by Ross, Fran
Chattanooga
A Job I Had Before Going on the Road: I am working in a dry cleaner’s. A member walks in. She is huge and powerful. She is permanently ready to take offense. Her eyes slit in indignation, her lips form a sullen pout.
SHE (with eye-slitting and pouting): Where mah clo’es? They been here since Tuesday! (This is Wednesday.)
ME (placatingly):The tailor will get to your alterations as soon as his fracture heals, his wife gets out of the hospital, and the baby’s funeral is over.
SHE (the standard slit/pout): Don’ gimme no scuses. Y’all must think I’m simple. They better be here t’morra, two-three o’clock. (She lumbers out.)
The expression on her back shows that she likes me, else I would now be on the floor with a broken nose. I close the shop and walk across the street to catch the trolley. I am standing directly opposite the shop when along comes Mr. Johnson with a huge pile of dirty clothes. I can smell them from where I stand. I stagger and hold on to a telephone pole for support. Mr. Johnson looks disconcerted. The shop is obviously closed. He stares at the door. Obviously, the thought of turning around and going back home, a matter of about fifty feet, does not occur to him in his disoriented condition. Oh-oh. He spots me. A relieved smile lights up his face. I look down the trolley tracks. I can see the trolley coming, but I can’t quite hear it. Meanwhile Mr. Johnson has dashed across the street.
HE: Hi.
ME: Hi.
HE (smiling): Glad I caught you.
ME: Oh?
HE: Could you do me a favor?
ME (trying to get downwind of the funky shmatte he is waving under my nose): What?
HE: Could you check these in for me?
ME (flabbergasted): Look, Mr. Johnson, the store is closed. I’ve had a hard day and I’m anxious to get home and my trolley’s coming.
HE (considering the reasonableness of my speech): I see. Well, couldn’t you just open the door and throw them in on the floor? I don’t mind. They’re dirty anyway.
ME (lying): If I open the door any time between now and eight o’clock tomorrow morning, the alarm will go off.
HE (disappointed): Oh. (Then, brilliant idea!) Tell you what. Why don’t you just take these home with you and then bring them in with you in the morning?
The trolley rattles toward us, its metallic jig fortunately out-clamoring my words as I tell Mr. Johnson where to go, what to do, and what to kiss. He is still standing there cradling his redolent bundle as I settle back and watch him recede until he is a raggedy blue dot.
Davenport
Pensées d’Hélène: I used to think that Rudy Vallee was short for Rudolph Valentino. He is.
Minneapolis
Jobs I Have Had (cont’d): I once demonstrated fill-in painting at a ten-cent store. I would gather a crowd around me and take out my Sylvan Scene Number 10 cardboard with its jigsaw of shapes, all numbered. For about three minutes, I would do my cyborgian routine, showing the shoppers how to put bleeding-gum crimson in all the 5’s—never in a 7 or a 2. Then, all of a sudden, I would go crazy. I could not bring myself to stay within the lines. My blind-man blue would stray from the 52-to-75 lower-sky section, where it belonged, and would begin to invade the cavity yellow of the 45-to-48 cloud tinge. But the management kept me on. They merely warned against sloppiness, saying prissily, “Neatness counts, neatness counts.”
I kicked at the traces. I started to seek out the potential artists among the old men and housewives who were my students. I told them not to bother with these shlock paints, to save up and buy some real oils or watercolors or even crayons. I showed them how to mix pigments, stretch canvas, keeping just ahead of them by studying at night. For my first life class, I invited the harridan whose regular mooch was ten feet on either side of the double doors of that Woolworth’s to come in and pose for us. Each of my students gave her ten cents. The total take was more than she could have hustled outside in the cold. In the middle of their first fumbling attempts at what critic Bernard Mosher has called “gesture drawing,” I was fired. “Don’t stay in the lines!” I managed to shout over my shoulder as I was thrown out.
