Dear Reader

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Dear Reader Page 9

by Mary O'Connell


  I had always been in his thoughts.

  Whatever pale passion he felt for his fiancée—the cornball rom-com sound of the very word!—meant nothing to me. Also, I felt pretty confident that his fiancée would not make the kind of sacrifice I was prepared to make.

  And so I was more than happy to respect Jayne’s wishes and not ask about her quotidian online-dating misadventures, to cut the conversation away from romance, and continue with many inane homilies from the Church of Caitlin.

  “Oh, and it’s not just the teachers: The students, the Sacred Heart girls, are pretty bad. Their brains are so sloggy from sexy vampires and perfect dystopias that they can’t tolerate a protagonist living in a fictional real world: Oxymoronville, I know. This week I taught Wuthering Heights, and they can’t abide Heathcliff, because he’s such a downer. I mean, he’s a bit of downer, I grant you, especially in his later years—”

  “—When he goes from troubled love interest to vengeful sociopath?”

  I offered up a blast of nervous laughter, fearing she was drawing upon a recent Match.com dating experience, and stayed on topic: “Well, according to my Sacred Heart girls, Heathcliff needs Zoloft.”

  When I said the word Zoloft, my hand shot down to my front zippered coat pocket, where my Nardil was stashed. I’d started on heavy antidepressants my freshman year, after Jayne Means had suggested I make use of the university counseling service. The medicine had saved me from my circular ruminations and despair, and now I wished that Jayne Means could facilitate my salvation once again. Dear Reader, I wanted her to be more than a kind human, more than my Wednesday morning confessor; I wanted her not to be a postfeminist Match.com Christ figure, but Christ himself/herself, immaculately good-humored and possessed with X-ray vision. I suppose I longed for a dramatic rescue, as anyone does, for Jayne Means to say: “Hey there, Cait, is that a big old amber cylinder of SSRIs in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

  Jayne Means gulped her Sans X. “If Emily Brontë would have had access to Zoloft, I wonder if she would have created Wuthering Heights as we know it, or a novel with more measured emotions? I’m just thinking aloud here, Cait, I hardly subscribe to the whole ‘artist as manic genius’ school of thought. And we can only speculate on what her mental state was like when she wrote Wuthering Heights.”

  “With a Zoloft prescription, Emily would have wiled away her evenings in the parlor doing cross-stitch with Charlotte. And a Zoloft-ed Heathcliff would have gotten over Cathy. He’d be looking for a new love on Match.com: ‘I enjoy fresh air, foxy ladies, and strolling moors.’”

  Jayne Means smiled nervously. God, not only was I yapping about romance again, I was talking so loudly. I couldn’t stop myself, though: “Because that’s what my Sacred Hearters like, a stupidly happy ending! They aren’t just disdainful of Wuthering Heights. They crave a saccharine, unrealistic resolution in each and every book. They hated the The Bell Jar; O, how they dreamt of a world where Sylvia Plath would have stuck her head in the oven before she sat down at a typewriter.”

  “That’s depressing.” Jayne Means sighed. “And pretty typical, I’m afraid. The girl-on-girl literary meanness sure starts early.”

  “Oh, and they didn’t even want to read The Diary of a Young Girl, because they did the ‘Whole Anne Frank Thing’ in eighth grade, and I suppose it’s tiresome to read something twice, what with all the quality cable programming. How can Anne Frank be expected to compete with the Kardashians? I logged on to Goodreads and read the reviews of several of my students who had dazzled me with their critical skills. Get this: Anne Frank was simply not up to par. You know, the life of an extraordinary girl in an extraordinary situation was apparently ‘not terrible or anything, just full of self-indulgent prose that never really goes anywhere.’ One pithy reviewer with the intelligent username SACREDHEARTHATESHOMEWORK37 gave a magnanimous two stars! With a caveat, though: ‘I’m being super generous because it probably deserves just one star. Spoiler alert: OMG IT’S SO BORING!’”

