Oreo (5 page)

He smiled sweetly at them. Finally, when they were almost through chewing and swallowing
and staring, a glow transfigured Jimmie C.’s face. “I know what!” he exclaimed. He chuckled
musically to himself.

“What, fool? Speak up,” said Oreo.

Jimmie C. ascended to the top step, stretched out his arms to the multitude, and sang, “I
dreamt the park!”

Oreo looked at him in disgust, then she had to turn and protect him from thirty-six fists,
handicapped though they were by the remnants of the hoagie à la Louise they were still
clutching. Jimmie C. thoughtfully advised them to hold on to this sustenance, for they would
need nourishment on the long journey back home.

Oreo expressed the sentiments of the whole group when she looked at her little brother and
said slowly, “You are a
yold
. You and your jive dream parks.”

Oreo did not go to school. With the income from James’s back-list, Louise’s numbers, and
Helen’s piano playing, the family was able to hire special tutors for Oreo. Professor
Lindau, renowned linguist and blood donor, was her English tutor. He spoke in roots. He
would come in after his daily blood-bank appointment mumbling, “How are you this morning, my
vein, my blood?” which was not a comment on his most recent donation but a greeting to Oreo.
He would then toss Oreo a volume of one of his two idols, Partridge or Onions, and Oreo
would have to figure out what he meant by consulting the book. Thus his greeting was a
simple “How are you this morning, macushla?” Professor Lindau talked so much about Partridge
and Onions that Louise was inspired to invent
perdrix en poirier à l’oignon
.

One day. Professor Lindau came in, in a bad mood. He ranted fitfully about his girlfriend.
“That wedge!” he shouted. “What can one do with a wedge like that?” he asked
rhetorically.

Oreo was puzzled, so the professor tossed her the desk copy of Partridge. After following a
trail of false roots and camouflaged cognates, she came to Partridge’s assertion that
cunt
(or, as Partridge put it, “
c*nt
”) derived from the Latin
cunnus
, which was related to
cuneus
, or “wedge.” Eric went on to say
that the word had been considered obscene since about 1700, adding that “the dramatist
Fletcher, who was no prude, went no further than ‘They write
sunt
with a C, which
is abominable’, in
The Spanish Curate
. Had the late Sir James Murray courageously
included the word, and spelt it in full, in the great O.E.D., the situation would be
different; . . . (Yet the O.E.D. gave
prick
: why this further injustice to women?)
. . . (It is somewhat less international than f**k, q.v.)”

Oreo fell off her chair laughing at this witty entry in Partridge. When she got herself
together, she shook her head. Her
sprachgefühl
told her that Eric was stretching a
point (or, rather, a wedge) and that the professor was perpetuating Partridge’s error by
persisting in this pie-eyed usage. She had never been misled by her
sprachgefühl
, and
as she thumbed through a later edition of Partridge, she found that that worthy had
corrected himself in a supplement: “(p. 198) cannot be from the L. word but is certainly
cognate with O.E.
cwithe
, ‘the womb’ (with a Gothic parallel); cf. mod. English
come
, ex O.E.
cweman
. The
~nt
, which is difficult to explain,
was already present in O.E.
kunte
. The radical would seem to be
cu
(in
O.E.
cwe
), which app. = quintessential physical femineity . . . and partly explains
why, in India, the cow is a sacred animal.”

Oreo fell off her chair laughing at the part about the cow. She was, after all, just a
child in her mid-units. Then she pointed out the passage in the supplement to the
professor.

“I know, I know,” he said, dismissing her quibble. “But I like the
idea
of wedge.
It whips.” When Oreo looked puzzled again, he tossed her volume 12 of the O.E.D.

Oreo became adept at instantaneous translations of the professor’s rhizomorphs. “Mr. Benton
is worn out by childbearing. Of course, his paper was an ill-starred bottle. I don’t wonder
he threatened to sprinkle himself with sacrificial meal.” “You mean,” said Oreo, “that
Benton is effete, his paper was a disaster, a fiasco, and he wanted to immolate himself.”
The professor was impressed but not struck dumb. “I am phonofounded,” he said
logodaedalyly.

Once in an adjective-adverb drill, Oreo wrote: “He felt badly.” The professor was furious
and viciously crossed out the
ly
. He was ashamed of Oreo.

Oreo looked him dead in the eye and said, “I am writing a story about a repentant but
recidivous rapist. In the story, this repentant rapist catches his hand in a wringer.
Therefore, when he goes out, recidivously, to rape, he feels both bad and badly.” The
professor kissed Oreo on both cheeks.

