Fran Ross - Oreo

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.

Oreo at the laundromat

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.

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.

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.)