Adelaide Piper (29 page)

Next I went by Kmart to pick up a book of children's nursery rhymes and drove right out to the suburbs to visit Georgianne and Baby Peach.

“Let's get him started early on his poetry,” I said as Georgianne opened the screen door with Baby Peach cocked on her hip. “If I have anything to say about it, he's going to be the next James Dickey. Minus the alcohol, of course.”

Then I strolled with them over to their neighborhood park, where I marveled at how well the toddler boy could climb up the stairs and zoom down the slide and rock himself back and forth on the tire swing.

As he plopped down his pail and shovel to dig in the sandbox, Georgianne invited me to sit down on a park bench, where I promptly grabbed her arm and said, “Forgive me for freaking out when you got married a few summers ago.”

Georgianne grinned, recalling the scene in the bathroom of the country club. “So where is this coming from?” she asked as she held a rubber band between her teeth and pulled her hair back.

“It's just . . . a lot of crazy things happened to me at college. And let's just say I learned the nobleness of your decision to carry Peach and raise him up even though it wasn't what you had planned.”

Georgianne's eyes settled on me.

“Thanks,” she said, and then she looked away to check on Peach.

“That means a lot to me. I mean, it's no cakewalk raising a kid and going to college at the same time. But it's what happened, and I'm going to see it through.”

“I'm not trying to romanticize it or anything, but I just want you to know I think you made the right decision.”

“Me too,” she said before making a visor with her hand to get a better look at Peach. “I've missed a lot, Ad. But I wouldn't take the world for him.”

We both looked on as he patted the full pail of sand with the back side of his shovel and blended a medley of toddler songs that started with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and ended with “The Farmer in the Dell.”

“Oh, and just in case you are curious, you aren't missing a thing when it comes to the Camellia Debutante Club. It's just a bunch of old ladies and chicken salad.”

“I figured,” Georgianne said as Baby Peach brought a fistful of sand to his mouth. When she scurried toward him screaming, “No!” he looked up at her with a Cheshire grin and opened his chubby fingers to let the grains spill out and onto his knees.

“So how's school going?” I asked Georgianne when she returned.

“Pretty well, actually. I got into the honors program, and I'm going to double-major in math and biology. Peach wants me to go premed, but I think I'd rather teach.”

“Boy, I could have used you a few weeks ago when I took my calculus exam.”

“Bad?”

“Lost my scholarship over it. I'm coming back here for school.”

“Hey, that'll make Randy's day.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“But if they let you retake, come see me. I aced calculus.”

When we looked up, Baby Peach had decided that the sand looked too delectable not to sample, and we both ran over to him and tried to teach him how to spit, which he took to surprisingly well, and he spit just for fun much of the way home in his stroller.

That afternoon, I threw on a tweed suit and raced over to the curtsy tea with Jif. We were delighted to see Harriet and even the socially awkward Winkie and the obnoxiously preppy Nan.

“What's different about you?” Harriet asked as I bit into a cinnamon scone. She squinted her eyes as if to singe my veneer, then handed me a linen napkin to wipe away the clotted cream on the corner of my mouth. “You look better,” she said, tapping her hand on my cheek. “Come over to dinner at Marguerite's tonight and spill the beans.”

“Okay,” I said as Mrs. Percy got our attention by tapping her silver spoon on her delicate china teacup. Her gardener and housekeeper rolled an ancient television set, complete with tinfoiled rabbit ears, into the parlor and propped it on her ottoman.

Jif took a place beside us as Marguerite, Harriet's grandmother, instructed us in the dos and don'ts of curtsying, first toward our fathers as they held our white-gloved hands in the spotlight, then toward our mothers and the Camellia Club board, who would be seated in Queen Anne chairs in front of the guests on both sides of the red velvet carpet in the center of the ballroom. We watched successful curtsies as well as several faulty attempts from videotapes of past balls; then Marguerite modeled it for us gracefully a few times before asking each of us to stand up and give it a try.

I got as much of a kick out of Mrs. Marguerite Hartness as Harriet did. She had to be pushing eighty, but she'd been giving this curtsy lesson for fifty years. She was as spry and physically capable of bending down to the floor as any twenty-year-old deb in the room. She reminded me of Katharine Hepburn in her final films: elegantly sturdy even as her head trembled with Parkinson's.

