Letter to My Daughter (5 page)

Three o’clock now and your father’s out on the back porch trying to repair the ceiling fan.

He won’t say it, but I can tell he’s beginning to get worried. He drove around the city for two hours hunting for you. I suspect that was what finally got to him. “She could be anywhere,” he said, throwing the keys down on the counter when he came in. He pulled out your school directory, thinking we might go down the list of your classmates and phone their parents. But with two thousand students we hardly knew where to begin—really, you could be with any of them, or none of them. We gave up after the twelfth call. Then your father thought to phone the school counselor, in case she had some clue as to where you might be, but she wasn’t in her office, it being Saturday, and her home phone is unlisted. So after all this, he’s on the back porch, taking apart the ceiling fan. I hear him cursing and rattling metal. He’ll probably break something soon.

It’s been almost fifteen hours, Liz. Fifteen. Do you know how hard this is on your parents? Can you imagine how this makes us feel? Do you even think of us at all?

Missy’s parents, you like to say, let her do anything she wants. Missy’s parents let her go out with boys twice her age. Missy’s parents let her take vacations with friends to Cancún. Missy’s parents let her spend Christmas with her uncle in Aspen. Missy’s parents, I would say, are shitty parents. Pardon me, but it’s a parent’s job, like it or not, to set some boundaries. You’re still our daughter, and I honestly feel that we would be failing in our responsibility to you if we let you go off and do whatever you want.

Do I sound like my mother now? Fine. I don’t care. Fear and worry, I’m beginning to learn, can turn even the most open-minded person into a raving conservative. I’m ready to send you to your room and lock the door for the rest of your teenage life. You think it’s hard being a fifteen-year-old? Just wait until you’re the mother of a fifteen-year-old. Honestly, I don’t know whether I’ll shout at you or hug you when you get back. Probably both.

Okay, I’m going to stop ranting now and make carrot cake. I know it’s your favorite, or at least used to be. I’ve got the TV on in the next room so I can listen to it while I bake. No special bulletins about runaway teenage girls yet. Just the usual dismal reports from Iraq—boys with guns, women in black head coverings crying and shaking their fists at the air.

Those poor women, losing their homes and husbands, their sons and daughters. Mothers all over the world must look at those women and say: I pray to God I’ll never have to know that kind of pain.

Have you ever read
The Scarlet Letter?
Do they assign that book in high school anymore? Or is it on some kind of ridiculous banned books list now?

I remembered it while I was shredding carrots. In 1970 the book was on our summer reading list for SHA sophomores. I was back at home in Zachary. My parents still wouldn’t let me see Tim, even though he lived just eight miles down the road from us. We were in the same town and yet we might have been stranded on opposite sides of the world. Keeping us apart all this time was worse than unjust: it was cruel. I was fuming over this one night the first week home from school when I pulled out
The Scarlet Letter
from a pile on my desk. Summer reading wasn’t due for another three months, but I was so bored and lonely and angry that I dropped down on my bed and began turning pages. And as I kept turning pages, and as my parents creaked around in the front parlor, I got drawn in by the story.

I was amazed. Hester Prynne: she was me! And this Nathaniel Hawthorne, how’d he get to know so much about women? The style was maddeningly long-winded, but the story was so true to life I could hardly believe it had been written over a hundred years ago. I kept turning to the front of the book to check the date.

The cruel New England Puritans were perfect stand-ins for my parents, of course. And poor, brave Hester Prynne, standing up on that scaffold with her baby in her arms and that horrible red letter stuck on her chest—a charity case if I ever saw one. As she was jeered at by the crowd, then scolded by the mean town elders sitting in their balcony, and then banished to a shack at the edge of the village, I couldn’t help but think of Tim’s letter stuck up on the bulletin board, and of my classmates laughing at me, and of the nuns sending me to my dorm room for a two-day suspension. And yet, even standing on the scaffolding in front of the whole town, Hester managed to hold her head up and look them all in the eye. How did she do that? That’s what I wanted to know. How in the world did she get through all that with her pride intact? And if Hester Prynne could do it, I thought, well then, maybe there was hope for me.

Our dog, Tick, barked in the front yard. The windows all around the house stood open, letting in the night air. I heard my father get up and open the front door to scold the dog. “Shush! Shush up!” My mother said something about armadillos. “Crazy mutt,” my father said, coming back into the parlor.

