Letter to My Daughter

by George Bishop

  It was a test, I knew. In my father’s eyes, Tim was barely one rung above black himself, and the only way for him to prove himself to be good and truly white would be to join my father in belittling the Negroes. Tim, though, to his everlasting credit, made the honorable choice of defending his father’s customers, saying that without their patronage the shop would’ve closed a long time ago, and anyway, from an electronics point of view, a TV was a TV no matter who owned it. Then he went on to declare that some of their closest neighbors were black people, and they’d never had any problem with them at all, in fact found them to be quite friendly and decent, probably the best neighbors they’d ever had. This led, as I knew it inevitably would, to the topic of the integration of the public schools, and my father’s claim that he was “no racist,” but to be rational about the matter, mixing would have no benefit for anybody. No one wanted it—not the blacks, not the whites—and to insist on it was worse than undemocratic, it was criminal. Tim tried to reason with him, but he had the disadvantage of being younger and more polite and smarter than my father. He finally lost his patience, though, when my father brought out his favorite argument, throwing it down like a trump card on the table: the secret scientific study done at Louisiana State University that proved the inferior intelligence of the Negroid races. They had the skull measurements! Brains in formaldehyde! Right there in the basement at LSU! Those were the scientific facts. What about that, Tim? Huh?

  “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe I’m having this conversation,” Tim said, standing to leave. “I’m sorry, Mr. Jenkins, sir, but you … you’re just plain ignorant.”

  Well. My father rose, his hands coming up in fists like he was ready for a fight. No swamp rat was going to call him ignorant. I jumped up to try and defend Tim, and as he and my father traded words, my mother, her face by now so hard that it looked like it would crack into a hundred pieces, could only sputter uselessly from her perch on the sofa, “Now now! Now now!”

  Later, sitting beside Tim outside in his father’s service truck, I felt so ashamed that I wanted to disappear into the seat. Why had God given me two such horrible parents? How could they be so mean and awful? What had I ever done to deserve them?

  “You’re not them, Laura. You’re not them,” Tim whispered as he wiped the tears from my face with his fingertips.

  “Never be afraid of the truth, girls.”

  That was another saying of Sister Mary Margaret’s, and one of my favorites. This next part of the story is important, though it’s difficult to tell. Still, I’m sure you know more about sex than I ever did when I was your age, so I don’t suppose anything I write will shock you. I’m just giving you notice, is all.

  It was the Christmas holidays and my parents had gone out to visit friends for the evening. You can picture winter in Zachary—you’ve been there enough yourself when you were younger. In that flat delta landscape of pine trees and sugarcane fields, winter comes as a relief from the heat and terrible humidity suffered throughout the rest of the year. It was my favorite season, and the only time I felt any real affection for the farm. The air became crisp and clear, the pond froze over at the edges, squadrons of brown pelicans flew overhead. Making pumpkin pie with my mother in the kitchen, or carrying in firewood with my father, I could imagine myself becoming reconciled with my parents and creating a life with them on the farm. I could imagine a future where parents and child were friends instead of combatants, allies in a peaceful, sensible world.

  Tim came over later that night, after my parents had left, to pick me up for a movie date at the mall. Although my parents hadn’t explicitly forbidden me to see him, it was plain they didn’t approve, and so Tim took pains to avoid meeting them, and I took pains not to mention his name around the house. They didn’t know I was still seeing him, in other words.

  Tim stoked the fire in the parlor while I went to get ready. I remember chatting to him from my bedroom off the hall as I dressed, him answering me from time to time through the open doorway. When I came back into the front room he was still squatting down in front of the fireplace, adjusting the logs with a poker-Have you ever seen a man do that? I’m sure you have: the way they poke at burning logs with a kind of natural assurance—turning them over, prying them up on one end, settling them down again—as if tending a fire was something they were born for, something inherited in the genes, generation after generation, going all the way back to people living in cabins and caves. Tim was talking out of the corner of his mouth, his chin turned slightly from the fire, thinking I was still in the bedroom. I held back in the doorway to watch him.

  Like I’ve said, Tim wasn’t a big boy, but he had on his red plaid barn coat that evening with a nice pair of jeans and a gray muffler looped around his neck. The side of his face caught the glow from the fire. Watching him in secret while he went on talking and poking at the logs, so at ease, so content, I felt I was seeing him at his most private. This, I thought, was exactly what Tim was like when he was most alone. And it was a most admirable and inspiring sight.

  I’m only trying to put this like I remember it. Outside was cold, inside was warm. The fire was burning. We were alone and my parents weren’t due back for another couple of hours. We did just what any fifteen-year-old girl and seventeen-year-old boy would do in that situation.

  I turned off the light by the door and hugged Tim from behind. He squirmed, chuckling, as I kissed his neck and ear. He turned around and lay me down on the rug. Then he hovered above me, gently stroking my hair as he studied my face. His eyes ticked back and forth, like he was divining signs of our future together in my features. He looked so serious that it began to make me uncomfortable.

  “Why’d you ever ask me to dance?” I asked him finally.

  “What?”

  “That night at the Freshman-Senior Dance. Why’d you pick me?”

