Scream

by Tama Janowitz

  But I keep on going to the nursing home every single day to visit Mom, waiting for the latest attack from my own brother. He started to accuse me of things. Like, my mom’s Social Security check is directly deposited into her bank account, out of which I pay my mom’s nursing home bills. He’s accusing me of committing Social Security fraud. Then I get a letter from him saying I’m embezzling. There’s more and more accusations about me stealing Mom’s money. He e-mails me vitriol, constantly.

  I’m still trying to get Mom calmed down from his visit six months ago, when he went to the home and read James Thurber to her every day for three hours at a stretch. It’s become hard for her to talk and she can’t move. She was trapped. They had to increase her medication after he left.

  And now he’s after me. And I am afraid. You can try to be good, you can try to do the right thing, but no good deed goes unpunished, etc. Look at my mother. She was about the most decent, moral, good person on the planet, although she did make a porn film once. It was private and she did it before it was something everybody did, and I don’t really see what that has to do with morality. She was just doing what my dad wanted, since he liked girl-on-girl action, just as he loves lawsuits. So does my brother. Lawsuits, I mean: I don’t know about girl-on-girl.

  divorce in the 1960s

  My mom got arrested in 1968, a year after my parents divorced. The local townspeople, had they learned of this, probably would have said it was to be expected. She was already a divorcée, and at that time, in a small New England town, divorce was a shocking thing.

  One little girl told me she could no longer come over to play because her mother said I was “from a broken home.” In my family, divorce did not just mean Mom and Dad split up—it meant no one else on my father’s side ever spoke to us again. Well, except for my grandmother, for a bit, when she came to see my dad. Otherwise, even now, I get these Facebook friend requests from strangers, and it turns out we’re related. Their messages are all some version of “I spent a lot of time with your grandmother, who was my great-aunt, when I was growing up—but I never met you, because of the divorce.”

  At least this makes me realize I’m not making things up.

  Dad was busy. He was having an affair with his secretary, and then a bit later with some guy. The secretary lived with us for a while before the divorce—Mom, me, my brother, Dad, and his secretary. Also he was having sex with his patients, neighbors, maybe more guys? I don’t know!

  It didn’t matter to Dad—he had had his tubes tied, or whatever the slang is for a vasectomy.

  As he once said to me, “I would never have any more kids, not after the way your mother ruined you and your brother.”

  He kept the big house. Dad “borrowed” money from his mother, Grandma Anne, although he never repaid her. Later, when he sold that house and could have paid her back, he still did not. “All I want, Julian, is when I get old, you will build a little house for me to live in on your property,” she used to beg.

  But he never did. And he never gave her back her money. She went on living in her second husband’s tiny house in Paterson, New Jersey. It was a step up from the basement she had inhabited for many years, prior to her remarriage. She had spent years working in various discount department stores, where she lovingly purchased for me various women’s undergarments of a peculiar nature, and dating a man who was in the Mafia, or who was at least a gangster, with whom she smoked pot even though she did not care for it.

  Her neighborhood got worse. Men broke into their house. She heard them coming in the window (her husband, Harry, was deaf). “Harry, take this knife and stab them,” she would say. Harry was eighty. The burglars took the knife from Harry and stabbed him first.

  There was no use robbing the place, though: it was filled with my grandmother’s paintings and items from Korvette’s, May’s, and S. Klein’s—brassieres, sweaters with sequins, and other items you could find on sale.

  She and Harry moved to a low-income Jewish ghetto in Florida. Then Harry died, and then she died, and Dad took her ashes and threw them in the wild blueberry bushes on the bank of his swamp and said, “My mother always liked picking blueberries, now she can be part of them forever!” This was at the memorial.

  But I’m getting out of order. Mom let Dad keep the big house because she felt sorry for him; Dad loved that house so much he said he would kill himself if he didn’t get to stay there.

