Adelaide Piper (20 page)

What had happened to Dizzy? And why did she want to dress like death?

As I bent down to nudge her, I could smell the marijuana and alcohol, and I wondered where in the world she had been earlier in the evening. I tapped her leg until she arose from her grogginess and shuffled to the kitchen for a glass of water.

“How was the Holy Roller night?” she asked, her gray eyes squinting in the fluorescent kitchen light.

“It was something,” I said.

“I'm too beat to hear about it,” she said, yawning. “You can catch me up tomorrow.”

“You know, you smell like trouble, Diz. You'd better take a shower before Mama and Daddy catch a whiff of you.”

Dizzy rolled her eyes and turned away from me as she shuffled toward the stairs.

“Like they have anything other than Bizway on their minds.”

“If you keep going on like this, you're going to get yourself in a fix,” I warned. I was never a partier like Dizzy, but I knew that trouble could sneak up on you before you could plan an escape, and I didn't want my sister to mess up big-time by making one bad decision or finding herself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“You're preaching already, Adelaide?” Dizzy said midway up the stairs, and before I could think of a good response, I heard the slam and lock of her door.

When I walked back into the kitchen, I noticed for the first time a bouquet of wildflowers and an envelope with my name on it.

Adelaide,

This has been the best summer I can remember. Thank you for spending it with me.

Love,
Randy

10

New Moon

T
he following week, Shannon drove me to Charleston to see her aunt Bernise at Trident Hospital. Before we even chose a magazine article in the waiting room of the women's health center, Bernise called us to her office, where she took my blood and sent me to the bathroom with a little plastic cup that would hold the answer to my future in forty-eight hours.

After Bernise quizzed me on symptoms of which I had none, she said, “Some don't show up for a long while, but let's be optimistic, girls.”

Looking to Shannon, I guessed that Bernise was addressing the greatest of the unspoken diseases: HIV. A college graduate had come to a dorm meeting at NBU once to share the story of how she had contracted it, and it had frightened me, not so much for my own mortality (I had planned to be a virgin until Mr. Right came along), but for Ruthie and Jif, who I suspected were in physical relationships with their beaus.

“You want to tell me about what happened?” Bernise asked me as she labeled little plastic tubes
A. Piper.

I had met Bernise several times before at Shannon's annual family reunions on Lake Summit. She was the one who brought a seven-layer chocolate cake that we looked forward to devouring in our wet bathing suits as we sat on the dock and stuck our toes into the cold black water. Bernise was religious, but single and fun, and she had always been willing to cart us over to the movie theater in Saluda on rainy days when we just had to get out of the house.

“It's too hard to talk about,” I said, and my eyes pricked before I decided that I could not recount the story.

Shannon squeezed my shoulder, and Bernise looked me straight in the face. “There is mending for you, Adelaide. I don't know what happened to you exactly, but I do know that God can mend your heart.”

“You guys are ganging up on me,” I said to both of them. Then, to Bernise, “You're a Jesus freak too?”

“Oh, sure I am,” Bernise said. “Do you think I could work in this place without faith?”

“Okay, okay,” I said, putting my hands up as if to say, “Enough.”

“One thing at a time,” Shannon whispered to Bernise, slowing her down.

“Yeah,” I said. “First let's see if I've got some fatal disease; then we'll go from there.”

Bernise was sweet and hopeful. “Sorry if I push too hard. It runs in our family.” She gave Shannon a wink that made us all chuckle, albeit nervously.

Then she gave Shannon a twenty-dollar bill and told us to get a warm lunch on our way back to Williamstown and not to worry too much.

“Call me after noon on Thursday,” she said; then she patted the top of my hand. “All of the results will be in by then.”

“Let's put it in God's hands,” Shannon said as we scarfed down fried okra and creamed corn at the Lizard's Thicket just off Highway 17.

“Do I have a choice?”

I wondered how God would feel if I started to pray to Him about this after keeping my distance for so long.

“So did Bernise play a role in bringing you to your faith?”

“I suppose she planted some seeds, but it was really that Young Life retreat that made it clear.”

