Adelaide Piper

by Beth Webb Hart

  But I certainly wouldn’t let romance knock me off track, as it had Georgianne Mayfield. Poor Georgianne, the honest winner of that valedictorian race of the Williamstown class of 1989, was about to give birth to her first child. She had been accepted at Princeton and Wellesley and even offered a full scholarship to Davidson, an above-average college in the right direction, but before she could make up her mind, she started feeling queasy in the morning and had to face the fact that her future would take a dramatically different turn.

  It was Peach Hickman who had sucked my dear friend back into Williamstown with his good looks and his fifty-yard-line seats at the University of South Carolina football games. He was a junior at Carolina, but he came home every weekend, and Georgianne had thought it was so romantic the way he would pick her up on game days with a picnic basket filled with his mama’s pickled okra and pimento cheese sandwiches. I tailgated with them on occasion in the corporate field where his daddy’s tractor company was a sponsor. I did a lot of thumb twiddling and daydreaming as Peach and Georgianne threw the football back and forth and snuggled beneath the blankets when the temperature dropped.

  Now Georgianne wouldn’t be a scholar or a debutante. She’d married Peach Hickman just three weeks ago. Jif, Shannon, and I threw a bridal shower for her at the country club, and I cried tears of grief over her future with every Pyrex dish and cookbook that she unwrapped. I made such a scene that Georgianne pulled me into the powder room for a reprimand: “This is not a funeral, Adelaide. It’s not even an original story, Miss Smarty-Pants Poet. You ought to know that much.

  Now, buck up and give me a little support here!”

  I nodded to appease her, but to me Georgianne was living the worst nightmare I could ever imagine. I did not know how I would survive the stifling life of casseroles and dirty diapers that awaited her.

  Maybe it was a good thing that no boy at Williamstown High had ever asked me out.

  Nobody in my class ever talked about sex. And no one’s parents ever talked about it, and the school never talked about it, and neither did the church. So we were all clueless as to what it was all about and how a tragedy like this could sneak up on you unawares. I put it together—the mechanics of what actually happened between a man and a woman—in eighth grade after watching a Little House on the Prairie episode in which one of the town’s girls was attacked by a man in a clown mask. It came to me like a great revelation at the end of the show, and I went and told Dizzy about how it must work. But, of course, she already knew all about it from a classmate named Angel who had spelled it out to her the summer before.

  Not me. I would not succumb to this fate. In fact, if an NBU guy got the hots for me (and let me tell you, one had better!) I would keep him at arm’s length until I knew where I wanted to go. I’d worked too hard to get caught in that old trap.

  Yes, I was up for adventure, I longed for romance, and I wanted desperately to know the meaning behind the collage of terminology that spilled out of Penelope Russo’s mouth: words like postmodern, deconstructionists, existentialism, or names like Kafka, Beckett, and Proust. I had to study Shakespeare—anyone who seemed remotely cultured was always quoting him. I had to read Virginia Woolf—heck, there was a whole play written about her! I had read it at Governor’s School but had no idea what it was about.

  What I did know was that there were mysteries all around me— and more than this, there were moments of downright splendor. Like when my daddy took me fishing in the Santee River by the old rice fields, and the sun set behind the cypress swamp, leaving a backdrop of red and orange, and the gnarled limbs of the oak trees reached up to the sky like open arms. Like when I found an abandoned kitten in the packing room at the mill and brought it home to our infertile house cat, Marmalade, whose breasts miraculously swelled with milk so that she could nurse him back to life.

  And like the time I ate a bad oyster and my throat closed up so I could hardly breathe, and Juliabelle made Daddy drive me over to Berkeley County, where they carried me through the Francis Marion Forest and over to the artesian well by Huger Creek. Juliabelle filled an empty Co-Cola bottle with the water from the spigot, and when she handed it to me, she said, “Drink up. This is the tonic.” When that cool underground water coated my throat, I swear I could breathe again.

  The explanation of such splendor and more opportunities to experience them had to be in books and colleges and heated discussions in coffeehouses, and NBU had to be the place where my journey would begin.

