by Tod Davies.
Life moved on. We did too—from the working class Irish neighborhood where we’d outgrown our small bungalow to a rambling old house set in a row of other rambling old houses. These once were inexpensive homes for the working class. My father had lived two doors down as a teenager. Now he moved in as a prosperous post war executive, for it had become a neighborhood of the aspiring upper middle class, with leafy trees, good crosswalks, and a bike lane.
My parents had made an offer on a different kind of house on the other side of town, a new build across the street from a park. It had an intercom, which I found enticing as a sign of modernity. But the offer was refused, and rudely, too—the owners unfortunately made it clear this rejection was on account of my mother and her Asian look. It didn’t matter that she came from a far more successful and educated family than my father’s. She was foreign. There was no more to be said.
Except of course by her. She raged. I secretly raged with her, and I suspect that rage has stayed with me all these years, tinting many experiences that I’ve had and many things that I’ve done.
It turned out to be a good thing, though. There was much to love in our new house. Hardwood floors. A music room. Thick white porcelain bathtubs. A basement playroom for my brothers. And a yard where my father built a tree house looking over into the neighbor’s beautifully manicured garden.
These neighbors were lovely. They had a son, a perfect house, and a fluffy white dog named Duke, for John Wayne. The mother, Ruth, kept a grey horse named Mouse in a stable in Marin, over the Golden Gate Bridge. She would invite me to go with her, and let me ride Mouse around and around the ring. When we were at home, she’d invite me over the fence onto the stairs to their garden. We would sit inside a glassed in porch next to her kitchen drinking tea.
Was it because of Duke that my brothers yearned for their own dog? I’m not sure. But what I do remember is my brother Bill and his friend Barry picking out two black Labrador puppies from the same litter. Barry named his Brandy. Bill’s was christened Elsa.
Why Elsa? It may be my imagination, but I remember that when you picked up her ears and pushed them down on top of her head, she looked like a good-natured German hausfrau. For Elsa was the best natured dog imaginable. As Labradors so often are.
She loved all of us. Even though she was officially Bill’s dog, we all took turns walking and fussing over her. My father adored Elsa. She took care of him, especially when he was drunk. I remember coming downstairs to the kitchen as a teenager to find him lying on the floor with his head on her stomach. She gave me a look, like, “Don’t worry, I’ve got this covered.” So I just got my tea and went back upstairs to finish my homework. Another time when my mother and I guarded a bedroom door to keep my father from stumbling out, I heard him say to Elsa, “You bark and create a diversion. I’ll sneak past them.” A wise creature, Elsa nuzzled him and was silent.
She never busted me, either, when I snuck out of the house, creeping down the creaky wooden stairs from my third floor room right past my parents’ door. I did that often, whether it was to sneak out to see a boyfriend, or, more often, just to walk off the insomnia I’d had since a child, and have still. I wake almost every night at 2 in the morning. I always wondered if this is because that was when the bars closed.
Elsa was a great comfort. We would summer as a family at a lake surrounded by vacation houses. In one of these lived a girl older than me who had a small black horse. This was a rescued Mustang named Spider. A smart, tough little thing, Spider would pretend to be lame whenever his owner wanted to compete in a horse show. This first annoyed, then bored her. She ignored her pet. But Spider needed exercise. So I was allowed to ride him, as long as I had Elsa to lope along by my side, and as long as—supposedly—I stuck to the main roads.
Needless to say Elsa and I never stuck to the main roads. I remember rustling through the manzanita brush, riding up the dried yellow wild oats covered hills, far away from the clubhouse by the lake where the adults had their cocktail hour. After one of these, and more than one cocktail, my father promised me my own horse. By that time I knew enough to know that was not going to happen, any more than the European trip he promised after another evening party. I didn’t really mind. I had learned by then that adults didn’t do most of the things that they promised. My own parents were no exception to what appeared to be a general rule.
Many years later, when I started out as a struggling writer, my father promised that if I ever made enough money to build a house on the piece of land my parents owned by that lake, that he would sell it to me. Of course, when I did make enough to do just that, he said, “I didn’t think you’d ever be able to do it.” And took back the promise. It didn’t really surprise me. My parents were always thinking I wasn’t going to be able to do the things that I said I was. I wonder about that. I think it was probably because I only ever exerted myself when I really wanted something. And what I tended to really want were not the things that my parents assumed I would.
Which reminds me of a time that my father did keep his promise, and I managed to get something I really wanted. It was the summer after the mustang year. Spider had been sold or given away. I was bereft. Elsa and I took long, rambling walks by ourselves. I missed the rides.
I was an extremely nearsighted child. My glasses had lenses as thick as bottle bottoms. I’d inherited this condition from my father, a fact that never ceased to irritate my mother. She worried every time one of us children fetched up less than perfect. Which as a matter of course happened way too often for our comfort and for hers.
My father liked to dive off the dock in the lake and swim over a weed covered bottom to a float. Before he did this, he would tie his glasses into the waistband of his swim trunks. The inevitable happened. He arrived at the float one day without the glasses.
Glasses were an expensive item. I’m afraid I didn’t appreciate mine at all. I was simply annoyed that without them I was half blind.
I remember my parents sitting on the grassy slope above the lake with some of the other summer adults. My mother was bemoaning the loss of the glasses. I said, “I’ll find them.”
“Hah!” she scoffed. “You’re blinder than he is.”
“What will you give me?” I said. “If I do find them.”
I knew that sounded like a fairy tale. But I knew I could find them. I had a pretty good idea about where they would be.
“Anything at all,” she said in that breezy tone she used when she was around other adults. A tone that used to annoy me when I was young, and that breaks my heart to think of now, when I’m older and know what bravery was behind it. What fear of being scorned that led her to scorn others. “You won’t be able to find them, so it doesn’t matter what I promise. You’re blinder than he is. Ha ha.”
All the other adults were there. She was saying this in front of them. I saw my father flush with anger, but, as usual when she taunted him in public, he didn’t say anything back.
“Okay,” I said. “Horseback riding lessons for the rest of the summer.”
“Fine,” she said, laughing.
“And contact lenses,” I said, pushing my luck.
She laughed again. “Fine,” she agreed. She went back to whatever conversation she’d been having, and paid no more attention to me or to what I might do.
What I did was walk down to the lake and lower myself off the dock. I knew what had happened. My father had undoubtedly tied the glasses in a little too loosely, and the dive off the dock had unmoored them from his trunks. It wasn’t likely, I reasoned, that they would have just fallen off as he swam smoothly across the lake. So they had to be there.
I took one, maybe two, dives. There they were, lying just where I had thought they must be, on top of the waving underwater weeds, waiting for me to skim down and scoop them up.
I was only twelve years old. But I will never forget the look on my mother’s face as I walked up the grassy slope toward her and the other adults, twirling the glasses in one hand.
I stopped in front of her, and laid them down on the grass. She started to speak.
“Not one word, Violetta,” my father said in a tone I had never heard before. “She gets those lessons. She gets the contacts. And if you say one more thing, she gets prescription sunglasses, too.”
It was one of two times in my life that he, a shy man, stuck up for me in public. I never forgot it.
The horseback lessons wound up being free. I loved helping around the ranch, feeding the livestock and mucking out. So Mrs. Vanoni, who ran things, never charged my parents a dime. Also I suspect she enjoyed our rides, where she filled me in on all the gossip about the summer people.
There was a lot of that.
When I got home from my lessons, Elsa and I went for long walks alone on the trails around the lake.
It was a fine summer.