Scream Read online

  dedication

  For John Laughlin

  epigraph

  SLIP

  by Phyllis Janowitz (1930–2014)

  My mother blew away in a molecular

  diffusion. I never stopped asking her

  questions although her answers

  could not be heard over weather conditions.

  Something remains: a smile, an obsolete refrain.

  I remember my mother in Queens; in New Jersey;

  in Portugal; Lima; Franconia, New Hampshire.

  Clever woman, she is liquid mercury

  between my fingers. I see her or touch her

  but there is no holding her, not her arms,

  not her hair. The little that is leftover

  will presently roll out of reach.

  As for me, I will continue the family tradition,

  vanishing, one part then another

  with the argyle socks on the line

  cotton sheets and underwear piecemeal

  swept off in an easterly direction

  the same way I saw her come towards me

  when the Amherst bus stopped at Leverett Station

  setting her down in a blizzard—she

  staggered, hip-deep in snow

  rigid cold stiffening her connections

  to a house she had never been to,

  finding the right road regardless—

  or when suitcase open, her torn

  umbrella turning inside out, she flung

  herself from a taxicab in Boston

  at midnight, the wind baneful

  and Commonwealth Avenue too chilly to welcome

  a visitor so temporary, so uncontainable.

  contents

  dedication

  epigraph

  a visit to dad

  dad, guns, and pot

  my mom

  a supermarket in ithaca

  life in ithaca

  a bit about schuyler county

  an inhabitant of schuyler county

  time in brooklyn

  family relations

  an attempt at explanation

  divorce in the 1960s

  israel in 1968

  mom’s arrest

  psychic studies

  portrait of the artist with a young epiphany

  mom becomes a boardinghouse landlady

  london in 1976

  a side trip to france

  back in london

  new york city, 1977

  an influential teacher

  i was a guest editor at mademoiselle

  looking for work

  transgender publishing outing

  once i was brave

  on lou reed

  on andy warhol

  i buy an apartment

  a city of rich and poor

  how i met the kennedys

  socialites, art, and fashion

  my mom gets a job and a real home

  ithaca is the wrong place

  life in the old days

  how to inspire rage

  the search for help for willow

  leaving ithaca

  in search of lost time

  swag and parties

  my new home

  a trailer named esperanza

  1850

  another day, another nursing home

  goodbye

  remembering andy

  alone

  a fine romance

  the history of mankind

  it’s a man’s world

  my little brother

  i get an accountant

  bookkeeping

  no conclusion

  postscript

  acknowledgments

  about the author

  also by tama janowitz

  bookperk

  credits

  copyright

  about the publisher

  a visit to dad

  I have decided to leave you my property.” It’s my father on the phone. “Please come at once.”

  Dad has lived for fifty-five years in western Massachusetts, five or six hours away from where I’m living in upstate New York. I moved here to look after my mom, and my daughter, Willow, who is seventeen, left Brooklyn to move in with me. Then, I had to put Mom in the home. Now it’s just me and Willow. My husband, Tim, still lives in Brooklyn, but he’ll meet us in Albany and make the trip with us.

  We take my mom’s car, a 1995 Mazda: it only has twenty-five thousand miles on it, but it is still a very old car. I have had the wheels replaced, the cooling system, but it seems every time I drive it, it needs a valve replacement or some other bypass operation.

  My father owns two hundred acres of swampland. It’s mortgaged up to the hilt. It’s got a mortgage, a reverse mortgage, and restrictions. Still, it’s a beautiful swamp.

  Dad has summoned me to discuss how I will handle my inheritance.

  In particular, he doesn’t want my dogs in his house, although he used to have a dog. I guess he means after he dies. Before, when I visited, I had to stay in a motel. Now he says he will cover the floor of the guest room with plastic if I will come to visit, and that I can bring the poodles.

  By the time we arrive it’s evening.

  My father greets us at the front door. He is dancing with excitement. “Hi! Welcome! Sooooo . . . my drug dealer is coming over in a little while!”

  He’s a pothead. Dad is eighty-three years old and has smoked marijuana every day since I was eight. That’s almost fifty years—not quite, but let’s round it up. And when I say “every day,” what I mean is he smokes all day. From when he gets up until just before bedtime, every couple of hours. When he started, he smoked joints and the pot wasn’t so powerful. Now the stuff is so strong that when his friends come over and he offers a bowl, bad things happen. They fall over in a faint, they go backward in a chair and smash their heads on the tile floor, they fall into the swamp, they get in car accidents.

  “My friend Alan took one puff and had a seizure!” he said once, laughing. Dad barely gets high from it, that’s how accustomed to it he is.

  He starts the day with a “public smoke” in his garden room (the one with the hot tub and the orchids). Or at the kitchen table, or on one of the many screened decks overlooking the swamp. Maybe three times a day it’s a public smoke. Then two or three times a day he goes up to his room for a private toke—you can smell it as the smoke plumes out under his bedroom door, great wafts of it, gusts of it, like a skunk got in the house, which is what I always think at first until I realize, Oh, that’s just Daddy!

  There is not an hour when Dad is not stoned. Still, it’s not enough.