  Penelope Russo had applauded the poem I wrote a few weeks ago at the end of my summer session:

  There has to be more to this world

  than climbing the Williamstown water tower

  and drinking cheap, tasteless beer

  at the end of the frontage road.

  She’d asked me to read it during the closing ceremony of Governor’s School in the College of Charleston auditorium. It upset my parents that I looked as though I was a drinker and a water-tower climber when, in fact, I couldn’t stand the taste of beer or anything other than champagne, and I was hardly the daredevil, tower-climbing type. But my parents didn’t understand that you could write something from the heart even though it wasn’t from your own personal experience. I had concluded that Zane and Greta Piper were, sad to say, unenlightened.

  Now, I was no fool. I realized that one could not mention the splendor of this world without acknowledging the sadness.

  Just a mile from my home, I had once wandered over to Cousin Randy’s farm when cows were being slaughtered. I could see the bloodstained walls of the cinder-block building and the carcasses piled up behind the barn with flies swirling around them in their buzzing frenzy. The smell made me so weak in the knees that I swore off hamburgers for a year.

  And once, when I was cleaning up a back road for a school service project, I saw a man hit a woman so hard that her lip bled. When he walked to his truck to leave, the woman chased after him, hugging and kissing him and begging him to come back inside their mobile home, which he did.

  And what about the old car in the kudzu-covered woods behind my house? Dizzy and I had found it one morning when we were playing hide-and-seek. It looked like those first Model Ts. There was a spring popping out of the backseat cushioning, spiderwebs around the steering wheel, and a woman’s black high-heeled shoe caught in the door handle. What made someone abandon a car like that? Did they win the lottery? Did they fall into the swampy quicksand? Or had they been swept up in a hurricane, their remains spread out across the marsh, only to be picked apart by the vultures I saw from time to time circling the sky?

  Definitive queries:

  Is there a point

  to my life?

  Am I missing it?

  Why so much brokenness

  and wonder all

  in the same place?

  Give me

  more,

  more

  splendor!

  And less

  of the cracked

  and spoiled.

  The problem was, I could not shake the feeling that I was created for a reason. That I had a specific role to play on the stage of the world, as Shakespeare (I think) suggested. But what? I could reel in daydreams about it for hours. Was this God’s hand on my life, as Shannon had once argued? I had not ruled out that possibility. But the ivory tower was where I was going to look first, and as I watched the nose of our car tilt toward the mountains, my heart delighted to know I was moving closer to it, mile marker by mile marker.

  Oh, and I couldn’t wait for my sweet reunion with Peter Carpenter, an NBU student from Williamstown, who had promised to show me around once the fraternity rush that he was directing was over. Peter was two years my senior and as responsible and bright as they come. He had tutored me in geometry when I was a freshman in high school, and I’d had a huge crush on him. I can remember his rugged hands with the ruler and protractor, marking off the angles and degrees of squares and triangles. I could see a pulse in the vein on the side of his neck and co
mposed a little poem in my head while we worked.

  Peter Carpenter is so alive,

  Look at his pulse,

  His geometrical drive!

  Dizzy, sensing my crush, embarrassed me greatly by announcing during one of our lessons, “Sister says you’re the best-looking guy in Williamstown!”

  My face had lit up like a ripe tomato, but somehow, this moment sealed our friendship, and he always went out of his way to say hello to me on our summer breaks while he was mowing lawns or coaching the country-club swim team. He had even met with me and Daddy last October in the NBU snack bar after our campus tour. He bought us a Co-Cola and gave us pointers on my admissions interview while nodding out of the corner of his eye to an assortment of fraternity brothers and girls who meandered by, their backpacks hanging from one shoulder, their unwashed hair sticking up in all directions. I remembered wondering why they were all underdressed for the cold, whipping wind, in their tight midriff T-shirts and low-riding blue jeans. How I yearned to be one of them!

  Now I had permed my hair just for Peter Carpenter, and I thought it looked nice despite Dizzy’s reaction when I walked into the kitchen: “Figured you would have lost the poodle look by high school graduation.”

