Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey

by Geraldine Brooks

  At that point in the letter her handwriting changed abruptly. “I am going to start printing—it may be easier for you to read. I am having a hard time (physically) writing because I am so tense.”

  And I was having a hard time reading this outpouring of painful emotion. Until now, Joannie had written to me after she had climbed out of her depressions. As a result, I hadn’t felt the full force of her despair. I’d let myself believe that Joannie was going through a bad phase that would eventually pass. It had seemed impossible to me that her intelligence wouldn’t somehow lead her out of the emotional thicket in which she was temporarily lost.

  For a few paragraphs, her letter covered familiar turf, with a critique of the state of the Union—confidence in the President at an all-time low of twenty-six per cent, the energy crisis, inflation, a truckers’ strike, problems in the Middle East. But instead of her usual wry assessment, this time the catalogue of problems seemed to weigh upon her personally and add to her affliction.

  “Part of me has just stopped fighting and I’ve got to find it and get it going again—it frightens me that I can’t find it. Geraldine, I like you—that’s reason enough to want to live, isn’t it? I’ve got to find my will to live and give it a kick—I need some motivation. There are a lot of things I could hold onto but nothing seems to matter right now.”

  It was another nine days before Joannie was able to finish the letter. “I have already taken two Valium (a calming pill) tonight and as a result am feeling kind of wiped out. The depression in me makes me not want to go to school, the fright in me is sure I can’t do the work, my various hang ups prevent me from doing the work, and everything is all messed up.” She had called her psychiatrist and would be going by his office at 8 A.M. the next morning “so he can give me a shot of some sort to make me hopefully feel better.”

  I hoped her psychiatrist knew what he was doing. Surely this seesaw of downers and uppers risked making everything much worse. “I hope by the next letter to be able to paint a cheerier picture but I just can’t write any more now. Take care of yourself, write soon, and I will try to write you back as soon as I can.”

  I read and reread the letter, trying to frame a reply. She had said that my friendship was a reason to live. I wanted to yell, “Yes! Yes! You’re my oldest friend! We’re going to do great things together one day. Don’t you dare think of checking out!” I wanted to write something that would reach her and pull her out of her dark place. I wanted my letter to be as reassuring as an enfolding hug.

  And yet there was another small voice in the back of my head—a querulous, no-nonsense voice saying: “Snap out of it. Fight your fears. Everyone goes through it. Stop thinking about yourself all the time.” It was my mother’s voice. Without even noticing, I had absorbed her belief that neurosis was the self-inflicted wound of the coward who can’t face the fight. Deep down, there was a small, ungenerous part of me that didn’t empathize with Joannie, a tiny kernel of contempt for her weakness.

  Earlier that month I had finally walked through the big stone gates of Sydney University. I’d arrived there brimming with confidence, proud of good exam results.

  But the exhilaration didn’t last long. Drifting from one big anonymous lecture hall to the other, I soon felt lost and lonely at the university. My Bland Street school had been a safe, intimate environment full of people just like me—same gender, same socioeconomic level, same religious background. The vast arts faculty of the University of Sydney was a different story. I had thought I would love the diversity, but instead I felt overwhelmed by it. I was in awe of the students from the private schools of the North Shore and the eastern suburbs who seemed to have so much poise and polish. I wasn’t sure how to act in front of the young men in my classes. The English department was huge; the fine arts department snobbish.

  The only place I felt comfortable was the government department. I’d taken the subject as an afterthought because Duff had said it had good lecturers. Many of them were Americans—disenchanted veterans of the 1960s culture wars. One, who described himself as a “Lyndon Johnson Canadian,” had left his country to dodge the draft.

  But my shyness made it an ordeal to speak up in tutorials. I might have gone through the year in silence if it hadn’t been for the only-in-Australia custom of some of the younger tutors, who liked to hold their tutorials in the beer gardens of the various pubs near the uni. I soon found that a swiftly downed boiler-maker made it possible for me to barge into any discussion without inhibition. Because of Australians’ cultural acceptance of drinking—even of drinking to excess—it never occurred to me to question what I was doing.

