Scream

by Tama Janowitz

  You know, you have neighbors. In the country, they do things like that, slapping up a building right on the property line without a permit, and what are you going to do? You keep your mouth shut and try to get along.

  They were good people. When I went out to garden, it was hard work. It was hot. I had to pull up weeds. Then the neighbor appeared. He tried to help. He shouted, “You look stressed! You should take up meditation.”

  I did not want to get angry with the neighbor. I did not want to explain to him, if you are gardening you don’t need to take up meditation, it is a form of meditation.

  As soon as I tried to get some kind of yard work done, he would appear to remind me to meditate. I had been perfectly calm and peaceful until I got the meditation command, but you can’t start shouting back, “I don’t NEED to meditate! I don’t WANT to meditate! I WON’T meditate!”

  When I had calmed down a bit he came and leaned over the fence. “Feeling any calmer now?”

  That was what it was, I guess, to have a neighbor up there. You are more careful about your privacy when you live in a city apartment. You don’t get involved with your apartment neighbors if you can help it. In the city, only a wall separates you. Here, there was a little yard.

  I saw him on the street by the house, when I had taken the bus up from the city. He was walking his dog, and when he saw me he opened his arms in a wide embrace.

  I hugged him back. “Hi!”

  “Ooo, what’s going on here?” he mumbled in my ear and pressed up against me. “That’s quite a greeting.” How could I hug him in a friendly response ever again? Maybe he would say he got definite “vibes” from me. But there were no vibes! To me, if a man has a ponytail but is bald on top, I am not giving him any vibes. I don’t like ponytails, not on men; that’s my own problem.

  I was sitting in a hanging chair that was on the side porch. The neighbor was walking with his wife and dog. “You look like you are sitting in a sex chair!” he shouted.

  I winced. What was a sex chair, anyway? Now I could never sit in that hanging chair again.

  ithaca is the wrong place

  I’m just trying to explain why I thought it was better for me to sell my mom’s house, after I couldn’t look after her at home, and go somewhere without people nearby. I just could not keep out of trouble, I could not keep doing bad things. I was on the bus again in the middle of the day, headed back from the city, when I got a call from the police. “We got a call from your neighbors, saying your dogs are barking.”

  “Oh my gosh. I’m so sorry. I am on the bus coming home. I just spoke to my child; she was at home twenty minutes ago. She said she was going out for a little bit and she must have forgotten to shut the back door.”

  I called up the neighbor right away and apologized. I felt so bad. It was the second time that back door had been left open when no one was home and the dogs had gone out and barked. I had told him at the time, “Please, if that ever happens again, just go around to my mom’s house and shoo the dogs inside and shut the door.”

  I didn’t have parties, I didn’t play music late at night, but once in a while—this was the second time—those dogs did bark, and so it was no wonder the neighbor went to the police. Although, come to think of it, his did, too.

  Then someone began to vandalize the property. I had a big rhododendron bush in the front that I had planted there for my mom, twenty years earlier. Day after day someone walked along and broke off branches.

  Some kid? I don’t know. Just wrecking this lovely shrub. They broke off all the tips that were going to bloom, they broke off the branches . . . Was this shrub impinging on someone’s walk? Yes. A few limbs stuck out. I figured, this was a private street—any pedestrian was free to walk there, and, on their walk, could easily walk around it by taking a step onto the street and back onto the sidewalk. Or, if the shrub bothered you, you could leave a note on the front door of the house where that shrub is planted. “Hi! I like to walk here and your shrub has been bothering me. Would you mind pruning?”

  I mean, the home health worker had no qualms leaving a note on the front door complaining about my mom’s hygiene and physical state. I don’t think anyone would be too shy, in that area, to complain about a shrub with protruding limbs. But, whatever. I was guessing there was some kind of criminal in the area, possibly a student, who enjoyed hurting plants.

