Adelaide Piper (15 page)

On the drive down the mountains, we listened to training cassettes of Bizway gems who had built lucrative businesses by signing up folks underneath them who purchased products. At one point Daddy pounded the steering wheel and said, “Now, doesn't this excite you, Adelaide?”

Excite me?
I thought.
Winning the Nobel Prize in poetry wouldn't excite me at this point.
I was all but numb to the core.

As Daddy talked about the plan and how he wanted to make a run for it, wanted to become a diamond and collect a $12,000 paycheck every month (not to mention the speaking fees), I tuned out and wondered how I could avoid revealing to Mama and Juliabelle what had happened to me. They would be the two to sense that something was wrong, so I'd have to be a heck of an actress to convince them otherwise.

When we pulled into the driveway of my white clapboard house that afternoon, I was struck with the thick, moist air and the syrupy scent of jasmine that was in full bloom along the sides of the house and the front porch. Lou jumped up from the rocking chair and ran out to the car barefoot, her face lit up like a jack-o'-lantern.

“Adelaide!”

She ran up to the passenger side and put her hands on the window before she jumped up and down.

“She's here!” she shouted to the house, and in seconds Mama and Dizzy were running down the porch, clapping and smiling and saying, “Welcome home!”

When I got out of the car, they crowded around me, even Dizzy, and embraced me. They smelled like perfume and tomatoes and cigarettes and pluff mud, and it was all I could do to bite my lip and try not to fall apart in front of them.

Daddy gave everyone a job in unpacking the car, so I was relieved that I didn't have to look anyone in the eye too long.

It was Juliabelle who took notice of me a few minutes later. She caught my eye that afternoon as she was packing up Papa Great to move him out to Pawleys Island for the summer while Mae Mae and Mama went debbing with me. I was hauling two pillowcases of dirty clothes when I spotted her running across my grandparents' front garden and over to mine to greet me. She had a Pyrex bowl full of pickled creek shrimp that she'd made for me.

“Adelaide!” she said. “Look at you, child!”

She hugged me, dirty clothes and all, rocking me back and forth in her skinny arms. I could feel her jaw working her bubble gum, and the sweet smell of it reminded me of all that was good about my home life.

I thought about the St. Christopher medal and the prayers she'd offered for me daily, and I vowed I would do all in my power to keep the awful secret of my defilement from her.

Then she cupped her pink palms around my flabby cheeks and took a look into my eyes. At first, I turned away toward Mama's hydrangea blooms, but she wouldn't let me loose. Then I glanced back at her and tried to make my face say, “Nothing. Nothing is wrong here.”

She stepped back and put a clenched fist over her mouth and blinked hard. It was the same thing I'd seen her do the summer she spotted a gator that had drifted out of the river and into the surf at Pawleys Island. And she had done it once when Papa Great told Mae Mae to fire the gardener who had shown up late.

“Adelaide,” she said through her lips, “you come talk to me when you can.”

I shook my head as though I hadn't the faintest idea of what she was talking about and gulped back the tears. I had never been so relieved to see the round shadow of Papa Great as it surfaced on the driveway.

I turned away from her to greet him.

“Well, the college girl's home,” he said, pinching his nostrils together before snorting once for good measure.

He patted my back, then looked me up and down and said, “Well, gotta lose that weight before the debutante ball. Adelaide Rutledge Graydon had a slim figure, you know?”

I didn't know whether to slap him or hug him for changing the subject.

“Hope the year treated you right,” he said; then he looked over to the Cadillac that was packed to the brim with Co-Colas and bright linen blazers and fishing rods and buckets.

“'Bout ready to head on?” he said to Juliabelle.

“Yes, sir,” she said as he started back toward the car.

“Come visit us when you get a break from all the parties, Adelaide,” he said.

Juliabelle put her long fingers back on my chin. “I'll give you a few days. But then I 'spect you to come out to the island and talk.”

I looked beyond her at the two fingers of smog billowing out of the paper mill and then down at the cracks in the driveway where the spider grass was pushing through the bricks and oyster shells. Papa Great was starting the engine, and she reached to the top of the station wagon where she'd rested the bowl of shrimp, handed it to me, and walked back across the garden.

