When I took Willa to pick some of Mama’s tomatoes and smell the flowers in Mae Mae’s rose garden, I chuckled to see how she planted her nose as deep as it could go into the center of an open bloom to enjoy the fragrance. All I could see was the back of her head and her little ears while she breathed in the yellow and pink blossoms that the summer heat had opened.
When I took Willa to the Kmart, I couldn’t stop her from waving to the stranger in line behind us. “I’m Willa,” she would say with a coquettish grin. Then she’d hold up her fingers and count. “And I’m one, two, three years old!”
One afternoon, a migrant worker who stood behind us in the checkout line grinned back at the little girl and whispered something in Spanish that I assumed was sinister. As he scratched his unshaven chin with the tips of his dirt-encrusted fingernails, I shot him a cold look before studying his face: small dark eyes, scar in the center of his nose, mullet.
“C’mon, let’s go,” I said sharply to Willa. Then I grabbed the receipt from the checkout lady and hurried past the candy machines and the grimy plastic rocking horse that I had told Willa she could ride after we’d finished our shopping.
When we were unlocking the car door, Willa cried, “Horsey ride!”
Then she threw her sippy cup onto the filthy asphalt that was cracking in the summer heat and screamed, “You promised horsey!”
“Not now, girl,” I said as I buckled her tightly into her car seat.
“You mustn’t talk to strangers, Willa. They’re dangerous.” Of course, Willa had no way of understanding, and she kicked and screamed in disappointment until we reached her neighborhood.
When we got home, I gave her a Popsicle as a consolation gift and rocked her on the porch until she fell asleep in my arms.
Willa was the only person I could stand coming into physical contact with. And I held the little girl tightly for the rest of the afternoon and wept in anger at the terror that now framed my thoughts.
I visited Georgianne and seven-month-old Baby Peach in the late afternoons. Georgianne lived out beyond the mill village in a new little subdivision where all of the cookie-cutter homes looked as though they were built out of paper and might tip over in the next big storm. We would sit on the back patio of the house and blow bubbles or fill a plastic pool with water and watch Baby Peach splash around in it until his fingertips shriveled up like raisins and the mosquitoes started to bite.
Neither of us talked about the elephants in the kitchen as Georgianne prepared a casserole in her Pyrex dish. That is, Georgianne’s derailed education and defunct debutante status and my nightmare of a first year as I continued my schooling and squinted in the spotlight of the Camellia Club of stinky old Williamstown.
My emotions were mixed as I watched Georgianne boil the macaroni for another batch of tuna surprise or wipe little Peach’s runny nose for the umpteenth time of the day.
As sad as I was for Georgianne’s change of plans, Baby Peach was a dear, and I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I even brought him gifts: a rattle from the dollar store or a stuffed animal from Kmart. It was obvious that he was going to be bright like his mother. He was so alert and already learning to crawl. Just yesterday he’d planted his fat little feet on the ground and lifted up his rear in a pike position as if he would prefer to walk if he could just get himself upright.
When Big Peach came home from work at the tractor company, he would kiss Georgianne softly and tickle his son’s underarms until he turned red in the face and wet his diaper. Georgianne never seemed to tire of lugging him back to the changing table or bathing him or reading him nonsensical books as he cackled in his crib before bedtime. Was the hole in Georgianne’s heart filled now? Was the itch scratched? At times it appeared so, but I didn’t have the nerve to ask her straight out.
Now Mama could tell that something was wrong, but she wasn’t very good at talking, so how could she pry when I was closed tighter than a periwinkle snail? Instead, she busied herself on my behalf by cooking my favorite summer dishes: tomato pie, sweet creamed corn, and peach ice cream. She cut beautiful blue hydrangea blooms from the yard and put them in a vase on my bedside table and invited me on a trip to the outlet mall in Myrtle Beach to shop for sundresses. I declined the invitation. There were too many mirrors in dressing rooms. And when it was just the two of us rocking in the hammock as the sun went down beyond the marsh, I couldn’t bear to explain my despair. It would break many places in Greta Piper’s carefully guarded heart.
