By Rebecca Wallace ’95

A thud came from the other side of the door. Then a piercing squeal.

“Help! I’m stuck in the bathroom!”

Even my roommate Stacy, who could probably break me in half even without her ROTC uniform on, was no match for our bathroom door. Our decrepit old East Davis house had been creaking and settling in response to the changing weather, and the door frame had taken on an unforgiving shape.

Stacy took a long time to get out. Our roommate Joanna and I shouted helpful advice, like, “Pull!” When that didn’t work, we laughed until tears rolled down our faces, and we fell onto the rug.

Onto the vile sludge-brown carpet, to be precise. Suddenly it wasn’t funny any more. “Why do we live here?” I wondered. It was our own fault. We hadn’t been able to decide where to live and had put off signing a lease while the good places got snapped up. So here we were, living out the 1994–95 school year—my senior year at UC Davis—in a pit on Spruce Lane painted the color of spearmint gum.

Paint peeled off the shower. The network of scratches on the hardwood floors looked like a road map of Paris. A hole in the back fence allowed our dog to regularly escape and bound up to visitors in the front yard. The mailman refused to come to our house.

Prospects for improvements in “The Spruce” seemed bleak. Our landlord always looked baffled. When summoned to make repairs, he’d stay for 10 minutes, staring at the broken faucet or moribund sprinkler. Then he’d mutter something about the hardware store, leave and never come back.

As the year rolled along in a blur of classes, Cubist cookies and Aggie crossword puzzles, we covered up the cracks in the living room walls with posters of James Dean. We strung Christmas lights everywhere. I found they made a nice glow in my room, where a bygone art student had sponge-painted the walls dusky pink. We started having friends over on Mondays to watch 90210 and Melrose Place, and on Thursdays to see a funny new show called Friends before we went dancing at Mr. B’s.

There was little insulation in The Spruce, so we froze on cold winter nights. We burned candles to give the illusion of warmth. One night after a party, a friend walked two miles home rather than sleep on our couch. But it was cozy huddling around the space heater in Joanna’s room with popcorn and Jumbo Red Vines.

One night, Joanna and I had to go out looking for the dog. We didn’t know what else to do, so we drove around calling her. As I leaned out the car window, driving two miles an hour in the middle of the night in a long flannel nightgown, I said, “This is the dumbest thing I have ever done.” But something good came out of it: The memory has made me laugh for 10 years. (We never did find the dog that night.)

The last time I was in Davis, Joanna and I had driven up from the Bay Area for a day to catch up with friends. It was great to be back, but we missed Stacy, who was in the Army. We ate at Woodstock’s and made fun of the Egghead sculptures and wondered why the freshmen looked so young. Finally we drove to see our old pit.

Gone was the mint gum paint. Instead, The Spruce glowed with a fresh coat of yellow. The lawn had been mowed. No fugitive dog ran up to greet us.

We stared at the house. “Wow,” Joanna said. “It looks like someone’s taking care of it now.”

I smiled, then thought, a little wistfully, “Too bad.”