Adelaide Piper

by Beth Webb Hart

  “I probably shouldn’t,” I said. “I’ve got to work on that paper for McSweeney tonight, and my time is ticking on a study room.” I had reserved one of the private rooms in the library, and I envisioned my stacks of papers and reference books as they lay open and sprawled across the table.

  Also, I was still shaky with hunger. I’d gotten only a fourth of the way through my pasta primavera before the waitress whisked it away, and I was already planning a trip to the Hardee’s drive-through on the way to the library.

  Devon pointed to the sky, and I saw hundreds of stars staring back at us.

  “I’ll have you back before the clock strikes ten,” he said, “or I’ll turn myself into a pumpkin.”

  Suddenly I remembered Jif and Ruthie waving me good-bye earlier in the evening with their fingers crossed.

  “Now, don’t be so uptight,” Ruthie had advised. “Let yourself have some fun, Adelaide. It’s okay.”

  I had put in a lot of preparation for this date to have it over already.

  “All right,” I said to Devon as we walked toward his car. “Perhaps it will inspire me.”

  He drove me up the hill in his old Volvo station wagon. The telescope rattled and scraped across the back window as we made our way up the gravelly incline. Much to my embarrassment, my stomach began to groan in protest of the Tully Dorm Diet, and I felt a little light-headed.

  “It’s a clear night,” he said, not seeming to notice the noise. “Perfect conditions for stargazing.”

  “Great,” I said, basking in his attention and the romantic notion of peering at the stars together. If I could just get my stomach and head to hold on a little longer, I would give them what they needed in less than an hour.

  Devon set up the telescope and pointed me in the direction of Virgo. He stood behind me, gently directing me on how to use the apparatus. Yes, I could see it, the outline of the maiden who, Devon told me, announced the harvest when the sun passed through her in mid-September.

  “I’ve spotted it!” I said.

  “She’s the second-largest constellation in the sky,” he said as he spread a blanket out on the grass just outside the cemetery gates. “She’s one of the zodiacs too,” he added while pulling out a bottle of red wine from his backpack, “but I’ll let Tuttle fill you in on all of that.”

  As he unrolled two delicate glasses from a dishrag, he sheepishly admitted they were from his mother’s kitchen.

  “I’ll have just a sip,” I instructed. “I don’t really drink, and I do have to get some work done tonight.” Loosen up, Adelaide.

  I sat up Indian-style as he reclined on his elbows and the crickets called to one another in every direction. After we stared into the Milky Way in an attempt to catch a falling star, he leaned in to kiss me and I moved away instinctively. I was startled by this sudden move, and things were beginning to go a little too fast for my taste. I hadn’t kissed anyone since Luigi Agnolucci, and that was two summers ago.

  Did I get a fear of physical intimacy from my mother, or was I right to want to take things slow? Shannon believed in abstinence before marriage. But Ruthie was physically active with Tag—at least I assumed so after seeing a condom fall out of his wallet one day while he was buying us ice cream in downtown Troutville. I hadn’t made up my mind about such things, but I knew it would have to be a serious relationship. But one kiss can’t hurt, I thought, and when he leaned in again, I responded nervously.

  We took a few more sips of wine, and he smoked a cigarette, which seemed somehow out of character. I hadn’t figured him for a smoker.

  My stomach groaned again. I needed to eat something soon. The smoke from his cigarette made my head pound, and I was beginning to think about all of the work that was waiting for me in my study room. I had reserved it only for the next twenty-four hours.

  “We’d better head back, Devon,” I said. “That paper for McSweeney is due day after tomorrow. The time is ticking in my study room.”

  When I said this, he gripped my shoulders firmly and pressed me hard into the ground.

  “That hurt,” I said, pushing him away. I was shocked at his sudden physical aggression, and I gritted my teeth and said, “Let me up. Get off of me!”

