Oreo (8 page)

Helen told the family stories of her life on the road. She acted out all the parts, animate
and inanimate (one of her best bits was a bowl of mashed potatoes being covered with gravy).
The family favorite that night was the story she told about playing at a house party in the
all-black suburb of Whitehall, so much in the news when low-income whites were making their
first pitiful attempts to get in. The upper-middle-class blacks of Whitehall objected to the
palefaces, not because they were poor (“The poor we have with us always,” said town
spokesman, the Reverend Cotton Smith-Jones, rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church), but
because they were white (“We just do not want whitey, with his honky ways, around us,” said
Reverend Smith-Jones to a chorus of genteel Episcopalian “Amens”). As Smith-Jones pointed
out, whitey was beyond help. Chuck did not groove on crime in the streets, the way black
people did; he did not dig getting his head whipped, his house robbed, his wife raped, the
way black people did; he was not really into getting his jollies over his youngsters’
popping pills, tripping out, or shooting up, the way black people did. Such uptight,
constipated people should not be allowed to mingle with decent, pleasure-loving black folk.
That was the true story, but officially Whitehall had to be against the would-be intruders
on the basis of poverty.

The town adopted a strict housing code, which was automatically rescinded for blacks and
reinstated whenever whites appeared. (The code was shredded, its particles sprinkled into
confiscated timed-release capsules, and is now part of the consciousness of millions of cold
sufferers.) “Keep Whitehall black,” the townspeople chanted in their characteristically rich
baritones and basses. “If you’re black, you’re all right, jack; if you’re white, get out of
my sight,” said others in aberrant Butterfly McQueen falsettos. These and other racist
slogans were heard as the social, moral, economic, and political life of the town was
threatened.

The white blue-collar workers who labored so faithfully at the Smith-Jones Afro Wig and
Dashiki Co., Inc., were welcome to earn their daily bread in the town, but they were not
welcome to bring their low-cholesterol foods, their derivative folk-rock music, and their
sentimental craxploitation films to Whitehall. The poor, the white, and the disadvantaged
could go jump.

The people of Whitehall set up floodlights to play over the outskirts of the neighboring,
honky-loving black town, whose lawns (formerly reasonably manicured but now nervously bitten
to the quick) bore sad witness to the instant herbaphobia that whites brought with them.
Black Whitehall posted sentries and devised elaborate alarm/gotcha systems (the showpiece
was a giant microwave oven with the door ajar). The Whitehall PO-lice raised attack dogs on
a special ‘‘preview” diet of saltines and the white meat of turkeys. Helen quoted Reverend
Smith-Jones as saying, in his down-home way, “If any chalks should be rash enough to come in
here, those dogs will jump on them like white on rice.”

“Pass me some
tsimmes
,” said Helen, when she had finished with Whitehall. She
tasted it, blew her mother a kiss. “You know who made a lousy
tsimmes
—Mrs.
Zipstein.”

At the mention of the wife of the man who had pickled him into anti-Semitism, James stirred
in his corner. He immediately went back to concentrating on swallowing the Veuve Clicquot
Jimmie C. was feeding him, grinning as he reminisced about Gladstone’s village idiot.

“You ever yere from de daughter? Whatchacall?” said Louise.

“Sadie. Sadie-Above-It-All, the Jewish princess. No, I wonder what ever happened to her.”

