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

began to wonder if that wasn’t preferable to what had happened to my American friends, who seemed to have had adult passions thrust at them. They’d been forced into bloom like branches of hothouse blossoms.

Our extended timetable for growing up had saved me from plunging too soon into an emotional deep end where I might not have been able to find my footing. I began to wonder if Joannie had felt rushed out of her childhood. I knew that one theory of anorexia suggests that young women strive to stay thin as a way to hold on to their girlishness, starving so their bodies won’t ripen into the rounded curves of womanhood. Joannie had written of her reluctance to accept adult responsibility, and her frequent flights home to the nest suggested her unease with the adult world of independence. But it wasn’t until I lived in New York that I understood the different meanings that “womanhood” and “adult” had for the two of us. For the first time, I could see what it was that had terrified her so.

As fall turned to winter in Manhattan, I did the things I’d imagined doing with Joannie—made weekend sorties to see the leaves turn, wandered museums on snowy Sundays. But I never went to the second “Star Trek” movie. I just couldn’t bring myself to see it without her.

Somewhere toward the end of the academic year, I began to have glimpses of the possibility of an alternative life—an American life—different from the one that was waiting for me back in Sydney. Chance encounters turned to job offers. And then I met a fellow student with blond curls and a history as a labor organizer among poor black woodcutters in Mississippi. As a kid, Tony had watched “Star Trek” in his family’s rambling Victorian house in a suburb just like Maplewood. Summers, he roamed around Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard.

He should have met Joannie, not me. And it was she who should have been stepping through the professional doors that were opening for me. By spring, I began to have the eerie sensation that I had slipped into Joannie’s place and was leading the life she should have had.

The following summer, just a few months before Tony and I were married, he took me to Martha’s Vineyard. We went to watch the sunset at Menemsha—the place that for so many years had been a postmark I didn’t know how to pronounce. We sat on the beach and watched the sky turn purple and gold—the colors on the postcards Joannie had sent me. As the sun dropped into the ocean, I imagined her sitting there in my place, happy and in love.

I was lonely for her. I looked up the hill to the collection of fishing shacks and holiday homes behind us, and wondered which of them had been hers. That night, back at the little inn where we were staying, I pulled out the skinny Vineyard phone book. Her family’s name was there—the only listing under that name on the island. At last I screwed up my courage and dialed. I sat there on the bed as the phone rang, and rang, echoing into the emptiness of a summer home already deserted for the year.

• • •

It was nine more years before I finally contacted Joannie’s mother. After Columbia, I went to Cleveland to take a job in The Wall Street Journal’s news bureau there. The year after that, Tony and I married in France. We spent the next eight years in Sydney, Cairo and London, living out of the never quite unpacked duffel bags of Foreign Correspondents.

When we returned to the United States in 1993, Tony longed to revisit the Vineyard. For me, the place was still haunted by Joannie. Every time I sat laughing over a delicious meal, I thought of her, and how she should have been there, enjoying it in my place. And then of the long years in which she’d been unable to enjoy such meals, and of the many ways, during those years, that I’d failed her as a correspondent, and as a friend.

Before my resolve failed again, I wrote to the old address in Maplewood.

On the phone, Joannie’s mother had a strong New Englander’s voice that broke as we talked of her daughter. “I was very touched to get your letter,” she said. “Come and see me. I can’t talk any more now.”

And so, on a beautiful fall day in 1993, as a crisp breeze pushed little cumulus clouds around on the horizon, the conductor handed back my yellow ticket with the long list of New Jersey suburbs. The hole punched through Maplewood made it official: I was finally making the journey I’d thought about for so long. The train rattled past Newark’s razor-wired demolition sites and graffiti-scrawled gas-storage tanks, then through humble neighborhoods of simple working-class houses. Eventually, about twenty miles southwest of Manhattan, trees closed in, offering only glimpses of the winding boulevards and elegant homes beyond.

Joannie’s house was exactly as I had imagined it: a charming Victorian surrounded by trees. On the porch steps her cat, Selena, an old lady in the reckoning of cat years, stretched on the warm stone. Upstairs, her bedroom had been kept as it was: a pretty room of nooks and windows, flooded with sunlight, the green plants she tended still thriving under her mother’s care. In a brilliantly lit window alcove stood her desk—her writing desk.

I imagined her there, in late August 1968—a just-turned thirteen-year-old, tanned from a summer at the beach. Hiding her shyness behind a flimsy airmail sheet, she wrote: “I’d like to be your pen-pal. I have several others in Austria. People often confuse Austria with Australia. They’ll ask me why I can speak German, or why I’ve got a slight European accent, and I’ll answer that I spent some time in Austria. Then, they will say brightly, ‘Oh, did you see any kangaroos there?’ ”

Downstairs, at the breakfast bar in the kitchen,