Letter to My Daughter (14 page)

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 Evelyn and Agatha. Two Beta Club girls stared at me, entranced, as they slowly sorted mail into teachers’ pigeonholes. When Sister Mary Margaret arrived, she shooed them away.

“Laura—” she said, stopping in front of me. The oversized wooden cross swayed against her tunic as she took a moment to collect herself. “First of all, is this true?” I nodded. “And what’s written there, is that … Browning?”

“He died,” I explained. “In Vietnam. Three weeks ago, just before he was supposed to come home.”

She brought a hand to her mouth. “Oh dear. Oh dear, you poor child. I’m so sorry.”

“There was a funeral, in Zachary. And I didn’t … You know I didn’t plan to do this, Sister.”

“No …”

“It was something … I had to do. For him. It’s for him.”

She nodded slowly, as if forcing herself to understand. “Yes.”

“I didn’t have a choice. This is what I had to do. To remind me … so I never forget … how much he loved me.” I looked away. It seemed hopeless. “They won’t understand.”

Sister Mary Margaret was quiet, as if thinking things through. After a moment she sighed and said, as much to herself as to me, “No. No, I don’t suppose they will.” I saw her glance anxiously at Sister Evelyn’s office. Then she bent down and gave me a hug. “Are you all right here?”

“I’m okay.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said and, straightening her back, went in to join the others.

Sister Mary Margaret tried her best for me that day, I’m sure, but it was an impossible defense. She argued that, technically, I had done nothing wrong; there was no prohibition against tattoos in the school handbook. “There’s no rule against murderers, either, but we don’t allow them in the school,” answered Sister Agatha. Sacred Heart Academy, she reminded everyone, didn’t even allow girls to wear earrings to school.

Trying to deflect some of the blame onto herself, Sister M&M then confessed her role in the affair. She told how she was the one who had secretly passed letters from the boy in Vietnam, willfully violating the principal’s own orders, and thus leading the poor girl down the confused path that brought her to this desperate, grief-stricken end….

The good nun, I found out later, would pay for this admission. But for now, she succeeded only in delaying my immediate expulsion from the school. I was put on disciplinary probation until the academic staff council could meet and decide my fate. That very afternoon, I was sent home with my parents to Zachary, “so as not to disturb the other girls.”

It wasn’t a happy return home, as you can imagine. I kept to my bedroom, rereading Tim’s letters. My parents again wondered where they had gone wrong. At dinner, passing the potatoes and string beans, they tried not to look directly at me, the tattooed lady sitting at their table. Sister M&M phoned occasionally regarding the status of my case; the academic staff council wouldn’t meet until Friday afternoon, but in the meantime she was trying to lobby the other teachers on my behalf. It didn’t look promising. I had been suspended once before. And as a work-study student, admitted only through the charity of the nuns, I was already practically provisional. It wasn’t like I was the daughter of an important alumna, a legacy student; SHA could let me go without much fuss.

For myself, the tragedy wasn’t so much in the prospect of losing my diploma from SHA as it was in losing my chance to enter LSU. I had been awarded a small scholarship in the Journalism Department, and being expelled from high school would certainly mean forfeiting that. The university might not even accept me at all after this. I saw myself becoming the tattooed outcast everyone already thought I was, slinking around dark alleyways, thin and mean and full of sin.

You remember the charity cases, Liz. I can’t credit myself for the actions they took. When I first arrived at SHA, I had clung to them only as castaways in a life raft must cling to one another. It was instinctual, necessary—not born of any special generosity or sacrifice on my part. That’s why what they did for me seemed that much more surprising and, in retrospect, that much more valorous.

The first was Soo Chee Chong. She slipped away from campus after her last class one day midweek and found her way downtown. It must have been far more difficult for her to enter the shop than it had been for me. I had no choice; Soo Chee did. I can imagine what she must have been feeling, considering all that was at stake: her parents’ reputations, their standing in the local Chinese community, her own position as the first of her family to be educated in America. She would’ve had plenty of doubts waiting in that dingy front room, seeing the biker and girlie magazines on the coffee table. Meeting Greg, she thrust the piece of notebook paper into his hand. Greg was cautious—he made sure she knew what she was doing. “Yes. Of course, I know. Let’s begin,” Soo Chee said, hopping up onto the cot. The poster of the Buddha put her strangely at ease as Greg talked her through the painful procedure. When she arrived at school the following day, she proudly showed everyone what she’d done: there, high on her left breast, was her name spelled out in Chinese characters—Soo Chee Chong, the beautiful sound of jade.