  So he built us, his ex-wife and kids, a tiny house at the bottom floodland of his property. I guess that was part of the divorce settlement. Maybe he just gave her five grand toward it, I don’t know. I don’t remember the details except at that time Dad earned thirty-six thousand dollars a year and he gave his ex-wife and children five grand a year that got upped to six.

  The deal was, he would pay her this six grand a year until we each turned eighteen, and then he would pay her three grand a year for life or until she remarried. But he didn’t. He just stopped paying the money.

  Going to court with Mom to face off against Dad and his wife was not a whole lot of fun. But who else was going to go with her? And Mom needed the three grand a year! Dad and his wife Gigi showed up stoned and giggling and sneering; and the judge’s decision was yes, Mom was entitled to that amount of money. But, still, Dad never paid.

  In addition to divorce being such a shocking and terrible thing, there really weren’t any jobs for women apart from being secretary or whatever. I mean, when my mom got pregnant with me she had been a dietician, but in those days, you could get fired if you were a woman and got married, or if you got pregnant. My aunt had gotten an advanced graduate degree in economics at Duke, but after that the only job she could get was as secretary to an economist.

  People today, especially young women, have no idea how limited the lives of women were back then. They might have let one or two women become doctors—and then it helped if you had connections or were rich—but otherwise, if you were a woman, you were a nurse. Then you married and stayed home.

  BEFORE THE DIVORCE, Mom was kept pepped up by a huge permanent supply of some kind of speed, little orange triangles, that Dad got for her by the thousand-pill jar so she could keep her weight down. She didn’t have a weight problem, but she had been plump as a child, so it was a constant issue for her. Even if she had been plump, women wore girdles all the time, which was an unbelievable undergarment—thick rubber, tight, hot, and white, with four dangling bands hanging down with rubber and metal clasps on the end to hold up the woman’s stockings. All women wore these as soon as you hit about fourteen years old.

  If you were female, and a wife in particular, that was just part of the job uniform. In Mom’s case it went with getting to live in a beautiful home. Even though she was very frugal, she still had to dress the role of the doctor’s wife. The house had Danish modern furniture, the latest in stereo equipment, imported Italian quarry tiles, wall-to-wall carpeting, whatever you could think of. There was an office for his psychiatric practice downstairs, a huge workroom, and sliding doors everywhere; there was an indoor atrium with a fountain and fish pond, a massive fireplace, a huge kitchen with an indoor grill.

  But my parents were not happy. Both stalked the halls in the black hole of rage. Both were experts at sulking, but it was not just sulking; it was a cloud of dark hate that could neither be cut through or broached.

  There was money, but unless we had guests, the thermostat was kept low, so the house was freezing cold, and winters then were bitter. At that time you could buy monkeys from ads in the back of comic books for twenty dollars, and I got one. The squirrel monkey arrived from Florida in a wooden box. The monkey declined, languishing in the cold, in a cage built by my father. I was afraid of the monkey, since he bit viciously. He was not my friend. We moved him into a bathroom and chained him under the sink, where he occupied his time by stuffing food into the heating vent in the wall.

  One day my parents had people over and screams emerged from the bathroom. They had forgotten to tell the guests there wa
s a monkey in there, and while a woman was sitting on the toilet, the monkey had popped out. The monkey was sent to the zoo, where he joined a group of hundreds of other squirrel monkeys who had been ordered from comic books, back when you still could do so.

  After the divorce: “Your bedroom here will always be your room,” Dad said.

  But in the new prefab home I moved to with my brother and my mom, there were cement floors downstairs and no money for anything to put over them. Upstairs there was wood, though. We couldn’t afford any furniture, so we had an inflatable couch that did not last long, and a couple of metal folding reclining chairs, which folded up whenever anyone sat down in them and then in slow motion toppled over, spewing out the human contents.

