Letter to My Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

you want. In this hyperactive age of emails and text messages, the kind of correspondence that Tim and I shared must seem like an anachronism to you. (Anachronism: something so old-fashioned that it’s almost ancient.) But I sincerely hope, dear Elizabeth, that someday you might have the pleasure of such an anachronism; that one day you’ll experience for yourself the irreplaceable joy of receiving letters from a lover.

    This would hardly be a story worth telling if something bad didn’t happen next. Something bad did happen—something that put the period at the end of my first semester at Sacred Heart Academy, and that for me will always be the standard by which to measure just how cruel teenage girls can be to one another.
    By May of that year I had been at Sacred Heart for four months, and while my affection for the school hadn’t grown any, I had settled into a kind of stoic acceptance of my internment. My days were kept especially busy because my parents, to save money, had enrolled me as work-study, which basically meant I was a full-time slave to the nuns. Six o’clock every morning, while the nuns were at chapel, a couple of other hardship students and I went to the kitchen to help Maddy, the cook, prepare breakfast. After that it was: morning bell, lunch, afternoon bell, study hour, help Maddy again, nuns’ dinner, girls’ dinner, clean up, lights out, sleep. And then again: six o’clock, help Maddy, morning bell, lunch, afternoon bell, study hour …
    This conventlike regime was amazingly effective in stifling any wayward emotions a girl might have had. Whoever invented it, I thought, must’ve been a genius. I barely had time to remember how miserable I was.
    I’d since become friends with the other charity cases, too: Soo Chee Chong, whose tutoring helped me through Freshman Science; and Anne Harding, whose stiff demeanor hid a bitingly sharp sense of humor that, like her own steely orthopedics, gave us misfortunates the support we needed to carry ourselves upright through the halls of Sacred Heart. During study period, when I wasn’t writing letters to Tim, I studied, and my grades gradually began to improve. I received an “A—very nice!” for an essay on Pride and Prejudice for Sister Mary Margaret’s Freshman Rhetoric—the first A I’d ever received for any essay, anywhere. This pleased my parents, naturally, and validated in their minds their decision to send me to a private Catholic school: they had done the right thing. Those nuns knew their stuff.
    Still, in spite of all the sermons in Friday chapel about turning the other cheek, and in spite of all my mother’s efforts to find some reconciliation with me (spring shopping trips to Godchaux’s department store in Baton Rouge, for example, or dinner plates that she wrapped for me to bring back to the dorm on Sunday nights), nothing could make me forgive my parents for keeping me and Tim apart. They still refused to let me see or talk to him whenever I took the Greyhound back to Zachary for the weekend. Any kind of reunion was out of the question; it wasn’t even mentioned. My parents, of course, knew nothing about the letters—at least not until that May, when the event I’m about to describe to you took place.
    It was almost the end of the school year, and despite last-minute anxiety over exams, the halls and classrooms of SHA felt giddy with the prospect of summer. The sun spilled onto the lawns and oaks outside. Squirrels chased each other through the branches, blue jays squawked. Senior boys from Cathedral High, emboldened by their imminent graduation, cruised their cars around the perimeter of the school grounds, luring the more reckless girls to dash across the sidewalks to their windows to exchange notes or kisses or promises.
    I was passing through the first-floor hall after lunch hour when I was drawn to the front lobby by some commotion there. A bunch of girls were crowded around the bulletin board opposite the main office,