  But he didn’t. And he didn’t look me in the eye when his fists pounded my chin as he ripped open the top of my dress. The metal taste of blood filled my mouth, and my jaw ached with pain. When I screamed, he punched me in the stomach and pinned my neck down with his forearm. I could feel the blood from my lip sliding down my cheek and into my hair as I gasped for air.

  It was over in a matter of minutes. He had taken my virginity away by force in no time at all while I hit his back and scratched at his face before giving up and going somewhere else in my mind: the salt-marsh creek behind my house where I caught my first spot-tailed bass and put its slippery body back into the water. Daddy had removed the plastic portion of his hand to reveal the metal pinchers in an effort to get the hook out of the fish’s mouth. “Hurry now, Daddy,” I had called. “Get it back in the water!”

  “Let’s get you home,” Devon said after standing up, adjusting his pants, and rubbing his hands together as if to keep warm. “I’ll give you a lift back down to campus.” He nodded toward his car, where the telescope was still pointing in the direction of the stars.

  I kept my face buried in the quilted blanket and let out a muffled cry.

  “Get away from me,” I said when he extended his hand to help me up. “I wouldn’t dare get in a car with you!”

  “C’mon, now.” And I could tell that he couldn’t even recall my name in all the excitement. “How are you going to get back to the dorm?”

  “Get away from me,” I said again with an intense wrath in my voice that did not register with him.

  “Suit yourself.” He shook his head as if I were a supreme disappointment. Then he drove back down the hill, his taillights blinking like a warning that comes too late.

  When I found myself in complete darkness, I wept and wept for what seemed like hours while a dog far away let out a howl. The crickets were making music, and wisteria buds were forming in the vines that lined the cemetery.

  I gathered the quilt around my shoulders when the security guard made his way up the hill on his usual late-night rounds to lock the campus gates. His flashlight blinded me for a moment; then I sat up and waved him toward me. He did not seem altogether surprised to find me there, and he ushered me to his car and down to the infirmary after guessing what had happened by my muffled weeping into the quilt.

  Ms. Eugenia, the nurse, met us there in her bathrobe.

  I squinted in the fluorescent light of the examining room, the grass-stained quilt draping me like a shroud.

  It was the death of many things.

  I had studied William Blake’s The Songs of Innocence and The Songs of Experience in Penelope Russo’s class, and I knew now what they were about. My virginity was gone in one brutal moment, and so were my wide-eyed innocence and trust of other human beings. What would move in, in their place, was fear, anxiety, and bitterness. These things were taking root in my heart even as I waited for Ms. Eugenia to direct me.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

  “No. I want to be examined by the doctor, then just go to my room. I have a paper due tomorrow.” I felt a sense of urgency to turn back the clock and remember what had been my focus just minutes before I was raped.

  “The doctor is out of town until tomorrow afternoon,” Ms. Eugenia said. “Why don’t you take a bath and spend the night here in the infirmary?” She handed me two pills that she said would calm my nerves.

  “I want to go back to my room. Isn’t there a backup doctor?”

  “I’ll write your professor an excuse,” she said as she reached to pat my shoulder.

  Jumping back from her, I cried, “If there is no doctor around, please let me call my roommate to come get me.”

  “All right,” Ms. Eugenia conceded, “if that will make you feel better. But y
ou should come back tomorrow to see the doctor. They usually don’t, but you really should.”

  Jif and Ruthie picked me up within ten minutes. They took me home and sat in the bathroom with me while I took a long, piercing-hot shower.

  In less than three weeks my folks would be here to take me home for the summer. Mama had already sent me copies of the debutante tea and luncheon invitations, and she was making a scrapbook of them and ordering dresses from Talbot’s and Laura Ashley for the occasions.

  I pondered all of this as Jif and Ruthie quietly guided me into my pajamas before I curled up in my creaky bed and stared at the grooves around the blocks in the wall.

  Depression set in like fog on the mountain peaks as my freshman year concluded. My period came two days after my date with Devon Hunt, and I didn’t return to see the doctor at the health clinic. The books sat in the library of my reserved study room gathering dust all week, and I barely passed my exams and received a D on my McSweeney paper, which I changed at the last moment to an examination of the poems of Marianne Moore.