Oreo watched with anticipation as her mother got up from her seat to do some
shtiklech
. “Here’s Mrs. Zipstein,” Helen said. She bent over, holding her back.
As she walked, she pointed to her feet. “Mrs. Zipstein has those lumpy black shoes that look
like they have potatoes inside—no, like she has a lot of
little
feet stuck to her
regular foot. She’s walking, see? ‘Oi, oi, oi, doit and filt, filt and doit. God to gad id
op. Oi, oi, oi.’” Helen straightened up. Instantly she was Sadie being carried on a pillow
by Nubian slaves. ‘Be careful with my gown, you
graubyon
! You, on the right—don’t
glitch
or you’ll tear it! This is no
shmatte
, you know. Cost a fortune.’” Helen/Sadie’s arms flapped helplessly. “‘Oh my God, the floor’s dirty—come quick,
somebody, and clean it up. Quick or I’ll turn blue.’” Helen sat down. “Nobody enjoys
digging in other people’s dirt, but Sadie can’t even come near her
own
. She could
be sitting on the toilet and she’d say, ‘I’m sorry, I just can’t do it. Somebody, come in
and wipe!’ They could cut her salary to a dollar ninety-eight a week and her
‘girl-who-comes- in-twice-a-week’—who’s probably older than her mother—would be the last
thing she’d give up. ‘There’s always a
shvartze
to do these nasty things, so I
should worry?’ Ah, but the guilt. ‘I don’t know what it is, Debbie, but I can’t bring myself
to stay at home when Beulah’s there. I do my important shopping on those two days.’ Beulah
down there on her knees probably reminds her of her mother, Mrs. Clean. As for Mrs. Clean
herself, maybe she’s always making with the rubbing and scrubbing because there’s nothing
else for a religious Jewish woman to do.” Helen was suddenly a rabbi. “‘Go to the
mikvah
and stop
nudzhing
, you dirty women, you. Don’t defile our
scholars with your monthlies and your sinful ways. It’s enough, already, and stretching a
point besides that we let you light the
shabbes
candle. So cook, so clean, so make amends.’” Helen paused. ‘‘So vot am I tokkink?” she said, laughing, and changed the subject.
“Mother, do you remember when I was going with Freddie Cole, the football player?”

“I disremember de name.”

“You’d remember if you saw him, a real hulk, a Baby Huey. Well, anyway, he says to me on
the phone one day, ‘Helen, I’m gon bring you something real special tonight—one perfect
rose.’ He must have seen that in a movie or something. Well, anyway, that night, he lumbers
up the steps, his ham fist like a misshapen vase for the rosebud he’s clutching.” She paused
to demonstrate. Her imitation of Freddie’s bulk and gait was so exact that, in that instant,
Louise remembered him. “He gives it to me, and I say, ‘Oh, Freddie, it’s lovely now, but
it’s going to be a real beauty when it opens.’ He gives me this dumb look, grabs the rose,
and says, ‘Duh, I can fix that.’ And with a rip, a tear, a shred, he breaks open the petals
one by one and hands it back to me.
‘Bulvan!’
I screamed, and threw him out.”

Jimmie C. and Oreo laughed, James grinned in his corner, and Louise said, “Bull what?”

Talk of roses and
mikvahs
reminded Oreo that it was time to change her sanitary
napkin. She excused herself from the table.

Oreo’s menarche had been at age eight. She had been minding her own business, experimenting
to see whether her pet turtle would try to mate with an army helmet, half a walnut shell, or
a swatch of linoleum (the “bottom-shell hypothesis”), when she felt a slight contraction in
her lower abdomen. She was vague about the area—it happened so fast—but it was somewhere
below the
pupik
and above the
mons veneris
. She went to the bathroom to
check on a stickiness she felt—and saw the blood. “
Oi gevalt
,” she said, “what the
fuck is this shit?”

She summoned Louise, who looked at Oreo’s panties and handed her a Kotex. Louise did not
believe in tampons, which were too newfangled for her. “Ain’t but one thing spose to go up
in dere,” she told Oreo. She explained to Oreo the implications of this issue and that she
could expect it for three to five days in every twenty-eight. Louise was only slightly
surprised that Oreo had started so young. That was the way it was with Oreo. She was,
however, astonished when she saw that the gouts of blood had formed an American Beauty rose
in the crotch of Oreo’s panties. Her own uterine lining had always reminded her of bits of
raw liver, but Oreo’s bloomer decoration looked as if it had been squeezed from a pastry
bag.

“What do we call this?” Oreo asked.

“Well, you kin call it fallin’ off de ruff or hab’m de rag on or de cuss. But it mos’
ladylike to say, ‘Grandma, I hab my purriod.’”

Oreo shook her head. She looked at the red of her blood, the white of the pad, the blue of
the thread running down the middle, and said, “No, I’ll call it flag day.”

Louise nodded her head with satisfaction. “Dat right pat’rotic of you, chile.” She left
Oreo in the bathroom and went to the kitchen. For some reason, she was torn between fixing
calf’s liver Veneziana and baking a cake.

