Oreo by Fran Ross Read Free Book Online Page B

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