Scream

by Tama Janowitz

  The contractor and I went and got a bite to eat. “I don’t understand,” I said. “Where did you find this guy? I never met someone who hates windows so much!”

  “I was in the Dandy. I asked for the name of a local architect. He grew up in Burdett. He designed the Dandy. And you know that building in the center of town?”

  “You mean the really ugly one?”

  “Yes.”

  “The one that looks like a cement chicken coop? With a base of crushed brick? The one without any windows?”

  “Um . . . yes. That’s the library.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me! That’s the most hideous wreck anywhere. I thought it was a prison.”

  “It was a beautiful old grange. The architect inherited it and rebuilt it.”

  Every week that architect sent another bill. By the time he was done he had billed for forty hours, and at every meeting he screamed. He wouldn’t return the escrow or retainer. He handed in plans that made no sense. But at least we had the plans, and the contractor was able to redesign it.

  The contractor added black walnut trim, and windows and doors and anything else you see on it that made it special. He made counters and beams and a mantelpiece and it was a combination of Japanese and whimsical and graceful. You would not think someone who had hands like slabs of meat and did not read books and was angry and powerful could have such wonderful visions. But he did.

  Then, Mom died. I had only gotten to show her pictures of it in progress.

  goodbye

  I was at the Chemung County Fair when it happened. I had gone to watch the contractor’s sister Suzette play in a horseshoe tournament. I knew nothing about horseshoes before then. Sometimes at a family gathering, my dad and his uncles and his cousins might play, but I never quite got it myself. It turned out this was a very big sport, especially in upstate New York. And the contractor’s sister was very good at throwing those horseshoes. I went to watch her qualify for the state championships in Montour Falls, at the Moose Lodge.

  I had passed the Moose Lodge many times. It was a large, nondescript, tin-roofed structure with a big sign in front announcing the dinner menu; once in a while the sign would say it was open to the public, but even so, the food advertised was never really very appealing.

  Horseshoes wasn’t the most photogenic or charismatic of sports. The players were, generally speaking, dressed in grubby T-shirts and, for the most part, not physically beautiful specimens. Horseshoes lacked the visuals to become a commercially supported activity. There were no players in tight little outfits whacking balls back and forth, or Argentinians galloping on horses, or men on skates speeding around and bashing each other.

  You could see that this was a complicated and difficult sport but was not going to get many sponsors, and this was probably why there were only a few people sitting around watching in the side lot of the Moose Lodge.

  Even bowling had more visual drama than this. But I sat next to a man in his sixties named Spike who had a lot of big tattoos and a mustache. One of his tattoos was of his two-year-old granddaughter, who had been killed when someone backed their car over her, then drove off and tried to pretend it never happened, but got caught. Spike started crying, and he wasn’t drinking beer, either. He had had polio, so one of his feet was in a very large shoe. He was really nice. I couldn’t help it, I just liked sitting next to this handsome guy in a baseball cap with a clubfoot.

  I could be “one” with the people. I had lived in a trailer, even if it was for only two days. The workers the contractor knew, or met, and put to work on the project, were so stoned all the time they walked around in a cloud of smoke. You could literally see it, I am not exaggerating—it was like Pigpen from Peanuts. They mostly had no teeth. They were on Social Security disability, so the contractor paid them under the table or they would get their SSI checks rescinded.

  They had the bleak haunted look of men who had never eaten anything outside of the hamburger, mayonnaise, and Dorito food categories. They had long straggly hair and beards, and with the teeth missing, they could have been twenty-five or seventy-five—but they all looked seventy-five. These men, with their gnarled, gaunt faces and their wide, stark eyes, they were all as interesting to me—or more interesting!—than the “sculptors” and “artists” and “actors” in New York hustling and jockeying for position and trying to impress you with what restaurant they had eaten at or who was showing their work or what movies they were going to be in.

  These men were broke, they were crippled, they were angry, they were stoned, they were illiterate—we did not have the same references, even though we probably had all watched the same TV shows. They were as foreign to me and as strange and as inscrutable as if I were in another country.

  So now I was at the Chemung County Fair and Suzette was playing this horseshoe tournament. It was a big fair and it was a good fair because it did not just have a midway with rides and fried items, it had a big building with the horticultural displays, where there was table after table where people had brought in bouquets of, say, their roses or gladiolas, or their flower arrangements, most of which were now dying or wilting because it was the last day of the fair, and things they had knit or crocheted, like socks and blankets and stuffed bears, and jars of pickles, all of which I found very fascinating.

  There was another barn with rabbits that were being judged, and another shed with pigs. I think some of the pigs were going to be sent to be slaughtered after the fair, because there were children in a few of the pens lying on top of their pigs, sobbing gently.

  Even though the contractor was acting kind of cold to me, it was still a happy day. I bought some kind of fried dough thing for the contractor’s beautiful mother, Sylvia, who was there watching Suzette play, and I thought, it is so great to be with people, especially women, who actually eat a big fried dough thing, because where I came from, the most any woman ever ate in New York City was a leaf—with the dressing on the side.

