Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,48

late, Liz. Your father won’t go to bed. I told him I’d wait up, he didn’t need to, but he says he’s not sleepy. He found an eyeglass repair kit, and now he’s repairing all the eyeglasses and sunglasses he can find in the house. It looks like we’ll be waiting this out together. He’s got the TV on again in the living room, but it’s just news about the war, that interminable, mad war.

I have to imagine the best for you, Liz. You’re not lugging a suitcase from a bus station to a tattoo parlor. You’re not lying unconscious in your black clothes on an empty beach somewhere. You’re out having fun with friends, laughing and talking in an all-night diner. Or maybe you’re already safe and warm in bed—a friend’s bed, or even a lover’s. Or maybe you miss your own bed, and even now you’re turning the car toward home, coming back to us.

I could stop this letter here—god knows it’s long enough. But I’m afraid if I stop now it’ll make the story of my adolescence sound like a tragedy, and I don’t want to leave you with that impression. There are happier things to tell if I can write a little longer.

Could all our lives be that simple, I wonder? They’re only tragedy or comedy depending on where we end them? Here’s the rest, Elizabeth, the happy ending.

The first week back of my last semester at Sacred Heart Academy, during an afternoon PE class, my tattoo became public knowledge.

We’d been running basketball relays in the gym when the tattoo began to bleed. I didn’t notice it until we were already in the locker room and I was removing my gym shorts and saw red. The bandage had worked loose, and when it came off, so did the scab, leaving an ugly black scar, like someone had carved up my skin with the point of a steak knife. Blood was dripping down my leg. Obviously this was not your usual menstrual mishap. Girls gasped, the coach was called, and as I was cursing and shouting for paper towels and trying to clean up the mess with my underwear, Sister Agatha stepped into the locker room.

You have to understand, Liz, that in the 1970s normal people like me just didn’t get tattoos. Today I know they’re almost commonplace; you can hardly go to the shopping mall without seeing dozens of teenage boys and girls flaunting them. Even celebrities wear tattoos nowadays, giving them an air of glamour. But back then, tattoos were reserved for people of only the lowest, most disreputable classes, like prisoners, or prostitutes, or sideshow freaks. They signaled thuggery and vice. So for a girl at a Catholic school to have one was … well, it was unheard of. It was outrageous.

For the second time during my stay at SHA, I was dragged by Hagatha-Agatha to the nurse’s station. The principal was called. My parents were called. Sister Evelyn couldn’t bring herself to use the word tattoo over the phone. “It’s … something … your daughter did … horrible …” she stammered. “You should come immediately.”

Nurse Palmer was furious. “I can’t understand it. Why you, a young woman, would knowingly inflict this kind of damage to your skin, your own skin! Not to mention the health risks involved …” She painted the wound with Mercurochrome and rebandaged it. “Were you drunk?” she asked, and then gave me a tetanus shot, jabbing me with the needle much harder, I thought, than was necessary.

When my parents arrived from Zachary the bandage had to be removed again so they could see. Nuns bent around taking turns to look and recoil in horror. My parents were shocked, of course, but more than that, they were ashamed. They stood as far back from me as the small room allowed, as if they were already taking steps to disown me. When we all moved from the nurse’s station to the principal’s office, they walked well ahead of me, my mother with her arms folded grimly over her coat, my father close by her side, touching her elbow. “Back to class! Back to class!” Sister Evelyn shouted at the girls who had gathered in the front hall. They gawked as I passed, the girl with the tattoo. I heard my name repeated, passed down from the upperclassmen to the newer girls: “Jenkins … Zachary … trouble.”

I sat on a chair outside the principal’s office while my parents conferred inside with Sisters