by Ross, Fran
A. The Oddball and the Evenball.
Scott was delighted with Oreo’s skillful mathematical manipulations. It was very curious, he said, that he himself had no aptitude for such things, yet he could recognize the right answer when he saw it. He complimented Oreo on her “to know-to do,” which he could see she had much of. His mother tried to help him as much as she could, but she was involved in her own creative work. She did not come by her clumsiness naturally, he explained, but had developed it, through years of diligence and application, into an art form. For a person with her creative bent, she had been born with a handicap that would have made a lesser woman give up in despair or change her métier: grace. It had taken years of practice to overcome her inborn agility, dexterity, deftness, and finesse and develop to a point of such consummate cloddishness, such eye-popping lack of coordination that she could not see out of both eyes at the same time.
She had not reached the summit of achievement to which she aspired, however, Scott confided. No, that day was still many vandalized vases, squashed tomatoes (a mechuleh medley), and lightly fantastic trippings away. That day would be reached only when his mother had perfected her art to such a point that she would be able to make breathing and blinking totally voluntary actions. Then and only then would she be ready to star in a play she had written for them both, Clumsy Claudette at the UN, in which she played the title role of warmongering bulbenik and he played the world’s greatest pacifist translator. The marquee would read: SCOTT SCOTT AND SCOTT SCOTT IN SCOTT SCOTT’S CLUMSY CLAUDETTE AT THE UN. They had agreed that although she would give up the stage after the run of the play, she would continue to share in any fame that accrued to his Scott Scott as though it were her own. It was to him equal, since he was convinced that the play, a marvelous melding of their unique talents, would probably run for their lifetime or until one of them was eighty-five, whichever was later.
As his mother exploded from the kitchen with the tray of hors d’oeuvres, Scott rushed over to her. “Permit me. The outside of works—me, I them will carry.” He took the tray from her. “Rest you on that chair-long there.”
Mrs. Scott must have been tired. She tripped only twice on her way to the couch. Scott brought the tray over—a farrago of spills and misses, which Oreo tasted only out of an experimental sense of politeness.
“You said you might have some information about my father?” said Oreo, picking up a plain cracker whose spread was a blob on the underside of the tray.
“Ah, yes, one moment, if it you pleases.” Scott tore a sheet of paper from his three-ringed looseleaf notebook and wrote something with a flourish. “There is!” he said, handing it to Oreo. He explained that she might be able to find her father at either of two sound studios uptown, one on the East Side, the other in Harlem.
Oreo thanked the Scotts for their hospitality and got up to leave.
“So long. It was nice meeting you,” said Mrs. Scott. She waved good-bye, knocking over a stool, which set up a vibration, which made a cup fall off a hook on the kitchen wall and crash to the floor, where she could trip over the shards later.
“To the to see again,” said Scott. He opened the door for Oreo.
“To God,” said Oreo, swinging her walking stick in salute.
Oreo on Second Avenue in the seventies
No one at the In-the-Groove Sound Studios had seen Samuel Schwartz for several weeks. As Oreo walked up the street, she saw a pig run squealing out of a doorway, a bacon’s dozen of pursuers pork-barreling after it. Oreo started running too. As she neared the building from which the pig had made its exit, she saw that it was a pork butcher’s. In its attempt at escape, the pig had made a shambles of the shambles. Oreo continued in the pig pursuit. The porker darted across the street. Oreo flung her walking stick at its legs. The cane did a double whirl, tripping up the pig. A taxi turning into Second Avenue screeched on its brakes, but not in time. The cab sideswiped the pig, which tottered a few feet, then fell dead in front of Temple Shaaray Tefila, directly across from the pork store.
Unwittingly, Oreo was the indirect cause of the pig’s death, but as she reflected on its porcine demise, she realized that she could take out her list again. That hashed rasher of bacon defiling the temple sidewalk—that surely was “Sow.” Yes, that must be so.