  As I was giving her this dough thing dripping with oil and cinnamon-sugar on a paper plate, I saw I had gotten a phone call from the nursing home. It had come in a few minutes earlier. I hadn’t heard it; maybe I was looking at the gladiolas.

  I called back. The woman said, “Just a minute,” and then another person got on the phone and said nonchalantly, “Hi, Tama. Your mother died at lunch about a half hour ago! When do you think you’ll be able to have her body picked up?”

  I sat down on the grass. I had seen my mom the day before. She had been kind of out of it, for her. She was in some kind of big reclining wheelchair but she seemed to be watching TV. I’d sat with her for a bit and had planned to go back that afternoon, after the horseshoes. I lost it and started crying and crying; Sylvia and April, Suzette’s wife, were hugging me and trying to talk to me, but . . . I was in shock.

  My mother! My mother was dead? There was nothing wrong with my mom! I was getting a little cottage built for her, on my property. My mother had said, “Yes, please! Great! When will you get me out of here?” and I had put ads in the papers to try to find staff to take care of her; it was a big project but her little house was almost complete and we were going to be together. Because my mom was my friend—she was my best friend.

  She had always been my best friend. Yes, she could be difficult. She could go into a black rage and slam a door and not speak to me for three days. It didn’t matter. She had always been my friend. We spoke every day, for a long time. She knew my entire life, she told me I was great, she helped me with my writing, she was brilliant, she was kind, she was supportive, there was no one else on the planet who cared for me like my mom did.

  Sylvia and April were so sympathetic, and I was crying, “My mother, my mother.” And then I was saying, “And the contractor doesn’t love me, he doesn’t care about me.” And at that moment I just thought if he cared about me, I would not be alone on this planet. But he didn’t care about me. He had not even come to see his own sister qualifying in this important match. I had my venomous brot
her and I had my insane father. I sat on the grass and bawled and bawled.

  remembering andy

  In 1987, I was in Princeton, New Jersey, when the phone rang. It was a former journalist I knew in New York City, who had once written an article about me for the cover of New York magazine. It was all a fluke, getting that cover story. The journalist had asked to borrow my letters for the piece, saying she just wanted to read them and that she would return them to me. She never did.

  Now she called to say, “Did you know Andy Warhol is dead?”

  “What?” I said, shocked.

  She told me that that morning Fred Hughes, who was Andy’s “business manager,” had called Ed Hayes, a lawyer, and said, “Andy is dead, will you come to his estate?” So Ed Hayes immediately called a reporter for a New York newspaper. It was his job to keep things private, and he was on the phone calling the tabloids. But that wasn’t the point. Before this call, I hadn’t even known Andy was in the hospital. I had seen him a couple of nights before at some opening, and he had told me he was going to be modeling that night in a fashion show, but I didn’t feel like going.

  Andy had told only one person he would be in the hospital, because, ever since he got shot in the 1960s, he had an obsessive fear of dying in a hospital.

  I called Paige, Andy’s and my mutual friend. “Paige, I got a call that Andy died.”

  “What?” she said. “No, of course not. You’re wrong.”

  But she called me back a minute later. “Oh, Tama,” she said. “Come quickly.”

  I got the train to New York City and went to her house. It was awful. She had told me that the nurse had been asleep while Andy filled with fluids; and then, too, maybe it was something his doctor had done incorrectly. Years later, this doctor died in a horrible way, some kind of event had happened and it was apparently while engaging in some kind of rough sex, and he was badly burned and was found stumbling down a street in Manhattan. I don’t think the doctor ever really got over the fact that Andy had died after this basically minor operation. And with Andy’s death, though he hadn’t been treated that nicely by the city, the lights of New York were diminished.

  alone

  I got home and my mother was still dead. And I thought, my mother would never again tell me she thought I was terrific, we would never sit around reading books and talking about them, we would never laugh together, I would never be able to show my mom whatever it was I was working on and have her say, “I think it really starts to take off around page thirty,” and I would never have her say to me again, “Look, I’m not rich, but you can always come and live here with me and it won’t cost anything and we can be together.”

  I had waited on line with my mom when she collected unemployment in the grim offices with the steelworkers who had also been laid off back in the seventies and were waiting to collect.

  We had lived in bleak apartments and trailers and we had gone to the library and gotten out armloads of books and read and read and swapped back and forth while we ate tuna fish sandwiches.

  We had shopped together for clothes at the Salvation Army and then at home tried everything on, pleased with our purchases even though we had spent more than we should have, but some of the things were half off and we knew the things were nice so we had splurged. When the three of us moved in 1970 to the rabbi’s apartment outside Boston, it was so my mother could be near her sister. Although her sister had found her the apartment, not too far from her large Newton Highlands home, after we moved there, my aunt did not really want anything to do with us. My mom adored her sister, though. That’s why we moved there. Mom got very sick. She got sicker and sicker. She lay in bed, coughing. I was fifteen. It irritated me to have my mother lying around, so sick. She kept calling her sister, but her sister was busy. I don’t know why or how her sister could have been so busy. She only lived a ten-minute drive away. Days passed. Mom wasn’t getting any better. I used this situation to my advantage. I told my mother I wanted a skunk. “No!” my mom said weakly.

