by Tod Davies.
My brother Bill was a college hippie at Chico State. He lived in Whiskey Flats, five miles out of Paradise. Years later, that same town was the one that famously burned to the ground, fast and furiously, a sign of climate change here and to come. By then the years had changed Bill, who still sports the aviator shades and leather of his hippie youth on his now business trips up to Paradise. Now it isn’t in an old pick up truck, it’s in his own little plane, his portable office. He isn’t a college student anymore. Now he’s a lawyer. Now he’s giving free legal advice to people who lost everything in the Paradise fire.
Then, though, when he and I were both hippies and in college, he found a stray German Shepherd dog, probably abused, fearful, shy, skinny. He named her Vita.
When I think about Vita, I remember all the pains of being in love in one’s twenties. Bill was in love with a skinny, shy little hippie girl named Leslie. I gave Leslie one of my suede coats, and a pretty white nightgown I’d never worn since my mother bought it for me to wear in the dormitory where I lived during my first year at Berkeley.
“But I don’t wear nightgowns.”
“It’s a co-ed dorm.”
“The boys live on different floors. And anyway, they’re not going to come into my room after I’ve gone to bed.”
“Have you ever heard of…lesbians?”
She never forgave me for how hard I laughed at that. And Leslie got the nightgown. I kept the more stylish pink one to pack for when I had to go on trips and sleep in strange places where it made more sense to be fully covered.
Leslie broke up with my brother, and I remember him sleeping on my living room floor, heartbroken. Him and Vita.
I was intermittently heartbroken too. I’d made a series of typical young girl love mistakes, and the current one was a tall, skinny half-Danish, half-Latvian Jew with black hair and blue eyes. He was very funny, which always won me over even in the most unlikely circumstances, and he played the guitar. Of course he played the guitar. But his mother had been intrusive to an incredible degree, and he had spent his teen years sleeping on a couch in a tiny one bedroom apartment. So his idea of privacy was infidelity. As far as I could tell, the reasoning was if your girlfriend didn’t know what you were doing, and preferably, what she didn’t know was something she wouldn’t have liked if she did, that was autonomy. Anyway, there seemed to be no other explanation for it.
I remember one night calling him from a pay phone on the street, and realizing he had some other young woman with him. I hung up and vomited, and for years after, I turned my head away when I walked by that corner.
Vita’s scared look seemed very familiar to me. She shied away at the least little thing. I could see where that came from.
I could relate.
Bill took her up to Spokane, finishing college there. I graduated Berkeley, and headed to Los Angeles to become, I thought, a screenwriter. Why a screenwriter? I didn’t like most popular films, spending all my movie time at the kind of old theaters that showed foreign, culty, old-fashioned ones. I knew I wanted to be a writer. I didn’t know I was already a writer. That would come later. And anyway, I needed to make a living. My parents wanted me to make money, and I had a vague idea that screenwriters made money. So I headed to Los Angeles and an MFA program in screenwriting.
The unfaithful boyfriend was long gone. I had lain next to him, night after night, imagining a thick cord, something like an underwater phone cable, connecting our hearts, and imagining myself cutting through that cable, fiber after fiber. Until one night I cut the last one through. I shook him awake and told him it was time for him to go home. I moved to LA after that, and moved in with another boyfriend who also was not particularly good at fidelity, but who was much more frightened at being found out. From him I moved on to my first husband.
Bill followed me to Los Angeles, leaving Vita behind with my parents. She was always the lost, lorn dog until the day she was walking with my mother near the local high school. There was a rustle in the ivy, Vita dove in and emerged with a newborn kitten held gently in her mouth. From that day on, she was a happy dog. My mother told me later that the kitten must have been the only one that survived being gassed by the high school janitor when he found the mother and litter in a vent above the ivy. The kitten, Max, was the smallest and had fallen out before discovery. Vita loved that kitten. My mother loved Max, too. So after that, she was reconciled to Vita being her dog. They had this love in common. That was the plain fact.
While Bill and I were trying to make our ways in Los Angeles, Max grew up to terrorize my parents’ home. Vita and my mother remained besotted. I came there, one weekend, and Max scratched a long and bloody line down my arm.
My mother and I went out on an errand. She said to me that she didn’t think Bill had the talent to be a writer in Los Angeles, because why wasn’t he famous yet? I told her it didn’t work like that, and she looked at me sideways and said, “Maybe you don’t have the talent either.”
“Maybe not,” I sighed. “But it’s a little late to worry about it now.”
I left as soon as I could. Vita had found her way into my mother’s heart by loving Max. I didn’t like Max myself, so it was better that Vita stayed and that I went.