Fran Ross - Oreo

When Hap got off the phone, Oreo knew that here was a mother lode of information that, properly worked, could grout together some of the odd bits of information she had about her father. Oreo sidled over to the kitchen. She glanced with just the right look of longing at the arrangement of canapés Hap was making.

Hap’s hearty laughter was surrender. Her generous breasts, transformed by her uniform into giant marshmallows, heaved, sweetening the air above her apron. “Take one, chile, ’fore you break my heart.” (She meant a canapé, not a breast.)

Oreo popped a caviar cracker into her mouth. She praised it overmuch for itself but just enough for her purposes. She went on to sample and laud the other hors d’oeuvres Hap was preparing. A Louise she wasn’t, but good enough for any Almanach de Gotha kitchen below the rank of marquis — viscount would be about right.

A few leading questions about the Schwartzes and Hap offered a verbal tidbit: “His first wife was a colored girl, chile.”

“Naw,” said Oreo.

“Um-hm,” confirmed Marvin and Edgar, who, Oreo found out within the next few minutes, gossiped like yentas .

On Hap’s return from her biweekly stints at the Howard Millers, her sister would fill her in on Jacob Schwartz’s every burp; the boys outdid Bessie in scope with detailed reports on Mildred, Samuel, and the rest of the second floor. In this pincers of prattle, the Schwartzes were squeezed dry.

Oreo had only one thing left to do. “I have to go to the bathroom. Is it okay if I take a book in with me, Miss Hap?”

“Sure, chile, go on. Be a while yet ’fore she be back.”

Oreo stood in front of the bookshelf. She took her time. She looked long and hard. Finally, keeping in mind her late father’s penchant for dumb clues, she narrowed the likely volumes down to two. “Eenie, meenie, miney, mo, catch a cracker by the toe…” She realized how unfair that was and revised the parochial rhyme. “Eenie, meenie, miney, mo, catch a honky by the toe…” She still could not decide. In a fit of impatience, she grabbed both books from the shelf and went into the bathroom. Left-right, left-right, left-right went her heart for the second time in two days.

Oreo in the bathroom

She made her first choice: The Queen of Spades and Other Stories . She riffled through Pushkin’s pages. Nothing. She went through the book more slowly, this time looking for printed clues. Did the Table of Contents form an anagram, the first lines of the stories a coherent paragraph meant for her alone? Still nothing. She sighed and picked up the other book. This time she decided to leaf through page by page. Between pages 99 and 100 (symbolism again?), she found the sheet of paper. On it were two numbers — a telephone number and a span of nine digits, the latter separated, like a social security number, by dashes after the third and fifth integers. Under the numbers was one word: “Aegeus.” She looked ruefully at the book title again. She had to face it. Samuel’s brains had been in his tuchis . He had just had no class. The book was The Egg and I .

Oreo came out of the bathroom. She put the books back on the shelf. “I wonder what the weather’s going to be like,” she said for Hap’s benefit as she dialed the phone number on the sheet of paper.

The voice on the other end of the line said, “GI. May we help you?”

Oreo hung up. She had read an article about GI in a newsmagazine. Which one?

“What they say?” asked Hap from the kitchen.

“Partly sunny,” Oreo said abstractedly.

“Heard chance of rain on my radio this morning. They don’t know no more about weather than my big toe. Less. At least my big toe know when it gon rain.”

Oreo was not really listening. “I have to go in a few minutes. I was only hired until”—she looked at the clock on the far wall—“eleven.” That gave her ten minutes to go through the family telephone book.

“Guess she figured that’d give me time to fix this here mess,” Hap said.

“Guess so.” Oreo found what she wanted on a page headed “Emergency Numbers.” She copied down the three names and numbers. Then she looked in the white pages for the nearest branch of the public library. It was only a few blocks away.

Oreo said good-bye to Hap and the boys. As she closed the door to 2-C, she could hear Marvin telling Hap, “You know what? Anna was here yesterday and…”

Oreo on a pay phone

After an hour’s research at St. Agnes, she had found what she wanted. It had taken almost that long to find a pay phone that wasn’t broken. She made the first two calls knowing that, as usual, neither would be the one she wanted. But she did not know which number would be the last, and right, one until she had called the other two. The first of the three doctors turned out to be a dentist. Just before she hung up on his receptionist, Oreo told her that everything was fine — her cavity was at that very moment filling itself, and she no longer needed an appointment. The next doctor was Mildred Schwartz’s voodoo consultant, Dr. Macumba. Oreo hung up after telling him that for three sundowns he must avoid spicy foods and women who did not shave their legs. She heard him choke on what sounded like a hot sausage or a hairy leg.

The third doctor was the right one, Dr. Resnick, the Schwartzes’ family physician. She told him that she worked for the Schwartzes and that she desperately needed a strong prescription for her menstrual cramps, which were about to descend on her (or whatever direction they came from) that very day. He said, chuckling knowledgeably, that menstrual cramps were all in her head. She marveled at his knowledge, saying that just went to show how smart doctors were, because she had lo these many years thought the cramps were in her uterus. She pleaded with him to humor her, and he condescended to allow her to come to his office for a prescription. The mitzvoth he must perform daily, she exclaimed, thanking him, and was in his office in fifteen minutes. Five minutes after she arrived, she had a prescription for a placebo. She threw the top half into the nearest wastebasket. She also had an envelope and a sheet of stationery that she had stolen from Dr. Resnick on which were embossed, in dignified medico black, his name, address, and telephone number. She had one more stop to make before she went to GI.

Oreo at the Central Library, Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street

She spent half an hour perfecting her forgery of Dr. Resnick’s scrambled-egg signature. Then she rented a typewriter and composed a letter. Its chief paragraph was:

The bearer is therefore authorized to withdraw any and all deposits made to account no. 865-30-2602.

Oreo at GI

She handed the sealed envelope to a man with a head as knobby as a potato and a shaggy, rounded snout of a beard that made him look like a botch of an American bison, the Wolfman, and Cocteau’s Beast — an Irving. He slit open the envelope, read the letter, and subjected Oreo to untoward scrutiny. She tried to look dull-normal when he said what she had expected someone to say.

“I’ll have to verify this with Dr. Resnick.”

Oreo replaced dull-normal with sullen-hurt, the look of the congenitally insulted. “He jus’ gib me de ’scription. Say fill it.” She had decided to use Hap’s economical sentence structure and Louise’s down-home accent.

“I still have to verify it, miss,” he said, smiling like a shaggy potato — almost imperceptibly.

“He jus’ gib it to me,” she repeated sullenly. “Say fill it.” Irving picked up the phone and dialed the number at the top of Oreo’s letter. “Dr. Resnick? GI here. I have a young lady here.” He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “What’s your name, girlie?”