10 Sciron
Oreo and Mr. Soundman
Mr. Soundman, Inc., was in a renovated brownstone on Lenox Avenue. Oreo could hear the strange permutations of words speeded up and slowed down, rushed backward and whisked forward, the barbaric yawp of words cut off in mid-syllable (the choked consonants, the disavowed vowels), burdened with excessive volume, affecting elusive portent. Words were all over the floor. Words and time. What word was that there in the corner, curled up like a fetus? And this umbilicus of sound, what caesarean intervention had ripped it untimely from its mother root? Sound boomed off the walls, rocketing around the hallways as it charged out of an open door marked Control Room B.
Reep-warf-shuh, reep-warf-shuh, reep-warf-shuh, repeated some backward sounds as Oreo stuck her head in the door. An engineer in a desk chair wheeled among three machines—two tape decks and a master-control console—his ropy arms whipping about like licorice twists. Two pencils stuck out at forty-five-degree angles from his hedgelike natural, pruned to topiary perfection and so bulbous that, along with his dark, chitinous skin and his sunglasses with huge brown convex lenses, he had the look of an undersized mock-up of a movie monster—the grasshopper that spritzed on Las Vegas.
The soundman noticed Oreo on one of his whirls and motioned her into a chair. He stopped the two tape machines. Then he deftly unreeled a three-foot length of tape from one end of a reel, pulled it back and forth between the sound heads (Raugh-vooff-skunge, raugh-vooff-skunge, it went as it sawed between the heads), found the spot he wanted, and made a quick slice with a razor. The piece fell to the floor amidst the curly riot of words previously dispatched. How many reep-warf-shuhs and raugh-vooff-skunges that piece represented, Oreo couldn’t guess. The engineer then laid a loose end of the tape still on the reel in a groove at the front of his machine, stripped in a piece of white leader from another reel with Scotch tape and a razor, whirled the gray reels of his tape deck a few times, then stopped. He walked out of the control room, motioning Oreo to follow him.
They walked down the hall to a small office. So far neither of them had said a word. The engineer pointed to a chair next to a desk piled with a stack of oddly shaped cardboards. Oreo sat down. Since the man didn’t say anything but merely looked at her expectantly—or, rather, his glasses were turned toward her—she said, “I’m Christine Clark. Is Slim Jackson around?”
The man pointed to himself, then shuffled through the pile of cardboards next to him on the desk. He held one up. It was shaped like a cartoon balloon, and the message read: YOU’RE LOOKING AT HIM.
“Can’t you talk?” Oreo asked. He shook his head. After establishing that Slim was neither antisocial nor laryngitic but mute, Oreo asked permission to look through his balloons so that she would know the range of answers he was prepared to give. She found the usual:
FORGET IT, CLYDE
RUN IT DOWN FOR ME
RIGHT ON
YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING
LATER FOR THAT
GROOVY
TOUGH TITTY
I CAN DIG IT
WATCH YOUR MOUTH
DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS
She saw that he had translated the typical cartoon asterisk-spiral-star-exclamation point-scribble as a straightforward FUCK YOU, YOU MUTHA. He had a pile of blank balloons and a stack of balloons with drawings: a cocktail glass with an olive followed by a question mark; a Star of David followed by a question mark; an egg-shaped cartoon character with a surprised look on its face (the “That’s funny—you don’t look Jewish” follow-up to the Star of David? Oreo wondered); an inverted pyramid of three dots and an upcurving line; the three dots again with a downcurving line; a clenched fist with the middle finger ra
ised in the “up yours” position. These last Oreo thought redundant, since Slim could easily pantomime them or use an available word balloon. True, the drawings gave him shades of translation that might be lost in the original gesture. Besides, his blank cards indicated that he was not unaware of the limitations of form balloons. Oreo conceded her argument with herself to herself. Yes, both the words and the drawings had a place.
“I was told I might be able to find Sam Schwartz here,” Oreo said.
Slim pulled one of his pencil antennas out of his hair, printed something on a balloon, and held it up: TRY NEXT DOOR TONIGHT.
“What’s next door?”
He wrote and crossed out, wrote and crossed out. Then held up his cardboard voice: A A A HOUSE OF JOY.
“Oh, a whorehouse,” said Oreo.
Slim looked at her appraisingly. He shuffled through his standard balloons and pulled out a cartoon of a bibbed man with his tongue hanging out, knife and fork at the ready over a turkey drumstick.
“Likes women with big legs?” Oreo guessed.