“Right. Where you ‘met Jesus,'” I said and immediately realized it came out more sarcastically than I meant for it to. “That phrase cracks me up, because I see this man in a white robe and sandals charging toward you with his arm outstretched for a firm handshake. You have to admit it sounds hokey.”

Shannon chuckled. “Yeah, I need to work on my lingo. Christian-speak can turn people away. That's one of the things Dale and Darla have been teaching us.”

“What made you decide to do it?”

“A few things, I guess,” Shannon said as she buttered her corn bread. “My father's death, for one.”

I had forgotten about that. Frank, Shannon's stepfather, had been with them since they moved to Williamstown, and Shannon even referred to him as Dad. But Shannon told me once in the deep of night that her real father had been killed in a car accident when she was in kindergarten.

“Frank is great, but it wasn't the same. I wanted to know where my dad was. Then the knee injury sort of pushed me over the edge. I mean, it sounds stupid, but I had put all of my time and effort into that soccer scholarship to Clemson, and so it was a real blow when it didn't happen for me.” She pondered a misshapen piece of fried okra on her fork and added, “But I guess the main thing was the way those guys loved me.”

“The God Squad?” I said, chuckling at my picture of the college cheerleaders with the fuzzy letters “Go, God!” across their polyester chests.

“Yeah,” she admitted. “And they had a kind of life in them that seemed better than anyone else's around. Then when I was at that camp, it just became clear. A man named Danny Powell was talking to us, and it just seemed right. Something, like, nudged me, you know? I still have a ways to go, but it's been the best thing that has ever happened to me. I have peace. I know where my dad is. I don't have to take my identity from a sport. Or from being a part of the Camellia Debutante Club. Or anything else.”

Now, I had to admit that some of the vines of fear had loosened their grip since my trip to Harvest Time. I sensed a kind of hope that just wouldn't go away. It was like I was being courted by Shannon, Charlie Farley, and perhaps God Himself. But why?

It was nice to be pursued. But it was all so out of the blue. And
so
Williamstown.

With only a half hour before Randy was picking me up for a deb shag party, I raced up to my bedroom, locked the door, and got down on my knees.

“Please let me be okay. I don't deserve to even talk to You, much less ask You for Your help, but here I am anyway, doing just that. If You're as merciful as people say You are, then You can understand my position. I'll go meet with Dale and Darla and hear this thing out, but please let those test results be good.”

“Are you getting ready?” Mama called up the stairs to me as I became aware of the many minutes I had been kneeling. My thighs ached, and the carpet left large indentions on my knees as I stood up to say, “Yes, ma'am.”

The deb party was at Mrs. Hartness's house, which was at the tip of the Williamstown Peninsula, facing the harbor, and it was in honor of Harriet. Marguerite hired the Catalinas, a famous beach-music band, and ordered two trucks full of sand from Pawleys Island to be dumped in her backyard so it would feel like we were dancing on the beach.

Harriet was nervous about the whole thing. Her grandmother had sent her to a two-day crash course to learn the dance steps, but she was as clumsy as an ox and utterly frustrated by the whole endeavor.

She didn't know a soul to bring to the coed events, so she'd made friends with the assistant manager at the Blockbuster video store next to the Kmart. He sported a diamond stud earring and a goatee and seemed to get a kick out of having all the socialites stare at him.

Jif and I had been bonding with Harriet over the last few weeks. She was so different. Like a shot of Texas Pete in your hominy. And yet she was earnestly trying to be a part of our world. We'd gone tubing down the Santee and gone to the county fair, and plans were well on the way to take a day trip to Myrtle Beach.

“Why aren't you at some fancy dude ranch this summer?” I had asked her one evening as we sat on her porch eating vegan molasses cookies.

Harriet let out a guffaw and said, “They eat a lot of red meat on those ranches.” And then, “But seriously, this place is charming, and, hey I like to have parties thrown in my honor.”

“Mmm,” Jif said as she stamped on a palmetto bug that was scurrying toward them. “I hadn't looked at it that way.”

“Don't they have debs in Connecticut?” I probed.

