Forgetting to Be Afraid: A Memoir

by Wendy Davis

  The silver lining in the open-classroom concept was that I could be with Joey when I needed him. Which was all the time. Seeing him gave me such an enormous sense of relief and comfort. He was my touchstone. Many days we worked alongside each other because our learning skills were at similar levels. We ate lunch by age group, and afterward I’d stand outside the lunchroom and wait anxiously for him for “free time.” Almost always, he’d appear and rescue me from my misery and we’d go to the playground together, but on the occasions when he didn’t show up, I wouldn’t go out for free time by myself. I’d just wait until it was over and go back to the classroom.

  But I have happy memories of our time in Chula Vista as well. During the time that we lived there and always, my father absolutely loved to surprise us, and I remember one of his best surprises came on an Easter Sunday in San Diego. We observed Lent, and even as small children we were expected to give up something—I recall that I usually gave up eating anything sweet. We always had an Easter Sunday outfit and went to church, and an Easter basket would inevitably await us when we came home—nothing too fancy, just the cellophane-wrapped kind you’d buy at the store. But on this particular Easter, when we came home from church, my dad was really excited.

  “You need to look in the backyard,” he said. “I think the Easter Bunny might have come.”

  We all ran out into the backyard, and there was a badminton net, and badminton racquets for each of us, and of course we immediately started playing with my dad. Because the weather was always perfect in the San Diego/Chula Vista area, I have many memories of us playing badminton out there—it was usually the three of us older kids (as Jennifer always seemed just too young to do the things the rest of us were doing) with my dad—he would come out to play with us on the weekends and on some evenings when he’d get home from work. And every now and then, even my mom would give it a try. He’d created an opportunity for us to bond as a family in a way that we hadn’t before.

  —

  One of our happiest surprises from my dad while in San Diego came in the form of a dog, Mr. French.

  One morning when my father left for work, he told us that he was going to have a surprise for us when he came home. We had no idea what it would be and anxiously awaited his return. When he came home, he walked in the door with Mr. French, who would become the most beloved dog our family would ever have.

  Mr. French was actually the second dog we’d had. When we lived in El Paso, we had a little dachshund whom my mother named Lady Bird, for Lady Bird Johnson, but, for whatever reason, Lady Bird didn’t make the trip from El Paso to Oklahoma City. I’m not sure who my dad had claimed him from, but Mr. French, a medium-size poodle, needed a new home. He was suffering from some pretty bad ear infections and wearing the Cone of Shame when he arrived that first day, and we were beyond delighted when he came to live with us. He quickly became very special to us—he was incredibly smart and fun and so cute, and, because we never groomed him like a regular poodle, he was always shaggy in a most endearing way. We loved him tremendously. And for a shy girl like me, he was especially important. To this day, I believe it was my love for Mr. French that fostered my enduring love for and need to always have a dog companion in my life, filled in for the past eleven years by my much-adored Labrador, Moots.

  —

  Sadly, though, while we were in Chula Vista, my paternal grandfather died, less than a year after that last visit in Oklahoma, during which I think he must have known he was ill. He had lung cancer, and to this day I believe it was likely a by-product of his many years of working in the textile factories and inhaling toxic materials. Of course, they didn’t have the same health standards in place that they do today, and though I recall him every now and then puffing on a pipe, he wasn’t a real smoker the way my dad was. He was very young when he died—only in his late fifties—though in my memory, from the perspective of a six- or seven-year-old child, I believed he was elderly.

  What I remember was coming to the breakfast table on a weekend morning and my parents sitting the four of us down and telling us that he had died. Up until that moment, we had not even been made aware that he was ill, so we were all just devastated by the news. To comfort us, my dad made sure to tell us that when our grandpa died, he had all of our photos with him in the wallet that he kept in his shirt pocket, keeping us close to his heart right up until the end. The next day, my father left to go to the funeral and to help my grandmother settle my grandfather’s very modest estate, and then he returned, and that was that. As was the tradition back then, children didn’t attend funerals and weren’t invited to play a role in those rituals the way they are today, so we didn’t have the kind of closure that a funeral would have brought us. It was our first loss of a loved one, and we all took it very hard.

  —

  Sometime before or right after I’d started third grade, NCR, as National Cash Register was now called, transferred my father to New York. We moved to a town called Pearl River, a bedroom community in Rockland County, twenty miles north of midtown Manhattan, where he worked, and just shy of the New Jersey border. It is the second-largest hamlet in New York State, green hills giving it the lushness of Ireland and attracting a population that’s now more than half Irish-American exiles from New York City.

  Its current topography is a far cry from the swamps and woods the Dutch found in the 1600s, when they settled there and called it Muddy Creek. So is the name, which was changed either because a town resident supposedly found small pearls in the mussels of a brook or because the powers-that-be in the late 1800s knew that “Pearl River” would roll off the tongues of train conductors and prospective residents infinitely better once the railroad came and ran through it.

