Oreo (4 page)

The trolley rattles toward us, its metallic jig fortunately out-clamoring my words as I
tell Mr. Johnson where to go, what to do, and what to kiss. He is still standing there
cradling his redolent bundle as I settle back and watch him recede until he is a raggedy
blue dot.

Davenport

Pensées d’Hélène
: I used to think that Rudy Vallee
was short for Rudolph Valentino. He is.

Minneapolis

Jobs I Have Had
(cont’d)
: I once demonstrated
fill-in painting at a ten-cent store. I would gather a crowd around me and take out my
Sylvan Scene Number 10 cardboard with its jigsaw of shapes, all numbered. For about three
minutes, I would do my cyborgian routine, showing the shoppers how to put bleeding-gum
crimson in all the 5’s—never in a 7 or a 2. Then, all of a sudden, I would go crazy. I
could not bring myself to stay within the lines. My blind-man blue would stray from the
52-to-75 lower-sky section, where it belonged, and would begin to invade the cavity yellow
of the 45-to-48 cloud tinge. But the management kept me on. They merely warned against
sloppiness, saying prissily, “Neatness counts, neatness counts.”

I kicked at the traces. I started to seek out the potential artists among the old men and
housewives who were my students. I told them not to bother with these
shlock
paints, to save up and buy some real oils or watercolors or even crayons. I showed them how
to mix pigments, stretch canvas, keeping just ahead of them by studying at night. For my
first life class, I invited the harridan whose regular mooch was ten feet on either side of
the double doors of that Woolworth’s to come in and pose for us. Each of my students gave
her ten cents. The total take was more than she could have hustled outside in the cold. In
the middle of their first fumbling attempts at what critic Bernard Mosher has called “gesture drawing,” I was fired. “Don’t stay in the lines!” I managed to
shout over my shoulder as I was thrown out.

Because of my experience with painting-by-numbers (I didn’t bother to mention that I’d been
fired), I had the perfect background and experience for my next job. Heshie Herschberg,
dress wholesaler
extraordinaire
, was faced with a Chicken Little disaster. A
five-thousand-lot shipment of sky-blue summer cottons had arrived with a piece of sky
missing. With an empty display of resistance, each of the dresses, stewing in celestial
juices, had refused to dye. There it was—a bull’s-eye about the size of a dime that would,
if given a chance, ring the size 12 average whatsis of the size 12 average shopper (the
biggest market for this simply cut basic that you could shop anywhere in).

As Heshie outlined it, this was my job: “Listen closely, girlie, this particular number,
it’s my bread and it’s my butter. And to me a life isn’t a life without it should have bread
and butter. If, God forbid, I shouldn’t be able to unload this number as per usual, my wife
Sadie will never let me hear the end of it that ‘Revka-down-the-block-she-should-drop-dead
was able to go to Florida and get a nice tan and me—whose husband is supposed to be such a
big deal in the garment world, yet—I can’t afford to go around the corner.’ Now, this number
is going to roll past you at a rate of, oh, one every five seconds, but we can
adjust—faster, slower, you name it. I want you should wash your hands real good. I want
people that they are walking down the street and never saw you before in their lives that
they should take time out to pass a remark that such clean hands they have never before seen
on a person, except maybe on a surgeon as he slips into the rubber gloves, and what with the
dope and
dreck
that they had when they saw it on the surgeon, his hands were pretty
blurry, but on a bet they would say yours were cleaner. With these clean, clean hands, I
want you should gently grasp each of these number 12 regulars here, pull it tenderly toward
you, and then with these No. 2 Magic Markers that my brother Morris, he should live and be
well, has seen fit to provide me with at a special discount, with these No. 2 Magic Markers,
you should with a swish and with a swash fill in that little dime-size white spot just below
where the
pupik
should be. Sam Spade—pardon me—with an X-ray machine should be able
to look at this dress and not see dark edges from where the Magic Marker overlapped onto the
part that’s already blue. He should not be able to see one little hint, one little breath,
one little zephyr of a white spot left over from where the No. 2 Magic Marker, God forbid,
missed. Have I conveyed the importance of this task? Yes? Well, then, begin. I will stand
here until I see that you’ve got the hang of it, the swing of it, the
art
of it.
Good, good. I knew you were the one for the job when I saw you walk in. I will come back in
an hour to check on your progress. I figure that with hard work and steady effort, you
should be able to say to me at six o’clock on the dot, just before I am ready to lock up and
go home to Sadie the
nudzh
, ‘Mr. Herschberg, I have the honor of informing you that
I have finished my appointed task and the number 12 average is, thank God, ready for
shipment.’”

