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

Late at night, when the babble of voices from the portside restaurant finally ebbs, different sounds flow up the hill. There is a gentle tinkling, then an answering note, deeper and more resonant. Ping-ting. Bong. Ping-ting. Bong.

Don’t these phantom bell ringers ever rest? I toss on the narrow bed, unable to sleep. Finally, pulling the orange coverlet over my shoulders, I step out into the starry night. Down in the port, boats rock in their moorings, their shrouds gently clinking. Ping-ting. A pulse of white glare briefly illuminates the dark trail of my footsteps across the dew-wet grass. It is the beam from the Gay Head lighthouse. Somewhere out on the inky water a bell buoy chimes a further warning. Bong.

I wander back across the meadow to the cabin where my husband and son are sleeping. Joannie’s cabin on Martha’s Vineyard. It is 1996. She has been dead for fifteen years.

“The cabin is just a cabin,” she wrote in August 1972, “one room, with two beds in it, which I took over two years ago and have since redecorated. Now it looks halfway presentable—I’m working on some new curtains for it now—and your mobile fits right in with everything else. Thanks!” I had sent her a mobile for her birthday that June, and she had brought it to the Vineyard for her redecoration project.

The strings on the mobile rotted years ago and the thing fell apart. I can’t even remember what it looked like. But the curtains Joannie worked on in 1972—orange and yellow hippyish swirls—still hang in the windows. And the linoleum she chose, with its flower-power daisies, brightens the dark wood floor. An old piece of 1970s macramé dangles from a beam.

The summer of the redecoration was also the summer that Joannie decided she was too fat for her swimsuit. She had just turned seventeen: the year of the beginning of the end of her life.

And now I am here, as I was last year. Joannie’s echo.

“I’m terribly pleased at your winning the scholarship and coming to New York,” Joannie’s mother Elizabeth had written to me in 1982, when she broke the news of Joannie’s death. “You must get in touch with us and come to visit—even stay a while if you need a place.”

But I did not get in touch, although I thought about it almost every week of the nine lonely months I spent in New York City. Even after three years as a reporter, cold-calling strangers and doorstopping politicians, I remained excruciatingly shy in my personal life. When it came to making contact with Joannie’s family, I couldn’t summon the nerve to pick up the phone.

That autumn at Columbia University, I began to glimpse for the first time the sources of Joannie’s despair. Growing up had been so easy in Sydney, where childhood passed at its own leisurely pace, with no rush into adulthood.

At Columbia, I came to see the different way achievement was measured for my American classmates. For them, graduate school wasn’t the surprising and luxurious blessing it was for me. Instead, it was just another hurdle on a track determined for them at birth. And for many of them, the bar was always set just a hair beyond the point that they could comfortably reach.

I’d been spared the pressure that my American contemporaries felt, some of them since preschool. For me, with parents who’d never had a chance to go to college, any academic achievement was treated as a small miracle. If my grade in a subject was a credit or a distinction, that was great and we celebrated. No one asked me why I hadn’t got a high distinction.

Within a month or two I’d moved out of the grungy student residence hall within earshot of sporadic gunfire in Morningside Park. I’d heard of a room in an apartment tucked above a diner that sounded like my old place near the uni in Sydney. I would be sharing with a vivacious woman named Valerie, about three years younger than I, who was dating an Australian reporter.

I soon learned that she was dating a great many other people as well. Valerie worked days as a bookkeeper and was usually asleep in her room at the far end of our railroad apartment when I returned from class in the early evening. At 1 A.M., when I’d gone to bed, she would get up and dress for her night’s entertainment. I would catch a sleepy glimpse of her as she headed out the door. Her taste in clothes ran to tight leather and microscopic mini-skirts; in clubs, to places with names like Hellfire; in men, from rough trade to the sexually ambiguous.

One night she arrived home at 5 A.M. and disappeared giggling into her bedroom with a uniformed police officer. When I asked her about him, she tossed her head and howled with laughter. “Oh no, honey, he ain’t a cop. He’s just, like, really into authority. He has these neat handcuffs.”

A few weeks later, when the real police called, looking for one of Valerie’s regulars, a man named Sticks who was wanted in connection with a murder in a gay bar, I decided it was time to move out. Kate, one of my best friends from high school, had come to New York to study acting. She had a room available in an apartment in the East Village.

Moving in with Kate was a relief. My Sydney childhood—even my Sydney adulthood—hadn’t quite prepared me for Valerie. In the staid suburbs of Sydney there had been no need to feign sophistication and, in a cloistered all-girls school, no rush to be sexy. But in New York it seemed that everything from sitcoms to sermons assumed a world in which nine-year-olds had opposite-sex admirers, thirteen-year-olds went out on dates and fifteen-year-olds had sex. I’d hated my parents’ strictness about curfews and living on my own because it was holding me back from the adult passions I craved. But in New York I