  I’d like to think it was because pearls were found in the brook, since living there was the pearl of my childhood. It was the place that would feel most like home to me until we moved back to Texas and the place where I would have some of my happiest childhood memories: where Joey and I played in the rural wonderland around our house every day; where my mother, aided by the help of my paternal grandmother, who came to live with us after my grandfather died, tried to create a sense of structure and routine of traditional family life. But, like everywhere else we’d lived and every other part of my life so far, those years we spent in Pearl River also held some instability, so some of my saddest memories of my childhood come from there, too. Maybe it was because I was becoming old enough to understand the tension in my parents’ marriage. Maybe it was that it was the actual beginning of the second unwinding of their marital bond. In either event, I was aware in New York that my parents’ relationship was beginning to unravel.

  The house we rented belonged to Basia Hammerstein, the daughter-in-law of Oscar Hammerstein, of Rodgers and Hammerstein fame, which I think now is such a strange and wonderful coincidence, given the fact that musical theater was one of my father’s great passions. At the time it felt as though we were living in the home of a celebrity, and I remember bragging to the few friends I had at school about it. There was a separate garage across the driveway with an apartment above it that Basia maintained, and from time to time she would come to stay there. There was a piano in the apartment and another piano in the house itself, and on the rare occasions that we weren’t outside, Joey and I would fiddle around with the music books and try to teach ourselves to play.

  The house itself was set in a rural area, up on a hill surrounded by several acres of heavy woods that seemed endless. For Joey and me, who were complete nature lovers, it was heaven. There was a beautiful little brook that ran down toward the bottom of the driveway, and every day we would follow it for hours and hours, fishing and playing and having some kind of adventure, Joey with a red rag hanging out of his pocket and both of us getting filthy in the process. We were always together and always outside, and, like any respectable adventuresome duo, we gave each other nicknames—Buddy Girl and Buddy Boy. There was always some stray cat we w
ere taking in or stray dog we were trying to bring home. There was even a horse we discovered one day while walking far enough down the brook—we’d go through our yard with giant Hefty bags and pick leaves off the trees and go back down to feed him. Sometimes we would catch fish in the little brook below our house. I have a picture of us on the back patio cleaning one, and I was as comfortable doing that as I was doing anything—that’s the kind of tomboy I was.

  Mr. French also loved the adventures that he’d make for himself day to day, wandering around the woods that surrounded our home. We never had to worry about having a fence where Mr. French was concerned, because he loved his family and returned home to us every night even if he’d gone off for a long escapade of his own during the day. But he did return several times after having been sprayed by a skunk, and my father would use the old-fashioned remedy of filling the bathtub with cans and cans of tomato juice and dousing him with it to get rid of the smell. Mr. French also came home one day with a BB in his hindquarters, which I’m sure meant that he had been up to creating some nuisance in someone’s yard.

  —

  Because my paternal grandmother lived with us, my mother was able to take a job outside our home for the first time in my childhood, at a ShopRite grocery store not far from where we lived, and as a result I spent a lot of time with my grandmother after school. The house wasn’t huge, but it was laid out well, with an attic space on the partial second floor where she was able to have her own living area: a bed and dresser, a small sofa, and a little round wooden table with four chairs. Almost every day after school I’d go up there and play gin rummy with her for hours. It didn’t take long before I got really good at the game and started beating her with fair frequency, so every now and then I would let her win. If she caught me, though, which she sometimes did, she would get mad at me and make me leave her room.

  When it snowed, we’d have to shovel the driveway, which was incredibly arduous because the driveway was so long. We’d come home after school and get started, doing just two paths for the tires, my grandmother beside us, working as hard as we were. Luckily, sledding the unshoveled strip in between the tire tracks was always our reward. And when we would finally come in, she would make hot chocolate for us and help my mom with the house. Even though she was reserved and contained, in her own way she was very nurturing and spent quality time with all her grandchildren, especially me.

  Pearl River is also where I first recall us attending church regularly; no doubt my grandmother’s presence helped to drive that. She and my grandfather had raised my father in the Catholic Church, but he and my mother chose to raise us in the Episcopal Church—“Catholic-Lites,” as we referred to ourselves. Regular attendance usually consisted of twice-weekly Mass, every Wednesday evening and Sunday morning, with my grandmother always accompanying us. I went through my confirmation process there, as did my brother Joey. On the few occasions that we expressed a desire not to go, my dad would be so disappointed in us. Apparently even Episcopalians still went heavy on the guilt.

  By then, as I was growing a bit older and probably because I spent much more time playing with my brothers than I did with my younger sister, I was still quite a tomboy, so for me it was a fate worse than death to have to wear a dress. Maybe that’s why I remember so vividly the long, pale blue dress I wore for my First Communion in the Episcopal Church, which my mother had bought me for the occasion, and how she’d actually gone to the trouble to fix my hair in sponge rollers. Looking at those pictures now, I think how uncharacteristic it was for me to appear so well dressed with my hair so kempt; back then I didn’t have a lot of everyday casual attire, nor did I care that much about it. I had jeans and a couple of shirts, which I would repeatedly wear to school, and I wasn’t at all concerned with what my hair looked like. But because it was so long and so curly, it was frequently very disheveled, since my idea of doing my hair was to just brush over the top of it, leaving the back pretty gnarly, and sometimes I’d get teased at school because of it. My mom didn’t pay much attention to that, and though my grandmother tried, she didn’t have much success in focusing my attention on my appearance.

