Well, the mystery of the abruptly ended letter from yesterday has been solved. Dot simply continued it past midnight and dated the new page with today’s date, fooling me into thinking there were two separate letters
She begins with “Don’t tell me you’re still sitting on your bunk waiting for me to finish this thing! Well, I guess I can keep it up just about as long as you can stand reading this stuff. This shall be a case of the ‘survival of the fittest.'”
Does Dart remember that Thursday night when they had a nice long talk and he said something about her nose and Dot made a crack about how stupid it’ll look when she’s sixty? He tried to console her by asking how she thought his bony frame would look when he was sixty. Well, she’s been giving it some thought and she knows there’s hope for his bony frame. There are a number of things that can be done to put some meat on him, but there’s no viable solution for turning her poor square nose into a pretty little triangle. (Note to reader: There is not a living creature on Earth who ever found anything objectionable about Dot’s nose, except Dot. It’s a lovely nose, well-suited to her pretty face.) She goes on to tell Dart the sad story of her cousin who was born with no bridge in his nose. He recently underwent a painful surgical procedure with very little improvement in his appearance. She suggests she should quit stewing about that which can’t be fixed and worry more about the size of her body rather than the nose she seems to be stuck with.
While writing this letter, Dot has been thinking about what she was doing five years ago and what “they” will be doing five years from now. At the tender age of 13, she had just discovered a brochure from Andrews School and was determined to attend there. When she looks forward five years, it seems like an eternity in the future, but when looking back, she can scarcely believe how quickly those years have flown. How glad she is that she and Dart didn’t meet back in 1940, because a 16-year old boy would probably not had much interest in a 13-year old girl. Although she would like to have known him better and longer, she thinks the disadvantages of an earlier acquaintance outweigh the advantages. Still, she says the only reason she was happy at age 17 was that she didn’t know what she was missing until she met Dart.
Commenting on Dart’s portrait (the one where his eyes are turned away from the camera), she says his radiant smile is lighting up the wall in her bedroom. If she holds the picture at a close angle and closes one eye, she can almost imagine that he’s looking at her. She sure hopes he won’t flash those pearly teeth at any Australian girls, should he happen to meet any.
She’s proud that she’s gotten this far into a letter with very little effort. Is he starting to get bored? Has he been reading it on the installment plan? she asks. Having reached page eight, she declares that this has been loads of fun on her part and she hopes they can do it again sometime. She also hopes that by the time he receives this, he will have read all her other letters, too and that she will finally have heard from him.
Tonsillectomy adds a brief postscript and the letter is finally complete. As Dot prepares for her trip to Cleveland for graduation, she will write no other letters this month. We’ll have to rely on Dart to keep us connected.
