Oreo

by Ross, Fran

  Then she saw something that perked up her curiosity. The side door opened, a man stepped in, dropped to his knees, and looked around as though choosing a path. It was to be toward the table where the customers folded their dry towels and linens, Oreo observed. A woman stood there now, the center of a sheet chinned to her chest, her arms rhythmically opening and closing as the sheet halved and thickened, halved and thickened. She did not notice as the crawler moved under the table, passing the table’s legs and hers at a slow but steady creep. He did not slacken or increase his pace when he came out on the other side but merely kept going. He completed his traverse and went out the front door and down the street, still crawling. He attracted no more notice in the laundromat than would a large dog, for which he was mistaken by a man who shouted after him, “No dogs allowed—can’t you read!” As if a dog would have brought his dirty clothes to such an inconvenient location.

  Oreo’s dryer stopped. She took out her dress and examined it. “Pristine, Christine,” she said approvingly to herself. After a slight struggle, she released the dryer drum from her bra’s metallic grasp.

  Now what Oreo needed was the purifying waters of a tub or shower. She was grungy from her encounters with Kirk and Parnell, her night on the floor of Mr. Soundman, the dirty stares she had gotten from Sidney as she left Kropotkin’s. She walked along St. Nicholas Avenue looking for a hotel, but she saw something better for her purposes.

  Oreo at the sauna

  It was run by Jordan Rivers. “Deep Rivers” he called himself, according to the eight-by-ten glossy of himself in the window. It was the first such photograph Oreo had ever seen where those dimensions referred to feet, not inches. This was less out of egotism than necessity, Oreo guessed. Judging by his photograph, Rivers was almost seven feet tall. He was as slender and black as a Dinka, his skin tone the more striking because of his apparel—what seemed to be a billowing white choir robe.

  She went in. Much to her disappointment, Rivers did not appear. Only an attendant was on duty. After a few minutes of prying, Oreo learned that she had been right about the choir robe. Rivers had been an itinerant gospel singer for many years. He had sung so many choruses about washing sins away that, taking the gospels as gospel, he began to follow the letter and not the spirit of the spirituals. He left most of the work of running the business to his employees, devoting himself almost full time to purification. Dividing his lustral day in half, he sweltered in a sauna the first four hours, soaked in a tub another four. “He looks like Moby Prune,” the attendant informed Oreo. Jordan Rivers was not his real name, and he had taken his nickname, “Deep,” from one of his favorite spirituals. No one knew his real name. Whenever he lost favor with his employees, they called him “Muddy Waters” for spite. Oreo saw that Rivers carried his convictions about the redemptive powers of bath water to the extent of labeling the entrance to his domain SINNERS and the exit SAINTS.

  Oreo in the sauna

  Her eyeballs were hot globes of tapioca. She breathed in flues of fire without flame, exhaled dragon blasts, stirring up sultry harmattans in her private sudatorium. The wax in her ears was turning to honey. Liquid threads were in conflux at her belly button (an “inny”), which held a pondlet of sweat. Pores of unknown provenance opened and emptied, sending deltas of dross toward her navel’s shore. When she judged she had nothing more to give, she stepped into a cold shower, which felt warm because of her sauna heat. When the chill deepened finally, she made the water hot, soaping and resoaping herself, finishing her ablutions with a vigorous shampoo. She combed out her afro to its fullest circumference, put on her dress, her new sandals, and her mezuzah (it felt cool in her clĕvice—a word Jimmie C. used to mean a cross between cleavage and crevice). Last, she chose her black headband because of the solemnity of the occasion. Her skin pinged with cleanliness. She felt godlike. Perhaps Jordan Rivers was on to something.

  Oreo on 125th Street

  She walked along swinging her cane. Workmen were changing the marquee of the Apollo, temple of soul.

  NOW APPEARING

  THE DOLPHINS

  EXTRA ADDED ATTRAC

  As Oreo passed the theater, the man at the top of the ladder dropped his T. “Jesus H. Christ!” he exclaimed, obviously obsessed with letters. He pointed to Oreo. “Is that a fox or is that a fox!”