My childhood friend Shannon also could tell that something was different, and she had the gumption to come right out with it.
Shannon was not an official debutante. Her parents were fairly new to town. That is, they arrived fifteen years ago. But she was invited to some of the social engagements because she was friends with me, Jif, and the others, and we often added her to the guest list.
Perhaps because Shannon had “found Jesus,” she knew how to cut right to the heart of any matter. So one day when she and I were in the powder room at the country club, full from shrimp salad and Jell-O molds, she asked me, “What’s wrong with you, Adelaide? Something has happened. I know it.”
I was so tired of pretending that I broke right down on the pink-and-green-striped love seat and went into a crying frenzy right by a rack of golf clubs.
“Can’t say,” I said to Shannon, who gently patted my shoulders until Mrs. Kitteridge came to the door to announce that our ride was waiting for us.
“That’s all right, Mrs. Kitteridge,” Shannon said. “We’ll just walk.”
And so we sauntered the two miles to our neighborhood together as I recounted what happened to me on that clear night in May and all the rest of what had burst my bubble last year at NBU while the pink sandals that Mama had just bought nipped sharply at my heels.
Shannon just listened and wept for me from time to time during the account. I was greatly relieved to tell the story to someone I trusted.
Shannon had been my closest childhood friend, and no matter how much of a Jesus freak she had become, she still had a backstage pass into my head.
“How awful, Adelaide,” Shannon said, “that you had to go through that. It was wrong. What that boy did to you was wrong. I’m so sorry.”
What-that-boy-did-to-you-was-wrong. These words were like a flashlight in the shadowy corridors of my mind. I had spent so much of the last two months blaming myself for what had happened, but to hear that it was someone else’s fault was a great reprieve. It felt true somehow.
And it was contrary to the voice that chided me most days and nights.
I watched a blue jay take flight from a magnolia tree, and a little piece of hope rose up inside me.
Shannon said, “I know I’ve pushed too hard on this religion thing with you before.” (We had missed the turn to Shannon’s house and were going to continue this conversation the six blocks more toward my home.) “But I earnestly believe that God can carry you through this.”
God, I thought to myself. I had a fuzzy memory of a sentimental Jesus cradling a lamb in His arms from a poster hanging in my childhood Sunday school class. I had not thought about Him in a long time, and I wondered if what Shannon anchored her life upon these days was actually real and could help me in some way.
I had resented my friend for overhauling her life a few years ago for what Jif and I called the “God Squad”—a group of college-aged men and women that dropped by our high school from time to time to invite the students to church and to mountain-climbing retreats at Windy Gap.
“Go, God! Beat the vices!” Jif and I cheered as we smoked cigarettes in her basement after the high school football games, and I imagined those zealous college folks jumping beneath Shannon’s window in cheerleading uniforms and megaphones, coaxing her into their fanatical game.
Shannon had been drawn to the God Squad almost instantly after a knee injury on the soccer field that would blow a month of her junior year of high school and cost her the athletic scholarship to Clemson she had always wa
nted. Members of the God Squad would show up in Shannon’s hospital room with her favorite candy bars and silly gag gifts. Then later, after she was on the mend, they carted her to the soccer games both in and out of town so that she could cheer her teammates on to the regional championships.
I had missed my best friend so much, had almost felt abandoned by her after her conversion. Shannon was no fun after that. She wouldn’t gossip or tell a dirty joke or go to an R-rated movie or smoke cigarettes with me from time to time in the basement of Jif ’s house. And she had evangelized up a storm whenever we were together. She carried a Bible around in her backpack, for goodness’ sake, and prayed out loud whenever I was worried about a test or having a bad hair day.
Finally, I avoided her at school and stopped returning her phone calls.
“He’s the one, Ad,” Shannon said now. “He can restore your soul with a new kind of peace.”
