Scream

by Tama Janowitz

  I asked my friend Sue Martin if she would come with me to go and look at it. The contractor was the sort of man who, for some reason, I didn’t want to be alone with in a room, let alone a cabin.

  He said it was only about ten minutes away from my “new” house, where he would be working, and from the farm where I leased a horse.

  We got in his car to go see. We drove and drove. It was not ten minutes. We pulled in. From the road, it was a work facility, a barn with a tiny roof, one of those places you pass on the roadside. “This is it!” said the contractor.

  “Twenty-three minutes,” said Sue Martin, who was timing our drive.

  The front side resembled a workspace, a factory. On the other side, it was a log cabin. He had built the roadside to look like a workplace. Around the back, it was High Adirondacks, skinned logs, a hot tub out on the upper deck—what anybody would probably refer to as a testosterone palace. You’ve probably seen these places on TV, where real men live in Alaska. Inside, if it was indigenous to North America and a man could kill it and have it stuffed, it was there.

  There were stuffed and mounted trout and bass. There were stuffed and mounted turkeys. There were the heads of deer with antlers with few points and the heads of deer with antlers with many points. Fortunately there weren’t any foxes, but there was a framed poster of a girl wearing a cowboy hat and skimpy shorts with her buttocks hanging out and the caption WIDE OPEN SPACES. I guess because she was looking out to the west.

  “Wow,” said Sue.

  “Come in here,” he said, and took me into the bathroom. There was a big shower, with large river stones lining the walls. “You could fit four people in this shower!” he said.

  You could, too.

  But why would you?

  The whole place, it was great. It was authentic, it was real, I did like it. Don’t get me wrong. If you took me into a 1500s farmhouse in Wiltshire, of daub, wattle, and thatched roof, with a large spit over the fire upon which be roasting a haunch, a loud beehive glade (you know the kind of place I’m talking about), it could not be more authentic. “So, you can live here,” he said. “I ain’t gonna be bothering you, I ain’t around here. I’m living with my girlfriend, it’s empty.”

  A few weeks passed and I was still down there, waiting for my “new” house to close. Closing on a house is something to do with contracts. It takes a long time as legal documents are prepared.

  The contractor had gone over the whole place—with me, on his own—many times.

  Every time I met him and he went over the property to give me an estimate, he sighed and shook his head. I didn’t understand why, exactly.

  I knew the place was kind of a mess. I knew maybe you would want stairs that you didn’t fall through to get upstairs, and you would want things like a toilet and a sink. I just didn’t know why having a place with walls that were falling down and floors that were buckling and broken windows signified any major issues.

  Every time we arranged to meet and he went over the place and kept sighing, I kept sighing, too.

  So, while the contractor viewed the property on which I had not yet closed and kept shaking his head, I kept sighing because he seemed to think it was going to be such a difficult task, fixing up this crumbling farmhouse.

  He was a contractor, wasn’t he? He knew how to do all that stuff.

  Then I really screwed up. I fell in love with him.

  He worked and worked and he stayed there, nights, while I slept in his warm man-cave cabin. And after a few months, even though it was a total gut renovation and he had had to rip out floors and rebuild them, and redo the wiring and the plumbing and the walls and the ceiling and the insulation and every single aspect, just like a house built from scratch, only more difficult, it looked like that house was ready for me to move into. From October to mid-December, that’s how long it took him. It wasn’t entirely finished, but he did a brilliant, elegant, very, very fine job.

  I was innocent then. I did not understand that pipes had to be connected to other pipes and then to some kind of tank or pump in order to have water. I did not understand that you had to have wires going through the walls connected to a pole, or a generator, in order to get electricity. I did not understand.

  I want to communicate. If you are reading this, and you have gotten this far in my memoirs, can you tell me how the elevator works if you are in an office, or the subway, if you had to take a subway to get to work, or your engine, if you drove a car? If you know, I am proud and happy for you.

  Do you know how the key to your car is made? Where you put the transmission fluid? How your phone works? Let’s say you are by your refrigerator, do you know about that coolant or whatever it is? I am sure you do.

  But you are smarter than I. I don’t get it. If there is a radio program, where does the sound go when it’s over? Where does the image that comes out of your TV set go to, after the scene changes? What happens to the leftovers you toss from the vegetable bin? Where are the files you “deleted” from your computer? How do you use a sander? How do you level the ceiling?

  Okay, I know—you know all this stuff.

  But I don’t! I don’t understand.

  My three months overlapped the right time. But the closing kept being postponed. I knew even once I had officially bought it, there would be months and months of additional renovation. That place was still not inhabitable. But for some reason, I just couldn’t register these mathematical time-frame facts.

  It was supposed to close the same day I sold my mom’s house. It did not. My mom’s house sold. I shipped the kid off to college, I put all the contents of my mom’s house into storage. I had eight poodles and nowhere to go.

  a trailer named esperanza

  In all those years, my mother’s colleagues from the university had never called me to see how I was doing. A couple might have visited my mom once. They never asked if I might want to teach a workshop at Cornell, or give a reading, or go to dinner. I know, people are busy.

