Oreo (9 page)

Milton the milkman came up on the porch and said to Oreo, “I hear you’re leaving us to go
find your father. Well, good luck to you. Funny thing about trips. You ever notice that if
you meet somebody where they’re not supposed to be, in a foreign country, say, or another
city, you’re happier to see them than if you bumped into them every now and then where they
were
supposed to be? I mean, take me, for instance. You see me almost every day
and you’re glad to see me, but we’re just acquaintances, right? You couldn’t call us
friends. But if you saw me in Cincinnati, we’d act like we were long lost buddies. And if we
met in France—why, there’d be no separating us. Then we’d meet again in Philly and we’d be
back to being just acquaintances again, right? Now, before you go, I’d like to tell you my
theory of divorce, based on the experience of a friend of mine. Now, this friend of
mine—let’s call him Stan—and his wife —let’s call her Alice—had a big problem. She preferred
a night bath
before
sex, he liked a morning shower
after
sex. What with
one thing and another, one of them was always too clean or too dirty for the other one. So
they rarely got together, so they got a divorce. Now, my theory is that the divorce rate
could be reduced by ninety percent if, before marriage, couples would honestly discuss, one,
the time of day they like to have sex and, two, the time of day they like to take baths
and/or showers. A lot of heartache could be avoided later if they did this, because you can
tell a lot about a person’s character from these two things. Well, goodbye, kid. It’s been a
pleasure serving you all these years. Take care, and remember to drink at least a quart of
milk a day.”

“Good-bye, Milton.”

Douglas Floors interrupted a crucial discussion of the Sino-Soviet War on Oreo’s last day
with him to inveigh against Central Park. “It is not quite so bad as Fairmount Park, of
course, being smaller, but it is bad enough. The foul Sheep Meadow, the treacherous Great
Lawn, and—I actually get a
frisson
every time I think of it—the Ramble, where
benighted creatures actually go to watch
birds
.” He shuddered behind his dark
glasses and turned his chair more directly to the wall, the better to avoid seeing Louise’s
bare arm as she passed through the room. Her vaccination scar reminded him of a
chrysanthemum. “I contribute to an enlightened East Coast group determined to pave all the
parks. We’d like to start with Central. Our research indicates we have the best chance
there. Of course, there are the lunatic conservation groups to contend with, but they will
soon be neutralized by hay fever, poison ivy, ticks, and all the other little goodies their
beloved Mother Nature inflicts on them whenever they go a-Maying.” He snickered with
nonnatural satisfaction.

“Remember,” he said as he was leaving, “look out for rock outcroppings. Manhattan is full
of schist.”

And so are you, thought Oreo, misunderstanding him.

“Good-bye, Oreo.”

“Good-bye, Doug.”

Professor Lindau, after all his years of giving blood, was now taking. He went daily for a
transfusion of the blood he had donated over the last decade, convinced by Milton the
milkman that getting back his callow plasma, his jejune erythrocytes, his puerile
leukocytes, his tender platelets would make him young again. Oreo believed that his
conflations with his latest wedge were doing more for his rejuvenation than any old stale
blood.

For her last assignment, the professor had given her a standard treatise in the field of
economic agronomy upon which she was to model an essay on the same subject. She read the
first and last words of the treatise, titled
Lying Fallow, or What You Should Know About
Federal Subsidies
, and started and ended her essay with similar words. In
Lying
Fallow
, the first word was
snow
and the last word was
potatoes
. In
her book-length essay
(Secretaries of Agriculture I Have Known, or God: The First
Economic Agronomist)
, Oreo experimented with
monsoon
and
broccoli
as her first and last words, but decided they were too exotic, and, what is more,
monsoon
had too many syllables. Already she had strayed from the obvious pattern
Fallow
’s author had established with his forceful yet sensitive first and last
words. After an evening with Roget, Oreo decided that her first word would be rain and her
last word rice. She was more than willing to sacrifice syllables (her two to
Fallow
’s four)
for alliteration. She quickly filled in the middle section of her essay, using the same
technique. What she sacrificed in cogency, she gained in mechanicality (her serendipitous
assembly-line gobbledygook against
Fallow
’s numbing agroeconomic clarity). Thus a typical
sentence in
Fallow
: “Wheat farm B showed a declining profit-loss ratio during the
harvest season,” became in Oreo’s manuscript: “Oat ranch wasp played the drooping
excess-death proportion while a crop pepper.” The professor was amused by Oreo’s little
farewell drollery, which ran to more than six hundred pages, single-spaced.