Because of my experience with painting-by-numbers (I didn’t bother to mention that I’d been fired), I had the perfect background and experience for my next job. Heshie Herschberg, dress wholesaler extraordinaire, was faced with a Chicken Little disaster. A five-thousand-lot shipment of sky-blue summer cottons had arrived with a piece of sky missing. With an empty display of resistance, each of the dresses, stewing in celestial juices, had refused to dye. There it was—a bull’s-eye about the size of a dime that would, if given a chance, ring the size 12 average whatsis of the size 12 average shopper (the biggest market for this simply cut basic that you could shop anywhere in).
As Heshie outlined it, this was my job: “Listen closely, girlie, this particular number, it’s my bread and it’s my butter. And to me a life isn’t a life without it should have bread and butter. If, God forbid, I shouldn’t be able to unload this number as per usual, my wife Sadie will never let me hear the end of it that ‘Revka-down-the-block-she-should-drop-dead was able to go to Florida and get a nice tan and me—whose husband is supposed to be such a big deal in the garment world, yet—I can’t afford to go around the corner.’ Now, this number is going to roll past you at a rate of, oh, one every five seconds, but we can adjust—faster, slower, you name it. I want you should wash your hands real good. I want people that they are walking down the street and never saw you before in their lives that they should take time out to pass a remark that such clean hands they have never before seen on a person, except maybe on a surgeon as he slips into the rubber gloves, and what with the dope and dreck that they had when they saw it on the surgeon, his hands were pretty blurry, but on a bet they would say yours were cleaner. With these clean, clean hands, I want you should gently grasp each of these number 12 regulars here, pull it tenderly toward you, and then with these No. 2 Magic Markers that my brother Morris, he should live and be well, has seen fit to provide me with at a special discount, with these No. 2 Magic Markers, you should with a swish and with a swash fill in that little dime-size white spot just below where the pupik should be. Sam Spade—pardon me—with an X-ray machine should be able to look at this dress and not see dark edges from where the Magic Marker overlapped onto the part that’s already blue. He should not be able to see one little hint, one little breath, one little zephyr of a white spot left over from where the No. 2 Magic Marker, God forbid, missed. Have I conveyed the importance of this task? Yes? Well, then, begin. I will stand here until I see that you’ve got the hang of it, the swing of it, the art of it. Good, good. I knew you were the one for the job when I saw you walk in. I will come back in an hour to check on your progress. I figure that with hard work and steady effort, you should be able to say to me at six o’clock on the dot, just before I am ready to lock up and go home to Sadie the nudzh, ‘Mr. Herschberg, I have the honor of informing you that I have finished my appointed task and the number 12 average is, thank God, ready for shipment.’”
Well, children, the finish is, I walked out of there cross-eyed. Before I had gone three feet, I had to resist the impulse to color the spots before my eyes. That cleared up after a block or two, but now if I see a white spot on a dog, I want to fill it in.
I saw Sadie Herschberg as I was leaving. She was so fat she could have used a bra on her kneecaps—about a 38D. I mean to tell you, she was 360 degrees fat. Herschberg himself was a beanpole—a loksh. When they went down the street together, one streaking, one shloomping, they looked like a lame number 10 or maybe an 01, depending.
Newark
A few minutes ago, I was listening to the local TV newscast, and the announcer said something like: “Fred Jones of Rahway, New Jersey, has been indicted for milking a bankrupt kosher meat company of thirty-three thousand dollars.” Milchedig and fleishedig! A frosk in pisk to Fred.
Happiness, Montana
What am I doing in Montana? What am I doing in a town call
ed Happiness? Nothing. So I make long-distance calls to the circulation departments of the New York Review of Books, the Partisan Review, and Commentary. I say, “Hello, [name of magazine]? This is Miss Cream at your fulfillment house in Iowa [all fulfillment houses are in Iowa]. Could you please give me a list of your subscribers in Happiness, Montana? Our computer has gone haywire, and we are double-checking our records.” There is a short wait, and I look out the window at the pyorrheic mountains while New York checks its records. New York comes back on the line with a list of two names. In each case, they are the same two names.