“At home, I am a palmetto bug,” Harriet said as Jif kicked the creature into Mrs. Marguerite Hartness's sculpted shrubs. “My mother is, like, brain-dead from her alcohol consumption, and my stepfamily chooses not to acknowledge me—the butt-ugly, freak-show vegan who takes up space in their nearly perfect home. Sometimes I think they actually want me to hide when they bring their friends home.”

I furrowed my brow and looked down at the floorboards.

“Whatever.” She shrugged. “At least I have Marguerite. I mean, she's a small-town snoot, and her house reeks of mothballs, but she thinks I'm the bee's knees. Who can say why, but she always has.”

“Wonder if there's a good vegan diet out there,” Jif pondered as the fireflies began to light up the front yard.

“Don't start,” I said. “The answer to everyone's problems is not in a thinner waistline.”

“Seriously,” Harriet said as she handed us each another tasteless molasses cookie. “I'm built just like my dad, so there is no way of getting rid of this barrel-on-stilts shape.”

Jif pulled out a half-eaten Twix Bar from her pocketbook and said, “If I'm going to be bad, it might as well have some flavor.”

The three of us grinned while Mrs. Hartness called out from the kitchen to offer us some lemonade.

Now, as the sun made its way down, Randy and I made our way onto the sandy backyard, where we shagged barefoot and without reserve beneath the string of white lights that were draped from her roof to the blooming magnolia trees that framed the end of her garden. Randy had more moves than an eel in a croaker sack. He was spinning and dipping me, and I would have bet anything he'd been practicing with his mama.

Harriet looked great. She'd pulled her hair up in a free-form twist and sported a simple black sundress that was cut just so in the back so that you could see a tattoo on her left shoulder: a “yin and yang.” Much murmur commenced about this among the parents and older social folks who danced around her in their preppy madras pants and floral skirts. But it didn't seem to bother Harriet. Rod, the Blockbuster guy, had become quite adept during their shag lessons last week, and he led her around the backyard all night as she stepped-two-three with pride and smiled toward her grandmother.

Marguerite presided over the party in a white linen suit. Three heavy gold bangles accented her right arm, and her silver helmet hair was styled just so. Even she took off her sandals and danced with Rod, then a few deb fathers, as we gathered around the punch table to whisper and laugh.

Shannon was there with Teddy Mee from Harvest Time, and they seemed to be having a great time too. As a group of townspeople gathered around him to hear about his mission, Shannon pulled me aside and said, “How are you doing?”

“Okay. Even said a prayer this afternoon.”

“Sounds promising,” she said, then squeezed my wrist.

Randy came up behind me and said to Shannon, “May I have my date for a minute?” Then he grabbed my hand and pulled me through the garden and the covering of live oaks and magnolias and toward Marguerite's dock, where the harbor lights glistened across the glassy water as the last pink streaks of daylight faded.

“Look,” he said, sitting down and patting a place beside him before he dipped his toes into the water. Three porpoises were feeding along the marsh bank near the dock, and they would slap their tails along the shallow water, trapping the schools of mullet for their sunset dinner. The seagulls and terns were flapping furiously toward their roosts, but the pelican took her sweet time above us. She flapped her wings for a moment, then let the wind carry her as long as it could before she exerted herself again.

The coast guard station trumpet rang out taps, and I sat down beside Randy and dipped my feet into the warm water. The ripples from my ankles grew larger and larger across the glassy surface.

“Could you ever get tired of this?” Randy whispered, interlocking his large fingers with mine.

The porpoises zigzagged from one bank to another as we looked on.

The thick Low-Country air hung around us like the Spanish moss framing our vista, and if I didn't look behind me at the puffing towers of mill waste, I might have confused this with a subtropical paradise.

Randy turned to face me.

Randy. Mmm. He had become a man, and only now was I cluing in. His shoulders had broadened during the last year, and he was at least a foot taller than me now. He had even been recruited as a second-string kicker for the University of South Carolina football team, and I had seen him practicing in the Williamstown High School field in the early morning, kicking the oblong ball through the goalpost time and time again.