by Tod Davies.
Certain things stick most to my memory. I can bring up pictures of places I’ve lived, of people I’ve loved, of meals I’ve eaten. I still remember meeting my best friend of almost fifty years. It was at a Chinese restaurant. Ya Su Yuan. The dumplings were fantastic. I hadn’t wanted to go to dinner with a lot of people I didn’t know, but was dragged out by another friend. So I was sulking, even as I enjoyed those dumplings, committing them to sense memory. Then the guy sitting next to me said, “What are you going to be for Halloween?” That stopped me. I looked at him. I said, “I don’t know. What are you going to be?” He thought about it for a moment, ate another dumpling, and said, “I was thinking of going as a used tea bag.” I helped myself to some greens with oyster sauce, and then I said, “What were you last year?” “Europe,” he said matter-of-factly, passing me another plate of food.
So we were friends. I was nineteen years old, but I have a crystal clear memory of our friendship and its history. Especially of the many meals we’ve shared over the years.
And of course I remember dogs. The prime categories in my memory: dinner and dogs. It’s funny, that’s where my clearest memories are stashed. Obviously it’s those times, those creatures, who made the biggest impression on me.
Or, maybe, were allowed into my memory, into my sense of myself, past the censor trying to keep out the things I’d rather not have as a part of my identity
It’s remarkable that there are any dogs in my past that I can’t remember. But there is one, a notable exception. I cannot remember Manzanita.
Manzanita belonged to Tish. Tellingly, I can’t remember not only the dog, but I also can’t remember a single meal I shared with Tish. This is remarkable. Because it’s a fact that I lived with them both, when I was nineteen years old, the same year I had that first dinner with my best friend. That was the year I moved in to live with Tish, in a dark, thoroughly haunted house.
In my memory, it was always dark in that house, whether in reality or because of tragedies past and future acting on my imagination. Probably both. The way I remember it was that my own room was the only one that was light. But that can’t be right. True, that room had the only south-facing window that wasn’t blocked by overgrown trees or the house next door. The only other room like that was the dining room, which in my memory, rightly or not, has thick curtains always drawn. But still, that’s the way I remember it. I do remember that Tish’s room had a kind of light that made it look underwater. As I write that, I shudder, realizing why my memory, playing tricks on me, played that particular one.
When I lived there, it was a household of young people, just starting adult life: chaotic, messy, loud, battling, the way young people are and do. I remember that much.
I was just nineteen, putting myself through college after moving out on that boyfriend who cheated on me almost as if it was his art form. I was still agonizingly in love with him, though I was trying my best to cut the tie. Moving out was the first step.
Tish owned the house. There were two other roommates, too, boys who had just graduated college along with Tish’s boyfriend. There was that dog in the house. Manzanita. I don’t remember where it came from or how it got that name. It was a smallish shepherd mutt, dirty brown, yellow and gray, with pointy ears. It looked like Tish, who had found it somewhere I also don’t remember, the way dogs so often look like their owners. They both had pointy ears and long noses, like an elf, or a fairy, or some kind of water sprite. Manzanita was very badly behaved. Tish refused to train it, or discipline it in any way. I remember that much, though I don’t remember any specifics. I remember how chaotic it was there. The dog must have just added to the general uproar.
Tish grew up in that house. It had been her grandmother’s. Mrs. Rogers. Mrs. Rogers was the mother of Tish’s mother, who died, too young, when Tish was too young to lose her. A rare form of cancer. Tish, even then as a little girl, greatly resembled her mother. Both were beautiful, judging by her mother’s portrait that hung in the house. Pointy ears. Long noses. Not the usual beauty, but strangely beguiling.
Tish told me the story of her childhood later, offhandedly, casually, just the plain facts. I remember the story. It was horrific and compelling, the kind of story that would fascinate a nineteen year old in spite of herself. I even remember her telling it, the first night that we met. Her father, grief-stricken and alcoholic, confused the ten-year-old Tish with her mother, living with her as if she was. Tish’s grandmother, realizing what was happening, descended on the pair and whisked Tish away to her own house. After which, Tish’s father, bereft, drank himself to death.
It wasn’t a house for a child. It was already an old lady’s house by the time Tish moved in. It accrued layers of life undisturbed. Old dark pictures on the walls. Old dark furniture. Old books on dusty shelves. An overgrown garden filled with leggy plants of the type grandmothers of the time appreciated. Hydrangeas. Geraniums. Calla lilies.
