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

uni sheila who thinks she’s too bloody good to down a beer with us.” Buffering my nervousness at the university had already made me a fierce drinker: I kept frosted glasses in the refrigerator for the perfectly mixed martinis that lubricated my lingering social awkwardness. But the drinking of the sportswriters was a new league in which I had no desire to compete. When I left the pub, my grandest ambition was to make it upright to the huge gray Herald building rotating through space on the other side of the road.

It wasn’t exactly the kind of world-changing reporting I’d imagined, and I lived for the day of the three-month assignment changeover, when I’d be sent to a paradise such as the letters page. When the assignments finally went up on the newsroom notice board and I saw that I’d been condemned to another three months in the sports section, I almost resigned on the spot.

To stay sane, I’d started writing unsolicited features for the paper’s soft underbellies, the Home Section and the Weekend magazine. On the day one of these—a pensée about the Ice Age in my undefrosted freezer—appeared, I suddenly got a summons from the Herald’s editor-in-chief, otherwise known as God. Nobody I knew had ever seen him. Omnipotent yet invisible, the editor-in-chief communicated only by memos. I’d had one of these on a previous story—a one-liner saying he’d found the piece “readable.”

The summons to his office arrived just as I’d returned from an afternoon at the racetrack. I wasn’t exactly dressed for success. Dust crusted my wind-blown hair, manure rimmed my sensible sneakers, and a dribble of meat-pie gravy and tomato sauce traveled in a Jackson Pollockesque splatter across the front of my dress. For fragrance, I was wearing that unmistakable eau-de-pub medley of stale tobacco and beer. In a panic, I rushed across the newsroom to the fashion section and threw myself on the mercy of the cadet assigned there. In the staff bathroom, she scrubbed me off, made me up and loaned me her high-heeled burgundy boots, in which I tottered off to meet God.

David Bowman had the face of a kindly boy, topped by a mop of prematurely silvered hair. After a brief comment on that day’s article and a polite query on the state of my shorthand (cadets were supposed to reach a hundred words a minute before they could pass out of trainee status) he dismissed me. Relieved that I hadn’t been sacked for muddling the odds on some greyhound, I left the office baffled as to why Captain Memo, as Bowman was also nicknamed, hadn’t simply put it in writing.

The next morning the sports editor waved me into his cubicle. This gruff, taciturn man had barely said a word to me since I’d joined his section. He looked up over the heavy black rims of his glasses. “Want you round in features,” he barked, and returned his attention to the pile of 8-ply on his desk.

And so I found myself vaulted into one of the best jobs on the paper, writing everything from celebrity profiles to investigations of toxic waste dumps. Suddenly I had a real salary and an office with art on the walls.

• • •

“We’re starting a scholarship to send an Australian reporter to study at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York,” David Bowman told me one day. The scholarship was being created to memorialize Greg Shackleton, a young reporter who had been killed by the Indonesian army while covering the invasion of East Timor. “I really think you should apply.” This, I realized, might be my Big Trip. New York for a year would be perfect. And I would know someone there.

Joannie had been accepted to the Graduate School of Social Work at Rutgers and was living in an apartment in New Brunswick. “I do hope you get to study at Columbia,” she wrote when I told her of my application, “it’s a good school but as you said, we could finally get to meet each other!” Her weight remained low and her eating habits precarious, but she seemed at last to be winning the battle to normalize them. On weekends, I imagined the two of us wandering a museum in Manhattan, or going off together to watch the leaves change in Vermont.

In spite of the different turn our lives had taken as seventeen-year-olds, I still had more years of shared confidences with Joannie than with any of my mates in Sydney. There was no one left who remembered my Mr. Spock obsession or whose first adolescent stirrings of political consciousness had so closely paralleled my own. I had written things to Joannie that I hadn’t divulged to anyone else. And she had exposed her fears to me in a way that no Australian friend had ever dared. I wouldn’t need a martini before I visited Joannie: she would understand my shyness. I knew, I’d always known, that when we met each other we would be soul mates.

And so it seemed perfect to me that when I got the news that I’d won the scholarship, the second “Star Trek” movie was about to be released. “Don’t you dare go see it until I get there!” I wrote.

She didn’t answer at once, which I thought odd, since even a trivial “how are you” note always got an instant, enthusiastic response. But perhaps she was away, as she so often was in summer, in her cabin on Martha’s Vineyard.

The letter in reply finally arrived at my parents’ house in the last week of August, just as I was packing. A note on the front said: “Please forward to NYC if she has already left!”

It was from Joannie’s mother, and it began with an apology for its lateness. “I am sorry, but far sorrier to say what I have to—that Joannie died unexpectedly … due apparently to some metabolic catastrophe, she just did not wake up one day.”

9

She Was Going