Letter to My Daughter (4 page)

I suppose even at the time a part of me relished the melodrama of it. We were every pair of young and divided lovers there had ever been. We were Romeo and Juliet. We were Abelard and Héloïse, we were Antony and Cleopatra. But we were greater than all of them, because we were real and alive and this was ours. And the secret knowledge of the profound and historic suffering we were forced to endure on account of our love made our separation bearable; it made our separation, I daresay, almost pleasurable. Our sweet, secret pain.

Go ahead, roll your eyes if you want. In this hyperactive age of emails and text messages, the kind of correspondence that Tim and I shared must seem like an anachronism to you. (Anachronism: something so old-fashioned that it’s almost ancient.) But I sincerely hope, dear Elizabeth, that someday you might have the pleasure of such an anachronism; that one day you’ll experience for yourself the irreplaceable joy of receiving letters from a lover.

This would hardly be a story worth telling if something bad didn’t happen next. Something bad did happen—something that put the period at the end of my first semester at Sacred Heart Academy, and that for me will always be the standard by which to measure just how cruel teenage girls can be to one another.

By May of that year I had been at Sacred Heart for four months, and while my affection for the school hadn’t grown any, I had settled into a kind of stoic acceptance of my internment. My days were kept especially busy because my parents, to save money, had enrolled me as work-study, which basically meant I was a full-time slave to the nuns. Six o’clock every morning, while the nuns were at chapel, a couple of other hardship students and I went to the kitchen to help Maddy, the cook, prepare breakfast. After that it was: morning bell, lunch, afternoon bell, study hour, help Maddy again, nuns’ dinner, girls’ dinner, clean up, lights out, sleep. And then again: six o’clock, help Maddy, morning bell, lunch, afternoon bell, study hour …

This conventlike regime was amazingly effective in stifling any wayward emotions a girl might have had. Whoever invented it, I thought, must’ve been a genius. I barely had time to remember how miserable I was.

I’d since become friends with the other charity cases, too: Soo Chee Chong, whose tutoring helped me through Freshman Science; and Anne Harding, whose stiff demeanor hid a bitingly sharp sense of humor that, like her own steely orthopedics, gave us misfortunates the support we needed to carry ourselves upright through the halls of Sacred Heart. During study period, when I wasn’t writing letters to Tim, I studied, and my grades gradually began to improve. I received an “A—very nice!” for an essay on
Pride and Prejudice
for Sister Mary Margaret’s Freshman Rhetoric—the first A I’d ever received for any essay, anywhere. This pleased my parents, naturally, and validated in their minds their decision to send me to a private Catholic school: they had done the right thing. Those nuns knew their stuff.

Still, in spite of all the sermons in Friday chapel about turning the other cheek, and in spite of all my mother’s efforts to find some reconciliation with me (spring shopping trips to Godchaux’s department store in Baton Rouge, for example, or dinner plates that she wrapped for me to bring back to the dorm on Sunday nights), nothing could make me forgive my parents for keeping me and Tim apart. They still refused to let me see or talk to him whenever I took the Greyhound back to Zachary for the weekend. Any kind of reunion was out of the question; it wasn’t even mentioned. My parents, of course, knew nothing about the letters—at least not until that May, when the event I’m about to describe to you took place.

It was almost the end of the school year, and despite last-minute anxiety over exams, the halls and classrooms of SHA felt giddy with the prospect of summer. The sun spilled onto the lawns and oaks outside. Squirrels chased each other through the branches, blue jays squawked. Senior boys from Cathedral High, emboldened by their imminent graduation, cruised their cars around the perimeter of the school grounds, luring the more reckless girls to dash across the sidewalks to their windows to exchange notes or kisses or promises.

