The Correspondent

by Virginia Evans

I suggest telling your brother your plans to embark on the program and give him your account password so at the point of your death he has no trouble accessing your profile. Unfortunately, the window for refunds has passed. Bruce would have had to request a refund within sixty (60) days of purchase. His date of purchase was December 23, 2013.

Golf, drinking, staying in one’s pajamas until late in the morning, stretching oneself to find ways in which to pass the days is the way we were meant to spend our vacation weeks, not decades of our lives. Guy and I heard a case years back in which a respected physician who retired at the age of sixty-two had, within two years, wrapped himself up in a scheme related to prostitution in Cleveland, been busted and lost all of his money.

However, the restaurant you suggested, Capitol House, is a stuck-up establishment riding on the coattails of a bygone reputation for good steaks frequented by tourists reading outdated guidebooks and high school students before prom.

Has opinons.

According to the office of the registrar, per the information my son dug up for me on the webpage, UMDCP does, in fact, maintain the allowance of citizens not enrolled in the university to audit courses with the permission of the dean of the particular college. It appears the matter is not one of policy, but of your caprice. Despite this chilly correspondence I would again like to request permission to audit a literature course.

I’m sorry I didn’t write to you on July 1. We were on vacation in Alaska with my sisters and I didn’t realize what day it was. When I saw that I missed July I thought it would be better to wait until the next first of the month rather than change the pattern of our letters.

How will you live alone when you’re blind? Will you learn to read braille? I started to learn, in case you need me to. It’s very simple and I think I’ve mostly got it down. My mother listens to books on CD.

We went on a cruise to Alaska with my sisters. Lauren has a boyfriend and he came. His name is Steve and I don’t like him at all because he only talks about professional football and his job in marketing. My dad pretends to care, but I know he doesn’t because Dad doesn’t watch sports.

I wrote a story about a made-up world. It is 46 pages single-spaced size 12 Times New Roman font with one inch margins.

I know nobody goes to a mental hospital because they’re tired, so I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with her, but Lauren called me and told me it is hard for my dad when I ask loads of questions, so I haven’t.

I went to two weeks of summer camp. The camp was a sleepaway camp and the subject was electrics and engineering, which I like OK. The daytime at camp was good. We did a lot of interesting projects, not stupid stuff, but things with electricity and real tools.

One morning I put my shoes on and they were wet. I smelled urine, so I knew what had happened.

Nerds bully each other?

My birthday is August 10, which you know, and I’ll be 14. Instead of having a party, my dad is going to take the day off and give me an iPhone, take me to the Spy Museum and then for cheeseburgers for dinner.

The two books do, of course, share certain themes universal to the human experience—isolation, loneliness.

You do very well with inhabiting your narrators and telling the story as they would.

I RAN OVER THEODORE LÜBECK’S CAT WITH MY CAR. OH MY GOD.

Dear God.

Lübeck’s cat (it’s a slate gray color with white paws) must have come underneath my car, stupid imbecile, while I was stopped and I didn’t see it—how could I have?

He asked me to go get a towel. Of course I was not going to bring out one of my own good towels, so off I went, straight in the front door of his house, Rosalie! Just waltzed right in, never set foot inside the man’s house before in my life (more on the house to follow), and I went to the bathroom and took a towel from the rack and brought it to him.

I don't think the state of your towels matter.

When I came back out the cat was fully deceased and Mr. Lübeck was on his knees. His old knees in the middle of the street wearing good khaki pants and I could see the top of his head (have I ever told you he is quite tall? A big man, built for sport, like Lars. He still has a good head of white hair).

Dad is doing OK, pleasant as usual, but thin and quieter, or tired. Will miss you at the holiday—was sweet of you to send the sweater for Charles.

As horrible as it was that day, him walking from Washington to Arnold, and James and Marly half dead with terror, and all the things that could have happened but, mercifully, did not, I will admit, it felt wonderful the moment he showed up on my doorstep.

You cross the street from my driveway and there is a magnolia as tall as two light poles, and beside it is a little opening you might not notice if you were passing by, but there it is.

In winter it’s rather easier, whereas in the thick of summer it’s much more like walking into a tunnel made by dryads, but anyway you walk in and then the path becomes clear after a few feet.

Sometimes I see herons. It smelled cold this morning, and rainy, and there’s of course the briny must of the water, that smell, and the rotting trunks and leaves from the fall, and I love all of this, but it’s melancholy, too, in a way. It’s hard to explain it exactly, but it is gorgeous and melancholy all at once.

