Adelaide Piper

by Beth Webb Hart

  “If it weren’t for that ice lady,” one of the runners said, “I wouldn’t have made it to the finish line.”

  And there was a letter to the editor that read, “Thank you, ice lady!” and recounted one overheated woman’s blurred vision during the race, cured only by the sweet, icy oranges that a lovely lady in a large straw hat handed to her at the busiest intersection in town.

  But while I refused to call her by the nickname, I could see the second truth in it. Greta LeVan Piper was emotionally distant somehow. I couldn’t remember her ever spontaneously hugging one of us—or Daddy, for that matter. And she didn’t shower us with kisses or “I love yous” the way I saw some mamas do. Now, I knew we were her very life, but she showed it to us by what she did for us. Works of service—that was her love language.

  “You have to admit she’s kinda frigid,” Dizzy had said to me one afternoon when Daddy coaxed Mama to an overnight in Myrtle Beach to attend a Bizway meeting. She didn’t want to go, and she was terrified that Papa Great might find out what they were up to. When she was leaving, she couldn’t bring herself to kiss us good-bye, not even Lou, who had been stung by a bee on her top lip that afternoon. “Oh, girls,” she’d said, wringing her tough little hands. “I’ve made you spaghetti and a salad, and you can call Juliabelle if you need anything.”

  “Loosen up and have some fun at MB, Mom!” Dizzy said.

  “Yeah,” I said, putting my arm around Lou. “Take a walk on the beach and pretend you’re on vacation.”

  Mama shook her head in dismay and walked through the door, head down, before muttering, “Bye-bye.”

  Now, I suspected that Mama had a story and a half to tell if she could ever get the words out. She was raised mostly by a nanny named Rosetta in the thick of Charleston high society. Her aristocratic mom was prone to nervous breakdowns, and her daddy, a famous German physician at the medical university, didn’t pay her much mind. Mama hated even going back to the “Holy City” and asked me to take Zane to his doctor’s appointments at the veterans hospital. She said that the Charleston skyline, with all of those steeples stabbing the clouds, just made her stomach turn.

  Mama was also a master escape artist, and she had taught this craft to me, which I honed through my poetry and excessive daydreams. When my allergies flared up during childhood and I scratched the backs of my knees until they bled, Mama calmed my nerves by saying, “Imagine you are somewhere else, sweetheart. An opera singer on a stage, or a mermaid in a deep-sea cave.” And I could do it; I could nearly escape the present and go somewhere else in my mind. What a wonderful trick to be transported like that!

  Once, during my third-grade bedtime routine, I asked her, “What is heaven like?” in expectation of a great imaginative journey. To my surprise, Mama stood gulping back tears and said, “I don’t know. No one ever told me about it.” Then she scurried out of the room, sending Daddy in to kiss me good night.

  Mama was an orphan in a sense, and she did all in her power not to make the same mistake with us. The dedication with which she approached her role as mother ranked head and shoulders above that of the other moms in town. She was always the first in line to pick us up from school. The napkins in our lunch boxes had stickers or smiley faces on them each day, along with a thought: “I am thinking about you!” Or “Smile!” Or “I love you.” (It was much easier to write it.)

  Motherhood was the role she had always wanted. Domesticity was her territory, from the tomato vines to the laundry room, and she claimed it as best she could.

  Maybe that’s why Juliabelle was in my life. She was a widow, and she didn’t have any children or grands of her own, and she never saw me that she didn’t cup my face and tell me that she loved me.

  “I’m afraid Adelaide’s right, Zane,” Mama said now while he forcefully turned the air-conditioner knobs and held out his plastic hand over the vents as though the cold, hard machinery of his prosthetic could feel the hot air.

  He pulled reluctantly over on the side of a mountain and puttered into a run-down Exxon station. After a few minutes of conversation with the gas station manager, he bounded back to the car, shaking his head in defeat.

  “Well, we went up the parkway in the wrong direction, and we’re in Goodloe, Tennessee.”

  “Good grief!” Dizzy shouted. She maniacally caressed the cigarettes in her backpack with the tips of her black-painted nails and asked to go to the bathroom. Daddy gave her one stern look because he knew what she was up to.

