Love, Jo

Most of my friendships have come about in close quarters. I've bonded through late night talks and daily routines. I've had friendships age slowly, like fine wine. Absence has never made my heart grow fonder. And yet, surprisingly, the friend who's been the closest to my heart for twenty-five years, the one with whom I'm the most intimate, is the one I've seen barely ten times. This friend who knows all my secrets, who has my absolute trust and devotion is a woman of her word–actually, of many, many words. Because for all those years, my friend Jo and I have nurtured our friendship in a way that's turned out to be more connected than an embrace and more bonding than Superglue–we write letters. Hilarious and heart-wrenching, soul-baring and celebratory, our letters have made us closer than if we lived next door.

We didn't like each other when we first met. It was at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, the only time we've ever lived in the same place. It was a small, gossipy school where everyone seemed to know everything about everybody and share what they knew as casually a party nuts. But I didn't know anything about Jo, other than that she was thin and beautiful with a waist-length ripple of glossy hair, and we were both wildly, passionately in love with the same man, who was only mildly in like with both of us. I was jealous of her. I didn't want to be her friend. I was messy and verbal and a little wild, while she seemed quiet and serenely in control, and I couldn't imagine we'd have anything in common other than the man we were both desperate for. So we kept our distance, and when forced to pass each other, we tried to be polite. Maybe we wanted to show our male friend how evolved we were. Or maybe we didn't want to give the Brandeis grapevine an inkling of a feud they could gossip about. Or maybe it was just easier to be pleasant. In any case, we small-talked about what local restaurant had the best Chinese food, what new movie was any good. Then we moved on, as far away from the other as we could get.

And then our male friend announced he was gay, moved in with his lover, and shattered both our hearts.
I was determined to flee my grief. I applied for transfer for a school in Wisconsin, sure I'd never come back. I got in, and right before I left Brandeis, I saw Jo, sitting alone in the student union, crying, a tissue blossom to her nose, and I felt a flare of compassion. I walked over to her and told her I was leaving. "You're lucky," she said. On impulse, I scribbled my new address. "Send word sometime if you feel like it," I said, never expecting–or really wanting-- a single one.

Ah yes. I forgot about her, involved in a brand new life. I had friends, I had a boyfriend, I was trying to be a writer. It wasn't until a few months later, that I found a letter in my mailbox, fat and thick in a bright purple envelope, and when I saw her name on the return address, I was astonished. What could she possibly have to say to me? I sat down in the student union, my legs curled under me and opened it, sure it was about our lost, mutual love, that he had come back to her, or gotten married–all news I wasn't sure I wanted to know. Instead, the letter was about her. Four handwritten pages, and the letter was so astonishingly personal, the pages seemed alive in my hands. I couldn't stop reading. By the time I got to page two, I knew more about Jo than I had the whole year we had spent at Brandeis together. "I just feel like I can tell you what's going on in my life, don't ask me why, " she wrote. "Maybe because you left for Wisconsin, of all places, it seemed like you might be up for everything. Even one of my letters." She told me she had spent the beginning of the semester studying in Paris and had ended up on the verge of a breakdown. It was a crushing defeat for her, and shamed and shaken, she had fled home to recover. But she had no one to talk to, and the one person she had approached at school had been so put off by her precarious state, her frank neediness, that the woman had pivoted and walked away.

Jo on paper was nothing like the composed Jo I had known at school. This Jo wasn't afraid to bleed on the page. She was so raw in her emotions, so honest, so passionate, and at the same time, so fiercely funny, that I suddenly wanted to know more about her.All that week, I carried her letter around with me, rereading it until it was a little dog-eared. I wasn't quite sure what to write back to her, not until one day, when a writing professor humiliated me in class.

"You'll never make it," he scorned. "You should consider another field." Devastated, desperate for comfort, I looked for my friends. I knocked on doors. I made phone calls. My friend Lucy was out on a date. Barb was cramming for an exam at the library. I was alone. I sat down at my desk in my tiny dorm room. I cried some more, then I thought about writing a paper I had due. I took out my notebook, picked up my
pen. And then, without even thinking, I began to write to Jo.

