Breakdown Lane, The Read Online Free PDF Page B

kid or worked for ten years for bosses whose personalities strongly resembled Dr. Mengele’s.
    The whole phenomenon of writing a total stranger to ask for advice seemed, at first, eerie but deeply, overpoweringly poignant. But really, it’s not very different from pouring out your soul to a stranger on a plane. It’s a potent temptation. You’ll never have to eat your words.
    One day, Miss Winton went into the ladies’ room and never came out—well, not as Winona Understands. An hour later, one of the general-assignment reporters found her sitting properly, her smile melted, on the pot nearest the door. Ambulance summoned. Miss Winton carried off to Sheboygan Mercy, then to The Oaks. (We went to see her, Stella and I, bringing her handfuls of letters, and she answered them, although you couldn’t read what she wrote. We smilingly assured her we’d get them into the mail. The next time, we brought Stella’s Kmart coupons, and Miss Winton answered those, too.) The snappy new editor, Steve Cathcart, found out via Stella what I’d been up to. One morning, he stepped up to my gray metal desk, planted his feet Colossus-fashion before me, and said, “Gillis. I know you’ve been tinkering. We need to spice up the advice. Can you do that? Okay. Done. We’ll call it ‘Tell Julie.’”
    “No,” I said to him, stunned that I’d dared to contradict an editor, a new editor whom I barely knew. “It’s not about me, a person . I want to call it…‘Excess Baggage.’ After all, that’s what these letters are, stuff people haul around that’s breaking their backs.”
    He liked it!
    Not even one anniversary at the paper and I was a columnist!
    I didn’t know then, but I do now, that this line of work is one everyone drifts into. I thought Cathcart was impressed by my sense and sensibility. He later told me he figured that since I was a girl, I’d have empathy, and since I was my father’s daughter, I’d be able to write an English sentence. We are almost all women, except the MDs. And yet I never met an “agony aunt” (yes, we were called that fifty years ago and still are) who, at age twelve, said to herself, you know what I want to be when I grow up? I want to be the next Dear Abby. Dear Abby probably didn’t even think that. Most of us were on our way to a psychology practice or some other kind of writing when we were caught and held by the sheer power of being asked and believed. There now are advisers for the young, the aged, for every affectional preference, for politicos, pet lovers, quilters, and gardeners. But we’re the foremothers, offering comfort over the faithless lover, the thankless child. Most of us have no more credentials than I did. And everyone has a pocket psychologist, like an ace in the hole, to help out. Cathy’s a family therapist whose own family, at that time, consisted only of her and her dill pickle of an Irish mother but she knew the ropes of loss and adjustment too. Cathy was gay, and I met her and her then sweetheart, Saren, and we instantly bonded. Cath loved the notion of spreading her gospel on sensitive relationship topics while hidden behind my semi-serious column photo. She once said advice columnists should have a 900-number: 1-900-AW-HONEY. When she and Saren parted—because Saren fell in love with a guy—I was that hotline for Cath, and we grew closer, spending long nights with red licorice, red wine, and the Joni Mitchell Blue album, the universal soundtrack to women’s grief. I questioned, naively, how Cath could so utterly fall apart, gain weight, and spend whole Saturdays in bed, given that she had advanced degrees in knowing how to take care of herself in a period of mourning. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you,” she said to me once, “that knowing how you should be reacting to a loss has anything to do with how you react when it’s your loss.”
    Leo and Cathy got along famously, at first, and we sort of made extended family of her and her mom, Connie,