I Am No One You Know Read Online Free PDF Page A

happened; I’d broken their hearts too, moving out on the June morning following my high school graduation, living in a half-dozen cities, two husbands and more lovers than I can recall and no children, whether by design or chance I couldn’t have said, but none of that sorry crap figures here. None of the rest of my life figures here.

In Hiding
    N OT THINKING Is this a mistake, to begin? nor Will I regret this? Normally a guarded woman, she’d given in to impulse. Hadn’t considered any future beyond the gesture of an hour.
    His name was Woodson Johnston, Jr.—“Woody.” He signed this name with a thick-nubbed pen in black ink with a flair that suggested he wished to think well of himself.
    Where’d he get her home address? A directory of poets and writers?
    Please accept my poetry as a gift. I love your poetry truly. Even if you don’t have time to read my writings. Even if you don’t have a feeling for it. I understand!
    He was an inmate at Kansas State Penitentiary for Men in Fulham, Kansas. His number was AT33914. He’d sent her a packet of poems and a few pages of a prison diary. She was a poet, translator, part-time college teacher, and divorced mother of a fifteen-year-old son. For the past seven years, since the divorce, she’d lived in Olean, New York.
    A snowswept November. Swirling funnels of snow like vaporous human figures dancing across the snow-crust, then turning ragged, blown apart. She’d opened the packet, quickly read Johnston’s poemsthat had been published in a small smudgily printed magazine with a clever name— In Pen. The diary had been photocopied from a laboriously typed manuscript without margins. There were frequent misspellings and typographical errors and Johnston had written in corrections in a neat, crimped hand. Her heart was moved to pity, seeing these corrections. As if they mattered! But of course they mattered to the author.
    Quickly she read the poems, and reread them. She read the prison diary excerpt. Johnston was talented, she thought. Her pity became sympathy. Impulsively she wrote back to him, just a card. Thank you for your intriguing, original poetry. And your disturbing diary with its vivid details. Mailed off the card, and that was that!
     
    E XCEPT: W OODY IMMEDIATELY wrote back. More poems, and more diary excerpts, and a snapshot of himself. A black man of about thirty-five, with faint Caucasian features, curly dark hair parted on the left side of his head, and plastic-framed glasses with lenses so thick they distorted his eyes. Woody was smiling hopefully, but his forehead was deeply creased. He wore a shirt open at the throat, and a jacket. On the back of the snapshot he’d written In happier times—6 Yrs. ago.
    She hesitated, this time. But only for a few minutes.
    She sent Johnston a package of paperback books including one of her own and one by a young black poet from San Diego. (Though afterward wondering was that a condescending gesture? perhaps even racist?) She didn’t send him a snapshot of herself but there was one, blond-blurred and smiling, the poet at the age of thirty-nine, a few years back, on the back of her book of poems.
     
    S OMETIMES, THESE LONG winters in upstate New York, she couldn’t recall any previous life. Couldn’t recall having been married, or before that. And her son Rick barely remembered a time before Olean. In her memory there’d been a young, wanly blond woman who might’ve been a next-door neighbor, a shyly smiling, self-conscious young wife secretly astonished that she was loved by any man, a man’s wife, in time a young mother, all this blind-dazzling as winter sunshine on fresh-fallen snow and in truth in the deepest recessesof her heart (as she’d written in her frankest poems) she had never believed in such happiness; and so it had been revealed to her, in time, that her happiness was unmerited after all, the man who’d loved her had departed, withdrawing his love.
    But leaving her with a son she adored.
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