Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey

I asked Darleen for the Campbells’ address and put the letter in the mail.
The reply lay in the yellow mailbox, buried under the bills and the supermarket fliers.
I put my school bag down on the hot concrete pathway and slit the envelope, and in that moment I found the opening I’d looked for to the wider world.
“I had a brainwave the other day, thinking you might like to be my pen-friend.”
I held the letter as if the offer it contained was an admission to Harvard. “Actually,” she wrote, “my name’s not even Laura, it’s Sonny.”
I was enthralled. I wrote back immediately, trying hard to sound like someone worthy of a pen pal with three names.
Sonny wrote that she had another pen pal, a girl in Manchester, England. But that correspondent was about to be jettisoned. She had earned Sonny’s disgust by expressing surprise that an Australian knew who the Rolling Stones were. “What does she think we are, kangaroos?” A Sydney pen pal mightn’t be as exotic as an English one, but at least I wouldn’t make gaffes like that. And the stamps would be cheaper.
Sonny lived just across town—ten miles as the crow flies. Her home was across the Harbour Bridge, on the side of the city known as the North Shore. Watery inlets and fingers of bushland full of bellbirds and cockatoos embraced its neighborhoods. Most homes there sprawled graciously on large lots set back from tree-lined avenues. In Sydney, North Shore signified affluence as surely as West End in London, or Beverly Hills in Los Angeles, although the wealth represented there was far less, and less ostentatiously displayed. From his columns, we knew that Ross Campbell took the train to work, worried about how to carve a single roast chicken into sufficient portions to feed family and guests, and resented the musical jingle of the ice cream truck because treats for his four children stretched his scarce cash supply. Like most Australians in the 1960s, Campbell, with his large family, portrayed himself as “an Aussie battler” striving to make ends meet. It was years before the rapacious decade of the 1980s would open up wide disparities of wealth.
Still, class existed, and announced itself in a dozen subtle ways. A North Shore family lived close enough to the best beaches to pop down for a dip, burdened by nothing more than a towel. For us, a trip to the beach meant driving over an hour through traffic. We went only on heat-wave days, when the temperatures became unbearable. My uncle would arrive in the pickup truck he used for his secondhand furniture business, and my cousin and I would ride in the back with the heavy paraphernalia—coolers, beach chairs, umbrellas—of those who have to “make a day of it.” By early afternoon my skin, unaccustomed to beach glare, showed the first pink symptoms of the sunburn I’d carry home. It was in a series of such small distinctions that Australia’s class lines were drawn.
But much more important than any geographic or class divide between Sonny and me was the difference in our ages. Sonny was just about to turn thirteen—making her more than two years older at an age when two years might as well be a yawning generation gap. At school, the idea of a sixth-grader approaching me, a humble fourth-grader, would have been as unlikely as a Brahmin consorting with an Untouchable. Somehow, pen-friendship magically erased these issues of caste and opened a window to Sonny’s different world.
The extent of the difference was apparent in her second letter. Sonny Campbell didn’t want to be a nurse or a teacher, and certainly not a nun. She would be, she informed me, “in Musical Comedy.” What, she wanted to know, did I want to be?
This harmless question for her was a loaded one for me. I’d already learned that stating one’s ambition could be a risky business.
• • •
“I wonder what it’d be like working at the hairdresser’s,” says Ann, peeling back the white bread of her sandwich to examine its contents.
It is lunchtime in the playground at St. Mary’s. We cluster in the puddle of shade provided by the towering facade of the church. At the other end of the playground, high gates open onto the roar of Parramatta Road—six lanes of exhaust-belching cars, trucks and buses—the main artery westward from the city to the Blue Mountains and the endless Outback beyond. In between the road and the church is a treeless expanse of black asphalt marked up with a basketball court and rimmed with painted benches.
We sit in a little knot by the basketball hoop so we can talk to our friend Margaret, the team’s goalie, as she shoots her prescribed one hundred daily practice goals. The rest of us unwrap the waxed paper contents in our Tupperware lunchboxes. The unlucky have sandwiches with Vegemite—a yeast-extract paste that looks like axle grease. The lucky have meat pies with dribbly brown gravy purchased at the “tuck shop” for one-and-a-penny (the equivalent of eleven cents).
“Hairdressing’s a stinky job—all old ladies with blue rinses and perms,” says Maureen, who wants to be a nurse. “You won’t meet any boys.”
“Well, the only people you’ll meet’ll have sores all over them or be chundering all the time. Imagine kissing someone after you’ve emptied their bedpan!” says Ann. We hoot at this, no one willing to raise the really awful part—that nurses see men’s “privates,” and even have to touch them.
“Dummies!” says Maureen. “Everyone knows nurses marry doctors, not patients.”
“Why do you have to marry a doctor? Why not be one?” I say. The others stare at me as if I’ve pulled a rotting fish from my lunchbox. Undaunted, I carry on. “I’m going to be a scientist. I haven’t really decided the field yet, but most probably biochemistry.” This doesn’t seem out of the question to me. My mother has told me I can do anything. I believe her.
There is a hush first, as the others look at me, then