The house, like Tish, was sorrowful, mysterious, and compelling. It gave the impression, like Tish, of being slightly dirty behind the ears.
We all moved in. Tish. The two young men, one an accomplished painter, the other a brilliant crank. Me. And Manzanita. We started adult life there. Awkward. Stumbling. Unclear on the concept. A bunch of puppies, come to think of it.
We all had such different fates. Such different lives. And one life that ended too soon. Too horribly. Is that why I’ve forgotten so much?
I moved in first. A few years before, Tish had escaped to live with her high school boyfriend in his college dorm back east, where she met the other two of our future roommates. While she was still there, Mrs. Rogers died. Tish sent me the keys, and invited me to move in. I was putting myself through college, and the prospect of free rent was a serious relief. I thankfully accepted. It wasn’t just the free rent. It was Tish, too. I was a bit in love with Tish. The unsatisfactory and unfaithful boyfriend, who’d been in high school with her too, had introduced us. The attraction was immediate, almost violent. I remember that, maybe the clearest memory I have of her, of my coming home after working a teller shift at a neighborhood bank, tearing off my clothes and yelling about my day, before I noticed a woman with a long nose and pointed ears peering around the corner of a door at me. Like an undine. Like a fairy.
I think I fell in love with her at first sight. I do remember that. She had that effect on people. In my case, she was the first and only woman I ever felt love for in the way I loved men. We never did more than hug and kiss the way women do with their friends, but that was my feeling for her. It wasn’t friendship, it was a bit more than that. It wasn’t sexual love, but a bit less. It was something in the middle. Some kind of mix of heated admiration and desire. Which to a nineteen year old, which is what I was, amounts to love.
The house was a terrifying mess when I moved in. Stacks of yellowing paper. Furniture that sent up clouds of dust when you walked by. Old blankets and clothes everywhere, a kitchen and bathroom that had obviously not been seriously cleaned in years. I tried to clean them, but it was hopeless. None of us, the roommates, Tish and I, ever seriously tried. Still, it was Tish’s house, and it was free rent, and we were all so young. I was happy to move in. I tunneled my way from the front door to the relatively debris free spare room formerly used for infrequent sewing projects, and made my nest there.
The other three, arriving west from the east, moved in later. Tish took her old childhood room. The brilliant crank, eccentric and hilarious, set up in what had been the dining room, which probably means my memory of the curtains always being shut is correct. The artist, matter-of-fact, laconic, moved into the bedroom of Mrs. Rogers. It didn’t seem to bother him that she had died in there.
He woke one of the first nights to find her ghost standing over him. “What are you doing in my bed?” it asked. “I’m a friend of Tish’s, Mrs. Rogers,” he said. And then he added, helpfully, “You’re dead.” She looked confused, he told me later, but disappeared at that, never to return. Though the house still always felt haunted. It could hardly help it. In my imagination, Manzanita pawed under furniture at things no one else saw, and stared into empty corners. But I don’t really remember if that happened, or if I, certain it must have, invented the memory.
It was a disruptive, almost uncanny time. I still loved Tish, although the violence of the initial affection already predicted its inevitable rupture. Strangely enough for me, I didn’t like Manzanita. That might have been a sign. Me, who loved all dogs, didn’t like that one.
I wonder about that now. Was it actually because it was such an unprepossessing little mutt? But I’ve loved other difficult dogs, or at least befriended them. Was it because I already knew my love for Tish was going to end badly? I think that might be more likely. Was I already starting to detach? I think so. Because I did detach. It started early, too.
Tish was always peculiarly seductive, and not just to me, but to everyone she met. She wore her clothes, a mix of thrift store finds, surprising buys, and friends’ hand me downs, with the style of a character in a fairy tale. In any gathering, she was the center of attention. She was a strange mix of little girl and grandmother. Around the house, she insisted on wearing a certain kind of chenille bathrobe, very hard to find outside of a catalog catering to old ladies, one that featured flannel nightcaps, slippers for bunion tortured feet, and the perfume that my own grandmother had worn—Emeraude, then so out of fashion it was impossible to find in the stores. As were the chenille bathrobes. Those robes always made her look like an illustration by Arthur Rackham. I tried wearing one of them myself. But it wasn’t the same. I just looked like a college student wearing a bathrobe. She looked like one of the twelve dancing princesses.
