Letter to My Daughter (11 page)

“Are we invited to the wedding?”

“No,” Chip said.

“Yes. Of course. Why not?” I said. “You’re all invited. Please come.” Then I added, just to be funny, “Bring your own beer. We’ll decorate the trailer, get some balloons and crepe paper.”

Everyone at the table laughed.

“Zachary. Yuck,” a girl said. “You’ll be barefoot and pregnant before you’re twenty.”

“That’s me. Trailer bride,” I said, sipping my rum and Coke through a straw. “I can hardly wait.”

“How many kids?”

“Two. No, five,” I said.

“Make it seven,” another girl said. “One for each day of the week.”

“You can name them that way,” a boy said. “‘Monday, come over here! Leave Wednesday alone.’”

“We’ll grow snap beans up the side of the trailer,” I said, on a roll now. “I’ll plant petunias in old tractor tires.”

“Laura Loo! Get on here and snap those beans,” Chip said in a funny Cajun voice. “I want my okra. Now!” He hugged my shoulders. “Look, honey, I done shot a coon for the gumbo. Mm-mm good.”

“Gumbo. Yee haw!” a boy cried.

“Save the fur, honey!” I said. “I’ll make pants for little Thursday. He done worn his out rolling in the mud.”

This won me an even bigger laugh. Drunk and inspired, brilliant in our gowns and tuxedos, we went on making fun of poor Cajuns like Tim until the band started playing “Nights in White Satin” and we were obliged to dance.

“Come on, Laura Loo,” said Chip, taking my hand to lead me to the floor. “We gotta go fais do-do.”

•   •   •

Four o’clock in the morning. See us lounging in a suburban rec room, pale-faced and bleary-eyed in our striped bellbottom pants and denim vests. We’d done the postprom parties, the postprom party breakfasts, and now the girls’ hairdos had all gone flat, and the boys’ faces, slick with sweat and oil, had sprouted tiny whiteheads, budding up overnight like mushrooms after a storm. As Elton John played softly from a cheap stereo in the next room, boys began rummaging for their car keys and rousing their dates from sofas. Someone was busy cleaning up vomit in the bathroom. Someone else’s parents were calling on the phone, wondering where they were. Stumbling across dewy purple lawns, we shouted drunkenly affectionate goodbyes to one another; and even though we knew we’d all be seeing each other at school later that week, there was a rush of sentimentality as we threw our arms around each other and said how this night was the best of them all, we would never forget it, we would be friends forever, friends for life.

I leaned against Chip in the Cadillac Sedan DeVille, my arm hooked into his, as he piloted us slowly through town. The streetlights were still on, casting their watery glow across the flat yards and empty parking lots of Baton Rouge. Tired, happy, I was floating on that dreamy euphoria that comes from just the right blend of sleeplessness, alcohol, caffeine, and youth. You must have tasted it yourself by now, Liz, though you might not recognize it yet as something rare and special, and therefore to be handled with special caution.

At a park overlooking the LSU lake, Chip turned in and stopped the car. We talked a bit, snuggling up against each other. His button-down shirt felt dry-cleaner pressed, and his after-prom loafers held a deep burgundy shine. He smelled nice. Clean. Secure.

He pointed out his home across the lake. Following his finger, I could make out, framed by two enormous live oaks on the opposite shore, a white columned porch and a redbrick chimney. The lake was still and black, and the moon, sunk low behind us, laid a milky white path across the water. I had the fantastic notion that Chip and I could step from the car and walk hand in hand across that white road to his house and up the porch steps to the front door and keep walking forever into a rich, easy future. It would be that simple. Life would be that simple.

How do I justify what I did next? It would be easy enough to blame the alcohol, but there was more to it than that. There was genuine affection involved. I knew that Chip was graduating soon and going to Tulane. This was possibly our last chance to be alone together before he left. Certainly this was the only senior prom he would ever attend, and the only night after a senior prom he would ever know. And he was so kind and polite and decent. I thought of it as a gift I might offer him. “I want this night to be special for you,” I said, and meant it as sincerely as I had ever meant anything.

“My god,” he whispered. “What are you doing?”

“Shh—” I said.

“Laura—”

“Do you like that?” I found his right hand on the seat and held it in my left. He squeezed my fingers. I only wanted to make him happy. The radio dial cast a blue-green glow into the front seat, as if we were sinking underwater. Sounds became muted and distant, and all of our movements seemed to be in slow motion. His brass belt buckle glinted in the submarine light. The song on the radio, I remember, was “Close to You” by the Carpenters.

