Free Scream by Tama Janowitz

were other items my brother and I had deemed necessary to obtain: big heavy clay Arab drums with skin tops that only cost fifty cents; inexpensive goatskin or sheepskin coats that smelled very bad; rocks and ancient artifacts like chunks of Roman glass and clay handles from original Turkish coffee cups, all collected on the beach; small carved wooden sheep made of olive wood, and so on.
    The English tourist family we had befriended gathered around us and our twelve trunks. The hotel owners came out, looking ominous. The sleeping poodle (who had been hidden in a bag, since dogs were not allowed in the hotel) jumped out and came to life. He had been in a catatonic stupor. Now he urinated over everything and began running in circles, barking, leaping, and biting. A crowd stopped to watch.
    I didn’t know why the hotel owners were waiting, grinning eagerly, until the police arrived. It was a trap. They had thrown us out and called the cops. Some were in a car and others were in a Black Maria, or whatever you call a police van in Hebrew. The owners of the hotel began pointing at Mom and shouting at the police. Then a whole lot of hotel guests came out to witness as well. Mom was crying and trying to explain the money was supposed to be in the bank and that she would pay, only the bank was always closed.
    In the broiling summer heat of the Mediterranean sun, I, the poodle puppy, and my cute little brother (the same person who would, some fifty years later, work to organize my arrest!) sat on the trunks, surrounded by suitcases and bags, as the police swarmed around.
    The police huddled to discuss the situation. Then one officer came forward and took my mother by the arm. She was led to the police wagon and they opened the back and led Mom in. She was wearing the pink-and-yellow sundress and the pink straw sun hat, the matching pink plastic handbag, and strappy multicolored platform sandals. The paddy wagon doors closed behind her and they drove away. My brother and I sat on the steps with all that stuff.
    â€œThey’re taking her to jail. She skipped out on the bill,” said Mrs. Grynaple in a harsh, gleeful voice. “That’s the last you will see of her.”

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    M y mother was arrested and eventually (okay, later that day) released from prison after the police took her to the bank when it was finally open and discovered the money had in fact been wired into her account.
    From the hotel, we next moved to a pension outside Netanya. Two young guys from Greece, in their twenties, were also staying there, briefly, and one of them stepped on my puppy while it was running in the yard. This boy—I think his name was Jacques—broke the dog’s leg. I have never been so angry in my life. Believe me, the disdain of a twelve-year-old can be very pure and wholehearted. It was an accident, but in my opinion, no more idiotic creature existed than a seventeen-year-old Greek man tripping over a poodle and breaking its leg. *
    At this time my mother subscribed to Fate magazine, and she’d brought the whole collection of back issues with us to Israel. The magazines were full of articles about aliens, UFOs, psychic abilities, how to astral-travel, and stuff like that. She would read aloud articles about peculiar, inexplicable events.
    Things happened to people. Someone did a load of laundry and when they opened the dryer, there was part of a Civil War uniform inside. Apparently this dryer was a conduit to another time? This seemed stupid to me. †
    The other articles in each month’s Fate were usually about things like a rain of frogs in a small section of the Midwest or a woman who panicked and couldn’t get on an airplane because of a bad dream and that airplane crashed . The Bermuda Triangle was a big topic. That kind of stuff.
    I did not like the magazine. It came, I think, once a month, and then my mom made one of us stand against a white wall while the others had to try to see the big