  Come spring, after it bloomed, I would prune that tree at the appropriate time. Meanwhile, though, I placed an expensive traffic cone (seventeen dollars from a hardware store) in front of that shrub as a protective barricade.

  The shrub molester took the cone and broke off more branches.

  They took that cone and they threw it into someone else’s yard, a few blocks away. But I did not find the cone right away. It was gone, and my shrub was further attacked. So I bought another cone (seventeen dollars) and a “caution” sign (seventeen dollars) to put in front of that shrub, and I put a stake in the ground to tie that sign—and stake the cone—onto the sidewalk.

  This picture does not show the full construction I built to protect that shrub, I just have it here to give you an idea. But the shrub hater broke off more branches of my rhododendron that was about to burst into bloom once the winter chill had passed in another eight to ten months, maybe a bit longer depending on whether or not this was a good year or bad, and that shrub hater took my sign and my ropes and my stakes and my cone and threw them somewhere, littering the landscape.

  So I bought more things to protect that shrub. I got more cones and tied the cones to some string and I wrapped the string around the shrub. And the person with the vendetta against the shrub pulled everything down and broke off more stalks.

  I reapplied my shrub protection. This time I took a bag of mulch and I put it on top of the base of the cone and the stake to weigh it down so that it would not be so easy to move, since the bag of mulch (seventeen dollars at the local supply store) weighed forty pounds, and then I tied a bunch of wind chimes (very lovely, seventeen dollars in a gift shop) on the whole structure and on the shrub, so when that shrub hater came along I would hear him or her trying to break the shrub branches and stealing those things I had used to protect it.

  But by the time the anti-landscaping person jingled the wind chimes and I got out there, they were gone and the further damage was done. So I rebuilt. And then I poured a few things on the branches to discourage the person who hated my shrub, so that my shrub would teach whoever was trying to hurt it a lesson, and that the person’s gloves would remember not to do that again. I spritzed deer repellent (seventeen dollars) made out of coyote and fox urine and rotten eggs, that was alleged to keep the deer from eating your garden plants, guaranteed to provide six months of foul odor, and I added some maple syrup (seventeen dollars, but I didn’t use the whole bottle) to make sure the deer repellent stuck. And I added some hot sauce. After all, I thought, probably I was being paranoid and it was just one of the local deer at work.

  If it was a deer, the maple syrup might attract the deer to the shrub where it would taste the hot sauce and simultaneously be repelled by the deer repellent causing it to bolt into the ropes and stakes and set off the wind chimes, which would make so much noise I would be able to hear the noise, run to the antique historic diamond pane crisscross windows and look out there and SEE what was at that shrub doing the damage.

  But if it was a student, walking by on their way to the campus and hurting my twenty-year-old rhododendron just for fun on their way to class, it was my belief that when he or she went to class no one would want to sit next to them, smelling like fox urine and rotten eggs, smearing hot sauce on their desk. And handing in papers sticky with maple syrup would not result in a good grade.

  From now on, any person or deer who wanted to try to steal the cones on the sidewalk and the sign suggesting the person walk around rather than wound the shrub, he or she or the deer would learn a lesson, or their nice winter gloves would be spoiled.

  But it was only a short time af
ter I set up this system when the neighbor called me. “Tama! You can’t have a bag of mulch on the sidewalk!”

  No preliminary “Hi, is this a bad time?” No “Listen, I have some concerns . . .”

  No, he just launched into yelling.

  Then he had a lawyer send me a threatening letter saying he was going to sue me.

  life in the old days

  Before I moved into my mom’s house I would take the bus up from Brooklyn every few weeks to check on her. She was falling a lot during this time. Mom was not always so easily reachable, and because she did not always know how to hang up the phone, it would remain busy for days. I wouldn’t be able to reach Mom, nor could the neighbor, and after a couple of days, when my mom didn’t respond, the neighbor (who had her key) went over and found she had fallen again.