  But even with the alcohol buffer, the university became bleaker as the seasons changed. In late summer, when the lawns were still covered with clusters of students laughing together or arguing over their books, I had been able to imagine myself eventually becoming part of such a group. But as the cooler weather drove the students inside and rain stripped the foliage from the sycamores, I wandered alone from class to class over the slick, blackened leaves and despaired of ever finding a friend.

  “Snap out of it! You don’t know how lucky you are.” My mother, the voice of reason, had little patience with my moroseness. “When I was a kid I was so shy I didn’t just have trouble speaking to strangers—I used to cross the street so I wouldn’t have to say hello to people I knew.” My mother had dealt with her shyness by getting a job in radio, where she spoke to thousands of strangers at a time. Her prescription was simple: find the thing you are most afraid of, then go and do it.

  I was afraid to be noticed, to speak up in public. The last time I’d visited Darleen in Melbourne, she’d had a photographer friend from the advertising agency take some nice pictures of me. So, looking for an antidote like my mother’s, I made an appointment with a Sydney casting agent, to see if I had any chance of getting work as an extra in commercials or TV shows. Within a few weeks I had more jobs than I could handle.

  Instead of moping around the campus in between classes, I sped off to shoots all over the city. I played a biker’s moll (in a bad movie called Sidecar Boys), an eighteenth-century French aristocrat (in an ad for ice cream), a mountain climber (Deep Heat liniment), a dancing groupie (Bacardi and Coke) and—my favorite role—a steer-roping, canoe-racing nun (in a TV comedy called “Flash Nick from Jindavik”).

  These jobs gave me the nerve to audition for a tiny part in a production by SUDS, the Sydney University Dramatic Society. At the first rehearsal I glimpsed a tall blond in white overalls wandering around discussing lighting and props. He was the stage manager. Someone introduced us, and when he smiled at me it was like the sun coming out. Trevor was an architect, designing buildings for the government by day, studying for his degree at night.

  Being in love made everything easy. The Gothic buildings of the university once again looked beautiful instead of daunting, and by September, as the weather warmed, I was sprawled on the sunny lawn, laughing with my friends from the drama society.

  With everything going so well, it became hard to write to Joannie. I didn’t want to dwell on how good my life was, when hers was still so precarious. And yet if I didn’t tell her what I was doing it left very little to say.

  Her replies were warmly enthusiastic. “Twenty years from now I will be able to boast that I possess a piece of correspondence from the world-renowned actress Geraldine Brooks!” she joked when I wrote to her about my jobs as an extra. During her college vacation she was working at the local swimming pool snack bar. “The work keeps me busy, which is important, and it’s generally fun.”

  But the battle with her weight continued. “I was down to 69 lbs. but that was about a month and a half ago … now I’m up to 74 and feel much better.”

  I had to get out a calculator and work out her weight in kilograms before I could make sense of this. I weighed forty-five kilos, or a hundred pounds. At thirty-three kilos, she was twelve kilos lighter than I, and yet she was three inches taller. (She’d gained height in the ye
ars we’d been writing to each other; I was stuck at my twelve-year-old stature, five feet two and a half inches.)

  “I still don’t want to gain weight, which I know is irrational, and my whole family is desperately concerned about me because like at 74 lbs. I’m a walking health hazard—the least germ caught could mean curtains—plus I may be doing permanent damage to myself, plus I look like a walking skeleton, but all this just doesn’t make me able to see the light.” She wrote that she was eating three good meals a day and a bedtime snack, so was metabolizing more or less normally. But depression continued to hit her hard from time to time, and occasionally she heard voices.

  She wasn’t able to keep the weight she’d gained. By September she’d dropped to sixty-eight pounds and once again needed hospitalization. This time she went to Texas, to a leading doctor in the field of eating disorders. Within six weeks she was up to ninety-seven pounds and also had gained, she wrote, “a lot of insight and resolve.”

