Scream by Tama Janowitz

went by. I was an undergraduate at Barnard College. I was fixed up on a blind date? Met some guy in the student lounge? Anyway, we went out. He was Greek. We got to talking. I said I had lived in Israel. He said one summer when he was seventeen he had been in Israel. I said, “Some idiot broke my dog’s leg.”
    â€œUmm,” he said.
    This poor guy. I still could not forgive him, and cursing, I left.
    â€     Years later, while doing laundry, we did find unusual things in the washer or dryer. There appeared more than once a giant pair of women’s underpants that could not possibly ever have belonged to either me or my mom, and another time, a man’s tie. At that time I still lived at home; it wasn’t like someone had been in the house and I hadn’t seen him or her.

portrait of the artist with a young epiphany
    E ven in high school I wanted to be a writer. By then it was 1970 and my mom, brother, and I were living in Newton, Massachusetts. My mom decided she had to get away from that town of Amherst, Massachusetts, one year after we got back from Israel. She wanted to be near her sister, who lived in a big house in Newton Highlands. My mom found us a one-year sublet—the walk-up apartment of a widowed rabbi who had taken his own family to Israel for a year. It was a pretty bleak place, especially if you have been in the country most of your life. I had been used to the country and was not particularly happy in an urban environment. Newton Center was a grim, built-up area of small shops and apartments.
    We survived in near poverty. Although my aunt and uncle had told my mother, after the divorce, that she should return to being a dietician (which is what she had been until she got pregnant with me, when she got fired, which is what happened to women back then), Mom did not want to. Even if she had wanted, she would have had to go back to school to be recertified.
    She had already gone back to school and gotten an M.F.A. in poetry. It was a grant from the Radcliffe Institute that partially paid for our time in Israel. But unsurprisingly, jobs for poets were hard to find. She taught courses here and there in community colleges and high schools, which paid almost nothing, so she was forced to eke out an existence for three on the six grand we got from Dad. She had moved here to be near her sister, but her sister never called or called back or came over.
    We never ate out or bought new clothes or went to the movies. Our special treat was buying books with the covers ripped off, for sale at the drugstore. Sometimes there was enough money to get a pound of hamburger meat. Then, using a little press with a lid, we divided the pound of meat into thirds, so that no one got more or less.
    It was hard to visit Dad in his huge house with his freezer full of gourmet ice cream and his stereo system and dishwasher and indoor grill, his atrium and indoor fountain and floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace. Mom had to drive us halfway, then wait in the car, since he was invariably late. From our place in Newton to Dad’s house was a three-hour ride each way, and at his house you worked. Vacuuming, mopping, preparing meals, clearing the table, gardening, clearing pathways. We always operated under a low (or high) level of rage; one never could do a job right or do enough to earn one’s keep or behave in a way Dad liked. One summer I said I wanted to take a course in etymology at U. Mass, and Dad said I could live with him and study. When I got there it turned out he planned for me to pay for summer school myself.
    I was fifteen and had neither a job connection nor a mode of transportation to get to a job, but Dad found an ad in the paper for jobs in a nightclub that was a former Quonset hut. He drove me there and left. I applied for a job as “hostess,” which of course I did not get. That’s when Dad suggested I enter the wet T-shirt contest, but I was stubborn and fractious even