“Is that okay? Do you like that? Do you?”

“Oh my god,” he said, miles above me. “Oh dear god, yes.”

•   •   •

In case you’re counting, Liz, that was the third time I betrayed Tim that evening. In the days that followed the prom, it wasn’t the act itself, no matter how stupidly inappropriate it might have been, that caused me such remorse. Rather, it was how easily I had disowned Tim that racked me with guilt, making me feel lower than Judas, the lowest, most untrustworthy friend in the world. And as the weeks went on and Chip became more and more peculiar and unresponsive and eventually stopped talking to me altogether, I felt it was only fitting retribution for my unfaithfulness that he should turn away from me.

I don’t blame Chip. He was and always would be a kind and decent Catholic boy—that would never change about him. But as a kind and decent Catholic boy, he also had certain expectations about girls, and in particular the type of girl he might bring home to his parents one day, the type he might safely marry knowing that she was as pure and untested as his own mother had been on the day of her wedding. I, clearly, was not that girl. And it was only just, I felt, that in addition to the private guilt I suffered for my betrayal of Tim, I also suffered the public shame of soon being branded by my peers and classmates at Cathedral High School and Sacred Heart Academy as a low-class, easy slut.

Your father’s out mowing the grass again. It’s eight o’clock at night and he’s mowing the grass. The noise of the engine builds to a roar as he pushes it past the rear of the house, fades to a whine as he steers it to a dark corner of the yard.

Do you remember when you were three years old and caught pneumonia? You probably don’t. Your father took off work for a week so he could sit by your bedside and rub you with witch hazel and feed you chicken broth. He loves you, he does, he just doesn’t know how to show it anymore. As best as I can explain it, Liz, that’s why he’s out there now mowing the grass, the grass he’s already mowed.

Before going out your father suggested I take a break. Why was I still obsessively writing this letter? Wasn’t I tired? What was the point? I told him I need to finish before you get home. He looked at me oddly, started to say something, but then left. I didn’t ask what he meant to say; I don’t need to know. The writing gives me comfort. Isn’t that enough? This, I tell myself, is at least one thing I can do now to make up for whatever wrongs I’ve done.

Because the question that still haunts me most, daughter, is why? Why did you run? Has your life here been that unbearable? Did that one slap sting that much? Or is it something else, something that troubles you more than I’ll ever imagine? Because I know, you see, how much a daughter can hide from a mother. I’ve heard you crying behind your bedroom door, and I’ve hated myself for not having compassion enough even to knock, telling myself that your problems are your own making, and that the best thing I can do for you is to let you live and learn, that I should respect your privacy like you demand I should…. I’ve listened, and I’ve walked away until I couldn’t hear you crying anymore. That, Liz, is why I keep writing this letter.

Here comes the mower again, back around behind the house. My hand’s tired, my energy is flagging, and I’m not especially looking forward to this next part. But there are things you still don’t know yet, and I promised I would tell everything.

No doubt you’ve heard about the sexual revolution of my generation—women’s liberation, the pill, ban the bra, all that. How I wish I’d been a part of it. But at Sacred Heart Academy we may as well have been living in the nineteenth century. Our sexual education, what little there was of it, was all tangled up with our religious education. It was a forced, unhappy marriage.

Sister Hagatha-Agatha taught both “Church History and Doctrine” and “Health and Our Bodies.” Being old, she often confounded the two, but this hardly mattered, since she preached the same lessons no matter what the class. We learned the difference between purgatory and limbo, and what is a venial sin and what is a mortal sin, and what are the respective punishments for these two categories of sin. She taught us the nine orders of angels and brought in pictures of each type so that, presumably, we would know who we were talking to if we ever got to heaven.

