“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.
Sister Evelyn waited for my response. Behind her back, Jesus pointed to his burning red heart, commanding me to speak.
“I want a better life for myself,” I said at last. Which was the truth at least as far as I could tell it.
I’ve sometimes wondered since then why the school took me in. I suspect Sister Evelyn knew there was more to our story than what we were telling. We weren’t the first non-Catholic family to come knocking for admission since the integration of the Louisiana public schools was announced, after all. And if that wasn’t the reason, well then, everyone knew that Sacred Heart was where families sent problem girls who needed reform. None of this was spoken of openly, of course. And regardless of the truth of the situation, I believe the nuns in their own blinkered way preferred to see my enrollment simply as one more victory for the faith: a poor Baptist farm girl from Zachary had been brought into the fold. One more ransomed pagan baby, saved.
Sunday evening before the start of classes for the new year 1970, Sister Agatha led me and my parents down a black-and-white linoleum tiled corridor to my room. Sacred Heart Academy used to have one wing of the convent building reserved for a small number of boarding students. That year, I remember Sister Agatha telling us, there were thirty-two—“Now thirty-three, of course, counting you.”
It seemed like all thirty-two came to their doors to witness my arrival. I had my suitcase, my mother carried the linens, my father had a cardboard box full of books and things. Sister Agatha explained to us about the house rules, the hall phone, my work-study obligations. My new roommate, Melissa Thayer from Hammond, watched as my mother hugged me goodbye, and my father, pushed forward by my mother, kissed me stiffly on the cheek. He gave me five dollars and they left.
“Welcome to the nunnery,” Melissa said when they had all gone. She was tall and thin, with sharp features and an abrupt manner of speaking. “Laura Jenkins,” she said, looking me up and down. “Did you just come from the farm, or what?”
“Zachary,” I said.
“Oh. Wow. Sorry,” Melissa said.
What has been the most lonesome night in your life so far? Could you pick out one, say, “That was the worst of them all”? For me it would have to be that first night at Sacred Heart. Separated from my boyfriend, abandoned by my parents, I felt like the most unloved fifteen-year-old girl in the universe. As the stark reality of my situation sank in, I was filled with a loneliness that ached in every bone and tissue of my body. My mother and father weren’t going to be overcome with remorse and return the next day to bring me home. Tim wasn’t going to appear on the lawn below the window to carry me off in his arms. Nothing was going to get better. Pale winter moonlight shone through the barred window at the head of the room, casting a gray grid on the floor. Buried down under a too-thin blanket, I tried to stifle my sobs so as not to disturb my new roommate. Sometime around midnight, Melissa called from across the room:
“Do you mind? I’m trying to sleep over here.”
• • •
To be a high school transfer student is hard, but to be a midyear high school transfer student is even harder. Most of the girls at Sacred Heart came from old-time Baton Rouge families, daughters of daughters of alumnae, and so a new out-of-towner like me was a great curiosity. I might have been a chimpanzee just delivered from the zoo for all the stares I got that first morning. I kept tugging at my new uniform; it didn’t seem to fit right—it was too tight in all the wrong places and too loose in the others. I was wearing ugly thick-soled lace-ups instead of the smart penny loafers the other girls wore, and I couldn’t get my navy blue knee socks to stay up the way they were supposed to. In almost every class I had to stand, say my name, where I was from, and what I liked to do. “Tell the class something about yourself, Laura,” the nuns asked. That last question stumped me until I hit on “I like to read”—which at least pleased the Freshman Rhetoric teacher, Sister Mary Margaret.
At lunch I ended up sitting at a table in the cafeteria with a bunch of other misfits. A more forlorn group of girls you couldn’t find. There were the girls on hardship scholarships, like me; there was one pathologically shy Asian girl, Soo Chee Chong, who never spoke a word and was ashamed of her name; there was Christy Lee, one of five black students at the school, who crept around so silently that she looked like she wished she were invisible; and there was Anne Harding, locked in a monstrous steel neck brace that didn’t allow her to turn her head independent of her body. We were, I later learned, what the other girls called the charity cases.
