Free Scream by Tama Janowitz Page B

provided the oddest education you could hope for. Along the way—later, too, it’s all mixed now—there was Alan Watts, Zen in the Art of Archery, Autobiography of a Yogi, Madame Blavatsky, Ouspensky, Eileen Garrett—who knows?
    In Israel we eventually left the cottage on the beach after a bad flood, and my grandparents, my mom’s parents, gave us money so we could get into an inexpensive hotel nearby. There we met another British family, the Sharkeys, who were on holiday—and at the end of the year I told my mother I was going to visit them in England. Somehow my mom came up with the money for my trip. She and my brother took a boat back to the States and I flew to England. Mom took me to the airport but couldn’t go through security. I was carted away. Because we had entered the country on a “family” passport—I had my own passport now—it showed no record that I had ever entered the country. I don’t know when they decided that was okay, but I was taken to the plane. I couldn’t see my mom. A woman came and found me on the plane. “I haf seen your muzzer,” she said. “I haf seen your muzzer and she was crying and crying. I do not think you will ever see your muzzer again.” I was thirteen. (Later, my mom told me she had asked this woman to find me on the plane to tell me she was going to wait outside security and wouldn’t leave until my plane took off—and not to worry. But, that’s not what the woman told me.) We didn’t really know this family particularly well, but Mom wrote to them and they said I was welcome.
    I don’t remember being scared and I don’t remember thinking I was only thirteen. Even though it was Swinging London in 1969, the Sharkeys weren’t really part of it. They were just a nice, hip family who lived in Radlett, Hertfordshire. Dave had been the first Jewish boxer in the United Kingdom and was a follower of Gurdjieff. Anne, the mother, took me to Biba to get new clothes. Biba had just opened. I remember being very shocked by the fact that you had to change in a communal dressing room, but my mother had given me a small sum of money to go shopping and I had to try on the clothes. I bought an Empire-waist minidress in a Liberty of London print, another dress with a shirred front and puff sleeves, and a few other items, like a hat.
    (By the time I got back to school in the U.S. that fall, I had outgrown the items, so I never really got to wear them much. And I did not realize that wearing clothing from Biba was not going to be normal in an Amherst regional junior high school in 1969. On the first day, a tiny man came running up to me and said, “Take off that hat at once!”
    I laughed merrily. It was a large-brimmed red velour hat made by Madcaps. “Take off that hat and put it in your locker!” shouted the tiny man.
    I thought he was the janitor. Besides, there was no rule against hats.)
    In London we lunched at Cranks—the first trendy vegetarian restaurant—and Anne’s friend Barbara was an editor at The Ritz, a kind of English equivalent of Andy Warhol’s Interview, a newsprint underground paper.
    It wasn’t until 1976 that I went back for my junior year abroad. I had no money, but because the tuition in London was less than New York, my father paid. By the divorce decree he had to pay; he was supposed to pay for my graduate school, too, but he did not. Because of the cost, I dropped out of the Yale School of Drama (M.F.A. in playwriting) after a year, and it was years before I could pay back the student loans I had incurred.
    Around the time I dropped out of grad school, Dad began billing me for my undergraduate education, sending letters stating what he had given me for food when the dining hall was closed on the weekends (he gave me fifteen bucks a weekend) or my annual budget for clothes ($250 a year).
    But I didn’t pay him back.

    *    Some years