I like to go down to get away from everything man-made and I feel like I’m far out in the wild, and then I find I can think.

Millie’s husband is dead, and Trudy’s been divorced longer than me.

I could never trust a person who wasn’t a reader, though my doctor says I am going to go blind here in the not too distant future, at which point I suppose I will become a nonreader.

Additionally, it’s terribly unfortunate about your home in Syria. And of course I apologize for the offense I caused when our correspondence began, flippantly referring to your foreignness as being “Indian.” I was worked up and I often find myself behaving with less civility over e-mail, and now as I type this I do feel rather ashamed of that carelessness. I hope you will forgive me.

Well that's nice.

We do not conduct DNA testing here; it is outsourced to labs around the country, so I will not personally receive, process, or dispose of your sample, but I can assure you it will be handled with professionalism and care.

Your apology is noted, and previous offenses are forgiven. You are not the first person to mis-assign my ethnicity, and you will unfortunately not be the last.

*eye roll* some people.

While I have mercifully not lost a child, I have lost many family members, my home, my country, my religion, so I think I can understand a little of your grief, though when my brother died in the war it toppled my mother, so perhaps that specific grief, that of a mother losing her son, I cannot. My degree is from a university in Egypt called Kafr El Sheikh.

I brought the Space Trilogy (C. S. Lewis) and a bunch of Isaac Asimovs, but I’ll finish those soon.

Even NANCY PRUITT had a date (a boy from Belvedere).

That trollop.

He told me there will be more books in The Chronicles of Narnia series, and he gave me a couple of hints about what happens!

Dear Rosalie, Mom died yesterday. I went home Monday because my dad called up to tell me she was declining suddenly and it was probably time, so I got the bus. It was while she was sleeping. I’m not sure when I’ll go back to school. I might forgo the term.

He’d started sleeping in my bed when I went to school, and I can’t coax him out.

My phone number is 515-5988 and my email address is carocarodobby@gmail.com, if you want to do that.

What's The area code for Baltimore?

Apparently I am fully one-half British (I suppose this includes Scotland and Wales, wouldn’t it? Northern Ireland?), a quarter Native American, which surprised me but explains my dark eyes and hair, and a quarter bits of this and that, Russia and Iberia.

Aren’t we all just ready mixes of everything now that the world is so small and everyone going this way and that—but it’s neither here nor there, Felix, I logged into my profile on the website and it’s got my little colored world map and a corresponding pie chart simple enough for a second grader to decipher.

I asked my friend Basam (he’s a Syrian refugee engineer customer service representative) a little more about the box you can check to link to others. I’m not going to do that, of course, seems like the most foolish thing in the world, doesn’t it?

Changing topic, I didn’t tell you a few weeks ago I met with a high school student for an interview. She’s writing a paper about me because of the clerkship. When she came to the house in sweatpants about five sizes too large and her wet hair thrown up in a mess on top of her head I thought, well, she looks about as bright as a root cellar, but she asked me good questions, as a matter of fact. The child knew something about government and politics. I did enjoy thinking about everything again. She recorded the conversation as if she was Bob Woodward.

She was astounded that people write back, and of course I told her: people are just people. Famous or not.

Hi Basam, How is your wife doing with her English course? Did she quit at the restaurant? What that boss is doing to her is harassment, and surely she can find restaurant work anywhere. And how are the children? Did Zoha get glasses? Surely that’s all it is.

The best course is for you to send me your resume, I’ll look it over and clean it up for you, as we have previously discussed, and then I will send the resume back to you and you can contact Dale directly, referencing Bruce.

She's Too much.

Sometimes, like a test, I wander that house in my mind and see if I can still open every door and see what was inside. I make sure I can account for the entire house, down to the details like what photos we had on the mantel.

The fact is, I won’t live very much longer. They have tried all sorts of things and they don’t say it isn’t working, but I can feel the cancer.

They call it “fighting.” Fighting cancer. Fighting through treatment. Putting up a fight. But you know I am not a fighting man. I am far more inclined to surrender. I’m ready to go, but I keep this to myself. Sometimes I imagine you being here. I think you would let me go. Lina holds on.

You are a remarkable woman. Solid as a mountain. Intelligent.

I felt honored those years we were together that you entrusted me with your stones, and I still keep them.

Parenting the other two, trying to help them with their own grief, was like acting. I could say what needed to be said, but I was only thinking of myself in the ring with Gill’s death.

I think neither of us was able to shepherd them in those first crucial months, submerged, completely, in the swamp water of despair.