  But it was 1989 and the era of big hair in Williamstown, South Carolina, and I thought I would knock Peter Carpenter’s socks off with my curls and bubble gum–pink lipstick. I had daydreamed about our meeting all during the summer. I could picture us studying together on the college colonnade on a sunny afternoon or throwing snowballs at each other across the quadrangle when winter set in. I had high hopes for Peter Carpenter and my college social life.

  These daydreams willed me to eat sparsely during the last two weeks in an effort to drop a size. It had been painful to drink water instead of Co-Cola, and eat Special K instead of pancakes and bacon, but it was worth it. Poor Mama was distraught when I wouldn’t touch her tomato pie or Mexican casserole (my all-time favorites) during my last night as a permanent resident under her roof. But I took one look at the grease rising from the ground beef and cheese, pinched my waist, and said, “No way, Mama.” (Though late into the night, when everyone else was asleep except for my moaning belly, I snuck downstairs for a few cold bites of the leftovers and a bowl of Mama’s delectable banana pudding.)

  We’d been traveling awhile now, and I was still looking for that “You are now leaving South Carolina” sign. I wanted to put my eye on it.

  I mean, South Carolina. Ugh. We’re talking about a state where cockfighting is as common a crime as theft and where Strom Thurmond will never lose a senatorial election though the old geezer has made a pass at nearly every woman in the state. It’s a world where blacks—and women, for that matter—are still secretly considered second-class citizens by some. There is a lingering prejudice that still has its hooks in the region. Ku Klux Klan descendants are still around—albeit tight-lipped. And the public education system ranks the lowest in the country.

  Ah, but in her glory day she was a strong, feisty state. Standing up against the British and later the Union. Problem is, like an old lady with dementia, her rebel brand of courage seems to have perverted itself into a crusty pit of backwardness, and in a lot of ways she has failed to progress.

  Except for making my debut, I didn’t plan to come back. New York City is where I hoped to land. Mae Mae took me there when I was twelve, and I kissed the dirty sidewalk of Broadway and Lexington and said, “I’ll be back!” before we hopped into a cab to go to the airport. In my mind’s eye I was there, writing poem after poem on a dirty park bench in Washington Square about the Southern world from whence I came—its curse and its blessing. But, so help me God, I would no longer be in it.

  Before I knew it, the station wagon had made its way up to the Blue Ridge Parkway, and I admired the gaping view of the valleys below while my ears popped from our ascent. There were cabins perched on the sides of the mountains and homemade signs for apple cider on the edge of the road. A mountain man was sitting on a wooden chair on the front porch of a run-down sweetshop at the top of a nearby hill. He stared through us at the clouds.

  “It is burning up!” Dizzy shrieked before pulling the back of Mama’s hair. “Ice Lady, do something.”

  “Zane,” Mama said ever so gently as the wagon passed a sign that read “Welcome to the state of Tennessee.” “It is a bit hot.”

  “Did that sign say Tennessee, Daddy?” I pointed out in horror.

  “Heck no, darlin’,” Daddy answered. But I knew he was unreasonably optimistic and would not entertain the thought that we were headed up the parkway in the wrong direction.

  It amazed me that after all he had lost, not one shred of doubt or pessimism entered his thoughts.

  Zane Piper and Greta LeVan Wimmer had married in August 1968, two months after they graduated from the University of South Carolina. Zane had just signed a handsome contract with the Washington Redskins, but feeling a call to serve his country, he enlisted in the marines in September, and they shipped him off to Paris Island and then Vietnam, where he joined a reconnaissance group, some of whom had watched him play college ball on TV for years.

  “Are you nuts, Piper?” Gil Galbraith, a fellow classmate, had asked him when their paths crossed on a base west of Chu Lai.