Then something clicked against the wall just outside my window. I jerked up in bed, startled. The curtains were parted halfway, the night black and motionless beyond the mosquito screen. I sat listening with the book in my lap. Then again,
click
. Our house had a tendency to creak at night, but nothing like this. Then another click, this one sounding purposeful and directed. I crawled across the bed and peered out the curtains.

Squatting in the shadow of a magnolia tree, just at the edge of the light from my window, was Tim. He held Tick, the dog furiously wagging his tail. I was so happy to see him that a shout escaped my lips. Tick yapped, and Tim signaled for me to be quiet as he tried to calm the dog.

We hadn’t seen each other since Christmas, when my father had thrown Tim from the house, so to find him like this now at my window, after all those months of agonized and impassioned letter writing, seemed almost too good to be real. I even began crying a little.

Tim indicated that I should open the screen, and I tried to do so without much noise. The screen was an old one, the kind that hinged at the top and fastened at the bottom, and it hadn’t been opened in years. I had to pry the hook loose with a pen. As I was doing this, I heard my father pass through the hallway just outside my door. And seconds later the light suddenly doubled on the lawn as my father switched on the overhead lamp in my parents’ bedroom.

Tim crouched closer to the tree trunk, trying to keep to the shadows. Working quietly, he pulled a folded sheet of paper out of his top shirt pocket, unfolded it, and crumpled it into a ball. Seeing what he meant to do, I knelt on my bed and opened the screen as wide as I could, holding it up and away from the windowsill. Tick eagerly watched all of this. Then Tim took aim and lobbed the ball of paper underhanded across the yard and over the boxwood hedge at the side of the house. The ball arced smoothly through the window, bounced off my shoulder, and landed on the rug at the foot of the bed. Tick started barking again. Tim couldn’t quiet him—the dog thought we were playing.

I heard my father grousing in the next room, and then he yanked open the curtains on their window, throwing light like a spotlight onto the side yard.

Tim ducked behind the tree. I could see the shadow of his body standing out along the left side of the trunk. Tick ran back and forth at the tree, barking.

“Hey! Hey!” my father shouted from his window.

“It’s okay! I’ll get him!” I shouted back, and ran out of my room, past my mother sitting in the parlor watching TV, and down the front porch steps. “Here boy! Come on!” I called, and the dog came running. “It’s okay. I got him now!” I shouted, and my father let fall the curtains again on their bedroom window.

Holding Tick in my arms, I lingered on the porch long enough to watch Tim, my brave, clever boyfriend, steal along the edge of the yard, down the side of the gravel drive, and away into the night.

Back in my bedroom, I closed the door and unwadded the note. He knew it was impossible for me to see him because of my parents, Tim had written, but if I could somehow get out Saturday night and come to the Greenwoods Mall, he’d be waiting for me behind the A&W. “I got something important to tell you.” He signed it “Love always.”

I smoothed the crinkles out of the paper and excitedly folded it into
The Scarlet Letter
, where Hester Prynne sat with her daughter in the cottage at the edge of the village, working her strange and mysterious embroidery as she waited for her redemption, however it might come.

Tim stood up out of the cab of his father’s truck as I ran across the parking lot to meet him.

He had begun to grow sideburns and a mustache since his graduation from Zachary High earlier that month, and when we kissed his new hair tickled my nose. Between kisses I told him his mustache made him look like Paul McCartney. He said he didn’t like the Beatles, and could I pick someone else? In that case, I said, how about Robert Redford in
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?
He said that was better, and we went on kissing.

I had fashioned an elaborate lie in order to see Tim that night, telling my parents I was meeting some girlfriends for a movie in town, and then having one of them phone the house so she could casually mention this to my mother, and then studying a review for the movie I had found in the paper just in case I was asked about it. I even begged money from my mother for a Coke and popcorn before I borrowed their car for the night. All of this deceit didn’t come naturally to me. I had never lied to my mother before, not in any big way. Lying, I knew, was wrong, and lying to your mother was the very worst kind. It violated the trust that family members are supposed to have for one another. But as far as I was concerned, my mother had already violated that trust when she held me back in the hallway so my father could beat Tim bloody. And anyway, what would she have answered if I’d said I was going to meet Tim that night? She would’ve said, “No, you’re not.” So lying to her now, I reasoned, wasn’t like lying at all; it was like integrity, a bold act taken for the sake of a higher good.

