Oreo

by Ross, Fran

  An important incident in the legend of Oreo

  Louise’s brother Herbert was a great traveler. On his return from Morocco or Afghanistan or Greece or Chile, he would stop by to see his sister, check on James’s immobilization, and give Oreo and Jimmie C. the presents he had brought with him from foreign shores. He was a huge man, a 1 on the color scale. He had a scar from the corner of his lip to the top of his right ear, a memento of an incident of his childhood outside the village of Gladstone, when, with a callow slip of the tongue, he called two playmates of somewhat higher color-scale value black sons of bitches. Whenever he came to the house, he would go directly to the large mirror in the dining room, pull a flask from his hip pocket, drink deeply, growl, wipe his mouth with satisfaction, and say, “I’m Big Nigger Butler.” It was strange to hear this from a man for whom Hermann Goring could serve as Doppelgänger.

  Herbert would fling off his coat and take out a little black book clotted with columns of three-digit numbers, written in heavy pencil. Under or over each digit in a three-figure unit was a dot or a dash or a circle or a slanted line or a cross. Herbert took Oreo on his knee and explained to her what these mysterious markings meant. It was an elaborate system for playing the numbers, a passion he shared with his sister Louise. His diacritical marks showed him which numbers had come out, when, their pattern of recurrence (did 561 prefer to come out in December, for example?), their correlation with world events (did numbers starting with 8 always presage the fall of a South American government, for instance?), and so on through a warren of statistical complexities that only Herbert could keep track of—Herbert who could correctly multiply any figure up to five digits by any other figure up to five digits in his head. But there was one difference between Herbert and Louise. Herbert had never hit a number. Oh, he had come close—once. He had played 782 straight on the day that Louise played 782 in the box and thereby hit for seven hundred dollars when 827 came out. Other than that, he rarely had even one digit in common with the number that hit. But he kept showing Oreo his book, telling her that one of these days, when she was old enough, he would have her trace his markings in ink. He secretly believed that his niece’s palimpsest of his numerical adventures would magically change his luck. His perverse delay (for Oreo had had her eraser and ballpoint at the ready for years) was a good example of herculean self-tantalization.

  On one visit, Herbert had just returned from Africa. He had flung off his coat—made of the skin of a lion he had killed in a Nairobi pet shop—and had gone to his accustomed spot in front of the mirror to do his Big Nigger Butler routine, when all of a sudden there was a commotion behind him. He did not turn around, for he could see what was happening in the mirror. He had tossed his lion coat on a chair directly behind him, its hood with the opened-jawed lion’s head nuzzling his back. Oreo, thinking that the skin covered a live lion, had jumped up on the table behind her uncle and was stalking the coat. She came up behind it slowly, her hands behind her. When she was close enough, she pulled her jump rope from behind her back, whipped it around the head and mane, and double-dutched the coat to death—or so she thought. Her uncle, watching all this in the mirror, was impressed with her bravery. “She sure got womb, that little mother,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to mess with her when she gets older. She is a ball buster and a half.” He told the entire neighborhood about the incident. So it was that the legend of Oreo began to grow before she had cut her second teeth.

  An important letter

  At about this time, Oreo received a letter from her mother that influenced her thinking a great deal. Helen’s letter had its usual quota of asides, such as her paranoia about white dentists: “Suppose your dentist is white and suppose he just happens to harbor an unconscious hatred of black people and suppose he is in a bad mood anyway when you come in. Might he not just happen to bear down on the old drill a little harder, go a little deeper than he needs to? I am just asking and don’t want you to be warped for life by this thought. Besides, you still have your perfect little milk teeth. But since I’m on dentists, I will tell you about Dr. Goodbody. Dr. Goodbody starts spraying Lavoris before you even make an appointment. His sprayer bears a striking resemblance to a flame thrower. But who can blame him for his finickyness, considering the effluvium, the untreated sewage, the ick that issues from some people’s mouths? But Dr. Goodbody has never realized that a patient who is going to a dentist is like a housewife who cleans up before the maid comes. Such goings on with water picks and dental floss and mouthwash and toothpaste—to say nothing of sandpaper!”

