Adelaide Piper

by Beth Webb Hart

  “I am so proud of you, I could burst,” Daddy said, hugging me tightly, oblivious to the truck as my eyes met Averill’s from behind the windshield. If my football legend/Vietnam vet father had not been holding me, he might have run right over me, but instead he took a hard right just before us and flew out of the parking lot.

  “What the heck?” Papa Great looked over his shoulder to see what the screech was about. The smell of burned rubber seemed to sting his nose, and he shook his head as Daddy turned to him.

  “Now, come on, Papa—didn’t I tell you this girl would do good?”

  Papa Great snorted and tried to think up a compliment while I watched Averill’s truck disappear beyond the curve. “Sure she did,” he said to Daddy, opening the driver’s side door. “Now let’s get to that brunch Mae Mae has been planning all week before your uncle Tinka eats all the deviled eggs.”

  “All right,” Daddy said, knocking his plastic hand on the hood of the Cadillac. But he couldn’t dim his pride. “It was something, though, Papa. My gal got Most Likely to Succeed too!”

  It had taken only a moment for the hot sun and the humidity to take their toll, and I could already feel a ring of perspiration forming under my turquoise gown as I opened the back car door.

  “Get in!” Papa Great said.

  While the Cadillac spewed out its smoke of cold air into the backseat, I spotted a red-tailed hawk landing on a live oak limb at the edge of the school gates.

  I pulled my folder close to my chest and pictured Averill shoveling coal as I nibbled on shrimp and deviled eggs.

  2

  Rattlesnakes and

  Brunch at Mae Mae’s

  There were only three places to eat in Williamstown. There was Ryan’s Restaurant with the mega bar, McDonald’s with the Big Mac, and the run-down country club where I once found a cockroach in my fruit salad. So Mae Mae invited the family and some of my closest friends over for a graduation luncheon.

  She and Juliabelle had been polishing silver and dusting off the crystal all week. The fine linens had been pressed, the shrimp had been peeled, and the house was decorated with beautiful homemade flower arrangements—pale pink roses, Queen Anne’s lace, and greenery from the garden—in a variety of silver urns.

  Mae Mae and Papa Great’s house was next to ours, divided only by thirty yards and a wall of pittosporum shrubs. There was a well-worn footpath between the two properties, with an opening between the branches big enough for Daddy’s shoulders to plow through. The two homes (which had been in Mae Mae’s family since the 1870s) were at the end of the historic district, overlooking the salt marsh and a narrow creek that poured into the Williamstown Harbor, where shrimp boats and barges of steel and paper made their way out to sea.

  We had a piddly crab dock barely big enough for one hammock because the creek was really shallow on our end, but Papa Great and Mae Mae had a large covered dock with rocking chairs and a floating dock for their boats and for us girls to sunbathe on while dipping our fingers into the dark water.

  One morning when I was sunbathing at the edge of the floating dock, the splash from a pelican dive left a cool spray on my shoulder, and I thought this wasn’t such a bad place to cocoon. And I often walked through the shrubs and over to my grandfolks’ to watch the pelicans dive for food and hear about the grand old days of Mae Mae’s ancestors, whose Carolina Gold rice provided a beautiful life of culture and refinement that this country has not matched since.

  One dead-and-gone native son and state poet laureate, Archibald Rutledge, said every life has its azaleas and its razorbacks. The bygone era’s razorback was slavery, which every thinking person around here knows is wrong, but its azalea was an unspoken code of chivalry and honor among the plantation pioneers, and I loved to imagine those grand plantation dinners where men like Thomas Lynch Jr. mustered up the courage to sign the Declaration of Independence and Francis Marion pieced together the ragtag militia.

  Another local planter and colonel of the continental army, Christopher Gadsden, designed the “Don’t Tread on Me!” flag with a rattlesnake poised to strike the British, who would not let our New World be. Mae Mae and Papa Great flew that flag from the end of their salt-marsh dock each Independence Day, and we ate watermelon and hot dogs beneath it and thanked God for men with more guts than sense.

  Ever wonder if you were born in the wrong place or the wrong time? Sometimes I did. Williamstown in the mid-eighteenth century would have been my first choice of places to live. I would have secretly left food out for the Swamp Fox in my kitchen or hosted George Washington on his tour of the South.

