Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey

at each other. Then they all explode in the raucous, untamed cackle of ten-year-olds.
I haven’t yet learned that when you’re in a hole you should stop digging. Flushed and hurt, I blurt out my retort: “All of you won’t be laughing when you see the headline: ‘Sydney Scientist Discovers Cure for Cancer.’ ”
To my fourth-grade classmates, I am hilariously out of line. Japanese have the saying that “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.” The Australian equivalent is the “tall poppy syndrome”—any Australian who rises above the crowd risks being cut down by a storm of derision. I have committed the cardinal sin of “having tickets on myself,” or, more crudely, “being up myself”—an expression we use without knowing what it means.
Across the playground, the girls spot our teacher and run off to share the joke with her. This young nun is the best teacher the school has. In English class, she has set aside the tedium of parsing and analysis and allowed us to try our hand at writing our own poetry. Recently, she has begun introducing us to “nature study.” These proto-science lessons are basic stuff to me—her chalk drawings of cells on the blackboard are a feeble reflection of the bright world I’ve explored through my microscope lens. I know the oozing form of the amoeba, the whimsical thrusts of its pseudopodia as it slinks across a slide. I’ve studied the matter of my own body; cells scraped from the inside of my cheek and the drop of blood squeezed from my finger. When she draws a simplified cell with nucleus and cell membrane, my hand shoots up. “Sister, you’ve left out the vacuoles and the plastids.” My know-all demeanor must have driven her crazy. Whatever the reason, she joins in my classmates’ laughter. I stand alone in the playground, my eyes stinging, my cheeks hot with the blush of humiliation.
After thinking about it, I decided that it would be safe to confide my goal to Sonny. At Sonny’s school, no one made fun of ambition, or gave girls poor grades for art because of “bad types” in the art world. Most children in Sydney attended free government schools staffed by teachers well enough paid to make the career esteemed. My schoolteacher cousin was our family’s most conspicuous material success, living in a big house with a pool, traveling abroad every other year. Catholics paid modest fees to attend our own schools, a little more disciplined, a little more personal than the government option.
And then there were a handful of schools like Sonny’s: expensive and unabashedly elitist. Abbotsleigh was known for its excellence. Its alumnae, such as Jill Ker Conway, had made their marks in many fields, from traditional academics to avant-garde art. To announce that one wanted to be “in Musical Comedy” would have been certain social death at St. Mary’s. But at Abbotsleigh it was a dream to be encouraged.
Like me, Sonny had missed a lot of school during a childhood illness. In her case, a bout of hepatitis when she was ten years old had kept her home for three months. She had spent her invalid days watching midday movies and had developed a taste for musical extravaganzas.
Her theatrical flair imbued every letter, turning the small businesses of childhood into high drama. She used punctuation decoratively, throwing in clusters of exclamation points like bouquets of flowers, to brighten things up. A trip down a storm-water drain became an epic trek to the heart of darkness: “We were half way through when a man through a bucket of water down!!! It’s pitch black the whole way but the good thing is, it’s IMPOSSIBLE to get stuck, suphercate (or however you spell it) drown or anything else.”
A week at camp was transfigured into a series of near-death experiences of perilous hikes and buses careening down mountains. “One day we hiked for MILES to the beach and when we got there, it was closed! We also hiked for miles to Church, but of course, it was open.” Her world was full of experiences, ranging the streets in a clot of neighborhood kids, going to pajama parties—“boy! was it beaut! We talked ALL night (sorry, a bit of exajuration (or however you spell it) there we got to sleep at 1.30 AM!).”
Even her handwriting was dramatic, changing from cuneiform spikes in one letter to flamboyant curvaceous scrawls the next. “For my birthday,” she wrote, “Sally gave me two divine garters. They’re black lace with colored ribbon.”
For my birthday, I got The Student’s Book of Basic Biology—an illustrated tome I’d longed for. I racked my brains to make my letters as interesting as hers. My life had more to do with thinking than doing. It was solitary, full of books and the imaginary journeys they took me on. I had just discovered science fiction. I was devouring John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet as fast as the library could order them. I spent more time than ever staring at the stars from the sun-warmed roof of the back veranda, imagining the unseen planets out by Alpha Centauri.
Sonny and I couldn’t have been more different. But somehow we eked out a correspondence of equal parts dreams and dailiness. When she wrote to me excitedly that she was to make her television debut, I rushed home from school in time to see her, decked out in a cloud of tulle, dancing the role of White Bird in an adaptation of an Aboriginal legend for an afternoon children’s program. To me, it might as well have been a lead role in a Broadway hit. Sonny was on her way!
My progress toward my dream was more incremental. By then I was in better health and going to school regularly. My mother’s one-on-one tutorials proved more than compensation for the months of classes I missed. I found that rather than being left behind I was embarrassingly ahead in all but