Scream by Tama Janowitz Page A

then.
    Without the funding to go to summer school, I returned to Newton and my mother’s house. I got a job folding shirts at a discount store in a strip mall. At least there was bus service, albeit erratic.
    Initially, the rabbi from whom we were now renting might have been some kind of romantic setup with Mom; I’m not sure. But they met and he took off, leaving some stuff behind in his apartment we now occupied. One day I opened a box. “Ma, what is this?” I asked.
    â€œOh!” said my mom, who had been brought up as an Orthodox Jew. “Those are the rabbi’s phylacteries. His tefillin. Just shut the box and I’ll put it away.” She was upset that I had found these items. This scared me a great deal. I did not know what phylacteries were, but just the sound of it made me realize I had done something wrong. I had opened a box of phylacteries! What the hell were they? To a modern kid you could probably say, “Those are sex toys!” and that kid wouldn’t even blanch.
    Like I keep saying, though, things were different then. I was maybe fourteen, fifteen, I don’t know. Sometime after we moved in, I got—found, acquired, was given—paper panels from a billboard, new, that had never been hung. Each panel was huge. And I unfolded them, one by one, and pinned them on the living room wall. When they were installed they made a picture, a portion of this giant billboard that would have been, I don’t know, five stories high on the highway. So now, one end of this living room was taken over by a huge photograph: ONE GIGANTIC EYE. The room of this dreary apartment did not look any better, but it was unusual. That living room now appeared even smaller, covered with part of a billboard of an eye at one end. Design-wise, it didn’t really work, but that was my mother, who always let me do whatever I wanted. It was encouraging that I didn’t have to follow rules.
    Downstairs, there were two doorbells. One was for the downstairs half of the house, the other was for this rabbi’s apartment. And I got a little can of red paint and I painted the button of each doorbell. They were matching doorbells, and now they had red nipples.
    I’m sure those neighbors didn’t like it, but they weren’t Jewish and I doubt they had a way to reach the widowed rabbi in Israel. Anyway, what could they have said? “Your tenant’s daughter painted the doorbells so now they look like nipples”?
    They themselves were pretty rough, anyway; this was not a fine area of Newton, Massachusetts. This was for the people who lived in houses that got turned into apartments. The daughter who was my age spray-painted her name at the bus stop, and this was a long time before graffiti was in art galleries. Back then people who tagged were considered mentally ill or juvenile delinquents.
    Ten years later, in New York City, spray-painting became a career choice, but 1970 was the year that the book Love Story by Erich Segal was published. That early graffiti tagger was reading it. One night I was downstairs there, and I read it, too. I thought it was a bad book, but I also thought Catcher in the Rye was stupid. (How much longer is that book going to remain an American classic, with that pretentious, obnoxious little prick Holden Caulfield dictating some odd version of honesty?) But now I would give anything to have written Love Story. Just saying.
    The school I went to in Newton was part of a regular public school, but it was separate. It was an experimental school. You were supposed to teach yourself.
    Some parts of the experimental concept worked. Not for stuff like math, though, or foreign languages, or science—so basically I missed ninth grade. I had already missed seventh, living in Israel, when I hardly went at all. At Weeks Junior High School—I forget the name of the experimental program—you didn’t go to school at all one day a week but were supposed to work