Oreo

by Ross, Fran

  With this success as a foundation, James went on to tie-ins with other mail-order houses. He was able to offer his customers cheese blintzes for Shevuoth, handkerchiefs for Tisha Bov (“You’ll cry a lot”), dreidels for Chanukah, gragers and hamantashen for Purim, wine goblets for Passover, honey for Rosh Hashanah, branches for Succoth (“Have the prettiest booth on your block”), and a recording of the Kol Nidre for Yom Kippur (“as sung by Tony Martin”). Next to each item in his catalog was a historico-religious paragraph for those who did not know the significance of the feasts and holidays. “You have to explain everything to these apikorsim, ” he told Louise, who said, “What say?” Over the years, his steadiest seller was the Jewish History Coloring Book series, including “the ever-popular Queen Esther, Ruth and Naomi, Judah and the Maccabees (add 50¢ for miniature plastic hammer), the Sanhedrin (the first Supreme Court), and other all-time Chosen People favorites.” At last, his money worries were over. He was able to send Helen to college and buy Louise the gift of her dreams: a complete set of Tupperware (5,481 pieces).

  Temple University, choir rehearsal

  As Helen sang her part in the chorale chorus Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, she constructed one of her typical head equations, based on the music’s modalities and hers:

  where B = Bach

  T = time

  U = weight of uric acid, ml

  Simple, she conceded, compared with the overlapping fugal subject-answer-countersubject head equations that were her favorites—elegant, in fact, but not quite absorbing enough to keep her mind off the fact that she was perspiring and wanted desperately to pee.

  Samuel, passing through the rehearsal hall, caught a glimpse of Helen’s face and, mistaking her expression of barely controlled anguish for religious fervor, was himself seized with an emotion that mystics have often erroneously identified as ecstasy-cum-epiphany (vide Saul on the road to Damascus, Theresa of Ávila every time you turn around): the hots. His accounting books fell to the floor.

  Decisions, decisions

  After much soul- and neshoma-searching, respectively, Helen and Samuel decided to marry and live in his hometown, New York City. Samuel wanted to be an actor. Furthermore, because Helen was a math freak, obviously gifted, Samuel wanted to have Helen’s child—or, rather, he wanted her to have her/their child. Helen did not mind. Pregnancy, she felt, would give her time to sit and play the piano and do her head equations while Samuel was studying Intermediate Walking and Talking at drama school.

  Birth of the heroine

  A secret cauled Christine’s birth. This is her story—let her discover it. Helen named the baby girl in a moment of pique after a fight with Samuel in the hospital. They made up before the ink was dry on the birth certificate. Although Samuel was a nonobserving Jew and did not give a fig that his daughter was named after Christ, he playfully extracted a promise from Helen that he could name the next child.

  Helen and Samuel

  Later that year, Samuel stroked Helen’s thigh and joked, “Now let’s try for the Messiah.”

  Helen and Samuel (cont’d)

  They fought Mondays and Thursdays. Finally, Samuel said, “When Christine is old enough to decipher the clues written on this piece of paper, send her to me and I will reveal to her the secret of her birth.” He handed Helen the paper, adding a lot of farchadat instructions it is not necessary to go into here. “I still hope to see you from time to time,” he said.

  “Later for you, shmendrick,” said Helen.

  Samuel left to work on a scene in drama class in which he was to play Aegeus.

  Helen goes home

  After the breakup but before the divorce, Helen moved back to Philadelphia. She was with child again. In the fullness of time, a son was born, in circumstances neither more nor less unusual than those that attended the advent of Christine. Samuel sent Helen a one-word telegram: “MOISHE.” He thought it was funny to name a black kid Moishe. It was the name on the birth certificate, but everyone called the child Jimmie C., after his maternal grandfather and, inadvertently, after his paternal grandfather (James = Jacob).

