Scream by Tama Janowitz Page B

at a job that day. It could be volunteer or otherwise.
    I found a volunteer job at the zoo, and spent a lot of time shoveling manure and other things. One day, the elephant keeper asked me to watch the baby elephant while she took a lunch break. She handed me a whole bunch of tiny bottles of Johnson’s baby oil, the tiny travel-size ones, and told me to give the baby elephant a rubdown. Then she left.
    This elephant was young, but already weighed hundreds of pounds and was as tall as me. The skin of the elephant was dry, thick, and bristly. It was in a big round pen and there was a crowd watching. I entered the round pen with the baby elephant. It was a hot day, and I was dressed only in shorts and a tank top. The elephant was naked.
    I poured oil on the elephant. Now it was no longer dry but slippery, being massaged by a semi-naked fourteen-year-old. In the sun it was hot. Soon I was covered in oil, too.
    The crowd watched with interest, growing in size.
    Suddenly the three-hundred-pound baby elephant grinned, backed up, and came at me. It ran into me, slamming me full force with the top of its hot, heavily greased trunk.
    Already slinky from spilled baby oil, punched in the stomach at full force, I was thrown up in the air and back, sending me down in front of the audience, which was now howling with laughter.
    The wind was knocked out of me. So was any pride I had at being in charge of the baby elephant. I lay flat on my back for a few minutes before I scuttled out of the pen and staggered off.

mom becomes a boardinghouse landlady
    H ow would we survive? Mom wasn’t earning any money and Dad was giving us hardly any.
    The rabbi was due to return, so we needed a new place to live. My mother answered an ad for a job as a landlady for a house owned by some people in Lexington, Massachusetts. Now retired, the couple who owned the place were joining the Peace Corps, heading to Sierra Leone and leaving behind their dog and their youngest son, who had not yet moved out, along with a bunch of tenants renting rooms in the back half of the house. We moved in before the couple went on their adventure, so they could show us the ropes.
    It was a big ramshackle Victorian house in a fancy town. The tenants kept to themselves, except for the owners’ son, in his early twenties, who took all his food to his room, where he saved it under the bed. He only came downstairs to clean his guns and rifles at the kitchen table.
    Then there was the neighbor. She had been having an affair—for twenty years—with the man who had gone away to Sierra Leone with his wife. Now lonesome for her boyfriend, and irritated by her own husband, she liked to come over, unannounced, especially when her son returned to live with them, bringing his team of sled dogs.
    One day my mom made a very fancy lasagna and left it on the counter. When she came back, it appeared to have been elegantly sliced down the middle. The whole front half was gone. There were various people under suspicion. First was the rifle-cleaning son, who left chicken bones under his bed, followed by the neighbor, who we believed suspected my mom of having an affair with the man who had gone to Sierra Leone with his wife (she wasn’t).
    Our paranoia grew until one day when we came into the kitchen we discovered that the house dog (we were also looking after him for the year) was able to reach high enough to devour food left on the counter, depending on how close to the edge it was positioned. In a sense this was a bit of a disappointment. Nobody wants to have their paranoia shoved down their throat, not when you can blame a neighbor for sneaking in and eating half your casserole.
    The dog’s name was Brahms and he was a semi-poodle. He was an early evolutionary prototype of a labradoodle or a goldendoodle, before these hybrids existed, and because of his early stage on the evolutionary scale, he felt no shame about leaning over onto the counter. I am sure later hybrids