Oreo

by Ross, Fran

  “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?”

  A bloom in the bloomers

  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 and Oreo shmooz

  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!”

  6. Ta-ta Troe
zen

  Oreo’s good-byes to her tutors

  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.”

  Oreo’s good-byes to her family

  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.”