  “A spoiler alert for Anne Frank’s Diary of a Boring Young Girl.” Jayne Means laughed, pushing her fingers through her hair. She said it a second time with a sigh, a sad refrain. “Spoiler alert.” Then again, louder and proscriptive: “Spoiler alert, Caitlin. All teachers get discouraged. Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights after she’d quit her teaching job in the middle of a school year. She was homesick, lonely, and I’m guessing completely depressed. It’s not like teaching is fun every single day for anyone. But the good students can make it a little easier, and they usually make up about a fourth of the class, and, in my experience, there’s usually a brilliant, quiet one in the bunch.”

  “Oh, sure … there are a few bright spots; I’m always rooting for the underdog. One of my students is going here next year. She’s a terrific student—a wonderful, original writer.”

  Flannery gasped and lightly pounded her fist to her forehead. “Oh, God,” she whispered, “God, God, God!” She didn’t care if the people at the next table turned to look at her: an odd young woman crying out to the Lord and quite possibly ditched by her date. (Heath was taking an awfully long time in the bathroom.) Because, forget all the sublime sentences she’d read in her lifetime: Miss Sweeney’s last sentence was her new favorite.

  Jayne shook her head. “I’m sure she got in to Columbia because she had someone like you to help her. I knew you’d be a superb teacher; I could see it.”

  Jayne Means! She was so lovely.

  “I’m actually not a good teacher. It’s all her. And once she’s here she’ll be fine; she’ll find her people and be more than fine. But for now she’s plagued by the mean girls at Sacred Heart, and so I’ve tried to explain that high school is a relatively short chapter, and yet the mean girls are like cockroaches, that they’ll marry and spawn more mean girls, and what can you do but move on and live your great big life. But also? This poor girl is saddled with the name … wait for it … Flannery!”

  So Miss Sweeney felt sorry for her, and if it was searing humiliation to see it there in black and white, Flannery also relished the pity.

  Jayne Means struck her hands to her heart, a beat of dramatic anguish that made me laugh, and I could tell my laughter pleased her. “That’s a lot of name to carry … Of course I automatically love her parents for their literary taste, but also for their bravado: Flannery.”

  “Weirdly, at conferences, they seemed sort of cold, sort of random, really, not at all worthy of such a nice daughter, but I guess she got it from somebody. I don’t know. About anything, actually. Just being in such a suffocating environment has depleted me: the parents, the students, the teachers … it’s the whole atmosphere. Girls who think I can’t see their vicious eye-rolls, or the way they exclude the girls who aren’t great at sports or whose parents aren’t all friends, or just, you know, if there’s something special about a girl, of course she’s punished for that. It makes me livid. It just infects my brain that it’s allowed to go on. It’s so hard not to say: Isn’t this a Christian school? As in the much-touted philosophies of Christ?”

  My heart felt like it was skipping beats. I oh-so-casually pressed both my hands to my sternum, hoping this would help my heart return to its usual dub-dub dub-dub. Something changed in Jayne Means’s face as she looked at me; her natural expression vanished, and she put on the excessively neutral smile of one who might be dealing with a deranged person. She had a good memory, and I had shared stories of my bullied years with my own psychotic Catholic school girls before and even after my morphing into—say it!—a modest beauty who had caught the eye and the deep true heart, Dear Reader, of the captain of the football team: Brandon Marzetti-Corcoran. I paused to remind myself that Brandon had not fallen in love with my pilgrim soul when it had been shrouded in an extra thirty pounds and I’d worn the full metal jacket of orthodontia: top and bottom braces and the palate-extender that made me lisp. Of course when I had lost the pounds and the metal, he’d found my insights and bad poetry exquisite! Unforgettable. O,
Brandon: I even loved his quotidian faults.

  “The counselor at Sacred Heart is this bland, dim lady who, when I talk to her about improving the social atmosphere, says things like: ‘Well, you know girls.’”