  This digression brought Helen logically to the main topic of her letter: the oppression of women. “This is a subject I’ve given a lot of thought to, and I think I have the answer. I’ve tried to encompass in my theory all the sociological, mythological, religious, philosophical, muscular, economic, cultural, musical, physical, ethical, intellectual, metaphysical, anthropological, gynecological, historical, hormonal, environmental, judicial, legal, moral, ethnic, governmental, linguistic, psychological, schizophrenic, glottal, racial, poetic, dental [this was the logical link], artistic, military, and urinary considerations from prehistoric times to the present. I have been able to synthesize these considerations into one inescapable formulation: men can knock the shit out of women.”

  Helen’s letter went on to point out the implications of her formulation for the theory of the so-called black matriarchs: it tore the theory all to hell. In a later day, Helen might have gone on to add (with a slip of the pen owing to hunger): “There’s no male chauvinist pork like a black male chauvinist pork.” Now she contented herself with pointing out how her own mother still deferred to her father even in his immobilization, keeping on the safe side in case he ever came out of it. As Louise often said, “He ain’ gon [pronounced, by Louise and others, as if it were a French word, never as “gone”] hab no scuse to box my jaws.”

  Helen’s letter so impressed Oreo that it led her to do two things: adopt a motto and develop a system of self-defense. The motto was Nemo me impune lacessit—“No one attacks me with impunity.” “Ain’t no nigger gon tell me what to do. I’ll give him such a klop in the kishkas!” she said, lapsing into the inflections of her white-skinned black grandmother and (through her mother) her dark-skinned white grandfather, as she often did under stress.

  She called her system of self-defense the Way of the Interstitial Thrust, or WIT. WIT was based on an Oriental dedication to attacking the body’s soft, vulnerable spaces or, au fond, to making such spaces, or interstices, where previously none had existed; where, for example, a second before there had been an expanse of smooth, nonabraded skin and sturdy, unbroken bone. To this end, Oreo developed a series of moves that made other methods of self-defense—jiu-jitsu, karate, kung-fu, savate, judo, aikido, mikado, kikuyu, kendo, hondo, and shlong—obsolete by incorporating and improving upon their most effective aspects. With such awesome moves (or, as Oreo termed them, blōs) as the hed-lok, shu-kik, i-pik, hed-brāc, i-bop ul-na-brāc, hed-blō, fut-strīk, han-krus, tum-blō, nek-brāc, bal-brāc, bak-strīk, but-kik, the size or musculature of the opponent was virtually academic. Whether he was big or small, fat or thin, well-built or spavined, Oreo could, when she was in a state of extreme concentration known as hwip-as, engage any opponent up to three times her size and weight and whip his natural ass.

  She was once inadvertently in the state of hwip-as when she was riding in her uncle’s car. A man standing on a corner as the car passed had seen her and had made sucking noises to denote his approval of her appearance. Oreo did not consciously know she had heard these primitive sounds, but as she was getting out of the car, she was in such an advanced state of hwip-as that when she yanked at the ashtray, mistakenly thinking it was a door handle, she heedlessly created for her uncle the only three-door club coupe in America.

  Half WIT

  Oreo’s tutors were on vacation. She needed something to do to occupy her fourteen-year-old mind for a few weeks, so she put an ad in the papers. Three days later
, she received a phone call from what sounded like a young white man.

  “May I speak to Miss Christine Clark?” he asked.

  “This is Christine Clark.”

  “Are you the girl who advertised in the Situations Wanted column of the Inquirer?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Dr. Jafferts. I’m the medical examiner for district five. I was wondering if I could interest you in a job?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Your ad said you’re a recent college graduate.”

  “Yes, it did say that.”

  “And your field was Chinese history?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see,” he said. “Well, let me tell you a little about the job we have in mind. In this job, you’d be negotiating government contracts.”

