Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,20

of the summer my scrapbook was already bulging with pressed flowers, newspaper clippings, movie ticket stubs, Life Saver wrappers. I wanted to share every detail of my life with him, but there wasn’t room for every detail.

I puzzled over this while brushing my teeth or fixing my hair in the morning. If you had to choose the moments that best represented your life, what would they be? The small actions that pass almost without our noticing them, yet that we spend most of our time doing: aren’t these in fact the real stuff of our lives? Putting on your shoes, eating breakfast, singing songs to yourself, opening and closing doors, racing the dog to the end of the driveway to bring in the newspaper …

You could fill all the scrapbooks in the world. The most mundane details of life are not mundane if they’re done with someone else in mind. When you’re in love, everything’s important.

While I wasn’t happy to be returning to Sacred Heart for the start of the new school year, I at least found consolation in the fact that I wasn’t a freshman anymore. I’d gotten through the worst of it, I figured. I knew which girls to trust, which ones to avoid, and how to please the nuns from time to time with a raised hand and an intelligent-sounding question.

The letters from Tim, though, abruptly stopped coming as soon as I returned to school. I didn’t understand it. He had promised to keep writing; he had the school address so there shouldn’t have been any problem. After four weeks into the start of the semester with still no word, I became worried for him. What if he had been injured in his training? Or what if he had somehow already shipped off to Vietnam—was even now flying over a jungle and looking down on green palms and thatched huts? Or, worse—and I could hardly bear to let myself think this—what if he was losing interest in me? Already? So soon?

I was fretting over these possibilities one Friday afternoon during study hour when Sister Mary Margaret entered the library. Half looking down at my textbook, half gazing out a window to the side lawn, I barely noticed her dark figure gliding past. She disappeared among the stacks, and two other girls at the far end of the room bent their heads together again in private conversation. I turned back to the green grass and bushes outside—green like they might have had in Vietnam—and resumed thinking about Tim, wondering where he was, hoping he was all right.

After some time there was a soft rustle at my side. I looked up, surprised to find Sister Mary Margaret there.

“Laura,” she whispered.

“Sister Mary Margaret,” I said. “Hi.”

“You’re studying?”

“Um … yeah.” I glanced down at my book. “Chemistry.”

“That’s good.” She looked across the room, then back down at me. She wore a plain wooden cross hanging at the front of her habit. Even though Sister Mary Margaret was one of the senior nuns at Sacred Heart, fifty or sixty years old at least, the wooden cross made her look, somehow, hippielike.

“Do you know this book?” she asked.

I turned my head to read the cover on the dark gray volume she suddenly presented to me. “What is it?”

“The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” she whispered. “We have both volumes. One and two.”

“Oh. That’s nice.”

“You should have a look,” she said, laying the book down carefully by my elbow. “I think you’ll enjoy it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Be sure to put it back when you’re finished.”

“I will.”

“Volume one. Back there—” She indicated the row from where the book had come.

“Right.”

“Put it back there. Then you can always find it again later when you need to.”

“Thank you, Sister.”

She smiled oddly as she moved off, her habit waving. “Enjoy.”

These nuns, I thought: too much prayer and no sex. They were all a little loony.

I had to go soon to my job in the kitchen. I began to gather my things, but just to please Sister Mary Margaret, I slid the Elizabeth Barrett Browning toward me. The book didn’t look like it got much use at SHA; it was as old and dusty as the sister herself. But then as I picked it up, the pages fell open on a letter. The envelope was addressed from Fort Devens, Massachusetts, to me, care of Sacred Heart Academy.

In an instant I understood: the nuns had been keeping my mail from me. I remembered the incident with the bulletin board