Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey

I could learn it.
Instead of dreading the monthly blood tests that monitored my illness, my mother conspired to have me look forward to them. She befriended the pathologist, who praised my bravery and told me funny stories of grown men fainting. That, of course, made me braver.
Soon I had my own set of test tubes and slides. We cleared a space for my “lab” on the back veranda, between the ironing board, the dog’s basket and my father’s clutter of tools and paint cans. For my birthday and the following Christmas, I got a chemistry set and a microscope. There were rock collections painstakingly labeled and summer nights on the warm tin roof, lying on my back counting meteors. If the puddle water I was examining spilled on the clean laundry or bits of copper sulfate crystal got tracked into the carpet, my mother shrugged it off.
We would watch midday movies together and critique the plot, my mother falling like a hawk on inconsistent details. When neighbors dropped by for cups of tea, I would listen unobtrusively and then, when they left, we would deconstruct the conversation, she pointing out to me the subtexts of adult motivation, duplicity and self-deception that I had missed.
She taught me to recognize cant, to appreciate satire. To cheer me up on the days I went reluctantly to school, she’d plant little notes in my lunch box parodying the overwrought style of my religion textbooks: “Precious daughter—Whilst out there in the large world today, battling against forces almost beyond your control—remember, if you will, the hope of our hearts. Keep the lamp of the future trimmed and shining with a clear white light. Your mother—who loves you. (P.S. The doctors say it’s not hereditary—you’ll be O.K.)”
By lunchtime, I usually needed cheering up. When my temperature was normal and my strength had returned, my mother would pack me a lamb sandwich and a snack of carrot sticks, and the two of us would set out on the short walk to the school. More mornings than not, halfway up the hill a wave of dread and nausea would overpower me, and I’d wind up by the gutter, vomiting.
On the surface, St. Mary’s Infants was a pleasant little Catholic parochial school with old peppercorn trees in the playground and big-windowed classrooms. The pupils were as homogeneous a group of children as it’s possible to assemble—a roll call of Anglo-Saxon and Irish names such as Butcher and Brown, Sullivan and Hamilton, Cullen and Cahill. It should have been a playful, harmonious place. But the infants’ school was staffed at that time by undertrained nuns in their late teens and early twenties. Grappling with who-knows-what doubts and strains in the claustrophobic confines of the convent, these tightly wound young women were too edgy and irascible to be trusted with the care of five-, six- and seven-year-olds.
In retrospect, it’s clear that the nuns thought I was spoiled. They dealt with my tears and nausea by cuts of the cane, or tried to toughen me up by seating me with the roughest group of punching, hair-pulling boys in the class.
It wasn’t until I reached third grade that I had any hope at all of shedding my school phobia. Miss Callaghan, the third-grade teacher, was an experienced, grandmotherly woman with the crinkly face of an apple-head doll. As I arrived weeping at the beginning of the school year, she simply held out her arms and hugged me.
And so I passed my childhood in the vast middle ground of Australian life, in a place that had neither the postcard beauty of the dramatic coast nor the lonely drama of the Outback.
All through the long, hot days of summer, Concord snoozed in a kind of stupor. Of a weekday afternoon, with the men at work and the women in their kitchens, a stillness settled over the empty streets. Only certain sounds marked the wearing away of the hours: the tic-tic-tic of a neighbor’s lawn sprinkler, the gargling call of a magpie or the thump of the dog’s hind leg, scratching for fleas.
On Saturday morning, the street erupted. Lawnmowers growled up and down, gnawing their way over dozens of identical oblongs of buffalo grass. The noise passed from yard to yard as one mower shuddered to a stop and another sputtered to life, like singers picking up their parts in a round. Next door, the neighbor’s boy spent the day under the hood of his car, endlessly revving its sickly engine.
Saturdays were noisy inside our house, too. All afternoon, the flat voice of a race caller muttered from the radio, a rapid burble of horse names as incomprehensible as a Latin litany. From the television came endless sports broadcasts—the loud, coarse-voiced football announcers; the slightly hushed, more genteel cricket commentators. My father set his day to this relentless tattoo, curlicues of blue smoke from his cigarette holder marking his trail from the dining-room table where he studied the race form to his easy chair in front of the television.
All day long, I’d weave through the house to the soundtracks of my father’s passions:
“… and at tea, Australia is one for fifty-six, with Harris caught for a duck at silly mid-on …”
“… andthey’recomingupontheoutside. It’sElPresidenteby anosetoHulaLadyandhalfalengthonit’sGhostlyGrey …”
“YOOOOU LIT-TLE BEOOOUUDY! IT’S A GOOD ONE! RIGHT BETWEEN THE POSTS!”
When my head rang from the voices, I’d retreat to the highest branches of the backyard willow tree, the only growing thing in the garden that escaped my father’s ruthless pruning. Hidden in its green tresses, I would read books published in Britain and wonder what “frost” looked like, or why writers used expressions like “cold as the grave” when our relatives were buried in cemeteries where the hard red earth was hot as a kiln.
I was ten when the yellow mailbox became my way to find out.

3
Little Nell
My first pen pal came to me by way of the Sunday paper.
On Sundays, our neighborhood quieted as if someone had thrown a blanket over it. It was a stillness different