After the lesson, the professor excused himself and went to the bathroom. When he returned,
he said, “Now that I have sifted out, I shall not go into a long wearing away. I shall
merely give you a big comfort and take my leave.” He hugged Oreo.

“Good-bye, professor.”

“God be with ye, Oreo.”

The family farewells took three days because Louise needed the time to prepare a box lunch
for her granddaughter to take on her journey perilous. The peroration of those good-byes
went as follows.

Oreo said good-bye to her grandfather first, since that would take the shortest amount of
time. “Good-bye, Grandfather,” she said, kissing him on the cheek.

James, who had been grinning a second before, stopped grinning. There was a vacant stare on
his face. This often happened and signaled the fact that he was giving his facial muscles a
rest.

Oreo went next to Louise. “You look real nice, chile. Yo’ white dress is spotless—you might
eem say maculin.” Louise dragged over Oreo’s box lunch—more accurately, her duffel-bag
lunch, since that was what it was in. They could not find a box big enough for all the food
Louise had prepared.

Oreo strapped the lunch to her backpack frame. Since the food took up so much space, Oreo
had to repack the other equipment she was taking on her journey. She soon grew tired of
shifting it around, said, “Oh, the hell with it,” and shoved it into the duffel bag next to
the lunch. It was a toothbrush, but difficult to pack because its interproximal stimulator,
or rubber tip, and its bristles faced in opposite directions. Oreo kissed Louise. “Good-bye,
Grandmother.”

Louise kissed her. “’Bye, Oreo.”

Jimmie C. made a long speech in cha-key-key-wah, telling Oreo how much he loved her and
promising not to be a
yold
. Then he said, “I know you won’t be gone for a spavol
time, but”—and he sang this—“nevertheless and winnie-the-pooh, verily, I’m going to miss
you.” His voice had changed with age. His sweet countertenor was now a sweet boy soprano.

She kissed him on both cheeks. “Good-bye, Jimmie C.”

“Vladi, Oreo.”

When Helen embraced Oreo, she did not say anything, but her head equation, brought on by
Jimmie C.’s keening in the background, was a simple

L = P + GD

where
L
= leavetaking, mph

P
= pain, ppm

G
=
gevalts
, cwt

D
=
davening
, pf

“Good-bye, Oreo,” Helen said when her equation was over. She was doubly sad, since she too
would soon be leaving, to go on the road again.

“Good-bye, Mother.”

Suddenly there was a sound like the primal rasp of a rusty hinge on a long unopened
door—the pearly gates, perhaps. “Now, as I was saying . . . ,” James croaked in his disused
voice.

The whole family was stunned. They gaped at James in amazement. He was not aware of it now,
but a few moments earlier all the good-byes had led him to believe that he was being
abandoned. The shock of this fearful defection had quickened his broken blood vessel, which
reached out across the vascular gap like a severed snake, probing the brain’s topography for
its other half. It made a slipknot around the break as a temporary measure until it could
repair itself permanently. His anterograde amnesia disappeared. He stood up with a crisp
popping and cracking of joints, the sound of Louise snapping gigantic green beans. His half
swastika straightened into a ramrod.

His wife and daughter embraced him joyously, and he was reintroduced to his grandchildren
for perhaps the umpty-third time.

“Well, I hate to greet and run . . . ,” Oreo began. She had no shame.

When Oreo’s impending journey was explained to him, a shudder ran through him at the
mention of Samuel’s name. But the slipknot in his brain held fast. James was somewhat
consoled when he was told that Samuel and Helen had been divorced for years. Helen promised
to postpone going on her road trip for a few days in order to help Louise catch James up on
all that he had missed during his years of amnesia. She had come to love the road, but once
James was fully recovered and making money again, she could make shorter swings and come
home more often.

Louise timidly approached her husband. “Do de name Will Farmer ring a gong?” she
asked.

James thought a while, shook his head. “No, can’t say that it does. Do I know him?”

“No, and I don’ neither,” she said, a glaze coming over her eyes as she lied in her teeth.
“De name jus’ come to me in a dream. I was dreaming ’bout one dem horny-back Baptist
churches.”

