Oreo (15 page)

“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.

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. They 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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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
.

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.

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

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.