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

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His name was Duff: a long-haired university student whose smiling eyes had etched wonderful crow’s-feet into his tan. I’d won his heart by leading a party that scaled the towering, barbed-wire-topped walls of the Sydney Showground to break into a sold-out Led Zeppelin concert. The fact that I was wearing a floor-length tie-dyed evening dress at the time must have added to my allure.

There was tremendous cachet in having a uni student for a boyfriend when one was still at school. I loved to meet him at the university to catch a film-society screening and sit sipping coffee on the balcony of the Union theater. Duff was a government major, so we had long political discussions in between rolling around on the soft grass of the university quad, kissing till our mouths ached.

He was also a pothead of serious proportions. My own venture into “grow-your-own” had come to an untimely end just months after it began. My father came wandering into the kitchen one Saturday morning after mowing the lawn. He had a puzzled expression on his face and a leaf of one of my precious plants in his hand. At work the day before, he’d proofread an article on how to identify cannabis. “Do you think we should call the police?” he said.

My mother grasped the situation instantly. She shot me one of her patented glares that could peel paint off brickwork. Then, rearranging her face into an expression of benign indifference, she turned to my father, took the leaf from his hand and deposited it in the kitchen tidy. “Don’t be a mug, Daddy. It’s just a weed. Reminds me, I was planning to clean up the side garden. Never seem to have time to get to it. Maybe this afternoon. Aren’t the begonias blooming beautifully right now?”

Duff’s supply line of what he called “dakka” didn’t run through the parental backyard and was seemingly inexhaustible. After several years of enforced abstinence, I leaped at this second chance to become a substance abuser. But my lungs still wouldn’t tolerate the smoke. I coughed like a consumptive and never absorbed enough to get high. So I sat through the parties, cross-legged and closed-eyed, pretending to groove on the over-amplified bass line of Iron Butterfly and the Aztecs—an Aussie band Duff loved to play at painful decibels. Before long, his turn for the Big Trip Elsewhere took him off on travels to Southeast Asia. I moped over his departure, but it probably saved my hearing.

Joannie’s next letter came from Poughkeepsie, New York, from a dorm named Davison at Vassar College. I was months away from learning if I’d been accepted to the university, and almost half a year from actually starting classes. So I was curious to hear how Joannie was enjoying the experience.

It was 11 P.M., she wrote, and she was sitting with a bunch of fellow freshmen she’d just befriended. “My room is a single, which I don’t really like, which is why I’m writing this letter with 3 other people in room 208 instead of shutting myself off in 211.” It sounded cozy and collegiate. “Mike is reading Tolkien, Anita is reading Biology, Bill is reading economics and I have just finished reading 2 chapters of Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day for English.” It was the evening of her first full day of classes. “I can see I’m going to have to work awfully hard here, especially if I continue as a pre-med student. I really wonder if I can do it.… Write soon and enjoy yourself—Peace, Joannie.”

I didn’t have much time to enjoy myself at that point, with the matriculation exams looming and my last days as a high school student drawing to a close. I don’t think I even had time to reply to her letter. With the exams finally over, I bought Joannie a silver chain for Christmas and sent it off with an apology for my tardy correspondence.

And so it was December before I learned that Joannie had almost died. Just two weeks after she’d written to me from her Vassar dorm, Joannie went home for the weekend and took an overdose of an antidepressant drug, Tofranil. She was rushed to intensive care as the doctors battled to save her life. After several days in the coronary care unit, she was admitted to a psychiatric clinic in Belle Mead, New Jersey, in a deep depression.

By early November she’d climbed out enough to be allowed home, but when she wrote to me late that month, the tone of her letter was strangely flat, as if she was still in the grip of a lingering sadness. “I will probably be going back to school next semester, although not to Vassar,” she wrote. “I would be attending a local college and living at home.” In the meantime, she had a volunteer job at a local hospital—“it gives me something to do.” She thanked me for the silver chain: “I never used to wear jewelry.… I went through my Mr. Spock phase and decided jewelry was illogical and superfluous.”

It seemed like such a long time since we’d both played at being the emotionless Vulcan. Now, Joannie was in the grip of emotions so overpowering they risked destroying her.

I worried when Joannie skipped her usual New Year’s letter. Remembering that the previous holiday season had been the beginning of her hospitalization, I wrote inquiring how she was, and I worried as weeks passed without a reply.

It was almost the end of February before a letter arrived. It was a long letter, written over several sheets in a tiny, crabbed handwriting that I didn’t even recognize. She’d started writing it late at night on the second of February.

“Hi. Sorry about not writing for so long—I’ve been going through sheer hell mentally and don’t know if I feel like writing about it in detail—I have taken to wearing a silver crucifix which my great