Oreo (6 page)

On one visit, Herbert had just returned from Africa. He had flung off his coat—made of the
skin of a lion he had killed in a Nairobi pet shop—and had gone to his accustomed spot in
front of the mirror to do his Big Nigger Butler routine, when all of a sudden there was a
commotion behind him. He did not turn around, for he could see what was happening in the
mirror. He had tossed his lion coat on a chair directly behind him, its hood with the
opened-jawed lion’s head nuzzling his back. Oreo, thinking that the skin covered a live
lion, had jumped up on the table behind her uncle and was stalking the coat. She came up
behind it slowly, her hands behind her. When she was close enough, she pulled her jump rope
from behind her back, whipped it around the head and mane, and double-dutched the coat to
death—or so she thought. Her uncle, watching all this in the mirror, was impressed with her
bravery. “She sure got womb, that little mother,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to mess with
her when she gets older. She is a ball buster and a
half
.” He told the entire
neighborhood about the incident. So it was that the legend of Oreo began to grow before she
had cut her second teeth.

At about this time, Oreo received a letter from her mother that influenced her thinking a
great deal. Helen’s letter had its usual quota of asides, such as her paranoia about white
dentists: “Suppose your dentist is white and suppose he just happens to harbor an
unconscious hatred of black people and suppose he is in a bad mood anyway when you come in.
Might he not just happen to bear down on the old drill a little harder, go a little deeper
than he needs to? I am just asking and don’t want you to be warped for life by this thought.
Besides, you still have your perfect little milk teeth. But since I’m on dentists, I will
tell you about Dr. Goodbody. Dr. Goodbody starts spraying Lavoris before you even make an
appointment. His sprayer bears a striking resemblance to a flame thrower. But who can blame
him for his finickyness, considering the effluvium, the untreated sewage, the
ick
that issues from some people’s mouths? But Dr. Goodbody has never realized that a patient
who is going to a dentist is like a housewife who cleans up before the maid comes. Such
goings on with water picks and dental floss and mouthwash and toothpaste—to say nothing of
sandpaper!”

This digression brought Helen logically to the main topic of her letter: the oppression of
women. “This is a subject I’ve given a lot of thought to, and I think I have the answer.
I’ve tried to encompass in my theory all the sociological, mythological, religious,
philosophical, muscular, economic, cultural, musical, physical, ethical, intellectual,
metaphysical, anthropological, gynecological, historical, hormonal, environmental, judicial,
legal, moral, ethnic, governmental, linguistic, psychological, schizophrenic, glottal,
racial, poetic, dental [this was the logical link], artistic, military, and urinary
considerations from prehistoric times to the present. I have been able to synthesize these
considerations into one inescapable formulation: men can knock the shit out of women.”

Helen’s letter went on to point out the implications of her formulation for the theory of
the so-called black matriarchs: it tore the theory all to hell. In a later day, Helen might
have gone on to add (with a slip of the pen owing to hunger): “There’s no male chauvinist
pork like a black male chauvinist pork.” Now she contented herself with pointing out how her
own mother still deferred to her father even in his immobilization, keeping on the safe side
in case he ever came out of it. As Louise often said, “He ain’ gon [pronounced, by Louise
and others, as if it were a French word, never as “gone”] hab no scuse to box
my
jaws.”

Helen’s letter so impressed Oreo that it led her to do two things: adopt a motto and
develop a system of self-defense. The motto was
Nemo me impune lacessit
—“No one
attacks me with impunity.” “Ain’t no nigger gon tell me what to do. I’ll give him such a
klop in the
kishkas!
” she said, lapsing into the inflections of her white-skinned
black grandmother and (through her mother) her dark-skinned white grandfather, as she often
did under stress.