Harriet was proud of her vivacious grandmother, who sported an up-to-date sarong and DKNY pumps, and she had every right to be. Marguerite brought the class level in Williamstown up several notches, and she even had a way of making the place seem livable.

“My cousin, the governor, has just accepted the invitation to the ball, and so has his dashing son, Paul, who is a senior at USC,” Marguerite announced after winking in Jif 's and my direction before dipping down to the ground again.

Yes, she had to be the most poised woman in all of South Carolina.

Rumor had it that Strom Thurmond had proposed to her once and she'd said, “I don't think I can put up with you, Senator.”

“Let's see y'all do it,” she said as we all stood up to attempt the curtsy. We chuckled clumsily through the remainder of the afternoon as we each attempted to place the ball of our right foot just so behind our left and bend gracefully down to the Oriental rug without showing our cleavage or toppling over headfirst.

“I figured this might be a tasteless vegan meal,” Jif said when Harriet opened Marguerite's garland-draped door in ratty blue jeans and a hooded sweatshirt a few hours later. Jif lifted up two chocolate Slim-Fast bars and said, “So I brought my own food.”

“What food?” Harriet said, looking her up and down. “By the looks of you, you haven't eaten in months.”

Jif grinned with pride as the scent of freshly cut pine and toasted pecans wafted through the doorway. That was just what she wanted to hear.

Harriet rolled her eyes. She hadn't wanted to encourage her.

“Gaunt must be in,” she said, snatching the bars out of Jif 's hands.

“We're having Marguerite's homemade spaghetti with marinara sauce and a Greek salad sans the feta, all right? If I weren't a Yankee, I'd be offended by your bringing a prepackaged meal when you'd been invited to dinner.”

“No kidding,” I said, nudging Jif into the grand home, which was the picture of a Southern Christmas, with a fresh balsam-and-pine garland winding its way up the grand stairway and a wall of poinsettias lining the entrance hall.

“Besides,” Harriet said, “the menu is entirely vegan and low-fat, so everybody should be happy.”

“Welcome, girls,” Marguerite said as she brought out a tray of freshly poured Co-Colas in crystal tumblers with a handful of salted peanuts, which she dropped into each glass before inviting us into her living room. We took a seat on the velvet Martha Washington chairs and watched the angel-abra carousel on the coffee table propel the brass angels around and around the gold star as the bells chimed.

“This is the way your mama used to drink them when she was a teenager,” Marguerite said to Harriet as we sipped the sweet and salty froth.

“Why didn't she stick with these?” Harriet whispered with a momentary forlorn expression as Marguerite left the room to stir the sauce. She informed us, “Mom checked into the Betty Ford Center in October. Seems my stepfather found her passed out in the hot tub one afternoon when he came home early from work. She's always tipped the bottle, but it had gotten a lot worse in the last few years—what with my stepfather taking a little trip to the Bahamas with his personal assistant, and his perfect offspring turning into little devils. The one at Andover was kicked out for cheating on his finals, and the one at Yale was arrested for possession of cocaine. I don't care if I
ever
go home again.”

The steam from the pasta curled out the kitchen window and into the night air.

“Thank goodness for Marguerite,” Harriet said, and we all agreed.

“She's like your true mother,” I said.

“You said it,” Harriet agreed. “We're as thick as thieves, and we're going to spend this coming summer in Nice. Might even try Tuscany after that.”

Marguerite's dining room was inviting. Magnolia limbs lined the fireplace, where a porcelain crèche decorated the mantel, and in the center of the dining table was a Williamsburg apple tree with a pineapple on the top, its spiky leaves fanning out and leaving pointed shadows on the linen place mats and china.

“Where's baby Jesus?” Jif asked as she peered into the empty manger.

Marguerite answered after passing the pasta. “Oh, my family had a tradition of hiding Him away from the children until Christmas morning. We'd all try to guess where He was throughout December, but we never could find Him. I think my mother kept Him in her underwear drawer.”

“Why did they hide Him?” I asked. I had been a Christian for less than a week, and Christmas was becoming real to me.

