Even having known
my wife Dody since she was a girl, I still relish the secrets
of her checkered childhood she sometimes reveals in unguarded
moments.
The time she ran away
from home when she was eight, for example.
After a spat with her
four-year-older sister, Cissy, she decided to shake the dust from
her heels at the ancestral residence and flee to a more hospitable
environment. She left abruptly, without packing even an extra
pair of white socks, and fled for almost an entire city block
before pausing in her headlong flight to rest under a tree and
collect her thoughts. While she was collecting them, her parents
discovered her absence and questioned her sister. Who admitted
that she and Dody had quarreled. After berating her soundly, they
sent her out to track down her headstrong sister. Which she did,
being familiar with the neighborhood. By the time they had made
the journey home they were friends again. Having taught them all
a lesson, Dody never again ran away from home, although she did
move out when she got married.
Both times.
And when she was 12
she embezzled family funds.
In those days, when
girls were 11 or 12, they were allowed to go downtown alone in
Houston (boys did it at seven). On
Saturdays, when she received her weekly allowance of 25 cents
( a not insignificant sum in those days of the Great Depression),
she would ride the streetcar to downtown, where the movies were,
for five cents. For another nickel she bought a James Coney island
( a chili dog) and for another a Delaware Punch to wash it down.
That left a dime for the movie. Which included a newsreel, a short
subject, a feature film and a stage show (she still speaks fondly
of the Weaver Brothers and Elvira). Then she would go next door
to an ice-cream parlor named D’arcy’s (we call it Dee-arcies)
where they had a free scales, and weigh herself. (She doesn’t
remember what she weighed then, and doesn’t much care.) Most of
the time.
Some Saturdays she
might go into stores to look around. Despite the abjuration she
always got along with the her quarter. "Don’t go in stores. Don’t
buy anything!" On one "shopping" trip she saw a designer
dress, a Kate Greenaway dress with a gathered skirt, she just
had to have. So she bought it. In those days, before credit cards,
folks had charge accounts at stores and just had to give their
name. Didn’t even sign anything. Her designer dress cost $1.98.
Having blown all her
cash on food and fripperies, she walked the two miles or so home.
She ran into a fire storm when she got there, bearing the dress
in a package.
"We told you
not to buy anything! Why did you do it?"
"Because I wanted it,"
she explained.
And she kept the dress.
And at an even more
tender age than when she ran away from home, she was a school
drop-out. She dropped out of kindergarten.
When she entered kindergarten,
the school was on a double-shift. Her class met in the afternoon.
When she got to school at one, the teacher was putting the class
down at one for their afternoon nap. Dody didn’t want to take
a nap. She had already had hers at home. But the teacher insisted
and made her lie on the floor with the other tots. But Dody wouldn’t
put her head down. The teacher pushed it down for her. Dody got
up and went home. She told her parents the teacher had banged
her head down on the floor and she was never going back to that
teacher’s class again.
And she didn’t. And
never got her kindergarten diploma.
Though she was a runaway,
an embezzler, a school drop-out as well as imperious and demanding,
she was generous with those who served her. In her childhood days,
Milky Way bars were considered delicacies. And frozen Milky Way
bars were the crème-de-la-crème. She and her sister used to order
them by phone from the neighborhood drugstore, a block-and-a-half
away. When it hadn’t arrived after five minutes, they would call
the drugstore and demand to know what had happened to their order.
Assured it was on its way, they would go out on the front porch
and wait. When the delivery boy arrived on his bicycle, they never
fussed at him. They tipped him 20 per cent.
Two cents for the two
Milky Ways. They were a nickel each.
She is nothing if not
consistent. When she was a freshman at Rice Institute (Rice University
now) she was flunking math. She says her teacher was a mean old
lady. So she went to the registrar and got a new teacher, a nice
young male.
And she passed the
course.
David Westheimer lives
with his wife of 57 years, Dody, in the same Los Angeles apartment
they moved into from Houston, Texas 40 years ago. Their son, Fred,
is a Senior Vice-President at the William Morris Agency and his
younger brother, Eric, is a veterinarian. Succeeding generations
include five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. As a journalist,
David worked for Oveta Culp Hobby. At 83, David Westheimer continues
to write, and not just for Senior Women. His latest effort, The
Great Wounded Bird, his recollections of World War II, winner
of the Texas Review 1999 poetry prize, was published this year
by Texas Review Press and may be ordered from Amazon Books, where
it is 1,458,159th on their sales list, from Barnes & Noble and
Borders Books. David is a novelist and a retired Air Force Officer.
He can be reached for a repertoire of feigned curmudgeonly remarks
at: DWestheime@aol.com.
