Adelaide Piper

by Beth Webb Hart

  “Wonder if there’s a good vegan diet out there,” Jif pondered as the fireflies began to light up the front yard.

  “Don’t start,” I said. “The answer to everyone’s problems is not in a thinner waistline.”

  “Seriously,” Harriet said as she handed us each another tasteless molasses cookie. “I’m built just like my dad, so there is no way of getting rid of this barrel-on-stilts shape.”

  Jif pulled out a half-eaten Twix Bar from her pocketbook and said, “If I’m going to be bad, it might as well have some flavor.”

  The three of us grinned while Mrs. Hartness called out from the kitchen to offer us some lemonade.

  Now, as the sun made its way down, Randy and I made our way onto the sandy backyard, where we shagged barefoot and without reserve beneath the string of white lights that were draped from her roof to the blooming magnolia trees that framed the end of her garden. Randy had more moves than an eel in a croaker sack. He was spinning and dipping me, and I would have bet anything he’d been practicing with his mama.

  Harriet looked great. She’d pulled her hair up in a free-form twist and sported a simple black sundress that was cut just so in the back so that you could see a tattoo on her left shoulder: a “yin and yang.” Much murmur commenced about this among the parents and older social folks who danced around her in their preppy madras pants and floral skirts. But it didn’t seem to bother Harriet. Rod, the Blockbuster guy, had become quite adept during their shag lessons last week, and he led her around the backyard all night as she stepped-two-three with pride and smiled toward her grandmother.

  Marguerite presided over the party in a white linen suit. Three heavy gold bangles accented her right arm, and her silver helmet hair was styled just so. Even she took off her sandals and danced with Rod, then a few deb fathers, as we gathered around the punch table to whisper and laugh.

  Shannon was there with Teddy Mee from Harvest Time, and they seemed to be having a great time too. As a group of townspeople gathered around him to hear about his mission, Shannon pulled me aside and said, “How are you doing?”

  “Okay. Even said a prayer this afternoon.”

  “Sounds promising,” she said, then squeezed my wrist.

  Randy came up behind me and said to Shannon, “May I have my date for a minute?” Then he grabbed my hand and pulled me through the garden and the covering of live oaks and magnolias and toward Marguerite’s dock, where the harbor lights glistened across the glassy water as the last pink streaks of daylight faded.

  “Look,” he said, sitting down and patting a place beside him before he dipped his toes into the water. Three porpoises were feeding along the marsh bank near the dock, and they would slap their tails along the shallow water, trapping the schools of mullet for their sunset dinner. The seagulls and terns were flapping furiously toward their roosts, but the pelican took her sweet time above us. She flapped her wings for a moment, then let the wind carry her as long as it could before she exerted herself again.

  The coast guard station trumpet rang out taps, and I sat down beside Randy and dipped my feet into the warm water. The ripples from my ankles grew larger and larger across the glassy surface.

  “Could you ever get tired of this?” Randy whispered, interlocking his large fingers with mine.

  The porpoises zigzagged from one bank to another as we looked on.

  The thick Low-Country air hung around us like the Spanish moss framing our vista, and if I didn’t look behind me at the puffing towers of mill waste, I might have confused this with a subtropical paradise.

  Randy turned to face me.

  Randy. Mmm. He had become a man, and only now was I cluing in. His shoulders had broadened during the last year, and he was at least a foot taller than me now. He had even been recruited as a second-string kicker for the University of South Carolina football team, and I had seen him practicing in the Williamstown High School field in the early morning, kicking the oblong ball through the goalpost time and time again.

  And he was a good man. He took his little brother and Lou fishing every Sunday afternoon, and Mae Mae or Mama was always calling him over to fix things: Lou’s bent bicycle rim or the leaking dishwasher. Even Papa Great had noticed his worth, and with no male heirs in the direct line, he was bending Randy’s ear about joining the Piper Mill after college.

  Despite my weight gain and my skittishness, he continued to put the full-court press on me. He was as loyal as a Labrador, and I was grateful to have him as my debutante escort. I hadn’t ever felt anything more than friendship for him, but I wondered if that would change.

  “Come home for good, Adelaide,” he said to me as the porpoises blew air like breathless swimmers.

  The Catalinas were singing, “Well, you’re more than a number in my little red book. You’re more than a one-night stand. Babe, I think to tell you that I’ve been hooked. You’re more than a number, baby, in my little red book.” The dull roar of the party wafted through the oak trees and out into the harbor.

  “Randy,” I said, but I had no idea what to say next.

  His olive-colored eyes looked down on me as though I were the football itself and he did not want to lose focus. “You can’t tell me that college in Virginia has done you any good, now, can you? What with all of the crazy stuff going on there?”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I said. And I knew that if I told it all to him, he would take me in his arms and say, “You are still the pearl for me.”

  “Transfer back to Carolina. Come home and be my girl, and I’ll build you a house on Pawleys Island and marry you, and you can write poetry until your fingers go numb.”

  A blue crab skittered sideways into the water, and I wondered if it was warm enough for molting season. If the moon was new, the timing would be right—the male crab would swing his claws and kick up sand with his hind legs to get his mate’s attention. And after she acquiesced, he would carry the female in his claws for up to a week until her shell softened and they mated. Then he’d hold her again another two days, until her back hardened and she was no longer in danger.

  “Don’t make me an offer I can’t refuse,” I said, nudging him with my elbow. (Harriet had told me the other day that Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin had married their first cousins, so it couldn’t be that bad to fall for your second.)