  Mama ran out from the kitchen with her apron tied around her beige linen suit. Her hands were white from flouring the biscuits.

  “Are you exhausted, darling?” she asked with a light embrace. “Your daddy was so proud, I thought he was going to pop the button on his suit!”

  “I feel good,” I said, accepting a mimosa my sister Dizzy brought over to me.

  Dizzy was a sophomore at Williamstown High and a dedicated member of the Goth fringe set, but today Mama had forced her to wear a blue sundress, and she looked good despite her dyed black hair and ghastly white makeup.

  My baby sister, Lou, was growing up too. Already in the sixth grade and sporting her first bra. She hugged me tightly and rested her head on my chest. Her speech impediment kept her from talking at the speed of her mind.

  “R-r-really. G-good, Ad!”

  The back garden looked beautiful. There were five round tables draped in fine linens and decorated with flowers in crystal vases, silver, and gilded china.

  Uncle Tinka, the black sheep of the family (who refused to go to Vietnam or marry or work for Papa Great), came up to hug me.

  “You brought down the house today, sister. Don’t tell Papa Great, but I think you’re the smartest member of the family.”

  I pushed his shoulder. “Go on.”

  “Now I’m going to put you to work for me—after I hog-tie the old coot,” he said.

  Uncle Tinka, a car mechanic by trade, was going to town with a new network marketing business called Bizway, and he was trying to talk Daddy into going in with him, though Papa Great had made it clear his textile job would be in jeopardy if he even considered such a thing.

  Mama had said, “You know better than to ruffle your daddy’s feathers, Zane.”

  I craned my neck to look for Juliabelle and Mae Mae, who had put on this exquisite spread. I was so thirsty that I downed my mimosa and went inside to find them.

  Mae Mae kissed me on the cheek as Juliabelle put a pan of her buttery biscuits in the oven. Mama had harvested the first of her homegrown tomatoes of the season and had sliced them up on a big silver platter with a dollop of mayonnaise on top of each one. The smell of sautéed shrimp and hominy grits filled the kitchen, and it was all I could do to stay away from the two large skillets on the stove.

  “Don’t even talk to us right now. We’ve still got work to do,” Mae Mae said.

  Juliabelle laughed and looked up at me with a wink as she closed the oven door. She had sat between my daddy and Mae Mae when I gave the graduation speech, and I hoped she was proud of me.

  “Go freshen up, upstairs in my powder room!” Mae Mae added. “Your cousins are ravenous, so we’ve got to act fast.”

  The bathroom window was open and overlooking the party, so I gazed out and onto the garden before I sat down at the vanity to reapply my lipstick. Below me Daddy was pouring mimosas with his new metal pinchers, and Uncle Tinka was taking my cousins down to the dock to check the crab traps. Mama was setting her homemade strawberry preserves on the tables to go with the biscuits, and my second cousin Randy was talking to Jif and her snobbish Charleston boyfriend, boring them with Gamecock football trivia, no doubt. He hadn’t made the team this year, but he would be trying again for next.

  Papa Great and Dizzy were right below the bathroom window, rocking on the chairs of the back piazza.

  “Well, my big sis pulled it off, didn’t she?�
�� I could hear Dizzy say. We were often at odds, but we were united in that we liked to show Papa Great he had a skewed vision of the gender divide.

  “Yeah,” he said. “A fresh start up at college will do her good, I believe.” I hid behind the drapes to listen as he leaned in toward my sister and said, “Sometimes I wondered why she never went on a date with a boy.”

  “Slim pickings, I suppose,” Dizzy said. “Ad’s a little picky, you know?”

  “Yeah,” he said, puckering his lips in concern. “Sometimes I wonder if maybe she’s one of those who likes other girls, you know?”

  “What? ” Dizzy said before giggling in disbelief.

  “You know,” Papa Great said, gaining strength, “what do you kids call it—a lesbian, right?”

  “Adelaide, a lesbian?” Dizzy said. “I don’t think so, Papa Great.”

  And the fury rose up in my throat.