Slim looked disappointed. He shook his head as he printed and held up: LIKES DARK MEAT.
So, dear old Dad is already two-timing his second wife. “Do you know where I could find him now? Do you have his address?”
Slim shook his head. I DON’T TRY TO KEEP TRACK OF WHITEY, he ballooned. She started to get up, but Slim held up his hand, SAY SOMETHING, another balloon demanded.
“Like what?”
He shrugged.
“Jack Sprat could eat no fat. His wife could eat no lean.”
Slim rotated his wrists, his hands indicating “keep going.”
Oreo switched to something more appropriate for a soundman. “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, I am become as a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.”
Slim held up his hand, COULD YOU RECORD A FEW LINES FOR ME? he printed.
Oreo shrugged. “I guess so.”
He beckoned her as he went out of the office and back into Control Room B. He did his Shiva routine with the reels of tape on his machines, taking some off, putting some on, twirling his dials. He had her go through a door into the soundproof studio. He disappeared for a few minutes and came back carrying some sheets of paper and a stack of his balloons. He put the papers down on the table in front of her, adjusted her mike, then went back into the control room. She watched him through the glass partition. He held up a balloon that said: GIVE ME A LEVEL, PLEASE. He pointed to the script he had left with her.
In a loud voice, she read what was written at the top of the sheet. “Mr. Soundman, Incorporated. Account Number 3051478.”
Slim held one finger to his lips. Oreo read the same thing in a normal voice. Slim made the “okay” sign with thumb and index finger and gestured for her to continue reading.
Oreo cleared her throat and read. “In these busy days of rush, rush, rush, it’s nice to have friends you can depend on when you need them. We at Tante Ruchel’s Kosher Kitchens want you to know you can depend on us. I was saying to my tante just the other day—and my tante is your tante—I said to her, ‘What won’t you think of next?’ And she told me. I want to share with you the wisdom of this marvelous woman. You know her by her prizewinning tchulent, you’ve marveled over her kasha varnishkes, and thrilled to her kugel. Now she has outdone even herself. Now Tante Ruchel brings you a product that will revolutionize your holiday dinners. So sit down, pull up a chair, and be the first to hear over the miracle of the airwaves about a miracle of a product—”
Slim waved her to a stop. YOU’RE POPPING YOUR P’s.
Oreo quickly looked over what she had read. She saw a “prizewinning,” a couple of “products,” and a “pull.” She said these aloud tentatively. They all popped. She could not figure out how to get her mouth around a p without a little explosion of air. Behind the glass, Slim moved his lips in what Oreo assumed was a non-p-popping demonstration. Of course his p’s didn’t pop. Besides, it seemed to her he was mouthing m’s, not p’s. She’d sound pretty silly talking about “mroducts,” “mull,” and “mrizewinning.” She tried again, imitating Slim’s lip movements. After a little practice, she noticed that even to her ears there were fewer rags of breath catching at the grille as she pushed the pesky words past the microphone, which Slim had placed slightly to her left.
She did another take. This time the p’s were popless, but Slim ballooned: A LITTLE MORE JEWISH, PLEASE.
Oreo tried to think of how her mother would do this. She pretended she was Tante Ruchel’s niece, as the copy said. She got to the punchline again. “. . . be the first to hear over the miracle of the airwaves about a miracle of a product: Tante Ruchel’s Frozen Passover TV Seder.” Oreo laughed to herself. If her grandfather had thought of this, he could have sold a million of them as fast as Louise could cook them.
She consulted Slim about two apparent typographical errors in the next paragraph and was assured that the client did indeed want the copy read as the soundman instructed.
YAHWEH, he explained.
