Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,15

lock the door for the rest of your teenage life. You think it’s hard being a fifteen-year-old? Just wait until you’re the mother of a fifteen-year-old. Honestly, I don’t know whether I’ll shout at you or hug you when you get back. Probably both.

Okay, I’m going to stop ranting now and make carrot cake. I know it’s your favorite, or at least used to be. I’ve got the TV on in the next room so I can listen to it while I bake. No special bulletins about runaway teenage girls yet. Just the usual dismal reports from Iraq—boys with guns, women in black head coverings crying and shaking their fists at the air.

Those poor women, losing their homes and husbands, their sons and daughters. Mothers all over the world must look at those women and say: I pray to God I’ll never have to know that kind of pain.

Have you ever read The Scarlet Letter? Do they assign that book in high school anymore? Or is it on some kind of ridiculous banned books list now?

I remembered it while I was shredding carrots. In 1970 the book was on our summer reading list for SHA sophomores. I was back at home in Zachary. My parents still wouldn’t let me see Tim, even though he lived just eight miles down the road from us. We were in the same town and yet we might have been stranded on opposite sides of the world. Keeping us apart all this time was worse than unjust: it was cruel. I was fuming over this one night the first week home from school when I pulled out The Scarlet Letter from a pile on my desk. Summer reading wasn’t due for another three months, but I was so bored and lonely and angry that I dropped down on my bed and began turning pages. And as I kept turning pages, and as my parents creaked around in the front parlor, I got drawn in by the story.

I was amazed. Hester Prynne: she was me! And this Nathaniel Hawthorne, how’d he get to know so much about women? The style was maddeningly long-winded, but the story was so true to life I could hardly believe it had been written over a hundred years ago. I kept turning to the front of the book to check the date.

The cruel New England Puritans were perfect stand-ins for my parents, of course. And poor, brave Hester Prynne, standing up on that scaffold with her baby in her arms and that horrible red letter stuck on her chest—a charity case if I ever saw one. As she was jeered at by the crowd, then scolded by the mean town elders sitting in their balcony, and then banished to a shack at the edge of the village, I couldn’t help but think of Tim’s letter stuck up on the bulletin board, and of my classmates laughing at me, and of the nuns sending me to my dorm room for a two-day suspension. And yet, even standing on the scaffolding in front of the whole town, Hester managed to hold her head up and look them all in the eye. How did she do that? That’s what I wanted to know. How in the world did she get through all that with her pride intact? And if Hester Prynne could do it, I thought, well then, maybe there was hope for me.

Our dog, Tick, barked in the front yard. The windows all around the house stood open, letting in the night air. I heard my father get up and open the front door to scold the dog. “Shush! Shush up!” My mother said something about armadillos. “Crazy mutt,” my father said, coming back into the parlor.

Then something clicked against the wall just outside my window. I jerked up in bed, startled. The curtains were parted halfway, the night black and motionless beyond the mosquito screen. I sat listening with the book in my lap. Then again, click. Our house had a tendency to creak at night, but nothing like this. Then another click, this one sounding purposeful and directed. I crawled across the bed and peered out the curtains.

Squatting in the shadow of a magnolia tree, just at the edge of the light from my window, was Tim. He held Tick, the dog furiously wagging his tail. I was so happy to see him that a shout escaped my lips. Tick yapped, and Tim signaled for me to be quiet as he