Fran Ross: Oreo

Louise talked in generalities that required the listener to fill in the who, what, where, when, why, and how. She rarely bothered to remember names (“Dere go Miz What-cha-cawm an’ her daughter”), or she made two or three tentative tries at capture before the killing pounce (“Yoo-hoo, Jenkins… I mean, Mabel… I say, George! ”) or substituted names that were close (the “Jolly” of “Go to de sto’ and git me some-a dat dere Jolly” meant Joy dishwashing liquid). She was vague about time. She never gave you the hour or the minute. It was always “ha’p pas’,” “quart’ to,” or “quart’ afta.” Thus any time from 3:01 P.M. to 3:24 P.M. was merely “quart’ pas’.” No one knew from whom she had expropriated the southern expressions that seasoned her speech. When Helen was growing up, Louise would tell her that as long as she had two holes in her nose, she would “be John Brown” if she would ever understand “why de ham-fat” a daughter of hers was so “slub’m” (slovenly), that her hair looked like a “fodder stack,” her room like a “debbil’s hurrah’s nest,” that she lacked “mother wit,” acted sometimes like a “fyce dog,” was a “heathen” because she refused to go to Calvary Baptist Church, and, as for her day-to-day actions, well, everybody knew that “God don’ like ugly.”

In her later, more corpulent years, Louise liked to sit on the front porch rocking in her rocker or gliding in her glider. She sat and rocked and glided and judged. Of a woman wearing a riotous flower print: “Look at dat gal goin’ by. Dere she. Look like any Dolly Vahd’n [Varden]. And she in the fam’ly way fo’ sho.” Of a prosperous dentist: “His money’s awright, but he sho-god is ugly! ” She covered her face. Every once in a while, she would open her fingers, peek at Dr. Bruce, shudder, and close them again, gliding, gliding.

Louise was very lucky. Forget the odds against hitting the numbers; she hit them virtually at will. Two of her regular numbers were 595 (her brother Herbert’s old standby) and 830 (given to her by Helen when she was just a toddler and babbling anything that came into her head), which seemed to come out every August.

The immobilization of James

After James was afflicted, whenever Louise wanted his tip on a number, she would first adjust the asafetida bag she had put around his neck. (Asafetida headed her list of panaceas. The others sounded like ingredients in a you-are-what-you-eat recipe/cure for a constipated, sickly child with rickets and a chest cold: mustard plasters, Epsom salts, cod-liver oil, castor oil, cambric tea.) Then she would point to the numbers she had written down that morning after consulting her dream book. When her husband grinned like a “Chessy ket” (Cheshire cat), she would play that number — in the box, to be on the safe side. On the very day after he was stricken, she had played 421, the number for paralysis, and hit for three hundred dollars.

What she did not know was that James was not paralyzed. When Honeychile had broken the news about Samuel and called herself Hélène Sun-See-A-Ray Schwartz, she had also broken a blood vessel in her father’s brain. James’s affliction was a bad case of retrograde amnesia. As Louise would have said, he remembered the past like white on rice, but he could not hold on to the present for more than a few seconds at a time. He would start to get up, for example, then forget what he was doing before he had moved perceptibly. He could have talked, but he just had not tried.

For years, Louise had commandeered any help she could get from passersby, neighbors, relatives, and friends to help her carry James into the back yard for exercise and hosing off. The exercise consisted in pushing his head toward his knees and pulling his legs out in front of his body, but he always snapped back into his half-swastika pattern. James’s clothes mildewed after the first few months, and there was always the danger of his catching a chill after the hosing. Louise solved that problem by making him a line of stylish ponchos (different materials, patterns, and colors to change with the seasons), which she could just whip off and on whenever he had to be hosed. Louise’s brother Herbert had devised a jar-and-bucket contraption for James’s waste, and she herself fed him her latest recipes. According to her readings of his facial twitches, veal stuffed with ham mousse barely beat out lamb bobotie as his postaffliction favorite.

To Louise, a Jamesian grin meant “yes,” and she consulted her husband on all household matters. She was not far off, since James grinned only when he was having a particularly pleasant memory of the past or had thought of a new way to run a game on Jews. He was, of course, unaware that he kept thinking of the same swindles over and over again and would forget them before he had had time to stand up and get the shells moving. One of his schemes, which recurred every time Louise asked him to give her a tip on the number, was of somehow revising dream books and palming his product off on ignorant Jews as gematria. “Did you dream about a visit from your cousin Sarah?” his copy would read. “Turn to SARAH in the list of names at the back of this numerology book. The number next to that name is G 18-6, which means Genesis 18:6. This verse from the Five Books directs you to ‘Make ready quickly three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes upon the hearth.’ If you do as directed, such mazel you wouldn’t believe! If for some reason you cannot do as the verse directs, find other entries in this book that have the number 18-6 or 1-86. Look for hidden clues that will tell you how Sarah’s visit will turn out. See also VISIT.”

His mind usually jumped then to ways in which he could take advantage of Jewish children. Why stop with the parents? He thought immediately of the local yeshivas. Was there a way, he wondered, to convince them of the need for a know-your-opposition unit on Jesus as a historical figure, using materials that he, of course, would supply them with? What about some bobbe-myseh about the day-to-day life of Jesus, tied in maybe with some shlock toys and games? As for educational value — hoo-ha! He would devise a series of short-answer quizzes to be used at the end of the unit. When the little bonditts of the yeshiva were through with these quizzes, they would be able to tell the goyim a thing or two about the Nazarene. “Do you know in what New Testament verse Jesus makes a pun?” the little smart-asses would say. “I’ll give you a clue — the name Peter means ‘rock.’ Give up? Nyah-nyah, Matthew 16:18!” Or they would sidle up to a gentile and whisper, “Nobody knows what Jesus did on the Wednesday before he died.” Twenty years later, a Jewish art historian would owe this revelation to James: “Byzantine mosaics, the earliest representations of Jesus, will one day prove to be not just an art technique but an accurate rendering of the cracks in [Christ’s] face.” James did not remember, of course, but every day he devised the same quiz:

JESUS THE CARPENTER

The purpose of this quiz is to find out what you know about Jesus as an ordinary laborer. Did he do good work? [For the teacher’s edition, James planned to add his educator’s joke for the day: “Did Jesus know his adz from his elbow?”] Pretend you are a citizen of old Galilee, and answer the following questions:

1. How would you rate Jesus on over-all workmanship?

() A balmalocha () Good () Fair () All thumbs

2. Do you have to wait in for him all day?

() Yes () No () Sometimes

3. Are his hourly rates

() high () average () a bargain?

4. Does he have good work habits?

() Yes () No () Can’t say