I told her how much the professor had hurt me. How I was afraid that maybe he was right. I told her about Wisconsin, how it was so icy that night that the only reason I didn't go out to lose my grief in a movie was because I was afraid my tears would freeze on my face. How what I really yearned to do now was move to New York. By the fourth page, I felt calmer. I told her how her letter had moved me, how I understood how overwhelming being in Paris could be. By the fifth page, I was telling a funny story. By the sixth, I felt release. I didn't worry that I had been too open, too intense, because she had been that way herself in her letter to me. I didn't know if she'd write back again, but writing to her had been so therapeutic, had made me feel so good again, that it didn't matter. I instantly sealed the envelope and ran out that night to mail it. I had nothing to lose.
A few days later, I got a four-page letter back. "That professor is a dolt," she wrote. "Drop his class and find a better teacher." She wrote how she was trying to figure out what she wanted to do, where she might live, and about the tangled mechanics of her family–which was very much like mine. As soon as I finished reading her letter, I wrote back.

We were like lights, suddenly switched on. I don't know why we bared our souls so easily, so much earlier than I usually did with my face-to-face friends. Why it seemed so instantaneous. Maybe because it was letters instead of in-person contact, all the usual getting-to-know-you pleasantries could be dispensed with. Maybe it was easier to confide in someone you don't really know in person, someone you don't see so the facial cues–a frown of disapproval, a glaze in the eyes, isn't there. We were halfway across the country from each other, and knew we probably wouldn't see each other again, so issues like shame or embarrassment became moot points. Or maybe it was just because the simple act of writing unleashes your subconscious, freeing you to be who you really are, without social constraints. In any case, we wrote and wrote, pouring out our thoughts. And we began to know and trust each other in a way we never had in person.

I graduated college, got married and moved to Pittsburgh, where my new husband was a lawyer. Jo went to study in Brazil. We were both stressed. Jo's studies were difficult, and I hated Pittsburgh, and the only thing that helped us was to write more and more letters to each other. When Jo came home to Boston to find she had lost her boyfriend and the job she had lined up, I wrote and pushed her to take a chance and do the one thing she had told me she was yearning to do–buy a home in New Mexico, the place of her dreams. When she did, she sent me photos of every room–my favorite being her kitchen, festooned with Cheese-it boxes on the cabinets. It was in Pittsburgh, too, that my husband began dramatically cheating on me. For the first time, I called Jo, catching her just as she was out the door to work, but the ten minutes of talk soothed e enough so I could sleep that night. "Get a divorce and move to New York," Jo urged. "It's your chance now to live where you've always wanted."
I moved. Further away from Jo. But, we were never closer.

Like any good friendship, we've had–well-words. When I first moved to New York, scared to be alone, I threw myself into the first relationship I found, with a subtly abusive man Jo instantly told me she didn't like on paper. To leave him would mean I'd be alone again, so I stayed, even when he started not to want me to have friends of my own. Even when he wanted to read all my mail, especially Jo's letters. "Don't write what you wouldn't want anyone else but me to see, " I advised Jo. The letter she sent me back was so furious, her pen had torn the paper in some places. "I will never stop writing you and I will never edit what I say," she said. As soon as I read her words, passionate, angry, honest, something in me snapped. "Let me see that," my boyfriend said, grabbing for her letter. I stuffed it into my pocket and walked out the door, and the only time I came back was to get my things.

Sometimes we both couldn't help but wonder (especially when our other friends asked us), was this just a friendship on paper? Recently, there's been all these studies about the false intimacy set up via e-mails. Was our epistolatory bond something we could trust? Our friendship clearly went the distance, we talked occasionally on the phone, but maybe it was time to test our bond at closer range. So, six years after we had started writing each other, we decided to meet up in Boston, where we both had family.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but I was nervous. I didn't want anything to ruin our letter-friendship.
We met at a café. She walked in wearing a child's red rubber boots, big funny earrings with stars all over them, and as soon as I saw her, I felt excited. All that afternoon, we sat and talked. "Want to see if we can have fun together?" Jo asked. We went to a movie. We went to fireworks at the Esplanade with the Boston Pops. We plumbed the depths of Filene's Basement. We did all the things girlfriends do, and we had so much fun, I never wanted it to stop. Jo was still steady and calm and quiet in person, the same traits that had bothered me way back when we were at Brandeis, but now those things were endearing because I knew intimately just what tumbled beneath her serene surface.