  Some nights, Dad came over to our house to screw Mom—not every night, but in between the other women—and then there was a new wife, Annette, but us kids weren’t invited to the ceremony because (although his mother was invited) they were going to be dropping acid at the wedding and he didn’t think it would be appropriate. Annette was a nurse. Dad explained to me she had sexual frigidity due to having been molested by her brother. Did I need to know that, at twelve years old?

  Dad was starting to smoke a lot of pot then; Annette, too. Naturally, I repeated this to some friend—I hadn’t been told not to say anything—and one day when Annette took me shopping she said she had found out I had been telling on them, although she wouldn’t tell me who had told her. She said that I was never to repeat this and that unless I kept my mouth shut I was going to get my dad fired and the FBI would take them away.

  The shopping wasn’t any fun, although it was supposed to be entertaining for me to watch her buying an expensive Marimekko dress and a fifty-dollar white china gravy boat. I guess it was something of a break for me from vacuuming their house and weeding their garden.

  Dad was furious. “You bought a one-hundred-dollar dress and a gravy boat? The gravy boat is ugly!” he said to his wife. It didn’t matter that it was her own money Annette had spent.

  Poor Dad. No wonder after he dropped me off that night at the village fair on the town commons, he went back across the parking lot and got into his car with another woman, who wasn’t Annette.

  When Annette kept on with her frigidity and bad taste in china service, they went to Mexico for six months so Dad could cure her. I guess it didn’t work, though, because when they got back Dad still stopped by to see Mom. She would go out to try to find a new boyfriend, but Dad was right back in there. I think what finally inspired her to leave was my comment, “Dad has a pair of binoculars on his deck, and when I looked through them, I saw they point right to your bedroom!”

  You could get trapped in that town and never escape. I had a girlfriend whose parents split up a few years after mine. Her father was a mathematics professor at the University of Massachusetts, but her mother had to get a job as a cafeteria worker in a school so they would have enough money to survive on. When my friend was still in her teens she had a baby.

  People think the 1960s was all about being a free spirit and ending repression. They don’t realize, there still weren’t any real jobs for women, that women felt guilty and ashamed about getting divorced, and that even if you wanted to have an abortion, they weren’t legal. The shame and stigma of divorce today is about as well remembered as the feeling of what it was like to wear a girdle.

  israel in 1968

  Mom was brilliant. She went back to school, got an M.F.A. in poetry, and then got a grant from the Radcliffe Institute to write. Her parents were not well off, but they said they would help pay if we wanted to move to Israel. So, in June of 1968, we rented out the house and left the country.

  My brother was not all that happy about going there, so Mom said we would try it for a year and if my brother still wanted to come home, then we would. I was twelve, and my brother was ten.

  Our poodle, Fury, was sent up the hill to live with Dad and Annette in the big house. Mom rented out our place, fully furnished, with our three beds on metal frames, the inflatable sofa you had to blow up every time someone sat on it, and our two family heirlooms: a quartz crystal and an amethyst geode my grandfather had given her. It was a good thing we did not have more heirlooms, because the tenant, a wealthy woman named Pinky Astor from New York who wanted to try the rural life for a year, stole the large quartz crystal and amethyst geode when she left. I would still like them back.

  Maybe something happened to make her feel entitled to them. I know my dad might have made a mistake, if he forgot my mom was no longer living there and went down one night. After we got back, before Pinky Astor moved out, I went for a walk with Dad, and Pinky emerged from some bushes and began shouting at him. “You are the white underbelly of America!” she screamed.

  I was upset for my dad. I can’t possibly imagine what brought this about.

  My upbringing in the small New England town was the world as I knew it, and very little had crept in from the larger world. It was still Olde New England, with a town commons where cows grazed; the Lord Jeff Inn; Hastings Stationery, a family business where we got school supplies; a shoe store where a red-haired, partially deaf (two terrifying attributes) man sold velveteen Mary Janes to little girls; a jeweler’s; and Augie’s Tobacco, with a wooden Indian in front, where you could also buy little jokes and tricks, like a packet of chewing gum with a spring that snapped on the finger of the unsuspecting recipient when the gum was proffered or soap that turned your hands black, and so on.