Have you ever wondered why so many unfortunate people seem so spiteful? Why they so often refuse—despise, even—efforts made to help them? I know why. Because I sat at their table, I know why. Within a week at Sacred Heart Academy, I had learned what every charity case knows: that any act of kindness can also be cruel. If some girl happened to be nice to us, we knew she was only being nice out of a sense of Christian duty, because she felt she had to be nice to us. And if some other girl wasn’t nice, well, that only proved how rotten all people really were at the core. So we, the charity cases, were doomed to be doubly bitter: bitter when rejected, and bitter when not.
Lucky for you, Liz, you don’t seem to have this problem. You’ve always had plenty of friends, and none of them charity cases as far as I can tell. Still, I suspect that all of us, no matter how fortunate, feel like charity cases at some time or another in our lives.
• • •
My only consolation that first week at Sacred Heart came in the form of a letter, delivered to me by Sister Agatha late one afternoon at the dormitory. Even now, thirty-four years later, I remember the shape and feel of that envelope, with the Zachary return address in the upper left corner, the six-cent Dwight D. Eisenhower stamp in the right, and my name square in the middle. And inside, the folded sheet of notebook paper covered with his handwriting; handwriting that was so like his character, teetering between an adolescent awkwardness and a touchingly earnest effort to appear upright and manly.
“Dear Laura,” Tim began. He went on to say how he wasn’t much of a writer, but he wanted me to know that he missed me more than I could imagine. If anyone was to blame for my being sent away, he wrote, it was him. He was the man, after all, and he should’ve been more responsible for our safety that evening. Not that he regretted it, though. That night, no matter what came after, would always stand for him as the best night of his life. Because it was that night, he wrote, that he found out what true love is.
Thus began our correspondence, one that would continue for as long as I was a student at Sacred Heart, and that, in the early days at least, was like a lifeline, tethering me to a tree of hope in an otherwise bleak landscape.
I wrote back right away to tell Tim how much I loved and missed him, too. I wrote about my first miserable night in the dormitory, and my roommate, Melissa, and the charity cases at the lunch table. I wrote him letters in the back of my notebook from the last row of Freshman Science while Sister Helen—Yellin’ Helen—lectured on the periodic table. And in the afternoons, while other girls were out flirting with boys from Cathedral High School, or going to piano lessons, or attending basketball practice, I would write to Tim from the library, long shadows slanting across the dusty tabletops as I emptied out my loneliness onto page after page of white paper.
I came to rely desperately on his responses. My heart jumped up whenever Sister Hagatha-Agatha delivered another letter to me in the afternoon at the dormitory, frowning in poorly disguised disapproval behind her old-lady eyeglasses. Who ever knew so much happiness could be contained in one small envelope? If Tim missed more than a few days, I would become anxious and dash off two letters at once, wondering what was wrong. He would write back apologizing, saying how he’d been out hunting with his buddies over the weekend and so wasn’t able to answer my last letter as soon as he would’ve liked, but not to worry, I was always on his mind. I’d write again: How could he even think about going out hunting with his friends and having fun when I was locked up here in this prison for girls? Didn’t he have any feelings at all? And why had he signed “Love” instead of his usual “Love always” in the closing of his last letter? Maybe he didn’t miss me as much as I missed him. Maybe what he called “the best night of my life” wasn’t so great after all. Maybe we’d be better off just forgetting that anything ever happened between us…. And so on, until he would send me a reassuring letter by Express Mail, filled to the margins with the most tender sentiments a girl could ever want to read. On paper, I learned, even arguments can be beautiful.
I suppose even at the time a part of me relished the melodrama of it. We were every pair of young and divided lovers there had ever been. We were Romeo and Juliet. We were Abelard and Héloïse, we were Antony and Cleopatra. But we were greater than all of them, because we were real and alive and this was ours. And the secret knowledge of the profound and historic suffering we were forced to endure on account of our love made our separation bearable; it made our separation, I daresay, almost pleasurable. Our sweet, secret pain.
