Fran Ross: Oreo

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 disinclined 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.