Before I could stop them, tears were streaming down my face, but Daddy was so busy telling Mama about the Bizway meeting that Lou was the only one to notice me.

“A-Ad?” she said. “What's wrong?” She looked up at me with three pronounced worry lines across her shining forehead.

“Just missed you is all,” I said. Then I handed her a pillowcase of laundry. “Want to help me wash clothes?”

I didn't look back at the Cadillac as it drove out of the historic district and toward the bridge. But I could imagine Juliabelle in the backseat by the fishing tackle, her big dark eyes bearing down on me.

When I walked into the house, Daddy was throwing one of Mama's ripe tomatoes against the wall in the kitchen. It hit the bright striped wallpaper by the pantry and slid down the blue and yellow lines, landing right at Mama's feet.

“You're a
fool
to jeopardize your job, Zane Piper,” Mama was whispering harshly to him. “When he finds out, then you tell me where we'll be!”

They both looked up at me as I tried to make myself scarce and head toward the stairwell.

“Adelaide,” Mama called to me in a sweet, strained voice, “I'll have your lunch ready in just a minute, darlin'.”

It helped to be home for the summer. There were times when I could forget for whole minutes about what happened with Devon Hunt on the campus hillside, but the anxiety never left me completely. I could get lost watching the dust dance in the morning sun that poured through my bedroom window or Mama tending to her tomato vines, but when someone tapped on my door with a breakfast invitation, dread seized me once again. It ran up my spine and made every muscle in my back tighten.

When I looked out into the kudzu-covered field that met my backyard and ate everything but the marsh, I remembered learning in a high-school botany class that the unyielding vine grows a foot each day during the summer months and sixty feet each year, snuffing the life out of trees that need sunlight and overtaking any abandoned vehicle or building in its path. I knew I was a meager tree in the center of that field, and I had no way of stopping the vine of fear from darkening my days.

Ruthie and I were glad to have left that dank dorm room with all its bad memories and move on to our debutante summers. Ruthie would be receiving tea and chicken salad at her own “coming out” luncheons at the Country Club of North Carolina, while Jif and I did the same in the handful of once-grand homes that lined Third Avenue in downtown Williamstown.

In a sense, our transition into womanhood (which was what the debutante season was supposed to be about) was a thick piece of iced pound cake. There was a certain charade about this rite of passage passed down from our English ancestors, but we had it easy compared to girls in other cultures or other time periods. We didn't have to bind our feet like a Chinese girl in the thirteenth century or mutilate our bodies like the young women in the northern and western parts of Africa do even today. Instead, we just learned to ballroom dance, socialize, eat mayonnaise-laden chicken salad at the country club, and write warm and witty thank-you notes on monogrammed stationery.

To the South of the 1990s, this was what prepared you for becoming a grown lady in good standing. And this summer was all about social engagements of every sort, where we were to gain confidence in each facet of Southern etiquette—to include table manners and small talk with little old ladies who were most proud to have an opportunity to put their fine china and silver to use. It was a tradition that had been passed down since the plantation days, and, like the Confederacy, it would not be forgotten.

The Williamstown summer debutante season was our formal introduction to society, and it concluded with a ball the following Christmas, where we would first lift our floor-length white gowns with the tips of our long kid gloves to curtsy in front of our parents and grandparents and then march up and down the corridors of the Magnolia Club as if to say, “Here is the next generation of well-bred Southern ladies! We're of age, so have at us!”

“How was your first year at Nathaniel Buxton?” Mrs. Zapes asked me during the first luncheon of the season.

“It was good,” I flat-out lied. I knew it just wouldn't do to say, “Horrible. The classes were monotonous, the students took no interest in me, and to top it all off, I was raped by my one and only date a few weeks before the year concluded. By July, I'll know for sure if I've lost my scholarship, so chew on that with your chicken salad and fruit tarts, Mrs. Zapes!”

I caught my eye in the gilded mirror of the musty drawing room. I felt ridiculous in the paper-white dress and patent-leather flats that Mama insisted I wear. I looked like a doily or a handkerchief in one of Mrs. Zapes's beaded purses.