  A peek at Jacob

  Jacob lived on the Upper West Side of New York City. The first thing you noticed about him was that his upper middle incisors did not line up with the center of his face. A line drawn through the interstice of the two teeth would bisect not the septum but his left nostril. This gave the impression either that his face was off-center or that his false teeth had not quite settled around his gums. But his teeth were his own. Had they been false, he would have had a better set made. All his life, everybody and his brother had driven him meshugge cocking their heads this way and that whenever they talked to him. Everybody, that is, except his Frieda, rest in peace, whose neck and therefore head had been permanently set at an angle on her shoulders ever since her Uncle Yussel, klutz, had missed when he was playing upsy-daisy with her when she was six months old.

  “Another year, another yahrzeit, ” he sighed. “Two years already have passed and still I can’t bring myself to go into my Frieda’s room. In there are all her plants. She loved plants.” He gestured helplessly to his neighbor, Pinsky, apartment 5-E. “Pinsky, she would talk to them, what can I tell you, like she was having a shmooz with her friends.” He wept yet again when he thought of his wife’s devotion to her greenery.

  An hour later Bessie, the cleaning woman, came in to do her daily chores. She decided to take care of the dead lady’s plants first, before her corns started tom-tomming (“Sit down—bam!—’fore you—double wham!—fall down —boom! Would I—boom-boom!—treat you this way?—wham-boom-bam?”). “Lord have mercy, that woman do have some plants,” she said as she took out her feather duster and opened the door on one of the largest collections of plastic plants in America.

  2 The Cube and the Pip

  Food

  Louise Clark’s southern accent was as thick as hominy grits. No one else in the Philadelphia branch of the family had such an accent. Her mother and father had dropped theirs as soon as they crossed the Pennsylvania state line. Her husband could have been an announcer for WCAU had they been hiring 10’s when he was coming up. While all about her sounded eastern-seaboard neutral, why did she persist in sounding like a mush-mouth? One reason: most of the time her mouth was full of mush or some other comestible rare or common to humankind.

  Louise was once challenged to name a food she did not like. She paused to consider. That pause was now in its fifteenth year. During that time, she spoke of other things, lived her life, paid attention to what was going on, to all appearances; but all the while—simmering on a back burner, as it were—she was trying to bring to the boil of consciousness the category of food she had once tasted at Ida Ledbetter’s second child’s husband’s cousin’s wake after Ida Ledbetter’s second child’s husband’s cousin’s mother had collapsed after dishing out the potato salad. She would go to her reward without putting a name to that food, which was not food at all but a frying pan full of Oxydol. Why the Oxydol was in the frying pan in the first place is beyond the scope of this work, but when Louise had walked by the stove, she had hand-hunked a taste. Her judgment was that, whatever it was, someone had been a mite too heavy-handed with the salt. Thus, this was not truly her first antifood opinion but, rather, her first (and only) antiseasoning decision, an important subcategory.

  She always looked with perfect incomprehension on those finicky eaters who said that so-and-so’s spaghetti sauce was too spicy, her greens too bland, her sweet potatoes too stringy. For Louise, nothing to eat was ever too sour, salty, sweet, or bitter, too well done or too rare, too hot or too cold. Anything that could be subsumed under the general classification “Food” was exempt from criticism and was endued with all the attributes of pleasure. Consequently, anything Louise liked was compared, in one way or another, with food. A free translation of what she said on her wedding night after James went into his act would be: “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.”

  Aside on Louise’s speec
h

  From time to time, her dialogue will be rendered in ordinary English, which Louise does not speak. To do full justice to her speech would require a ladder of footnotes and glosses, a tic of apostrophes (aphaeresis, hyphaeresis, apocope), and a Louise-ese/English dictionary of phonetic spellings. A compromise has been struck. Since Louise can work miracles of compression through syncope, it is only fair that a few such condensations be shared with the reader. However, the substitution of an apostrophe for every dropped g, missing r, and absent t would be tantamount to tic douloureux of movable type. To avoid this, some sentences in Louise-ese have been disguised so that they are indistinguishable from English. In other cases, guides to pronunciation and/or variant spellings are given parenthetically whenever absolutely necessary to preserve the flavor and integrity of the Louise-ese or, antithetically, translations are provided for relict English words, phrases, or sentences that survive her mangle-mouth.