Then I call up the local newspaper, the Happiness Chronicle, and speak to the editor-publisher-reporter-layout man. I say, “Hello, Chronicle? This is Life magazine calling. Miss Sweet here. We are doing a survey on ethnic and religious groups in Montana and want to include your town in the survey. We know you’re on top of things out there, and if you can help us we’d be glad to mention your name in the piece we’re doing. Our question is twofold: (a) How many members of the Jewish faith are there in Happiness? And (b) What are their names?” The editor-publisher-reporter-layout man says, “Well, yes, there’s a Jewish fella out here—Mel Blankenstein. He’s the only one of Jewish persuasion in this town. A real nice fella too. Keeps to himself. Joe Kerry down to the superette does land-office business on farmer’s cheese because of Mel, I hear tell.” Then I say, “Thank you so much for your cooperation, sir. Look for your name and the name of that fine paper you’re running in the pages of Life magazine.”
I hang up and I compare my Partisan Review—New York Review—Commentary list. Yes, Mel Blankenstein, reader of the above-named magazines, is one and the same Mel Blankenstein that is the nice fellow who has a taste for pot cheese. But—wait a minute. There is another name on my magazine list. What of that? I stare at the name. The name is Leonard Birdsong III. Leonard (surely Lenny) Birdsong (Feigelzinger, perhaps, or is the last name simply a flight of Wasp-inspired fantasy?). And III, of course just means third generation on Rivington Street. I now know something that nobody else in town knows—not even Mel. I know that Leonard Birdsong III is a crypto-Jew. My God, he’s passing—the geshmat!
I look at the two-page phone book and, yes, there they both are, the proud Jew and the meshumad. I decide to send Lenny a note before I leave town. My note will say: “Dear Lenny: Can you come over Friday night? My wife will fix you a meal like in the olden days. A little gefilte fish, a little chrain, some nice hot soup, a nice chicken. Who knows? Maybe a kugel even. Come on, Lenny, enough shlepping trayf home from Kerry’s Superette (though the pot cheese is unbeatable—imported from New York). It would be an averah if we Jews didn’t stick together, especially way out here. I am so sick and tired of looking at goyim I could plotz! We’ll expect you early. Best, Mel. P.S.: If you like pepper, please bring your own. We don’t keep it in the house. It’s such a goyische thing, pepper, but to each his own. M.B. P.P.S.: Bring this note with you. I am writing my autobiography and ask all my friends to save any invitations, postcards, etc., I send them. I could have sent you a carbon, but I feel it’s so much nicer to receive an original. So bring it with you and I’ll keep it on file under F for Feigelzinger. You can refer to it whenever you wish to—if you happen to be writing your memoirs also. M.B.”
I feel I have performed a real mitzvah for Lenny, and I look up at the clock and see that if I hurry, I just have time to make it to the local movie house for the cultural event of the season. They are having a John Agar Festival.
4 Pets, Playmates, Pedagogues
Christine and Jimmie C.
From the Jewish side of the family Christine inherited kinky hair and dark, thin skin (she was about a 7 on the color scale and touchy). From the black side of her family she inherited sharp features, rhythm, and thin skin (she was touchy). Two years after this book ends, she would be the ideal beauty of legend and folklore—name the nationality, specify the ethnic group. Whatever your legends and folklore bring to mind for beauty of face and form, she would be it, honey. Christine was no ordinary child. She was born with a caul, which her first lusty cries rent in eight. Aside from her precocity at mirror writing, she had her mother’s love of words, their nuance and cadence, their juice and pith, their variety and precision, their rock and wry. When told at an early age that she would one day have to seek out her father to learn the secret of her birth, she said, “I am going to find that motherfucker.” In her view, the last word was merely le mot juste.
Where Christine was salty, Jimmie C. was sweet. He was a 5 on the color scale and was gentle of countenance and manner. He had inherited his mother’s sweet voice, and he was given to making mysterious, sometimes asinine pronouncements, which he often sang. From Louise he had inherited a tendency to make up words. Thus this exchange between Louise and her grandson:
LOUISE: Dessa cream on your boondoggle? (Trans.: “Condensed milk on your boondoggle?) How ’bout some mo’ ingers on dem dere fish eggs, sweetness? (She points to the onions on the red caviar.)
JIMMIE C. (looking sweetly at his plate): I have never had such a wonderful dish. It is like biting into tiny orange-colored grapeskins filled with cod-liver oil. (He snaps his fingers.) I know! These wonderful little things here before me in the bowl of my grandmother are like (and he signs in the key of G) tiny little round orange jelly balls. (On a letter scale with legatos indicated by hyphens and rests by commas this phrase would be GG-CC-G, FF, EDC.) From now on I shall call these good things trevels.