  “If I ever catch you with one of those in your mouth, I’ll tan your hide, Dizzy! Now, hand ’em over!”

  She pulled out a half-empty pack of cigarettes, and he snatched them with his good hand and threw them in the trash can behind him.

  “You might think you’re a renegade,” he said to her angry eyes, “but I’ll have you tamed yet, and we can do it the hard way or the easy one. That much of it is up to you, sister.”

  No one moved for a few seconds so that his point could sink into her hard head.

  Then Lou whimpered, “Can I g-get a Co-Co-Cola, Daddy?”

  “Me too!” Dizzy added, taking her eyes away from his.

  “Okay. Co-Colas and Nabs for everyone; then we’ve got to head back down the mountain and get on the interstate if we’re going to get Adelaide to her convocation on time.” And then he added, “If the air-conditioning is broke, no one at this place can fix it, so I need y’all to press on without it.”

  Back down the parkway we went, with Mama reorganizing her maps so that we could make up the lost time on the interstate. Daddy and my sisters were quiet, enjoying the sweet, dark bubbles and peanut-butter crackers that rolled down their throats. When we crossed over into Virginia, I marveled at the runaway truck ramps on our way through the mountains. Could a truck get going so fast that it needed a runaway ramp to slow it down? I scribbled this notion down in my journal as a metaphor for a future poem.

  Dizzy was like a runaway truck, speeding out of control by way of drinking and smoking and dressing in funeral attire, and Daddy would step up to serve as the ramp that she needed to stop her in her tracks.

  As for me, I was still a parked truck that had never left the lot. Sure, I’d had my minor run-ins with Averill and the no-goods and my romantic night with Luigi Agnolucci, but all in all, my life had been mostly uneventful. I had a tank full of gas, but what I needed was for someone to turn the ignition key and get me rolling. Surely college would lift the heavy speedometer needle of my boring life above the 0.

  4

  Orientation

  Ahandsome, towheaded boy met us with a clipboard as we entered the campus gates. The grounds were lush and manicured, and the air was refreshingly crisp. Nathaniel Buxton University transcended the August heat, and the cool air that spilled through the open car windows left goose bumps on our arms and legs.

  We looked like the Griswolds with the full-sized storage box on top of the station wagon and our carload of frowning faces. I could see the boy grimace as Daddy awkwardly put out his left hand (the good one) to say, “I’m Zane Piper, young man.”

  “Bo Hagerty, student council vice president,” he responded before glancing in to pick me out of the group.

  “Brought the whole family with you?” he said with a half grin, his straight white teeth standing out against his tan skin. He looked as if he had spent the summer on a beach.

  He scanned down his list until he found my name. “You’re on the third floor of Tully, Miss Piper.” Then he pointed the way around the bend to the freshman dormitory.

  “Thank you,” I called from the backseat, but he was already talking to the inhabitants of a sleek Range Rover that had pulled up behind us. (He was so not South Carolina!)

  “Bo Hagerty is Beauregard,” I said to Dizzy with a thump on her knee as we made our way around the bend. We had always been able to find a common ground when it came to good-looking boys.

  “If you like the preppy, stuck-up type,” she said, still licking her wounds from the Exxon episode. S
he seemed envious of my pending escape.

  “Look at it this way, Diz: you and Lou will have the whole backseat to yourselves on the way home. You could practically stretch out and sleep.”

  She shrugged, then couldn’t help but gawk at the beautiful green campus that opened up before us, its weeping willows and oaks waving us in. NBU was on the edge of the quaint valley town of Troutville, and beyond the campus gates and the three-block town, there were rolling hills with pastoral vistas of barns and silos and cows grazing on patches of emerald. Rising up above the hills were the colossal Blue Ridge Mountains that surrounded us as far as the eye could see.

  Daddy lifted his hand out the window to feel the cool air.

  “Isn’t this something, girls?”

