Foreign Correspondence (18 page)

Joannie had been accepted to the Graduate School of Social Work at Rutgers and was living in an apartment in New Brunswick. “I do hope you get to study at Columbia,” she wrote when I told her of my application, “it’s a good school but as you said, we could finally get to meet each other!” Her weight remained low and her eating habits precarious, but she seemed at last to be winning the battle to normalize them. On weekends, I imagined the two of us wandering a museum in Manhattan, or going off together to watch the leaves change in Vermont.

In spite of the different turn our lives had taken as seventeen-year-olds, I still had more years of shared confidences with Joannie than with any of my mates in Sydney. There was no one left who remembered my Mr. Spock obsession or whose first adolescent stirrings of political consciousness had so closely paralleled my own. I had written things to Joannie that I hadn’t divulged to anyone else. And she had exposed her fears to me in a way that no Australian friend had ever dared. I wouldn’t need a martini before I visited Joannie: she would understand my shyness. I knew, I’d always known, that when we met each other we would be soul mates.

And so it seemed perfect to me that when I got the news that I’d won the scholarship, the second “Star Trek” movie was
about to be released. “Don’t you dare go see it until I get there!” I wrote.

She didn’t answer at once, which I thought odd, since even a trivial “how are you” note always got an instant, enthusiastic response. But perhaps she was away, as she so often was in summer, in her cabin on Martha’s Vineyard.

The letter in reply finally arrived at my parents’ house in the last week of August, just as I was packing. A note on the front said: “Please forward to NYC if she has already left!”

It was from Joannie’s mother, and it began with an apology for its lateness. “I am sorry, but far sorrier to say what I have to—that Joannie died unexpectedly … due apparently to some metabolic catastrophe, she just did not wake up one day.”

9

She Was Going to Be You

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 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.