  But that dissipated quickly once she left the protective environment of the hospital. Unable to stand her situation at home, she moved in with her older brother in Boston. She had found a therapist and a job as a nurse’s aide in a convalescent home, but “was getting more and more depressed, and finally one night I overate, felt really suicidal, and ended up in the psych ward of Mt. Auburn Hospital for five weeks.” She spent Christmas at her brother’s on a day pass, and was discharged December 30.

  Her first letter of 1975 came from a halfway house in the Boston suburb of Brookline. “There are 16 other residents, mostly in their 20s … sometimes it’s a little lonely but I have made friends and it is getting better.” The following weekend, Joannie’s mother would be driving up from New Jersey, bringing the beloved mice to keep her company.

  She’d quit the depressing job in the convalescent home and was working at McDonalds, learning how to make milkshakes and operate a french-fry machine. She was also taking a course to become a guide at the New England Aquarium: “I can give you a good 3 minute talk on Priscilla the Octopus, or on sea anemones—care to try me?”

  In September she started at Boston University as a biology major, writing that being back in school was “sort of rough but I have to at least make it through the year.…”

  She made it only four months. “Boston University just got too big and impersonal” and living alone in her own apartment after the halfway house didn’t help. By January she had reenrolled at Rutgers. “Things are going fairly well; ups and downs as usual.”

  And so it went on, through 1976 and 1977—“ups and downs as usual” as Joannie struggled with demons I couldn’t begin to fathom. I’d exhausted my repertoire of reassurance: I seemed to have been repeating the same platitudes for years.

  Each time she wrote it seemed that she had a new major: horticulture in one letter, anthropology the next. She would send me the address of a new apartment she’d leased and I’d write to her there, only to be informed in her next letter that she’d never moved in. “I chickened out, stayed home instead which I know isn’t a good situation … but I’m too afraid to leave.”

  For me, there had been no question of leaving home until I turned twenty-one—my parents just wouldn’t consider it. But finally, in 1977, they decided I was old enough, at last, to move into my own apartment. I found a one-bedroom flat behind a dry-cleaning shop a few blocks from the university in Glebe, the neighborhood in which Darleen had predicted we’d both have a “little house” one day. It was a wonderful old neighborhood—a finger of land jutting into the harbor, with small workers’ cottages and terrace houses pressed cozily together. My flat had a view of a park from the sitting room and a narrow, shady garden in back.

  But I was moving there without Darleen. Instead of returning to Sydney, she’d been offered a job in a big advertising agency in Los Angeles. “It’s all more competitive,” she wrote to me just after she arrived there. “Business is worshipped like sports are at home. Everybody says—‘oh, you’re from Australia, what are you doing here, I’ve always wanted to go there.’ It’s too early to make statements about the place though.… I’m glad you liked the Matisse poster, I thought that was your favorite of his. Did I tell you that was the blue of the sky when we climbed Mount Baldy?” Her plan, she wrote, was to stay for just a year. But her life didn’t go according to that plan. On her way back to Sydney she met a tall, charming Englishman. By the time I moved into my little flat in Glebe she had married him in London.

  I hung the Matisse poster, The Dance, in my freshly decorated bedroom, and imagined her nodding approvingly. Trevor and a few of his architect friends had spent a weekend turning my flat into a designer version of student digs: stark white walls and stripped timbers, exposed standstock bricks and rush matting. It was Trevor’s gift to me, to make up for the fact that he, too, was about to leave Australia for his Big Trip. He’d finally earned his degree after years of night classes, and he planned to go and see the architectural treasures of Europe, perfecting his French and his skiing en route. By then I was inured to departures. They were part of the price of being Australian. I knew I’d miss Trevor, but I had gained enough confidence to welcome some time as an unattached person again.