  “Girls!” Jayne Means snorted. “Surely they are a dangerous species, best observed from a safe distance.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “That is precisely what I am talking about. People can change, or, if they can’t change, then they should be called out for their bad behavior.” Yes, I was being self-referential and I was getting loud. My lips trembled. “The whole system makes me mental! The joy an evil person takes from bringing misery to a good person. It’s part of every system; I get it. Even if you’re not an evil person, you can make someone miserable.” I thought of Brandon walking down the street by himself in New York. My mouth was so dry that my tongue felt alien in it, a strip of balsa wood sprouting from the back of my throat. “But it makes a person want to opt out and find, you know, a new paradigm, a new grid, and move from the center to the side, to the periphery.”

  “Ah … Caitlin?”

  Her owlish eyes had gone even wider, and glassy, and just as I was making a mental note to simmer down and stash my crazy-girl persona, hail pinged! on Jayne Means’s window. I wanted to be outside as soon as I heard it; I wanted to be pelted with hail. I could accomplish nothing if I stayed cozied up to my old professor. Brandon was not here. PING PING PING! Jayne Means didn’t even mention the weather; Jayne Means was not the sort of person to make an insipid weather-related comment.

  “Caitlin? I don’t want to sound reductive, or full of psychobabble.” She spoke softly, rubbing the mottled skin between her eyebrows, which had formed an inverted V of concern. The hail shattered on. She was trying to choose her words with care. “But sometimes situations seem more … dire … when we aren’t feeling great. Also, this is such an awkward question, but … are you currently seeing a therapist? And can we pause to acknowledge that I have just uttered the least Midwestern question in the English language?”

  Dear Reader, I didn’t especially care for Jayne Means quizzing me about my mental health care plan.

  “I am in fact seeing a therapist. She’s great!” I tried to affect breezy laughter, but my teeth chattered like a wind-up Halloween skeleton. My psychiatrist was a kind-enough, chatty woman who favored heavy pharmaceuticals and brisk exercise—“Try a kickboxing class at the Y, Caitlin!”—but sitting in her office with the marigold walls and ergonomic office furniture, I sometimes wondered if I wouldn’t fare better with a circumspect, dark-eyed therapist, a soulful Gabriel Byrne or Dylan McDermott to listen to my troubles and gaze at me there on the worn couch with a smoky, guarded intensity.

  “And I don’t mean to sound dramatic about Sacred Heart! Certainly nothing is new or different in the world. Mean people have always really, really bugged me!” Insects everywhere shuddered at my slandering verb, and my sudden hatred for Jayne Means was nonsensical, quick and clean: the crisp sheer sheer of sewing scissors. I thought of how I’d cried in my hands in her office once, the freshman year follies, and when I finally lifted my face, she’d taken the brown napkin from beneath her bagel, leaned in close—a sweet-and-sour cloud of coffee breath and Mentos—and blotted the mascara tears from my face. Now I fixed my face in a casual smile, took the tiniest, tea party sip of my espresso, and said: “Brandon’s dead.”

  Brandon’s dead. The ash gray sound of it, with a touch of overdone drama—the PBS and chamomile tea consonants of death—as it rolled out of my ugly mouth. I watched Jayne Means bring her hand to her heart, her careful coral manicure to her peacock-blue silk shirt. Of course she remembered his name. She was kind like that. But I wasn’t. As she offered her words of solace, my brain turned into a bad dog; it chased down Jayne Means’s Match.com account and wrestled it to the ground, howling. How hopefully ironic it would be! “I don’t care for walks on the beach, or hiking in the mountains, but if you’re looking to discuss the protagonist in contemporary Irish literature, I’m your girl.” And in a bright burst of meanness, I recalled her unfortunate cap-sleeved T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan: THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE! Poor Jayne Means! I had pitied her when she’d worn it to class. She didn’t know that T-shirt only worked if you were a supermodel or a new baby or an old man with a beer gut. I feared some mean girl would sneak a photo of Jayne Means and post it on Facebook beneath the words UH, DUH. Because Jayne Means, the middle-aged college professor, was exactly what everyone thought a feminist looked like.

  Now she was the one nervous and rambling. “So you’re probably having a lot of triggers for your unresolved guilt and grief, thinking that you are responsible in some way—which of course you are not, Caitlin—since Brandon joined the Army right after you broke things off.”

