Letter to My Daughter (9 page)

“See what your father thinks,” my mother said.

“You want to what?” my father asked, barely looking up from his fried liver and onions.

“Borrow the car to drive to Baton Rouge for a party.”

“Don’t think so,” he said, and went back to eating.

“Mom?” I pleaded.

She shrugged. “If your father says no—”

I stared at her, this pinch-faced stranger sitting a hundred miles away at the end of the table who nonetheless wielded absolute power over me, who with a word could send me to a convent school in another city or deny me the chance to attend the most important party I’d ever been invited to, one that had the potential to change my life forever.

I couldn’t contain myself. “You’re useless. You know that?” I cried. “Useless! What good are you as a mother? You’re nothing. You don’t do anything. You just sit there and agree with whatever he says. You don’t help me, you don’t care, you don’t … I never get to go to parties! I never go anywhere!” I threw down my napkin and left the table.

“You come back here and apologize, young lady!” my father shouted, his mouth full of potatoes.

“I hate living in this house!” I yelled, slamming my bedroom door.

•   •   •

Sound familiar, Liz? It does to me. In fact, I’m ashamed at how familiar it sounds. I didn’t curse my parents and steal their car and leave, but I sure wanted to.

That was the night when, crying furiously in my room, I promised myself I would never treat my daughter the way my mother treated me. No, that would never happen. Because my daughter and I, I swore, would be best friends. We’d laugh and gossip. I’d give her advice about boys, and she’d tell me when my clothes were beginning to look frumpy and old-fashioned. When her father said no, I’d take her aside, slip a few dollars into her hand, and tell her not to worry, she should go ahead and enjoy herself.

As it turns out, Liz, we talk about as little as my mother and I did, don’t we? You huff and frown whenever I ask you to take out your earphones, and if I dare try to broach personal matters with you, you groan like I’m hurting you. Just like I did, you keep your private life locked up tight in a cupboard, hiding it from the one person who most wants to help you.

Am I really that bad? As bad as my own mother? I don’t feel like a villain, and yet you probably see me that way: a mean old witch whose only aim is to keep you from having any fun in life. But as hard as it may be to believe, your father and I really do have your best interests at heart. We might screw up now and then—we’re only human, after all—but we don’t set out to be cruel. I don’t think any parent does.

If I could speak now to my teenage self, I might tell her to be more forgiving of her parents. Maybe they were doing the best they could. It’s possible. If adulthood has taught me anything, it’s that even grown-ups are fallible. We’re not a whole lot smarter than we were when we were teenagers. We still feel the same stir of emotions, the same awkward human needs and doubts we felt then. Only the shell grows thicker; the inside, the more tender parts, remains surprisingly unchanged. Often—and this is a secret that not many parents will tell their children—often, we don’t know what the hell we’re doing. And so we yell, we shout, we slap our children.

We still make mistakes, daughter. Oh yes, all the time.

“Avoid sentimentality at all costs,” Sister Mary Margaret used to warn us.

An odd rule coming from her, I always thought, considering Sister M&M was about the most sentimental nun you could imagine, welling up any time she read two lines of poetry aloud to us. But it was a good rule, I suppose, for a classroom full of teenage girls whose confused emotions always churned just below the surface of their thin skin, threatening to spill over at the least agitation.

Back at school my junior year, I stopped by the library one Friday afternoon late in the fall semester and found a letter in the usual place, volume 1 of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I remember standing between the shelves, my satchel on my shoulder, as I opened the thin airmail letter and began reading.

Perhaps it shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise to learn that Tim had decided to stay on for another tour of duty in Vietnam. He explained how the extra combat pay plus cost-of-living allowance would add up to a nice savings. The army had him one way or the other for the next two years, he wrote, so he might as well take advantage of it. To sweeten the deal—and this was the big news he wanted to tell me—he had just been awarded a lateral promotion to corporal. For the first time in his life, people were saluting him and calling him “sir.” “Don’t worry, I won’t make you salute me when I get home,” he joked.

But most important, he finally felt he was doing something useful with his life, helping the South Vietnamese defeat the Communists. Pull out now, he said, and the whole thing would fall apart. No matter what the protestors back home said, and no matter all the horror stories you heard on the news, he knew that what they were doing in Vietnam was for the better….

When I finished reading, I stuffed Tim’s letter in my satchel, not quite wanting to think about it yet, and hurried to the gym, where preparations were under way for the Winter Formal. I was on the planning committee and was supposed to be overseeing decorations. The other girls were already there, putting up the backdrop for the souvenir photos and weaving crepe paper streamers. I dropped my satchel and threw myself into the work. Our theme that year was “Winter Nights,” and so the inside of the school gym was supposed to somehow look like, well, a winter night.

“The stars?” a freshman named Amy asked, holding out a stack they’d finished wrapping with aluminum foil. I showed her how we’d hang them from the ceiling with fishing line, assuring her that with the distance and the dim light her cardboard stars would look twinkling and gorgeous, not at all stupid. We rolled out the giant gym ladder and peered up into the rafters, wondering how we’d go about it—

And yet despite all the busyness and chatter around me, I couldn’t help but think of Tim. I was reminded of a dance two years ago at Zachary High, when I was a freshman and he was a senior. It seemed like half a lifetime ago already.