  “It sounds as if life is treating you fairly decently!” wrote Joannie that April. “Except for the guy who took off for Zermatt—that would be a real coincidence if your fellow met Dolfi in Zermatt. Dolfi works there on and off as a ski instructor—but he’s in Switzerland, I’m here, and in answer to your question, my love life is zilch and 100% absolutely nothing. Partly it’s me because I just don’t feel ready to get involved with a guy at this point—my whole social life … has in the past two weeks been rather difficult, as has everything—well, it’s just been a rotten two weeks.”

  Joannie’s letters, mostly sad, would thud like a stone into the contented bustle of my new life. I would set each letter on my desk, resolving to answer it quickly. But it would get buried under the notes for some prolix paper on “Working-Class Politics” or “The Mannerist Esthetic of Michelangelo.” It might be more than a month or two before I finally scribbled a guilty reply.

  She always wrote back immediately. But her letters increasingly began with a gentle, jokey reproach for my neglect: “Dear Geraldine, Hi! I haven’t heard from you in ages.” “Dear Geraldine, Hi! Long time no hear (again).” “Dear Geraldine, Hi! I was really glad to finally hear from you. I was afraid you were swallowed up like Harold Holt!” [the Australian Prime Minister who disappeared while swimming in the surf].

  As I settled into uni life, old friends had gradually fallen away, like old leaves making way for new ones at the change of season. I had no intention of shedding Joannie, but to write about my studies, which were going well, or my romances, which were agreeably diverting, seemed tactless when I knew that both those areas of her life were troubled.

  Even food, so problematic to her, had become one of my greatest pleasures. Darleen had started me down the road to gourmet cooking back in 1966 when she decided that the two of us would make a special dinner to celebrate our parents’ twentieth wedding anniversary. The centerpiece of the menu would be duck à l’orange, which would have been unremarkable, except that it was the first thing either of us had ever cooked. It was typical of Darleen’s style: go directly to haute cuisine, do not pass hamburgers.

  My great-grandmother, the Boorowa midwife Bridget O’Brien.

  My grandmother Phyllis, the most beautiful of the O’Brien girls.

  My mother, Gloria, a radio announcer in Canberra.

  My mother by a billabong in Boorowa with two of her cousins during the Depression.

  Portrait of Gloria Brooks.

  My father (standing, second from left) at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, circa 1935.

  My father at the microphone at radio station KGMB, Honolulu, where he hosted a show called “Chasing the Blues” in the early 1930s.

  Concord, 1961. Setting out for my first day at school.

  An evening on the front verandah of the
Bland Street, Ashfield, terrace house, 1957.

  With my sister, Darleen, at her sixth-grade Christmas concert, 1959.

  Nell “Sonny” Campbell (wearing hat) with sister Cressida, 1966.

  Mishal at age sixteen, 1971.

  Joannie in 1973 just before leaving for Vassar. On the back she writes, “This is a bad picture … makes me look fat.”

  Morneen Kamiki, Lawrie Brooks’s most important “pen pal.”

  She sent Mum and Dad off to see the romantic French film, A Man and a Woman, while we tried to find the verb in recipe instructions such as “julienne orange zest” and puzzled over the meaning of “deglaze pan.” Our pan was Teflon: it didn’t have a glaze. Somehow, we figured that deglazing involved tossing in some brandy. We’d extinguished the inferno and hidden the evidence by the time our parents returned from the movie.

  Later, working weekends as a waitress, I learned how to reduce a stock, how to fillet a fish, how to garnish a plate. I enrolled in cooking classes that were virtually free, thanks to government subsidies, and got to sample creations such as oysters au champagne sabayon, boeuf carbonnade, hay-roasted lamb with hollandaise minceur that were far beyond a student’s budget.

  By the time I moved into the Glebe apartment I knew how to turn cheap organ meats into succulent terrines and how to transform the bargains of a morning’s trip to the nearby fish market into delicious meals. I found I could hide my shyness in the role of show-off chef, and the kitchen of my little flat became a favorite haunt of my uni peers. But these were pleasures that I didn’t even dare to broach with Joannie. We were both using food to impose control on an uncertain social world. But my way was through feast and hers through famine.