Well, children, the finish is, I walked out of there cross-eyed. Before I had gone three
feet, I had to resist the impulse to color the spots before my eyes. That cleared up after a
block or two, but now if I see a white spot on a dog, I want to fill it in.

I saw Sadie Herschberg as I was leaving. She was so fat she could have used a bra on her
kneecaps—about a 38D. I mean to tell you, she was 360
degrees
fat. Herschberg
himself was a beanpole—a
loksh
. When they went down the street together, one
streaking, one shloomping, they looked like a lame number 10 or maybe an 01, depending.

Newark

A few minutes ago, I was listening to the local TV newscast, and the announcer said
something like: “Fred Jones of Rahway, New Jersey, has been indicted for milking a bankrupt
kosher meat company of thirty-three thousand dollars.”
Milchedig
and
fleishedig
! A
frosk in pisk
to Fred.

Happiness, Montana

What am I doing in Montana? What am I doing in a town called Happiness?
Nothing. So I make long-distance calls to the circulation departments of the
New York
Review of Books
, the
Partisan Review
, and
Commentary
. I say,
“Hello, [
name of magazine
]? This is Miss Cream at your fulfillment house in Iowa
[all fulfillment houses are in Iowa]. Could you please give me a list of your subscribers in
Happiness, Montana? Our computer has gone haywire, and we are double-checking our records.”
There is a short wait, and I look out the window at the pyorrheic mountains while New York
checks its records. New York comes back on the line with a list of two names. In each case,
they are the same two names.

Then I call up the local newspaper, the
Happiness Chronicle
, and speak to the
editor-publisher-reporter-layout man. I say, “Hello,
Chronicle
? This is
Life
magazine calling. Miss Sweet here. We are doing a survey on ethnic and
religious groups in Montana and want to include your town in the survey. We know you’re on
top of things out there, and if you can help us we’d be glad to mention your name in the
piece we’re doing. Our question is twofold:
(a)
How many members of the Jewish
faith are there in Happiness? And
(b)
What are their names?” The
editor-publisher-reporter-layout man says, “Well, yes, there’s a Jewish fella out here—Mel
Blankenstein. He’s the only one of Jewish persuasion in this town. A real nice fella too.
Keeps to himself. Joe Kerry down to the superette does land-office business on farmer’s
cheese because of Mel, I hear tell.” Then I say, “Thank you so much for your cooperation,
sir. Look for your name and the name of that fine paper you’re running in the pages of
Life
magazine.”

I hang up and I compare my
Partisan Review—New York Review—Commentary
list. Yes,
Mel Blankenstein, reader of the above-named magazines, is one and the same Mel Blankenstein
that is the nice fellow who has a taste for pot cheese. But—wait a minute. There is another
name on my magazine list. What of that? I stare at the name. The name is Leonard Birdsong
III. Leonard (surely Lenny) Birdsong (Feigelzinger, perhaps, or is the last name simply a
flight of Wasp-inspired fantasy?). And III, of course just means third generation on
Rivington Street. I now know something that nobody else in town knows—not even Mel. I know
that Leonard Birdsong III is a crypto-Jew. My God, he’s passing—the
geshmat!

