Then reckon your course on shadows
 

Mrs. Karl Bandema
Box 59
Ocracoke, N.C. 27960 

     Please forgive the familiar address when I don’t even know you, but the more formal would still feel strange. I hope you’ll understand. Along with this note, there should arrive a small parcel containing Karl’s pills. I don’t know if you have a doctor on the island, so I took the liberty of having Karl’s old prescription refilled. The moment his weight goes over 185, he should take one of these every morning after breakfast.  Also, no fat or salt in food preparation, less beef, more chicken and fish, more vegetables and salads, but no dressing on the salad, unless a little lemon. (Starting the meal with the salad helps cut the appetite.) And no cheese, except cottage cheese, and no alcohol.

         Sincerely,
         Annette Bandema
 

Mrs. Karl Bandema
231 E. 48th St.
New York, N.Y. 10017 

     The parcel arrived today, with your note. I will do as you say. K. is in pretty good shape at the moment. He goes for a long swim before breakfast, takes several walks by himself during the course of his working day, and then we swim and walk in the evenings. The vegetables are easy because I planted a garden. (Peas, beans, squash, cucumber, spinach, tomatoes, carrots, radishes, and three kinds of lettuce.) As for fish, no shortage of that here. I do bluefish stuffed with spinach sometimes three nights a week. There is a local doctor, but so far only I have had to go to him. I tend to get ear infections. There is no liquor store on the island. I appreciated your note and wish you all the best.

         Violet
 

     The most natural way for me to think of you is dear Mrs. Bandema, but how can there be two of us? And yet here we both are. I feel I cheated myself by mailing that letter off so quickly. I couldn’t wait to write it, to hurry back to the post office and mail it, even though the mail had already gone out for the day. It said nothing, absolutely nothing. Spinach and beans, walks and swims, all wrapped up in a cautious parcel of triumphant politeness. “I will do as you say,” etc. And yet I told you more about me than you told about yourself. You know, or will know when you get my letter, that I get ear infections and that I have a garden, and—if you read between the lines—that I am alone a good deal of the day. I have no knowledge about you, except what I manage to compile from my husband’s novels, steering uncertainly between fiction and fact. I shouldn’t probably say my husband. It hurts and bewilders you. It would me. It’s all so strange. I think it would feel less so to me if we could meet, just the two of us, in some neutral place, the way generals of opposing sides meet to sign a truce. Not that we need sign a truce, exactly. We are not on opposite sides...