She had a way of looking sidelong at you that was specific to her. It was mysterious and enchanting. I don’t know why. Years later, Gray, my much loved dog would gave me the exact same look. I had a brief moment of wondering if it was Tish, returned. “Tish?” I said. But Gray just looked at me gravely, as if to say these were matters between us better left unplumbed.
She loved me back. I think. I do remember she hated that I had loves outside of her enchanted circle. She hated when I bought food just for myself and stashed it in the back of a refrigerator shelf. I was going to school and working at a department store downtown; I kept odd hours, and when I got home I was hungry. I suppose it was rather mean of me not to share, and a bit antisocial that I didn’t eat or cook with everyone else. I had my own relationship to food. Is that why I don’t remember sharing with her a single meal? And yet, we must have eaten together, often too.
Tish hated when I had a relationship to anything that she didn’t. So she was openly hostile to my stash of snacks. And to my friends. At least, to any of them that hadn’t been her friends first.
I wonder if I remember her faults so clearly, in order to absolve myself of mine?
Back then, I lived in her house, not mine. Physically and metaphorically. I think now it was because I was scared to have my own. She’d inherited an orange grove from her other set of grandparents, so she had money and never charged any of us rent. She was a fiend for keeping the thermostat permanently at 68 degrees, no matter how cold it was. I remember that. I remember looking longingly at the thermostat one particularly foggy day. Still, it was her house, although that thermostat thing was probably at least part of the reason I moved on. But definitely not all of it.
A hothouse kept too cold. It was another contradiction of the sort that fascinated me. Tish never looked cold. She always looked as if she was perspiring just a bit on her forehead.
I don’t think it was Manzanita that caused my final bolt out of the hothouse. Although another friend of mine that Tish loathed, as she loathed all of my friends who hadn’t been originally hers, a fact I started to notice with more and more depressing clarity, that friend suggested I push the dog out of the house onto the street when no one was looking, so she could run it over. “Tish hates me anyway, she couldn’t hate me any worse, and at least we’d get rid of the damn dog.”
My best friend, who loved Tish as much as I did, reminded me about that story. I’d forgotten it. I imagine I’d forgotten because I was ashamed at laughing at running a dog over, even as a not very funny joke.
The friend who made the joke was very funny. I must have been gleeful that Tish hated her, though I don’t really remember much about it at all. A bit passive aggressive of me, and maybe another way of starting to detach. That friend was very charming. And she was very mean, which the charm covered up like expensive drapery. I was always laughing at the charming and mean things she said, until the day they were directed at me. Of course then I realized that they were mainly mean, not really charming at all, and we stopped being friends.
It wasn’t her fault. It was mine. It was hard for me to accept my own mean streak, and the fact that if a joke made me feel superior to the victim, I would go for it, all in. It shamed me to find that out for myself. I didn’t want to find it out, back then when I was just becoming an adult, so instead I dropped that friend.
Easier that way. Blaming your own faults on others, I mean. The way I blamed the mess in the house we lived in on Manzanita, and on Tish, rather than on myself for not doing anything about it, but just moving away.
I still loved Tish, even after I moved. But I told myself I needed to get out into the world. Pay my own rent. Eat my own food. Invite my friends over without worry. Still every time I moved away from her was painful, as if that tie was being pulled tauter and tauter, tearing at a bit of my heart I couldn’t admit to owning. That bit of my heart that was Tish’s would never let me out of the hothouse where she lived. I wanted to get out and see the world, I told myself. What I know now is I could feel the suffering heading toward her like a black monster from the past, raging out of control. I didn’t want to meet the monster too. I didn’t want to suffer along with her. So, cowardly or maybe just sensible—probably a little of both—, I moved away.
Is that why I can’t remember?
I moved away from Tish’s house, both physically and metaphorically. I moved into a light, clean apartment on the other side of town, with my new roommate a woman who’d also been a bank teller. She told me later that the cheating ex-boyfriend had come on to her, too, but she told him to get lost. I got more serious about another boyfriend, one Tish predictably hated, this time for his being too preppy-looking. When I graduated Berkeley, I moved to Los Angeles to live with him and go to graduate school. My focus changed, but a part of my heart still belonged to Tish, and when she fell in love and married, I helped her celebrate at the bayside dive bar she had loved. I do remember that. My best friend was there, too, and that may be why that memory is relatively clear. Tish wore a leaf green velvet dress that made her look like a beautiful slim tree. The wedding cake was in the shape of Manzanita.