Christine loved her younger brother, but often she was exasperated by him. Every day she would sit on the bottom step in the living room and read to Jimmie C. He stopped her gently once and sang, “But nevertheless and winnie-the-pooh”—which was one of his favorite expressions—“I get Christopher Wren and Christopher Robin confused.”
Christine looked at him and, in a rare instance, made up her own word. “You are a stone scrock, boy.” The family liked Christine’s new word and gave it inflections for various occasions:
LOUISE: Mayhaps if I’m careful, I won’t scrock up dis yere recipe. Las’ time, it turned out right scrockified, dey tell me. I liked it, though. Thought it tayce real good.
JIMMIE C. (gently): Uncle Herbie can be just a tiny bit scrocky sometimes.
HELEN (by letter): The TV set in my hotel room just scrocked out.
CHRISTINE: Oh, fuck scrock!
Louise’s dream
When Christine was about two and a half, she got her nickname. It came to Louise in a dream. Louise was walking down a dusty road with Christine on a gray, overcast day, when suddenly the clouds parted and a ray of sunshine beamed down right in front of the child. Out of this beam of sunshine came a high-pitched, squeaky voice. “And her name shall be Oriole,” squeaked the voice.
When Louise woke up that morning, she went straight to her dream book. Next to the word ORIOLE was the number 483. Louise played it in the box for three days. On the third day, it came out and she hit for five hundred dollars, her first hit in more than three weeks (the longest dry spell she could remember). She had told James about her dream on that first day, when she was hosing him off, and he had grinned. She had told her whole family and all her neighbors, as she usually did with her important dreams. Sometimes the entire neighborhood hit if they could figure out what Louise was saying.
Everyone thought that Louise had found a great nickname for Christine. People had been calling the child various things as she toddled down the street after Louise, cursing them under her breath. They called her Brown Sugar and Chocolate Drop and Honeybun. But when they looked at Christine’s rich brown color and her wide smile full of sugar-white baby teeth, they said to themselves, “Why, that child does put me in mind of an Oreo cookie—side view.” And that is how Oreo got her name. Nobody knew that Louise was saying “Oriole.” When, through a fluke, Louise found out what everyone thought she was saying, it was all right with her. “I never did like flyin’ birds, jus’ eatin’ ones,” she said. “But I jus’ loves dem Oreos.” And this t
ime she meant what everyone else meant.
Pets
Naming was very important in the Clark family. Here are two other instances. Herbert Butler, Louise’s wandering brother, brought back a parakeet for the children after one of his journeys. It was powder blue. Only its color (Louise’s favorite) saved the bird from her total disdain (“He ain’ eem a flyin’ bird, jus’ a settin’ one”). Oreo called the parakeet Jocko, Jimmie C. sweetly called him Sky. Louise, because she could not bother to remember either of these names, called him “bird,” not as a name but as a category, just as she called various other pets of friends and family “cat,” “dog,” and “goldfish.” She sometimes had to call all the categories before she got to the right one: “Take dat go’fish . . . I mean, cat . . . I say, dog out fo’ a walk.” After two months, in confusion over his true name, Sky-Jocko-bird died, a living (or rather, dead) example of acute muddleheadedness.
That was also the year that Oreo and Jimmie C. had the German shepherd. Everyone said he was the smartest German shepherd anyone had ever seen in the neighborhood. He could do anything—fetch the paper, roll over and play dead, shake hands. He would romp with the children for hours on end, and they would take turns riding on his powerful back. He ran back and forth between the children, his handsome eyes shining, his powerful muscles rippling as he leaped a fence to get a ball Oreo or Jimmie C. had thrown. His papers said his name was Otto, followed by a string of unpronounceable names, but the family decided to call him something else. This time they quickly agreed on a name, one that Helen suggested. They called him Fleck. “A German shepherd should have a German name,” Helen had written to them when the family consulted her, getting her jollies over the fact that she had named the princely German shepherd plain old ordinary Spot.