Go ahead, roll your eyes if 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, laughing and shoving one another. When I stepped into the lobby one of the girls gasped, “Oh my god,” and they all fell silent. A sick, scary feeling coiled up in my stomach. The girls moved aside as I approached, but stayed close enough so they could watch me.
On the bulletin board, pinned up behind the glass in the middle of the usual announcements about club meetings and lunchtime menus, was a letter from Tim. “Who did this?” I asked, looking around. The only people who ever handled mail at the school, I knew, were the nuns and the Beta Club office assistants. “How’d this get here?” No answer, of course. I turned back to the letter. It was one I hadn’t seen yet, dated just two days earlier, and written with even lines on clean white typing paper, as if Tim had taken special care with it. Feeling a dozen pairs of eyes on my back, I scanned the letter.
“Dear Laura My Love,” it began. After that I seemed to see only the most private parts, the sentences standing out on the paper as if they were scored in incandescent ink: “We’ll find a way to be together again,” I read. “Nobody or nothing can keep us apart. Don’t you worry.” And, “Next time I swear I will hold you and hold you and never let you go. I can’t give you up, not that easy. I love you. Don’t you know that by now? Haven’t I convinced you of that?” On and on it went, each heartfelt sentiment more intimate than the last. “How can you ever think that I’ll stop desiring you? I will never stop desiring you. You are the sexiest girl that I ever did know.”
I could feel the girls waiting for my reaction to this cruel joke. I could see their reflections in the glass in front of me. I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing me buckle, though, not yet. I tried to open the case, fumbling with the latch, but the thing was locked. I spun around.
“Who did this?” I shouted. “Who?” Some of the girls began backing away, some giggling, some horrified. I saw Anne Harding standing at the rear of the crowd, immobile in her neck brace, wearing a pained, tearful expression. I turned back to wrestle again with the case, but I couldn’t get it open, so I hauled back and punched it with the side of my fist. Wedges of glass dropped down inside the wooden case; a large piece crashed to the floor. Someone screamed. I jammed my hand in and grabbed the letter. By now it had become like a hurricane in my ears and eyes and I couldn’t hear or see anything clearly. People were jostling, someone was still screaming. I looked down and saw red everywhere. I wondered, distractedly, where it had come from. I watched it spread across my white blouse; I felt it gumming up the floor beneath my penny loafers. Red rosettes blossomed on the letter I held in my hand.
Then Sister Agatha was shaking me: “You will calm down! You will calm right down, miss!”
I protested, shouting back through the noise of the hurricane. “Let me go! I didn’t do anything! It was them! They did this! They did it!”
Sister Agatha tried to snatch the letter from my hand-as if somehow the piece of paper was the problem. “You give me that.”
“No!” I cried, and grappled with Sister Agatha over the letter, trying to keep it from her, until I did something you should never do to a nun: I hit her. I punched her as hard as I could in the chest and she fell back against the wall. In the next instant, a swarm of hands were on me, dragging me down the hall to the nurse’s station.
I suppose by then I was hysterical. But anyone with any sliver of compassion could understand why. The nurse, Ms. Palmer, closed the door and yanked shut the curtains over the corridor windows of the nurse’s station. Nuns crowded around, trying to stanch the blood, while Ms. Palmer gave me an injection, “To calm you,” she said—as if I were a lunatic in an insane asylum instead of just a hurt, humiliated schoolgirl.
Whatever she gave me worked fast, because soon I was groggy and indifferent to everything. People came and went, class bells rang, phone calls were made. Every time the door opened, a different girl stuck her head in, each face a queer mix of fascination, horror, and pity. “What’re you looking at?” I might’ve asked, but I didn’t have the energy or care to speak.
I was shuffled out of the school and into the back of a car. A minute later, I was surprised to find Sister Mary Margaret, Freshman Rhetoric, sitting beside me and holding the bandage to my wrist. Still more surprising, she was stroking my hair and saying, “There, there. It’s okay. You’ll be fine.”