  The man holding the ladder said, “Absofuckinglutely,” and began making fox-calling noises. “Where you going, sister? ’Cause whither thou goest, I will definitely go—you can believe that!”

  Oreo was in no mood to spoil her good mood. She merely hooked her walking stick under the fallen T and flung it as far as she could over the marquee. It landed on a rooftop, but the men, heads thrown back in wonder, seemed to be awaiting its return as if it were a boomerang.

  Oreo continued down the street, her cane resting on her shoulder like a club.

  13 Medea, Aegeus

  Oreo on the subway

  She was too preoccupied to observe noses, mouths, and shoes and award prizes. She did overhear someone say impatiently, “No, no, Mondrian’s the lines, the boxes. Modigliani’s the long necks.”

  And: “She a Jew’s poker. Take care the sinnygogue fo’ ’em on Sat’d’ys.”

  This last gave her an idea whose ramifications she considered during the ride. Distractedly, she doodled on her clue list. Her basic doodles were silhouettes of men facing left and five-lobed leaves. Her subconscious view of her father as mystery man? A pointless, quinquefoliolate gesture to the Star of David? No. Silhouettes and leaves were what she drew best. Next to her profiles and palmates, she made a line of scythelike question marks. Next to that, she sketched an aerial view of a cloverleaf highway, her gunmetal-gray divisions making a cloisonné of the ground. Then with offhand but decisive sweeps, she crossed “Kicks,” “Pretzel,” “Fitting,” “Down by the river,” and “Temple” off her list. How else to interpret the adventures involving Parnell, Kirk (he certainly had twisted himself every which way), Sidney of Kropotkin’s Shoes (she was perhaps stretching a point on this one), Jordan Rivers’s sauna, and the Apollo?

  She did not notice that the subway had come to her stop until it was almost too late. She jumped to her feet and barely had time to get her trailing walking stick through the door before it closed. (Some of you who have noticed that Oreo has been shlepping a long stick will interpret said stick as a penis substitute. Wrong, Sibyl, it’s a long stick.)

  Oreo around the corner from her father’s apartment building

  It was, she realized, quite close to the very first place in which she had looked for her father when she arrived in New York—the street of the Chinese-lady Schwartz.

  Oreo on her father’s street

  Left-right, left-right, left-right went her heart. Thump/tap-thump, thump/tap-thump, thump/tap-thump, went her feet and cane.

  Oreo in the foyer of her father’s lobby

  She looked down the ladder of names next to the line of black buttons. She pressed the button next to the slot marked 2-C. A strip of black plastic with white incised lettering announced: S. SCHWARTZ. A woman’s voice squawked over the intercom. Oreo did not understand what she said. She assumed it was “Who is it?” or some other similar question. Oreo, with perfect diction and the precise British accent of Abba Eban, made up a sentence in grammatical gibberish. It sounded good even to her. A few seconds later, the buzzer buzzed, releasing the lock on the lobby door.

  Oreo in the elevator

  A short vertical leap, a settling jounce, a lighted 2, a suck-slide. Oreo stepped into the hallway. It had an acrid odor.

  Oreo at her father’s door

  The odor was stronger. A tall, broad-browed woman appeared at the door. Oreo could not decide whether she looked more like Judith Anderson or the Statue of Liberty. After a few moments, she judged that the resemblance to the spike-headed Mother of Exiles was closer, the more so because the woman had one arm aloft, her fingers circling air. Just enough room for an invisible torch, thought Oreo. The woman seemed disin
clined to lower it. Incipient catatonia or a painful underarm boil, Oreo diagnosed.

  The woman’s deep-set eyes narrowed at the sight of Oreo. “Yes, what is it?”

  “Mr. Jenkins sent me.” Oreo had noticed the superintendent’s name on one of the first-floor mailboxes. “May I come in, Mrs. Schwartz?”

  The woman opened the door a little wider. “I hope it is about fixing the intercom. I could not understand a word you said,” she complained in a precise but heavily accented voice.