  Dern if that hog nose isn’t trying to burst my bubble at the loveliest gathering I have ever attended.

  I almost stuck my head out the window to spit down on him or to say, “Have you ever heard of a thing called discerning taste?

  Selectivity? And have you ever heard of a hottie named Luigi Agnolucci? A prodigy violinist with the strongest, longest fingers you’ve ever seen? I’m cocooning, for heaven’s sake! Saving myself so I can get the heck out of this hades hole you call home!”

  But I didn’t say a word. Instead, I rushed downstairs and stormed out onto the back piazza and between their two rocking chairs. Then I walked right over to my second cousin Randy, who was pretending to throw a football, and I grabbed his face and kissed him hard on the lips, tongue and all, before wiping my mouth with one of Mae Mae’s linen napkins and dropping it in Papa Great’s lap.

  He patted it against his wet forehead and said, “Well, that answers that.”

  Dizzy laughed at my response. “Since when did your ears become bionic, Adelaide?” she asked as I ran back into the house and up the stairs to reapply my lipstick.

  Dizzy. If I was a pot stirrer, then she took the pot, shook it with all her might, and hurled it in her victim’s face. She had more gall than me, and she drove Daddy crazy with her smoking and witch clothes and poor grades.

  But this was my day. And I decided not to let Papa Great or Dizzy rattle my cage as I blotted my lips and brushed my thick brown hair out of my eyes. I took off my gown and stared at my long white sheath of a linen dress that hung from my knobby shoulders. I could fit in Jif ’s snug miniskirts, and I could nearly fill out her strapless summer tops, so I suspected I must have a somewhat decent figure. I didn’t have the blonde hair or the blue eyes, but I did have olive skin that browned in the summer, and Mae Mae said that when I pulled my hair back out of my face, I looked like her grandmother, for whom I am named—Adelaide Rutledge Graydon. Her parents were building her a lovely spinster home (which is now our house) on the harbor next to theirs when she surprised everyone by accepting a wedding proposal from a French portrait painter who was working for her family, and she left Williamstown for a beautiful life of travels across America before settling in Paris and painting her own cityscapes. The house is called “The Spinster” in all of the Low-Country tourist books, and occasionally we have a busload of vacationers peering into our back garden or snapping a photo of the jasmine that frames our wraparound porch with its sweet white blooms each spring.

  Adelaide Rutledge Graydon’s elegant debutante portrait hung over the sofa in Mae Mae’s living room, and I hoped I would possess a remnant of her grace and beauty next Christmas when I performed the ritual of curtsying before the Camellia Club in her long white gown (which was wrapped in yellowed sheets at the back of Mae Mae’s closet).

  Making one’s debut was one of the last remnants of the refined society that once existed in Williamstown. Ever since I was a child, Mae Mae had told me about the importance of the ritual of a young lady being presented to society, and I was not about to miss a chance to be acknowledged as a local treasure who was crossing the threshold into womanhood.

  The brunch was divine, despite the heat, the no-see-um bugs, and Randy’s following me around the rest of the afternoon like a puppy dog. Toward the end of the party, he ambled out to the dock where Jif, Dizzy, and I were sharing a platter of lemon squares and a glass of champagne as we dipped our toes in the dark water and watched a school of mullet break the surface of the outgoing tide.

  “Beep,” said Jif. “Drooling cousin. Nine o’clock.”

  Randy slipped off his loafers, sat down beside me, and put his arm around my waist to draw me close.

  “No offense, Randy,” I said, stiffening, “but we’re cousins.”

  “Second cousins,” he said.

  “Kissing cousins,” Dizzy added, kicking her feet so that a few drops of dark water hit my shoulder.

  And it was true; many folks in South Carolina did marry their second cousins. Heck, in this state, it was legal to marry your first cousin!

  Anyhow, Randy had been smitten with me since the September I turned thirteen and we harvested oyster bushels along the riverbank at low tide. I nearly lost my bathing suit top while cutting away at the shells with the tip of a shovel, and when I looked up to tie the string back tighter, I thought he was going to keel over into the shell bank in awe. He was fourteen and utterly stupefied over the recent changes my body had undergone.