  But my new friend Sue Martin was different. She said if I had nowhere to go, I could live with her and her wife while the work was done on my new place. But I just couldn’t inflict that on anyone that I wanted to stay friends with.

  Sue found an ad for me on Craigslist. It was for an old trailer. The trailer was a 1966 silver thing; there was a picture of it in a field.

  The woman was asking $450 a month, and I called her. She was in California. She said the trailer was named Esperanza and was in the middle of ten acres and it would be fine to go and live there with my dogs. I could live there until probably November, when it would get too cold. The place wasn’t heated, but my dogs would be fine there and it would be a good place for a writer.

  Anne had raised her daughter in the area, in a house next to Esperanza that was now rented out. Now she had moved to California, where she rescued seals.

  She said she would have Esperanza’s cistern filled with water and that it held a couple hundred gallons. She said she would get the propane turned on soon, and the electric. “And if you want to bathe,” Anne said, “you can go for a swim in the lake. Or there’s an old bathtub outside. If it rains, maybe it will fill up!”

  I was slightly worried, but I was happy I had somewhere to go.

  I put my eight poodles in the car and we drove the half hour to the trailer named Esperanza.

  The trailer was in the middle of a field. It was a tiny trailer and the field was very sunny and very hot. I opened the door to the trailer. A wave of heat approximately 140 degrees swooshed out. Maybe it was more. I don’t know.

  Inside it was much less space than the picture had led me to believe. It had a built-in kitchenette table and banquette seats, there were twin built-in beds, but there was only a narrow space to get around in between the built-ins. I put the dog beds on the floor but that left even less space, especially after I moved my other things in.

  It was already quite full.

  There was a placard of wood on which stones had been glued that spel
led ESPERANZA. There were forks and knives and mugs and a kettle and a lot of other stuff. I was surprised there was no water and there was no electricity, since I had thought, somehow, those things would be working by the time I arrived.

  My friend Sue arrived and we managed to build an enclosure for my dogs, so that they would not have to sit inside Esperanza but wouldn’t wander away in the unfamiliar field. Inside the trailer it was just as hot, even with the windows open.

  The next day I went to the closing of my mom’s house.

  When I got near the turn-off for Esperanza, I noticed a lot of cars parked on the road, at the entrance to the next driveway. I guessed the neighbors in one of the nearby houses were having some sort of Labor Day Friday barbeque.

  It looked like a big gathering. I might mosey over, I thought, when I had checked on the dogs and unloaded the water I had brought from the farm. The dogs ran out to greet me at the car and I was relieved they were alive. I stopped and I got out and I started to unload the nearly empty buckets. Then I realized: How did the dogs get to the car?

  Sue and I had spent the entire day building a fence to contain them. Now I did a head-count. Candy Darling, Gertrude Stein, Petunia, Tartuffe, Moushka were here . . . but Demon, Fury, and Zizou were missing.

  How had they escaped? I was exhausted. I wondered . . . perhaps the missing had gone to the barbeque down the road. I tried to fix the fence and push the remaining dogs back in, dousing the overheated ones with the water. Gertrude Stein in particular looked kind of peaky. Then I headed out, shouting, “Zizou! Demon! Fury!”

  There was a hedgerow separating the bottom of the dirt road from the neighbors. I heard noise on the other side. “It’s her! It must be her! Hey, cut it out!” It sounded like some kind of struggle or altercation was taking place, and Demon—the larger white poodle—crashed through the bushes and came bounding to me. “Demon!” I said. I got to the road. Fury was running in circles as if he was being chased, but when he saw me he stopped and I picked him up. He weighed three pounds. Now a lot of people came running toward me. It was a lynch mob.

  “YOU!” a woman shouted.

  “It’s her!” others yelled. “Get her!”

  “Are you the owner of these dogs?”

  “Yes,” I said. “My dogs escaped, I’m still looking for Zizou!”

  “I have him—in a cage!” the woman said. “Do you know what happened? Do you know what you did? Your dogs escaped! They ran into Searsburg Road. How many dogs do you have!? They could have been killed! I stopped. I had to shut down traffic! All these cars stopped!”

  She pointed to the other six vehicles. There had been more, but they were gone by now. “Luckily, I had a cage!” She pointed to a tiny box. I went over to it. The woman tried to take it from me, but I got there first. My dog Zizou exploded from the confines.

  “We didn’t know where these dogs came from!” a man shouted as he shuffled toward me. “They came from everywhere. We didn’t know where they were coming from. Some were here and we tried to catch them but they escaped that way.” He pointed up the dirt road to the trailer.

  The other people looked very angry. “Yes, we tried to catch them!” They began to stumble toward me ominously. “We have been delayed because of this event.”

  “I called Animal Control!” the woman screamed.

  “I’m so sorry! I just moved into the trailer. I tried to make a fence but they got out. I had to go to get water.”

  Zizou was panting. “That dog has respiratory problems!” the woman said. “I know dogs. He is sick! He needs veterinary care. Animal Control is coming! These dogs could have been killed! I called the police.”

