Read Online Scream by Tama Janowitz - Free Book Online

little girls; a jeweler’s; and Augie’s Tobacco, with a wooden Indian in front, where you could also buy little jokes and tricks, like a packet of chewing gum with a spring that snapped on the finger of the unsuspecting recipient when the gum was proffered or soap that turned your hands black, and so on.
    There was a policeman who stood in the middle of the intersection and directed traffic. One way was the Jones Library, in a stone building, and opposite were the cinema and the only foreign food the town had ever seen—a Chinese takeout that served egg rolls and chow mein.
    Emily Dickinson had lived in town, in a big house that was now run-down. It wasn’t yet a museum, it was just owned by regular people. When you lived out in the country and you went to town, even though you were just going to the library, you always got dressed up: you didn’t wear shorts, you put on a dress and regular sandals or shoes.
    As it got closer to the time for us to depart for our time abroad, Mom took me shopping so I could get something to wear on the trip. A few shops had recently started to creep into town with influences from the outside: the Hungry U bagel store and a store called Paraphernalia, where there was an Andy Warhol silk screen—his flowers painting, those vivid flowers on a black background with green grass—in the window. My mother and I both thought it was the most beautiful picture we had ever seen. If we could have found the money to buy it, we would have. It was two hundred dollars, more than the price of a Marimekko dress and a gravy boat.
    I am not going to quote what this silk screen would bring at auction today.
    In that store we found something really great on sale: a sleeveless paper minidress printed with a gigantic human eye. It came folded up in a little bag.
    Other than visiting my grandparents in their fourth-floor apartment in Flushing, Queens, and my other grandmother in her basement apartment in Paterson, New Jersey, I had never been anywhere. The El-Al flight was many hours. In economy, the religious Jewish men also traveling got up every few minutes to pray, davening in the aisles, chitchatting with the other travelers. I had never been anywhere.
    The main thing about that plane trip was not that I did not know where we were going, or even why, but that my paper dress was ripping. All night Mom had to keep finding safety pins to try and keep me clad. By the time we landed in Israel and everybody got off and kissed the ground—which confused me, a lot—I was basically naked.
    There is a reason the disposable paper dress never lasted as a fashion concept.
    We were taken to a waiting station for new immigrants. It was hours before we were processed and then driven with others in a van to Netanya, north of Tel Aviv, where we were left at a hotel that was full. Somehow, eventually, a one-room fourth-floor walk-up was found for us across the street.
    For a few days everything was a blur—jet lag, heat, light; the noise at night, the clatter of forks and knives on plates, the foreign language, and the braying of donkeys at midnight and dawn. The beach burned your feet, and flip-flops and the water offered no respite. The sand was so hot that globs of oil and tar that had washed up were melted pools that you could not get off if you stepped in one.
    Netanya was a village. Two-story buildings, the beach, cafés, horse-drawn carriages decorated in bells and flowers. It was swarming and beautiful and alien. I was in shock.
    My mother wore a pink-and-yellow dress and a pink sun hat into town, carrying a pink handbag. She was stunningly beautiful, although to me incredibly ancient, as she was in her midthirties. The men trailed behind us wherever we went, yelling, “You fock me? Let’s fock!” Back in the States, nobody swore. I mean, maybe some construction workers did, but only when they were among each other. I didn’t even know what “Let’s