by Ross, Fran
“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.
PART TWO: MEANDERING
7 Periphetes
On the subway-elevated to Thirtieth Street Station
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.
1. Sword and sandals
2. Three legs
3. The great divide
4. Sow
5. Kicks
6. Pretzel
7. Fitting
8. Down by the river
9. Temple
10. Lucky number
11. Amazing
12. Sails
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?
The subway concourse at Thirtieth Street
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 th
e 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 hotfooting 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.
Oreo in the Waiting Room of Thirtieth Street Station
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.
Oreo on the train
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.”
“So tell me, already, and cut the crap,” said Oreo.
Waverley explained that he was a Kelly Girl, the fastest shift key in the East among office temporaries. Whenever a big corporation was having a major shake-up anywhere on the eastern seaboard, Waverley got the call to pack his Remington.
“Yes, but what exactly do you do?” asked Oreo.
“I thought you’d never ask.” He moved closer to Oreo so that their conversation could not be overheard. “My last job was typical. I get the call from Kelly, right? They say, ‘So-and-so Corporation needs you.’ So-and-so Corporation shall be nameless, because, after all, a boy can’t tell everything he knows.” He paused for the laugh. “But believe me, honey, this is a biggie. I mean, you can’t fart without their having something to do with it. Anyway, I show up at the building—one of those all-glass mothers. I flash my special pass at the guard. I wish I could use that identification card on all my jobs—absolutely adorable picture of me. Anyway, I take the back elevator to the fifty-second floor. The receptionist shows me to my cubicle. A man comes in a minute later with a locked briefcase. He opens it and explains the job. It’s straight copy work. What I am doing is typing the termination notices of four hundred top executives. Off with their heads! That’s why I call myself the traveling executioner. I mean, honey, most of those guys had been with that company since 1910, and they don’t know what the fuck is going to hit them in their next pay check.” He raised his eyebrows, an intricate maneuver involving a series of infinitesimal ascensions until the brows reached a plateau that, above all, tokened a pause for a rhetorical question. “Can you believe that? Well, my dear, the work was so mechanical and so boring that I insisted on having a radio the second day. So while I was decapitating these mothers from Scarsdale and Stamford and Darien, I was digging Aretha and Tina Turner and James Brown. Talk about ironic! While Tina is doing her thing on ‘I Want to Take You Higher,’ I’m lowering the boom on these forty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year men. Mad
e me feel just terrible! I really sympathize with upper-income people, honey. They’re my kind of minority.”
While Waverley went to get a drink of water, Oreo stared at the dirty cardboard on the back of the seat in front of her:
Thanks for riding Penn Central Have a pleasant trip
She looked out the window as the train passed a small station and saw another sign that, for an instant, made her think she was in a foreign country, until she realized that some letters were missing:
TRA
OCATION 5
As the train pulled into Trenton, Oreo got hungry. She hauled her backpack from the overhead rack and was about to start in, when she realized she was being selfish—besides, it wouldn’t hurt to have a carload of travelers in her debt. Reserving only a few choice bundles, she enlisted Waverley’s aid and distributed the rest to the other passengers. In a few minutes, groans and moans were heard amidst all the fressing.
Between bites, Waverley kept saying, “Oh my God, it’s so good I’m coming in my pants.”
The whole car broke into applause when Oreo went to get a cup of water. She bowed this way and that as she came back to her seat. She sat there for a while digesting Louise’s Apollonian stuffed grape leaves, her revolutionary piroshki. She was trying to decide what shade of blue the sky was. It was the recycled blue of a pair of fifty-dollar French jeans (or jeannettes) that had been deliberately faded. She decided that from now on, she would call that shade jive blue. Douglas Floors would approve.
Waverley was looking over her shoulder. Suddenly he sat back and sighed. “You’re the first nice person I’ve talked to in a long time. Can I drop my beads?”
“Sure, go ahead.”
He confided that he was not only a traveling executioner, but also a gay traveling executioner.
“Nu, so vot else is new?” she said, doing one of her mother’s voices.