“You mean hard-shell,” James said.

“Yeah, one dem. Anyway, a man was rollin’ in de aisles, and de preacher say, ‘You bet’ come
on out cho ack, Will Farmer.’ Jus’ thought you might recomember ’body by dat name.”

James put a strain on his slipknot trying to figure out why he should know someone in
Louise’s dream, but he shook it off and went on to other things. “Helen, what do you think
of this idea? I was thinking of making a special mailing to all the homes for used Jews
and—”

“You mean old folks’ homes?” asked Helen.

“Naturally. Well, I was thinking—”

Oreo interrupted to initiate a final round of good-byes, then slipped out the door as
unobtrusively as she could, considering her backpack.

Betty the nymphomaniac tore herself away from her father long enough to wave good-bye from
her bedroom window and shout, “Don’t forget those dirty postcards you promised me!”

“Vladi, vladi,” Jimmie C. called wistfully from the front porch until she was out of
sight.

And Oreo was on her way.

Oreo did what she always did on subways. She speculated or she compared.
She speculated on how many people in, say, Denver, Colorado, were at that very moment making
love. How many people in Cincinnati were having their teeth filled? As the El passed the
Arena and the gilded dome of Provident Mutual’s clock tower, in a mad rush to become a true
subway with its plunge into the Fortieth Street stop, Oreo wondered how many people in
Honolulu were scratching themselves. Was the number of people taking books out of the
library in Duluth higher than one-tenth of one percent of the city’s car owners? she mused.
And what about the ratio of nose picking per thousand population in Portland, Oregon—or
Portland, Maine, for that matter?

When she had tired of speculating, she went on to comparing. She looked up and down both
sides of the car. On her first sweep, she concentrated on the size and shape of all the
noses she could see. She awarded appropriate but valueless (imaginary) prizes to the
possessors of the largest, smallest, and most unusual. A man wearing an astrakhan cap won
the prize for the largest, with a nose big enough to accommodate nostrils that put Oreo in
mind of adjacent plane hangars, fur-lined. His prize: free monthly vacuuming with a
yet-to-be-invented nose Hoover. Modeling clay, the prize for the smallest nose, went to a
redheaded woman with the nose of an ant. A hand passing from the redhead’s formicine brow to
her mouth would have to make no humanoid detours around cartilaginous prominences. Most
unusual was the cross-eyed young man whose nose pointed to his left ear. Picasso
réchauffé
. His prize wasn’t really his. It was a blindfold for
others to wear in his presence.

Before she could go on to hands and shoes, Oreo got a seat. Sitting on the edge of the seat
because of her backpack, she felt at the neck of her dress to make sure the mezuzah was
still in place. She loosened the drawstring of her black handbag (the kind that looks like a
horse’s feed bag), pushed aside the bed socks her father had left her, and took out the
coffee-stained list of clues.

She crossed off the first item on the list. If number 2 was as farfetched as number 1 had
been, “Three legs” could mean anything from a broken chair to Siamese twins. No matter. She
was ready for any kind of shit, prepared to go where she was not wanted, to butt in where
she had no business, to test her meddle all over the map. Oreo was one pushy chick.

Her bravery was beyond question. She had chosen, against the advice of older, more cautious
adventurers, to eschew the easy canoe trip up the Delaware, piece-of-cake portage across the
swamplands of New Jersey, and no-sweat glissade across the Hudson to Manhattan and to travel
instead the far more problematic overland route via the Penn Central Railroad. What further
ensign of Oreo’s courage need be cited?

Oreo knew that there were several stiff trials ahead before she reached
the official starting point of her overland journey, the Waiting Room of Thirtieth Street
Station. The first and second trials came together: the Broken Escalator and the Leaky
Pipes. Countless previous travelers had suffered broken ankles and/or Chinese water torture
as they made their way between the subway and Thirtieth Street Station. With the advent of
wide-heeled ugly shoes, which replaced hamstring-snapping spike heels, much of the danger
had been taken out of the Broken Escalator’s gaping treads. Much—in fact, all—of the
movement had been taken out of the B.E. almost immediately after it began its rounds. Thus
it had had a life of only two minutes and thirty seconds as a moving staircase before it
expired to become the Broken Escalator of Philadelphia legend. Oreo had prepared for this
leg of the journey by wearing sandals, which provided firm footing on the treads of the B.E.
and also served as a showcase for her short-toed perfect feet.

