Oreo

by Ross, Fran

  Oreo saw that it was senseless to try the usual bullshit. She made a straightforward proposition. “Three things: I get the right of inspection for general cleanliness; there is to be no rimming—just straight-on fucking; and I get to go to the bathroom before we start.”

  “I don’t know where you get this what-you-will-do, what-you-won’t-do shit. You better watch your mouth ’fore I bust you right now, bitch. But none them requests don’t make me no nevermind. My man here’s gon do you in, chick. And I do mean do, and I do mean in. So make your play—you ain’t gon get away, dig?” Kirk was getting restless. Parnell stroked his back. “Just a little while now, Kirk. You let the little lady look at you now like a good boy.”

  “I hate to be a nag, but I don’t want to touch it. Could somebody else do it for me?”

  Parnell laughed. “You a funny bitch. You don’t want to touch it, but it shit-sure gon touch you in more ways than one. But have your fun now. I’m gon be getting my jollies in a few minutes.” He snapped his fingers. Without turning his head, he said, “Cecelia, turn this guy out for the girl, will you?”

  In a second, one of the women appeared at his side. She reached down and expertly pulled back Kirk’s foreskin. Oreo looked. Kirk had cornered the market on smegma. “You gotta be kidding,” Oreo said. “He could open a cheese store under there.”

  Even Parnell’s eyebrows shot up in distaste. “Take him to the crapper and wash him, Cecelia.” He turned to Kirk. “Go with the nice lady, Kirk, but don’t hurt her. She not for you. This one’s for you,” he said, fondly patting Oreo’s afro.

  Oreo was furious. She had been monumentally forbearing so far, out of curiosity—letting Parnell twist her arm, call her “bitch,” and in general dump on her—but now she had had it. She hated anyone to touch her soft, cottony hair without permission. She was having a shit fit, gradually working herself up into a state of hwip-as. Parnell would be the sorriest pimp in Harlem when she got through with him. But she would first take on Kirk and get that over with. “May I go to the bathroom while Cecelia’s taking care of Kirk?” she asked docilely.

  “That’s better. Now, if you’da come on that way from the git-go—you and me, we coulda got along. Always got room in my stable for a hot-chocolate filly like you. But first you gotta take your medicine for being a bad girl this afternoon.” He snapped his fingers. “Go with her, Lil.”

  A zaftig black girl of about Oreo’s age took her down the corridor to the bathroom. As they were passing a small room opposite the bathroom, Oreo heard a man’s resonant voice say something she couldn’t make out and then a woman laugh. “Where’s the woman I saw this afternoon carrying the shoeshine box?” Oreo asked.

  “In there, turning a trick with one of her regular johns,” said Lil, indicating the room of the voices.

  Oreo realized that this was the first word she had heard any of the prostitutes speak in solo. She also realized that the regular john across from the john might well be her father. Wouldn’t that be a blip? thought Oreo. She did not know which was more incredible—the possible coincidence or how badly she had to pee.

  She went into the bathroom while Lil waited outside the door. In a few minutes, she had stripped except for her mezuzah, sandals, and brassiere (which she had always thought should be called a mammiere, since she had never seen anyone try to protect her arm with one). She left the mezuzah on for irony’s sake, the sandals for comic effect, and the bra (or ma) because she was going to be taking advantage enough of Kirk without adding unrequited lust to his handicaps, an unavoidable state of mind, she felt, once he got hind sight of her perfect twin roes (Song of Solomon 4:5), to say nothing of Parnell’s reaction and—who knew?—a couple of the girls’ besides. Oreo reached into her handbag and pulled out a protective device she carried with her at all times. She wedged it into her wedge. She was ready.

  Oreo goes to the mat

  Parnell kept straightening the wrestling mat with the toe of his boot—on the theory, Oreo guessed, that anything he did with his hands he was really doing, but whatever he did with his foot was beneath notice and therefore no one could accuse him of performing useful labor. Parnell took Kirk to his corner and whispered in his ear, rubbing his back and giving his behind the athlete’s homosexual underhand slap/feel of encouragement. The women shifted impatiently in their chairs, every once in a while casting at Oreo what she took to be Aristotle’s glances of pity and fear leavened by De Sade’s anticipation of unmentionable acts.