  8

  Debutante Summer

  When Daddy picked me up at NBU the last Saturday in May, he was too excited about a successful Bizway meeting he’d had in Roanoke the night before to notice the dull glaze over my eyes. Not that I would have let him see it anyway.

  My daddy! He pulled me close with his stump and his arm on the front steps of Tully, where he had pulled the station wagon up to the loading zone and opened the wide, wood-paneled trunk door. He smelled like a mixture of aftershave and vitamins, and I would have wailed if I’d let my guard down. But I didn’t.

  He’d gone back to the habit of pinning up the long sleeve of the amputated arm instead of wearing the prosthetic, and when he nuzzled my head, I could feel the safety pin and the fabric from his blue oxford across the back of my head and then on my ear when he pulled back to examine me.

  It had been three weeks since the rape. I had failed most of my finals, jeopardizing my scholarship, and had managed to gain back a fair portion of the weight that I’d lost on the Tully Diet, and though he didn’t say a word, I could see a look of concern register on his face.

  “You all right, sister?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. Just ready to get home.”

  “Now, I never thought those words would come out of your mouth.”

  Then he loaded our car with my typewriter, books, and hanging clothes, laying them carefully on top of the Bizway vitamins, air filters, and cleaning supplies that took up a good portion of the trunk.

  There were no handsome young bucks carting my stuff down the three flights of stairs and into my car this time. Just my one-armed daddy and me, straining to carry the boxes of books and sweaters through the dorm doors as pockets of giggly freshmen hugged one another good-bye. I took one glance around at the colonnade and the grass, which seemed as though someone had spray-painted it a vibrant shade of jade each night while term papers and coffee beans danced in our heads. If I got word over the summer that my scholarship was gone, I’d probably never come back.

  On the drive down the mountains, we listened to training cassettes of Bizway gems who had built lucrative businesses by signing up folks underneath them who purchased products. At one point Daddy pounded the steering wheel and said, “Now, doesn’t this excite you, Adelaide?”

  Excite me? I thought. Winning the Nobel Prize in poetry wouldn’t excite me at this point. I was all but numb to the core.

  As Daddy talked about the plan and how he wanted to make a run for it, wanted to become a diamond and collect a $12,000 paycheck every month (not to mention the speaking fees), I tuned out and wondered how I could avoid revealing to Mama and Juliabelle what had happened to me. They would be the two to sense that something was wrong, so I’d have to be a heck of an actress to convince them otherwise.

  When we pulled into the driveway of my white clapboard house that afternoon, I was struck with the thick, moist air and the syrupy scent of jasmine that was in full bloom along the sides of the house and the front porch. Lou jumped up from the rocking chair and ran out to the car barefoot, her face lit up like a jack-o’-lantern.

  “Adelaide!”

  She ran up to the passenger side and put her hands on the window before she jumped up and down.

  “She’s here!” she shouted to the house, and in seconds Mama and Dizzy were running down the porch, clapping and smiling and saying, “Welcome home!”

  When I got out of the car, they crowded around me, even Dizzy, and embraced me. They smelled like perfume and tomatoes and cigarettes and pluff mud, and it was all I could do to bite my lip and try not to fall apart in front of them.

  Daddy gave everyone a job in unpacking the car, so I was relieved that I didn’t have to look anyone in the eye too long.

  It was Juliabelle who took notice of me a few minutes later. She caught my eye that afternoon as she was packing up Papa Great to move him out to Pawleys Island for the summer while Mae Mae and Mama went debbing with me. I was hauling two pillowcases of dirty clothes when I spotted her running across my grandparents’ front garden and over to mine to greet me. She had a Pyrex bowl full of pickled creek shrimp that she’d made for me.

  “Adelaide!” she said. “Look at you, child!”

  She hugged me, dirty clothes and all, rocking me back and forth in her skinny arms. I could feel her jaw working her bubble gum, and the sweet smell of it reminded me of all that was good about my home life.