  I can tell when Dad needs another few puffs because . . . well, he starts to decline. The black cloud of rage and hate comes over him and he gets angrier and blacker and bleaker. Then he has to go to his room and sit on his bed, which is covered with beaver pelts from his swamp. He keeps trying to kill all the beavers, but they only come back stronger.

  So now he’s banging on about his drug dealer—that the guy might be there within an hour—but it’s nine thirty and I am wiped out. “Dad, I’m tired, and I don’t want to let the dogs out if this guy is going to come up the driveway and run them over.”

  “Nah, I don’t think he’s coming. He’s very nice. He’s gentle. He’s a nurse at the local hospital. But . . . he’s not the most reliable!” Dad cackles with glee.

  Willow comes into the kitchen. I know she smokes pot. Once, I sermonized her at Mom’s house: “I would prefer you don’t, but I know you do. I am now raising you as a single mother. The neighbors here are peculiar. At any time, they can call Social Services and Child Protection. I can get in trouble. They can make my life difficult. If they took you away from me, I would die. I don’t approve of you smoking weed. My dad has s
moked for almost fifty years. It is no different than other addictions. But if you are going to smoke pot, don’t do it in the house!”

  So she smokes pot with her boyfriend, elsewhere. I know Dad is just dying to get high with her. I know because he often asks me, “Will you have a bowl with me?”

  And I say, “No, Dad.”

  And he says, “I guess Tim doesn’t want me to invite Willow.”

  Dad likes to stroke her bare arm and the side of her face and tell her how lovely her skin is. She, in turn, tries to politely move away. He would ask her himself to get high, but . . . I think he is afraid of Tim.

  Even though he and Tim smoke the pipe or bong together after dinner—or maybe more often, what do I know—for a long time Tim has told my dad, on our twice-a-year visits, “Don’t smoke in front of Willow.”

  Tim is very reserved in many ways. He’s British. The last time we were at Dad’s he drank a quart of vodka, smoked a bowl, fell off the stone wall in back, and broke his leg.

  As far as I am concerned, if Willow and my dad smoked together, this would probably be the best way to get Willow to quit smoking pot altogether. Dad can be so creepy! He was always on my case to smoke grass with him when I was growing up. Finally I did, when I was eighteen, and I never touched it again.

  Dad gets so . . . lascivious. That’s right, lascivious. Like, when I was fifteen and I couldn’t find a summer job, he tried to get me to enter a wet T-shirt contest. First prize, three hundred dollars. But I would not. At what age are you supposed to get over being scared of your dad entering you in a wet T-shirt contest? He would have had to drive me to that bar, too, since I was too young for a license.

  Because Dad is a psychiatrist, he knows how to make you feel you are mentally ill if you don’t care for his attentions, or if you don’t agree with him, like how he started explaining—as soon as Willow, his granddaughter, turned thirteen—that the legal age for sexual consent should be thirteen, fourteen tops, for girls.

  But, whatever. So far Dad and Willow haven’t smoked together, and so far Dad hasn’t disobeyed Tim’s request not to get high in front of her, either. But I guess Tim should have thought harder and told Dad, “And please don’t have your drug dealer come over while your granddaughter visits.”

  I’m tired after the long drive from Ithaca to Albany and then all the way to western Massachusetts. I’m yawning. “Well, Dad, I know you wanted me to meet your dealer. But if he isn’t going to stop by, I’m going to sleep.”

  His house is in the middle of nowhere. Dead center, middle of nowhere. His driveway is, like, half a mile long—a dirt road through the woods, off a dirt road in the woods. We are not talking Montana remote, but it’s “a couple hundred acres of private swamp in western Massachusetts” remote.

  The nearest shop is a hippie co-op, a three-mile drive away. He built his house, assisted by my brother, almost forty years ago. Everything in it is made by hand: the hanging lamps of stained glass, the massive wooden couch, the hot tub. Even the beaver skin bedspread is from his very own beavers he trapped and drowned.

  “Okay! Good night!” Dad says. “I’ll see you in the morning. The main thing is, while you’re here, you have to call your brother and tell him you are going to inherit the house and he will not be getting anything!”

  “Hang on,” I say. “You want me to call Sam and tell him you disinherited him?”

  “Yes, so you can work out the details of who gets to stay here when I go. He said he wants to live here six months a year and you said that was okay, that you would only stay here half the year.”

  “But . . . I have to call him and tell him now? You’re not dead.”

  “Oh, it can’t just be something he doesn’t know about! That wouldn’t be right, would it now?”

  “Um . . .”

  “We will organize this tomorrow. You will call your brother and tell him I have disinherited him and it’s all going to you. Of course, I want to remind you: your dogs, they can never come in the house! You will have to design a big fenced area and they will live outside in that area. But you will have to have it specially protected or your dogs will be snatched and eaten. And we can talk about other things. My debts. You are going to have to come up with two hundred twenty thousand dollars to pay the bank, after I die. Do you have that kind of money?”

  I head for bed as his eyes narrow. He’s trying to get me to stay. “How much money do you have?”

  “Oh, gee. Not much!”

  “How much?”

  I’m gone.