  “Chinese history doesn’t exactly prepare—”

  “That’s all right,” he said generously. “We would train you. This job doesn’t come under civil service. You’d be working with another woman. The job involves some traveling within a hundred-mile radius of the city. Do you drive?”

  “Yes.”

  “The job pays ninety-five to start and gas-mileage money. The hours are nine to three-thirty, five days a week. How does that sound?”

  “Fine.”

  “Now, here’s the catch. Would you submit to a medical examination for the job?”

  “Certainly. Where’s your office?”

  “Well, I don’t exactly have any particular office. I have to travel all over the district. I can give you the examination over the phone.”

  Aha, thought Oreo. “Over the phone?” she asked.

  “Yes. You’d be surprised at how thorough a phone examination can be.” He paused, then said, “Do you have a house or an apartment?”

  “House,” said Oreo.

  “And where is that located?”

  She gave him her address.

  Are you alone?”

  Oreo decided to go along with him. “Why, yes.”

  “I just asked because some of the questions may seem highly personal. But this is a combination psychological and medical exam, so don’t be alarmed.”

  “I promise,” said Oreo.

  “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen,” lied Oreo.

  “Are you a virgin?”

  Which answer is better for a shmuck like this? she wondered, and, having decided, said, “No.”

  “Would you mind telling me the color of your underclothes?”

  Oreo covered her mouth to keep from giggling.

  “I mean, are they white or different colors like pink, blue?” “All white,” said Oreo.

  “Um-hmm. And what material are they? Silk, rayon, cotton?”

  “Nylon.”

  “I see. Now, would you mind telling me all the words you know that mean sexual intercourse?”

  With a wicked smile, Oreo said, “Certainly. Procreation, cohabitation,coition, coitus.”

  “No, no!” He sounded terribly disappointed. Then, clearing his throat, he said calmly, “I don’t mean . . . scientific terms. I mean just any words that might come to mind or that you might hear on the streets, for instance.”

  “I’m sorry,” Oreo said. “Those are the only ones I can think of right now. Could I come back to that question?”

  “Of course, of course,” he snapped. “Now, have you ever admired your body in a mirror?”

  “Sure. Often.”

  “Have you ever been roused? Does music ever make you want to—?” He broke off, then he said, “I’ve finished the psychological examination. Now I want you to take off your clothes and give yourself the medical.” After a few moments he said, “Are they off?”

  “No,” said Oreo, “I’m having trouble with my wedgies.” The doctor continued, oblivious to her anachronistic answer. “Rub along the inside of your thigh and tell me when you get wet.”

  Oreo put down the phone and went over to water her begonia, then she came back and coughed into the phone to let the doctor know she was there.

  “Are you wet yet?” he said wistfully.

  Oreo said, “You know, doctor, the trouble with masturbation is you come too fast. There’s no one for you to give directions to. You know, like ‘No, not like that, like this. No, yes, no, harder, softer, up, down. No, no. I’m losing it. Yes, yes, that’s it, stay there, right there. No, no, not like that—the way you were doing it before. Yes, that’s it.’ And there’s no one for you not to give directions to. You know what I mean, doctor?”

  There was a moan at the other end of the line. “I’d like to come over and give you a complete examination,” said the moaner hoarsely.

  “Why don’t you do that,” said the moanee sweetly.

  “I’ll bring my tools with me,” the doctor said, in one last effort at pretense.

  “Tools?” said Oreo. “One will be enough. Oh, by the way, doctor, I’ve finally thought of some words. I don’t know how they slipped my mind before.” Oreo said a lot of words that begin with p and c and t and x, that rhyme with bunt and pooky and noontang.

  The doctor let out a gasp as big as Masters and Johnson and said he could be at her place in an hour. Oreo told him that she would wait for him on her front porch and that she would be wearing a begonia leaf.