  I thought about the St. Christopher medal and the prayers she’d offered for me daily, and I vowed I would do all in my power to keep the awful secret of my defilement from her.

  Then she cupped her pink palms around my flabby cheeks and took a look into my eyes. At first, I turned away toward Mama’s hydrangea blooms, but she wouldn’t let me loose. Then I glanced back at her and tried to make my face say, “Nothing. Nothing is wrong here.”

  She stepped back and put a clenched fist over her mouth and blinked hard. It was the same thing I’d seen her do the summer she spotted a gator that had drifted out of the river and into the surf at Pawleys Island. And she had done it once when Papa Great told Mae Mae to fire the gardener who had shown up late.

  “Adelaide,” she said through her lips, “you come talk to me when you can.”

  I shook my head as though I hadn’t the faintest idea of what she was talking about and gulped back the tears. I had never been so relieved to see the round shadow of Papa Great as it surfaced on the driveway.

  I turned away from her to greet him.

  “Well, the college girl’s home,” he said, pinching his nostrils together before snorting once for good measure.

  He patted my back, then looked me up and down and said, “Well, gotta lose that weight before the debutante ball. Adelaide Rutledge Graydon had a slim figure, you know?”

  I didn’t know whether to slap him or hug him for changing the subject.

  “Hope the year treated you right,” he said; then he looked over to the Cadillac that was packed to the brim with Co-Colas and bright linen blazers and fishing rods and buckets.

  “’Bout ready to head on?” he said to Juliabelle.

  “Yes, sir,” she said as he started back toward the car.

  “Come visit us when you get a break from all the parties, Adelaide,” he said.

  Juliabelle put her long fingers back on my chin. “I’ll give you a few days. But then I ’spect you to come out to the island and talk.”

  I looked beyond her at the two fingers of smog billowing out of the paper mill and then down at the cracks in the driveway where the spider grass was pushing through the bricks and oyster shells. Papa Great was starting the engine, and she reached to the top of the station wagon where she’d rested the bowl of shrimp, handed it to me, and walked back across the garden.

  Before I could stop them, tears were streaming down my face, but Daddy was so busy telling Mama about the Bizway meeting that Lou was the only one to notice me.

  “A-Ad?” she sai
d. “What’s wrong?” She looked up at me with three pronounced worry lines across her shining forehead.

  “Just missed you is all,” I said. Then I handed her a pillowcase of laundry. “Want to help me wash clothes?”

  I didn’t look back at the Cadillac as it drove out of the historic district and toward the bridge. But I could imagine Juliabelle in the backseat by the fishing tackle, her big dark eyes bearing down on me.

  When I walked into the house, Daddy was throwing one of Mama’s ripe tomatoes against the wall in the kitchen. It hit the bright striped wallpaper by the pantry and slid down the blue and yellow lines, landing right at Mama’s feet.

  “You’re a fool to jeopardize your job, Zane Piper,” Mama was whispering harshly to him. “When he finds out, then you tell me where we’ll be!”

  They both looked up at me as I tried to make myself scarce and head toward the stairwell.

  “Adelaide,” Mama called to me in a sweet, strained voice, “I’ll have your lunch ready in just a minute, darlin’.”

  It helped to be home for the summer. There were times when I could forget for whole minutes about what happened with Devon Hunt on the campus hillside, but the anxiety never left me completely. I could get lost watching the dust dance in the morning sun that poured through my bedroom window or Mama tending to her tomato vines, but when someone tapped on my door with a breakfast invitation, dread seized me once again. It ran up my spine and made every muscle in my back tighten.

  When I looked out into the kudzu-covered field that met my backyard and ate everything but the marsh, I remembered learning in a high-school botany class that the unyielding vine grows a foot each day during the summer months and sixty feet each year, snuffing the life out of trees that need sunlight and overtaking any abandoned vehicle or building in its path. I knew I was a meager tree in the center of that field, and I had no way of stopping the vine of fear from darkening my days.