  Back to food

  Fortunately for her family, who did not share her universal palate, Louise was a cook for the ages, adept at unnumbered ethnic and international cuisines, her shrewd saucisson-en-croûte surviving even her attempts to pronounce it to take its place on the dining-room table, in due course, beside her butter-blinded pommes de terre Savoyard, her brave corn pudding, untouchable beef curry, toe-tapping hopping john, auto-da-fé paella, operatic vitello tonnato, and soulful hog maws.

  One of Helen’s earliest memories was of sitting on her mother’s lap and being urged to “tayce dis yere tornado Bernice” (taste this here tournedos Béarnaise) as she looked over her mother’s shoulder to compare Louise’s startlingly white face with the portrait of her grandfather, a 1 if there ever was one. The portrait hung in an oval frame in the dining room. Helen’s grandfather had been the offspring of an enterprising African woman who had immigrated to New York in 1869 and had had a hand in the somewhat unfortunate attempt to corner the gold market (“Black Friday” was named after her) and a Richmond bugler who had been a turncoat during the Civil War and was vamping in the Bronx until he felt it was safe to tootle back to Virginia. Her grandmother was said to be half Cherokee and half French—hence the influence of French cuisine in the family, the oldest handed-down-from-generation-to-generation recipe being a providential dish called rabbit-on-the-run suprême, in commemoration of the French and Indian Wars. The last joke James Clark heard before his immobilization was his daughter’s rather feeble “Just think. Daddy, now I can call myself Hélène Sun-See-A-Ray Schwartz.”

  More about Louise

  Louise went gray at thirty-two trying to understand what her husband and child were saying when they talked that foolish talk they talked sometimes. (“You’re draying me such a kop with that racket, Honeychile,” said the father. “Kvetch, kvetch,” said the daughter under her breath.) She had her “good” hair dyed auburn, a color and texture that she never failed to compare favorably with the dull black kinks of her neighbors as she waited her turn while the beautician straightened their nappy heads with the hot comb (or “cum,” as Louise pronounced it, with the u of “put”). “I thank you, Father,” she would pray, “fo’ gib’m me de gray hairs, but I truly thank you fo’ gib’m folks de knowledge so I don’ hafta hab’m. I’d look like a f-double o-l walkin’ ’round yere wif a gray head, young’s I am.”

  Louise talked in generalities that required the listener to fill in the who, what, where, when, why, and how. She rarely bothered to remember names (“Dere go Miz What-cha-cawm an’ her daughter”), or she made two or three tentative tries at capture before the killing pounce (“Yoo-hoo, Jenkins . . . I mean, Mabel . . . I say, George!”) or substituted names that were close (the “Jolly” of “Go to de sto’ and git me some-a dat dere Jolly” meant Joy dishwashing liquid). She was vague about time. She never gave you the hour or the minute. It was always “ha’p pas’,” “quart’ to,” or “quart’ afta.” Thus any time from 3:01 P.M. to 3:24 P.M. was merely “quart’ pas’.” No one knew from whom she had expropriated the southern expressions that seasoned her speech. When Helen was growing up, Louise would tell her that as long as she had two holes in her nose, she would “be John Brown” if she would ever understand “why de ham-fat” a daughter of hers was so “slub’m” (slovenly), that her hair looked like a “fodder stack,” her room like a “debbil’s hurrah’s nest,” that she lacked “mother wit,” acted sometimes like a “fyce dog,” was a “heathen” because she refused to go to Calvary Baptist Church, and, as for her day-to-day actions, well, everybody knew that “God don’ like ugly.”

  In her later, more corpulent years, Louise liked to sit on the front porch rocking in her rocker or gliding in her glider. She sat and rocked and glided and judged. Of a woman wearing a riotous flower print: “Look at dat gal goin’ by. Dere she. Look like any Dolly Vahd’n [Varden]. And she in the fam’ly way fo’ sho.” Of a prosperous dentist: “His money’s awright, but he sho-god is ugly!” She covered her face. Every once in a while, she would open her fingers, peek at Dr. Bruce, shudder, and close them again, gliding, gliding.

  Louise was very lucky. Forget the odds against hitting the numbers; she hit them virtually at will. Two of her regular numbers were 595 (her brother Herbert’s old standby) and 830 (given to her by Helen when she was just a toddler and babbling anything that came into her head), which seemed to come out every August.