  As agreed upon by both parties—Oreo with a nod, Kirk with two floor-pawings—Parnell snapped his fingers three times as the signal to begin. Oreo stood quietly where she was, in the center of the mat. Kirk came out of his corner with his nose wide open. As he advanced, his stallion did an impressive caracole right, a no-slouch caracole left, then majestically reared its head. He threw the unresisting Oreo to the floor, stretched her legs wide in the ready-set position of a nutcracker, took aim, tried to jam his pole into her vault and—much to his and everyone else’s surprise—met with a barrier that propelled him backward and sent him bounding off the nearest wall.

  The look of astonishment on Kirk’s face as he gave the dullard’s flat-eyed stare to his bruised cock and muscles would warm her heart’s cockles for all the time she was alive, alive-o. The puzzlement of Parnell, the hoaxing of the whores—oh, Oreo could do nothing but smile her cookie smile.

  The barrier Kirk had come upon (but not come upon) when he tried to pull a 401 (breaking and entering) was a false hymen made of elasticium, a newly discovered trivalent metal whose outstanding characteristic was enormous resiliency. Elasticium’s discovery had been made possible by a grant from Citizens Against the Rape of Mommies (CAROM), an organization whose membership was limited to those who had had at least one child (or were in the seventh to ninth month of pregnancy) before being attacked (usually by their husbands, an independent survey revealed). CAROM’s work was a clear case of mother succor (and thus an aid to rhymesters). Vindictiveness would soon lead CAROM’s leadership to share false hymens with the world (“Maidenheads® are available in your choice of Cherry pink, Vestal Virgin white, or Black Widow black”), but Oreo had been able to get hold of a prototype because of her acquaintanceship with its inventor, Caresse Booteby.

  À propos de bottes, Parnell helped Kirk off the floor with the toe of his boot and sent him back to the mat, as if to say, “I don’t know what happened, but it shit-sure ain’t gon happen again.” It did. Kirk lowered his boom and boing-ed off Oreo’s indehiscent cherry as if it were a tiny trampoline—which indeed, in effect, it was.

  By now, the nine prostitutes were having a finger-popping time, whooping and hollering with uncontrolled delight. Parnell was hoarse from screaming at them to quiet down, polyped from screeching yet another set of futile instructions to the thwarted Kirk about the solution to Oreo’s architecture. Poor Kirk’s sexual charette availed him nothing. His back was lacerated from racketing against walls and furniture (once he had hit the black bottom woman’s empty chair and had bounced on the floor like a dribbled basketball). After each encounter, totally confused and uncomprehending, he fanned the head of his angry-red penis, occasionally patting it in consolation for its failure. The battering his quondam battering ram was taking was making Oreo feel sorry for him. He was lathered with sweat from his efforts, his great heart about to burst. Oh, the heartbreak of satyriasis.

  Oreo got up, tired of playing this game. “He’s exhausted, fagged out—oysgamitched! It takes a better man than him to break my cherry,” she taunted. “Why don’t you send this gelding back where he came from?”

  She knew that her words would enrage Parnell—the choler of a master whose pet has been maligned. Parnell rushed at her. This was the part she had been waiting for. Ducking his pimply right cross, she dealt him the humiliation special—a quick fō-han-blō, a lightning bak-han-blō. He dropped to the floor, more out of surprise than compulsion. The blōs had been meant to sting, not fell. The women made no move to help Parnell. The
y were immobilized, as if permanently, a frieze on an Attic temple.

  Parnell shook his head in disbelief. “I’m not jiving now. Woman, I am gon break your natural ass.”

  “No shit?” said Oreo as he started to get up. “Don’t talk so much with your mouth,” she advised, quoting one of her grandmother’s favorite lines, and she gave him a pendulum tō-blō to the lower jaw to make sure he would not. The slight crepitation she heard she at first feared was Parnell’s mandible mealing. When she saw what had made the sound, she was even more horrified by what she had done: she had broken one of her sandal straps. “Oh, drat and double phoo,” said Oreo. She dealt Parnell an el-bō-krac to the ear out of frustration. They were her favorite sandals.