She called her system of self-defense the Way of the Interstitial Thrust, or WIT. WIT was
based on an Oriental dedication to attacking the body’s soft, vulnerable spaces or,
au
fond
, to making such spaces, or interstices, where previously none had existed;
where, for example, a second before there had been an expanse of smooth, nonabraded skin and
sturdy, unbroken bone. To this end, Oreo developed a series of moves that made other methods
of self-defense—jiu-jitsu, karate, kung-fu, savate, judo, aikido, mikado, kikuyu, kendo,
hondo, and shlong—obsolete by incorporating and improving upon their most effective
aspects. With such awesome moves (or, as Oreo termed them,
blōs
) as the
hed-lok
,
shu-kik
,
i-pik
,
hed-brāc
,
i-bop
ul-na-brāc
,
hed-blō
,
fut-strīk
,
han-krus
,
tum-blō
,
nek-brāc
,
bal-brāc
,
bak-strīk
,
but-kik
, the size or
musculature of the opponent was virtually academic. Whether he was big or small, fat or
thin, well-built or spavined, Oreo could, when she was in a state of extreme concentration
known as
hwip-as
, engage any opponent up to three times her size and weight and whip his natural
ass.

She was once inadvertently in the state of
hwip-as
when she was riding in her
uncle’s car. A man standing on a corner as the car passed had seen her and had made sucking
noises to denote his approval of her appearance. Oreo did not consciously know she had heard
these primitive sounds, but as she was getting out of the car, she was in such an advanced
state of
hwip-as
that when she yanked at the ashtray, mistakenly thinking it was a
door handle, she heedlessly created for her uncle the only three-door club coupe in
America.

Oreo’s tutors were on vacation. She needed something to do to occupy her fourteen-year-old
mind for a few weeks, so she put an ad in the papers. Three days later, she received a phone
call from what sounded like a young white man.

“May I speak to Miss Christine Clark?” he asked.

“This is Christine Clark.”

“Are you the girl who advertised in the Situations Wanted column of the
Inquirer
?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Dr. Jafferts. I’m the medical examiner for district five. I was wondering if I
could interest you in a job?”

“I hope so.”

“Your ad said you’re a recent college graduate.”

“Yes, it did say that.”

“And your field was Chinese history?”

“Yes.”

“I see,” he said. “Well, let me tell you a little about the job we have in mind. In this
job, you’d be negotiating government contracts.”

“Chinese history doesn’t exactly prepare—”

“That’s all right,” he said generously. “We would train you. This job doesn’t come under
civil service. You’d be working with another woman. The job involves some traveling within a
hundred-mile radius of the city. Do you drive?”

“Yes.”

“The job pays ninety-five to start and gas-mileage money. The hours are nine to
three-thirty, five days a week. How does that sound?”

“Fine.”

“Now, here’s the catch. Would you submit to a medical examination for the job?”

“Certainly. Where’s your office?”

“Well, I don’t exactly have any particular office. I have to travel all over the district.
I can give you the examination over the phone.”

Aha, thought Oreo. “Over the phone?” she asked.

“Yes. You’d be surprised at how thorough a phone examination can be.” He paused, then
said, “Do you have a house or an apartment?”

“House,” said Oreo.

“And where is that located?”

She gave him her address.

Are you alone?”

Oreo decided to go along with him. “Why, yes.”

“I just asked because some of the questions may seem highly personal. But this is a
combination psychological and medical exam, so don’t be alarmed.”

“I promise,” said Oreo.

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen,” lied Oreo.

“Are you a virgin?”

Which answer is better for a shmuck like this? she wondered, and, having decided, said,
“No.”

“Would you mind telling me the color of your underclothes?”

Oreo covered her mouth to keep from giggling.

“I mean, are they white or different colors like pink, blue?” “All white,” said Oreo.

“Um-hmm. And what material are they? Silk, rayon, cotton?”

“Nylon.”

“I see. Now, would you mind telling me all the words you know that mean sexual
intercourse?”

With a wicked smile, Oreo said, “Certainly.
Procreation
,
cohabitation
,
coition
,
coitus
.”

“No, no!” He sounded terribly disappointed. Then, clearing his throat, he said calmly, “I
don’t mean . . . scientific terms. I mean just any words that might come to mind or that you
might hear on the streets, for instance.”

“I’m sorry,” Oreo said. “Those are the only ones I can think of right now. Could I come
back to that question?”

“Of course, of course,” he snapped. “Now, have you ever admired your body in a mirror?”

“Sure. Often.”

“Have you ever been roused? Does music ever make you want to—?” He broke off, then he said,
“I’ve finished the psychological examination. Now I want you to take off your clothes and
give yourself the medical.” After a few moments he said, “Are they off?”

“No,” said Oreo, “I’m having trouble with my wedgies.” The doctor continued, oblivious to
her anachronistic answer. “Rub along the inside of your thigh and tell me when you get
wet.”