  The immobilization of James

  After James was afflicted, whenever Louise wanted his tip on a number, she would first adjust the asafetida bag she had put around his neck. (Asafetida headed her list of panaceas. The others sounded like ingredients in a you-are-what-you-eat recipe/cure for a constipated, sickly child with rickets and a chest cold: mustard plasters, Epsom salts, cod-liver oil, castor oil, cambric tea.) Then she would point to the numbers she had written down that morning after consulting her dream book. When her husband grinned like a “Chessy ket” (Cheshire cat), she would play that number—in the box, to be on the safe side. On the very day after he was stricken, she had played 421, the number for paralysis, and hit for three hundred dollars.

  What she did not know was that James was not paralyzed. When Honeychile had broken the news about Samuel and called herself Hélène Sun-See-A-Ray Schwartz, she had also broken a blood vessel in her father’s brain. James’s affliction was a bad case of retrograde amnesia. As Louise would have said, he remembered the past like white on rice, but he could not hold on to the present for more than a few seconds at a time. He would start to get up, for example, then forget what he was doing before he had moved perceptibly. He could have talked, but he just had not tried.

  For years, Louise had commandeered any help she could get from passersby, neighbors, relatives, and friends to help her carry James into the back yard for exercise and hosing off. The exercise consisted in pushing his head toward his knees and pulling his legs out in front of his body, but he always snapped back into his half-swastika pattern. James’s clothes mildewed after the first few months, and there was always the danger of his catching a chill after the hosing. Louise solved that problem by making him a line of stylish ponchos (different materials, patterns, and colors to change with the seasons), which she could just whip off and on whenever he had to be hosed. Louise’s brother Herbert had devised a jar-and-bucket contraption for James’s waste, and she herself fed him her latest recipes. According to her readings of his facial twitches, veal stuffed with ham mousse barely beat out lamb bobotie as his postaffliction favorite.

  To Louise, a Jamesian grin meant “yes,” and she consulted her husband on all household matters. She was not far off, since James grinned only when he was having a particularly pleasant memory of the past or had thought of a new way to run a game on Jews. He was, of course, unaware that he kept thinking of the same swindles over and over again and would forget them before he had had time to stand up and get the shells moving. One of his schemes, which recurred every time Louise asked him to give her a tip on the number, was of somehow revising dream books and palming his produc
t off on ignorant Jews as gematria. “Did you dream about a visit from your cousin Sarah?” his copy would read. “Turn to SARAH in the list of names at the back of this numerology book. The number next to that name is G 18-6, which means Genesis 18:6. This verse from the Five Books directs you to ‘Make ready quickly three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes upon the hearth.’ If you do as directed, such mazel you wouldn’t believe! If for some reason you cannot do as the verse directs, find other entries in this book that have the number 18-6 or 1-86. Look for hidden clues that will tell you how Sarah’s visit will turn out. See also VISIT.”

  His mind usually jumped then to ways in which he could take advantage of Jewish children. Why stop with the parents? He thought immediately of the local yeshivas. Was there a way, he wondered, to convince them of the need for a know-your-opposition unit on Jesus as a historical figure, using materials that he, of course, would supply them with? What about some bobbe-myseh about the day-to-day life of Jesus, tied in maybe with some shlock toys and games? As for educational value—hoo-ha! He would devise a series of short-answer quizzes to be used at the end of the unit. When the little bonditts of the yeshiva were through with these quizzes, they would be able to tell the goyim a thing or two about the Nazarene. “Do you know in what New Testament verse Jesus makes a pun?” the little smart-asses would say. “I’ll give you a clue—the name Peter means ‘rock.’ Give up? Nyah-nyah, Matthew 16:18!” Or they would sidle up to a gentile and whisper, “Nobody knows what Jesus did on the Wednesday before he died.” Twenty years later, a Jewish art historian would owe this revelation to James: “Byzantine mosaics, the earliest representations of Jesus, will one day prove to be not just an art technique but an accurate rendering of the cracks in [Christ’s] face.” James did not remember, of course, but every day he devised the same quiz: