“I’m okay.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said and, straightening her back, went in to join the others.
Sister Mary Margaret tried her best for me that day, I’m sure, but it was an impossible defense. She argued that, technically, I had done nothing wrong; there was no prohibition against tattoos in the school handbook. “There’s no rule against murderers, either, but we don’t allow them in the school,” answered Sister Agatha. Sacred Heart Academy, she reminded everyone, didn’t even allow girls to wear earrings to school.
Trying to deflect some of the blame onto herself, Sister M&M then confessed her role in the affair. She told how she was the one who had secretly passed letters from the boy in Vietnam, willfully violating the principal’s own orders, and thus leading the poor girl down the confused path that brought her to this desperate, grief-stricken end….
The good nun, I found out later, would pay for this admission. But for now, she succeeded only in delaying my immediate expulsion from the school. I was put on disciplinary probation until the academic staff council could meet and decide my fate. That very afternoon, I was sent home with my parents to Zachary, “so as not to disturb the other girls.”
It wasn’t a happy return home, as you can imagine. I kept to my bedroom, rereading Tim’s letters. My parents again wondered where they had gone wrong. At dinner, passing the potatoes and string beans, they tried not to look directly at me, the tattooed lady sitting at their table. Sister M&M phoned occasionally regarding the status of my case; the academic staff council wouldn’t meet until Friday afternoon, but in the meantime she was trying to lobby the other teachers on my behalf. It didn’t look promising. I had been suspended once before. And as a work-study student, admitted only through the charity of the nuns, I was already practically provisional. It wasn’t like I was the daughter of an important alumna, a legacy student; SHA could let me go without much fuss.
For myself, the tragedy wasn’t so much in the prospect of losing my diploma from SHA as it was in losing my chance to enter LSU. I had been awarded a small scholarship in the Journalism Department, and being expelled from high school would certainly mean forfeiting that. The university might not even accept me at all after this. I saw myself becoming the tattooed outcast everyone already thought I was, slinking around dark alleyways, thin and mean and full of sin.
You remember the charity cases, Liz. I can’t credit myself for the actions they took. When I first arrived at SHA, I had clung to them only as castaways in a life raft must cling to one another. It was instinctual, necessary—not born of any special generosity or sacrifice on my part. That’s why what they did for me seemed that much more surprising and, in retrospect, that much more valorous.
The first was Soo Chee Chong. She slipped away from campus after her last class one day midweek and found her way downtown. It must have been far more difficult for her to enter the shop than it had been for me. I had no choice; Soo Chee did. I can imagine what she must have been feeling, considering all that was at stake: her parents’ reputations, their standing in the local Chinese community, her own position as the first of her family to be educated in America. She would’ve had plenty of doubts waiting in that dingy front room, seeing the biker and girlie magazines on the coffee table. Meeting Greg, she thrust the piece of notebook paper into his hand. Greg was cautious—he made sure she knew what she was doing. “Yes. Of course, I know. Let’s begin,” Soo Chee said, hopping up onto the cot. The poster of the Buddha put her strangely at ease as Greg talked her through the painful procedure. When she arrived at school the following day, she proudly showed everyone what she’d done: there, high on her left breast, was her name spelled out in Chinese characters—Soo Chee Chong, the beautiful sound of jade.
Anne Harding, who’d had her brace removed that year, and who was rumored to be a candidate for class valedictorian, was the second to go. Was it easier for her, after Soo Chee had gone first? I doubt it. I see her marching through the front door of the tattoo parlor, stoic and brave, to put her request to Greg. “Mark me here,” she might’ve said, jabbing her finger low at the back of her neck where her skin had been covered up for three years by the padding of her brace. In an elegant Parisian art deco script entwined with green vines and small red buds, hers read, “It made me stronger.”
The next was Christy Lee. She skipped morning classes the following day, and when she returned to campus after lunch she was wearing a permanent chain around her upper left arm. That was all, no lettering. At the outside of her arm, where you could easily see it, the chain was broken and the two ends dangled free.
The nuns tried to send the girls home, but they refused to go, and instead brought three chairs from the library, placed them deliberately on the front lawn of the school near one of the oak trees, and sat. The girls’ parents were summoned, and there were threats and tears and raised voices. Still, the girls wouldn’t budge. Soo Chee’s mother, a small, elegantly dressed woman, tried to drag Soo Chee from her chair, tilting it sideways onto two legs, but Christy Lee grabbed hold of Soo and wouldn’t let go. The parents retreated to the principal’s office to try and figure out what to do next. The girls, settling in, took out their books and notebooks and began studying for an upcoming trigonometry test and drafting letters to the editors of the local school newspapers.
When a Cathedral High School photographer, the one who’d taken Chip’s place, came by at noon to take pictures, Sister Evelyn tried to block his entry to campus. But he put up a fight, shouting about the freedom of the press, until the classes at the front of the building were disrupted; the principal decided it would be less trouble to let him take his photos. Attracted by the disturbance, other girls wandered out between bells to chat with those on the lawn; some brought their lunches with them, sat, and stayed. In the afternoon, boys driving home from CHS slowed their cars on the road in front to see what was going on. They honked their horns and shouted from their windows at the girls milling on the lawn; the girls shouted and waved back.
You couldn’t call it a protest exactly, Anne Harding said, keeping me posted by phone. But clearly the nuns were getting nervous. Sister Evelyn seemed to be trying to wait them out, hoping the trouble would blow over if she just ignored them. But instead of blowing over, it grew.
Before the week’s end, four more girls made their way downtown. A frizzy-haired girl named Lisa, who idolized Janis Joplin, got a rose on her right ankle. Another got a small, discreet dove on her hip. The third girl got a cross with a crown of thorns, dripping blood, on her shoulder blade. When they arrived at campus, wearing their bandaged tattoos like badges of honor, these girls didn’t even bother going to their homeroom classes, but went straight to the front lawn to join the charity cases, who’d since equipped themselves with blankets and thermoses of cocoa. Most surprising of all was when Traci Broussard, cheerleader and CHS-SHA homecoming queen, who we’d always considered the luckiest and most enviable girl in our class, arrived Friday morning with her own tattoo, a heart broken in two under a banner that said “Les blessures d’amour durent pour toujours”—love’s wounds last forever. She solemnly took her place in the circle with the charity cases, sitting knee-to-knee with them in her stadium coat, and quietly wept for much of the day, no one knew why.
Christy Lee declared it a sit-in and said they wouldn’t return to classes until the academic staff council allowed me back at school. Someone strung up a bed sheet in the oak tree, “Justice for Laura Jenkins!” Word spread, and more girls abandoned their books and pencils and streamed out onto the lawn, effectively canceling classes for the rest of the day. Anxious mothers of freshmen arrived by car to take their daughters home; they’d seen such things on TV and they never ended well. Boys from CHS began trickling over, and by Friday afternoon the crowd had grown to several dozen. A couple of boys with especially long hair strummed guitars and sang protest songs as they imagined the hippies did. They got up chants, girls made speeches, and the senior class president wrote a poem to co
mmemorate the occasion, called “The Winter of Our Discontent.” Anne Harding told me that Sister Mary Margaret had been spotted at the window of her second-story classroom, watching the goings-on with a faint but unmistakable smile on her face. It was a wholly peaceful demonstration, marred only when a boy named Randy, who people said was high on marijuana, fell from a tree and broke his wrist. The sixties had come at last to Sacred Heart Academy.
My only regret is that I wasn’t there to see it, stuck as I was at home in Zachary. But “it was huge,” Anne assured me. A Channel 9 reporter came with a cameraman to cover the story, and it made the evening news that night, prompting my parents to cluck their tongues in disapproval. No wonder, they said, that I’d gone bad, considering the school I was in. What were those nuns thinking, letting the girls run wild like that? It only proved, my father said, what he suspected all along, that the pope was aligned with the Jews and hippies to hand the country over to the Communists.
But the sit-in worked. At their meeting Friday afternoon, the academic staff council found itself in a quandary. As much as they disapproved of the girls’ actions, the school couldn’t very well expel all the students who had tattoos now. Traci Broussard? Anne Harding? Soo Chee Chong? Impossible. So they voted to rescind my probation; I would be allowed to return to school on Monday morning and could graduate with my class after all. But they ordered that the school handbook be revised immediately to make explicit the policy regarding tattoos, clearly stating that, in line with its Catholic mission to provide a sound academic and moral education for young ladies, the school would henceforth bar any girl with a tattoo, visible or not, from attending Sacred Heart Academy.
“We won!” Christy Lee said over the phone that night. “Power to the people!” Sacred Heart would never be the same, she insisted. The administration could never again take the students for granted; they weren’t anybody’s slaves; from now on, their voices would have to be heard. In fact, Christy had already spoken to some of the other girls about starting a black student caucus at the campus. “It’s about time, don’t you think?” she asked.
• • •
Well. It wasn’t over yet. As you must know by now, Liz, such an upset to the accepted order of things can’t go unanswered. The next week there were angry visits and calls to the principal’s office, and letters to the editor of the local Morning Advocate deploring the shocking “tattoo incident” at one of the city’s most venerable institutes of secondary education. Psychologists weighed in with theories of sadomasochism and mass hysteria. The alumnae association got involved, the PTA got involved. A couple of fathers of students were prominent local attorneys, and they got involved. Three of the girls who’d gotten tattoos, it turned out, were under eighteen. The consensus among the parents and school administration was that someone, somewhere, had to pay. And as you must know, too, Liz, it’s easy enough to find a scapegoat. Just look for the person with the lowest standing, someone a bit scruffy who lives at the edge of society. In Hester Prynne’s day they might have locked the culprit up in the stockade, or tarred and feathered him and run him out of town on a rail. We, though, being an advanced civilization, have a thing called the criminal justice system. Within a week, Greg Renfroe, big gentle Greg, was arrested and his tattoo parlor shut down. He was quickly brought to trial and sentenced to nine months in the parish jail on trumped-up charges of corruption of minors and moral turpitude.
And Sister Mary Margaret, the kindest, most compassionate nun at Sacred Heart, and the only one who, as far as I was concerned, was really worthy of her habit—what became of her? At the end of the school year, Sister M&M was quietly transferred to an elementary school in El Paso, Texas, on the Mexican border. In a letter to me that summer, she sounded amazingly sanguine about the whole affair. She was looking forward to meeting her new students, she wrote. From what she’d seen so far, any skills she had as an English teacher would be especially useful there. She counseled me to stick to the Romantics; they’d never let me down, no matter what anyone else said. She closed, “Be good, and if you can’t be good, at least be sensible.”
Well. That’s about it, the essentials anyway. It hasn’t always been a pleasant story, I know. I suppose that’s one reason I haven’t told any of this to you until now. And I’m afraid it’s fallen short of my promise to give you the “truth about life.” At best, I’ve only given you the truth, or at least part of the truth, of one life. But maybe that’s the closest any of us can get to knowing the big Truth.
It’s approaching midnight. Your father has made chamomile tea for us. He came in and rubbed my shoulders for a minute. He sits watching from the sofa now, sipping his tea, wondering when I’ll put down the pen. He looks at me curiously. Soon, soon.
My tattoo, thirty years old, has faded with age, but sometimes I swear I can still feel it throbbing, like it wants to tell me something. I seem to feel it now telegraphing a message as I sit by this window waiting for you to come home—a reminder, maybe, or a warning: “I shall but love thee better … I shall but love thee better …”
I ran into Greg again after that, by the way. It was in the admissions office at LSU, where I went to work while I studied for my BA. He had enrolled in the school of social work, and would drop by from time to time to say hello. He was hired as a counselor at Louisiana Training Institute, the place where they send juvenile delinquents. He’s still there, as far as I know.
And even today I’ll meet a charity case now and then. Soo Chee, Anne Harding, Christy Lee: we all turned out all right, every one of us. We pass each other at the mall, or pushing our shopping carts down the aisle of the supermarket. We nod and smile at one other like we’re sharing a secret. Look at us, the smile says. We survived. The scarred ones. The lucky ones.
Because it’s true, Liz. We’ve been so lucky until now. So lucky. I keep thinking of those poor women on TV, crying and shaking their fists in the air. It’s not for themselves they cry, you know. Mothers don’t care about their own pain, but for the pain of the son who was tortured, or the husband who was shot. The pain of the daughter who’s run away.
You never tell me, Liz, but I know. You’re fifteen, you’re a girl, so you hurt. It’s the fate of all girls, and it’s what in the end makes us women. Small consolation to you now, perhaps, but what else can a mother say? Things will be better. Things will be better. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine, I promise.
Well. I’ll finish this letter now. I intend to leave the pages on your bed so you can find them when you come home. Maybe you’d prefer a new cellphone for your birthday, but this is what you’ll get. Know, though, that all this doesn’t begin to say how much I love you.
It’s never too late to change, Liz. We could begin now by simply deciding to talk to one another. That’s all, just talk. It’d be as easy as taking a breath. As easy as turning the page.
I hear a car approaching. Your father sits up on the couch. Is it you? It could be you. I imagine your return. Lights sweep through the living room as you turn up the drive, and we rush out to meet you. Tears, hugs, forgiveness.
Welcome home, daughter.
Love always,
Mom
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GEORGE BISHOP holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he won the department’s Award of Excellence for a collection of stories. He has spent most of the past decade living and teaching overseas in Slovakia, Turkey, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, India, and Japan. He now lives in New Orleans.
Letter to My Daughter is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by George Bishop, Jr.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are regis
tered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Hal Leonard Corporation for permission to reprint excerpts from Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me). Words and music by Norman J. Whitfield and Barrett Strong, copyright © 1970 (renewed 1998) Jobete Music Co., Inc. All rights controlled and administered by EMI Blackwood Music Inc. on behalf of Stone Agate Music (A Division of Jobete Music Co., Inc.). All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured Used by Permission
eISBN: 978-0-345-51975-7
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
About the Author
Copyright
Letter to My Daughter Page 12