A Marriage Made at Woodstock by Cathie Pelletier

selected Correspondence. My dearest Chandra , he typed out in white letters on the blue screen. He sat waiting for the appropriate words to hit him. He had written her many letters in college. He had plagiarized Pound, O’Neil, Eliot, Fitzgerald, other men who’d had the lion’s share of crazy women. But now, after two decades of marriage, he sensed he would have to say something by Frederick Stone if he was to get Chandra’s attention. He stared at the blank screen before him, blue as a swath of sky, and waited. After a few minutes he went back to the keyboard. He deleted the My and est. Chandra would declare them sexist. He then inserted a capital D . Dear Chandra . He examined the salutation. Should he delete the dear ? That was the wonderful thing about being computerized, something he might mention to his brother, in case Herbert felt the need to send a monosyllabic note to any of the kindergartners he’d been dating. Frederick had slaved long and hard on those college love letters, churning them out at his old IBM Selectric, retyping due to numerous mistakes. Now, with a myriad of downloadable fonts, his laser printer could spit out any type style from Baskerville Italic to Swiss Condensed. He could plead for Chandra to return to him in letters three-fourths of an inch tall, or with words small enough to look like gnats scuttling across the screen. And mistakes? What were mistakes with spell-check right there to come in like some good, motherly soul and clean up after him? Who even needed the blasted dictionary when the thesaurus key stood at the ready? Mistakes were nothing—as he’d tried so valiantly to tell his opinionated big brother—when one was computerized . Frederick only wished this was something he could apply to his marriage. Maybe the Backspace key should have been used more often, the Control key less. Or perhaps he could have paid more attention to Home, Style, and particularly Save. Maybe there had even been a subtle directive in Merge Codes, had he known how to see it. It sounded very Woodstockian, after all. He sat there wordless, unable to summon up a single thought. The blinking cursor seemed to be asking, What now? What now? What now? His eyes filled with warm tears because all Frederick Stone could see, on the face of his beloved keyboard, were the words Escape , Exit , and End .

Five
    Why am I losing sleep over you?
    Reliving precious moments we knew?
    So many days have gone by
    Still I’m so lonely and I
    Guess there’s just no getting over you.
    â€”Gary Puckett & the Union Gap
    For the first few days—four of them, to be exact—Frederick Stone kept busy at his computer, reconciling the latest bank statements of his largest clients and doing the weekly payrolls. Several times, on each of those days, he found himself staring into the green leaves of the cherry tree outside his window, forgetting what he was doing, forgetting where he was, forgetting even who he was. Then, as if a breeze had blown through his mind, as well as through the black cherry, he’d remember the nasty details. His wife of twenty-plus years—a sound investment in marriage these days—had left him. And he didn’t know where she was. He had called her two days earlier, dialing the sickly digits of the number she’d left behind—it belonged to Amy Lentz—and had received a sound dressing-down rather than a plea to take her back. He’d had a little speech memorized for the latter possible event, some platitudes about forgiving and forgetting. He had nothing at all to say in response to the dressing-down.
    â€œYou gave this number to Joyce!” she had scolded him. “And then you went ahead and told my mother, my mother, when I’d asked you to let me tell her. Isn’t anything sacred to you, Freddy?”
    â€œIt just sort of slipped out,” Frederick had lied. He’d wanted to mention that lots of things were sacred to him,