I don’t believe there could have been a more unromantic place in Zachary for our reunion than that patch of black tar behind the A&W. Framing us were the back wall of the drive-in, a Dumpster, a gravel service road, and a weedy vacant lot. The giant neon root-beer mug in front cast a sickly yellow glow over it all. But as with our first meeting almost a year before in the school gym, it hardly seemed to matter where we were. The world was only as big as our bodies, and wrapped up in one another like a blanket around our shoulders, we felt warm and safe and far from our surroundings. Nuzzling Tim’s neck, I could smell his father’s Old Spice and a piney, earthy scent that made me think of their trailer in the woods. He pulled back and looked at me, fingering my hair and touching the collar of my blouse like there was something amazing there that he had never seen before.

Settling into the cab of the truck, I asked him about his note. “You said it was something important.”

He took a deep breath, almost a sigh. “Right.” He held my left hand in his lap. “You know how I feel about you,” he began seriously, rubbing my fingers. “I’ve told you before how I see us being together for a long time.”

I nodded and watched his eyes. I had a giddy feeling about what was coming.

“I’ve thought about this a lot. You know we can’t start anything until you finish high school. You know that, don’t you? You’ve got to finish high school first.”

“I know.”

“I’m willing to wait if you are. That’s no problem for me.”

I kissed his hand. “It’s no problem for me, too.”

“I want to get myself ready,” he said. “I want to feel like I can take care of you, and that I’ve got something to offer you.”

“You do! Don’t even worry about that. I don’t need anything—”

“Wait, let me finish. You know I’ve been wondering what I was going to do once I graduated. I wrote you about that, how I’ve been looking around town and all, but, well … there’s just not a whole lot of opportunity available for me here. I mean, there’s my dad’s shop, but you know what that place is like. That’s no kind of future.

“So what I decided—and I hope you won’t object to this—what I decided to do while we wait for you to finish school is I’m going to enlist.”

“You what?”

“Let me explain. I’ve been talking to a recruiter. He came by on career day—”

“You mean like with the army?” This was not at all what I was expecting. I was picturing something involving a ring, a white veil, and a bouquet of flowers. But this—

“Laura. Listen. Wait a minute. That’s what I thought, too. But we got to talking, me and Sergeant Coombs …”

Tim laid it all out for me. It had been the last thing on his mind, he said, but if you thought about it, it made perfect sense. The pay, the benefits, the job security. The education. The army would train him—the sergeant said Tim had “officer” written all over him—and when he got out after three years they’d put him through college. I would just be finishing high school then, so it’d be perfect. Hell, even if he did end up in Vietnam, which the sergeant said was not a foregone conclusion, most of the boys there spent half their time sitting on the beach drinking Budweiser beer and eating steak and lobster. “Imagine that,” Tim said, amazed. “Budweiser.”

As Tim went on, holding my hand and repeating all the nonsense the recruiter had told him, I turned to look out the front windshield of the truck. June bugs swarmed beneath a lamp hanging from a utility pole. Shiny black cockroaches crawled up the back door of the kitchen, and from an exhaust fan a burnt, fleshy smell blew our way across the asphalt. The real world had come back, and with it all its tawdriness. We were just two teenagers sitting in a truck in a grimy back parking lot in Zachary: a skinny fifteen-year-old girl with stringy blond hair and a striped polyester blouse, together with her eighteen-year-old Cajun boyfriend with a scruffy mustache who lived in a trailer with his father and couldn’t find a job and so had done what poor boys have done for ages.

Sure, the army has a bad rep these days, Tim was saying, what with Kent State and all. But like the sergeant told him, a smart man could see which way this thing was headed. Already they were cutting back on troops. The whole shebang would probably be over before Tim even got there. He should grab this opportunity while he could because he wouldn’t get another chance. And better to enlist now than to get drafted, because then you didn’t get any choice at all where they sent you; then you were really screwed. Sign up, and any career he wanted, it’d be his. He liked radios? Fine. They had a school for that. Electrical engineering, medicine, auto mechanics—hell, playing the clarinet—you could do just about whatever you wanted with the army.