Fran Ross - Oreo

“Well!” said Scott, nodding and rubbing his hands with apache aplomb. “Well, well, well, that goes.” He laid his finger aside his nose. “Then, so, in that case, thereupon! How you call you, young girl?”

“I call myself Christine Clark.”

“Well, well, well, that goes. Since what hour wait you for me?”

“Since three hours less ten minutes,” said Oreo.

“What a damage!” He turned to his mother. “I have need of the tea,” he said, speaking the speech trippingly on the tongue as his mother went trippingly into the kitchen.

While Mrs. Scott was klutzing around, Oreo explained that she obviously had the wrong Scott Scott. The Scott Scott she wanted, né Samuel Schwartz, had changed his name for stage purposes.

Scott nodded vigorously. “You have reason. Me , this Scott here — this is me.”

“But your mother’s last name is Scott too.”

Scott shrugged. “This is true. You have reason.”

Mrs. Scott came back in, squishing a tomato underfoot — that is, in her case, underfeet. She explained that she had changed her name for two reasons: one, she hated her husband for not deserting her because she hated him, thereby putting her to the trouble of deserting him; and, two, she knew her son would be famous someday, and she wanted part of that action. When people spoke of Scott Scott, they would be speaking of her too, since her real first name was also Scott. She and her son had taken her maiden names. Parenthetically, she said that she had assumed Oreo was one of her son’s chums from Professional Children’s School. He had many older friends, she said.

“Which reminds me,” Oreo said, “Sally at the SAG office asked me to say hello for her.”

“Ah, yes, Sally — my old. She is — how you say? — a veritable pedophile.” He shrugged again. “But that is the war.”

“That woman!” said Mrs. Scott with a shudder. She took the dripping teabag from Scott’s cup and plunked it into Oreo’s cup of hot water. “I hope you don’t mind,” she apologized.

“Not at all. I like weak tea. My grandmother calls it ‘water bewitched.’”

Scott clapped his hands. “This is magnificent! That phrase there — this is the word just.” He turned to his mother. “Mama, my cabbage flower, have we of the outside of works to offer this visitor charming?”

While his mother stumbled into the kitchen, Scott excused himself to go to the room of bath. Amidst klunks, bangs, and thuds, Mrs. Scott chatted with Oreo. Oreo marveled at young Scott’s accent. She told his mother that his inflection was so musically Gallic, she had had to remind herself that he was speaking English and not French. Mrs. Scott said that Scott came home with a different accent each day. Fortunately, she knew many languages and could follow him most of the time; but for two days the week before, because of her ignorance of Shluh and Kingwana syntax, Scott might as well have been speaking Shluh and Kingwana.

When Scott came back (one step and he loomed before them), Oreo told him that the other Sam Schwartz — the one who was still Sam Schwartz — must be her father.

Scott stroked his chin, then snapped his fingers. “There is!” He put his hand gently on Oreo’s shoulder. “Then, so, in that case, thereupon, the path of your father, it has crossed the mine many of times. The ten-eighth April, I think, that day there, your father, he was the voice of a bubble of soap, and I the fall of the snows of yesteryear,” he said, perhaps quoting Villon. He paced the floor (two and one-thirty-second paces) and turned sharply. “Have you the knowledge of the mathematics?” he asked pointedly.

“ Oui —I mean, yes,” said Oreo.

Scott removed his school books from the Play-Doh sculpture garden, saying that if Oreo would help him with his math problems, he would give her some leads to her father’s whereabouts.

Scott Scott’s math problems and Oreo’s fake answers (the real answers are found only in the teacher’s edition of this book)

Q. Gloria spent a certain amount for a new dress, a pair of shoes, and a purse. If the combined cost of the purse and shoes was $150 more than the cost of the dress, and the combined cost of the dress and purse was $127 less than twice the cost of the shoes, what is Gloria’s real name?

A. In round figures, Shirley.

Q. An aspiring starlet rode a train that traveled at 70 miles per hour from Kenosha, Wisconsin, to the terminal in Los Angeles. She took a limousine that traveled at 20 miles per hour to Watts, escaping in a motor launch that traveled at 14 knots to Knott’s Berry Farm. The entire trip of 2,289 miles required how many coups d’´tats if the starlet spent seven times as long on the motor launch as she did in the limousine?

A. Not counting Carmen Miranda, 3; counting Twentieth Century-Fox and General Maxwell D. Taylor, 547 at one blow of state.

Q. Jim has gone to school six times as long as Harry, and in 4 years he will have gone to school twice as long. What grade of motor oil does Jim use?

A. The question assumes a knowledge of calculus, thermodynamics, and jacks. It is not fair, and I refuse to answer it.

Q. A girl can clean her room in 46 minutes, and her roommate can do the job in 22 minutes. How long will it take them to figure out that they are wasting their time because the house has been condemned?

A. Two shakes of Charles Lamb’s tale.

Q. To lay in a straight walk from his house to his gate, a man used 92 feet of foundation into which he poured 40 cubic feet of concrete to make a slab 8 inches thick. Name his disease and its seriousness, or dimensions.

A. Schizophrenia. A 2-inch, diagonal split.

Q. A sales representative was allowed 17 cents per mile for the use of his car, a 1928 Auburn, and $4 a day for general expenses (another auburn). One month, he submitted expenses totaling $8,332, which he was reimbursed, to cover the cost of these two items. If the mileage charge was $46.82 less than his daily allowance, what name did this salesman sign to the ha-ha-I-got-away note he sent from Nicaragua?

A. A Distant Drummer.

Q. A babysitter charged 72 cents per hour before midnight and $1.10 per hour after midnight. During a certain month, the babysitter earned $12.60 and the number of hours worked before midnight lacked 2 hours of being six times the number of hours work after midnight. How many of you assumed the babysitter was female, and how many of you were correct in that assumption?

A. Three, two, and seventeen, especially Nicholas Chauvin.

Q. Tim and Tom were brothers who had a housepainting business. If Tim could paint 2 cubic feet per minute in decorator colors while Tom was painting his face blue and holding the ladder for Tim, what did the neighbors call the brothers after Tim’s operation?

A. The Oddball and the Evenball.

Scott was delighted with Oreo’s skillful mathematical manipulations. It was very curious, he said, that he himself had no aptitude for such things, yet he could recognize the right answer when he saw it. He complimented Oreo on her “to know-to do,” which he could see she had much of. His mother tried to help him as much as she could, but she was involved in her own creative work. She did not come by her clumsiness naturally, he explained, but had developed it, through years of diligence and application, into an art form. For a person with her creative bent, she had been born with a handicap that would have made a lesser woman give up in despair or change her métier : grace. It had taken years of practice to overcome her inborn agility, dexterity, deftness, and finesse and develop to a point of such consummate cloddishness, such eye-popping lack of coordination that she could not see out of both eyes at the same time.