He turned to look as a worried-looking woman who had been waiting for some time tapped impatiently on the glass of the glove counter. “Listen, I have to go. The natives are restless. But have you heard the one about the eight A’s? You know the old joke about the five A’s, yeah?… Well, this one is the eight A’s. Take a guess, go on… No, that’s pretty good. I’ll have to remember that one, but that isn’t it. It’s an alcoholic who belongs to the automobile club and — get this — has narrow feet.” His laugh was like elm blight — very Dutch.
He finally got off the phone and went to the counter.
“Please, schnell,” said the woman.
“Yeah, mach schnell.” He looked over his shoulder at Oreo, then said to the woman, “You mean you’re in a hurry, right? You should say, ‘I am in a hurry,’” he prompted in a slow, you-are-a-dummy voice.
The woman nodded as if to say, “I’ll agree to anything as long as you hurry up and wait on me.” She pointed to a pair of black kid gloves under the glass.
Sidney shook his head. “Those are not for you. You want my advice? Try a slightly larger glove.” He took a pair of dark-blue woolen gloves from the case. He helped the woman put the left glove on. To Oreo, the fingers looked too long, like the woolly blue ape’s. “See,” Sidney said, “you’ll be able to wiggle your fingers around in them. You don’t want a glove too tight.”
The woman shook her head, but she was desperate. She paid for the gloves and walked out.
“Do you have these in seven and a half?” Oreo asked, waving a pair of sandals that would do until she could get back to Philadelphia and buy a new pair of her special style (two simple crosspieces representing Chestnut and Market streets, which don’t cross).
The manager took two pairs of sandals from a shelf behind the cash register and came over. “You want my advice? It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care which pair you take. But if you take my advice, you’ll take the pair that fits tighter.”
“Why, do they stretch?”
“Yeah, it’s Greek leather — stretches a lot. Now, American leather, that’s another story.” He didn’t say what the other story was. He pointed to the sole. “You see this number here?”
Oreo looked at a 37. “That’s a European size,” she said.
He was obviously surprised that she knew. “Yeah, but see in here, it says seven and a half. We mark it ourselves. But take my advice — try the seven.”
“Okay.”
He knelt to help Oreo try one on. It was too small. Her big toe jammed against the strap, which had the give of an iron bar.
“Push, push,” Sidney insisted. “It’ll go, it’ll go.” He shoved the sandal further onto her foot.
“Stop, stop, you’re humping my hallux,” said Oreo, drawing back her foot. “What are you—meshugge?”
“Look, who’s the expert here?”
“I’ll take the seven and a half,” Oreo said firmly.
He shrugged. “No skin off my nose.”
“No skin off my toes,” Oreo said. She changed into the new sandals and put the old ones in a box to throw away in the nearest wastebasket. She winced at the prospect of throwing away one perfectly good sandal.
When she paid Sidney, she said, “You know why business is bad? You give people the wrong sizes.”
“Please, no lectures,” he said, holding up his hand. “From you I don’t need it, oytser.”
She was tempted to denounce him in cha-key-key-wah. “You know what I wish on you?” she said, imitating his inflections. “Part one, may you have a long bed and a short bed, and on the long bed may you have shortness of breath, and on the short bed may you long for the day when I release you from the following curse, which is part two: three weeks of every four you shouldn’t make three thousand, you shouldn’t make two thousand, you shouldn’t make even one thousand. You should make, give or take a little here and there, bubkes! And the fourth week of every four, you should have the worst business of the month!”
She left in a huff, a snit, and high dudgeon, which many people believe to be automobiles but are actually states of mind. She heard Sidney mumble, “The trouble with the shvartzes today is they are beginning to learn about insurance.”
Oreo at Woolworth’s
She bought a zebra-print paper dress, which she intended to wear only until she could get herself cleaned up. She bought a black headband and a white headband. She ordered a hamburger and a black-and-white milk shake. She changed the hamburger to a grilled cheese; since she would soon see her father, she wanted to be in a state of kosher grace.
Oreo at the laundromat
She had changed into her paper dress in a bar. Now she was being hypnotized by her good dress’s revolutions in the dryer. On the next bench, a Chinese woman waiting for her take-out laundry nodded her head in time to the music score she was reading. Every once in a while, she would laugh (scrutably enough, thought Oreo, who knew the score) at one of Mozart’s lesser-known jokes, her lower lids pouching up under her epicanthic folds. Oreo, getting dizzy from watching her clothes, looked with little interest around the laundromat. The circular seas of the washing machines, the round Saharas of the dryers lulled her with their cyclic surge and thrum.
Then she saw something that perked up her curiosity. The side door opened, a man stepped in, dropped to his knees, and looked around as though choosing a path. It was to be toward the table where the customers folded their dry towels and linens, Oreo observed. A woman stood there now, the center of a sheet chinned to her chest, her arms rhythmically opening and closing as the sheet halved and thickened, halved and thickened. She did not notice as the crawler moved under the table, passing the table’s legs and hers at a slow but steady creep. He did not slacken or increase his pace when he came out on the other side but merely kept going. He completed his traverse and went out the front door and down the street, still crawling. He attracted no more notice in the laundromat than would a large dog, for which he was mistaken by a man who shouted after him, “No dogs allowed — can’t you read!” As if a dog would have brought his dirty clothes to such an inconvenient location.
Oreo’s dryer stopped. She took out her dress and examined it. “Pristine, Christine,” she said approvingly to herself. After a slight struggle, she released the dryer drum from her bra’s metallic grasp.
Now what Oreo needed was the purifying waters of a tub or shower. She was grungy from her encounters with Kirk and Parnell, her night on the floor of Mr. Soundman, the dirty stares she had gotten from Sidney as she left Kropotkin’s. She walked along St. Nicholas Avenue looking for a hotel, but she saw something better for her purposes.
Oreo at the sauna
It was run by Jordan Rivers. “Deep Rivers” he called himself, according to the eight-by-ten glossy of himself in the window. It was the first such photograph Oreo had ever seen where those dimensions referred to feet, not inches. This was less out of egotism than necessity, Oreo guessed. Judging by his photograph, Rivers was almost seven feet tall. He was as slender and black as a Dinka, his skin tone the more striking because of his apparel — what seemed to be a billowing white choir robe.