  Mama cooed in agreement as we passed the colonnade and the quadrangle with its bright red bricks and Corinthian columns. A bearded professor in a stereotypical tweed jacket stopped to chat with a circle of students who were tossing a hacky sack. And a girl with a golden retriever at her feet napped on a rocking chair in the center of the quad.

  “Adelaide, I think these mountains are like wise sages calling you to learn, baby!” Daddy said.

  “I guess so,” I said with a chuckle. He was poetic in a Geechee sort of way, and so I had him to thank for that gene.

  “This ought to be an incentive to get those grades up, Dizzy,” he added. It was an untimely remark that hit below the belt.

  Dizzy flicked a Nabs wrapper onto the floorboard and rolled her eyes. At this rate, she’d be lucky to get into Myrtle Beach Technical College, and we all knew it.

  “Don’t hold your breath, Daddy dearest.”

  Thankfully, I knew my roommate, Ruthie Baxter from Gastonia,

  North Carolina. We had shared a cabin together at Camp Greystone a few summers in a row and had set out to room with each other when we found out we had both been accepted.

  And good old beauty queen Jif had gotten her wish: she had been plucked from the NBU waiting list and would forgo her Clemson scholarship to join me in the class of 1993.

  Now another strapping upperclassman with his hair pulled back in a ponytail, of all things, met us at the steps of the dormitory and helped Daddy carry in the luggage. This place is extremely organized, I thought as the Range Rover pulled in behind us and another boy ran out to grab its belongings.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see some sort of demonstration going on at the rear of the quadrangle. I saw a map that read “Beijing,” and a gravestone that read “For the thousands killed in Tiananmen Square,” and thousands of plastic forks were sticking up from the ground with different names inscribed on them. Where is Tiananmen Square, anyway? I thought to myself. I had become so engrossed in my literature that I was certainly not up on current events. It must be somewhere in Asia.

  Intimidation crept up on me like a rash. Was I already in over my head? Was I country-come-to-town even in my first hour on campus?

  I had to remember that just because I was near the top of my class in Williamstown didn’t mean my chops were up to some of the sharpest kids from around the country.

  Upperclass girls from the NBU Student Wellness Committee greeted me at the foyer with a pink care package that included bubble gum, Band-Aids, Tylenol, an instruction manual about how to check for breast cancer, and, much to my shock, a pack of condoms. There was a floral notice taped to them that read “Practice safe sex! Come See Ms. Eugenia in the health clinic if you need birth control pills” on one side and “A health and wellness seminar will be held in the Tully lounge on Friday at 4:00 p.m.” on the other.

  Daddy’s eyes met mine as I peered up from the bag. I could tell he was weighing his words carefully before he spoke. “Now, Adelaide, you’re going to be exposed to a lot of outlandish ideas up here, you know?”

  “I sure hope so,” I said, unable to fully sense his anxiety over shelling out thousands of dollars to a place that already threatened his daughter’s innocence. “I mean, that’s why I’m here, right?”

  Meanwhile, someone had mistaken Dizzy for a freshman and handed her a pink bag too. She pulled out the condoms in great delight, waved them between Daddy and me, and said, “Guess you’re not in Kansas anymore, big sis!”

  Daddy grabbed the bag from Dizzy with his metal pinchers and threw it into the trash can at the bottom of the stairwell. Then he gently grabbed my shoulders with his hands (one metal, one bone) and said, “We’re trusting you to keep your head on, sister.”

  “Yes, sir,” I assured him. “I’ve kept it on so far, and I’m not about to lose it now.”

  He nodded in relief and patted my back. Just behind him Dizzy was making a gagging gesture and pointing to a sign with rainbows and pink triangles that read, “Harmony, the NBU Gay and Lesbian Society, welcomes you to our campus.”

  She came over and whispered, “I’ll tell Papa Great they have a society for you.”

  I rolled my wide eyes. Even her teasing couldn’t stop the gnawing that had begun in my gut. I was overwhelmed by the new names and faces; the boys cut out of granite, lugging my belongings up three flights of stairs; and the talk of politics and sex at every turn. Was someone burning incense? I peered into an open dorm room where a girl and a guy were smoking cloves and tapping their feet to a folksy-sounding song. There was a black tapestry over the window, with a picture of a grinning skeleton wearing a top hat, and it blocked out the afternoon sunlight.