On rainy days, in an odd, low pious voice that bordered on the creepy, Hagatha-Agatha told us stories of all the most exotic saints and gruesome martyrs. I’m sure no student of hers will ever forget Saint Catherine of Siena, Virgin—she who consecrated her virginity to God while still a child, and later, to escape marriage, cut off all her hair, “beautiful golden-brown hair that reached down to her waist,” Hagatha-Agatha told us. “Cut it all off!” Thereafter, for her entire adult life she scourged herself three times daily with chains, and wore an iron-spiked girdle underneath her smock. (“Just try to imagine that, girls. Sharp spikes, sharp like needles, piercing the skin above your ribs. Every time you breathe they dig deeper.”) Saint Catherine of Siena, Virgin, lived only on boiled herbs and water, and fasted from Ash Wednesday until Ascension Day, accepting as her only sustenance for the entire forty days nothing but the blessed Eucharist. She humbly served the poor and afflicted, and once (Why, oh why, did you have to tell us this, Sister Agatha?) drank cupfuls of cancerous puss from a sick old woman whose only thank-you was to hurl more vile abuse at the saint. In a vision near the end of her life, God presented Catherine with two crowns, one of gold and the other of thorns, and ordered her to choose. Saint Catherine of Siena, Virgin, answered that her only solace was in pain and suffering, and eagerly seized the crown of thorns and pressed it upon her head.

This, Liz, was the tenor of our sexual-religious education at Sacred Heart. Little surprise that girls came away feeling mighty confused, if not outright repulsed, by sex. I think it also helps to explain what happened when I returned to Sacred Heart for my senior year.

With no one to confide in at home, I suffered miserably all summer over my abandonment by Chip Benton, and now he had gone, left for college in New Orleans without even returning my phone calls. Back at school the first week, I made the mistake of spilling my heart out to my roommate, Melissa. It was during one of those late-night orgies of conversational intimacy that an all-girls’ school encourages, and I said much more than I should have. She swore not to tell anyone about me and Chip, but by the week’s end I began to notice a subtle but distinct change in those around me. I heard whispers behind my back, and underclassmen stared at me oddly in the bathroom. I don’t think I was imagining these things, not entirely; someone even took the trouble to scratch “J = Jenkins = Jezebel” on the front of my locker. My guilty conscience only fueled my suspicions, until, walking down the corridor, I felt as if there was a red letter
J
emblazoned on the front of my uniform.
Look
, this letter announced to all who passed,
here is the Jezebel Laura Jenkins from Zachary who cheated on her boyfriend in Vietnam by committing obscene acts with her prom date in his car
. I hugged my books to my chest and tried to keep my head up high like Hester Prynne, but oh, it was hard. Instead, I withdrew more from the society of the school, and the more I withdrew, the more I felt ostracized, until I was that fifteen-year-old transfer student again, sobbing into her pillow at night. What should have been my happiest, brightest year was already turning into a disaster. This, I thought, only proved how conditional my standing was at the school. As easily as my classmates’ favor had been granted to me, it could as easily be snatched away. They would never let me forget that I was only an ill-bred farm girl who never really belonged among the Baton Rouge debutantes at SHA. Once a charity case …

Sister Mary Margaret noticed my unhappiness. The good nun tried to speak to me once or twice in the library, but there was no way I could begin to unpack the whole sordid story for her, and so I didn’t even try.

“It’s nothing, Sister,” I told her.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m fine.”

“Well … if you ever need to talk.” She nodded significantly toward the bookshelves. “Have you seen? Elizabeth Barrett Browning?” Sister M&M was still acting as a secret letter carrier for Tim and me. Every week or two, a new one would faithfully arrive, transported from the jungles of Vietnam by some in credible series of conveyance (army jeep—helicopter—carrier plane—truck—mailman—Sister M&M) to miraculously appear tucked between the yellowing pages of a neglected book here in our small library at SHA. I mustered a smile. “I will. Thank you. Thank you, Sister.”

Tim’s letters, though, when they arrived, brought me little comfort that semester. The poor boy was still mired in regret over the bombing raid he’d called down months ago on that Vietnamese village.

He’d tried everything to forget, he wrote. “I’d be ashamed to tell you what all I’ve tried. But I guess it’s no more than what most boys over here do.” Nothing helped. Night after night, it didn’t matter what bar or hovel he was in, he’d find himself hiking again into that wasted village. The smoke pluming above the palms, his buddy’s water canteen clicking against his ammo belt. And then—there was nothing to stop it from coming back—the high, agonized wail as they approached the first house, followed by the gut-wrenching smell of burning flesh. “You understand I had no choice in this,” he repeated. “I was just doing my job.” He seemed to be sinking into a depression far worse than mine. And then midsemester, something happened that brought him even deeper.

