Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (best ereader for epub .TXT) 📕

had developed the bad habit of doing my homework sprawled in front of the television set. As I struggled to devise sentences using the irregular verbs “to be” and “to have” the TV news offered a brief film clip from Paris. The street seemed to be on fire. In the midst of the flames, a devastatingly handsome Parisian student ripped up a cobblestone and hurled it at the police. It was May 1968, and the événements were under way.

“Il est un beau étudiant,” I wrote. “Il est en fureur. Il a colère.” Et moi, I thought, j’ai colère aussi. I wanted to hurl cobblestones, too—or I thought I did. I wanted to hurl something. I tingled all over with vague, nameless passions and urges. I wanted trouble, desperately. I wanted to kiss boys, take drugs, be hauled by the hair into a police van at an antiwar protest.

My parents were just as desperate to ensure that I did none of the above. For the next four years the tiny word “No” loomed large in Concord. No, I couldn’t go on a date. No, I couldn’t go to the beach with my girlfriends. No, I most certainly could not go and scream “Baby killer” at LBJ when he visited Australia.

Of course, I obeyed. Adolescent rebellion is a problem when your parents are your friends. But I ranted, I cried. I would have locked myself in the bathroom except that, since we only had one bathroom, locking oneself in it for any length of time seemed thoughtless. So I flounced through the house, singing loud, tuneless renditions of every song I knew with the word “free” in it: “Born Free,” “I Want to Be Free,” “set me free, why don’t you, babe?” I blasted the “come mothers and fathers” verse from “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” at maximum volume, knowing that Bob Dylan’s spectacular lack of vocal ability drove my father to distraction. I sulked in my bedroom over copies of Rules for Radicals and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. My parents ignored it all, and in between outbursts we continued to get on famously.

Darleen, who could have been my advocate, was suddenly gone. Lured to Melbourne by a job as an advertising copy writer, she was now earning the phenomenal salary of a hundred dollars a week—almost twice what my father made. I moved into her room and hoped that the vibrations emanating from her décor—hessian drapes appliquéd with hippie-esque daisies, interesting junkyard-salvage bookshelves, rice-paper lanterns—would work some kind of transformation on my style-impaired psyche.

From Melbourne, Darleen became another pen pal. Her first letter arrived doodled all over like an illuminated manuscript with inks she’d purloined from the ad agency’s art department. She had nicknamed me Face, gently mocking my discovery of heavy black eyeliner. “Heard you moved swiftly—up with the posters, on with the records—the dragon is dead—long live the face. How do you like the bed—bet you’re getting good sleeps—well that’s good—no lines for the face—right?”

From a distance, we drew closer. The letters got longer and more intimate. She sent me poems (Exley, Eliot), book recommendations (Tolkien, Vonnegut) and advice about boys: “With no brothers I found it hard to be natural at the beginning of my courting days.” One day a letter arrived sharing sisterly confidences about work and romance. In it, she predicted our future: “We’ll have little houses in Glebe and/or a dome house in the country, and we’ll wizz around, drink lots of tea with mum, pick dad up from the races and cricket. And I’ll either have a dog and lots of babies or a briefcase in the back seat and you’ll have lots of impressionable young owl-eyed boy students five years your junior from your English classes at uni.” She ended this letter with the words I’d longed for all my life: “And do you realise what an incredibly wonderful amazing thing it is to me to find I have a sister who has all the qualities, and more, that I look for in a friend. Much happiness, thank you face.”

Worried that my curiosity about drugs would lead me into the company of creeps, she sent me a Glad sandwich bag containing a tiny amount of pot, also scored from her agency’s art department. (No doubt from the “bad types” from whom the nuns of Concord had hoped to shield her.) I waited till Mum went down the street on a grocery errand, rolled a flaccid, emaciated joint, stood at the door of the back veranda and smoked it, fast. The spasm of coughing that followed was so intense that the dog started barking in sympathy. The back fence didn’t melt. The magpies didn’t start singing in harmonics. I didn’t see God. Disappointed, yet ever the optimist, I fished a couple of seeds out of the crease in the bag and shoved them into the loamy soil among the begonias.

I decided that if I was to be imprisoned by the bourgeois values of my backwater country, at least I could write to some brave French soul out there on the ramparts. I had visions of her, my French alter ego. She wore tiny black mini-skirts and lashings of eyeliner. She chose her lovers with discernment. I visualized her hurling cobblestones by day and retreating to an intimate Left Bank brasserie where she argued about Simone and Sartre as the blended smoke of Gauloises and marijuana thickened in the candlelight. I decided to ask my French teacher to help me find her.

Miss Fitzpatrick probably wasn’t the right person to ask. Sixty-something, her steel-gray hair wrenched into a prim bun, Miss Fitzpatrick was a caricature of the spinster schoolmarm, living with her elderly sisters and puttering to school in an ancient, pea-green Morris Minor that never went above thirty miles per hour. She always wore homemade, long-skirted Liberty-print dresses with a starched lace handkerchief attached to her lapel by a large safety pin. For thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds reveling in the rebellious atmosphere of the