Fran Ross: Oreo

Dear Kids—

Mommy misses you and sends you ∞ love.

Louise sometimes read “∞ love” as “lazy-eight love” and sometimes as “scribble love,” until Helen, home on one of her rare visits, straightened her out. Then she read it as “infanty love,” thinking it was a special term for babies.

The children paid no attention to Helen’s letters.

When Christine was three and Jimmie C. two, Helen’s letters read:

Pittsburgh [or wherever]

Mommy would give anything to just stay at home and take care of her precious babies.

One day, Christine looked up from her coloring book (a leftover copy of her grandfather’s best-selling Esau Gets a Shave ) and snatched the letter from her grandmother’s hand. Louise let the child play with the letter and went into the kitchen to prepare sop buntut Djakarta . Christine stared at the letter for some time, then, carefully selecting her Crayolas (a huge set that boasted exotic colors like red, green, and blue as well as the standard mauve, puce, chartreuse, and oregano), she composed a reply:

Helen made a moue of wry appreciation when she got her daughter’s letter, wrote her by return mail that intentional mirror writing had gone out with Leonardo, and began sending the kids letters about her own childhood remarkable for their Helenic this and that.

Selected excerpts from Helen’s letters to her children: the first twelve years

Minneapolis

Kindergarten! The smell of finger paints at George Brooks Elementary School: wet plaster going sour. Every afternoon at two, we would have a container of piss-warm milk and three graham crackers. Every afternoon at fourteen minutes after two, Roselle Morgan would spit up. We left a big space around her and went to sleep on our little rag rugs, our little noses twitching like rabbits’, our tender sinuses cleared.

Des Moines

My first boyfriend was a nayfish named Roger. I sat next to him in Miss Barton’s first-grade class. One day Roger said to me, “Malvina is my girlfriend. I like Malvina.” I looked at Malvina, the most beautiful first-grader in America. “Frankly, I don’t see what you see in her,” I lied. “Why don’t you like me instead?” “Okay,” he agreed, and I took him home with me for lunch. Louise made coq au vin that day, as I recall. Roger asked for a peanut butter sandwich, which he dipped in that divine sauce. A chaloshes! I dropped him at recess the next day and gave him back to Malvina.

Boston

Time: World War II. Place: Mrs. Dannenbaum’s room, Shoemaker Junior High School. As the scene opens, the students are singing patriotic songs.

“We’re the Seabees of the Navy. We can build and we can fight!”

“… oh, nothing can stop the Army Air Corps — except the Seabees.”

Mrs. Dannenbaum’s husband was a Seabee.

San Francisco

TV? Feh! In my day we had THE MOVIES! In our old neighborhood in West Philadelphia, we had the Cross Keys, the Nixon, the State, the Belmont, the Mayfair, and — bedbuggiest of all — the good old Haverford, affectionately known as the Dump. At the Dump, we ate until we thought we would plotz . Do they still make Grade A’s, Baby Ruth, Payday, Milk Duds, Rally, Hershey (with and without almonds), Butterfinger, Tootsie Rolls, Jujyfruits, Mr. Goodbar, Oh Henry, Raisinets, Good and Plenty, Dots, Milk Shake, Sno-Caps, Goobers, Chuckles, Hershey’s Kisses, Nestlé’s Crunch, and Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews? Mounds, Almond Joy, polly seeds, candy corn, candy buttons, candy-in-the-tin-fluted-cups-with-the-little-tin-spoon, Mary Janes? What about jelly apples, wax lips, fudgicles, ice cream cake?

For eleven cents we could see a double feature, five cartoons, a serial, and a footrace. We had cowboys like “Wild Bill” Elliott, Johnny Mack Brown, Bob Steele, Don “Red” Barry, Tim McCoy, Tim Holt. I can’t relate to a generation that thinks that the real Tarzan is Gordon Scott. We had the only real Tarzan — Johnny Weissmuller — and Jane and Cheetah and Boy. (The guys in the background saying “Ooga-booga” were jazz musicians who didn’t have a gig that week.) We had Maria Montez and Jon Hall, Sabu and Turhan Bey. We had Spy Smasher . But best of all, we had Perils of Nyoka , known to the neighborhood kids, of course, as Pearls .

Every week we’d leave Nyoka, Queen of the Jungle, and her boyfriend Larry in a mess , honey — they were sure to die. We’d rush to the Dump the next Saturday — and the episode would start practically in the middle of the previous week’s chapter. That way, only half the new chapter was really new . As for the “impossible” situation — a nebbech would have sneered at it. Something would always be added that hadn’t been shown the week before. Suppose old Nyoka was in a room with steel spikes sticking out of the walls. Suppose the room was getting smaller and smaller. Suppose you knew she was about to be iron-maidened to death. The next week the spikes would be about as close as Camden, New Jersey, when Larry, who was supposed to be in Camden (or thereabouts), would rush in, throw a piece of bubble gum into the machinery — and away all spikes. We fell for this week after week.

Then there was the footrace — a short feature of a ridiculous cross-country race with a lot of wildly dressed, scrocky-looking competitors cheating their way toward the finish line. When you first went into the Dump, you got a stub with a number on it. If your number matched the number of the nerd who won the race, you got a prize — a bicycle or something. Nobody I knew ever won anything. The movie manager’s son opened a bicycle shop on his fourteenth birthday. He was found Schwinned to death on the day after his fourteenth birthday.

Aside from the Scheherazade Perplex (Maria-Jon-Turhan-Sabu), over the years I had two movie idols: Jane Powell and Barbara Stanwyck (weep, Yma Sumac, over the range of Helen Clark!). I could be as moved by Song of the Open Road as by The Strange Love of Martha Ivers ; by Rich, Young, and Pretty, A Date with Judy, Luxury Liner , and Small Town Girl as by Double Indemnity and Sorry, Wrong Number. Nu , what moves you kids? Road Runner and Coyote!

Wapshot-on-the-Chronicle, Mass.

What ever happened to Toughie Brasuhn?

Baltimore

I wonder if the sign I used to see on Spruce Street is still there? It read: LITTLE FRIENDS DAY SCHOOL. I always expected a bunch of dwarf Quakers to run out of the building.

Denver

Scene: Overbrook High School homeroom. Brenda Schaeffer is telling her classmates Arlene Melnick and Helen Clark about her weekend. How she and her family were invited for Friday-night dinner to the home of a business acquaintance of her father. How at this house, a little old lady with the burning eyes of a fanatic was lighting candles. How this same L.O.L., when she lit the candles, did this also. (She demonstrates for Arlene and Helen, drawing her arms toward herself over the imaginary flame of the imaginary candle.) “Now, what was that all about?” says Brenda, daughter of the biggest pretzel maker in Wynnefield (it was her sacred duty to provide free pretzels for all her friends’ pajama parties). Arlene shakes her head like an ignorant shiksa . It is left for Helen the shvartze to explain to these apikorsim the tradition of the shabbes candles. “Oh,” says Brenda, her curiosity quenched, her religiosity quashed, “I just thought it was some weird European way of warming your hands.”