  “The Marines! Civilians often use the general term army for all branches of the military, which is very inaccurate, as there’s a big difference, say, between being in the Marines or the Merchant Marines or the Navy or the Air Force.” I paused to add one more word, one arch syllable to shame Jayne Means for not knowing more about the men and women who protected our country: “So.”

  As if my snottiness were born of injured knowledge, as if I were some sort of military expert or knew more about Brandon’s day-to-day life than any stranger happening upon his obituary. I printed it out as soon as I’d read it, but really, there had been no need. The words had imprinted on my brain instantly; I’d memorized them wholly and perfectly, as if preparing for an oration contest and about to wow the crowd with my personal Gettysburg Address of shock and sadness.

  “I apologize.” Jayne made a circular wiping motion with both hands, as if trying to physically erase her words from the air. “The Marines. My point is, your sensitivity is heightened right now, but beyond that, our experiences shape us. Of course you don’t have much tolerance for job BS, Caitlin. I know it sounds like reductive pamphlet-speak, but as you sit here you are a different person than you would be if Brandon hadn’t been killed.”

  The hail shattered on. I considered the cruelty of her last five words before I spoke.

  “If Brandon hadn’t been killed,” I said, each word a sharply studded knife tearing up my tongue and tonsils, syllable by syllable, “I would still feel precisely the same way about everything.”

  Dear Reader, how could that statement ever be true? It’s what I thought, though.

  Jayne Means gave an exhausted smile. “I’m a little worried about you, Cait. Actually, I’m more than a little worried.”

  I smiled brightly. “Oh, totally don’t be! I’m just … it’s nothing.” I regretted ever telling her about Brandon, about anything at all, I regretted ever going to Manhattan; I regretted being an insufferable Midwestern show-off and going to Columbia instead of the University of Kansas. I hated myself and I hated Jayne Means, a woman who had never shown me anything but kindness. I wondered how I could have ever found her to be a paradigm shifter, and what, exactly, I’d admired about her existence. Was it her apartment that smelled unironically of cat urine? Her embarrassing, sloganed clothes? Her pathetic, lonely life?

  “How long has it been since Brandon—”

  “You know what? I just can’t talk about this anymore.” I stood and put my little Sans X cup on her desk. I was being rude, but I considered it an Act-of-Mercy Rudeness. How could I tell Jayne Means that Brandon’s funeral was starting as we sat there talking? She seemed pretty weirded out already. “And I’m running really late to meet John.” I had chosen a highly original name for my long-suffering, purse-toting boyfriend.

  Jayne Means protested, of course. She stood and put her hand on my face—searing the bony, starfish memory of her spinster’s hand into my cheek—and said, “Caitlin! I’m so glad you’re seeing someone. That’s probably a big help for you right now, or at least a pleasant distraction. I’d love to talk more—”

  But I cut her off. I was livid with Jayne Means for not saying what I needed to hear, though I had no idea what that
might be. I backed out of her office as I embraced my inner mean girl: “Hey, and the whole Match.com thing? Good luck with that!”

  Jayne Means inhaled sharply. Her face was a cameo of caffeinated hurt.

  The weather was my punishment, ice slapping my face as I race-walked through campus, my eyes trained on the gates. I tried to relax my vision, to become one with the hailstorm—just another lowly physical manifestation!—so Brandon would come back to me, so the rain and the hail could cleanse us of all that had gone wrong, so I could watch Brandon lift his face to the weather, cold raindrops teetering on the ends of his dark, doll-like eyelashes, and falling on the bridge of his nose and the carved planes of his face as he put his cold hands on my naked back and whispered, “Caitlin.”

  But wonder was vaporizing, leaving a wicked blaze of nausea in its wake as I headed to the gates of Columbia. I was trying to quell the roiling in my stomach, so I started to move very, very slowly, my eyes on the ground, which is how I noticed the flowers: a dozen red roses loosely wrapped in a cone of deli plastic, propped at the allegorical statue of Letters, the woman holding an open book.

  I felt Brandon’s warm breath on my neck as I reached down for the bouquet.

  Caitlin.

  You have always been in my thoughts.

  Four

 

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