I look at the two-page phone book and, yes, there they both are, the proud Jew and the
meshumad
. I decide to send Lenny a note before I leave town. My note will say:
“Dear Lenny: Can you come over Friday night? My wife will fix you a meal like in the olden
days. A little
gefilte
fish, a little
chrain
, some nice hot soup, a nice chicken. Who
knows? Maybe a
kugel
even. Come on, Lenny, enough shlepping
trayf
home
from Kerry’s Superette (though the pot cheese is unbeatable—imported from New York). It
would be an
averah
if we Jews didn’t stick together, especially way out here. I am
so sick and tired of looking at
goyim
I could
plotz!
We’ll expect you
early. Best, Mel. P.S.: If you like pepper, please bring your own. We don’t keep it in the
house. It’s such a
goyische
thing, pepper, but to each his own. M.B. P.P.S.: Bring
this note with you. I am writing my autobiography and ask all my friends to save any
invitations, postcards, etc., I send them. I could have sent you a carbon, but I feel it’s
so much nicer to receive an original. So bring it with you and I’ll keep it on file under
F
for Feigelzinger. You can refer to it whenever you wish to—if you happen to
be writing your memoirs also. M.B.”

I feel I have performed a real
mitzvah
for Lenny, and I look up at the clock and
see that if I hurry, I just have time to make it to the local movie house for the cultural
event of the season. They are having a John Agar Festival.

From the Jewish side of the family Christine inherited kinky hair and dark, thin skin (she
was about a 7 on the color scale and touchy). From the black side of her family she
inherited sharp features, rhythm, and thin skin (she
was
touchy). Two years after
this book ends, she would be the ideal beauty of legend and folklore—name the nationality,
specify the ethnic group. Whatever your legends and folklore bring to mind for beauty of
face and form, she would be
it
, honey. Christine was no ordinary child. She was born
with a caul, which her first lusty cries rent in eight. Aside from her precocity at mirror
writing, she had her mother’s love of words, their nuance and cadence, their juice and pith,
their variety and precision, their rock and wry. When told at an early age that she would
one day have to seek out her father to learn the secret of her birth, she said, “I am going
to
find
that motherfucker.” In her view, the last word was merely
le mot juste
.

Where Christine was salty, Jimmie C. was sweet. He was a 5 on the color scale and was
gentle of countenance and manner. He had inherited his mother’s sweet voice, and he was
given to making mysterious, sometimes asinine pronouncements, which he often sang. From
Louise he had inherited a tendency to make up words. Thus this exchange between Louise and
her grandson:

Christine loved her younger brother, but often she was exasperated by him. Every day she
would sit on the bottom step in the living room and read to Jimmie C. He stopped her gently
once and sang, “But nevertheless and winnie-the-pooh”—which was one of his favorite
expressions—“I get Christopher Wren and Christopher Robin confused.”

Christine looked at him and, in a rare instance, made up her own word. “You are a stone
scrock
, boy.” The family liked Christine’s new word and gave it inflections for
various occasions:

When Christine was about two and a half, she got her nickname. It came to Louise in a
dream. Louise was walking down a dusty road with Christine on a gray, overcast day, when
suddenly the clouds parted and a ray of sunshine beamed down right in front of the child.
Out of this beam of sunshine came a high-pitched, squeaky voice. “And her name shall be
Oriole,” squeaked the voice.

When Louise woke up that morning, she went straight to her dream book. Next to the word
ORIOLE
was the number 483. Louise played it in the box for three days. On
the third day, it came out and she hit for five hundred dollars, her first hit in more than
three weeks (the longest dry spell she could remember). She had told James about her dream
on that first day, when she was hosing him off, and he had grinned. She had told her whole
family and all her neighbors, as she usually did with her important dreams. Sometimes the
entire neighborhood hit if they could figure out what Louise was saying.

Everyone thought that Louise had found a great nickname for Christine. People had been
calling the child various things as she toddled down the street after Louise, cursing them
under her breath. They called her Brown Sugar and Chocolate Drop and Honeybun. But when they
looked at Christine’s rich brown color and her wide smile full of sugar-white baby teeth,
they said to themselves, “Why, that child does put me in mind of an Oreo cookie—side
view.” And that is how Oreo got her name. Nobody knew that Louise was saying “Oriole.” When,
through a fluke, Louise found out what everyone thought she was saying, it was all right
with her. “I never did like
flyin’
birds, jus’ eatin’ ones,” she said. “But I jus’
loves dem Oreos.” And this time she meant what everyone else meant.