  So far Parnell had not touched her. He groped toward her like a man in a dream’s slow motion running after a silent, insidious double-time train, a train he must catch before the something that is gaining on him engulfs him. She eluded his grasp. She was making her domination of Parnell into a contest the integrity of whose outcome she would consider compromised if the oil from the whorls of one of his fingers was seasoned with the salt of her light film of sweat. Her mezuzah flew, her bra osmosed moisture, her sandal flapped, lofting zephyrs of air that cooled her Maidenhead as she went through her repertoire of WIT: sarcastic blōs from hed to tō, the irony of a fut in the mouth, facetious wise-kracs, kik-y repartee, strīk-ing satire—in short, the persiflaging of Parnell.

  When she had amused herself sufficiently, she straddled the prostrate pimp, arched his neck backward in a modified hed-lok, and addressed herself to the nine prostitutes. “How many of you would like to step on Parnell’s boots?” she asked.

  “Who?” they chorused.

  She had forgotten that she had made up the name Parnell and now did not want to know his true name. “Him,” she said, ducking her head and maintaining leverage on Parnell’s chin.

  The frieze unstuck. Five women came forward, leaving metopes among the glyphs—a majority decision in the absence of the working whore, who still had not reappeared. Oreo blindfolded Parnell with the scarf of one of the five so that he could not see which of his bootblacks were scuffers, which (by abstention) still buffers. She turned him around with a semi-ul-na-brāc. As she did so, she looked around for Kirk. He was standing in a corner asleep, his legs crossed, his hands cupping a gathering of gonads, a tear runnel glistening on one cheek of his hanging head. “Poor thing,” Oreo double-entendred.

  All the gristle had gone out of Parnell too. He seemed depressed. His proud, swanlike carriage was gone. In its place was a manifestly terminal droop. Swan’s down, Oreo punned to herself. He stood quietly until the first of the five laid a dulling toe on his blue-black boots, then a tremor went through him.

  Of the two women Oreo knew by name, Cecelia was a buffer, Lil a scuffer. If loyalty to Parnell had to be judged by this b-s choice, then Oreo had better use Lil as her intermediary for her final task in this house.

  After the laying on of feet, Oreo called Lil over.

  12 Procrustes, Cephissus, Apollo Delphinius

  Oreo at Kropotkin’s Shoe Store

  While the manager, a Sidney, was on the phone, Oreo idly twirled her walking stick. Her dress was wrinkled from sleeping on the floor of Mr. Soundman, Inc. She had left Parnell’s triumphant but weary. When she saw the slightly open window of the studio, she knew she could go no further that night. She pried the sash up with her cane and ducked in. (She left Slim Jackson a didactic balloon about carelessness.) Before she dropped off to sleep, she briefly considered how Parnell’s ménage à douze might be affected by her little visit. She did not really care too much—except that it was the place where she had finally learned her father’s address. As she had judged, Lil had been willing to help her. While Samuel was otherwise engaged, Lil had skillfully pilfered his ID.

  Now that Oreo knew where Samuel was, she was in no hurry to get there. First things first. She needed new sandals. Hence her appearance, in the early bright, at the first shoe store she had found open—Kropotkin’s. She tuned in to the young manager on the phone.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. This is a terrible location. It’s depressing, especially on a rainy day. The people up here want fashion, but they don’t want to pay for it, what can I tell you? You should see my store. It’s immaculate. You could eat off the floor. All my stores are like that. I tell you one thing, I’m glad for the experience. . . . Yeah, yeah, but now I know how to do all that stuff. I just want him to take me with him is all. I’m ready for bigger and better. I’m telling you, one store on Thirty-fourth Street would be better than two here. We did three thousand here last week, and we’re happy to do it. I’m used to doing forty-three, maybe forty-six hundred. . . . So when are you getting your promotion? . . . Oh, I hear things, you know. I hear that maybe they’re going to move Herbie Manstein and put you in his place. . . . No, I’m not kidding you. I’m not guaranteeing that’s what’s going to happen, but that’s what I hear, anyway. . . . Yeah, for a small store I’m not doing so bad, but now I’m ready for bigger and better.”

  He turned to look as a worried-looking woman who had been waiting for some time tapped impatiently on the glass of the glove counter. “Listen, I have to go. The natives are restless. But have you heard the one about the eight A’s? You know the old joke about the five A’s, yeah? . . . Well, this one is the eight A’s. Take a guess, go on. . . . No, that’s pretty good. I’ll have to remember that one, but that isn’t it. It’s an alcoholic who belongs to the automobile club and—get this—has narrow feet.” His laugh was like elm blight—very Dutch.

