Letter to My Daughter (6 page)

I couldn’t believe Tim had fallen for all this, and I told him so. “That’s nothing but a bunch of crapola. That guy’s giving you a line.”

“It’s true. I got it in writing,” Tim said. “It’s like a contract.”

“You signed it already?”

He nodded. I only had a year of high school, and the only thing I knew about the war in Vietnam was what I saw on TV, but even I knew it wasn’t something any sane person would want to sign up for.

“I can’t believe you went and did that!” I said. “The army? My god, Tim. What are you thinking? You can’t really be that stupid.”

Tim yanked his head back like I’d slapped him. He blinked at me, then turned away and stared out the side window, swallowing.

I felt terrible. I knew how fragile his self-esteem was, and to call him stupid was about the worst thing I could have said. I was reaching to touch his shoulder when he swung back to face me. His eyes were wet with hurt.

“I did it for you!” he cried in a hoarse voice. “Don’t you understand? It’s for you! It’s for you!”

He had done it for me. Even then the idea didn’t quite make good sense, but I was only fifteen, as hungry for affection and romance as any fifteen-year-old. I rested my hand on his knee in apology. “Tim. Sweetie. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” As we slowly began to make up I continued to protest, but feebly. “Of course I don’t want you to go,” I said. “You could get yourself killed over there!” In the end, though, it didn’t take much persuasion for me to see his enlistment as he wanted me to see it, a testament of his love.

He took my hand and kissed the scar on the inside of my left wrist—the scar I’d gotten for him—and pressed it to his heart. I did the same, kissing the palm of his hand—the hand of a soldier now—and laid it solemnly on my chest. Our actions felt weighted with something deeper and more serious than passion. We weren’t children anymore; we were adults, in the adult world of war and battle, guns and tanks in faraway foreign countries. My brave soldier boy, risking his life for me! For me!

Well. That’s what it is to be young and stupid, I suppose, isn’t it? Boy or girl, you believe anything anyone tells you as long as it’s wrapped up in noble-sounding words, and only because you’re so desperate not to feel so young and stupid anymore. And in spite of the accumulated wisdom of the ages, this never changes, apparently. I watch those poor, hapless boys on TV marching off to Iraq—because they’re nothing more than boys, really, just Tim’s age—and I wonder who put them up to this. What can they be thinking?

As for myself, I know how I would answer Tim today. I would say, “Don’t you dare do this for me. Don’t you dare do that in my name and call it love.” Do it for your own dumb ideas of bravery or heroism or patriotism, but please don’t say you’re doing it for me.

Before I left him that night, Tim stopped and held my face in his hands. As the yellow glow from the root-beer sign seeped into the cab of the truck and the June bugs swarmed beneath the streetlight overhead, he studied my features like he wanted to score them forever in his memory.

The one good thing you can say about war is that it forces you to value the present. It makes you consider last times: this could be the last time I see you. These could be the last words we speak.

“I’ll never forget you,” he told me.

“I’ll never forget you, too,” I promised.

You stupid, stupid boy, I would say today. Where did you get the idea this would make me love you more? I loved you regardless.

I’m sure you’ve seen film clips of the war in Vietnam on TV, Liz. Always alongside the footage of the soldiers fighting in the jungle, you’ll see the hippies back home protesting the war: the thousands of long-haired youth marching on the Capitol, burning flags, putting flowers in the barrels of rifles. “Make love, not war,” their banners read—a phrase that made my mother click her tongue over her knitting and my father grumble about “disgusting punks.”

Seeing those pictures, you might think that the whole country was caught up in the war. But for the girls at SHA in Baton Rouge in 1970, the war in Vietnam was a million miles away. It was no more real for us than
I Dream of Jeannie
or
Gilligan’s Island
. The good sons of the good families who sent their daughters to our school didn’t go to Vietnam. The good boys who attended Cathedral High School two blocks over didn’t go to Vietnam. There was no need to even talk about it. In probably much the same way you feel about the war today, it just wasn’t our concern. We had more important things to worry about, things like math tests and school dances and hairstyles. It was only when Tim enlisted that the war began to become real for me, involving real people with real names and actual events.

We had arranged that I would pick up his letters at his father’s repair shop in town, and I received the first one two weeks after he left. “Private Prejean now,” he wrote. “How do you like the sound of that?” Their drill sergeant at Fort Benning, Sergeant Millhouse, was a real hard-ass; he’d chew your head off for the slightest little infraction and then make you say how much you loved him. Tim had to do fifty push-ups for not having his razor clean during bunk inspection. “Can you believe that nonsense?” As far as he could tell, the sole purpose of all the rules and regulations—which were the most random bunch of BS you could ever imagine—was to turn new recruits into a pack of non-thinking, nonquestioning, standard-issue remote-control robots whose only purpose in life was to obey and kill. The army didn’t even try to disguise this fact, Tim wrote. God help the poor recruit who answered his drill sergeant with “But sir, I thought—” “Did I tell you to think? Did I?” Sergeant Millhouse would scream. “You will not think, you will not wonder, you will not question! You will love me and this army! Do you love me and this army?” “Yes, suh!”