Naming was very important in the Clark family. Here are two other instances. Herbert
Butler, Louise’s wandering brother, brought back a parakeet for the children after one of
his journeys. It was powder blue. Only its color (Louise’s favorite) saved the bird from her
total disdain (“He ain’ eem a flyin’ bird, jus’ a settin’ one”). Oreo called the parakeet
Jocko, Jimmie C. sweetly called him Sky. Louise, because she could not bother to remember
either of these names, called him “bird,” not as a name but as a category, just as she
called various other pets of friends and family “cat,” “dog,” and “goldfish.” She sometimes
had to call all the categories before she got to the right one: “Take dat go’fish . . . I
mean, cat . . . I say,
dog
out fo’ a walk.” After two months, in confusion over his
true name, Sky-Jocko-bird died, a living (or rather, dead) example of acute
muddleheadedness.

That was also the year that Oreo and Jimmie C. had the German shepherd. Everyone said he
was the smartest German shepherd anyone had ever seen in the neighborhood. He could do
anything—fetch the paper, roll over and play dead, shake hands. He would romp with the
children for hours on end, and they would take turns riding on his powerful back. He ran
back and forth between the children, his handsome eyes shining, his powerful muscles
rippling as he leaped a fence to get a ball Oreo or Jimmie C. had thrown. His papers said
his name was Otto, followed by a string of unpronounceable names, but the family decided to
call him something else. This time they quickly agreed on a name, one that Helen suggested.
They called him Fleck. “A German shepherd should have a German name,” Helen had written to
them when the family consulted her, getting her jollies over the fact that she had named the
princely German shepherd plain old ordinary Spot.

Louise said, “Dat Fleck, he eat like any starve-gut dog,” and she delighted in fixing him
special meat dishes that no German shepherd before him had ever had, dishes like
daube
de boeuf à la Provençale
and
kofta kari
. Then misfortune struck—or,
rather, bit. Fleck got into the habit of biting strangers, and the Clarks had to get rid of
him. The whole family was sad. Jimmie C. summed up their feelings when he said, “He was a
nice guy, that Fleck. If he could cure himself of that bad biting habit, brought on by
homesickness, I’m sure, he might be able to find a suitable flock—maybe out West, where the
employment situation for shepherds is better—and be able to bring his wife and children over
from the fatherland.”

“Auf Wiedersehen,”
said Fleck when it was time to go.

“Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott.”
(It was not clear whether he feared Bach or Luther
more—the old Rodgers-or-Hart dilemma.)

Oreo and Jimmie C. had to find a new playmate.

One of their playmates was their grandfather. As soon as the
children were big enough, they would tumble James to the floor and play with him as if he
were a piece of eccentric cordwood. Whenever Louise waxed the kitchen floor, they would get
James onto a throw rug and drag him into the kitchen, where they would give him a nice spin
and watch him revolve, his half swastika doubling in the shininess.

Once when Louise saw them doing this, she admonished the rambunctious children. “Y’all play
nice, you yere me? Hard head make soft behind. Don’ make me nervy. Doct’ say I got high
pretension.” She went on fixing the
tamago dashimaki
she was taking to her friend
Lurline at Mercy-Douglass Hospital. She decided to eat the omelet herself, since it would
not survive the journey. Then she put on her hat and said, “Now, Oreo, you and Jimmie C. put
James back in de lib’m room right now. He had ’nough ’citement fo’ one day. ’Sides, look
like to me he right dizzy.” She paused to think. “I greb’mine take the G bus [I’ve a great
mind to take the G bus], ’cause it fasta dan dat ol’ trolley. I will cenny be glad to see
Lurline on her feet again. Thank de good Lord her sickness not ligament.”

“Malignant,” Oreo said mechanically.

“Moligment,” Louise amended. “Oreo, you in charge. Take care yo’ sweet brother and stay in
de back yard.”

