from the Five Books directs you to ‘Make ready quickly
three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes upon the hearth.’ If you do as
directed, such
mazel
you wouldn’t believe! If for some reason you cannot do as the verse directs, find other entries in this book that
have the number 18-6 or 1-86. Look for hidden clues that will tell you how Sarah’s visit
will turn out. See also
VISIT
.”

His mind usually jumped then to ways in which he could take advantage of Jewish children.
Why stop with the parents? He thought immediately of the local yeshivas. Was there a way, he
wondered, to convince them of the need for a know-your-opposition unit on Jesus as a
historical figure, using materials that he, of course, would supply them with? What about
some
bobbe-myseh
about the day-to-day life of Jesus, tied in maybe with some
shlock
toys and games? As for educational value—hoo-ha! He would devise a series of
short-answer quizzes to be used at the end of the unit. When the little
bonditts
of
the yeshiva were through with these quizzes, they would be able to tell the
goyim
a
thing or two about the Nazarene. “Do you know in what New Testament verse Jesus makes a
pun?” the little smart-asses would say. “I’ll give you a clue—the name Peter means ‘rock.’
Give up? Nyah-nyah, Matthew 16:18!” Or they would sidle up to a gentile and whisper, “Nobody
knows what Jesus did on the Wednesday before he died.” Twenty years later, a Jewish art
historian would owe this revelation to James: “Byzantine mosaics, the earliest
representations of Jesus, will one day prove to be not just an art technique but an accurate
rendering of the cracks in [Christ’s] face.” James did not remember, of course, but every
day he devised the same quiz: