The Moth (39 page)

JOYCE MAYNARD

I
was thirty-nine years old, living in a small town in New Hampshire with my three children, writing a syndicated weekly newspaper column about my life.

It was a really bad time in my life. My mother had just died of a brain tumor. My husband had told me he didn’t want to be married to me anymore, and our marriage had ended the week that my mother died.

She left me a small amount of money in her will. I was spending most of that money on a lawyer, trying to defend myself against a suit for the custody of our three children. I was under scrutiny by a
guardian ad litem
to see if I was, in fact, a fit mother, and the legal bills were mounting with horrifying speed.

The winter was cold, Christmas was coming, and I was an orphan. And then one day, a letter dropped in the mail slot.

The address was written in pencil, and the return address was followed by a long series of numbers. Even if the city written on the return address corner was not Folsom, California, and even if I’d never bought a single Johnny Cash album, I would have known it came from a man in prison.

So I opened the letter. It began,

He knew them well, from my columns. He knew that my daughter had just been cast in
Annie
and gotten braces. He knew that my son Charlie played the trumpet and that my son Willy was a would-be pitcher. He knew that I drove a 1966 Plymouth Valiant that was frequently having problems. He signed his letter, “For real, Grizzly.”

So I wrote back. “Dear Grizzly, thank you very much for your note.” And I enclosed in the envelope the annual Christmas card photograph that I always took of my kids and me—them in their red-and-green holiday sweaters and me in this kind of ridiculous golden dress. And very swiftly I got another letter back.

Now, I should tell you another thing about men in prison. You know all that time that you and I spend on things like going to our jobs, taking care of our children, our houses, our cars, cooking meals, maybe having a relationship (maybe even having sex)? Men in prison don’t have to spend time on any of those things, which means they have a lot of time for writing letters. A man in prison who cannot touch a woman often develops a particular kind of brilliance at letter writing.

So when I wrote Grizzly a two-sentence letter, I got back a five-page letter. And when I wrote Grizzly a one-paragraph
letter, I got back a ten-page letter. And when I wrote Grizzly a one-page letter, I got back a fifty-page letter.

He was writing back more and more. You’re probably thinking—and I won’t pretend that this isn’t an issue here—that I might be a woman of questionable judgment, and you’re right, without a doubt. But one thing I will attest to, and I will stand on this to my last breath, is that I know good writing. And Grizzly knew how to do it.

He never wrote about life in prison. He always wrote about what had happened before, and he’d had a very tragic life. He grew up in the orange groves of Southern California, and he described how his family had very little money, but his mother used to make these little figures for him out of orange peels, and that’s what he would play with. Later in life his parents died tragically.

He wrote about the woman that he had loved. And he loved hard, Grizzly. Then his wife died in childbirth. He raised his daughter on his own.

I’m reading all this in his letters, you know, just enthralled. And sometimes actually weeping, he told the story so beautifully.

He fell in love again, but that woman was with him in a terrible motorcycle accident—she was on the back of his Harley—and she was so horribly disfigured that she forbid him to ever see her again. And then one day he sent me a photograph of his daughter in an open casket after
she
had died.

He’s sending me advice for my son Will, how to throw a knuckleball. He’s drawing diagrams of the inner workings of my Valiant to show me how I can check the plugs and points and change the oil. I could pretend that all of this correspondence was in the name of making a lonely prisoner feel happy, and maybe finding out about the lives of men in prison. But I
will admit to you that more and more I was being drawn into this relationship myself.

I have to say in my own defense here that at the point Grizzly came into my life, I had been single and out in the world of dating a little bit. And I know there are women who will understand this: if you have been a single woman out in the world of dating, the fact that somebody’s a senior partner in a law firm, or they work for Charles Schwab, or they have tenure at NYU, is absolutely no guarantee that the person won’t be a true sociopath.

So I actually came to believe that maybe I had found the one good man. I really believed that I had found the one good heart, just like he signed his letters: “For real, Grizzly.” There was something so real about this man. About his language, his stories. His spelling.

He sent me a photograph of himself, and maybe you’re picturing a kind of gruffly handsome Tommy Lee Jones kind of person. I’ve got to tell you, no. This photograph was especially taken for me, and he was standing in front of this cinder-block wall with a guard. He had a bandage over his head—I’m not exactly sure why that was—and he had a big long beard. And he said that he had actually put on his best shirt for this occasion. It was misbuttoned.

And to be honest, I’d have to say that he was an ugly man. But I had been married to a very handsome man, and so I knew the lie of that one too.

And he continued to write these letters and to talk about all of the ways that he would have treated me if he had been with me instead of my husband. He didn’t think much of my $125-an-hour lawyer either. He told me very clearly in his rustically authentic language what he would do to my husband if he were around. Which was to make him eat his underwear.

I guess I have to tell you that I was falling in love with Grizzly. I have seldom read stories more powerful than the ones that he spun out in the growing stack of pages that were accumulating on my bedside table. I had started saving these letters till I went to bed on those long, cold, New Hampshire winter nights when I felt so alone in the world, and it seemed like my one friend and protector was this man three thousand miles away in prison.

There were a couple of moments when I recognized that this really didn’t make sense, and I’d try to cut it off. Every time that I would send him a letter saying, “You know what? Really, Grizzly, I don’t see a future here,” he would send back another story that would just break my heart.