  But while Uncle Tinka fled to Toronto to dodge the draft, Papa Great had greatly influenced Daddy’s view of serving in the war. The Hog didn’t serve in WWII because the Piper Mill made the fibers that went inside the military tires that served the war effort. And he deeply regretted not going over to the Pacific Theater. He had lost a brother and a cousin there, and somehow he was ashamed to stay in Williamstown making tires—coming home every night to Juliabelle’s okra soup and pecan pie while his friends and brothers spilled their guts across the ocean to thwart the plans of the evil powers of the world.

  When Daddy landed in the Boston airport on his journey home from Vietnam, he was shocked to see people his own age spitting on the troops as they walked through the gates. The antiwar protests had not yet reached the insulated life of Williamstown or the trenches of Than Khe, and he had no idea what their fury was about.

  “They wouldn’t spit on me, though,” he had recalled to me countless times on fishing trips off Pawleys Island and vacation drives to Myrtle Beach. He had given his arm and his football career to the war, and he reckoned their consciences wouldn’t let them do that.

  Anyhow, he told the Redskins he couldn’t run the ball without an arm, and he took a job at the Piper Mill, where he pushed papers as a vice president and daydreamed about a life in which he didn’t have to sit behind a desk and wear those uncomfortable coats and ties.

  He would have loved to have been in sales, and I think that’s why he was flirting with the idea of joining Uncle Tinka’s Bizway venture. But Papa Great wouldn’t have any part of his calling on businesses. My family was big-time in the little town of Williamstown, and Papa Great was grooming Daddy to be the president of the mill, though everyone knew that the Southern industry was dwindling as every sort of textile became cheaper to make overseas.

  My daddy was bound by social status, parental control, and the limitations of only one working arm, but even with all these constraints, he was the most optimistic person I knew.

  He could be happy and hopeful just sitting on our crab dock, drinking iced tea. He’d look around at one of his daughters or his petite, well-dressed wife and say, “We’ve got it good, don’t we?” And then, “Let’s go down to the Dairy Cream and get a sundae, just for the heck of it!”

  “You’re the one I’m countin’ on,” he’d told me a few nights ago beneath the fluorescent light of the kitchen. I had forgone an evening of hanging out with Jif and Georgianne to finish my Catcher in the Rye novel because Penelope Russo had referred to it countless times in Governor’s School. To my disappointment, it was a fatalistic novel about the loss of innocence of a teenage boy, and I hoped that every book didn’t depress me this way. The thought dawned on me, Could Penelo
pe Russo not know the meaning of life? But I pushed it aside to listen to Daddy.

  “Lou has learning problems, and Dizzy is as wild as a goat, Adelaide.”

  He shook his head and squeezed the top of my hand with his good arm. “Heck, I just want to get her to adulthood in one piece.”

  He looked me square in the eye without a blink. “But you’re the one who is going to make it, sister. I can just feel it, you know?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, and I wanted to believe him.

  “Now, I know you like poems and that sort of thing, but you’ve got to promise your old man that you’ll pick a solid major and get a job that can support your dreams: lawyer, doctor, you name it. You can have it all, baby—work, family, and poems—but you’ve got to get the solid stuff first, okay?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, turning my hand palm up to squeeze his back.

  “Thing about it, I never understood that when I was your age. All I did was chase your mama and run the football, and it hurt me not to pay more attention to my books.” He tugged at his paisley tie to indicate his failure. “You want to have choices.”

  “I understand, Daddy.”

  “I think you do,” he said as he walked toward the den. “Now I’m going to get your mama to help me put on my fatigues and relax.”

  (He could not unbutton his shirt without her help.) Then he turned back once as I stared at my letdown of a novel, and he said, “I love ya, sweetheart. And I’m pulling for you.”

  When I looked up, he had walked out of the room.

  Now Mama, whom Dizzy had unfairly nicknamed “Ice Lady,” handed each of us a cup of ice from the minicooler at her feet before consulting her map.

  Her nickname came a few years back when she handed out icy treats at the Williamstown children’s charity run. She stood at the corner of Main and Mill Street and gave Dixie cups of sweet crushed ice and frozen orange slices to the participants as they flew past. There was a picture of her on the front page of the state paper that was in town to cover the event.