by Tod Davies.
She was a floppy, affectionate, shy dog. A kind of Buddhist dog, really, in her approach to life. Black and white and gray like her father, who she followed around worshipfully. I still remember the delight I felt in watching them dig a hole together in the front meadow. Happy, grinning away, went at it with his forepaws, dirt flying, while True stood at the edge of the deepening hole, barking with delight, egging him on. They both trotted back to the house when it was done (how did they decide it was done?), True following Happy the way she always did, both their tails wagging, satisfied, a job well done.
This was the period that a friend and I breezily referred to as my ‘Frontier Divorcee’ time. I lived out here in my little alpine valley alone but for True and Happy, and as that friend once said, it was the happiest time of my life till then. One of the happiest even now, after a lot of other happy times.
I love solitude. I love the woods. I love my fellows, but I easily get overstimulated by them, and lose my own meaning, retreating to find it again. I had a lot to do with my fellows at this time, but I had a lot of solitude, too. It was a perfect mix, really.
It was the time I discovered that women were a nourishing resource, rather than a competitive rabble to be wary around. My own mother had lost her adolescence during the war, a time, she said sadly many years even after the ones I speak of now, when ‘girls usually know girls their own age.’ She had been exiled to the Japanese countryside, alone with her mother and older sister, pushed out of her boarding school by the war. She never knew the kind of friendships that were possible between girls, among women. It left her permanently scarred in her relationship to her own sex, including her relationship to her daughter. So I was wary of women. I accepted as fact that stupid shibboleth that said women were only out to get each other. Who, in fact, does that particular myth benefit? It isn’t women, that’s for sure.
Bit by bit, I began to realize that in fact, the truth was the opposite: that women are each other’s best and most dependable allies. I found that out at Callahan’s Restaurant. The old Callahan’s Restaurant, not the one there now. From the amazing group of women who worked there waiting tables—so magical was that time it almost seems like a fairy tale to me.
Back then I needed a job. Living in the middle of nowhere, still trying to eke out enough to pay the mortgage with the money from a couple of writing jobs I’d had, and wanting to spend most of my time at my desk, writing, I thought long and hard about my options. What did I want the most? Time. That was always what I had wanted most. Time and solitude. Time and solitude and to be of use—but sometimes those three things were impossible to reconcile. In my attempts, I lived close to the bone. Not that I found that difficult when I was young. Buying things bored me. I had no ambitions, no deep desires, past solitude and writing…and love, of course. Another group of balls difficult to juggle without dropping one or the other, without the worry of damage or outright breakage.
So that was my problem. I needed a job, but it needed to be one that left my days free. And I lived half an hour from town. In the winter, this would mean a long, dangerous trek, not just up my snow covered gravel road, but even more frightening, down the slick freeway, curving downhill like a slalom run, trucks attempting the same dangerous runway on either side.
There was a restaurant, though, at the top of the freeway, right where my road ran into it. Callahan’s. It was family owned, then, by a mother and son. The son hated the restaurant, I was to discover later. He spent the minimum amount of effort there. As a result, it was the waitresses who ran it. Eccentrically but well.
I walked in and suggested myself as a cocktail waitress. I’d never waitressed, but I had a vague idea that you could make a good hourly if you hustled for tips, and I was pretty sure I couldn’t manage waitressing the dining room. I’d assessed the bar and its big, grumpy bartender, and reckoned I could handle anything that came out of that. Also, it was only fifteen minutes away from my little house, and my desk, and my dogs.
So I made up a history of cocktail waitressing and produced myself hopefully. Little did I know that Brian, the son who managed the restaurant, would have hired a llama if it had presented itself for the job. It never occurred to him, I was grateful to notice, to check any of my completely fictitious references. He, harassed and dreaming of another kind of job for himself, hired me on the spot.
This was the start of one of the happiest times of my life. For the women there took one look at me, and shrewdly—as shrewdly as they did everything else—recognized my complete and total lack of experience of anything having to do with waiting tables of any kind. There was no teasing, there was no hazing, they just gathered me up and said, as plainly as if it had been said aloud, “Don’t worry, we’ll bring you up to speed.”
And they did. Each one was like a mother dog herding her pup; I would bump up against one who would gently push me back in the right direction.
I learned fast. And I learned I loved it. I remember still how much I loved it, and how much I learned. So much of it was not what you would think you would learn, cocktail waitressing in a mountain bar.
I learned women love each other, and that there are few places warmer, safer, happier, than a seat around an open fire, after work, with your coworkers sitting at the end of their shifts, drinking a glass of wine and listening to the conversation going on, happily, around one.
Oh man. How many stories! How many things happened there that I never forgot, that formed the basis of so much else that would happen again in my life. I should have been the odd one out, but that never was an option, there was no such thing as an odd one out in that group.
I still remember a conversation about what actor one was most in love with, and I, who find it impossible to be attracted to anyone not actually met in the flesh, fished frantically about for an acceptable answer. “Gabriel Byrne,” I finally said, and in the ensuing silence, one of the waitresses exclaimed, “God damn it, Tod, just ONCE I wish you’d answer like the rest of us!” Which made everyone laugh, and someone bought me another glass of Chardonnay as a result.
They were all different, those waitresses. There was Stacey, who really ran the place, who could do at least ten different things at once and never lose sight of any of them. She is a psychologist, in Portland, now.
