Norma used to repeat the regretful observation that “Nobody writes letters any more.” She meant real letters. There is mail surely: abundant, demanding, cajoling; but few letters. Anyone who picks up the stuff beneath the front door mail chute knows the difference. “When I was a child,” she would add, “people used to write long letters to one another.”
Although she never knew exactly why-children didn’t ask so many questions in those days-Norma was the designated letter-writer in her family, called into service and working hard to keep up with her mother’s dictation. Filling long sheets of composition paper with whatever spilled out of her mother’s exuberant mind. The status of her feud with a certain sister-in-law. The details of her gall-bladder operation. Vivid accounts of wakes and weddings.
Norma also wrote at her mother’s direction letters to tradespeople, invariably complaining. A Field’s bill thought to be in error. (“Tell them we sent back those corduroy pants. Your brother didn’t like the color.”) A Sears shipment lacking the saw blades Norma’s father had ordered. A letter to a public utility company insisting that the current bill must be wrong because “you know how long the days are in July. We hardly turned on the lights at all. . . . Oh, just send it to the president of the company.”
To the coal dealer, Norma was directed to send a letter berating him for the quality of the fuel wheelbarrowed into the yard and dumped through a basement window above the coal bin: “This last load of Pocahontas Mine Run may be good for something,” her mother dictated, “but not for our purpose, which is to heat this two-flat.”
Released from this particular chore long ago, Norma leads a quiet life behind her tidy shrubs and orderly garden. She has been on her own as a letter writer for many years now. Having run out of distant relatives to write to, she suspects that her local messages have entered a new phase, have developed a new character. She finds herself composing querulous, mean-spirited letters to delinquent neighbors-in much the same mood as those carping letters she used to write for her mother. Some examples?
Dear Sir:
Is there some reason why you cannot cut your grass at least a few times each summer? If you do not choose to do it yourself, enclosed are names and telephone numbers of a couple of boys who will be glad to do the job for you. The elegance of your cars of recent vintage suggest that you can well afford paying for this concession to local custom.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. – – –
One day last winter I saw an elderly neighbor fall while attempting to scale mounds of snow covered with ice in front of your house. While you can reach your car without touching the ground, please consider those persons traveling these perilous sidewalks on their way to work or struggling to walk their dogs or manipulate their children’s strollers.
She has composed as well a kind of form letter addressed to everyone whose front walk has dissolved into gravel, urging that the homeowner do something about this matter, suggesting the name of a local cement- worker.
She works on such letters carefully; adding, subtracting, amending, polishing. She does not sign them or mail them, however. In fact, she doesn’t even commit them to paper. How can one explain this failure of nerve?
What if the recipient were able to trace the anonymous letter to Norma’s old Remington? What if her face, normally composed and friendly, should reveal the truth even as she exchanges the customary pleasantries with the recipient? What would then become of her local reputation as a harmless old party who has lived here peaceably for so many years?
One particularly virulent letter she works on during insomniac nights:
Dear Mr. – – –
One side of my garden has been rendered useless for growing anything but moss and a few wisps of wild grass. This is due to the proliferation of close-packed mulberry trees almost as tall as the house how, overhanging half of my yard and originating in yours, cutting off the sun, killing off anything I plant there.
After a recent night of tossing and turning phrases of this composition, she fell asleep in the middle of the next paragraph, and was awakened some time later by the banging of her mail-slot cover. This is a noise that always arouses her dog to a frenzy of proprietary barking, but strangely, not this time. Less than half awake, she staggered to the front door. On the floor beneath the mail-slot, she found a folded sheet of paper.
Dear Madam:
It has come to my attention that you have a number of complaints about me. I have a few of my own, all involving yourself.
First there were your numerous and noisy children, running up and down the narrow space between our houses, early and late. And there was also your late husband, addressing himself to storm windows and screens or painting on a ladder a few feet from my bedroom window, whistling cheerfully on Saturday mornings when I might hope to sleep. An early riser he was, and a diligent homeowner.
Some time ago another source of aggravation was added. Your grandchildren, frequent visitors, mounting in numbers with no end in view. I can anticipate, I fear, yet another generation of your burgeoning family.
Each morning very early I am awakened by your absurd falsetto, “Come on, Daphne. That’s a good girl,” as you urge your dog down the back stairs and out into the alley.
As for my trees which you complain about, be advised that I am trying to cultivate a source of shade myself, in which I might sit in my own yard and read in those rare moments of quiet when all members of your gregarious family are indoors or elsewhere.
No signature. None necessary.
When Norma awoke in relief from this revelatory nightmare, how grateful she was that she had always confined her well-crafted remarks to her fevered brain. Henceforth, as she continues to observe her neighbors’ errors, will the truth about her own flaws moderate the tone of her unsent messages? It is possible.
As for her earlier observation that nobody writes letters anymore, she is ready to add, “And sometimes that’s a good thing.”