“But soon you’ll graduate and I’ll be home and we can finally settle down,” he’d written in his letter to me. “Maybe next time you’re back in Zachary you can begin looking at neighborhoods you like.” He’d put his daddy to work, too, checking out home prices. Wasn’t any reason we couldn’t take out a loan and move into someplace nice. Other fellas threw all their paychecks away on fancy cars and what have you, but Tim was saving all his for me and him together. Heck, with the money he earned he might be able to turn around his daddy’s shop yet, expand it to home stereo sales. That’s where the real business opportunities were—

“Sound check!” Christy Lee shouted from the wings of the stage, and all at once the gym filled with loud, lush music. Christy ran out from behind the curtains and slid to a stop in the center of the basketball court. She began miming the song.

I say to myself, “You’re such a lucky guy.”
To have a girl like her is truly a dream come true
.

The other girls clapped and cheered her on. Then Christy ran over and tugged my arm. I protested—I was busy, I didn’t know the song, she should get somebody else.

“Come on!” she said, and dragged me out onto the floor. I reluctantly fell into step beside her for a silly Jackson 5 dance routine. She called the moves: slide, kick, turn, and back.

But it was just my imagination
Running away with me …

“Boy in the house!” someone shouted, and then I saw, over Christy’s shoulder, Chip Benton. He was standing in the door of the gym, grinning. He raised his camera and slinked toward us, snapping off pictures.

“SHA girls seen busily preparing for the annual Winter Formal,” he narrated. “Here they are practicing dance steps, hoping to impress boys. SHA student council secretary Laura Jenkins shows off her funky moves.”

“Out! Out!” the girls yelled, throwing crepe paper at him. Christy, laughing, spun me in his direction. He held his camera aside as I thumped into his chest. “Oof.”

“If you insist,” Chip said. He lowered his camera, took my hands, and began to dance with me. My classmates cheered and oohed.

“You dance divinely,” Chip said.

“You’re crushing my fingers,” I answered. Luckily, the record was reaching its end. “Oops, sorry,” I said. “Song’s over. Too bad.”

But Chip held tight, because Christy had disappeared behind the stage curtains and restarted the record.

“Oops, too bad. It’s playing again,” Chip said. “It’d be very rude to leave me now.”

Then Christy threw the switch that cut the overhead flood lamps, and suddenly we were at the Winter Formal, the gym floor bathed in blue and silver lights. As the song played again, the other girls paired up and turned in couples around us, singing along in their high, hopeful voices beneath the cut-out stars and artificial moonlight:

Ooh-hoo-hoo-hooh,
Soon we’ll be married
And raise a family …

“You really do dance well,” Chip said. “I’m not kidding.”

“I guess you do, too,” I said. His right hand rested sure but easy in the middle of my back, his left hand cupped warmly around mine. He pulled me closer and rested his chin on top of my head while the Temptations sang about building a little home out in the country with two or three children, just like a dream come true. Chip asked near my ear, “Are you going to the winter dance already? Do you have a date?”

The tears came on unexpectedly, bubbling up from inside my chest. Chip leaned back and looked at me. “Whoa. Hey. What’s wrong?” His eyes were sincere, his cheeks remarkably pink below that halo of blond hair.

“Nothing. I don’t know.”

“What’d I say? Laura?” When he lifted a finger to wipe my face, I stopped him.

“No, don’t. I’m just … I’m sorry, I can’t. I’m sorry.”

I pulled away, and as I ran out of the gym I heard the other girls whispering behind my back, “What happened? What’s wrong with her?”

•   •   •

Well. You can probably guess what the problem was.

As much as I loved Tim, I had only seen him once in the last two years—in high school time, that was like one day out of twenty years. And the four semesters I’d been at SHA, I had to admit, had changed me, just like my parents had hoped. It’s the good and bad of education: as the world grows bigger the more you learn about it, so the neighborhood you came from seems to grow smaller. Now all of Tim’s talk about shopping for homes and settling down began to make me nervous. I was only seventeen years old, after all, still just a girl. Maybe in Zachary, Tim’s plans wouldn’t have seemed out of place, but here at SHA none of my classmates got married and had babies right after they graduated. They went to college, got jobs, dated, had fun. What was his hurry, after all?

And the truth was, most of our relationship had been through letters, hadn’t it? Letters that, in spite of all their sweet words, had an air of make-believe precisely because they were only words on paper. They were abstractions, barely real. If a letter got lost in the mail, the world inside its envelope might as well have never existed. Or if you left a letter in the rain, the ink would blur and wash right off, carrying with it any evidence of the reality the words had ever represented.

But all this was mere justification, I knew, for the troubling realization that as my life at Sacred Heart Academy began to feel brighter and more hopeful, the life of Tim’s letters began to feel that much more dim and complicated. It was the giddy teenage world of Winter Formals with aluminum foil stars and dream dates, pitted against the frighteningly adult world of tours of duty in Vietnam and down payments on aluminum-sided homes on muddy suburban lots in small-town Zachary.

And honestly, which do you think a seventeen-year-old girl would choose? Which would you choose, Liz?

The choice became all the more difficult when around this same time, Tim’s letters began to undergo a change. I barely registered it at first. Tim was such a naturally optimistic person that it would have been hard to recognize anything like despair creeping into his words. And the story only appeared in bits and pieces, never all at once—just a fragment here, a sidelong reference there. But as the weeks went on, it became apparent that something awful had happened to Tim, something that cut a deep and lasting scar on his soul.