There was Bev, the kind of waitress and friend you would dream of having, so stalwart and tactful, and droll in her sense of humor. And Nancy, the kindest person I ever met, and Donna, and Terry, and Cindy.
And Diana, gorgeous with a full-bodied laugh, like an old time movie star. Right before I finally gave up on my first husband, I was working one night, and one of the male customers kept following me around in a weird way. Diana said, “Watch out for that one, honey. He’s looking for a mother for his two girls.” “Diana!” I said, a little shocked. “I’m married!”
She looked at me speculatively. “This is your first one, right, honey?” And then she swept out onto the floor, leaving me half-stunned at the vista that statement had opened up before me. She was a bit of a Buddha, Diana.
Later, there was Laura. She came on as a cocktail waitress too, to start, and for a lot of the same reasons as me. Unlike me, though, who was perfectly happy with my own little fiefdom in the bar, she moved on to full-fledged waitressing. She and I understood each other. We still do, when we run into each other in the market in town, thirty years later. We still do.
Funny. I didn’t get it then, but True was like them all. She was loyal. She was intelligent. She liked nothing better than to hang out with those she loved. She was nurturing. She was kind. She worried about everyone but herself.
I loved driving home from Callahan’s after my shift, especially down a snowy road in the moonlight. One night, just before my marriage ended, I was heading home ahead of my then husband, who I had managed to get a job at Callahan’s as well, to pay some outstanding bills.
It started to snow. Driving up the back road next to the freeway, I saw, to my mild shock, a man walking alongside it, carrying a plastic bag. He was wearing the lightest of jackets. There were no houses up ahead, no cars parked along the road. I pulled up and asked him where the hell he thought he was going.
He looked at me, dazed. “Isn’t this the freeway?” he said. As if being on the freeway in a snowstorm would have been any better of an option.
“Get in for God’s sake,” I said. It was almost midnight. It was snowing hard now. There really was nothing for it but to take him back home.
I figured if he was dangerous, the husband was coming back in an hour, and the dogs were in the house, as was a gun I knew how to shoot very straight and very well. So I asked if he’d like to spend the night on my study floor, on a futon, and get driven somewhere in the morning.
He thanked me, and said he had found out the day before that he had a rare and incurable disease. “I don’t really remember why or what I did next, but I guess I started heading for my sister’s house. She lives in Southern California. Then my car broke down, and I left it at a mechanic and just started walking. I don’t know why.”
I drove him home, gave him a towel, pushed him toward the shower, made a little soup for him, and made up his bed. I remember he was so tired, he just fell onto the sleeping bags on the futon and was sound asleep in five minutes.
When I looked in on him, there was True, sitting at his feet, looking at him kindly. That was when I knew he was all right.
In the morning I gave him an old raincoat we had, and a sweater, and drove him back to town. “Thank you,” he said as he got out of the car. “Something really nice is going to happen to you now.” I thought of that shortly afterwards, when I finally got the nerve to tell my husband it was time for him to go.
In that period, I fell in love again, with my former writing partner. I had gone to New York, supposedly to meet an agent, but really just because at a transition period, I was on restless walkabout. My friend, the Famous Filmmaker, was in New York too, for work. I was a bit annoyed with him, since he’d been offered a job that could have given me a bit of work, and he turned it down. I was annoyed since I thought if I’d had the job, I’d have enough money to divorce my first husband.
I didn’t know then that you always have enough money to get out of a bad situation. That taught me that.
Anyway, we went out drinking together, and I taxed him about that job.
“Oh,” he said, “I couldn’t take that job. Then I would have been an asshole.”
I looked at him, annoyed. “You’re an asshole now. That way you would have been an asshole with money.”
The friend drinking with us stood up. “Hoo boy,” she said. “That’s me leaving you two to duke it out.”
She left. We laughed. We drank some more. Somewhere in there, I told him I was leaving my husband. Couldn’t take it any more.
He looked at me. He looked down at his drink. He looked at me again, more earnestly this time. “What about me?” he said.
“What do you mean, what about you?”
“I’ve been in love with you for fourteen years.”
“No, you haven’t. You’ve been married twice.”
“What was I supposed to do? Just wait for you?”
Which made me laugh. He always made me laugh. Still does, in fact.
So we tangled up. I thought it was just an interregnum in both our lives. I mean, when we had first known each other, in Los Angeles, so many years before, he had been one of LA’s premier punks. While I was the kind of girl who wore Shetland wool sweaters with matching knee socks. None of our friends could understand why we were so close. His girlfriends, and then his wives, would complain to me about him, and ask me to intervene for them, but when I tried, he would just laugh, and we would get on with being friends.
I thought that was all we would ever be. It was good enough at the time. I thought.
He didn’t, though. He came to visit me, and I picked him up in the airport at night, driving down the dark gravel road to my house. He told me later he thought all the way down, “Tod is insane. We are going to be killed by survivalists. I have got to get her out of here.” And then there was his mild shock at the fact that the dogs slept inside the house; he had always imagined them kenneled outside. But in the morning, when I woke up, and went out to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, I saw him sitting on the railing of my deck, looking up at the trees, with True sitting worshipfully at his feet. Through the glass, I could hear him say, “You love Tod and so do I. We’re going to get along fine.”
He said to me, “We’re going to be together for the rest of our lives. All of our friends are going to be so surprised when we’re together twenty years.”
“Not any more surprised than me,” I said, and sometimes, almost forty years later, I’m still surprised. Happy, but surprised