The children wiped the excess wax off their grandfather and put him back in his corner in
the living room. They went into the back yard to play. Mrs. Dockery, their next-door
neighbor, was in her yard watching her brindle tomcat fight with an alley cat. She watched
for some time, then she turned to Oreo and Jimmie C. and said, “My cat’s a coward.” Jimmie
C. had his fingers in his ears at the time, and he heard Mrs. Dockery’s simple sentence as
“Mah cassa cowah.” Jimmie C. was delighted. He decided to use this wonderful new expression
as the radical for a radical second language. “Cha-key-key-wah, mah-cassa-cowah,” he would
sing mysteriously in front of strangers. “Freck-a-louse-poop!”

Oreo recognized the value of Jimmie C.’s cha-key-key-wah language over the years. For her,
it served the same purpose as black slang. She often used it on shopkeepers who lapsed into
Yiddish or Italian. It was her way of saying, “Talk about mother tongues—try to figure out
this
one, you mothers. If you guess
this
word, we’ll ring the changes on
it until it means
that
.”

Whenever they played together, if Oreo thought her brother had said something silly or
stupid or sweet, she would make one of her savage “suppose” remarks. Both children had the
habit of, in Jimmie C.’s phrase, “jooging” (the
o
’s of “good”) in their ears—to get
at an itch that ran in the family. Once when they were both doing this, Jimmie C. said,
quite seriously, “Let’s put our wax together and make a candle.”

Oreo answered, “Suppose you were sliding on a banister and it turned into a razor
blade.”

Jimmie C. fainted.

Oreo was very sorry when that happened. She did not really want to be mean to her sweet
little brother, but sometimes it was a case of simple justice. When Jimmie C. asked her
whether there was such a thing as an emergency semicolon (of course!), she answered,
“Suppose you were putting Visine in your eyes and it turned into sulfuric acid.”

Jimmie C. fainted.

Oreo resolved to give up her “suppose” game until she found a less deserving person to use
it on.

One day Jimmie C. came to Oreo and said gently, “Suffer the little children to come unto
me.” This was his derivative way of asking her to gather all the kids on the block for a
special outing. Soon there were eighteen children of eighteen colors, sizes, shapes, and
ages milling about in the Clarks’ back yard. (The eighty-one-year-old qualified on the
grounds of demonstrable dotage.) Jimmie C. explained to them that his grandmother was at
that moment making a six-foot-long hoagie à la Louise that could be cut into as many
sections as there were children and that he knew of a great place to have a picnic.

All the children jumped up and down shouting that they did not want to go. Oreo gave them a
threatening look, and they gave in.

Jimmie C. ran into the house and came back with a plastic bucket. He went to the side of
the house and turned on the garden tap. And, lo, the bucket did fill up with foamy orange
Kool-Aid.

The children gasped. Petey Brooks, the eighty-one-year-old, said wistfully, “In my yard it
always comes out water.” All assembled thought they had witnessed a miracle.

But honest Jimmie C. laughed his tinkly, musical laugh and sang, “The Kool-Aid was already
in the bucket.” Oreo thought her brother was a prize scrock for letting the kids know this,
but she kept her peace.

And so they set off. All the children took turns carrying the Kool-Aid bucket and slopping
it all over their sneakers and jeans. They had been walking for about fifteen minutes when
Petey Brooks, who was in bad shape for his age, said diplomatically, “Where the fuck
is
this park?”

“You’ll see, you’ll see,” said Jimmie C. “It’s near nobby.”

“I don’t remember any park near here,” said Petey.

And Jimmie C. said unto them, “O ye of little faith, it’s just around the grabus.”

They turned the grabus, or corner, onto another street. A plain street. No park. “So
where’s the park?” Oreo asked.

Jimmie C. looked stunned. “It
should
be right
nobby.”

But it wasn’t.

“I’m tired,” said Petey.

“So am I,” said seventeen other voices.

Oreo took over. “Let’s sit down here.” They ranged out over the steps of a row of row
houses. Oreo opened her paper bag and took out her section (the best) of the hoagie à la
Louise. She dipped her paper cup into the half inch of Kool-Aid that had not spilled on the
way. Everyone else did the same. Then they stared at Jimmie C.