  A Georgia Jew if Oreo had ever heard one. But the Georgia of Mingrelia and Tiflis, not Atlanta and (coincidence) Warm Springs. (A Mdivani, perhaps?) And she doubted whether peaches were native to the Caucasus. Her mother’s information was only a few thousand miles off. “It’s about proposed maid service for the building,” Oreo said, adapting the Jew’s poker idea she had gotten on the subway.

  The woman narrowed her eyes at Oreo again. “I suppose it is all right. Come in, I cannot stand in the doorway all day.”

  As Oreo stepped in, her nostrils were assailed by a piercing bite that was no longer an odor but a physical attack—as though a cat were snared in her nares. Her eyes watered. “What is that?” she gasped.

  The woman looked at her coolly. “Just something I am . . . dabbling with. You will get used to it.” She said it as though she were used to dismissing other people’s pain.

  As the clawing sensation diminished, Oreo sniffed around. There was a distinct odor of cyanide in the room—coming from a dish of bitter almonds. One side of the large, L-shaped living room was a chemist’s dream—chockablock with flasks, vials, retorts, Bunsen burners, a spectrum of chemical jams and jellies. If a chemist could dream, so could a cabalist. The opposite wall was hung with floor-to-ceiling charts—palmistry, astrology, phrenology; in a corner stood another, smaller chart, dense with numbers. A round table in front of the palmistry chart held tarot cards, tea leaves, and a crystal ball. This chick is ready, jim! Oreo marveled. She pictured the woman striding back and forth across the room (or did she fly?) fulfilling her own prophecies through her skill with mortar and pestle—with one hand, as it were, tied above her back.

  A gentian petal of flame enclosed the saffron budding of one of five Bunsen burners. Above the floral combustion, a noxious exhalation—an effervescing retort, source of Oreo’s nasal irritation. The nidor only added to her discomfort over not being able to state her business straightforwardly. Her father’s new wife was obviously alone in the apartment. She had to stall until she could find out whether Samuel was expected. “Interesting place you have here,” she began, trying to look undismayed at the array of cockamamie objets d’arts noirs she spied under the round table when she sat down. She could see only the top layer of the two-foot-high box. It was sectioned off into animal, vegetable, and mineral agencies: silver spikes and silver bullets; herbs that she could not readily identify; and, in what could be called the meat section, a shrunken head, a monkey’s paw, and what looked like a small jar of chicken entrails.

  “We call it home,” the woman said flatly.

  “Home is where the heart is,” Oreo said agreeably. She cast a furtive eye at the box under the round table. She thought she saw a telltale cordate shadow in the nether regions of the meat section.

  “Perhaps you would be good enough to explain why you have come?”

  Oreo launched into a jive story grounded in years of specialized research (her collection of New Yorkiana was the envy of the New-York Historical Society). She told Mrs. Schwartz that the landlord, who owned several high-rent apartment buildings on the Upper West Side, had decided to take matters into his own hands concerning the city’s foremost problem: roaches. Oreo held her breath in case she had made a drastic error and had mentioned the roach problem in one of the three buildings in New York that did not have them.