We went back to our lives and our letters, me in new York, Jo in New Mexico. And because our meeting had been so successful, we decided to try and see each other once a year if we could. We've never managed. Instead, we grab time when we can. And when we do see each other, it's always been markers of our lives. I held Jo's hand when her father died. When two year later, I became engaged and my fiancé died suddenly, it was Jo who flew east and brought me back to her home in New Mexico to help heal my wounds. It was the longest time we had ever spent together. For two whole weeks, she booted out her lover so she could care for me. She took me to work with her and loaned me her therapist and made me walk in the woods with her. When I woke in the morning, crazy with grief, trying to find the spirit of my dead, she sat beside me and held me and made me see there was a real, physical presence. Hers. I kept thanking her for taking care of me, but she shook her head. "You don't get it, I should be thanking you," she told me. "It's so good for me to know I can take care of someone else. I can be right there through it and not turn tail." When I left, we were both weeping at the airport, but not just because of my tragedy. Because we were leaving each other. I wept and wept and on the plane, the only thing that could calm me was to dig out a piece of paper and a pen, and snuffling, Kleenex in one hand, pen in the other, I started to write Jo a letter.

Any good friendship grows and changes, and so has our epistolatory one. Regular letters began not to be enough. We began to draw in the margins and paint our envelopes, festooning them with animals in bad fitting bathing suits, adding glitter and stickers. We've created our own personal cast of characters. Radioactive Rat, who testily says the nasty things we're too polite to voice. Professor Blob who grades and annotates the contents of our letters with hilarious rudeness. Once, recently, when I was home, and wanted to mail something to Jo, I caught my mother looking at my envelope, decorated with a King Kong in a wedding dress. She was completely appalled. "How can you send something like that?" she demanded. "What will the mailman say? And what does it even mean?"
"Jo will know," I said.

Once, I mailed Jo half a package of chocolate cookie so I wouldn't polish them off, myself. On birthdays, we send each other huge care packages, filled with windup toys, garish earrings only we would love, funny tee shirts to sleep in and, of course, letters. When I got remarried and Jo couldn't come to the wedding, I sent her a video of me in my wedding dress, twirling around with my husband, the two of us singing a bawdy song. She sent me a video tour of her house, with her own wise-cracking commentary. Four years ago, when I gave birth to my son, one of the first people I called was Jo and I put the receiver near the baby so she could hear him burbling–and so he could hear her voice. And when three days after giving birth, I became critically ill with a rare blood disorder, when my husband contacted all my friends to tell them I might be dying, Jo told me after I recovered, that, in an act of faith, she had kept writing me daily letters. "There were no words for thinking of you not in my world," she said.

Friendship is crucial in anyone's life. But life, these days, has gotten so busy, it's hard sometimes to see the friends who live near me. We all have mates or children or work or any number of things that need our attention. I e-mail my friends, I call or try for lunch. I love my friends, I want to give them the care and feeding they deserve. But sometimes, despite our best intentions, we're just touching base–instead of hearts.

But Jo is always only as far as the nearest piece of paper. I know we could e-mail, we can telephone, and we do, sometimes. But we need each other's letters in our hands. I want Jo's pages scented with a drop of the perfume she just bought and isn't sure she likes and what do I think? I want the coffee stains because she was so nervous about a new lover she wasn't paying attention. I want the ripped page because she was ruminating about where to live next, and would I consider forgetting I hate the heat and that wide spaces make me nervous and grab my family to come and live by her? Could she forget that cities make her apoplectic so she could move near me? For years, I've been saving her letters, even the envelopes, tucking them all into a black file cabinet that's gotten so crowded I can barely open it. And it's funny, sometimes when I feel lonely, or when I miss her, all I have to do is open up that crammed file cabinet and pull out those pages and pages of her life and there she is.

We may not be geographically close, but there's no friend nearer to my heart. Jo has my word on it. Every one of them.