Oreo had never seen any reason to tell Louise or anyone else that her period came not every
twenty-eight days, but on the following monthly schedule: on the thirtieth day in September,
April, June, and November; on the thirty-first day in all the rest, except February, when it
came on the twenty-eighth (and every fourth year on February 29). Flag day was for Oreo just
that—one day. Twenty-four times on that day—once every sixty minutes—she would extrude one
blood rose, like a womb-clock telling sanguinary hours. On those days, Oreo set her watch by
herself and adjusted all the other timepieces in the house. Now she changed her pad and went
back to have a private talk with her mother.

Helen said, “Have you seen the TV commercial where the housewife is being stoned to death
for using the wrong detergent, and this voice comes from out of a burning bush to egg the
stone throwers on?”

“Yes,” said Oreo.

“The bush is your father. Have you seen the one where the housewife gets a rash when a
little man jumps out of her toilet bowl?”

“Yes.”

“The bowl and the rash—your father. What about the one where the man is thinking of telling
his wife she has dandruff, while the woman is thinking of a good way to break it to him
about his b.o.?”

“The b.o. and the dandruff—my father,” said Oreo.

“No, the woman.” Helen explained that Oreo’s father was now the king of the voice-over
actors. He had found his niche after being in as many flop stage shows as Oreo now had
years, sixteen and a half. Samuel’s combined run in the shows was sixteen days and a
half-curtain—one play had closed before the first-act curtain was completely up.

“Your father has recently remarried,” Helen went on. “A Georgia peach, I hear.”

“Any reason why he never visited me and Jimmie C. or bothered to drop us a line or even
acknowledge our existence?” asked Oreo.

“Of course there’s a reason.”

“What?”

“He’s a
shmuck
.”

That made sense to Oreo.

“Also, he wants his father’s
gelt
. Jacob isn’t about to leave him any bread if all
Sam can show for it is
shvartze
children. You expected different,
noch
?”
Helen sighed. “In any case, baby, I came home this trip with a special purpose. It is time
you undertook to learn the secret of your birth. I thought that you would not be ready until
you were at least eighteen, but from what I have seen and heard, you are ready now. When
your father and I were about to split up, he gave me this piece of paper, which I have
carried with me on all my travels. He said that when I thought you were old enough to
decipher the clues written here, he would know it was time for him to tell you what you have
a right to know. It is not for me to tell you this secret. It is for Samuel alone. He’s
still in New York, but I don’t have his address. If he’s such a big deal, he should be easy
enough to find.” She handed Oreo the paper, which had turned brown from years of Helen’s
spilling coffee on it.

The handwriting was intelligible in spite of the coffee stains. The meaning of the first
item on the list was not so clear. “It says here: ‘Sword and sandals.’ What about it? Buy
the sword and sandals? Find the sword and sandals?
Stuff
the sword and sandals?
What?”

“I can help you with that one,” Helen said, “but all that other jazz is a whole ’nother
thing. You’re going to have to figure that out by yourself. Come with me.” She went out into
the back yard, Oreo following behind her.

Helen pointed to a huge rock in the northeast corner of the yard. “Can you lift that?”

Without a word, Oreo moved the boulder with one hand. It was Silly Putty that Jimmie C. had
been saving for years.

“Tell me what’s under it,” Helen said.

“Nothing.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember now. I decided that was a
tsedrayt
place to put them. They’re in the
house.”

Oreo followed her back inside. Helen went upstairs to Oreo’s room and straight to the third
floorboard from the window. She started to bend over, then said, “Technically, you’re
supposed to do this.” She showed Oreo a place where she could get her fingers under the
board.

Oreo pried it up and took out what had been hidden underneath: a mezuzah on a thin chain
and a pair of bed socks. “This he calls sword and sandals?”

“Hand them to me,” Helen said. They sat on the bed to look at the uncacheables. The mezuzah
and chain had turned green. “Cheapskate. He told me they were solid gold.” Around the
mezuzah was a piece of paper held in place by a rubber band. Helen rolled the rubber band
off and handed the paper to Oreo.

Oreo read it aloud: “‘For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any
two-edged sword . . . (Hebrews 4:12).’”

“
Golem
,” said Helen, addressing Samuel, “that’s New Testament!” She gave Oreo the
bed socks, saying, “Reach in.”

In the left bed sock was a ribbon of paper that read: “So you shouldn’t catch a chill.”
Oreo too was moved to address her absentee father. “You’re so thoughtful. Poppa,” she said
curling her lip. “If only I’m lucky enough to find you after all these years, I’ll give you
such a
zetz
!”