  When I get up it’s late. “Good morning! You missed my drug dealer visiting last night!” he says to me.

  I get a cup of coffee. “What time did he show up?” I ask.

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  Willow comes down. She has the upstairs room, the loft. It didn’t used to have a wall on the far side. There was once an open space dropping ten feet to the cement floor of the workroom, and it was right on that edge where the guest bed was placed. Then his last wife, Gigi, wanted the loft room for her loom, so eventually I guess she paid for a wall.

  “I just told your mom, she missed the drug dealer coming last night!” he tells her.

  “Yeah, Mom,” she says accusingly. “You went to sleep too early, Grandpa’s dealer had to make some other deliveries but he did get here eventually, right after you went to bed.”

  “Yes!” Dad says. “He is a nurse, so he had to wait until his shift was over to come by!”

  Dad has made pancake mix and we are supposed to cook our own pancakes—he’s got a frying pan full of oil a couple of inches deep. I don’t want a deep-fried pancake. Tim and Willow don’t like pancakes . . . they don’t really eat breakfast.

  “Nobody wants pancakes?” Dad’s pretty angry. He hasn’t smoked his morning bowl yet.

  I can tell he’s trying to keep his grumbling to a minimum, but I am slightly worried. He may lash out at me later, you never know with him. I should have made the pancakes and had everybody sit down and eat them, but honestly . . . I didn’t want to get into that trap. If I insist that Willow eat, she will bitch that she doesn’t want to. Tim is still asleep. If I wake him, he will get up, eventually, but will not eat anything, either. He will go outside to smoke a cigarette. The two of them will be irritated by me. Whatever I do, it’s going to be wrong. “I will have a pancake, Dad. Do you want me to cook?”

  “You have to call your brother and tell him he will not be inheriting my property. And I need to know: If you’re going to live here, what are you going to do about your dogs?”

  “Dad! I haven’t even had a cup of coffee yet!” What I do have is a throbbing headache.

  “You don’t have to sound so vicious, Mom,” my daughter says. “Grandpa’s just trying to help!” Her tone is of irritation with me and indignant support of old Gramps. That she even gets to consider him her grandpa! This guy only came to the city twice in her entire life to see her, his only grandchild. The other times, we had to drive to see him and then stay in a motel.

  I remember when I was growing up he used to write me letters, signing them “Julian” and adding in a P.S.: “I don’t know whether to call myself your father or your boyfriend.” “Dad” was not an option, at least not in his letters.

  Tim finally emerges from hibernation. He gets his coffee and smokes a cigarette, which he has to do outside even though Dad smokes marijuana constantly inside. Plus, the house is heated by wood-burning stoves, so nothing about this environment is smoke free, but whatever.

  Willow goes out in the canoe. For the moment I have managed to avoid calling my brother, Sam—his only son, the only other child apart from me—to disown him.

  dad, guns, and pot

  Dad goes up to his room to smoke pot before giving the tour of local colleges. It’s Labor Day weekend and there are a lot of colleges in the area for Willow to look at, since she’ll be applying soon.

  It’s already very hot. Willow is cranky in the backseat next to me. “See that house?” Dad says as h
e drives down the snaky winding road that leads to town. “That house is where my friend Bruce lives. When I got divorced from Gigi, I brought my guns to him. I said, ‘Bruce, you keep my guns.’ ”

  “Why did you want him to keep your guns?” I say.

  “I didn’t feel comfortable having them in the house. I was depressed.”

  I have heard this story before, when Gigi left him. She was young, maybe five years older than me.

  For a long time Dad tried to figure out what had gone wrong with this marriage. He decided that she had left him after twenty-five years because she did not want to look after him when he got old. “Gee, Dad,” I said, “do you think maybe you shouldn’t have kept saying all the time how great it was that you had a wife who had to go to work and support you while you got to stay home and play?”

  “What?” Dad said. “No. No. No. Gigi liked to work.”

  Nobody else is listening to Dad. I can’t help but think: What does that mean, you asked somebody to take your guns because you were “depressed”?

  If I had a knife I might say, Please take my knife from me. I am going to murder someone with it. I might say, Please take my knife before I stab myself. I would not tell people, Please, take my knife, due to my depression. I can still have a pair of scissors in my home, even though I am depressed a lot.

  “So . . . does your friend still have your guns?”

  “Huh? Oh no . . . I got them back. I sawed off my shotgun. But it was crooked, so I asked the chief of police to help me saw it off again. The police chief sawed off the barrel of my shotgun and then . . . the gun didn’t work!”

  The police chief had sawed off the barrel incorrectly, maybe it was at a slant, I don’t know. I don’t know what Dad’s talking about. He’s driving and Willow is cranky, grumbling in the way only a seventeen-year-old can: it’s too hot, she doesn’t want to go look at colleges, she’s got a headache, she’s hungry. Tim is in his own zone next to Dad. His body is in there in the front, but . . . he’s not exactly there. “And so, I took the shotgun home. Then I went to the gun store and I asked them there, can you fix this gun? Well, the chief of police came in, the same one who had sawed it off incorrectly. And he saw I had the shotgun and he said, ‘You can’t have that sawed-off shotgun, it’s illegal!’ ”