Peace. Despite her Bible-thumping diatribe, this was a word I had gained a much greater appreciation for now that I was without a shred of it. I woke up more than once in the middle of the night in a panic that made my heart beat madly until I oriented myself in the blackness of my hometown bedroom by making out the silhouettes of my bookshelf: my Madame Alexander dolls and a framed print of the Charleston High Battery where I’d taken many long walks during summers at Governor’s School. On my bedside table I’d see the form of the small King James Bible—a baptism gift—with its silver pages that stuck together and my name embossed in gold on the bottom right cover. If Mama had left the porch light on for the night, the silver pages would glisten faintly in the darkness. I was not sure if I had ever opened it.
It was a long walk, and my new sandals were now pinching my toes and tightening around my ankles. Stopping to loosen them, I saw the glint of light during our heart-to-heart quickly eclipsed by something else—the voice that told me I was of no significance and responsible for my violation had returned, and it overshadowed the glimpse of hope I was squinting to see.
“I don’t know about that stuff,” I said to Shannon as we reached the driveway to my home.
Shannon looked dejected. Her life had changed forever at the Young Life camp in Colorado where she had so often told me that she officially “accepted Christ.” She would have walked all the way to the country club and back to continue our discussion and share her true love with me. She was more excited than Uncle Tinka with his Bizway plan.
I was thankful for her friendship; it was a safe place to reveal what was going on in my heart. But I couldn’t see entertaining all of that born-again Christian strangeness at a time like this. Aside from Shannon and the God Squad that had taken her away, all I knew about vocal Christians were misfits and hypocrites like Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker or the strange man on the television on Sunday morning who interrupted whatever I had hoped to watch with his dramatic preaching and healing scenes that seemed more theatrical than holy. Papa Great had been ripped off by a preacher at a tent revival outside Williamstown, and he vowed never to attend church again. And it was common knowledge that Father Henderson, the former rector of St. Anne’s Episcopal Church, had a history of slipping into the strip clubs outside Myrtle Beach.
But most of all, I didn’t want to give up my life—the way I felt Shannon had a few years back. It would not be me to refer to Jesus as though He were sitting right beside me, stroking the strands of my hair. It would feel silly to pray that my jewel would fade away or that I would write a good English paper or have a nice time at the deb luncheons. In my heart of hearts, I sensed that I would have to give up too much to follow Shannon’s path, and my heart recoiled at the very idea of it.
All too aware of my vulnerable state, I feared being sucked into something that would leave me worse off than before.
“I’m just in a tough spot,” I said, “but I’ll find my way through.”
“A Rescuer exists,” Shannon said lovingly to me as she patted my shoulders. “I’m not going to push, Ad. That’s backfired in the past, I’ll admit, but I’m here to tell you about it any time of the day or night.”
“Thanks,” I said, suddenly recalling those countless summer hours we’d spent in Shannon’s garage, reenacting Charlotte’s Web during our elementary years. And how, after reading Black Beauty, we spent most of fourth grade pretending that we were horses and whinnying around the playground in our shared imaginary world during recess. We had even started our first periods within weeks of each other the summer between sixth and seventh grades.
“I guess we’re women now,” I had said to Shannon when Mama took us to the Kmart to pick out maxi pads.
“Yep!” Shannon said, giggling as she placed the bulky plastic package in our cart. “It’s official.”
Then we asked Mama to buy us a Diet Coke as we stood in the checkout line, forsaking our usual childhood request for a candy bar.
We slurped the bitter drink all the way home, wincing at the aftertaste as if to toast our bodies, which were quietly undergoing the great transformation beneath our T-shirts and cutoff shorts.
I wanted to be a child again. Wanted to be swinging in the hammock with Juliabelle or in Shannon’s garage, pretending to be Charlotte weaving Wilbur out of a fix with two simple words. But who could turn back the clock? Or better yet, allow me a second go at things? If only I could blot out the last year and start over. But I was spoiled. A strawberry tart stain on a white dress. Not just my body, but my mind too. My thoughts were out of control, and there was no way I could bridle them, much less express them on paper in what I had hoped would be my life’s purpose.