  He finally got off the phone and went to the counter.

  “Please, schnell,” said the woman.

  “Yeah, mach schnell.” He looked over his shoulder at Oreo, then said to the woman, “You mean you’re in a hurry, right? You should say, ‘I am in a hurry,’” he prompted in a slow, you-are-a-dummy voice.

  The woman nodded as if to say, “I’ll agree to anything as long as you hurry up and wait on me.” She pointed to a pair of black kid gloves under the glass.

  Sidney shook his head. “Those are not for you. You want my advice? Try a slightly larger glove.” He took a pair of dark-blue woolen gloves from the case. He helped the woman put the left glove on. To Oreo, the fingers looked too long, like the woolly blue ape’s. “See,” Sidney said, “you’ll be able to wiggle your fingers around in them. You don’t want a glove too tight.”

  The woman shook her head, but she was desperate. She paid for the gloves and walked out.

  “Do you have these in seven and a half?” Oreo asked, waving a pair of sandals that would do until she could get back to Philadelphia and buy a new pair of her special style (two simple crosspieces representing Chestnut and Market streets, which don’t cross).

  The manager took two pairs of sandals from a shelf behind the cash register and came over. “You want my advice? It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care which pair you take. But if you take my advice, you’ll take the pair that fits tighter.”

  “Why, do they stretch?”

  “Yeah, it’s Greek leather—stretches a lot. Now, American leather, that’s another story.” He didn’t say what the other story was. He pointed to the sole. “You see this number here?”

  Oreo looked at a 37. “That’s a European size,” she said.

  He was obviously surprised that she knew. “Yeah, but see in here, it says seven and a half. We mark it ourselves. But take my advice—try the seven.”

  “Okay.”

  He knelt to help Oreo try one on. It was too small. Her big toe jammed against the strap, which had the give of an iron bar.

  “Push, push,” Sidney insisted. “It’ll go, it’ll go.” He shoved the sandal further onto her foot.

  “Stop, stop, you’re humping my hallux,” said Oreo, drawing back her foot. “What are you—meshugge?”

  “Look, who’s the expert here?”

  “I’ll take the seven and a half,” Oreo said firmly.
r />   He shrugged. “No skin off my nose.”

  “No skin off my toes,” Oreo said. She changed into the new sandals and put the old ones in a box to throw away in the nearest wastebasket. She winced at the prospect of throwing away one perfectly good sandal.

  When she paid Sidney, she said, “You know why business is bad? You give people the wrong sizes.”

  “Please, no lectures,” he said, holding up his hand. “From you I don’t need it, oytser.”

  She was tempted to denounce him in cha-key-key-wah. “You know what I wish on you?” she said, imitating his inflections. “Part one, may you have a long bed and a short bed, and on the long bed may you have shortness of breath, and on the short bed may you long for the day when I release you from the following curse, which is part two: three weeks of every four you shouldn’t make three thousand, you shouldn’t make two thousand, you shouldn’t make even one thousand. You should make, give or take a little here and there, bubkes! And the fourth week of every four, you should have the worst business of the month!”

  She left in a huff, a snit, and high dudgeon, which many people believe to be automobiles but are actually states of mind. She heard Sidney mumble, “The trouble with the shvartzes today is they are beginning to learn about insurance.”

  Oreo at Woolworth’s

  She bought a zebra-print paper dress, which she intended to wear only until she could get herself cleaned up. She bought a black headband and a white headband. She ordered a hamburger and a black-and-white milk shake. She changed the hamburger to a grilled cheese; since she would soon see her father, she wanted to be in a state of kosher grace.

  Oreo at the laundromat

  She had changed into her paper dress in a bar. Now she was being hypnotized by her good dress’s revolutions in the dryer. On the next bench, a Chinese woman waiting for her take-out laundry nodded her head in time to the music score she was reading. Every once in a while, she would laugh (scrutably enough, thought Oreo, who knew the score) at one of Mozart’s lesser-known jokes, her lower lids pouching up under her epicanthic folds. Oreo, getting dizzy from watching her clothes, looked with little interest around the laundromat. The circular seas of the washing machines, the round Saharas of the dryers lulled her with their cyclic surge and thrum.