  There was a policeman who stood in the middle of the intersection and directed traffic. One way was the Jones Library, in a stone building, and opposite were the cinema and the only foreign food the town had ever seen—a Chinese takeout that served egg rolls and chow mein.

  Emily Dickinson had lived in town, in a big house that was now run-down. It wasn’t yet a museum, it was just owned by regular people. When you lived out in the country and you went to town, even though you were just going to the library, you always got dressed up: you didn’t wear shorts, you put on a dress and regular sandals or shoes.

  As it got closer to the time for us to depart for our time abroad, Mom took me shopping so I could get something to wear on the trip. A few shops had recently started to creep into town with influences from the outside: the Hungry U bagel store and a store called Paraphernalia, where there was an Andy Warhol silk screen—his flowers painting, those vivid flowers on a black background with green grass—in the window. My mother and I both thought it was the most beautiful picture we had ever seen. If we could have found the money to buy it, we would have. It was two hundred dollars, more than the price of a Marimekko dress and a gravy boat.

  I am not going to quote what this silk screen would bring at auction today.

  In that store we found something really great on sale: a sleeveless paper minidress printed with a gigantic human eye. It came folded up in a little bag.

  Other than visiting my grandparents in their fourth-floor apartment in Flushing, Queens, and my other grandmother in her basement apartment in Paterson, New Jersey, I had never been anywhere. The El-Al flight was many hours. In economy, the religious Jewish men also traveling got up every few minutes to pray, davening in the aisles, chitchatting with the other travelers. I had never been anywhere.

  The main thing about that plane trip was not that I did not know where we were going, or even why, but that my paper dress was ripping. All night Mom had to keep finding safety pins to try and keep me clad. By the time we landed in Israel and everybody got off and kissed the ground—which confused me, a lot—I was basically naked.

  There is a reason the disposable paper dress never lasted as a fashion concept.

  We were taken to a waiting station for new immigrants. It was hours before we were processed and then driven with others in a van to Netanya, north of Tel Aviv, where we were left at a hotel that was full. Somehow, eventually, a one-room fourth-floor walk-up was found for us across the street.

  For a few days everything was a blur—jet l
ag, heat, light; the noise at night, the clatter of forks and knives on plates, the foreign language, and the braying of donkeys at midnight and dawn. The beach burned your feet, and flip-flops and the water offered no respite. The sand was so hot that globs of oil and tar that had washed up were melted pools that you could not get off if you stepped in one.

  Netanya was a village. Two-story buildings, the beach, cafés, horse-drawn carriages decorated in bells and flowers. It was swarming and beautiful and alien. I was in shock.

  My mother wore a pink-and-yellow dress and a pink sun hat into town, carrying a pink handbag. She was stunningly beautiful, although to me incredibly ancient, as she was in her midthirties. The men trailed behind us wherever we went, yelling, “You fock me? Let’s fock!” Back in the States, nobody swore. I mean, maybe some construction workers did, but only when they were among each other. I didn’t even know what “Let’s fock” meant. It wasn’t English! I still got the point, but as a come-on, who would go out with someone if that was how he asked you on dates? My mother cried and cried, but not because of the way she was being asked out. It was about my father. “Do you think your father will come back to me? When will he come back?”

  I tried to reassure her, “Soon, soon.”

  The soldier boys and girls in their uniforms were handsome eighteen- to twenty-year-olds, and on the beach there were girls in Jantzen bathing suits with cone-shaped breasts, who were amazingly groomed, with glossy flip hairdos and long, painted fingernails, staring at the boys in their tiny, tight trunks. They played a game with paddles and a hard ball, fast as pumas. These were not my Polish relatives of Paterson, New Jersey. These were not my maternal grandparents’ coiffed and lacquered Hungarian friends. It was the first time in my life that I saw there could be Beautiful Jewish People.