Around that time, he wrote back with astonishing news—he was getting out! And in fact his bus could probably make it to New Hampshire by the start of Little League season.

My friend said, “You’ve got to find out what he was in for.”

This seemed like a really rude thing to ask a person. It showed a lack of trust, as if I didn’t have the kind of good heart that he did. But when I knew he was coming out, and he was coming to play catch with my sons, I thought I’d better place a call to Folsom Prison.

I went through a whole series of social workers to get to the one who was in charge of Grizzly’s case.

I said, “I’ve got to know what he’s in for.”

She said, “We don’t do that. There are many procedures. Why do you ask?”

I said, “Well, I’m in a relationship with this person, and now that he’s getting out on parole, he’s coming to visit.”

She said, “You know what? I’m gonna break the rules. Sit down, honey.

“Your friend will not be getting out any time in the next
three hundred years,” she said. “Do you know why they call him Grizzly? He’s in Folsom for the grisly murder of his parents. They were beheaded.

“And I’m going to ask you to please never let him know that I told you this because even in prison he is known as a very violent and dangerous man.”

I did not write back to Grizzly. But the letters continued to come to me, of course, dropping through the mail slot. At first he just sounded baffled, then increasingly pleading, and then the tone of the letters changed, and they became angry and fierce, and putrid and violent. If any words I’ve ever read could have drawn blood, these would have been the ones.

The letters kept showing up for a full year. I stopped reading them.

That was the year that my divorce concluded. The
guardian ad litem
determined that I was fit to maintain custody of my children. Clearly she had not spoken to the social worker at Folsom Prison.

I never could throw Grizzly’s letters away, so I put them in a box, and I put the box in the back of my closet. And I’m going to break Moth tradition tonight by reading a short passage from one of those letters:

And I guess I’m with him too, because even many years later I am haunted by this knowledge: that somewhere in a maximum-security prison in Folsom, California, there is a Christmas photograph of me and my three children taped to a cinder-block wall.

Joyce Maynard
is the author of thirteen books, including
To Die For
(adapted for the motion picture directed by Gus Van Sant)
and Labor
Day (soon to be released as a film directed and adapted by Jason Reitman, starring Kate Winslet). Her 1998 memoir,
At Home in the World
, has been translated into fourteen languages, and has just been rereleased with a new introduction by the author. Her newest novel,
After Her
, was published in September 2013.

STEPHANIE SUMMERVILLE

S
o I got to say, hands down, my twenties were the worst years of my life. I spent most of my young adult life trying to escape southern Indiana, which is where I’m from. And the thing you have to know about southern Indiana is it’s highly prejudiced and terribly boring. So one of the things I was looking forward to was going to college.

And I picked—back then we called them Negro colleges, it was part of the Negro colleges consortium—I picked a black school down in Atlanta, Georgia, so I could be with
my people
because I was the only black kid in the middle-income world of Evansville, Indiana. I knew nothing about my people. We didn’t have Martin Luther King Day and all those wonderful things yet. I thought it would be great!
I’m moving to Atlanta, I’m going to experience the culture of the African diaspora, and I’m going to change the world with my achievements.

The trouble started when I first got to school, and the president of the college decided to embezzle funds from the school. And the way he did that was he took loan checks and
scholarship money from innocent kids in transition like myself. So that was the first thing that happened.

The second thing that happened was I had an opportunity to work on a film set. The producers of the movie said, “Yes, yes, since you’re part of the mass communication classes you can take this and get credit.” So I am working on this major motion picture, and about three and a half weeks into it the producers and the directors just up and left. They pulled out their trucks, and they took everything away, and they didn’t tell anybody. So, as a result, I lost my college credit for the class, which ruined my GPA. I am an overachiever, and you do not fuck with my GPA, OK? You can take anything from an overachiever, but you
cannot fuck with the GPA
.

So I lost my scholarships, and as a result, I lost my housing, and for two and a half weeks I became homeless. I found a job at a McDonald’s, and I slept on the stock room floor until I got my first paycheck, and then I bought a bus ticket and came back to the place that I’d run from, southern Indiana.

So I got home, and I knocked on the door, and my mother said, “Oh, you’re here! So sorry, but I’ve sold your bedroom set to your grandmother. And your bedroom is no longer here either: I’ve turned it into my sitting area.”

There was nowhere for me to stay, so in protest I went to go live out in the garage with the car. It was an unfinished garage, and I was sleeping on the outdoor furniture that Mom had left, and I was terribly, terribly depressed now. I was sleeping something like sixteen hours a day, and this went on for a couple of weeks.

I became clinically depressed, and the thing you have to realize is that when you are clinically depressed, you have absolutely no energy. It’s not just like,
I’m sad.
You don’t have
energy to do anything. So I finally got up the nerve to open up a newspaper to look for a job in southern Indiana. I opened up the paper, and I got excited because this was the 1980s and the new thing was to have home health-care aides—people who would go in and sit with the elderly, help to feed them, give them their medicine and things like that. So when I opened up the page, I saw it, and it was like a hallelujah moment:
Ahh! Sitter! What better job for a depressed person than to have a job just sitting?
That’s all I had to do. I thought,
Thank God! I can go do this job.