I was passing through the first-floor hall after lunch hour when I was drawn to the front lobby by some commotion there. A bunch of girls were crowded around the bulletin board opposite the main office, laughing and shoving one another. When I stepped into the lobby one of the girls gasped, “Oh my god,” and they all fell silent. A sick, scary feeling coiled up in my stomach. The girls moved aside as I approached, but stayed close enough so they could watch me.

On the bulletin board, pinned up behind the glass in the middle of the usual announcements about club meetings and lunchtime menus, was a letter from Tim. “Who did this?” I asked, looking around. The only people who ever handled mail at the school, I knew, were the nuns and the Beta Club office assistants. “How’d this get here?” No answer, of course. I turned back to the letter. It was one I hadn’t seen yet, dated just two days earlier, and written with even lines on clean white typing paper, as if Tim had taken special care with it. Feeling a dozen pairs of eyes on my back, I scanned the letter.

“Dear Laura My Love,” it began. After that I seemed to see only the most private parts, the sentences standing out on the paper as if they were scored in incandescent ink: “We’ll find a way to be together again,” I read. “Nobody or nothing can keep us apart. Don’t you worry.” And, “Next time I swear I will hold you and hold you and never let you go. I can’t give you up, not that easy. I love you. Don’t you know that by now? Haven’t I convinced you of that?” On and on it went, each heartfelt sentiment more intimate than the last. “How can you ever think that I’ll stop desiring you? I will never stop desiring you. You are the sexiest girl that I ever did know.”

I could feel the girls waiting for my reaction to this cruel joke. I could see their reflections in the glass in front of me. I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing me buckle, though, not yet. I tried to open the case, fumbling with the latch, but the thing was locked. I spun around.

“Who did this?” I shouted. “Who?” Some of the girls began backing away, some giggling, some horrified. I saw Anne Harding standing at the rear of the crowd, immobile in her neck brace, wearing a pained, tearful expression. I turned back to wrestle again with the case, but I couldn’t get it open, so I hauled back and punched it with the side of my fist. Wedges of glass dropped down inside the wooden case; a large piece crashed to the floor. Someone screamed. I jammed my hand in and grabbed the letter. By now it had become like a hurricane in my ears and eyes and I couldn’t hear or see anything clearly. People were jostling, someone was still screaming. I looked down and saw red everywhere. I wondered, distractedly, where it had come from. I watched it spread across my white blouse; I felt it gumming up the floor beneath my penny loafers. Red rosettes blossomed on the letter I held in my hand.

Then Sister Agatha was shaking me: “You will calm down! You will calm right down, miss!”

I protested, shouting back through the noise of the hurricane. “Let me go! I didn’t do anything! It was them! They did this! They did it!”

Sister Agatha tried to snatch the letter from my hand-as if somehow the piece of paper was the problem. “You give me that.”

“No!” I cried, and grappled with Sister Agatha over the letter, trying to keep it from her, until I did something you should never do to a nun: I hit her. I punched her as hard as I could in the chest and she fell back against the wall. In the next instant, a swarm of hands were on me, dragging me down the hall to the nurse’s station.

I suppose by then I was hysterical. But anyone with any sliver of compassion could understand why. The nurse, Ms. Palmer, closed the door and yanked shut the curtains over the corridor windows of the nurse’s station. Nuns crowded around, trying to stanch the blood, while Ms. Palmer gave me an injection, “To calm you,” she said—as if I were a lunatic in an insane asylum instead of just a hurt, humiliated schoolgirl.

Whatever she gave me worked fast, because soon I was groggy and indifferent to everything. People came and went, class bells rang, phone calls were made. Every time the door opened, a different girl stuck her head in, each face a queer mix of fascination, horror, and pity. “What’re you looking at?” I might’ve asked, but I didn’t have the energy or care to speak.

I was shuffled out of the school and into the back of a car. A minute later, I was surprised to find Sister Mary Margaret, Freshman Rhetoric, sitting beside me and holding the bandage to my wrist. Still more surprising, she was stroking my hair and saying, “There, there. It’s okay. You’ll be fine.”

