Letting Loose. Joanne Skerrett

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      I couldn’t wait till I got home. I hurried, ran, really, to the teacher’s lounge to use one of the computers there. I had broken down late last night and written him a reply as long as a New Yorker short story. I gave him the family history—just the facts without too much of the ugly truth. Told him that I liked to read, cook, and watch movies; that I wasn’t too athletic, though I did like to dance and was beginning to enjoy my cycling class (that was stretching the truth a bit); and that there wasn’t much more to me than that. It sounded spare but I had to be honest because that was me. I wasn’t like James and Kelly, who had ten billion hobbies and interests. You would not catch me climbing a mountain in New Hampshire on any given Saturday afternoon, nor would I be running any five-mile races or 10 K’s. Give me a good book and a cookie recipe and I’m happy for a week. At least until I weighed myself again. Then I’d answered his questions. What made me truly happy? When my students show some interest in literature, spring, memories of my father before he got sick, great shoes. What made me laugh out loud? My brother’s dirty jokes, though he makes few of them these days. What made me angry? The fact that poor kids got so little from public education in one of the richest states in the country. That my relationship with my mother will always be full of conflict. That I can’t seem to bring myself to care about much anymore. Or did that last one just make me sad?

      At the time I’d clicked send, I realized it had been too much. But I’d been feeling melancholy. I’d eaten too much at dinner again. Pasta with shrimp in marinara sauce. Three plates of it. And then Healthy Choice chocolate chip cookie ice cream for dessert. I could hear James and Kelly going at it in their room and I felt lonely and a little sick from overeating. So I poured my heart out. Now I had to do e-mail damage assessment. Either he wouldn’t write back or he would with some reason why he suddenly became very busy and probably wouldn’t be able to write much anymore.

      There it was, his e-mail, at the top of my in-box, right on top of one from Whitney with only exclamation marks in the subject field. I didn’t really want to know what that was about, though I knew it would be something that ultimately would involve Max, her Tunisian.

      Here goes, I thought, as I opened Drew’s e-mail. It was long, as long as mine.

      Wow, it’s really hard to find a woman who’ll admit to liking to cook in the 21st century. You’re part of a dying breed. (Okay, he has a corny edge to him that needs to be shaved off.) I have to say I’m enjoying getting to know you. You sound like such a down-to-earth person. (Oh no! The equivalent of a woman describing a guy as “nice.”)

      And so on and so forth. He didn’t understand why I didn’t get along with my family. That’s probably because I left out the part about our little drinking problem. He also liked to read but prefered history books and biographies. (Hmm…only really smart people read stuff like that.) He said he was angry, too, at how the American government tended to “misallocate its vast resources” when it came to educating its youth. Yeah, I agreed with that, though I couldn’t have said it so eloquently. He wanted to talk, he said at the end of his e-mail.

      It would be nice to have a voice to match with the picture and e-mails.

      I had been thinking that, too, though I worried that my little fantasy could blow up into a thousand pieces if he ended up sounding like Pee-Wee Herman or that rapper who yelled all the time. But what if he sounded like Mekhi Phifer? Oh, then I’d be in big trouble. Then I’d have to get on the next American Airlines flight to that little twenty-nine-square-mile island.

      He’d left a number and said to call collect. What kind of a person did he think I was? I would wait as long as I could. Maybe all week if I could stand it. In my heart, though, I knew I wouldn’t make it through Wednesday—unless someone managed to destroy all the phone lines that got into my path.

      “What СКАЧАТЬ