The Leaky Pipes filled the traveler’s need for irritation, humiliation, irrigation, and
syncopation. According to the number of drops that fell on the traveler from the Leaky
Pipes, he or she was irritated, humiliated, or irrigated. These degrees were largely a
function of the Pipes’ syncopation. With a simple one,
two
, three,
four
, a
few even simpler souls would be caught by the drops of the offbeat. One who fell victim
three or more times to this rhythm could safely be said to have passed beyond the bounds of
irritation and into the slink of humiliation. The unlucky ones were those who got caught in
a one,
two
, three,
four
,—, six, seven, eight. They would end up soaking
wet by the time they got to the foot or the head (depending on their direction) of the
Broken Escalator. Ninety percent of those caught by the one,
two
, three,
four
,—, six, seven, eight were white. They just couldn’t get the hang of it. Black people were usually caught by the normal,
unsyncopated,
one
, two,
one
, two—it was so simple, they couldn’t believe
it.

Oreo stood at the top of the B.E. and closed her eyes. She did not want to be distracted by
looking at the drops. She just listened. She was in luck. The Pipes were in the one,
two
, three,
four
phase. She opened her eyes and observed that the drops
(
two
and
four
) hit the same side of the B.E. on every other tread. It
was a simple matter then to make her way down along the dry side, leaping over the treads on
which the drops fell to avoid lateral splash. She did so hastily—and just in time too, for
the Pipes switched into a different cycle just as her sandal hit the last tread, and one
drop narrowly missed her exposed heel.

The third trial was suffering through the graffiti of Cool Clam, Kool Rock, Pinto,
Timetable, Zoom Lens, and Corn Bread (the self-styled “King of the Walls,” who crowned his
B with a three-pronged diadem). It was not considered fair to squint and stumble along the
passageway to the station. No, the fully open eye had to be offered up to such xenophobic,
nonews lines as

DRACULA AND MANUFACTURERS HANOVER
TRUST SUCK

the polymorphous-perversity of

BABE LOVES

BILL & MARY & LASSIE & SPAM

the airy, wuthering affirmation of

CHARLOTTE
&
EMILY
LIVE!

the Platonic pique of

SOCRATES THINKS HE KNOWS ALL THE
QUESTIONS

Oreo stared at these writings, a test of her strength. So intense was her concentration
that at first she paid little notice to a tickle at her right shoulder. She felt it again
and whirled to look into the eyes of a lame man she had passed near the Babe-Bill-Mary-Lassie-Spam graffito. One of the foil-wrapped packages from her duffel-bag lunch
was in his hand. He had been picking her packet! She reached out to grab it but ducked when
she saw the man’s arm go around in a baseball swing. There was a
whoosh!
as
molecules of air bumped against one another, taking the cut her head should have taken.
Strike one. With the count 0-1, she noticed that the bat was a cane. She ducked again for
strike two. “Well, aint this a blip!” Oreo said aloud, finally getting annoyed. She grabbed
the cane and gave the man a mild
hed-blō.
She did not want to strike a lame
old man with a full-force
hed-krac.
When the old pickpacket saw the look in her
eye, he turned and ran down the passageway at Olympic speed. He was really
hot
footing
it, honey! He was really picking them up and putting them down!
Because of her backpack, Oreo did not catch him until he neared the end of the passageway.
Felling him with a flying
fut-kik
, she pressed on his Adam’s apple with his cane
until he promised he would not try to get up until she gave him leave.

She asked him his alias and his m.o. Perry recounted how he had gone into a hardware store
and asked for a copper rod. The proprietor brought it to him, saying they were having a
special on copper rods that day and that he was entitled to a fifteen percent discount.
Perry, caviling emptor, who had read in the papers that the discount was supposed to be
twenty percent, took the rod and racked up the storekeeper’s head with it. He paid not a
copper but, rather, copped the copper before the coppers came and he had to cop a plea. He
had taken the rod home, sheathed it in wood, crooked one end, and brazenly decorated the
other end with a brass ferrule. With this cupreous cudgel and a fake limp, he had been
lurking in the subway concourse, preying on unwary commuters, rampaging up and down the
passageway.