  She went immediately to a house three doors down from her and told a neighbor, Betty Williams, that she wanted to play a trick on an acquaintance. Betty was the neighborhood nymphomaniac. For two cents she would fuck a plunger. In fact, the story of Betty and the plumber’s friend was a West Philadelphia legend. Anyone who thought that the shibboleth friend referred to a person was known to be an outsider and was therefore the object of xenophobic ridicule and scorn. Betty agreed to help her young friend Oreo.

  So it was that when Dr. Jafferts came panting down the street, already slavering, it was Betty who, wearing the begonia leaf, waylaid him, as it were, on Oreo’s porch and led him to her house, where Oreo was in hiding.

  After a few preliminaries involving the you-sounded-different-over-the-phone routine, the doctor—a young shmegegge who looked like the kind of person who doted on tapioca pudding, and ergo propter hoc, whose favorite Marx Brother was Gummo—was seated in a chair cruelly sited to give him a view up Betty’s short skirt. Sitting on a high stool, Betty began a rhythmic opening and closing of her legs, revealing and concealing a tangle of pubic hair. The sweat stood out on the doctor’s head after the first two open-close, open-close beats. After a while, he seemed in danger of drowning in his own juice.

  But Oreo’s plan was without mercy. Simultaneously with the rhythms she was laying down from her stool, Betty began telling the doctor one of her favorite jokes. “It’s about this man and woman who go down to Florida on their fifteenth wedding anniversary. They get up in their room, and the first thing they do is take off all their clothes.”

  The doctor licked his lips in anticipation, his eyes fixed on Betty’s open-close, open-close.

  Betty was beginning to overheat from hearing her own story, but she went on. “And the man says to the woman, says, ‘Honey, we been married all these years now and we always do it the same way. Let’s screw new a way this time. Now, you stand over in that corner, and I’ll stand over here. Then we’ll run toward each other and meet in the middle.’ So they go to the different corners and start running toward each other. But they miss and run right past. The man is going so fast, he goes sailing out the open window. His room is on the tenth story, but he’s lucky ’cause he falls in the swimming pool. But he’s afraid to come out ’cause he don’t have no clothes on. Everybody seems to be running to the hotel and nobody’s paying him no mind, but he’s still afraid to come out the pool buck naked. Then he sees this bellhop ready to go in the hotel, and he calls him over. He says, ‘Say, bellhop, I want to get out the pool, but I can’t ’cause I ain’t got no clothes on.’ The bellhop don’t even look surprised. He says, ‘That’s all right, sir, nobody’ll pay no ’ttention to you. You just come on out.’ The man says,
‘What do you mean nobody’ll pay no ’ttention to me? I’m buck naked!’ The bellhop says, ‘I know, sir, but most of the people are up on the tenth floor trying to figure out a way to get a woman off a doorknob.’”

  By this time both Betty and the doctor were raging beasts. As the doctor ran to the attack—or, rather, the collaboration—Oreo came out of hiding and gave him a quick shu-kik to the groin, then got his jaw in the classic nek-brāc position. With his life but a blō away, he promised Oreo he would never again annoy innocent young women by phone or in person with his snortings and slaverings. With a half-force bak-bop she propelled him off Betty’s porch and watched as he shmegeggely fled the street.

  She turned back just in time to hear Betty saying plaintively, “But what about me?”

  Oreo realized that it had been very brave and self-sacrificing of Betty to participate in this little hoax. But her face brightened when she saw what time it was. She gave Betty the good news. “What about you? It’s five-thirty. Your father will be home any minute now. Do what you usually do in these circumstances. Fuck him.”

  5 Tokens Deposited

  Will Farmer

  James had been immobilized for fifteen years when Louise decided to take a boyfriend. By this time, she had added drinking to her cooking/eating hobbies and weighed in at a good two hundred pounds. She had a love-tap on her that could paralyze yeast for three days. Louise met her boyfriend, Will Farmer, at a pay party given by her club, the Rainbow Skinners. The Rainbow Skinners got together every Friday night to conduct the regular club business, which was to eat, drink, and play pitty-pat and Pokeno, and to conduct the special club business, which was to plan pay parties, which they gave to raise money to give other pay parties, and so on, unto several generations.