Oreo was still angry with him for doubting her, and in her story about the rapist she added
such abominations as: “The Empire State Building rises penisly to the sky. As architecture,
manurially speaking, it stinks.” She felt it appropriate to employ genito-scatological
adverbs to express academic vexation.

The professor wept and promised never to cross out her
ly
’s until he was sure of her
intentions.

A few months later, the professor’s gait was bouncier as he came up the front steps. His
blood donations seemed to be more and more a source of comfort and anemia to him. Oreo found
out that much of the credit for the new Lindau belonged to his latest girlfriend, a wedge of
a different fit. Oreo overheard him mumbling happily to himself about the many joyous
conflations he and his new friend had had together. That one was easy for Oreo to figure
out. “Conflation, from
conflare
, ‘to blow together,’” she said to herself. “Oh,
shit. The professor’s just talking about plain old sixty-nine.”

Oreo’s milkman, Milton, although not officially a tutor, was one of her favorite teachers.
Milton had observed much along life’s milk route and was eager to pass on his observations.
As he came up the steps to leave his deposit, he would also deposit his thought for the day.
Although others had doubtless made similar observations, it was from Milton the milkman that
Oreo first heard (here cast in Milton’s favorite syntactical form): You ever notice that all
dentists have hairy arms and a large wrist-watch? You ever notice that insurance men walk
fast? You ever notice that African men and women all look like men, except Masai warriors,
who look like women? You ever notice that you feel guilty when a bank clerk checks up on
your balance? You ever notice that you feel guilty sitting in a movie theater waiting for
them to turn the lights out and start the picture?

Milton the milkman had an udderful of theories, his Grade A theory a three-stage rumination
upon the supposition that short toes, kinky hair, and impacted wisdom teeth were signs that
their bearers were further along on the evolutionary scale than long-toed, straight-haired,
erupted-wisdom-toothed people. He came up on the porch one day, sat down, and took off his
shoes and socks. He believed in visual aids to get his ideas across to modern, media-oriented
youth. “Look,” he said, pointing to his feet. “See? Short toes. Now, what does this mean?
This means that I am on my way to being your man of the future. You ever notice that some
people have toes like fingers? Now, I ask you, do we go around grasping things with our feet
any more? The answer is no. Prehensile toes went out in the year one. Therefore, anybody
with long toes is like a throwback. Therefore, I, Milton, with my short toes, am practically
your man of the future. Pretty soon, toes will disappear altogether and people won’t be able
to walk. But that will be okay, because by then everybody will be their own helicopter.
They’ll be able to take off from a standing start and propel themselves wherever they want
to go with some kind of individualized motor mechanism.

“Now, kinky hair. Kinky hair—like that beautiful fuzzy cloud you have—is not really kinky.
It doesn’t zig and zag. Kinky hair is actually coily. That’s right—coily. Each little hair
is practically by way of being a perfect circle. Now, these millions of coils on your head
are all jumbled up, coiling around each other. That’s why it hurts you to comb your hair.
You’re pulling in one direction, the coils may be pulling in sixteen other directions.
But—and this is the main thing—while the coils are doing that, they are also forming air
pockets. Now, air pockets do several things. One, they keep your head warm in the winter.
Two, they keep your head cool in the summer. And, three, they protect you from concussions
by absorbing the shock of blows to the head. Therefore, kinky hair is certainly more useful
than straight hair. It is obviously advanced hair. I mean, the evolutionary wheel had to
take a couple of wrong turns before it came up with kinky hair.

“Now, impacted wisdom teeth. Everyone knows that wisdom teeth are disappearing altogether.
We don’t need all those teeth, what with your processed foods, your tenderized meats. Our
jaws are trying to tell us something. Our gums are saying, ‘Enough, already. Who needs
this?’ So to make the message a little clearer, the wisdom teeth say, ‘I’ll just stay here
under the gums. Nobody needs me out there anyway. Why should I sweat it, working away and
only catching an edge of something here, a piece of something there?’ So to sum up,” he
said, putting his socks and shoes back on, “short toes, kinky hair, and wisdom teeth that
won’t come out—these are your three indicators as to your superior person. If you should
meet anybody with all three, you’re shaking hands with the future, because such a person is
so far beyond us, he or she makes the rest of us look like cavemen.”

As Milton went off the
porch, Oreo patted her kinky hair, tapped her short toes, and—with supreme confidence—looked
forward to the day when her wisdom teeth refused to erupt.