  I didn’t care. I whined, I wheedled; I was going to get me a pet skunk. I think they might have been somewhat popular at that time—they were sold, de-scented, in pet stores.

  Mom got weaker and weaker. Right before I thought she was going to die, I went out on a babysitting job. The family had a pet skunk. It was not nice. I came back. “Okay, you’re not going to believe this,” I said. “The people I was babysitting for had a pet skunk. I don’t want one now. It smelled, even though it was de-scented, and it wasn’t nice.”

  The next day Mom finally found a doctor who would make a house call. He came over and took her to the hospital.

  She was almost dead, from pneumonia.

  Her sister never came around.

  I don’t know why some families like each other, or at least are able to put on an act.

  When my mom died, my brother quickly called my aunt. My aunt was older than my mom. In thirty years of my mom’s teaching at Cornell she had never been to visit her. Now she called me up. She left a message. “Sam told me that Phyllis had died. I was surprised! I remember I always found her to be a very interesting person. I remember when my mother brought her home from the hospital. I was four years old. Mother put her on the bed. I thought, Oh, that’s interesting. I always found your mother to be interesting. Would you send me her books?”

  Here’s the thing: my aunt was eighty-nine at that time. I know, that’s pretty old. Still, you’d think that by then you would know what to say, like, “I’m so sorry your mother died, my heart goes out to you!” or something like that.

  My mother had always given her sister her books of poetry when they were published, but I guess she had thrown them out.

  Now my mom was dead and all her older sister could say was that she had found her younger sister to be interesting.

  My mother would never again ask me to read one of her poems she was working on; I would never be able to pick up the phone and talk to her. I would never again be able to get her advice, her reassurance, her support. I would never have a mother again.

  a fine romance

  You know how in those books, the middle-aged woman in search of inner peace and a new way of living moves to Bali and meets a Brazilian, like the way Diane von Furstenberg did, and falls in love and brings him home? Like the books and real life, it was hot and heavy all right. But Diane von Furstenberg dropped her hot Brazilian shortly after being on the cover of New York magazine, and as for those romantic popular nonfiction books, they always ended before daily routine and existence reared its head.

  The contractor decided he was better off staying with his Christmas shop–owner girlfriend and helping her find lichen for her reindeer. She didn’t need him to go with her to a Wild Game Dinner at a sports club. She was independently wealthy and didn’t go to that kind of thing.

  It wasn’t until almost a week after my mom died that the contractor came over. My kid was just back from a trip with her dad, hanging around for a week before she had to go back to university. He came bristling up the drive and he saw her and said, “Willow, did you get your brakes fixed?”

  That’s when I remembered, he had mumbled to me at some point that Willow should get the brakes fixed on her car. But you know what? My mom had died, I wasn’t thinking straight.

  “No, I don’t need my brakes fixed.” She scowled at her mom’s almost ex-boyfriend.

  “Oh right!” I said. “Didn’t you say you were going to get them fixed? My memory’s gone. You have to keep up with this kind of stuff. You need to have them fixed.”

  “They’re fine. I’ve driven everywhere with them.”

  “You have to get your brakes fixed! You’re driving back to college on Sunday!” the contractor said.

  “You can’t drive with those bad brakes,” I told her.

  “I have been driving with the brakes like this for months, it’s fine. If I die, I die.”

  “No, that is not fine! You will also maybe kill others.”

  That night I went t
o sleep happy Willow was home. It had been hard, being alone in the house with my mom just having died. Then, when Willow got back from England and New York City (that was the Tuesday after my mom died on Sunday), she went right back to work at her job as turn-down maid at the hotel in Watkins Glen from three in the afternoon until eleven at night. I didn’t try to stop her. Was she supposed to sit here in the house with me while I wept? She loved being a turn-down maid. Just because I was depressed didn’t mean I had to spoil the end of her summer, did it?

  So she worked Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and that job was finished. She would return to college on Sunday. She got back okay on Friday. I remember, because I would wait up for her to get back from work, due to the fact that her job ended at eleven at night, in a region where deer waited on the sides of the roads until a car came by and then would spring out and try to wreck the car and kill the person.

  And when she got in, that Friday night, I heard her car and I finally fell asleep.

  But around 1 A.M., I woke up from a vivid dream, so real that it jolted me awake. In the dream the contractor was maybe four years old and he was just running around the room naked from the waist down, with nothing but a T-shirt on, the way little kids do when they escape from a bath before the adult has gotten a chance to reclothe the kid. There was wall-to-wall carpeting and the contractor (he wasn’t a contractor at that age) was running toward a sofa where Doug, his older brother, was sitting.

  I had never met Doug, but I knew it was Doug. That’s what dreams do, you know. In the dream Doug was saying to the contractor, “Well, hello, Lacy!” The contractor was this little boy dancing, floating around, from the sofa across the carpeting, like a piece of lace.

  I thought, “Hello, Lacy”?

  What could that possibly mean? It was peculiar. I thought, That’s rubbish! Maybe the older brother was saying, “Hello, Lazy”?

  But no. In the dream, he had said, quite clearly, “Hello, Lacy!”