At Baton Rouge General I got six stitches on my left wrist and a shot for tetanus while Sister Mary Margaret held my hand through the entire cloudy, painful operation. I was lying on top of a bed in the recovery room when my parents at last rushed in—my mother blubbery with worry, my father looking faintly ridiculous with stray pieces of straw hanging from the shoulder of his work shirt. Sister Mary Margaret narrated the gentlest possible interpretation of events for them: There had been some accident at the school bulletin board, she said. Nothing too serious—a cut on the wrist, probably two more stitches than were necessary, but better to be on the safe side. Of course, it was difficult being a new student and all, but really, Laura was fine, your daughter was just fine. What she needed now, the good nun said, was rest and sympathy.

You might imagine the gratitude I felt for Sister Mary Margaret. Up until that day I had known her only as a pale older nun who seemed unnaturally preoccupied with grammar; she smelled musty, like a library, and she rustled when she walked, like her very insides were made of parchment. In little more than an hour, though, she had become my new best ally in the world, and a happy disproof to my suspicion that all nuns below their habits were really witches at heart.

The good nun saw me as far as the school dormitory, where mean Sister Hagatha-Agatha took charge again. She and my mother settled me into my room, where I was ordered to stay for two days of bed rest. I mustn’t leave the building, I couldn’t go to class, and I couldn’t have any visitors. Suspended, in other words.

After they’d gone, Melissa looked at me from her bed on the other side of the room. She raised one eyebrow and asked, with something like admiration in her voice, “Wow, what’d you do, cut yourself?”

“Leave me alone.”

“Jeez. Only asking.”

In the principal’s office, meantime, my parents conferred with Principal Evelyn and Sister Agatha. I didn’t know then what they were plotting for me; it was only later that I was able to piece together what went on in that meeting. The nuns must have shown my parents the offending letter. My mother, taken in by their severe uniforms and the crosses on the wall, would have broken down and confessed to them the whole ugly truth of why they had brought me to Sacred Heart in the first place: it was on account of that very same pervert boy who had written that very same pervert letter. It was his fault, she said. He had corrupted their daughter and led her to all this, all this … perversion. Oh god! What could be done?

To my mother’s relief, the nuns knew what to do. They’d had experience in such things. They handed her tissues and, while my father sat by awkwardly, said that the wisest solution would be to confiscate any more of the dangerous evil obscene letters that arrived from the boy. (“Yes. Yes, you’re right,” I imagine my mother saying, nodding and dabbing her eyes.) The nuns would watch over me at school. And at home during the summer, I should be kept away from the boy and encouraged to take up other activities—softball, say, or sewing. (“Yes, yes, of course, that’s what we’ll do.” “We’ll do it!” my father seconded.) Then, when I returned for the fall semester, I would be fully ready to concentrate on my studies. I’d be encouraged to mix with the other girls, join some clubs. That’s what I needed. (“Yes, that’s what she needs.”) They’d seen worse cases, and more often than not, with gentle but firm guidance, the poor lost lamb was brought back into the fold. My mother needn’t worry. They’d look after me. They knew what was best. (“Oh, thank you. Thank you so much.”)

Oh cruel kindness.

Oh mean charity.

Oh sweet free love.

I still have it, by the way, the scar on the inside of my left wrist. I remember you asked me about it once when you were little. You were sitting in my lap and I was brushing your hair on the back porch one afternoon when you took my hand and ran your finger over the mark. I told you then pretty much the same story that Sister Mary Margaret told my parents at the hospital that day: an accident involving the bulletin board at school, nothing serious, two more stitches than necessary.

Well. Now you know. Today it’s pale, almost invisible. But as I’m writing this to you I can turn my wrist up and still see it there, a jagged little memento of my first year at Sacred Heart, and a presage of scars yet to come. But more important than that, it helps to remind me now, Liz, as I wait for you here, of just how hard it is to be your age.