As Milton went off the porch, Oreo patted her kinky hair, tapped her short toes, and — with supreme confidence — looked forward to the day when her wisdom teeth refused to erupt.
Another of Oreo’s regular tutors was Douglas Floors (né Flowers), her history instructor. Floors was a man of many parts — paranoid, tap dancer, cost accountant. But the chief part was the nature hater. His history lessons were extravagantly interrupted by heartfelt asides on what he had to put up with from trees and grass. He once told Oreo that he had offered to look after a friend’s pachysandra over the weekend, an offer that was hastily withdrawn when he learned that pachysandra was a plant and not an elephant seer whom no one believed. Now he cut short a discourse on the importance of ziggurats to the average Babylonian to say with a shudder, “Last night, the sunset was particularly ugly. Nasty oranges and purples, foul pinks and blues. On my way here, I saw a bird with fat cheeks — and a chest with the coloration of an autumn leaf.” He added dolefully, “Which is all right in its place: on an autumn leaf. At least you expect that kind of ugliness from an autumn leaf.”
Floors abominated the Bay of Fundy, detested the Marianas Trench, abhorred the aurora borealis, reviled the Sargasso Sea, was chilled by the Poles, North and South, and loathed any other manifestation of Mother Nature, commonplace or remarkable. It was from him that Oreo learned historical sidelights that have been suppressed by the international botanist conspiracy (code name: Botany 500): the unsightly foliage that nearly demoralized Sparta along its line of march just before the Battle of Amphipolis; the cumulative ill effects of cumulus clouds and photosynthesis on Richard III; the cypress infestation that was the last straw to relatives of bubonic plague victims fleeing Tuscany in 1347; the vindictiveness and moral turpitude of the puny (and Punic) shrubbery at Zama, the crucial factor in Hannibal’s defeat at the hands of Scipio Africanus Major; the real story behind the Wars of the Roses.
Whenever Floors came to teach, Louise flung a drop cloth over the hedges in front of the house, pulled the shades on the window giving onto the back yard, hid the flower vases and the century plant, and took the Turner and Constable reproductions off the walls. She changed James’s sun-pattern poncho and made sure the children wore nothing depicting flowers, trees, birds, clouds, mountains, rivers, or anything else that could be construed as part of nature’s bounty. Floors would enter, take off his dark glasses, turn his chair so that he would be facing a wall, and begin. “There’s a noisome Indian summer breeze blowing out there today. Such a breeze was blowing on that November day when Charles II lay on his deathbed — and greatly influenced his decision to die and start the War of the Spanish Succession.”
An important incident in the legend of Oreo
Louise’s brother Herbert was a great traveler. On his return from Morocco or Afghanistan or Greece or Chile, he would stop by to see his sister, check on James’s immobilization, and give Oreo and Jimmie C. the presents he had brought with him from foreign shores. He was a huge man, a 1 on the color scale. He had a scar from the corner of his lip to the top of his right ear, a memento of an incident of his childhood outside the village of Gladstone, when, with a callow slip of the tongue, he called two playmates of somewhat higher color-scale value black sons of bitches. Whenever he came to the house, he would go directly to the large mirror in the dining room, pull a flask from his hip pocket, drink deeply, growl, wipe his mouth with satisfaction, and say, “I’m Big Nigger Butler.” It was strange to hear this from a man for whom Hermann Goring could serve as Doppelgänger.
Herbert would fling off his coat and take out a little black book clotted with columns of three-digit numbers, written in heavy pencil. Under or over each digit in a three-figure unit was a dot or a dash or a circle or a slanted line or a cross. Herbert took Oreo on his knee and explained to her what these mysterious markings meant. It was an elaborate system for playing the numbers, a passion he shared with his sister Louise. His diacritical marks showed him which numbers had come out, when, their pattern of recurrence (did 561 prefer to come out in December, for example?), their correlation with world events (did numbers starting with 8 always presage the fall of a South American government, for instance?), and so on through a warren of statistical complexities that only Herbert could keep track of — Herbert who could correctly multiply any figure up to five digits by any other figure up to five digits in his head. But there was one difference between Herbert and Louise. Herbert had never hit a number. Oh, he had come close — once. He had played 782 straight on the day that Louise played 782 in the box and thereby hit for seven hundred dollars when 827 came out. Other than that, he rarely had even one digit in common with the number that hit. But he kept showing Oreo his book, telling her that one of these days, when she was old enough, he would have her trace his markings in ink. He secretly believed that his niece’s palimpsest of his numerical adventures would magically change his luck. His perverse delay (for Oreo had had her eraser and ballpoint at the ready for years) was a good example of herculean self-tantalization.
On one visit, Herbert had just returned from Africa. He had flung off his coat — made of the skin of a lion he had killed in a Nairobi pet shop — and had gone to his accustomed spot in front of the mirror to do his Big Nigger Butler routine, when all of a sudden there was a commotion behind him. He did not turn around, for he could see what was happening in the mirror. He had tossed his lion coat on a chair directly behind him, its hood with the opened-jawed lion’s head nuzzling his back. Oreo, thinking that the skin covered a live lion, had jumped up on the table behind her uncle and was stalking the coat. She came up behind it slowly, her hands behind her. When she was close enough, she pulled her jump rope from behind her back, whipped it around the head and mane, and double-dutched the coat to death — or so she thought. Her uncle, watching all this in the mirror, was impressed with her bravery. “She sure got womb, that little mother,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to mess with her when she gets older. She is a ball buster and a half.” He told the entire neighborhood about the incident. So it was that the legend of Oreo began to grow before she had cut her second teeth.
An important letter
At about this time, Oreo received a letter from her mother that influenced her thinking a great deal. Helen’s letter had its usual quota of asides, such as her paranoia about white dentists: “Suppose your dentist is white and suppose he just happens to harbor an unconscious hatred of black people and suppose he is in a bad mood anyway when you come in. Might he not just happen to bear down on the old drill a little harder, go a little deeper than he needs to? I am just asking and don’t want you to be warped for life by this thought. Besides, you still have your perfect little milk teeth. But since I’m on dentists, I will tell you about Dr. Goodbody. Dr. Goodbody starts spraying Lavoris before you even make an appointment. His sprayer bears a striking resemblance to a flame thrower. But who can blame him for his finickyness, considering the effluvium, the untreated sewage, the ick that issues from some people’s mouths? But Dr. Goodbody has never realized that a patient who is going to a dentist is like a housewife who cleans up before the maid comes. Such goings on with water picks and dental floss and mouthwash and toothpaste — to say nothing of sandpaper!”