Read Oreo for Free Online Page B

I invited the harridan whose regular mooch was ten feet on either side of
     the double doors of that Woolworth’s to come in and pose for us. Each of my students gave
     her ten cents. The total take was more than she could have hustled outside in the cold. In
     the middle of their first fumbling attempts at what critic Bernard Mosher has called “gesture drawing,” I was fired. “Don’t stay in the lines!” I managed to
     shout over my shoulder as I was thrown out.
    Because of my experience with painting-by-numbers (I didn’t bother to mention that I’d been
     fired), I had the perfect background and experience for my next job. Heshie Herschberg,
     dress wholesaler
extraordinaire
, was faced with a Chicken Little disaster. A
     five-thousand-lot shipment of sky-blue summer cottons had arrived with a piece of sky
     missing. With an empty display of resistance, each of the dresses, stewing in celestial
     juices, had refused to dye. There it was—a bull’s-eye about the size of a dime that would,
     if given a chance, ring the size 12 average whatsis of the size 12 average shopper (the
     biggest market for this simply cut basic that you could shop anywhere in).
    As Heshie outlined it, this was my job: “Listen closely, girlie, this particular number,
     it’s my bread and it’s my butter. And to me a life isn’t a life without it should have bread
     and butter. If, God forbid, I shouldn’t be able to unload this number as per usual, my wife
     Sadie will never let me hear the end of it that ‘Revka-down-the-block-she-should-drop-dead
     was able to go to Florida and get a nice tan and me—whose husband is supposed to be such a
     big deal in the garment world, yet—I can’t afford to go around the corner.’ Now, this number
     is going to roll past you at a rate of, oh, one every five seconds, but we can
     adjust—faster, slower, you name it. I want you should wash your hands real good. I want
     people that they are walking down the street and never saw you before in their lives that
     they should take time out to pass a remark that such clean hands they have never before seen
     on a person, except maybe on a surgeon as he slips into the rubber gloves, and what with the
     dope and
dreck
that they had when they saw it on the surgeon, his hands were pretty
     blurry, but on a bet they would say yours were cleaner. With these clean, clean hands, I
     want you should gently grasp each of these number 12 regulars here, pull it tenderly toward
     you, and then with these No. 2 Magic Markers that my brother Morris, he should live and be
     well, has seen fit to provide me with at a special discount, with these No. 2 Magic Markers,
     you should with a swish and with a swash fill in that little dime-size white spot just below
     where the
pupik
should be. Sam Spade—pardon me—with an X-ray machine should be able
     to look at this dress and not see dark edges from where the Magic Marker overlapped onto the
     part that’s already blue. He should not be able to see one little hint, one little breath,
     one little zephyr of a white spot left over from where the No. 2 Magic Marker, God forbid,
     missed. Have I conveyed the importance of this task? Yes? Well, then, begin. I will stand
     here until I see that you’ve got the hang of it, the swing of it, the
art
of it.
     Good, good. I knew you were the one for the job when I saw you walk in. I will come back in
     an hour to check on your progress. I figure that with hard work and steady effort, you
     should be able to say to me at six o’clock on the dot, just before I am ready to lock up and
     go home to Sadie the
nudzh
, ‘Mr. Herschberg, I have the honor of informing you that
     I have finished my appointed task and the number 12 average is, thank God, ready for
     shipment.’”
    Well, children, the finish is, I walked out of there cross-eyed. Before I had gone three
     feet, I had to resist the impulse to color the spots before my eyes. That cleared up after a
     block or two,