“That's a fine institution,” the widowed Mrs. Kitteridge chimed in. “My husband, Padgett, was proud to call NBU his alma mater, and I can still remember my first dance with him there at the Heritage Ball beneath the starry Virginia sky. What a romantic evening that was!”

“But did you all hear the awful news about the Carpenter boy who was in school up there?” Miss Pringle crooned. She was the old maid of the town and loved to talk about other people's business, particularly their falls from grace. “Juanita, their next-door neighbor, says his mama has not taken a single visitor. Says she's utterly inconsolable, bless her heart.”

“Yes,” Jif jumped in to save me from the conversation. “That was really awful, Miss Pringle. It looks like Peter made a very poor judgment call that will cost him dearly. But the NBU administration has taken great strides to enforce fraternity hazing rules so that nothing like that will ever happen again.” And then to Mrs. Kitteridge, “They still have the Heritage Ball and an outdoor dance floor on the front quad like always. My boyfriend, Ned, and I danced barefoot there into the early hours of the morning just a few months ago. You're right; it was truly romantic.”

Jif. Ugh. She was charming, and everyone admired her. She was dressed to the nines in a blue linen pantsuit and strappy sandals that snaked their way up her ankles, and she brought to the deb parties a kind of style and freshness that I envied.
How could she have come out of her freshman year at NBU unscathed?
I wondered. Just three doors away on the same floor of the Tully dormitory, and we were in completely different places.

Jif 's mama, Marny Ferguson, looked like a million bucks too. She had grown up in the mill village and had made her way out by becoming a beauty queen. First Miss Williamstown, then Miss South Carolina, but she downplayed this, as beauty queens weren't necessarily debutante material—too made-up and flashy for a well-bred gal. But Marny's life mission was to show the Mrs. Zapeses of the world that she did know the difference and was certainly able to ascend to the height of the social order of Williamstown.

She'd had the good sense to marry up with a local boy, Teddy Ferguson, while he was in medical school in Charleston. She persuaded him to switch his focus from pediatrics to plastic surgery, and he was given credit for improving the looks of every well-off woman in a sixty-mile radius of Williamstown. Thin as a rail and enjoying the benefits of her own first face-lift, she was sitting in the corner with a bird-sized plate of chicken salad, her tan Ferragamo shoes catching the sunlight.

Marny Ferguson was proud, it was easy to see, of the way NBU had sharpened Jif 's sense of wit and style. She encouraged her to keep her freshman weight off by taking her to an aerobics class once a day, and she introduced her to the meal-replacement bars and shakes that were selling at the new health-food store outside Columbia. She had even bought Jif a snug and gorgeous designer deb dress from a pricey Atlanta boutique to entice her into keeping her weight down.

Mrs. Kitteridge patted her wrinkled lips with a monogrammed napkin and began again. “Of course, they weren't admitting girls at the time my Padgett was there.”

“This conversation is dying a slow death,” my eyes said to Jif from across the drawing room.

“No, that didn't happen until 1982,” said Jif, flicking a fruit fly off her tart before sighing and giving me an “I tried” look.

I scanned the room to see what the other debs were up to. What an odd assortment of girls we were. Poor Winkie Pride was caught between a conversation with her mother and the mayor's wife, Flo Kuhn. Winkie had quite a flamboyant name for such a mouse of a young lady. She had been homeschooled all of her life and was still living with her folks and commuting to the USC satellite campus at Myrtle Beach. Whenever I spoke with her, she emitted a squeaky, nervous laugh, and she had a significantly delayed response to any question or comment I posed. It was downright
work
to carry on a conversation with her, and the worst part was that Winkie seemed to be all too aware of her verbal shortcomings. She had warm green eyes that pleaded, “Please don't leave me here with no one to talk to,” but she had no idea how to help herself.

Now I could tell that Winkie was relieved to have caught the attention of Mrs. Zapes's house cat, as this somehow excused her from conversing with anyone. She petted him the rest of the luncheon and whispered who knew what into his fuzzy ears.