“Craziness,” Tim wrote. But at least his company looked out for one another. They were a bunch of good ole boys from farms out west in places like Laramie and Walla Walla and Provo, and towns closer to home, like Natchez and Hattiesburg. He had aced the map-reading tests and navigation runs out in the woods. Turns out he was a pretty good shot with the M14, too. “All that squirrel hunting with my buddies back in Zachary must’ve paid off, I reckon.”

The army, for now at least, didn’t sound so bad in Tim’s letters. He seemed to enjoy it. Even when he was complaining about it, he seemed to enjoy it.

I wrote back that I was working on a surprise for him for when he came home in a year. This was a scrapbook that I had begun, with the idea that I would gather all the important events of my year together in one place so he wouldn’t miss a thing while he was away. I suppose I was too ambitious at first. By the end of the summer my scrapbook was already bulging with pressed flowers, newspaper clippings, movie ticket stubs, Life Saver wrappers. I wanted to share every detail of my life with him, but there wasn’t room for every detail.

I puzzled over this while brushing my teeth or fixing my hair in the morning. If you had to choose the moments that best represented your life, what would they be? The small actions that pass almost without our noticing them, yet that we spend most of our time doing: aren’t these in fact the real stuff of our lives? Putting on your shoes, eating breakfast, singing songs to yourself, opening and closing doors, racing the dog to the end of the driveway to bring in the newspaper …

You could fill all the scrapbooks in the world. The most mundane details of life are not mundane if they’re done with someone else in mind. When you’re in love, everything’s important.

While I wasn’t happy to be returning to Sacred Heart for the start of the new school year, I at least found consolation in the fact that I wasn’t a freshman anymore. I’d gotten through the worst of it, I figured. I knew which girls to trust, which ones to avoid, and how to please the nuns from time to time with a raised hand and an intelligent-sounding question.

The letters from Tim, though, abruptly stopped coming as soon as I returned to school. I didn’t understand it. He had promised to keep writing; he had the school address so there shouldn’t have been any problem. After four weeks into the start of the semester with still no word, I became worried for him. What if he had been injured in his training? Or what if he had somehow already shipped off to Vietnam—was even now flying over a jungle and looking down on green palms and thatched huts? Or, worse—and I could hardly bear to let myself think this—what if he was losing interest in me? Already? So soon?

I was fretting over these possibilities one Friday afternoon during study hour when Sister Mary Margaret entered the library. Half looking down at my textbook, half gazing out a window to the side lawn, I barely noticed her dark figure gliding past. She disappeared among the stacks, and two other girls at the far end of the room bent their heads together again in private conversation. I turned back to the green grass and bushes outside—green like they might have had in Vietnam—and resumed thinking about Tim, wondering where he was, hoping he was all right.

After some time there was a soft rustle at my side. I looked up, surprised to find Sister Mary Margaret there.

“Laura,” she whispered.

“Sister Mary Margaret,” I said. “Hi.”

“You’re studying?”

“Um … yeah.” I glanced down at my book. “Chemistry.”

“That’s good.” She looked across the room, then back down at me. She wore a plain wooden cross hanging at the front of her habit. Even though Sister Mary Margaret was one of the senior nuns at Sacred Heart, fifty or sixty years old at least, the wooden cross made her look, somehow, hippielike.

“Do you know this book?” she asked.

I turned my head to read the cover on the dark gray volume she suddenly presented to me. “What is it?”

“The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,”
she whispered. “We have both volumes. One and two.”

“Oh. That’s nice.”

“You should have a look,” she said, laying the book down carefully by my elbow. “I think you’ll enjoy it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Be sure to put it back when you’re finished.”

“I will.”

“Volume one. Back there—” She indicated the row from where the book had come.

“Right.”

“Put it back there. Then you can always find it again later when you need to.”

“Thank you, Sister.”

She smiled oddly as she moved off, her habit waving. “Enjoy.”

These nuns, I thought: too much prayer and no sex. They were all a little loony.

I had to go soon to my job in the kitchen. I began to gather my things, but just to please Sister Mary Margaret, I slid the Elizabeth Barrett Browning toward me. The book didn’t look like it got much use at SHA; it was as old and dusty as the sister herself. But then as I picked it up, the pages fell open on a letter. The envelope was addressed from Fort Devens, Massachusetts, to me, care of Sacred Heart Academy.

In an instant I understood: the nuns had been keeping my mail from me. I remembered the incident with the bulletin board last spring, and the meeting my parents had in the principal’s office. They had arranged it all then, their scheme to protect me from the corrupting influence of Tim’s letters. But Sister M&M, that crafty old grammarian, had somehow managed to intercept Tim’s letter in the front office so that she could secretly pass it on to me.