  That night at the family oyster roast, he found a black pearl the size of a pea inside his delicacy, and he gave it to me after holding it up in the moonlight and whispering, “You are a pearl to me.”

  “I was just proving a point to Papa Great, okay?” I said to him now.

  “Let’s forget it happened. I didn’t mean to send mixed messages.”

  Randy sighed and removed his arm, setting both hands on his knees.

  “I don’t know why you didn’t take that scholarship to Carolina,” he said, shaking his head. “We’d have a good time together.”

  Jif spit a sip of champagne out into the marsh and laughed through her coughing fit. “Randy, if you haven’t noticed, it’s been Adelaide’s life purpose to get out of South Carolina.”

  “Yeah, didn’t you hear her speech today?” Dizzy said. “She’s ocean-bound.”“I don’t understand why,” he said, looking me in the eye. He motioned to the harbor, where the sunlight was dancing on the water as a sailboat let the hot breeze and the outgoing tide carry it toward the sea. (Randy had just bought his own boat earlier in the summer and, like a good Southern boy, named it after his mama.)

  “Now, what could be better than this?” he said.

  On one level, Randy was right. The harbor on a summer Sunday was more than picturesque; it was like a Low-Country Eden with porpoise fins lifting up out of the water and herons perched on the green marsh banks. But if you looked back toward the city and the drums of the furnaces and the black smog of burning coal and molten iron, you might as well have been in a wasteland.

  Now, Randy loved his home. He was an avid hunter and fisherman and an active church member, and he had just finished his freshman year at Carolina. So I didn’t want to snub the place where he would surely build a decent life. But I knew this much was true: if you wanted to get out of Williamstown, you had to leave the godforsaken state; otherwise, it pulled you back into its forceful, homespun grasp. The kids who went to the University of South Carolina always came back home to do their laundry and eat their mama’s rice and gravy, and before they knew it, they were trapped, falling in love with some girl down the street and working in her daddy’s mill for the rest of their lives. But the ones who went off to school, especially in the direction of the Northeast, escaped, and they rarely came back to stay.

  “I want to see what’s beyond here,” I said. “I mean, Randy, don’t you ever wonder?”

  “Not so much,” he said, nodding up the intracoastal waterway. “There’s more to explore in this thirty-mile radius than I could ever get to—barrier islands, rice fields, the swamp . . . Heck, you could fill books of poe
try with what’s around you. Right?”

  “Well, maybe, but I want to go away. I just know it’s best for me.”

  “Oh, I hope they pluck me from the waiting list,” Jif chimed in with a whine. She wanted to go to NBU, too, but as it stood, she was headed to Clemson. “I mean, can you see me dodging cow patties and sporting orange?”

  I laughed at her dilemma, kicked my feet, and splashed everyone in the process.

  Randy cupped his hands with dark water and sprayed Jif and me.

  “Just what my cousin needs. Encouragement.”

  Then he splashed us both so hard that a streak of dark water and mud stained our dresses. “You two snobs don’t know what you’re missing here.”

  “Spare us, Randy,” Jif said, dabbing her sundress with a napkin.

  “You know, you really ought to work for the state tourism department.” Then she splashed him back, and so did Dizzy, and before I knew it, we had all toppled into the water and were coated with pluff mud. I even lost my sandal in the dense, dark marsh, and a blue crab snapped at my pinkie toe before Randy lifted us one by one back onto the dock.

  When we walked into the garden, Uncle Tinka was writing out a Bizway chart for Daddy, looking up every so often to make sure Papa Great was still snoozing in the rocking chair.

  Then Juliabelle met us with the hose.

  “And just when you think they’ve gone and got some sense,” she said before spraying us down.

  After we folded up the tables and piled up the linens, Juliabelle stopped me on the back piazza with a small box tied in one of Mae Mae’s perfect white ribbons. She had taken off her apron and looked very elegant in the peach suit with pearl buttons her cousin had lent her and with her hair pulled back tightly in a braided bun on the top of her narrow head. At graduation she had stood out in the audience in a white hat with white feathers that swayed in the draft from the air conditioner.

  “You made the grade real good,” she said, holding my chin up with her long, skinny fingers. “Here’s somethin’ worth totin’ on your journey.”