At Baton Rouge General I got six stitches on my left wrist and a shot for tetanus while Sister Mary Margaret held my hand through the entire cloudy, painful operation. I was lying on top of a bed in the recovery room when my parents at last rushed in—my mother blubbery with worry, my father looking faintly ridiculous with stray pieces of straw hanging from the shoulder of his work shirt. Sister Mary Margaret narrated the gentlest possible interpretation of events for them: There had been some accident at the school bulletin board, she said. Nothing too serious—a cut on the wrist, probably two more stitches than were necessary, but better to be on the safe side. Of course, it was difficult being a new student and all, but really, Laura was fine, your daughter was just fine. What she needed now, the good nun said, was rest and sympathy.
You might imagine the gratitude I felt for Sister Mary Margaret. Up until that day I had known her only as a pale older nun who seemed unnaturally preoccupied with grammar; she smelled musty, like a library, and she rustled when she walked, like her very insides were made of parchment. In little more than an hour, though, she had become my new best ally in the world, and a happy disproof to my suspicion that all nuns below their habits were really witches at heart.
The good nun saw me as far as the school dormitory, where mean Sister Hagatha-Agatha took charge again. She and my mother settled me into my room, where I was ordered to stay for two days of bed rest. I mustn’t leave the building, I couldn’t go to class, and I couldn’t have any visitors. Suspended, in other words.
After they’d gone, Melissa looked at me from her bed on the other side of the room. She raised one eyebrow and asked, with something like admiration in her voice, “Wow, what’d you do, cut yourself?”
“Leave me alone.”
“Jeez. Only asking.”
In the principal’s office, meantime, my parents conferred with Principal Evelyn and Sister Agatha. I didn’t know then what they were plotting for me; it was only later that I was able to piece together what went on in that meeting. The nuns must have shown my parents the offending letter. My mother, taken in by their severe uniforms and the crosses on the wall, would have broken down and confessed to them the whole ugly truth of why they had brought me to Sacred Heart in the first place: it was on account of that very same pervert boy who had written that very same pervert letter. It was his fault, she said. He had corrupted their daughter and led her to all this, all this … perversion. Oh god! What could be done?
To my mother’s relief, the nuns knew what to do. They’d had experience in such things. They handed her tissues and, while my father sat by awkwardly, said that the wisest solution would be to confiscate any more of the dangerous evil obscene letters that arrived from the boy. (“Yes. Yes, you’re right,” I imagine my mother saying, nodding and dabbing her eyes.) The nuns would watch over me at school. And at home during the summer, I should be kept away from the boy and encouraged to take up other activities—softball, say, or sewing. (“Yes, yes, of course, that’s what we’ll do.” “We’ll do it!” my father seconded.) Then, when I returned for the fall semester, I would be fully ready to concentrate on my studies. I’d be encouraged to mix with the other girls, join some clubs. That’s what I needed. (“Yes, that’s what she needs.”) They’d seen worse cases, and more often than not, with gentle but firm guidance, the poor lost lamb was brought back into the fold. My mother needn’t worry. They’d look after me. They knew what was best. (“Oh, thank you. Thank you so much.”)
Oh cruel kindness.
Oh mean charity.
Oh sweet free love.
I still have it, by the way, the scar on the inside of my left wrist. I remember you asked me about it once when you were little. You were sitting in my lap and I was brushing your hair on the back porch one afternoon when you took my hand and ran your finger over the mark. I told you then pretty much the same story that Sister Mary Margaret told my parents at the hospital that day: an accident involving the bulletin board at school, nothing serious, two more stitches than necessary.
Well. Now you know. Today it’s pale, almost invisible. But as I’m writing this to you I can turn my wrist up and still see it there, a jagged little memento of my first year at Sacred Heart, and a presage of scars yet to come. But more important than that, it helps to remind me now, Liz, as I wait for you here, of just how hard it is to be your age.