Things happened in my life. Los Angeles. Struggles to be a writer. First marriage. Move to Oregon. Divorce. Second marriage to a filmmaker. Learning to be a producer of indie films. My first produced film, first one I wrote, too. A part-time move to Liverpool. Commuting back and forth, Oregon to Liverpool and back again.
There was a lot going on, and unsurprisingly, I was absorbed by my own life. At least, that’s what I tell myself.
During my first marriage, Tish’s husband died. It seemed impossible that someone so young could die, let alone someone I knew.
I still remember getting the news, stunned, and taking to my bed. My body went into revolt. It was my first experience of someone my own age dying, so it was my body’s first understanding that I, too, would die someday. Unpredictable. Inevitable. It was the body that would die, so I wanted to get out of the body. The conflict left me exhausted. I didn’t go to the funeral.
We had all, we roommates, sailed away in our own small boats, away from the house. Tish, still living there, was happy with her artist husband, going to his shows, proud of him, content at last. I breathed a sigh of relief; we all did. Her life had been so tragic, it seemed like now it was going to coast into safe harbor.
But then he died. Too young. Too soon. I still have a photograph he took, of a curtain blowing into the bedroom that had been Mrs. Rogers’, an empty bedstead the only furniture. They both knew he was going to die. Tish fought it with all her might. When he finally went over, she was angry, furious with him. Why wouldn’t she be? It was suffering that couldn’t be helped. I couldn’t help it. Detach, detach. Coward.
I sailed farther and farther away. She disappeared over my horizon.
I got word of her over the years. My best friend told me stories about her, none of them good. After her husband died, she drank more and more.
She would travel to India, where she and her husband had been happy. He had once come home riding an elephant to make her laugh. After he died, she said she went there to work with Mother Teresa. No one believed that. Everyone knew she had gone there to drink.
At home, she would order pizza to be delivered, along with a case of white wine. My best friend, nearly out of his mind with frustration, went to the restaurant and accused them of poisoning her. But of course, it wasn’t the restaurant. They told him even the delivery guy told her she needed to stop drinking. But she wouldn’t stop. She was poisoning herself. She wanted to die.
At the end, she adopted two husky dogs. Insane, demented! Living, drinking herself to death, in her childhood home, never going out, two husky dogs trapped there with her.
Another memory I’ve totally forgotten. My husband tells me we visited her during that time. “And those dogs were totally out of control. They ran everywhere in the house, pissing and shitting.” I don’t remember any of it. I don’t remember ever meeting those dogs.
Was the shame too much for me, the knowing I should have intervened, gotten the dogs to a safer place, a better home? Is my failure of memory an automatic protection against knowing my own flaws? My own failures of love, my retreats into detachment?
Thankfully, our old roommate, who hadn’t detached, and my best friend intervened, this time successfully. They rehomed the dogs, but when they arrived to take them to their new owners, Tish let the huskies out, thinking to let them escape. Instead they ran to the safety of the car. She cried and cried behind them, calling them to “come home.” But they wouldn’t. The poor dogs had had enough.
It wasn’t her fault. It was Fate’s fault, a pattern made so long ago it was impossible to trace or change. When it looked like she would start to grow out of the hothouse she had made for herself, her husband died of the same rare cancer that killed her mother. One more time, Tish too young to lose the person she most loved.
She just couldn’t go on after that, though she lived for many years after. The last time I heard from her, it was as if she’d frozen in time, stuck helplessly, like a cursed heroine in a fairy tale, in the years before she married.
I remember that time. Of course I was much older then, well into another phase of my life when that unsatisfactory ex-boyfriend of mine, and Tish, called me on the phone.
The phone call startled me. We were all in our forties. I was living in Oregon with my second husband and our dogs, and while I was cautiously glad to hear from them, I was perplexed. Why had they suddenly thought to seek me out? Why then?
Another odd thing: they were giggling like teenagers. It was somehow uncanny. That made me uneasy. Then they told me why they’d called. They wanted to confess that, back then when I was nineteen and living with Tish, they had snuck around and cheated on me together.
