Fran Ross - Oreo

Oreo on the train

She had passed through the Finding a Seat phase and was now in the state of Hoping to Have the Seat All to Myself. She took off her backpack and put it on the overhead rack. As each potential seatmate came down the aisle, Oreo gave a hacking cough or made her cheek go into a rapid tic or talked animatedly to herself or tried to look fat, then she laid her handbag and walking stick on the adjoining seat and put a this-isn’t-mine expression on her face. But these were seasoned travelers. They knew what she was up to. Since most of them were in the pre-Hoping to Have the Seat All to Myself phase, they passed on down the aisle, avoiding the eyes of the shlemiels who were Hoping to Have Someone Nice to Talk to All the Way to New York. As the train filled, the hardened travelers knew that it was pie-in-the-sky to hold out for a double seat, and each of them settled down to the bread-and-butter business of Hoping My Seatmate Will Keep His/Her Trap Shut and Let Me Read the Paper and the even more fervent Hoping No Mewling Brats Are Aboard.

One young blond had been traipsing up and down the aisles for five minutes. Oreo’s first thought when she saw him was that he was almost as good-looking as she was, and she enjoyed watching the other passengers watch him. On this trip, the young man stopped in front of her with arms akimbo, resigned, and said, “All right, honey, I’ve checked, and next to me you’re the prettiest thing on this train, so we might as well sit together. Give these Poor Pitiful Pearls something to look at.”

Oreo smiled appreciatively at his chutzpah and moved her handbag and cane off the seat.

Before he sat down, he put a black case, about the size of a typewriter, on the overhead rack. He tried to move Oreo’s backpack over, but it wouldn’t budge. “Is this yours?” he asked.

Oreo nodded.

“What’s in it — a piece of Jupiter?”

Oreo laughed. “No, my lunch. On Jupiter it would weigh more than twice as much — between skatey-eight and fifty-’leven pounds.”

“Good, good. I see I can talk to you.”

By the time the train pulled into North Philadelphia, Waverley Honor—“Can you believe that name?” he said. “In this case Honor is a place, not a code, thank God!”—knew eight things about Oreo. “Okay, that’s enough about you. Now, go ahead, ask me what I do.”

“What do you do, Waverley?” Oreo said dutifully.

“Are you ready for this?” He paused. “I’m a traveling executioner.”

Oreo did the obligatory take.

“See that black case?” Waverley pointed to the overhead rack.

Oreo nodded. “It looks like a typewriter case.”

“Guess what’s in it.”

“A small electric chair,” Oreo said, playing straight.

“Good guess. No, a typewriter.”

“Oh, shit,” said Oreo.

Waverley placated her. “But it was a good guess. It’s my Remington electric. Carry it with me on special jobs. It’s a Quiet-Riter.”

“So tell me, already, and cut the crap,” said Oreo.

Waverley explained that he was a Kelly Girl, the fastest shift key in the East among office temporaries. Whenever a big corporation was having a major shake-up anywhere on the eastern seaboard, Waverley got the call to pack his Remington.

“Yes, but what exactly do you do?” asked Oreo.

“I thought you’d never ask.” He moved closer to Oreo so that their conversation could not be overheard. “My last job was typical. I get the call from Kelly, right? They say, ‘So-and-so Corporation needs you.’ So-and-so Corporation shall be nameless, because, after all, a boy can’t tell everything he knows.” He paused for the laugh. “But believe me, honey, this is a biggie. I mean, you can’t fart without their having something to do with it. Anyway, I show up at the building — one of those all-glass mothers. I flash my special pass at the guard. I wish I could use that identification card on all my jobs — absolutely adorable picture of me. Anyway, I take the back elevator to the fifty-second floor. The receptionist shows me to my cubicle. A man comes in a minute later with a locked briefcase. He opens it and explains the job. It’s straight copy work. What I am doing is typing the termination notices of four hundred top executives. Off with their heads! That’s why I call myself the traveling executioner. I mean, honey, most of those guys had been with that company since 1910, and they don’t know what the fuck is going to hit them in their next pay check.” He raised his eyebrows, an intricate maneuver involving a series of infinitesimal ascensions until the brows reached a plateau that, above all, tokened a pause for a rhetorical question. “Can you believe that? Well, my dear , the work was so mechanical and so boring that I insisted on having a radio the second day. So while I was decapitating these mothers from Scarsdale and Stamford and Darien, I was digging Aretha and Tina Turner and James Brown. Talk about ironic! While Tina is doing her thing on ‘I Want to Take You Higher,’ I’m lowering the boom on these forty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year men. Made me feel just terrible! I really sympathize with upper-income people, honey. They’re my kind of minority.”

While Waverley went to get a drink of water, Oreo stared at the dirty cardboard on the back of the seat in front of her:

Thanks for riding Penn Central Have a pleasant trip

She looked out the window as the train passed a small station and saw another sign that, for an instant, made her think she was in a foreign country, until she realized that some letters were missing:

TRA

OCATION 5

As the train pulled into Trenton, Oreo got hungry. She hauled her backpack from the overhead rack and was about to start in, when she realized she was being selfish — besides, it wouldn’t hurt to have a carload of travelers in her debt. Reserving only a few choice bundles, she enlisted Waverley’s aid and distributed the rest to the other passengers. In a few minutes, groans and moans were heard amidst all the fressing .

Between bites, Waverley kept saying, “Oh my God, it’s so good I’m coming in my pants.”

The whole car broke into applause when Oreo went to get a cup of water. She bowed this way and that as she came back to her seat. She sat there for a while digesting Louise’s Apollonian stuffed grape leaves, her revolutionary piroshki. She was trying to decide what shade of blue the sky was. It was the recycled blue of a pair of fifty-dollar French jeans (or jeannettes) that had been deliberately faded. She decided that from now on, she would call that shade jive blue. Douglas Floors would approve.

Waverley was looking over her shoulder. Suddenly he sat back and sighed. “You’re the first nice person I’ve talked to in a long time. Can I drop my beads?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

He confided that he was not only a traveling executioner, but also a gay traveling executioner.

“ Nu , so vot else is new?” she said, doing one of her mother’s voices.

He made a stage swishy gesture. “I’m beginning to think the whole world is.” He then gave a list of movie stars, past and present, who were “that way”; it included everyone except Rin-Tin-Tin and John Wayne. “Even though the Duke’s real name is Marion and he has that funny walk, we’re pretty sure he’s straight, but we’re not all that definite about Rinty. Lassie, of course, is a drag queen from way back.”

Waverley said that he had been very depressed since he and his last lover had split up. At first he had just sat around feeling sorry for himself, typing by day and jerking off by night.