  He thought about this for a moment.

  “After my mom died, it was like everyone was afraid to talk to me. Like I was contagious or something. I remember you used to look at me so pitifully—like you were the only one who knew how hard it was.

  “One morning—you probably don’t even remember this—one morning you smiled at me. I was coming on the bus and you were sitting in the back, watching me. You made this crooked kind of half-smile, like you were trying to cheer me up. It lasted maybe only half a second. You probably don’t even remember it. But it made me feel a whole lot better that day.”

  I did remember.

  “And so that’s why I asked you to dance that night. I just never—” He stopped.

  “What?”

  He hesitated, moving his lips like he was working up to say something.

  I prodded him with my knee. “Say it.”

  “I just never … I never in my life thought I could get so lucky.”

  At a time like this it’s not the words so much as the sentiment. This one came deep and true from inside him, and he was offering it to me, handing it to me, like something unspeakably fragile and precious. And him trusting me like that opened up something inside of me.

  Understand that before that night Tim and I had done little more than kiss. They were good kisses, to be sure. But I’d been brought up Baptist, and things learned in Bible school, no matter how absurd, have a way of sticking with you. And Tim, of course, was too polite to ever push himself on me. But that night everything was just so perfect that there wasn’t any question of right or wrong, good or bad.

  I helped him take off his barn jacket, his sweater, and his blue jeans. Tim was shy about his body, so I had never even seen him without a T-shirt before. His build was still that of a teenager’s—a little bony, slender, and perfectly smooth. As he helped me off with my clothes, he grew in confidence, until eventually we were divested of all shame and lay marveling at one another’s features. That evening before the fire, transformed by trust and love, we were both as young and beautiful and flawless as God had intended.

  Probably I shouldn’t be telling you this. Bu
t people can say whatever they want about what we did next. They can call it whatever they like, they can sell it and profane it however they want: I know that what we did was a good thing. And I know that no matter what anyone says, teenagers are fully capable of loving one another. At a certain age, teenagers may even be the most capable: before their minds are poisoned by hurt and doubt, before the world steps in with its age-old hates and prejudices to destroy whatever childhood notions of love still linger in their hearts.

  I won’t embarrass you with the details—you know well enough what I’m talking about. Let me just say that, together on the rug that night, we discovered a sympathy for one another that bordered on the divine. Call it our marriage. What was mine became his, and what was his was mine. Where had we learned to do all that? From no one. From our own God-given instincts. At the end, I remember, I cried a little. Tim whispered promises until I felt reassured. Sighing, laughing, wrapped up in each other’s arms, we didn’t see the headlights sweeping the walls of the parlor or hear the footsteps crossing the front porch before my parents stepped into the room and found us.

  The scene that followed was so ugly that even now I remember it as a hellish red blur. My mother screamed and covered her mouth. My father let out a string of obscenities. I scrabbled to hide myself behind the sofa while my father hauled Tim up from the floor and began beating him. Gripping his skinny arm in one hand, he slammed punch after punch at his head. “Hold her back!” he ordered my mother when I tried to stop him. She caught me by the arm and swung me around. An end table was overturned, a lamp was broken. We became like monsters, wailing and thrashing about the firelit den as our shadows danced like demons on the walls until at last my father, swearing in the vilest language, kicked Tim, bleeding and naked, down the front porch steps while I stood back in the hallway with a rug wrapped around myself, screaming, “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!”

  I was locked into my bedroom and banned forever from seeing “that degenerate” again. And the very next week, before the end of Christmas vacation, my parents brought me down to Baton Rouge for an admissions interview at Sacred Heart Academy.

  Well. It’s past noon and you’re still not home.

  During a break from writing I went up and checked your room. I didn’t go through your private things, don’t worry, but I see you took your daypack and toothbrush. I phoned Missy DeSalle’s house, but no one was home except the maid and she didn’t know anything. So then I phoned around to all your other friends—all the friends I know of, at least—but they say they haven’t heard from you.

  I wouldn’t be surprised if you went with Missy to Fort Lauderdale after all. That’s what this is all about it, isn’t it? That’s how our fight began, as I remember: our refusal to let you go to Florida for spring break, and then the arguing and the shouting and the cursing. Call me a hypocrite, call me any ugly names you want, I still don’t see how we’re being unreasonable. You’re fifteen years old, for god’s sake. What kind of parents would we be if we let you spend a week in Florida, unchaperoned, with a bunch of stoned high school seniors?

  After your father came in for lunch I finally convinced him to phone the police. He didn’t want to. He says you’ll be in a world of trouble if they find you driving with just a learner’s permit and we ought to try and avoid that for now, if only for your sake. I said we ought to be more worried about your safety than about your driving record, and if you broke the law, well, you broke the law and there was nothing we could do about that now.

  The police, as it turns out, weren’t very helpful. They said they don’t take reports of a missing person unless it’s been at least twenty-four hours, and then only if the disappearance is of a suspicious nature. I said it was, your father disagreed. Then they gave us the number for the Department of Juvenile Services. In case we needed help with ungovernable children, they said, we should contact them for an interview and a probation officer would be assigned to our case. I took the phone and said you weren’t ungovernable, just missing, and what good were the police if they couldn’t help people, wasn’t that what they were hired to do, to serve and protect and whatever? And so on like this until the woman on the other end of the line lost patience and hung up. After that I phoned all the hospitals in the parish. No one matching your description, thank god.