They giggled some more telling me this. I was at a loss. More than that, I was flabbergasted. What was I supposed to say? I barely remembered the time they were talking about. But neither of them had left the past. It was still vivid to them. I contemplated this insight while the two of them continued their giggling, until my ex-boyfriend said, “But you don’t seem like the same person as then.”
“No, I’m not,” I said. “But you two do.” They took that as compliment.
I got off the phone as soon as I could.
I realized after that they must have been drunk. The middle of the day. I vaguely understood that, back when we were young, they found some kind of pleasure in having sex together behind my back, that they enjoyed revisiting it now that we were old. It was a way of being young again. It seemed weird to me, but I kind of understood it.
My best friend, when we talked this over, said, in a disgusted voice, that the unsatisfactory ex-boyfriend was aiding and abetting Tish in her drinking, while he and all the rest of her friends were trying to get her to stop. “And you know what?” he said. “That guy has a girlfriend now. She lives in her car. He’s so out of it, he doesn’t even know your girlfriend is supposed to have a better apartment than you.”
We both had a good laugh over that, which was usually how we dealt with horrible facts that couldn’t be gotten around. It’s how we still deal with them.
I don’t know what was wrong with the ex-boyfriend, though I could tell from his voice on that call that he was probably cheating, with Tish, on the girlfriend who lived in the car. He was probably enjoying it as much as he had when he was twenty and cheating on me. I didn’t know what caused his arrested development, but I knew what was wrong with Tish.
The death of Tish’s husband had been one tragedy too many for her to bear. She had frozen there. It was not going to end well. It was going to end badly.
I cut line completely with her then. Not out of anger, or irritation, or even out of boredom. But out of that same cowardice that drove me away years before. I cut final line simply because I could see that the pain of her end was going to be too much for me. If I was to go on, I needed to cut the last tie.
I was in England when the inevitable phone call came. I was sitting at my desk in the production office of the film I co-produced. There had been an uproar that day; our very difficult star had arrived for a costume fitting with a shaved head, after we’d already shot some scenes of him with a full head of hair. My director husband was raving, swearing he’d fire him. My producing partner was pointing out the impracticality of this. The phone rang. I picked it up. It was my roommate from the hothouse of so long ago.
I knew what that meant. I sighed. “Is she gone?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “I knew you’d want to know.”
“How?” I said.
“We’d been checking on her. But nobody had seen her in a couple of days. We called the cops and they went in.”
They found her, drowned in her own bathtub. I do remember that bathtub. I do remember I tried many times, unsuccessfully, to get it cleaned. And when she had a skin rash, I remember I applied the medicine for her while she sat in the tub.
I thanked him for telling me. We said we loved each other, which was true, even if it had all been so long ago. There was nothing else to say or to be done.
I hung up the phone, and my husband said, still ranting about the passive aggressive actor, “What are we going to do about this?”
I said, “I’m sorry. This doesn’t seem very important to me right now.”
My producing partner said, “She’s right, you know.”
But there was work to be done, a way to figure out how to avoid having to do expensive reshoots, and the day just carried me on without my thinking too much about the things that really mattered.
In the night, many years later, in my bed in Oregon when the reality was far enough away that I could gingerly touch the memories, I thought about Tish. I lay there thinking, “I loved her and I abandoned her.” Was it sorrow I hadn’t allowed myself to feel back then that made my chest hurt and tears come to my eyes? Or was it the guilt about refusing to feel that sorrow completely, the shame at leaving Tish’s pain behind? Probably, as is usual in life, a mixture of both. I thought about Manzanita. I knew then that the reason I couldn’t remember anything about that dog was because it was part of things I didn’t want to remember. But there is no forgetting. Not really.
Do I regret the detachment? No, if I’m honest, I don’t. It really was too much for me to hold on to, and there is only so much you can grasp in a life. You have to choose. You have to get on with your day.
But the shame comes, inevitably, with the choice. The shame of not protecting, not being there for someone once loved. I have to admit what I can do, and, more, what I can’t. What I could do wasn’t enough. Where there are blank spots in my sense of myself, these tell me something important, something I want to know. Even if the knowing is painful at last.
It all came back to me in the night. Then in the morning, grateful to have left the night behind me, I turned to my husband and my dogs, smiled, and got on with starting another day.