“So why haven’t I read about this in the papers?” Oreo asked. “We’re only a stone’s throw
from the
Bulletin
building.”

“Oh, I just started fifteen minutes ago. You were my first victim, not counting the
hardware guy.”

Oreo helped Perry up off the ground, advising him that better he should be home waiting for
his social security check. She confiscated his cane and admonished him that the way of the
cutpurse was hard and drear. He wasn’t convinced. Then she said, “I can sum up your ability
as a
gonif
in one word.”

“What’s that?”

“Feh!”

He was convinced.

The trials of Getting a Ticket, Checking Departure Time, Finding the
Track, and Waiting for the Late Train are too typical to chronicle here. While Oreo was in
the state of Waiting for the Late Train, she decided to cross “Three legs” off her list. If
Perry’s cane, now her walking stick, was not the third leg of the Sphinx’s hoary riddle
about old age, she did not care what it was. She also decided that since this was, after
all, her quest (so far a matter of low emprise), she would cross all the other clues off her
list whenever she felt justified in doing so. This was not logical, but tough syll. For
instance, number 4 on the list was “Sow.” Did this pig in a poke indeed refer to something
piglike or to something seedlike? To a pork chop or to a Burpee catalog? If her father was
going to give such dumb clues, she was going to prove she was her father’s daughter. When
necessary, she could outdumb any scrock this side of Jimmie C. The arrival of the Silver
Gimp—two hours and twelve minutes late—interrupted her smug assessment of how dumb she
could be if given half a chance.

She had passed through the Finding a Seat phase and was now in the state
of Hoping to Have the Seat All to Myself. She took off her backpack and put it on the
overhead rack. As each potential seatmate came down the aisle, Oreo gave a hacking cough or
made her cheek go into a rapid tic or talked animatedly to herself or tried to look fat,
then she laid her handbag and walking stick on the adjoining seat and put a this-isn’t-mine
expression on her face. But these were seasoned travelers. They knew what she was up to.
Since most of them were in the pre-Hoping to Have the Seat All to Myself phase, they passed
on down the aisle, avoiding the eyes of the
shlemiels
who were Hoping to Have
Someone Nice to Talk to All the Way to New York. As the train filled, the hardened travelers
knew that it was pie-in-the-sky to hold out for a double seat, and each of them settled down
to the bread-and-butter business of Hoping My Seatmate Will Keep His/Her Trap Shut and Let
Me Read the Paper and the even more fervent Hoping No Mewling Brats Are Aboard.

One young blond had been traipsing up and down the aisles for five minutes. Oreo’s first
thought when she saw him was that he was almost as good-looking as she was, and she enjoyed
watching the other passengers watch him. On this trip, the young man stopped in front of her
with arms akimbo, resigned, and said, “All right, honey, I’ve checked, and next to me you’re
the prettiest thing on this train, so we might as well sit together. Give these Poor Pitiful
Pearls something to look at.”

Oreo smiled appreciatively at his
chutzpah
and moved her handbag and cane off the
seat.

Before he sat down, he put a black case, about the size of a typewriter, on the overhead
rack. He tried to move Oreo’s backpack over, but it wouldn’t budge. “Is this yours?” he
asked.

Oreo nodded.

“What’s in it—a piece of Jupiter?”

Oreo laughed. “No, my lunch. On Jupiter it would weigh more than twice as much—between
skatey-eight and fifty-’leven pounds.”

“Good, good. I see I can talk to you.”

By the time the train pulled into North Philadelphia, Waverley Honor—“Can you
believe
that name?” he said. “In this case Honor is a place, not a code, thank
God!”—knew eight things about Oreo. “Okay, that’s enough about you. Now, go ahead, ask me
what I do.”

“What do you do, Waverley?” Oreo said dutifully.

“Are you ready for this?” He paused. “I’m a traveling executioner.”

Oreo did the obligatory take.

“See that black case?” Waverley pointed to the overhead rack.

Oreo nodded. “It looks like a typewriter case.”

“Guess what’s in it.”

“A small electric chair,” Oreo said, playing straight.

“Good guess. No, a typewriter.”

“Oh, shit,” said Oreo.

Waverley placated her. “But it
was
a good guess. It’s my Remington electric. Carry
it with me on special jobs. It’s a Quiet-Riter.”