Foreign Correspondence (15 page)

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.”

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.

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 years 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.