Dear Malcolm,
I’m so glad you liked the teddy bear. I made it out of my black cashmere sweater. The one I was wearing the night we were in Putty’s apartment. It is named Errington. Oh, Malcolm, I miss you so much but I’m happy and I’m busy with schoolwork. I told my parents I was going to Emory to summer school next summer. Are you sure you’re going to be at Tech? If you are, I’m going to make the applications.
I wish I could apply you to my shoulder and my arms and around my waist and so forth and so on, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Ad infinitum.
I love you. More later. I have to go to class and I want to mail this from the student union.
Love and more love,
Rhoda Katherine, her mark
Dear Rhoda,
My roommate said he was going to take Errington for a swim and almost got him out but now I have him tied to the bed. Phinias, not Errington. Are you sure you want to write that paper for me? It would really help. It has to be a thousand words. You can write on any modern American poet. I have to tie his feet.
Love always,
Malcolm
Dearest Malcolm,
Here is the paper. It’s on Dorothy Parker, my absolute completely favorite poet now. She was speaking at Randolph Macon when I was at Southern Seminary but I was campused for smoking and they wouldn’t let me go. Can you believe that? Anyway, I hope you get an A. Anyway, I love and miss you so much. Are you really coming with Charles William in ten days? It seems like nothing and it seems like a million. I will kiss you a thousand times and then a thousand more.
Love,
Rhoda
P.S. Please bring Errington with you. I am lonely for him. He wants to see his old sleeves which I have made into pillows for my bed.
Te amo,
Rhoda
Dear Malcolm,
Now it is seven days. One week. The way we divide up time but time seems different in different times. Now it seems like water that never moves or waiting for rain.
We had the most amazing English class yesterday. The new teacher the dean got me is the best teacher I’ve ever had anywhere. His brain spins out in six or seven directions and he asks the most amazing questions. He’s been around the world twice. He quit everything he was doing when he was twenty-one and bummed his way around the world. He said he couldn’t presume to teach until he knew where he was in space and time. Now I think the only reason I moved to Dunleith and came to Tuscaloosa was to be in the presence of this man. Yesterday he spent the whole class on one poem. First he passed it out to us and let us read it. Then he read it out loud twice. It is called “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” I think you could keep on thinking about it the rest of your life and never completely understand it. Mr. Whitehead said he reads it every year and each year it seems to be about something entirely different but the images stay exactly the same. Here is a line from it, “Once a fear pierced him, in that he mistook the shadow of his equipage for blackbirds.”
There is another part that goes, “A man and a woman are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird are one.” “Among twenty snowy mountains the only moving thing was the eye of the blackbird.” I am going to write my term paper on Stevens. God, he might be the only poet I read all winter. “One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine-trees crusted with snow; and have been cold a long time. …” God.
Thirty minutes have gone by. I just want to hold you in my arms forever. Maybe this is too much for you. I don’t know any other way to be in love.
Hurry, love,
Rhoda
Dear May Garth,
Thanks for the note and the picture of Randolph Macon. I’m sorry you got shipped off there and I’m sorry you almost got raped by a football player from V.M.I. I really miss you and think of you when I walk by the Tri Delt house.
I am so much in love I am almost crazy. His name is Malcolm Martin. Charles William fixed me up with him for Homecoming at Tech. They are coming here in twenty hours. I haven’t been asleep in days. Durrell says there are eight people involved in any love affair but he doesn’t tell who they are. Maybe they are all the other boys you liked and the girls they liked. I don’t know who Malcolm liked except this girl I went to camp with named Pepper Allen who is a perfect little angel goody-goody whose grandfather owns Atlanta.
We will all be in Dunleith for Christmas for Irise and Charles William’s wedding and we can tell our stories then. In the meantime stay away from those gray uniforms and write when you have time.
Yours in the western world,
Rhoda
P.S. Later
I’m going crazy waiting for him to get here. I think he won’t like me after all or will think I’m fat or think I’m silly or think my hair is too short or maybe I’ll really get lucky and my face will break out for the first time in my life. I made him this teddy bear out of a cashmere sweater. In short, I am in love. More later. Don’t let the bastards get you down.
Dearest darling Rhoda,
You want the whole story? He pulled off my underpants and took them home. When he called up to apologize he said he had them in his hand while he was talking on the phone. He said he would be satisfied with the underpants but I said, no, come back over Saturday night and we’ll try it again.
I mean it. I went out with him again. He’s from a really poor family in some town in West Virginia. If he wasn’t playing football he couldn’t even go to school. He’s three inches taller than I am. His hands are very crude and he’s tough looking. He looks like someone your mother would have over to paint the house. His name is Iler. It’s his mother’s maiden name. I’m glad you’re in love. I am too. I can’t write you any more details. They read our mail. They feed us saltpeter in the potatoes but I never eat in the dining room anyway. My parents are still getting a divorce. It will keep my father from ever being on the federal appeals court. My mother did it on purpose because she hates him. She hates me too so I’ll probably go live with him when I get out of school here. Fuck this place. Iler says fuck all the time. I do too. I love to say it. Read between the lines if you want to.
Love,
May Garth
Dear Rhoda,
Charles William and I will leave Atlanta at four o’clock on Friday afternoon. He wants to leave sooner but I have to see my adviser at three. Thanks for all the letters last week. My roommate is in love with you. If we let him off the bed for more than five minutes he gets your letters and reads them. He is a birdwatcher and used to keep bees but I played football with him at Darlington so I have to keep him around. See you Friday night.
Love,
Malcolm
P.S. He wants to write a note.
Rhoda, oh, Rhoda, why are you wasting yourself on Monk Martin when I am here. I am five feet eight inches tall and will read Yeats to you while you languish in pools of aquamarine water. I will bring you oranges and tangerines and take you away from all this. He won’t introduce me, but he is letting me write this note because he ran out of things to say. People call me Kayo but my name is Phinias Kernodle. Errington likes me more than he likes Monk. I don’t hang him from the light fixture during the night.
Dear Malcolm,
It will never be Friday. It will never never never never never be Friday. Let’s say it finally gets to be Friday. And you leave Atlanta and start driving here. Then you will have a car crash and die a fiery death or I will fall into a hole and end up in China. You’ll be in Tuscaloosa and I’ll be in China. But there is no way we could be together in the same place. That would be too good to be true. I love you. Me.
Rhoda