I hugged my sweet, familiar friend at the edge of my driveway as the bees buzzed in and out of Mama’s hydrangea blooms.
“Just let me melt down from time to time.”
“Count on it,” Shannon said. “You’re a bright and wonderful person, Adelaide.”
“I thought I was headed somewhere,” I said, moving toward the front steps of her home. “What a fool I am.”
“But if you’d just—”
Stepping toward the threshold, my ears shut down. I waved a final time, then walked into the house, the straps from my pink sandals popping the blisters beneath my heels.
“Adelaide!” Mama exclaimed. “You’ve scuffed up your new shoes, and you’re bleeding on the Oriental rug. Run to the kitchen, sweetheart. I’ll meet you there.”
That night, Mama reluctantly agreed to host a dinner with what Daddy excitedly called some “Bizway diamonds” from Conway. I assumed that this meant some folks who had made it to the top of the business, but I kept picturing them as large round-cut stones who’d pierce the fabric of our antique chairs when they sat down to teach Daddy and Uncle Tinka the tricks of the trade.
“Pick the seven most influential people you know,” said one of the diamonds, named Big Bugs Murphy.
He and his wife had driven up in the longest Mercedes I had ever seen. It took up half the driveway with its sleek white body and gold hubcaps that looked like the big coins I got for Willa at the Chuck E. Cheese in Myrtle Beach.
Mama feigned interest in the discussion, though I could tell she was more preoccupied with the fact that Bugs kept his elbows on the table and slurped his she-crab soup through the gap between his teeth. And when Mama served the beef tenderloin, Big Bugs’s wife, Belinda, removed a piece of neon-green chewing gum from her mouth and set it on the side of Mama’s gold-rimmed bone china plate. Good gravy, what manners!
Escaping to my room with a slice of mud pie, I heard them slowly migrate to the living room, where they talked vitamins and acquiring points and graduating first to precious metals and then to gems.
I couldn’t resist pulling out my journal that night and searching my desk drawer for a nice ink pen to write with. Instead of thoughts or poems, I wrote questions about the God whom Shannon had brought up to me that afternoon. The God on the shoulder of St. Christopher on the medal I carried despite my unbelief. The God I had prayed to as a little girl each night and sang to with all my might duri
ng the one week of vacation Bible school I attended in grade school. The God someone—whoever had given me the silver-paged Bible—had hoped I’d get to know.
Yes, there was a part of me that worked to resist Him, but Shannon had infected me with the idea of hope this afternoon, and I felt an undeniable draw to dissect the idea with the tip of my pencil.
As I wrote, I felt sure that my questions were nothing new under the sun, but naming them kept me from exploring Shannon’s post-saved world.
1. If there is a good and powerful God, how come there is so much pain and grief in the world? Even good people suffer (i.e., war and Daddy’s lost arm and lost friends; Cousin Mina, whose one and only child was stillborn; Brother Benton, who died in the name of fraternity hazing; and Peter Carpenter, who didn’t mean to hurt anyone).
2. Why is it such a mystery—the whole Jesus Messiah thing? The language is so cryptic. Why can’t they just say it in plain English?
3. What about Genesis? If the world is only 7,000 years old, then how do you explain the Tyrannosaurus rex?
4. I mean, Jonah and the whale? Noah’s ark? What is a thinking mind supposed to do with these tall tales?
5. Is every other religion wrong? Do you mean to tell me that the Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus are all barking up the wrong trees?
6. And what about all of those bloodthirsty Crusades? Not to mention the modern-day hypocrites who steal money and molest children.
7. What does that horrific-sounding “die to self” phrase mean?
Closing my journal, I glanced over at that fancy Bible on my dresser. I flipped it open and saw the words scratched on one of the thin paper pages in Mae Mae’s handwriting, “To Adelaide on the day of her christening. From Juliabelle, November 1981.”
Adelaide Piper Page 13
