Page 21 - WTP VOl. XIII #2

One bundle of letters upset me in a different, deeper way. They’re from Nancy, a girl I knew from our second year in high school, before she moved away. What I see now is that she is crying out for help. I have no idea if this is something I realized, or how I responded. But she’s clearly telling me that she’s be- ing abused by her father, and that she’s anorexic, and suicidal. She says those things plainly. Would I be the only one she confided in? (Please, no!) I feel guilty for not recognizing the magnitude of her problems, and seeking help for her. Of course, I was a screwed up teenaged girl myself, but still... One letter says she “must have written twenty letters” to me, but “never managed to get those in the mail.” This time she’s writing to ask if she can stay in my room if she comes back for graduation. I can’t remember if she did, in fact, come back.
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Value is, no surprise, a recurrent theme of my mother’s letters. She was so open with her reckoning, explaining how she cares a lot for Orris—the man she met and befriended, moving in to share a home until his death—but is maintaining her financial independence. She details the value of his home and land, and how she’s insisting on paying the telephone and power bills, but for perhaps the first time in
her life, she’s not having to worry about money. My mother values this, and values his friendship, but in- sists that they’re “too old to marry.” What’s the point, she asks.
W, X, Y, Z
Work, like money, is a constant topic of interest to us in our letters, always—from those first summer jobs of the early teens and throughout the transitions that follow.
The wisdom to keep working, is on my mother’s mind in a letter she writes from 1995, when she’s 75. She shares that she “never should have retired so young.” She’s wishing she lived closer and could help me more, and how she has “SO MUCH energy.” Reading her words, I’m struck by how, no matter the differences, I am so much my mother’s daughter, re- sisting the whole idea of retiring, of not being useful, of wasting energy.
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XXXX is how one writer signs off. The letter is from the university years, and not an individual I can conjure up from the details within. There’s no trace of warmth which might suggest exaggerated kisses; nor of subversion which might explain an alias. Just that XXXX, leaving me with no idea who, or why.
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Yellow lined notebook paper, both sides script- filled, distinguish my youngest sister’s letters through the early ‘80s. One is ten pages! Who’d imagine Christie sitting still and focused for the time it would take to fill those pages. She’s just heard that I’m expecting our first child and writes to wish me well and to advise me to stop running. She’s sent me a big box of clothes to wear into the pregnancy, plus a pig-shaped hot plate (which we still have). She goes on to tell me about the house they (she and a new husband) bought in Bruns- wick (which I never will see), and about my broth- er and his annoying wife, and our annoyingly aging mother, and then on to her husband’s annoying family. Always generous in many ways, complain- ing seems to bring her comfort.
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Zzzz’s spill from the mouth of a Popeye-like sketch of himself, nodding off at his desk, in a get-well note from my brother. He’d be around 19 or 20 and at college, when I had my tonsils out, at eight. The card has been, at some point, carefully torn from the scrap book where I pasted it for safe keeping. Looking at it has always made me laugh.
Templeman grew up in Rockland, Maine. She now lives, writes, and works in the South Central-Interior of British Columbia. She has two books of essays, Notes from the Interior, and Out and Back, Family in Motion. Individual essays and book reviews have appeared in journals and anthologies including CRAFT Literary, and Eastern Iowa Review.
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