Oreo (16 page)

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.)

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.

Left
-
right
,
left
-
right
,
left
-
right
went her heart.
Thump/tap-thump
,
thump/tap-thump
,
thump/tap-thump
, went her feet and cane.

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.

A short vertical leap, a settling jounce, a lighted 2, a suck-slide. Oreo
stepped into the hallway. It had an acrid odor.

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.

Oreo was just warming to her subject when Mrs. Schwartz said, “But I
must
have
roaches. I use them in my . . . work.”

Oreo put on a concerned look. “I don’t mean to tell you how to run your business, but
would it be possible to breed them in captivity? That way, the rest of the apartment could
be roach-free and you would still have sufficient numbers for your . . . work—and under
controlled conditions.”

The woman looked at Oreo sharply. “Excellent idea, excellent,” she said slowly. Without
lowering her arm, she nodded her torch hand several times. “I have other, more serious
objections, Miss . . . ?”

“Christie,” Oreo said quickly. “But just call me Anna.” What would a foreigner know,
anyway?

“I will get to my objections in a moment, but first I have a favor to ask of you, Miss . .
. Christie.”

There was a definite smirk on her face, Oreo decided. Either that or she had a facial tic
without a toc, on top of her catatonia/boil. Oreo waited.

“Would you allow me to read your palm? I know you must have many more tenants to see today,
but I assure you it will not take long. I see something in your face that interests me.”
Oreo readily agreed.

They moved to the round table. Mrs. Schwartz shoved the animal-vegetable-mineral box
against the wall so that they could both get their feet under the table. It was just as
well. Oreo did not want to touch the ishy thing with a bare toe and inadvertently put a
jambalaya jinx on her perfect feet. She liked her hexes straight, simple, homogeneous.

Mrs. Schwartz studied Oreo’s palm silently for several minutes, her eyes rapidly scanning
the mounts and lines. With a long-nailed finger she traced Oreo’s rascettes. A chill pimpled
along Oreo’s right leg and around her hairline, as it always did when she was profoundly
shaken by something—good or bad. Her body registered the same sensation for Buxtehude well
played as for singing telegrams well sung, only her brain distinguishing between what she
called “thrilly chills” and “chilly chills.” Put on a sweater, her brain told her now.

When the woman dropped her hand as though it were a hot sea urchin, Oreo laid it to envy.
She had had her palm read before and had been told that her Mounts of Jupiter, Venus,
Apollo, and Lower Mars were transcendent, her lines of Mercury and Life enviable, those of
the Sun, Head, and Heart virtually a crime against the rest of humanity. In short, she had a
fabulous, a mythic hand—the quintessential chiromantic reading (though some might cavil at
a rather too well-developed Plain of Mars).

“Anything wrong?” Oreo asked.

The woman seemed to be agonizing over a grave decision. When, presumably, she had made up
her mind, she was friendlier than she had been since Oreo’s arrival. “You must stay and have
some lunch with me, my dear. Can you do that?”

“I’d love to,” Oreo lied. How was she going to fix lunch with one hand in the air? “Is
there anything you’d like to tell me about the reading? Anything special?”

The woman dismissed this possibility with a peremptory flick of the left hand. “No, no,
the usual, I am afraid. You will marry a basketball player at twenty-one, have three
children—two boys and a girl—and live happily ever after.”

Oreo knew all this was a stone
lie
. With
her
hand? Amaze the Amazons,
perhaps—but live happily ever after with some jive guard and three crumb snatchers?
Foul!

While Oreo was fuming, the door opened and two little boys, about six and seven, came in.
Their identical cream-colored shirts and navy-blue caps, ties, and short pants suggested a
school uniform or a mother with a twin fetish. They had latchkeys on chains around their
necks and were carrying small plaid suitcases. The boys stood in front of the door, which
they had not closed completely, rubbing what looked like black track shoes against the
pitiful calves of their spindly legs and wrinkling their navy-blue knee socks, which they
then hiked while keeping their eyes on Mrs. Schwartz and Oreo. They looked like frightened
voles. Their large gold-brown lemur eyes seemed to be searching out escape routes.

“Close the door,” said Mrs. Schwartz. “If I have told you once, I have told you thirty-two
and five-eighths times.”