Read Online Scream by Tama Janowitz - Free Book Online Page A

fock” meant. It wasn’t English! I still got the point, but as a come-on, who would go out with someone if that was how he asked you on dates? My mother cried and cried, but not because of the way she was being asked out. It was about my father. “Do you think your father will come back to me? When will he come back?”
    I tried to reassure her, “Soon, soon.”
    The soldier boys and girls in their uniforms were handsome eighteen- to twenty-year-olds, and on the beach there were girls in Jantzen bathing suits with cone-shaped breasts, who were amazingly groomed, with glossy flip hairdos and long, painted fingernails, staring at the boys in their tiny, tight trunks. They played a game with paddles and a hard ball, fast as pumas. These were not my Polish relatives of Paterson, New Jersey. These were not my maternal grandparents’ coiffed and lacquered Hungarian friends. It was the first time in my life that I saw there could be Beautiful Jewish People.
    When it became apparent we were never going to be transferred from the fourth-floor walk-up annex room, we changed hotels and went to the opposite side of town, to a much larger, newer hotel with an elevator.
    Money from my grandparents was being wired to Mom’s Israeli bank from the U.S. Each afternoon we walked great distances to the bank to see if the money had arrived. But every day, when we arrived at two, at three, at four—the bank was closed.
    In the new hotel we befriended an English family. There was a girl a year or two older than me and another who was sixteen, and then the eldest, who was there with her fiancé, and the parents, from Golders Green. Golders Green, England! Never had a name sounded more exotic to me. They had English accents. The oldest was maybe twenty-three; the middle one, Hilary, was incredibly beautiful and sophisticated; the youngest, Linda, was everything I was not: glamorous, with breasts and hips. Had traveled, knew about men, etc.
    My brother had been a picky eater but now suddenly could devour anything; he particularly loved tinned herrings in tomato sauce. I could not eat. The Israeli breakfasts were curious: a buffet of fresh cucumbers and tomatoes and farmer cheese, bread and boiled eggs, and dead cats.
    There were millions of cats in Netanya, not like American cats. These were long legged, with long faces, strange and Egyptian looking, and the hotel put out plates of sardines swimming in blue poison and the cats ate the sardines and died behind the breakfast table.
    I remember a drunk man on the street had a boxer bitch with eight puppies he was trying to sell, and how I begged and begged for one of these. I whined. I cajoled. I pleaded.
    My mother spent all her time crying. She had never been out of the United States before, Israel was a rough and young country, nobody spoke English, and here she was with two kids in a strange land where foreigners kept asking to fock.
    Now I was crying all the time, too. She got the English newspaper and saw an ad for miniature poodles. We went by bus to Tel Aviv and to the advertiser’s apartment, where we bought a poodle from the woman—the gimpy, catatonic runt of the litter, six or eight weeks old. “At least he seems quiet,” my mother sighed. “But remember, dogs are not allowed in the hotel! We have to smuggle him in and keep him hidden!”
    Then I had a puppy, but all he did was sleep. What was the point? I might as well have gotten a stuffed animal. I missed my dog from home. I still cried.
    One night, Linda, the English girl around my age, and her sister Hilary were going to a club. “Would you like to join us, Tama?” asked Hilary. She was the most perfect and tiny creature on the planet.
    â€œYou are inviting her to come with us to the club?” said Linda indignantly. “She doesn’t know how to dance.”
    â€œYes I do,” I said.
    â€œDo you know how to slow-dance?”
    â€œOf course!” I