Breakdown Lane, The Read Online Free PDF

benefits.”
    “We can go to the student health service.”
    “It’s in Milwaukee, Julie. It’s thirty miles away.”
    I knew he was right. If it hadn’t been for Liesel and Klaus, and the scholarship Leo got, we’d have been living on the rice without the peas.
    I became a temp. The less said about this, the better. Leo went to the expedited program for grad students with previous advanced degrees, nights and right through the summers.
    And then.
    I was nursing and, of course, impregnable.
    Theoretically.
    The Packers were in the playoffs. Everyone in town went crazy, and so did we.
    Hannah Caroline was the extra point.
    Two infants did have the effect of making me long for any extended conversation that didn’t include bowel movements. I tried to nurse them both, fighting to keep my weight up with lots of beer and cheese curds, nevertheless eventually looking like a lumpy and yet malnourished alcoholic. And though Leo did finally get his degree (summa, of course), the importance of my getting a job was real-life necessity, well beyond political theory.
    A law student Leo met brought her two-year-old to our house and took over so I could get outside work. Caro was only six months old, and I’ve always thought this was why she never seemed to like me as well as Gabe did. Smacking together a résumé, with my stint at the Chicago Sun-Times in boldface, I headed down to the News-Clarion . Leo bought me a Donna Karan skirt and sweater for my job interview, coral-colored, and the first new thing except underwear I’d owned for two years. (My folks, ever pragmatic, had that Christmas given me a fox-and-leather jacket, which we sold to fix our Subaru.)
    I started out editing copy, and, gradually, I made it over to the features department, where the advice columnist, Marie Winton, had written “Winona Understands” for forty years, and had to be eighty-five if a day. I edited her column and, once in a while, when it was too cold for anyone else, got to write the occasional fifteen inches on the ice-sculpting derby.
    Marie was still answering letters about whether printed instead of handwritten thank-you cards were ever appropriate. The department’s secretary, Stella Lorenzo, the Hot Lips of the newsroom, and I were as signed to copy down numbers of emergency organizations from Al-Anon to Parents’ Respite and send them off on cards stamped, “With best hopes, Winona,” for every letter we got that didn’t involve etiquette.
    “It doesn’t seem fair,” I would whisper to Stella, “she’s basically ignoring the real cries for help.”
    “Tell me about it,” Stella replied, rolling her huge, Annette Funicello eyes and lofting her big pile of corkscrew hair with a pencil. “I open letters every day from people who ask her whether their children might not be better off without them. Mother of Mercy, Julie, these women are thinking of killing themselves. I don’t know what to do.”
    Gathering my courage, I asked Marie, who wore a hat to work each day (ceremonially placing it on its stand before she sat down to her Smith Corona), “Are we doing enough for people who are in crisis, Miss Winton? Sending them a phone number doesn’t seem to be enough.”
    “I don’t deal with such nasty, personal matters, dear,” Marie told me. “My readers aren’t all that concerned with those kinds of things.” It was only my third or fourth month in the department, but, on the quiet, I started to answer a few of Winona’s worst-case correspondents, calling on Cathy Gleason, a friend and family therapist I’d met in a community production of Oklahoma! I became obsessed with the letters. The more I read, the more patterns emerged. All humans had their heads on backward. Bank tellers and brick layers. Secretaries and surgeons. I would despair, as I read, at how adults, with jobs and driver’s licenses, could exhibit such a stunning dearth of self-awareness. I started wondering how anybody ever stayed married or raised a