Oreo put down the phone and went over to water her begonia, then she came back and coughed
into the phone to let the doctor know she was there.

“Are you wet yet?” he said wistfully.

Oreo said, “You know, doctor, the trouble with masturbation is you come too fast. There’s
no one for you to give directions to. You know, like ‘No, not like that, like this. No, yes,
no, harder, softer, up, down. No, no. I’m losing it. Yes, yes, that’s it, stay there, right
there. No, no, not like that—the way you were doing it before. Yes, that’s it.’ And there’s
no one for you
not
to give directions to. You know what I mean, doctor?”

There was a moan at the other end of the line. “I’d like to come over and give you a complete
examination,” said the moaner hoarsely.

“Why don’t you do that,” said the moanee sweetly.

“I’ll bring my tools with me,” the doctor said, in one last effort at pretense.

“Tools?” said Oreo. “One will be enough. Oh, by the way, doctor, I’ve finally thought of
some words. I don’t know how they slipped my mind before.” Oreo said a lot of words that
begin with
p
and
c
and
t
and
x
, that rhyme with
bunt
and
pooky
and
noontang
.

The doctor let out a gasp as big as Masters and Johnson and said he could be at her place
in an hour. Oreo told him that she would wait for him on her front porch and that she would
be wearing a begonia leaf.

She went immediately to a house three doors down from her and told a neighbor, Betty
Williams, that she wanted to play a trick on an acquaintance. Betty was the neighborhood
nymphomaniac. For two cents she would fuck a plunger. In fact, the story of Betty and the
plumber’s friend was a West Philadelphia legend. Anyone who thought that the shibboleth
friend
referred to a person was known to be an outsider and was therefore the
object of xenophobic ridicule and scorn. Betty agreed to help her young friend Oreo.

So it was that when Dr. Jafferts came panting down the street, already slavering, it was
Betty who, wearing the begonia leaf, waylaid him, as it were, on Oreo’s porch and led him to
her house, where Oreo was in hiding.

After a few preliminaries involving the you-sounded-different-over-the-phone routine, the
doctor—a young
shmegegge
who looked like the kind of person who doted on tapioca
pudding, and
ergo propter hoc
, whose favorite Marx Brother was Gummo—was seated in a
chair cruelly sited to give him a view up Betty’s short skirt. Sitting on a high stool,
Betty began a rhythmic opening and closing of her legs, revealing and concealing a tangle of
pubic hair. The sweat stood out on the doctor’s head after the first two open-close,
open-close beats. After a while, he seemed in danger of drowning in his own juice.

But Oreo’s plan was without mercy. Simultaneously with the rhythms she was laying down from
her stool, Betty began telling the doctor one of her favorite jokes. “It’s about this man
and woman who go down to Florida on their fifteenth wedding anniversary. They get up in
their room, and the first thing they do is take off all their clothes.”

The doctor licked his lips in anticipation, his eyes fixed on Betty’s open-close,
open-close.

Betty was beginning to overheat from hearing her own story, but she went on. “And the man
says to the woman, says, ‘Honey, we been married all these years now and we always do it the
same way. Let’s screw
new
a way this time. Now, you stand over in that corner, and I’ll stand
over here. Then we’ll run toward each other and meet in the middle.’ So they go to the
different corners and start running toward each other. But they miss and run right past. The
man is going so fast, he goes sailing out the open window. His room is on the tenth story,
but he’s lucky ’cause he falls in the swimming pool. But he’s afraid to come out ’cause he
don’t have no clothes on. Everybody seems to be running to the hotel and nobody’s paying him
no mind, but he’s still afraid to come out the pool buck naked. Then he sees this bellhop
ready to go in the hotel, and he calls him over. He says, ‘Say, bellhop, I want to get out
the pool, but I can’t ’cause I ain’t got no clothes on.’ The bellhop don’t even look
surprised. He says, ‘That’s all right, sir, nobody’ll pay no ’ttention to you. You just come
on out.’ The man says, ‘What do you mean nobody’ll pay no ’ttention to me? I’m buck naked!’
The bellhop says, ‘I know, sir, but most of the people are up on the tenth floor trying to
figure out a way to get a woman off a doorknob.’”