Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,38
told him I need to finish before you get home. He looked at me oddly, started to say something, but then left. I didn’t ask what he meant to say; I don’t need to know. The writing gives me comfort. Isn’t that enough? This, I tell myself, is at least one thing I can do now to make up for whatever wrongs I’ve done.
Because the question that still haunts me most, daughter, is why? Why did you run? Has your life here been that unbearable? Did that one slap sting that much? Or is it something else, something that troubles you more than I’ll ever imagine? Because I know, you see, how much a daughter can hide from a mother. I’ve heard you crying behind your bedroom door, and I’ve hated myself for not having compassion enough even to knock, telling myself that your problems are your own making, and that the best thing I can do for you is to let you live and learn, that I should respect your privacy like you demand I should…. I’ve listened, and I’ve walked away until I couldn’t hear you crying anymore. That, Liz, is why I keep writing this letter.
Here comes the mower again, back around behind the house. My hand’s tired, my energy is flagging, and I’m not especially looking forward to this next part. But there are things you still don’t know yet, and I promised I would tell everything.
No doubt you’ve heard about the sexual revolution of my generation—women’s liberation, the pill, ban the bra, all that. How I wish I’d been a part of it. But at Sacred Heart Academy we may as well have been living in the nineteenth century. Our sexual education, what little there was of it, was all tangled up with our religious education. It was a forced, unhappy marriage.
Sister Hagatha-Agatha taught both “Church History and Doctrine” and “Health and Our Bodies.” Being old, she often confounded the two, but this hardly mattered, since she preached the same lessons no matter what the class. We learned the difference between purgatory and limbo, and what is a venial sin and what is a mortal sin, and what are the respective punishments for these two categories of sin. She taught us the nine orders of angels and brought in pictures of each type so that, presumably, we would know who we were talking to if we ever got to heaven.
On rainy days, in an odd, low pious voice that bordered on the creepy, Hagatha-Agatha told us stories of all the most exotic saints and gruesome martyrs. I’m sure no student of hers will ever forget Saint Catherine of Siena, Virgin—she who consecrated her virginity to God while still a child, and later, to escape marriage, cut off all her hair, “beautiful golden-brown hair that reached down to her waist,” Hagatha-Agatha told us. “Cut it all off!” Thereafter, for her entire adult life she scourged herself three times daily with chains, and wore an iron-spiked girdle underneath her smock. (“Just try to imagine that, girls. Sharp spikes, sharp like needles, piercing the skin above your ribs. Every time you breathe they dig deeper.”) Saint Catherine of Siena, Virgin, lived only on boiled herbs and water, and fasted from Ash Wednesday until Ascension Day, accepting as her only sustenance for the entire forty days nothing but the blessed Eucharist. She humbly served the poor and afflicted, and once (Why, oh why, did you have to tell us this, Sister Agatha?) drank cupfuls of cancerous puss from a sick old woman whose only thank-you was to hurl more vile abuse at the saint. In a vision near the end of her life, God presented Catherine with two crowns, one of gold and the other of thorns, and ordered her to choose. Saint Catherine of Siena, Virgin, answered that her only solace was in pain and suffering, and eagerly seized the crown of thorns and pressed it upon her head.
This, Liz, was the tenor of our sexual-religious education at Sacred Heart. Little surprise that girls came away feeling mighty confused, if not outright repulsed, by sex. I think it also helps to explain what happened when I returned to Sacred Heart for my senior year.
With no one to confide in at home, I suffered miserably all summer over my abandonment by Chip Benton, and now he had gone, left for college in New Orleans without even returning my phone calls. Back at school the first week, I made the