Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey

by Geraldine Brooks

  I hadn’t bothered to look at the envelope. But there in the top corner was the return address: Memorial Unit, Yale-New Haven Hospital. Joannie wrote that she had collapsed three days before Christmas and arrived at the hospital emergency room “unconscious, dehydrated, in shock, and with a blood pressure of 40/?”

  Almost three weeks later she was, she wrote, “a lot better, am up and around and gaining weight, but still I will probably be here for 3 months or so.”

  It sounded like an odd sort of hospital. “There are a lot of other patients my age, including some very nice boys”—after which she’d drawn a smiley face—“and the doctors and nurses are all wonderful too. We are kept very busy by all sorts of meetings and activities … and I’m beginning to learn a lot about myself, and a lot about other people too.”

  I didn’t know what to make of this. If Joannie had lost too much weight, surely all she had to do was eat more. Why would she have to spend three months in a hospital? How could she take the time, in the middle of her crucial senior year?

  In January 1973, I had never heard the words “anorexia nervosa.” The self-starvation that would become an epidemic of female adolescence was still little known in the United States and wasn’t yet discussed at all in Australia.

  Like many Australians, I had been raised to be suspicious of neurosis. Ours was the sentiment so perfectly articulated in the movie Crocodile Dundee, when Mick Dundee meets a woman at a New York party who has seen a psychiatrist. Mick, alarmed, assumes she’s crazy. His American girlfriend tries to explain that the woman isn’t mad, she just needed to see a psychiatrist to talk over her problems. “Hasn’t she got any mates?” responds Mick. To an American audience, that’s a gag line. To Australians it’s a sensible query.

  My mother, in particular, despised what she considered the navel-gazing of psychotherapy. To her, neurosis was nothing but self-pity indulged until it had run amok. She had mild claustrophobia that made her panic when pulling a sweater over her head. Going into elevators was a penance, yet she forced herself to ride them; she never took the stairs. “You have to fight your fears,” she said.

  I had my own neuroses, although I didn’t think of them that way. Whenever our debating team traveled to a competitor school, my first stop was the bathroom, so I could throw up. When I started going out on dates, I threw up during those, too. I had inherited my father’s stage fright, but it was stage fright amplified by the terrible adolescent delusion that I was walking around lit up by a spotlight, and that every gaffe I made was noticed by the whole world.

  It would never have occurred to me to try to get help with this. “Stop dwelling on yourself,” my mother said. “Think about how the other person is feeling instead.” My mother also said what always is said to adolescents: “Everyone goes through it. Everyone feels like you do.”

  Of course, I didn’t believe her. I certainly didn’t believe that Joannie—my well-traveled pen pal who had recently been elected class president—could be battling the same tide of insecurity that was tugging at me.

  I don’t know exactly what I wrote back to Joannie, but I suspect it was something Pollyanaish, with a “look on the bright side” tone. Her reply, on January 23, began brightly in response. “I just finished playing Ping Pong with my favorite one of those ‘nice boys’ you mentioned in your last letter !”

  But after a few polite queries about my vacation plans, the facade of cheerfulness soon fell away. “I was accepted last year at Vassar College, and had been planning to go in September ’73. But now I’m not really sure, mainly because of the hospitalization.” In 1973, I had heard of a handful of Ivy League schools—names like Harvard, Yale or Princeton would have meant something to me. I hadn’t heard of Vassar, so the extent of Joannie’s achievement in getting admitted to such a fine college was lost on me. And that meant I also missed an important signal as to the seriousness of her illness: that she was considering passing up such a prize.

  “I don’t know if college right away would be the best thing for me,” she wrote. “There’s a lot of talking with everybody to be done.” Some of the talking took place Saturdays and Wednesdays, when Joannie’s parents made the five-hour roundtrip drive from Maplewood to take part in “Family Meetings.” Patients, their relatives and the staff talked about “family difficulties, or problems they have in common, or what have you.”

  Over the years, Joannie had written a lot about her brothers and sister, and had warmly mentioned her mother a number of times. But she had never said anything about her father. She had never even told me what he did for a living. It was an odd lacuna in a correspondence as detailed as ours. All I knew was that his work had taken them to live in both Washington, D.C., and Austria for a time.

  Now, given the hints she was dropping of family strife, my overactive imagination began conjuring scenarios for its causes. I knew that Austria, in those Cold War days, was a key espionage base for spies operating behind the Iron Curtain. Perhaps Joannie’s father was a CIA agent. It would explain her silence on the matter; also, given her left-wing politics, it would account for bitter feeling between them. My theory thrilled me: I rolled it around in my head, thinking up clever questions that would allow me to test it.

  Joannie’s next letter mentioned her father, but only in the context of a package I’d sent containing books, bangles, rings and incense. “The incense even my father liked, and usually he hates the smell of it.” (Perhaps because it reminded him of nefarious CIA doings in Southeast Asia?)

  It was early March, and Joannie was writing from home: “I am finally out of the hospital and am going to school again. I have been so glad to see all of my friends!” They had thrown a welcome-home party for her. She was glad to be back in school. The class vice-president had been particularly pleased to see her—“he decided he wasn’t cut out for the job of President. As for me, I can hardly wait, I love the job, although it’s a lot of work, but the sense of responsibility is really good for me.” Aside from worrying about 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, write soon, and have fun with your guy, at least. What’s his name?”

  • • •

  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.”

&nbs
p; 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 grandmother gave my mother. I wear it to remind me there is love in the world amidst all the self-hatred I feel for myself. Anyway, I use the silver chain you gave me for it—thanks again.”

  She was, she said, battling to retain some semblance of a normal life, having started at a local college in late January on a three-day-a-week schedule. “Because of my mental difficulties, I am having problems in concentrating and going, but basically the classes are interesting.”

  She had also managed to pass her driving test—“a sign of independence and adulthood, which is important for me, since that’s part of my whole problem.” The letter broke off at the end of the page. It began again four days later. It had been snowing. Joannie had always loved the cold and the snow—it had been an ongoing joke in our letters, because to me any temperature below sixty degrees was a torment, while she complained bitterly if winter didn’t bring blizzards. Now, she said, she hated and feared the snow and the cold “because I feel it so intensely because I am so skinny and also I guess it has bad psychological representations to me to.” That tiny misspelling—“to” for “too”—jumped off the page. Joannie was a meticulous writer who rarely made a grammar or spelling mistake.