  Where I grew up, after the divorce, we had a party line. A party line means everybody on that same stretch of road had the same telephone line. If the phone call was for your house, you knew your ring—it might be one short ring and two long rings. Your neighbor might have the ring long, short, long. Anybody who got a phone call, all the phones on the party line would ring, but you knew not to answer it unless it was your home’s ring. If you picked up the phone and you wanted to make a call, but your neighbor had already made a call, you would hear your neighbor on the phone and hang up and hope they did not blab for a long time so you could use the line to call. Sometimes, if you were on a call, if they wanted, the neighbor might listen in, which was just not considered decent. But people did it.

  I am not sure how this could be in my lifetime, unless I am a lot older than I am admitting. Still, I would know, right? These telephones, they were rotary phones. They had a dial with numbers on it. When you dialed, you put your finger in the hole and turned this whole wheel, which would slowly revolve back to the original position. Touch-tone came later, with buttons instead of a dial. If you wanted to make a transatlantic call—not that anybody in the area knew a foreign person—you had to get the operator to “place the call.” They might tell you to hang up and call you back after they had procured a transatlantic line, because sometimes those transatlantic lines were busy.

  The phone was attached to the wall by a cord, and not a cord with a jack you could unplug. It was permanently tied to the wall, so you had a “telephone table” and a chair placed there so you could sit and speak, since you couldn’t move while you were on it. There weren’t remote controls for televisions, either, but that’s a different discussion.

  If you were very rich, you might have more than one phone in your house, but nobody around there was rich.

  Now, living with Mom, even though there was a phone in every room and no one else sharing the line, you still couldn’t make a phone call. There was always a phone left somewhere that had not been hung up. Mom didn’t like me using her phone, either. It had only been a year since she retired from Cornell at age eighty, but her physical deterioration was profound.

  SHORTLY AFTER I MOVED IN, my mother fell and hit her head. I called the ambulance and went separately to the hospital. She had been strapped to a board. “I have to use the toilet,” she said to me.

  “My mom needs the toilet,” I told the nurse.

  “No,” the nurse snarled. “She can’t. She’s tied up!”

  “Please help her,” I said. “The home health aide had just arrived to bathe her when she fell. She needs to be washed.”

  “No,” the nurse said.

  Hours passed. “My mom wants something to drink, she’s very thirsty.”

  “No.”

  More time passed. “My mom is hungry. My mom has been tied up here for five hours. Please, can’t you do something?”

  “No. She hit her head. She must remain strapped down.”

  The nurse went to join the others at a party out by the station. After six hours a nurse practitioner came in and untied my mom. “Her head is cut,” the woman said. “Where’s my staple gun?”

  It would take five minutes to gently sew the cut on her head, but the stapler speeded things up.

  After that a doctor arrived. “Okay,” he said. “You can take her home.”

  “I can’t!” I said. “She’s dehydrated and hasn’t eaten all day. She’s incoherent. And she can’t even sit up.”

  “She’s fine,” the doctor said. “Get her out of here.”

  “I’m telling you, she’s not able to move. How am I going to get her in the car?”

  “Nothing wrong with her.” Finally he looked at her directly. “How many children do you have?”

  “I don’t,” my mother said weakly.

  “How many children does your mother have?” the doctor said.

  “Two,” I said.

  He turned to my mother again. “Okay, who is this?” He pointed at me.

  “I don’t know,” my mother said.

  “She’s fine!” the doctor said. “She’s able to answer. This wasn’t an emergency, I can’t admit her. You should have taken her to a doctor. Anybody could have sewed up her head.”

  “But . . . it’s Labor Day. Her doctor’s office is closed. Even if she is wheeled out to the car and someone helps me get her in, I don’t think I can get her out when we get home, let alone in the house.”

  “I’m not going to approve any decision to keep her overnight. She can stay here, but you are going to be charged thousands to have her stay overnight.”

