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

how she was going to make up all her missed schoolwork, Joannie sounded like her old, ebullient self again. Her letter ended with the news that her Swiss boyfriend Dolfi “is coming over this summer in July—cheers!”

Whatever dark clouds had settled on Joannie that past December, they seemed to have lifted. By May, she wrote that she had firmly decided to start college in the fall. “They have sent me all sorts of forms to fill out, and naturally I’m very nervous, but I suppose that everyone is. Where do you plan on going?”

I planned on going to the University of Sydney, Australia’s oldest institution of higher learning. The heart of the campus was a beautiful collection of colonnaded Gothic buildings modeled on Oxford colleges. For years, riding the bus to and from the city, I’d passed the big stone gates and dreamed of entering them.

The only question was whether my marks in the public exam at the end of the year would be high enough. In Australia, marks were all that mattered. There were no selection committees, no personal interviews, no account taken of where one’s parents had gone or how much money they’d given the alumni fund. A computer matched your marks with your preferences, and the numbers made the decision. I’d done the work, and I loved exams the way a crossword addict loves a puzzle. Unless a bus hit me en route to the exam hall, I had every reason to believe that when the Australian academic year started the following February, I’d get my wish.

Joannie and I went back to comparing notes on politics, good books and music. All mention of eating disorders and group therapy disappeared from her letters. She had big plans for college, including a junior year abroad in a German-speaking country and a scheme, the summer following, to “fly from Europe to Australia. How does that sound?”

It sounded great to me. My own plans to travel abroad were still years in the future, so I jumped at the idea of finally meeting Joannie on my own turf. I imagined showing her my beautiful city, and maybe taking a trip to discover the Outback together.

Meanwhile, we continued to compare notes on our current lives. Mine, as the make-or-break exam approached, was consumed by academic effort. I lived between King Lear’s blasted heath and Bernini’s soaring baldachino; my mind rang with Goering edicts and Gide poetics.

Joannie, with her college admission in the bag, was having a far more relaxing year. We compared reading lists for our English classes. “I haven’t read Return of the Native, The Dubliners, Emma or Tree of Man,” Joannie wrote. “Maybe I’m illiterate. What I am rereading for school now is The Lord of the Rings, which is as good as ever.” I loved Lord of the Rings. At thirteen, I’d carried my copy to school and read it under the desk until caught during a geography lesson. But I was surprised that this entertaining fantasy was considered serious fare for senior-year literary study.

In the United States, Watergate was breaking. “I watched the Nixon speech with friends and we all nearly died laughing,” she wrote of the “I am not a crook” debacle. “I don’t think he’ll get impeached but he’ll never live this down, either. I hope he loses a lot of his power over Congress. Seemingly that is beginning to happen because both the House and the Senate recently passed a bill to stop all bombing in Indochina.”

In Australia, Whitlam’s new government was doing all it could to stop the bombing too. A few years earlier, Australia had pledged to go “all the way with LBJ.” Now our leaders branded the Christmas blitz of Hanoi as the act of “maniacs” and “mass murderers.” I was so proud of Whitlam’s stand. For the first time, I felt that a politician actually spoke for me. I felt sorry for Joannie, still stuck with a leader of whom she was ashamed.

• • •

In August, Joannie was once again writing from Martha’s Vineyard. It was there, a year earlier, that her problems had begun. Perhaps being back triggered something again. Her first letter from the island contained disturbing hints that everything wasn’t quite right. Inside the envelope was a snapshot of Joannie with her two-year-old niece. “This is a bad picture … makes me look fat” she wrote on the back of the photograph. I turned over the picture. It actually made her look thin—slender, leggy, beautiful, with the swanlike neck I’d always envied.

“I guess I didn’t tell you or maybe you forgot, but I am changing my name.” She had decided, she wrote, to take her mother’s maiden name. Since she was as much entitled to her mother’s surname as her father’s, she wrote, “why can’t I have the name I want?”

She would be leaving for college on the fifteenth of September. “I’ll send you my address as soon as I know it. I’ll be living in a dormitory where they’ll hopefully allow me to bring my mice.” She was enrolling as a premed student. “The course I am most nervous about is General Biology because I am afraid I will not be able to keep up with the rest of the class. I am also nervous about what I will do in my spare time as I often have difficulty in getting myself to go out and do things.”

Her Swiss boyfriend Dolfi had been with her all summer. “It sounds like a fantastic set-up but it hasn’t worked out so well, mainly because my feelings have changed. He’s really an awfully sweet and understanding person, and that makes me feel horribly guilty.… He’s incredibly active and always doing things and trying to keep up with him puts an awful lot of strain on me. Sometimes I do try, when I’m feeling good, but sometimes I honestly can’t stand the sight of him and then I go off by myself. He’s flying back on 22 August and I feel split.… Well,