  Suddenly I was afraid to climb the three flights of stairs to my new home. I stood at the bottom of the stairwell as if paralyzed and watched my family clomp up ahead of me. Was I up for this? Should I run back to the University of South Carolina and beg them to return my scholarship? Cousin Randy, here I come! Football, cockfighting— don’t start without me!

  Dizzy looked back and then ran back down and squeezed my elbow.

  “You can do this, Ad,” she said. “You’ve been waiting your whole life for this.” I looked my sister in the eye and bit my bottom lip to ward off the fear. When she offered her arm, I took it and held it all the way up the cold concrete stairs.

  The cinder-block walls in my dorm room seemed gray and sad. Twenty-six thousand dollars a year in tuition for cinder-block walls? Ruthie and I had coordinated our room in a soothing periwinkle and white, and Mama had made some adorable curtains that she draped around our one and only window to brighten the place up. After we frantically hung posters and pictures and piled notebooks and pens on our little wooden desks, the room warmed up a little. Mama, Dizzy, and Lou spent time fussing over the organization of my closet drawers, racing to get me settled before the convocation ceremony, while Ruthie hung pictures around the room of prom and college parties she and her boyfriend had attended together.

  Ruthie’s hometown boyfriend, Tag Eisley, had come along with her parents to settle her in. Tag was a junior at the University of North Carolina, and Ruthie had already circled in red on her desk calendar all of the game weekends during which she would drive down to Chapel Hill to visit him. They had dated since her freshman year in high school. Now he and Daddy paced and bristled at the invitations to fraternity rush parties that upperclassman boys were handing out up and down the halls.

  “Come on by tonight,” they would say as they slid the flyers under the doors.

  Ruthie hugged Tag hard after crumpling each invitation and tossing it into the trash.

  “I won’t be needing these,” she said.

  Great, I thought. Ruthie’s going to be no fun.

  A bulky upperclass girl named Beryl Dunlap dropped by to introduce herself as our small-group leader during orientation. She sported a yellow men’s polo tucked into red plastic workout pants. Out of her crinkly-sounding pocket, she pulled a flyer for some kind of athletic team tryout.

  “Play lacrosse?” she asked.

  Huh? Never heard of it.

  “I don’t think so,” I told Beryl, who had been playing ever since her sophomore year at Miss Porter’s.

  “I’ll pick you ladies up in an
hour and a half and escort you to the convocation,” she said. “It is best,” she announced to all parents, “if you say your good-byes before then.”

  Tears filled Mama’s eyes when Daddy said, “It’s time, Greta.” She put the last sweater neatly in my drawer and could not even look me in the eye to bid me farewell. I reached across the threshold and hugged her. “It’s okay, Mama. I love you, too, and I’m going to be just fine. Don’t worry.”

  “You’ll go to the cafeteria and eat something after convocation,” she urged. “It’s open until seven fifteen.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

  “I saw the menu,” she said. “They’re going to have lasagna and green-bean casserole, and the salad bar looks really fresh. And I left you some tomatoes in your minifridge and even some leftover Mexican casserole that I brought up in the cooler, and there’s a microwave down the hall by the lounge.”

  “I’ll eat. It’s a primary need. Don’t fret.”

  I could tell that she just didn’t know what to say or what physical gesture to give to express the joy and sadness this moment brought to her. I guessed that she was thinking of every diaper she had changed, every runny nose she had wiped, every multiplication table she had called out, and every science project she had stewed over, and now she could hardly bear the rite of passage that was before her firstborn.

  I kissed her on the cheek. “Mama, I’ll be okay.”

  Though Lou didn’t fully understand what was going on, she knew enough to hold my hand tightly all the way down the steps and out the dorm to the station wagon. Dizzy understood exactly what was happening, but she had more pressing issues to attend to.

  “I’m starving,” she called to Mama and Daddy as she puckered in the mountain air and reapplied her jet-black lipstick. “Can we stop at that Hardee’s on the way to the highway?”