Anne Harding, who’d had her brace removed that year, and who was rumored to be a candidate for class valedictorian, was the second to go. Was it easier for her, after Soo Chee had gone first? I doubt it. I see her marching through the front door of the tattoo parlor, stoic and brave, to put her request to Greg. “Mark me here,” she might’ve said, jabbing her finger low at the back of her neck where her skin had been covered up for three years by the padding of her brace. In an elegant Parisian art deco script entwined with green vines and small red buds, hers read, “It made me stronger.”

The next was Christy Lee. She skipped morning classes the following day, and when she returned to campus after lunch she was wearing a permanent chain around her upper left arm. That was all, no lettering. At the outside of her arm, where you could easily see it, the chain was broken and the two ends dangled free.

The nuns tried to send the girls home, but they refused to go, and instead brought three chairs from the library, placed them deliberately on the front lawn of the school near one of the oak trees, and sat. The girls’ parents were summoned, and there were threats and tears and raised voices. Still, the girls wouldn’t budge. Soo Chee’s mother, a small, elegantly dressed woman, tried to drag Soo Chee from her chair, tilting it sideways onto two legs, but Christy Lee grabbed hold of Soo and wouldn’t let go. The parents retreated to the principal’s office to try and figure out what to do next. The girls, settling in, took out their books and notebooks and began studying for an upcoming trigonometry test and drafting letters to the editors of the local school newspapers.

When a Cathedral High School photographer, the one who’d taken Chip’s place, came by at noon to take pictures, Sister Evelyn tried to block his entry to campus. But he put up a fight, shouting about the freedom of the press, until the classes at the front of the building were disrupted; the principal decided it would be less trouble to let him take his photos. Attracted by the disturbance, other girls wandered out between bells to chat with those on the lawn; some brought their lunches with them, sat, and stayed. In the afternoon, boys driving home from CHS slowed their cars on the road in front to see what was going on. They honked their horns and shouted from their windows at the girls milling on the lawn; the girls shouted and waved back.

You couldn’t call it a protest exactly, Anne Harding said, keeping me posted by phone. But clearly the nuns were getting nervous. Sister Evelyn seemed to be trying to wait them out, hoping the trouble would blow over if she just ignored them. But instead of blowing over, it grew.

Before the week’s end, four more girls made their way downtown. A frizzy-haired girl named Lisa, who idolized Janis Joplin, got a rose on her right ankle. Another got a small, discreet dove on her hip. The third girl got a cross with a crown of thorns, dripping blood, on her shoulder blade. When they arrived at campus, wearing their bandaged tattoos like badges of honor, these girls didn’t even bother going to their homeroom classes, but went straight to the front lawn to join the charity cases, who’d since equipped themselves with blankets and thermoses of cocoa. Most surprising of all was when Traci Broussard, cheerleader and CHS-SHA homecoming queen, who we’d always considered the luckiest and most enviable girl in our class, arrived Friday morning with her own tattoo, a heart broken in two under a banner that said
“Les blessures d’amour durent pour toujours
”—love’s wounds last forever. She solemnly took her place in the circle with the charity cases, sitting knee-to-knee with them in her stadium coat, and quietly wept for much of the day, no one knew why.

Christy Lee declared it a sit-in and said they wouldn’t return to classes until the academic staff council allowed me back at school. Someone strung up a bed sheet in the oak tree, “Justice for Laura Jenkins!” Word spread, and more girls abandoned their books and pencils and streamed out onto the lawn, effectively canceling classes for the rest of the day. Anxious mothers of freshmen arrived by car to take their daughters home; they’d seen such things on TV and they never ended well. Boys from CHS began trickling over, and by Friday afternoon the crowd had grown to several dozen. A couple of boys with especially long hair strummed guitars and sang protest songs as they imagined the hippies did. They got up chants, girls made speeches, and the senior class president wrote a poem to commemorate the occasion, called “The Winter of Our Discontent.” Anne Harding told me that Sister Mary Margaret had been spotted at the window of her second-story classroom, watching the goings-on with a faint but unmistakable smile on her face. It was a wholly peaceful demonstration, marred only when a boy named Randy, who people said was high on marijuana, fell from a tree and broke his wrist. The sixties had come at last to Sacred Heart Academy.