My Dog's Name Was Sasha

Notebook, 1978, 1979

Self-portrait 1975

I’m reading old notebooks not intended for other people. Mostly they make me feel sad and self-critical because I used them to move painful and anxious thoughts out of my body onto the page. Did this serve any purpose for me as a person or a writer? I think not, but here the pages are.

Sometimes they contain anecdotes and reflections that look out, rather than in, and something of a little world appears. The little world of what I was doing and who I was spending time with and the social times in which I was living. I collect them from time to time, not systematically.

Today’s notes were written in 1978 and 1979 when I was 32 and 33. I'm so glad no longer to be her, the writer of these pages, although of course I’m still her. By this time, I was making whatever money I had from writing. I wrote for The Village Voice, and I wrote a column about books for Viva, a magazine owned by Bob Guggione, the publisher of Penthouse, and run by Kathy Keeton, who hired a few feminists she wasn’t always prepared for what they’d say.

In 1978, I was living in East Hampton with a man I’ll call Tomas. We had been together for six years. He was beautiful. We had a dog named Sasha we loved. We bought land in East Hampton and made plans to build a house. This plan began to scare me, and we didn’t wind up building the house. We were playing tennis with a man named Gardner, an artist. Some time that year, Gardner and I would get together and Tomas would go to California and get involved with a doctor.

This little summary feels so age 32. I mean it felt you would never die and could therefore change directions like that. It felt like you would never die and at the same time you thought you were already doomed to go on being what you were. At least, I did.

One of the rewards of reading old notebooks is seeing what’s changed and what remains cemented. I realize I’m not jealous of other people, or not very much. In these pages—not the ones I’m going to show you—I’m jealous of everyone. It’s relentless, and I have to imagine it must have been very difficult to know me. People must have felt sorry for me—not pity but maybe bemused comprehension. The people I found had compassion. It’s probably one of the things that attracted me to them. I was lucky. I learned from them. I think I studied people who were different me—not so angry and competitive—the way a being from another planet would try to figure out how humans worked. If I wanted to imitate them, I wasn’t able to. (It’s just occurred to me I’m jealous of people who were never hampered by jealousy!)

Not being jealous feels like a part of me has fallen off. Some people wake up to find they are missing the eye color they had when they went to sleep or the possibility of sleep at all going forward. They know it won’t be waiting for them in bed.

The reason I’m not as jealous as I used to be is I don’t know. Maybe it’s Richard and believing we are going to tumble along together til one of us stops first. The writer of these pages can’t imagine sticking it out with anyone in a future she tries to see. Well, I can now.

Time Capsule March 1978. (Most names are changed)

I went to see my friend Helen who was in New York at the Plaza Hotel. She was having an affair with a man named Alberto, who was forceful, deep-throated, and burly-looking. He was a writer who had written six books about leftist politics. As a member of an underground group, he’d been arrested and had managed to serve only three months for inciting a riot, because his lawyer had arranged a police brutality charge to trade off with the judge.

In order to organize the police brutality charge, Alberto had to provoke a prison guard to punch him. When the time arose, Alberto was so frightened, he couldn’t spit at the guard, as planned. His mouth went dry, and the guard laughed, understanding the situation immediately. He asked Alberto what he needed for the police brutality charge. Alberto’s lawyer had said it would have to show. The guard then said it would have to hurt. And the last thing Alberto remembers was hearing, “Good luck, comrade.”

Helen met Alberto when she was writing about professors who have affairs with their students. Alberto was one of them and has a “theory” about it. He was the kind of man I was raised to expect to enter my life, an artist/intellectual/revolutionary who would teach me, and guide me, and transform me into some form of him. These are the men I don’t want to be with. Seeing Helen, though, I wondered, do I still want to shine through a man?

********

I don’t know my gifts as a writer, but I know my limitations. I won’t write long, expansive, historically significant novels like Doris Lessing. It will be in a new form, based on the letter and the diary. I’m oddly happy anticipating the turmoil of the next few months of packing, moving, raising money, and building the house.

********

Sasha, Tomas, and I have been running on the beach in the early evenings, running on the hard sand to the sound of pounding surf in an open expanse of sky. The waves splash our feet. I run without stopping. It just happens. Suddenly, I’m weightless.

Time Capsule August 1978

I told Deb I would leave her all my clothes if I died. She was happy to hear that. She also wants my blue sapphire ring with the little diamonds. She's under the impression I have a lot of jewelry.

********

Diana Nyad's swim was aborted. She was stung by jelly fish and had to be taken out of the water. Her lips and tongue had swollen up enormously.