  I attended third and fourth grades in Pearl River, and in third grade I had a wonderful teacher named Ms. Thomes. Like Mrs. Gary, she was young, kind, and very nurturing. She was into some alternative teaching methods and would introduce them to us as part of our class: making mellow music with bamboo sticks and bouncing red rubber balls. She was very modern in the way she dressed and in the way she related to us, talking to us and treating us almost as if we were grown-ups. It was from her that I learned about the homeless. “Hobos” was the term she used, not intending to disparage or be unkind. She explained to us that she once invited a hobo into her home for a meal and a bath and that thereafter there was a fairly constant stream of transient homeless people who would come to her door. She believed that they had marked her house in some way so that others would know, a secret code that they shared.

  I didn’t have a nurturing teacher in fourth grade, nor did I have many friends, but I didn’t care, because I always had Joey, at least during recess and lunchtime hours. Just as in San Diego, in Pearl River he was my buddy during the school year and during the summers, when we would spend the majority of our time together.

  —

  The years in Pearl River also gave me some of my fondest memories of my dad really enjoying being with us. We were his first playmates, his first siblings—as an only child, he’d never really had the experience of family peers.

  My dad wasn’t usually home too early in the evening—I’m sure the commute was long, and once again he’d gotten involved in community theater. One production he did in probably every city we lived in was The Music Man. My brother Chris often played Winthrop Paroo to my father’s Professor Harold Hill, and when I was eight, I had a small part in the Oklahoma City production—a tiny, frail, timid girl wearing a band uniform, with my little fist swallowed in the bell of a French horn. During the last performance there, the theater where we’d performed honored my father with an award, and I remember crying when he got it, telling him how proud I was of him as he carried me out to the car. But being in New York City was an opportunity for my father to really try to do something more professional in the acting arena. And he did snag some bit parts—he had an agent, and he was getting some voice-over work. He even did a water-bed commercial and had a tiny role in some movie we saw at a drive-in theater after we left New York and moved back to Texas.

  The older and smarter we got, the more fun he had teaching us how to play chess and other strategic games. But it was while he was listening to comedy tapes on his reel-to-reel tape player with my brothers and me that we truly had the most fun—The Best of the Flip Wilson Show, Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America, to name just a couple. They were absolutely hysterical, and we would sit and listen to them and laugh and laugh, and then my brothers and I would get them out again and listen to them while he was at work. I’m not a funny person but I’m a wonderful audience, and I’m sure my sense of humor and irony formed from listening to these recordings. My dad also loved riddles and enjoyed presenting them to us. On his commute home from the city each evening, he listened to a radio show that would pose a riddle to its listeners. My dad enjoyed asking us these same riddles at the dinner table and would wait for us to figure them out on our own. Sometimes it took us all week.

  I still remember one of them to this day:

  A traveler is lost on a journey, and he meets two gentlemen at a fork in the road, one of whom always tells the truth, and one of whom always tells a lie. But the traveler knows only that about them: he doesn’t know which one is the liar, nor does he know which one always tells the truth. And he is able to ask only one of them one question to determine the correct path to take. So the riddle is this: What is the one question the traveler can ask one of the gentlemen in order to determine the correct path to take?

  The answe
r to the riddle was that the traveler could ask either of the gentlemen this question:

  “Which path would the other one tell me to take?”

  If the traveler asked the man who always told the truth, the man who told the truth would know that the liar would tell the traveler the wrong path to take. If the traveler asked the liar what the truthful man would say, the liar would lie about what he thought the truthful man would say. So in either case, the traveler should take the opposite road of whatever he was told to take.

  It was one of the riddles we could never figure out—my dad finally had to tell us the answer.

  —

  While I loved having my grandmother live with us, I do remember some tension between her and my mom around little things. It must have been difficult for both of them to find themselves sharing the role of “woman of the house.” So after about a year, whether it was because of those tensions or because she missed her home community, my grandmother moved back to Rhode Island, where her friends and relationships were, and lived in a small apartment. Sadly, a couple of years later, after we had moved to Fort Worth, she was diagnosed with late-stage colon cancer. The summer after she had a colostomy as part of her treatment, when I was around eleven or twelve, I went to stay with her for a couple of weeks. My mom knew that of all her grandkids, I was the closest to her, and my mom wanted me to be some company for her. But my grandmother was embarrassed for me to see her struggles with her colostomy bag, and so, every morning, she’d spend an hour or two secluded in the bathroom to deal with it before getting dressed. She was sad and didn’t talk very much. I think she missed my grandfather desperately and, with her newfound health problems, simply lost the will to live. She passed away shortly after my visit, far too young, just like my grandfather.