Oreo shrugged and continued. “Passover is a celebration of freedom, gee-dash-dee’s gift to our people. So why spend precious holiday time shopping and preparing? The ell-dash-are-dee has seen fit to provide you with Tante Ruchel, a real bren. Let her do it for you. When it’s time for Seder, you’ll be able to sit back, calm and cool, and say, ‘It’s such a mechaieh to have Tante Ruchel for a friend.’ Have you ever been so farchadat on the holiday that when your youngest starts in with the Fier Kashehs, you say, ‘Don’t ask so many questions?’ Pesach is such an important holiday—a happy yontiff, as we say—you wouldn’t want to forget anything and slight the traditions of our people. Don’t worry, Tante Ruchel has thought of everything. No one will be able to point the accusing finger at you and say, ‘See, she forgot the parsley.’ Parsley-shmarsley—have we got a meal for you! First of all, Tante Ruchel’s Frozen Passover TV Seder comes in special foil trays—kosherized for the occasion. Use them once and throw them away. No worry come next Pesach about did your Uncle Louie forget and mix up the special china for Passover week with the everyday. Tante Ruchel would not make a move without our own mashgiach by her side to see that everything is strictly strictly. In fact, our mashgiach is so strict, he’s known in the FAM—the Federation of American Mashgiachs—as Murray the yenta. And it goes without saying that each and every lamb is led to the slaughter by our own shochet, who, if he didn’t work for us, would be a world-famous surgeon. For that reason, we call him Dr. Jacobs. It’s only his due.”
Oreo paused to say that she needed some water. Slim stopped his tape and went out of the control room. He came back to the studio a few seconds later with a paper cup of water. He winked, patted Oreo on the shoulder, and went back to start his machine again.
Oreo cleared her throat and went on. ‘‘By now, you’re all ears. ‘What is Tante Ruchel serving for Passover?’ you query. I’m glad you asked. This Seder meal was tested in our kosher kitchens for an entire year until we came up with just the right amount of everything—so you should feel nice and full but not so stuffed you could plotz. Each individual tray has eight sections—get the symbolism?—and in each section a gem of a dish. To start, Tante Ruchel has improved on her famous matzo-ball soup. She found an old family recipe in a trunk in the attic just the other day. It’s the same delicious soup Tante Ruchel has always made—but with one new secret ingredient that makes it divine, an ingredient that if we told you, you’d say, ‘Of course.’ But we can’t tell you, dear customers, because our competitors have ears also. Suffice it to say that such delicious broth, such secret-ingredient matzo balls you have never in your life tasted. You could strap a pair of Tante Ruchel’s matzos to your shoulders and fly—that’s how light they are. As Tante Ruchel was joking just the other day when she taste-tested her latest batch of matzos, ‘Let’s try and work out a deal with Pan Am.’
“In the next section, you have your chopped chicken liver, with an extra portion of shmaltz so
that you can mix it to your own taste. Next to that is Tante Ruchel’s justly famous gefilte fish. Next to that is our chrain, with an extra wallop especially for Passover. Next to that is a hard-boiled egg, already halved for your convenience. The main course, occupying a double section all its own, is baby lamb shank—roasted to perfection and garnished with generous sprigs of parsley. See, Tante Ruchel didn’t forget. A packet of kosher salt comes with every frozen Seder. ‘What’s for dessert?’ you ask. For dessert we have, of course, charoseth, but it’s Tante Ruchel’s own special blend of apples, nuts, and cinnamon—a taste treat you’ll never forget. Tante Ruchel has even thought of wine. Where state laws permit, you’ll find a two-ounce container of holiday wine in the eighth and final tray section. Be sure to remove the container before you pop the Seder into the oven. Yes, believe it or not, that’s all you have to do to serve your family a delicious, traditional Passover meal. Just pop Tante Ruchel’s Frozen Passover TV Seder into a three fifty oven, relax for thirty minutes, and your family will think you slaved over a hot stove for days. Remember our motto: ‘A holiday for your family should be a holiday for you also. Let Tante Ruchel worry.’ Look for Tante Ruchel’s Frozen Passover TV Seders in your grocer’s freezer. Why wait for Passover? Try one today. Who’s to say no?”
Slim had her redo a couple of sections here and there, which he called “wild” lines, but he seemed pleased.
“How did you know I could do it?” Oreo asked.
NICE VOICE, SLIGHT JEWISH ACCENT, he ballooned.
“What Jewish accent?” Oreo protested.
Slim pointed to his ear—the “Golden Conch” he had termed it earlier in the session. REMINDS ME OF SAM SCHWARTZ, he printed.
“I’ve never met the man,” Oreo said wryly.
Slim shrugged a “So what can I tell you?” and pointed again to his ear.