  There was nothing I could do; my mother was too weak and dehydrated to move. When he saw I wasn’t going to take her, he decided that he would sign her in as needing a CAT scan or something so that she would be admitted.

  A day or so later the home health service I had hired daily staff from called. “We aren’t supposed to tell you this,” they said, “but we wanted to give you a heads-up: someone at the hospital called Adult Protective Services and turned you in.”

  “What?” I said.

  “We got a call from Adult Protective Services saying your mother was admitted to the hospital. She was dirty, hungry, and dehydrated.”

  “But . . .”

  A day or so later there was a knock on the door. “Hello?”

  “I’m here from Adult Protective Services. I’ve come to see your mother and talk to you. I’m not allowed to tell you who reported you.”

  She sat with me and my mom for a long time. I told her I had help on a daily basis and that I had already contacted a nursing home, nearby, even before my mom’s fall. I told her the hospital knew all this, and that I had taken her there after she fell.

  “I don’t know why the hospital turned you in,” she said.

  Now I couldn’t sleep. Was living here any different than Communist Russia, where your neighbor could call up the KGB to come and get you and take you to the Gulag? What if someone—maybe my neighbor!—called Child Protective Services? The next visit might be from a different social worker, trying to take my kid away!

  I REALIZED I NEEDED HELP. I saw an advertisement for a psychiatrist and gave him a call. I went to his office, which was attached to his house on the lake and smelled like pot. Dr. Sandor F— told me his life story, how he was not Jewish.

  He had been a neurosurgeon but then became a psychiatrist and had worked for Adult Protective Services—or a similar government department—before going into private practice. “Once they’ve come to your house and were unable to find anything wrong, they can’t keep coming back,” he said about APS.

  Then he told me a long story about Eckhart Tolle. “He was a very ugly man who was a failure,” he said. “When he was in his twenties he decided to kill himself. He lay on the floor when he had a revelation: he should stop feeling bad. So he got up and wrote a bestselling book, which enabled him, although ugly and a failure, to make a lot of money and get a beautiful Japanese girlfriend.”

  I didn’t quite follow what the doctor said.

  Then he gave me a prescription for some anti-anxiety pills and told me to make a follow-up appointment.

  The follow-up ap
pointment was going to cost less than the initial visit of $250, but I still didn’t have another $150 to get the rest of his life story, so I just started taking the pills.

  Even though he said Adult Protective Services wasn’t going to come back, I was still upset. All I had been doing, day in and day out, was trying to look after my kid and my mom. What kind of hospital would tie an eighty-year-old woman to the bed for six hours and then turn in the person who had brought her for help? So I wrote a letter to the hospital.

  There was no answer. I wrote again. I saw an ad in the paper; all the people who were on the fundraising board of this hospital were going to hold a grand benefit gala. I sent my letter to all those people on the benefit committee. I wanted to tell them: you are fundraising for a hospital who leaves old people bound to a bed for six hours, while the nurses and doctors gather for a party at the nurse’s station.

  After I sent out the letter again, a man telephoned. “Are you Tama Janowitz?” he said. “I’m from hospital publicity. I looked you up on the computer. You’re famous. Will you come to the hospital to discuss our writing a letter of apology to you?”

  I went to see him. The man in PR was very intrigued with me. He brought in the head nurse and they both looked at me. “We’re not going to write a letter of apology to you. We just wanted to see you in person.”

  MOM FELL MORE FREQUENTLY. I took her to every type of doctor, for every type of test. We went to a neurologist who was young and from some South American country. He hit her on her leg with a hammer. “Ow,” my mom said.

  “Oops,” the doctor said. “Sorry, I was aiming for your knee.” He hit her again and her leg twitched. “Very good!” he said. “Now, listen to this sentence: a brown fox jumped over a sleeping dog.” He looked out the door down the hall. A receptionist was leading a young cute girl, his next patient, to another room.

  “A brown fox jumped over a sleeping dog,” my mom said.