  “Thank you so much,” I said again. “I’m so embarrassed. I’m terribly sorry.”

  The people got back into their cars and I walked with Demon and Zizou and Fury the few hundred feet back to the trailer. It was afternoon and very hot. I yelled at the dogs for a while.

  A man crashed through the brush on the far side of the field. He looked angry. There sure were a lot of people around, even though it had seemed, at first, this trailer was in the middle of nowhere. “Sorry!” I said. “If it was about my dogs escaping, I fixed the fence, I hope.”

  “Are you living here now?” he said.

  “Temporarily.”

  “Who said you could live here?”

  “The owner.”

  “No. You can’t stay here!” he said. “She had no right to let you stay here. You can’t stay here! You do not have a septic system! I am calling the Board of Health. You have to leave.”

  He disappeared back through the shrubs.

  I went to the porch. I sat down for a minute on the chair I had brought. It was early evening now, but still just as hot.

  A police car drove up. A cop got out.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Somebody called and reported your dogs got out,” he said.

  I was filled with terror. I was overtired and dehydrated. I started to cry. “Are you Animal Control?”

  “No, I’m the police. I don’t know if Animal Control is also coming.”

  “Will I be arrested?” I said.

  “What?” he said. “Do your dogs have licenses?”

  “What?” I said. “No. Am I going to get a ticket? I’m going to jail?”

  I couldn’t stop crying. I tried to calm down. In prison I would have running water. I could shower. Even my dogs would be better off. When Animal Control came, they would be taken to a kennel, or to the pound.

  What was I doing here in this trailer? Why was I here? I had spent years moving my mom from nursing home to nursing home, driving miles to visit her. I had spent years cleaning out her house, getting her things packed, trying to stop her house from falling down. I was totally alone. “Take me,” I said to the officer, and I put out my hands to be cuffed.

  “I don’t know why they called the police,” the cop said at last, and he left.

  I was hungry and hot and sticky and I hadn’t obtained any provisions for myself, but I fed my dogs and we all piled into the trailer and I shut and locked the door. It was too hot, really, to sleep with the door shut, but by now I was awfully jittery.

  In the morning the owner called my cell phone. “How’s it going?” she said.

  “There’s no electricity. There’s no water. There’s no propane. I am in a tin can with my dogs and nothing works.”

  “I’ll send help,” she said. After a few hours a truck turned onto the dirt road and a man got out. “I’m a friend of Anne’s,” he said. “She said you needed help.”

  The man was very angry. “It’s Saturday,” he said. “It’s Labor Day.”

  He fiddled with the equipment for a long time. “Even if the electricity was working, the pipes in this thing are ancient!” he said. “There is no way to get the water running through them.”

  He tried to get the propane to work. He poked and prodded and he flipped a switch and there was a crackling noise and then a loud boom. “Get back!” he yelled. A big cloud of black smoke started pouring out. “Get out now! It’s not safe!”

  I grabbed a few things and I put my dogs in the car and drove to my friend Sue’s basement in Ithaca.

  It wasn’t really a basement; it had sliding doors to the outside. It was a normal house. There was water, and a washing machine and dryer. In the evenings I would go upstairs. I cooked vegan food for Sue. Kristine, Sue’s wife, was vegetarian, so she liked the food, too. Sometimes I would watch TV with them. My dogs only escaped once or twice, at the beginning, then the neighbors appeared, but they were not irate or enraged the way they had been in the neighborhood of the trailer. I sat in bed every night with my poodles. I never knew before that how happy I could be.

  I’m sitting on the couch upstairs in Sue and Kristine’s house when the contractor stops over one night to see me. He pulls up the drive, he’s dressed in his work boots and tight jeans and hoodie, and the four of us are hanging out, when Devin, their daughter, comes in. She’s just arrived hom
e from Maryland for a couple of days. She stops in the doorway for half a second, startled. I keep thinking of that movie La Cage aux Folles, only this is the opposite?

  Here she grew up in this normal home with two vegetarian moms and a younger brother, gets back from college for a few days, and a middle-aged woman has moved into the basement with eight poodles and her parents are entertaining a tattooed, mustached Kool-smoking guy with a big truck parked in front of the house. Then she takes off her shoes and sits as if it’s all perfectly usual. Now the scene was pretty much like a face-off: the Indigo Girls versus Ted Nugent.

  A few weeks went by and I was telling someone about Esperanza, and how that trailer blew up when the man tried to turn on the electricity and how my eight poodles escaped and the police came. And there was something very familiar about this story, not just because I had told it a number of times. I was uneasy suddenly.

  Then I remembered: some years before I had written a book, By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee. In this book, the family lived in a trailer with eight dogs and the dogs escaped and the police came and then the whole trailer blew up due to a propane tank incident.

  There were a few differences between what had happened to me and the family in this book I had written so many years previously. For example, the family owned eight Mexican hairless dogs (xoloitzcuintlis), not poodles. And the family consisted of a mother and five kids—each by a different father. Then the mother ran off and ended up living with another woman in California as a lesbian. And when the trailer in the book blew up, it slipped down the hill and into the lake below.