“Oui—I mean, yes,” said Oreo.
Scott removed his school books from the Play-Doh sculpture garden, saying that if Oreo would help him with his math problems, he would give her some leads to her father’s whereabouts.
Scott Scott’s math problems and Oreo’s fake answers (the real answers are found only in the teacher’s edition of this book)
Q. Gloria spent a certain amount for a new dress, a pair of shoes, and a purse. If the combined cost of the purse and shoes was $150 more than the cost of the dress, and the combined cost of the dress and purse was $127 less than twice the cost of the shoes, what is Gloria’s real name?
A. In round figures, Shirley.
Q. An aspiring starlet rode a train that traveled at 70 miles per hour from Kenosha, Wisconsin, to the terminal in Los Angeles. She took a limousine that traveled at 20 miles per hour to Watts, escaping in a motor launch that traveled at 14 knots to Knott’s Berry Farm. The entire trip of 2,289 miles required how many coups d’´tats if the starlet spent seven times as long on the motor launch as she did in the limousine?
A. Not counting Carmen Miranda, 3; counting Twentieth Century-Fox and General Maxwell D. Taylor, 547 at one blow of state.
Q. Jim has gone to school six times as long as Harry, and in 4 years he will have gone to school twice as long. What grade of motor oil does Jim use?
A. The question assumes a knowledge of calculus, thermodynamics, and jacks. It is not fair, and I refuse to answer it.
Q. A girl can clean her room in 46 minutes, and her roommate can do the job in 22 minutes. How long will it take them to figure out that they are wasting their time because the house has been condemned?
A. Two shakes of Charles Lamb’s tale.
Q. To lay in a straight walk from his house to his gate, a man used 92 feet of foundation into which he poured 40 cubic feet of concrete to make a slab 8 inches thick. Name his disease and its seriousness, or dimensions.
A. Schizophrenia. A 2-inch, diagonal split.
Q. A sales representative was allowed 17 cents per mile for the use of his car, a 1928 Auburn, and $4 a day for general expenses (another auburn). One month, he submitted expenses totaling $8,332, which he was reimbursed, to cover the cost of these two items. If the mileage charge was $46.82 less than his daily allowance, what name did this salesman sign to the ha-ha-I-got-away note he sent from Nicaragua?
A. A Distant Drummer.
Q. A babysitter charged 72 cents per hour before midnight and $1.10 per hour after midnight. During a certain month, the babysitter earned $12.60 and the number of hours worked before midnight lacked 2 hours of being six times the number of hours work after midnight. How many of you assumed the babysitter was female, and how many of you were correct in that assumption?
A. Three, two, and seventeen, especially Nicholas Chauvin.
Q. Tim and Tom were brothers who had a housepainting business. If Tim could paint 2 cubic feet per minute in decorator colors while Tom was painting his face blue and holding the ladder for Tim, what did the neighbors call the brothers after Tim’s operation?
A. The Oddball and the Evenball.
Scott was delighted with Oreo’s skillful mathematical manipulations. It was very curious, he said, that he himself had no aptitude for such things, yet he could recognize the right answer when he saw it. He complimented Oreo on her “to know-to do,” which he could see she had much of. His mother tried to help him as much as she could, but she was involved in her own creative work. She did not come by her clumsiness naturally, he explained, but had developed it, through years of diligence and application, into an art form. For a person with her creative bent, she had been born with a handicap that would have made a lesser woman give up in despair or change her métier: grace. It had taken years of practice to overcome her inborn agility, dexterity, deftness, and finesse and develop to a point of such consummate cloddishness, such eye-popping lack of coordination that she could not see out of both eyes at the same time.
She had not reached the summit of achievement to which she aspired, however, Scott confided. No, that day was still many vandalized vases, squashed tomatoes (a mechuleh medley), and lightly fantastic trippings away. That day would be reached only when his mother had perfected her art to such a point that she would be able to make breathing and blinking totally voluntary actions. Then and only then would she be ready to star in a play she had written for them both, Clumsy Claudette at the UN, in which she played the title role of warmongering bulbenik and he played the world’s greatest pacifist translator. The marquee would read: SCOTT SCOTT AND SCOTT SCOTT IN SCOTT SCOTT’S CLUMSY CLAUDETTE AT THE UN. They had agreed that although she would give up the stage after the run of the play, she would continue to share in any fame that accrued to his Scott Scott as though it were her own. It was to him equal, since he was convinced that the play, a marvelous melding of their unique talents, would probably run for their lifetime or until one of them was eighty-five, whichever was later.
As his mother exploded from the kitchen with the tray of hors d’oeuvres, Scott rushed over to her. “Permit me. The outside of works—me, I them will carry.” He took the tray from her. “Rest you on that chair-long there.”
Mrs. Scott must have been tired. She tripped only twice on her way to the couch. Scott brought the tray over — a farrago of spills and misses, which Oreo tasted only out of an experimental sense of politeness.
“You said you might have some information about my father?” said Oreo, picking up a plain cracker whose spread was a blob on the underside of the tray.
“Ah, yes, one moment, if it you pleases.” Scott tore a sheet of paper from his three-ringed looseleaf notebook and wrote something with a flourish. “There is!” he said, handing it to Oreo. He explained that she might be able to find her father at either of two sound studios uptown, one on the East Side, the other in Harlem.
Oreo thanked the Scotts for their hospitality and got up to leave.
“So long. It was nice meeting you,” said Mrs. Scott. She waved good-bye, knocking over a stool, which set up a vibration, which made a cup fall off a hook on the kitchen wall and crash to the floor, where she could trip over the shards later.
“To the to see again,” said Scott. He opened the door for Oreo.
“To God,” said Oreo, swinging her walking stick in salute.
Oreo on Second Avenue in the seventies
No one at the In-the-Groove Sound Studios had seen Samuel Schwartz for several weeks. As Oreo walked up the street, she saw a pig run squealing out of a doorway, a bacon’s dozen of pursuers pork-barreling after it. Oreo started running too. As she neared the building from which the pig had made its exit, she saw that it was a pork butcher’s. In its attempt at escape, the pig had made a shambles of the shambles. Oreo continued in the pig pursuit. The porker darted across the street. Oreo flung her walking stick at its legs. The cane did a double whirl, tripping up the pig. A taxi turning into Second Avenue screeched on its brakes, but not in time. The cab sideswiped the pig, which tottered a few feet, then fell dead in front of Temple Shaaray Tefila, directly across from the pork store.
Unwittingly, Oreo was the indirect cause of the pig’s death, but as she reflected on its porcine demise, she realized that she could take out her list again. That hashed rasher of bacon defiling the temple sidewalk — that surely was “Sow.” Yes, that must be so.
10 Sciron
Oreo and Mr. Soundman