Another of Oreo’s regular tutors was Douglas Floors (né Flowers), her history instructor.
Floors was a man of many parts—paranoid, tap dancer, cost accountant. But the chief part
was the nature hater. His history lessons were extravagantly interrupted by heartfelt asides
on what he had to put up with from trees and grass. He once told Oreo that he had offered to
look after a friend’s pachysandra over the weekend, an offer that was hastily withdrawn when
he learned that pachysandra was a plant and not an elephant seer whom no one believed. Now
he cut short a discourse on the importance of ziggurats to the average Babylonian to say
with a shudder, “Last night, the sunset was particularly ugly. Nasty oranges and purples,
foul pinks and blues. On my way here, I saw a bird with fat cheeks—and a chest with the
coloration of an autumn leaf.” He added dolefully, “Which is all right in its place: on an
autumn leaf. At least you expect that
kind
of ugliness from an autumn leaf.”

Floors abominated the Bay of Fundy, detested the Marianas Trench, abhorred the aurora
borealis, reviled the Sargasso Sea, was chilled by the Poles, North and South, and loathed
any other manifestation of Mother Nature, commonplace or remarkable. It was from him that
Oreo learned historical sidelights that have been suppressed by the international botanist
conspiracy (code name: Botany 500): the unsightly foliage that nearly demoralized Sparta
along its line of march just before the Battle of Amphipolis; the cumulative ill effects of
cumulus clouds and photosynthesis on Richard III; the cypress infestation that was the last
straw to relatives of bubonic plague victims fleeing Tuscany in 1347; the vindictiveness and
moral turpitude of the puny (and Punic) shrubbery at Zama, the crucial factor in Hannibal’s
defeat at the hands of Scipio Africanus Major; the
real
story behind the Wars of
the Roses.

Whenever Floors came to teach, Louise flung a drop cloth over the hedges in front of the
house, pulled the shades on the window giving onto the back yard, hid the flower vases and
the century plant, and took the Turner and Constable reproductions off the walls. She
changed James’s sun-pattern poncho and made sure the children wore nothing depicting
flowers, trees, birds, clouds, mountains, rivers, or anything else that could be construed
as part of nature’s bounty. Floors would enter, take off his dark glasses, turn his chair so
that he would be facing a wall, and begin. “There’s a noisome Indian summer breeze blowing
out there today. Such a breeze was blowing on that November day when Charles II lay on his
deathbed—and greatly influenced his decision to die and start the War of the Spanish
Succession.”

Louise’s brother Herbert was a great traveler. On his return from Morocco or Afghanistan or
Greece or Chile, he would stop by to see his sister, check on James’s immobilization, and
give Oreo and Jimmie C. the presents he had brought with him from foreign shores. He was a
huge man, a 1 on the color scale. He had a scar from the corner of his lip to the top of his
right ear, a memento of an incident of his childhood outside the village of Gladstone, when,
with a callow slip of the tongue, he called two playmates of somewhat higher color-scale
value black sons of bitches. Whenever he came to the house, he would go directly to the
large mirror in the dining room, pull a flask from his hip pocket, drink deeply, growl, wipe
his mouth with satisfaction, and say, “I’m Big Nigger Butler.” It was strange to hear this
from a man for whom Hermann Goring could serve as
Doppelgänger
.

Herbert would fling off his coat and take out a little black book clotted with columns of
three-digit numbers, written in heavy pencil. Under or over each digit in a three-figure
unit was a dot or a dash or a circle or a slanted line or a cross. Herbert took Oreo on his
knee and explained to her what these mysterious markings meant. It was an elaborate system
for playing the numbers, a passion he shared with his sister Louise. His diacritical marks
showed him which numbers had come out, when, their pattern of recurrence (did 561 prefer to
come out in December, for example?), their correlation with world events (did numbers
starting with 8 always presage the fall of a South American government, for instance?), and
so on through a warren of statistical complexities that only Herbert could keep track
of—Herbert who could correctly multiply any figure up to five digits by any other figure up
to five digits in his head. But there was one difference between Herbert and Louise. Herbert
had never hit a number. Oh, he had come close—once. He had played 782 straight on the day
that Louise played 782 in the box and thereby hit for seven hundred dollars when 827 came
out. Other than that, he rarely had even one digit in common with the number that hit. But
he kept showing Oreo his book, telling her that one of these days, when she was old enough,
he would have her trace his markings in ink. He secretly believed that his niece’s
palimpsest of his numerical adventures would magically change his luck. His perverse delay
(for Oreo had had her eraser and ballpoint at the ready for years) was a good example of
herculean self-tantalization.