“Oh, for a sense of expectation, dear,” the beautiful lady said, her head wobbling on her neck. “When we woke up on Christmas morning, instead of racing down to check our stockings, we would gather around the crèche to see if He was there. How I remember picking Him up and cupping Him in my hands as a young girl on those mornings. I had been waiting and waiting on Him, and now He had arrived, and there was nothing so satisfying as His perfect little body in the palm of my hand.”

I nestled myself beneath the blanket of Marguerite's memory and the earthy scent of freshly cut pine and pasta, and I pictured the Christ child on my own family's mantel. Yes, the dog had chewed up one of His legs, and there was a waxy mark from a purple crayon across His shoulder, as well as a seam down the side, evidence of the machine that had pressed him together. But His newborn eyes were like two perfectly formed pearls, and His arms were open and reaching out for an embrace that I had not returned until now.

“That's my mother,” Harriet said, pointing up to a portrait above the fireplace of a pale young woman in a beaded gown, holding a single pink camellia in her lap. Her head was tilted slightly toward the ground, forbidding anyone a look into her eyes.

“That was when she made her debut at the Magnolia Club,”

Marguerite said, “some twenty-five years ago.”

“And there is Marguerite,” Harriet said, pointing to a smaller painting that hung between two windows on the opposite side of the room. “She made hers in 1930.”

“You're stunning,” Jif said.

And I stared into the painting at Marguerite, who was looking the portrait artist straight in the face with her black eyes. Her shoulders were draped with scalloped white lace, and her gloved hands were empty and resting, palms up, on her knee as though she were waiting for the world's gift, the baby Redeemer, to appear in her hands.

After a delicious dinner, we went back onto the porch to drink decaf coffee and eat vegan raspberry sorbet, compliments of the health-food store in Charleston.

As an owl hooted from the top of the magnolia tree, Harriet asked, “So what's been going on at NBU?”

“Quite a bit,” Jif said, looking at me. “None of it has been good unless you count Adelaide becoming a Jesus freak and me losing five pounds.”

“Five pounds?” I said, sizing Jif up and down. “I think you weigh less than I did in third grade.”

We all laughed.

Then Harriet turned to me. “So you found religion up there? That's what's changed. I knew it was
something
.”

“You could say that,” I said. “I got in a tough spot, and it became my hope.”

“Mmm,” Harriet said, raising her dark eyebrows so that three clear lines stretched across her forehead. “You're talking stranger than the vegans in Bronxville, my friend.”

She sucked down her coffee with soy milk and licked the bottom of the sorbet bowl as we inquired about her fall at Sarah Lawrence.

“I saw the Grateful Dead in Central Park,” she said, lifting her sweatshirt to reveal a silver loop that was piercing her belly button. “That's where I got this,” she whispered, then brought her finger to her lips and looked toward the kitchen, where we could hear Marguerite stirring her coffee. “She doesn't need to know. It's not exactly deblike.”

Jif and I grinned at each other. Harriet was so out there, and we loved every refreshing minute we were with her.

“And I took a Flannery O'Connor story and turned it into a play for my theater class,” Harriet said.

“Which one?” I asked.

“‘The Life You Save May Be Your Own
.
' And there's a chance the theater club will perform it in the spring. You'll have to take the train up if they do.”

“Cool,” we said, and I could see Jif was already imagining what a trip to New York would be like.

“Could we go into the city to shop?” she asked.

“Why not?” Harriet said. “I mean, I personally loathe Fifth Avenue, but I'd go along if you guys made the trip.”

“I'm turning in,” Marguerite said as her head bobbed behind the screen door.

“
Bonsoir
, Grandmama,” Harriet said in a French accent, and we all blew her a kiss from the porch swing after thanking her for the delicious dinner.

On my way home, I parked at the boat landing along the Waccamaw River and walked down to the bank to watch the moonlight on the water. What a long way I'd come in the few days since my conversion. No way would I have ventured to the river by myself just a few months earlier. My anxiety would have convinced me that someone might be hiding in the woods, planning an attack, or that I would somehow slip down the bank and into the current, where an alligator would seek me out.