  So just now I’ve sent your father out to look for you in the car. He says it’s a ridiculous idea: If you’re already in Florida, what’s the point? And if you’re not in Florida, how’s he going to find you in a city of half a million people? He says he’ll go to Home Depot first to buy some fertilizer for the lawn and then he’ll go check the shopping mall. He says you’re probably there trying on clothes. I said he shouldn’t be making jokes at a time like this.

  If it’s your intention to punish us for being too mean, or too strict, or too whatever, well then, you’ve succeeded. We get the message. We’ll sit down, we’ll talk this out and find some compromise. You can come home now. We won’t be mad, I promise. We just need to know you’re safe. You hear so many terrible stories on the news these days. I turned on the TV for the noon news, hoping somehow I might see something about you—crazy, I know. What I saw instead was another report about that twelve-year-old girl in Prairieville who went missing last year. They found her, locked in a soundproofed basement below the home of a local couple. A middle-aged man and woman, no doubt with friends and jobs and club memberships, they could’ve been anyone you passed on the sidewalk. But the things they did to her—you can’t imagine human beings capable of such depravity. Horrible things, things you don’t even want to think about. God help that poor girl.

  Okay. Now you see why I get so worried. Pardon the interruption. I’ve set my mind to tell you this story, so I’ll get back to it now.

  “Oxymoron.”

  Do you know what that means? Sister Mary Margaret taught it to us. It’s when you put two contradictory words or ideas together for literary effect, as in “cruel kindness” or “sweet pain.” One phrase that I always considered to be an especially good example of an oxymoron, and one that was popular back in 1970, is “free love.”

  Could there be two more contradictory words? When has love ever been free? When did it ever come without a cost?

  When my parents drove me down to Baton Rouge for the interview at Sacred Heart Academy, I was sick at heart with hurt and loss. I’d spent most of the weekend crying in bed, not eating meals and refusing to speak to my parents. My mother wept outside my door and wondered where they had gone wrong. My father slammed around the house cursing the blacks and perverts and hippie Jews who had destroyed the morals and decency in the country. If the integration of Zachary public schools had first made them think of sending me away to a private boarding school, then catching me on the floor of the living room with Tim Prejean convinced them that this was the only smart thing to do. They only wanted what was best for me, after all. Locked in my bedroom, hearing them talk this through, I became halfway convinced myself that what they said was true, and that what Tim and I had done was indeed sinful, and that the best recourse for everyone was separation.

  I sat in the back of the car, looking out the side window at the bare trees and winter fields blurring past. My parents sat up front, exchanging barely a dozen words between them during the one-hour drive to Baton Rouge. The air from the heater was warm and stale, heavy with our compounded shame, anger, and guilt.

  In the principal’s office at Sacred Heart we all sat in a semicircle in front of Sister Evelyn’s desk. You can imagine the scene: a cross on the wall, a framed portrait of the pope, a painting of Jesus pointing at his glowing heart. My father leaned forward with his hands on the knees of his trousers, trying to appear gentlemanly and sincere. My mother sat upright with her ankles crossed primly below her chair, wearing old-fashioned black shoes and an ugly furry gray wool dress with oversized buttons, an outfit that she somehow thought looked Catholic.

  You remember how much your grandfather distrusted the Catholics. To
him, Catholics were almost as bad as Jews. But in the interview with Sister Evelyn, I saw my father’s eyes take on that same crafty, guilty look he got whenever he was bargaining with the manager of the feed store or wrangling for handouts from the Farm Bureau. He spoke about how they had always wanted to provide me, their only daughter, with a good moral education, and what an excellent reputation Sacred Heart Academy had, not only in the field of morality but also in the field of academics, and how although we were not ourselves of the Catholic persuasion, we nevertheless had always held a great respect for priests and nuns and people like that, and anyway we were all Christians under the skin, weren’t we? My mother nodded and agreed with whatever he said, adding, outlandishly, that she always wished that she could have gone to a Catholic school herself. Lies, of course, all of them. But my parents couldn’t very well come out and say the truth, which was, “We’re here because we hate the coloreds and we caught our daughter having sex on the living room floor with a trailer boy.”

  After they had finished speaking, Sister Evelyn turned to me. “And why do you want to come to Sacred Heart, Laura?”

  I hadn’t expected the question. It wasn’t something my parents had expected, either. They watched me anxiously from their chairs, my father’s jawbone flexing beneath the skin of his rough cheeks, my mother’s face fixed into a crooked, tense smile. Sister Evelyn tilted her head to one side below the picture of Jesus.

  At that point I had no feeling one way or another about Sacred Heart. But I despised my parents just then, for all they’d done and for all they stood for—their bigotry, their hypocrisy, their low-down meanness. And I knew my relationship with Tim was as good as dead, so staying at home in Zachary or going away to Baton Rouge hardly made any difference to me. For the hopeless, one prison is as good as the next.