********

I had a dream in which J came to dinner and nothing was prepared. I had to take a frozen chicken out of the freezer and go shopping in a market where the vegetables were old and rotted—all this in the middle of "dinner." I bought the best of the rotted carrots.

********

I have not yet figured out how to make my life unselfish without being bored by the options.

********

I ran into E at the Sag Harbor Cinema. She called out when she saw me, an involuntary response, I thought, to someone she recognized. I usually take people at face value. But you can't take a psychiatrist entirely at face value, I think, because I doubt they are ever taking themselves at face value.

********

At dinner, Gardner's wife told us about her life in New York when she was room mates with Cloris Leachman. She described how Cloris introduced them to Brando, Wally Cox, and all the other members of the Actors Studio. She told us Gardner had been a bomber pilot in the war. I remembered a remark he made while we were playing tennis at the club. I looked up at a small plane moving slowly across the sky and said, "It looks like it would be fun to fly a plane like that." Gardner said, "Yes, it is." I asked if he flew planes and all he did was give me a sly nod as if to say, naturally, I do everything.

********

Sasha has lined up three bones in the middle of the floor. They are sharp little shards. I could get killed stepping on any one of them.

Drawing of Sasha by Gardner Leaver.

Time Capsule 1979

When exactly did I decide to move away from Tomas and live by myself? It might have taken a much longer time if not for Gardner. I can’t pretend I left cleanly, that I made a decision outside sex—the great, stupid, forceful . . . what is it?

********

For the past week I’ve been getting up and running in the park with Gardner first thing. Then we come back to my apartment and eat breakfast. I keep the fridge stocked with things he likes. I horde the baked farmer cheese for myself. Gardner eats omelettes or bagels or both or yogurt with fruit and honey, honey on everything, on the bagel, in his coffee, you name it.

********

Karen came by to talk about a play she’s writing. While she was here, she told me about her life. She and four other women are raising a boy named Manny. Ella is Manny’s biological mother, and the three of them live in an apartment together. Karen and Ella are both gay but aren’t lovers. Manny also has a room with his things in two other apartments in the city as well as in a house in the country. Karen said Manny was in very good shape. I told her I was thinking of writing about women who were raising children in experimental ways as a consequence of feminism. By coincidence later that day, I was telling the outline of this story to Deb and Fran, and Fran told me she knew one of the women taking care of Manny. She said Manny felt shunted around and as if he didn’t really belong anywhere. Also, the other three women felt Karen and Ella were using them for “help.” I thought both aspects of the story probably contained truth. How could it go any other way?

Everyone I told this story to said how she was feeling about having a child. Deb said she’d decided she didn’t want a child and her shrink had told her “not to close the door on thinking about it.” I wondered if this was a thing shrinks thought they needed to say to their women patients. I didn’t think Deb wanted to keep the door open, although maybe she did. Eva told me she and her friend Petra had often talked about helping raise another woman’s child. I now know I want to have a baby, but I don’t think I could share the raising of the child. I think I would be too possessive.

********

Eva, Freddie, and I have decided to form a study group to read all of Freud and all of Marx. This will probably have to continue for the rest of our lives. I’m not a true intellectual. I need the incentive of getting together with people I like in order to accomplish something.  

********

I stayed over at Pat’s apartment and got up at 9:30. My head was pounding. I couldn’t put my lenses back in. I wanted to get home to Sasha. I was worried about him being inside so long. I got dressed and went uptown in the subway. It was a warm, sunny day. I felt very hung over, even though I hadn’t had that much to drink. I wanted to get back to my rituals. I know if I do certain things: wash my face carefully, prepare my lenses, wash the dishes, make sure the apartment is in order before going to sleep, take Sasha for a walk, get the mail, straighten my desk, that when I wake up my life will be able to resume. Have I fallen into maturity just in time for the aging of my face?

********

A woman I know in East Hampton tells me this story. Her father, a powerful, easily-angered man, owns a bakery in New Jersey. He's a diabetic. She says, "I'm afraid what's going to happen to all of us when he dies, and partly I want him to die, we're all like one extended person, no one can tell when something is happening to anyone else, it feels like it's happening to you."

She tells me about the two-family house she grew up in with her uncle and aunt and their two children. Each set of children had two sets of parents. Her father was the powerful one, and his brother, her uncle, was the subservient one.

After 26 years of cohabitation the brothers had a terrible fight. One day, the powerful brother comes home from the bakery to find his brother hacking down the 100-year-old mulberry tree in the backyard. The subservient brother had hated the tree for all the years he lived in the house. He was fastidious, and when the berries ripened, they fell on the path. He was out there sweeping the path five times a day.

The powerful brother became so enraged that the two men had a fist fight. They are rolling around on . . .

The narrative ends here because I can't find the next page.

Diana Nyad.

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