  Mrs. Schwartz gave not an eye-narrow, not a lash-flutter. Oreo was reassured that she had not blown her cover through a blattid blunder. She went on with her bullshit. The landlord, she said, was concerned for the health and safety of his tenants, certainly. He was even more concerned that New Yorkers not be subject to social embarrassment when out-of-towners came to visit, went to the kitchen to get a drink of water, turned on the light, and started a career of cucarachas on their nightly sprint at the crack of a hundred-watt bulb (“Maude, you’ll never believe what I saw in there. I always said your brother George was filthy. How can people live like that?”). Therefore the landlord proposed, for only a token rent increase—more a gesture of tenant solidarity than a true rent raise—to supplement the monthly visits by the Upper West Side Exterminating Company with weekly maid service for those who did not already employ professional cleaning women. The work of presently employed cleaning women would have to be thoroughly checked, of course, to see that their services met union standards. Yes, the building would now come under the guidelines set by Local 7431 of the International Dusters, Moppers, Washers, and Waxers, recently organized by the Teamsters. (The union logo was a clogged dust mop—so clogged, in fact, that it looked like a canine footpad.) Tenants who, out of sentiment, insisted on employing ninety-year-old cleaning women, who might chew but could not be said to be up to snuff, senior citizens (second class) who could no longer see where to dust and, in effect, merely moved the dirt from one place to another—such tenants might be required to pay a monthly fee for as long as their sentiment or their cleaning women (whichever died first) kept them in violation of IDMWW standards. Tenants who retained old family retainers but also employed union cleaning women and cleaning men (no sexual discrimination would be tolerated) and thereby reached union standards would not be fined, of course. Tenants who refused any service whatsoever—who in effect told the IDMWW to go suck on its mop—and whose apartments were judged health hazards by both the IDMWW shop steward and a majority of the tenant cleanliness committee would face eviction. The rent commission might have to decide the merits of individual cases.

  Oreo was just warming to her subject when Mrs. Schwartz said, “But I must have roaches. I use them in my . . . work.”

  Oreo put on a concerned look. “I don’t mean to tell you how to run your business, but would it be possible to breed them in captivity? That way, the rest of the apartment could be roach-free and you would still have sufficient numbers for your . . . work—and under controlled conditions.”

  The woman looked at Oreo sharply. “Excellent idea, excellent,” she said slowly. Without lowering her arm, she nodded her torch hand several times. “I have other, more serious objections, Miss . . . ?”

  “Christie,” Oreo said quickly. “But just call me Anna.” What would a foreigner know, anyway?

  “I will get to my objections in a moment, but first I have a favor to ask of you, Miss . . . Christie.”

  There was a definite smirk on her face, Oreo decided. Either that or she had a facial tic without a toc, on top of her catatonia/boil. Oreo waited.

  “Would you allow me to read your palm? I know you must have many more tenants to see today, but I assure you it will not take long. I see something in your face that interests me.” Oreo readily agreed.

  They moved to the round table. Mrs. Schwartz shoved the animal-vegetable-mineral box against the wall so that they could both get their feet under the table. It was just as well. Oreo did not want to touch the ishy thing with a bare toe and inadvertently put a jambalaya jinx on her perfect feet. She liked her hexes straight, simple, homogeneous.

  Mrs. Schwartz studied Oreo’s palm silently for several minutes, her eyes rapidly scanning the mounts and lines. With a long-nailed finger she traced Oreo’s rascettes. A chill pimpled along Oreo’s right leg and around her hairline, as it always did when she was profoundly shaken by something—good or bad. Her body registered the same sensation for Buxtehude well played as for singing telegrams well sung, only her brain distinguishing between what she called “thrilly chills” and “chilly chills.” Put on a sweater, her brain told her now.

  When the woman dropped her han
d as though it were a hot sea urchin, Oreo laid it to envy. She had had her palm read before and had been told that her Mounts of Jupiter, Venus, Apollo, and Lower Mars were transcendent, her lines of Mercury and Life enviable, those of the Sun, Head, and Heart virtually a crime against the rest of humanity. In short, she had a fabulous, a mythic hand—the quintessential chiromantic reading (though some might cavil at a rather too well-developed Plain of Mars).

  “Anything wrong?” Oreo asked.

  The woman seemed to be agonizing over a grave decision. When, presumably, she had made up her mind, she was friendlier than she had been since Oreo’s arrival. “You must stay and have some lunch with me, my dear. Can you do that?”

  “I’d love to,” Oreo lied. How was she going to fix lunch with one hand in the air? “Is there anything you’d like to tell me about the reading? Anything special?”

  The woman dismissed this possibility with a peremptory flick of the left hand. “No, no, the usual, I am afraid. You will marry a basketball player at twenty-one, have three children—two boys and a girl—and live happily ever after.”

  Oreo knew all this was a stone lie. With her hand? Amaze the Amazons, perhaps—but live happily ever after with some jive guard and three crumb snatchers? Foul!