The Distillation of Letters
There were six of us in the mailroom flinging envelopes. Typical for an afternoon shift, we stood side-by-side before the columns and rows of cubbyholes and rapidly stuffed the letters into mailboxes. We were precise, despite the endless acronyms used for Harvard’s buildings and departments; and if we refrained from chitchat, we could play a few rounds of speed Boggle.
Ginger head Joe, though, couldn’t help himself. “I’m on my sixth novel,” he said.
I could see right through his skin, blue ribbons crawling up his arms that I wanted to snip. This was Joe’s way of asking how much material I’d finished. I ignored his ghost eyes, trying to stay focused on the stack in my hand, but he’d made me impatient. I looked over my shoulder at the clock above the bulletin board. It had a sketch of The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, that we still kept posted but not because he was still a threat. He’d been arrested last year in ’96; but because the drawing resembled Wayman. He was one of the drivers who always having problems with his baby momma and often wondered aloud what it’d be like to fuck on one of them Harvard chicks.
“The thing is, Joe,” I said but I couldn’t tell him the truth. I was unraveling. Sitting in a corner slurping black soup. I dropped the letters in my hand, an amount equal to the pile of puny poems hidden in the shoebox in my closet. Nothing close to book-length. I squatted to gather the various papers and envelopes and one piece stuck out because of its size and thicker weight. It was a homemade postcard and there were so many angry scribbles I had to twist it around to find a name. A balloon full of penciled words was addressed to Alan Dershowitz: You blew off my brother’s legs and now he can’t skate on Duck Pond! I pictured this puddle of a man, his half torso on a sled and his mitten hands pushing him along the powdery ice and I choked down a swallow and almost cried because I knew exactly how he felt.
I hadn’t let go of the fact that I was a maid’s daughter and that I was a pro at cleaning blood out of other girls’ underwear. I didn’t belong here. I flew home four days early for the winter holiday. I watched the movie Reversal of Fortune, in which Alan Dershowitz defends Claus von Bülow, a man accused of killing his wife, and the whole time I’m wondering if anyone’s going to lose his legs.
And then I stayed a week after break without calling the mailroom. When I finally returned, the manager Ursula called me into her office. She looked tall behind her desk, even though she was seated. “I’m giving you a raise,” she said, pushing her mushroom-colored hair away from her greasy forehead.
I coughed, “Thank you.”
“No one’s ever covered the prime rib or washed the countertops. You even soaked the forks and knives,” she said, shaking her head.
That was for myself. I’d removed the silverware so I could scream into the empty drawers.
The rest of the semester was an opaque blur as if I were seeing the world through cheesecloth. Faye Dunaway was in the elevator at Widener Library; the lights went out in the Harvard Faculty club where I sucked on very salty, delicious peanuts and drank green margaritas and everyone looked spindly as if they’d crawled out of an Edward Gorey book; a Pygmy was dressed in a purple silk robe; the Dalai Lama was coming to enlighten us; I sat on a swing set, dragging my socks in the dirt, folded into myself and died.
This sadness went on for weeks. I wanted someone to pick me up and take me to the Sylvia Plath hotel, but no one came. So, I painted all of my walls murder red and tucked the x-rays of my brain into the corners of the windows and waited for the shadows of my thoughts to project outward. Everything had been locked away for so long and I didn’t know how to tell anyone how I was feeling and it seemed so simple. Here’s my brain. Look, I can make it glow and show you everything I know, everything I’m feeling but it didn’t work which was probably a good thing because I was pretty lousy then, you probably wouldn’t have recognized me. I barely knew myself.