One day after watch duty he was lounging in his hut when he saw a spider crawling up the wall. It was a giant hairy red and black thing, almost the size of his hand. At the camp they called them jumping spiders, or cave spiders, or just “big hairy gook spiders.”

He picked up his pistol from the side of the bed, aimed, and shot the thing, blasting a nice hole in the corner of his hut. The cleaning boy, a Vietnamese kid they called Bo, came running, saw what was left of the spider, and freaked out. When the boy turned to Tim, the expression on his face was like he was seeing a ghost. “What? What is it?” Tim asked. Bo wouldn’t answer, only began rapidly mumbling prayers to himself. Tim grabbed his arm, but the kid jerked free and ran out of the hut.

Tim asked around after this, and apparently killing a spider was about the unluckiest thing a person could do in Vietnam. “It’s crazy, I know,” he wrote. “I don’t buy any of that stuff. What does a spider have to with whether or not Charlie gets a crack at me?” But the cleaning boy began to avoid him, running to the opposite side of the road, even ducking around corners when he saw Tim coming. It made him feel, Tim wrote, like he wore the mark of death on him.

His letters began to take on a darkly philosophical tone. He wrote about things he’d never mentioned before, friends of his who had gone out on routine patrols, or even just down the street to buy farm eggs in the next village, and had never come back. He wrote about the superstitions that soldiers came up with to explain away the randomness of life and death. How you should never say aloud the number of days you had left, for instance—that was sure to kill you. Or how some claimed that they could tell how long a newbie would last the minute he stepped off the chopper; it was a gutted look behind the eyes, or a hesitant gait that gave it away. “That one’s a goner,” they’d say. “Two months, tops.” But as far as Tim could see, death didn’t play by any rules. A clumsy blueleg from Minnesota who could barely load a rifle would go home without a scratch, while the smartest, sleekest tracker you ever met would get blown to a gory paste his third day out. Didn’t have anything to do with how good or bad a person was, neither. Line them all up—the nun, the priest, the shopkeeper, the rapist, the murdering NVA, the screaming teenage girl in a straw hat holding a live baby boy, the smoke still rising from its black charred body: you think there was any difference between them? There wasn’t no difference. Didn’t matter who you were or what you did, we all came to the same dead end. “And if you can figure that one out, I’ll be happy to hear it,” Tim wrote.

But even as his letters dipped into this darkest of places, he still clung to one desperate hope, and that was me.

“I picture you running up to meet me when I step off the bus in Zachary at Christmastime,” he wrote. “You look just like I left you, only better. You’re wearing shorts. (I always picture you wearing shorts even if it’s the middle of winter, hope you don’t mind.) I pick you up and hug you and kiss you and nobody can say nothing because I just came back from Vietnam and I got a whole mess of medals on my chest.” We’d have a little house there near the woods, nothing but peace and quiet, and for about a year he wouldn’t do anything but sit and look at me and we’d make love all day.

“My good luck charm,” he wrote. “Laura. All I got to do is turn my arm up to see you. That’s permanent, won’t ever go away.”

•   •   •

Elizabeth, see if you can understand this. I stopped reading his letters. I couldn’t bear to hear any more about his ugly war. Why did he have to tell me all that? What could I do to help him? I had my own problems to worry about. I couldn’t take on the burden of being his lifesaver, too, his one and only hope.

The first one I removed from Elizabeth Barrett Browning and didn’t open right away because I knew how depressing it would be; then I didn’t open it for the rest of the day, and then a week had passed and it was still in the drawer of my desk, unopened, beside the scrapbook I’d abandoned long ago. And then the next letter came, and I put it in the drawer with the first. Then another one. Later, I told myself. I would read them later, when I was stronger. But by semester’s end I had a small stack, light as the airmail paper they were written on but weighted with the accumulated guilt of my avoidance.

He was killed, they said, in his sleep. Two weeks before his discharge, three clumsy mortar shells were lobbed from a hill where they hadn’t seen any North Vietnamese for a year and a half. One landed just short of the base fence, one landed on the wash shed of the kitchen, and one landed on a hut that wasn’t even Tim’s but had an air conditioner and the fellow was away and so Tim was using it. Even the army morticians, with all their glue and stuffing and wax, couldn’t make him resemble a human being. His remains were delivered to Zachary in a closed coffin draped with an American flag, which was how he was displayed on the altar of St. Aloysius Catholic Church that chilly winter day between Christmas and New Year 1973.