I feel I have performed a real mitzvah for Lenny, and I look up at the clock and see that if I hurry, I just have time to make it to the local movie house for the cultural event of the season. They are having a John Agar Festival.
4 Pets, Playmates, Pedagogues
Christine and Jimmie C.
From the Jewish side of the family Christine inherited kinky hair and dark, thin skin (she was about a 7 on the color scale and touchy). From the black side of her family she inherited sharp features, rhythm, and thin skin (she was touchy). Two years after this book ends, she would be the ideal beauty of legend and folklore — name the nationality, specify the ethnic group. Whatever your legends and folklore bring to mind for beauty of face and form, she would be it, honey. Christine was no ordinary child. She was born with a caul, which her first lusty cries rent in eight. Aside from her precocity at mirror writing, she had her mother’s love of words, their nuance and cadence, their juice and pith, their variety and precision, their rock and wry. When told at an early age that she would one day have to seek out her father to learn the secret of her birth, she said, “I am going to find that motherfucker.” In her view, the last word was merely le mot juste.
Where Christine was salty, Jimmie C. was sweet. He was a 5 on the color scale and was gentle of countenance and manner. He had inherited his mother’s sweet voice, and he was given to making mysterious, sometimes asinine pronouncements, which he often sang. From Louise he had inherited a tendency to make up words. Thus this exchange between Louise and her grandson:
LOUISE: Dessa cream on your boondoggle? (Trans.: “Condensed milk on your boondoggle?) How ’bout some mo’ ingers on dem dere fish eggs, sweetness? (She points to the onions on the red caviar.)
JIMMIE C. (looking sweetly at his plate): I have never had such a wonderful dish. It is like biting into tiny orange-colored grapeskins filled with cod-liver oil. (He snaps his fingers.) I know! These wonderful little things here before me in the bowl of my grandmother are like (and he signs in the key of G) tiny little round orange jelly balls. (On a letter scale with legatos indicated by hyphens and rests by commas this phrase would be GG-CC-G, FF, EDC.) From now on I shall call these good things trevels.
Christine loved her younger brother, but often she was exasperated by him. Every day she would sit on the bottom step in the living room and read to Jimmie C. He stopped her gently once and sang, “But nevertheless and winnie-the-pooh”—which was one of his favorite expressions—“I get Christopher Wren and Christopher Robin confused.”
Christine looked at him and, in a rare instance, made up her own word. “You are a stone scrock, boy.” The family liked Christine’s new word and gave it inflections for various occasions:
LOUISE: Mayhaps if I’m careful, I won’t scrock up dis yere recipe. Las’ time, it turned out right scrockified, dey tell me. I liked it, though. Thought it tayce real good.
JIMMIE C. (gently): Uncle Herbie can be just a tiny bit scrocky sometimes.
HELEN (by letter): The TV set in my hotel room just scrocked out.
CHRISTINE: Oh, fuck scrock!
Louise’s dream
When Christine was about two and a half, she got her nickname. It came to Louise in a dream. Louise was walking down a dusty road with Christine on a gray, overcast day, when suddenly the clouds parted and a ray of sunshine beamed down right in front of the child. Out of this beam of sunshine came a high-pitched, squeaky voice. “And her name shall be Oriole,” squeaked the voice.
When Louise woke up that morning, she went straight to her dream book. Next to the word ORIOLE was the number 483. Louise played it in the box for three days. On the third day, it came out and she hit for five hundred dollars, her first hit in more than three weeks (the longest dry spell she could remember). She had told James about her dream on that first day, when she was hosing him off, and he had grinned. She had told her whole family and all her neighbors, as she usually did with her important dreams. Sometimes the entire neighborhood hit if they could figure out what Louise was saying.
Everyone thought that Louise had found a great nickname for Christine. People had been calling the child various things as she toddled down the street after Louise, cursing them under her breath. They called her Brown Sugar and Chocolate Drop and Honeybun. But when they looked at Christine’s rich brown color and her wide smile full of sugar-white baby teeth, they said to themselves, “Why, that child does put me in mind of an Oreo cookie — side view.” And that is how Oreo got her name. Nobody knew that Louise was saying “Oriole.” When, through a fluke, Louise found out what everyone thought she was saying, it was all right with her. “I never did like flyin’ birds, jus’ eatin’ ones,” she said. “But I jus’ loves dem Oreos.” And this time she meant what everyone else meant.
Pets
Naming was very important in the Clark family. Here are two other instances. Herbert Butler, Louise’s wandering brother, brought back a parakeet for the children after one of his journeys. It was powder blue. Only its color (Louise’s favorite) saved the bird from her total disdain (“He ain’ eem a flyin’ bird, jus’ a settin’ one”). Oreo called the parakeet Jocko, Jimmie C. sweetly called him Sky. Louise, because she could not bother to remember either of these names, called him “bird,” not as a name but as a category, just as she called various other pets of friends and family “cat,” “dog,” and “goldfish.” She sometimes had to call all the categories before she got to the right one: “Take dat go’fish… I mean, cat… I say, dog out fo’ a walk.” After two months, in confusion over his true name, Sky-Jocko-bird died, a living (or rather, dead) example of acute muddleheadedness.
That was also the year that Oreo and Jimmie C. had the German shepherd. Everyone said he was the smartest German shepherd anyone had ever seen in the neighborhood. He could do anything — fetch the paper, roll over and play dead, shake hands. He would romp with the children for hours on end, and they would take turns riding on his powerful back. He ran back and forth between the children, his handsome eyes shining, his powerful muscles rippling as he leaped a fence to get a ball Oreo or Jimmie C. had thrown. His papers said his name was Otto, followed by a string of unpronounceable names, but the family decided to call him something else. This time they quickly agreed on a name, one that Helen suggested. They called him Fleck. “A German shepherd should have a German name,” Helen had written to them when the family consulted her, getting her jollies over the fact that she had named the princely German shepherd plain old ordinary Spot.
Louise said, “Dat Fleck, he eat like any starve-gut dog,” and she delighted in fixing him special meat dishes that no German shepherd before him had ever had, dishes like daube de boeuf à la Provençale and kofta kari. Then misfortune struck — or, rather, bit. Fleck got into the habit of biting strangers, and the Clarks had to get rid of him. The whole family was sad. Jimmie C. summed up their feelings when he said, “He was a nice guy, that Fleck. If he could cure himself of that bad biting habit, brought on by homesickness, I’m sure, he might be able to find a suitable flock — maybe out West, where the employment situation for shepherds is better — and be able to bring his wife and children over from the fatherland.”