  “Remember that day you kissed me last summer? On your graduation?” he said.

  “Yes.” I felt a tinge of guilt for how I’d used him that way to get at the Hog.

  Randy had long eyelashes, and his green eyes glistened in the light of the harbor. Even I had to admit that with his new football physique, he really was striking. He lifted the hair off my forehead and rubbed my jewel with the tip of his thumb. “There’s not a day that’s gone by that I haven’t thought about that kiss and prayed to the good Lord to make you mine.”

  I sucked on my teeth and wondered what to say to all of this. Randy had real feelings for me, and I didn’t want to drop-kick his tender heart. Should I relax into his embrace?

  After a minute went by and I didn’t reply, he nodded. The air was so still that the no-see-um bugs were starting to nip at our scalps.

  “Just think on it,” he said, taking my hand and pulling me back through the tree covering and toward the music. “But know this: I’m going to do all that I can to convince you.”

  When we came back to the sand-filled garden, we danced. We shagged and spun and dipped until our foreheads glowed, and we traded partners and laughed and kicked at the soft grains until the last note was played and the band loaded their equipment into their shabby van.

  Randy had all but proposed to me, and I was flattered to be loved like this. If I’d lost my scholarship, I might do just what he said—move back and make this my life. It might not be the worst fate, after all.

  Shannon called me every morning and every night over the next three days, and she even left an encouraging note in my mailbox one day with a verse about not being anxious and gaining the pea
ce that passes all understanding.

  Now, I didn’t have that kind of peace, but I did manage to survive the wait for the test results. I even ate three meals a day, though every time I let my mind go back to it, my stomach churned and the vines of fretfulness tightened their hold on me.

  When the time arrived for me to contact Bernise, I rang her from the pay phone at the Piggly Wiggly before a deb luncheon at the country club.

  There I stood in my pink linen suit and pearl earrings, wiping off the gritty receiver and sliding in the proper change. Two whole minutes went by before Bernise made her way to the telephone. As I was scrounging up more change from the bottom of my purse to feed to the pay phone, she picked up the line and said, “Well, go ahead and breathe yourself a sigh of relief, ’cause they all came back negative.”

  “Negative?” I said, suddenly aware of the cars whizzing by. A truck pulled up just in front of me, and the driver began unloading cartons of Co-Colas through the side door of the grocery store.

  “You’re clean as a whistle, Adelaide.”

  “Are you serious?” I wanted to hug Bernise through the telephone. “Thank You, God!”

  “Now, stay that way for me, okay?”

  I sighed with relief, and a new hope seemed to fill my lungs as I inhaled again.

  “No problem. I can guarantee you that.”

  After hanging up the phone, I walked a few steps over to a shaft of light that was hitting the wall of the store and the concrete slab beneath the awning. And there I stood in my patent-leather pumps, the dark stains of discarded bubble gum and spilled soft drinks beneath my feet as I let the sun fall on me.

  Had God answered my prayer? Did He have a place for me in the palm of His hand? The world was a filthy and dangerous place, but there might be another side to it after all. A side where mercy and pardon existed.

  “Thank You,” I said, peering above the crumbling asphalt of the parking lot and squinting into the morning light that was cutting through the mill smog. If He was real and had reached out to me, I certainly wanted to give Him the credit He was due. Early that afternoon, Shannon and I snuck into the country-club powder room after a decadent deb lunch of honey ham, tomato pies, and blackberry cobbler with ice cream. As we were celebrating over my medical results, Jif stumbled out of one of the stalls with a pink face and watery eyes. She popped a mint into her mouth, but that could not cover up the sour smell of vomit.

  “Jif,” I said, “what were you doing in there?”

  She dabbed at her eyes with a Kleenex and straightened out her designer dress. “That lunch must have had two thousand calories,” she said, not looking at either of us straight on. “I’ve got to keep my weight down if I’m going to fit in my gown.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” I said. “You look terrific, and you could stand to put on a few pounds.”

  Jif shook her head in firm disagreement.

  “Jennifer?” Marny Ferguson’s snappy voice penetrated the bathroom door. “Time to go if—”

  “Coming,” Jif called back to her with a froggy voice.

  I stepped in front of the door and stared Jif down. As she began to look me in the eye, Marny said through the door, “Time to go if we want to make our eyebrow appointment.”

  “Chill, Marny!” I called from over my shoulder.

  “What in the world?” she said, then cleared her throat dramatically. “Who said that? Is that you, Adelaide? A deb doesn’t speak to anyone’s mother in that tone.”

  “Don’t you fall into this trap,” I said, grabbing Jif by the shoulder.

  “You look great, and you need to eat.”

  “I eat,” Jif assured me. “Just not tomato pie and blackberry cobbler with vanilla ice cream.” Then she shooed me out of the way and ran out to meet her mother.

  Shannon and I stared at each other, our eyes widening. Jif was a diet freak, but I didn’t know she was making herself sick over it.

  Marny was waiting to get a good look at me when the door opened. She stared me down like nobody’s business, as if there was something about me that had always bugged her and it was all she could do to keep a lid on it. As if my ancestry weren’t really Graydon-Piper but some backwoods brand of swamp kin who would raise a girl who mouthed off to her elders. I stared right back at her for what seemed like a whole minute until Jif pulled her away.

  “I’ll try to talk some sense into her,” I said to Shannon.

  We peered out the powder-room window as the two sets of long, skinny legs in high-heeled mules hurried out to their candy-blue Mercedes.

  Marny was a bit of a cheesy pageant gal turned Gucci mannequin, but I didn’t think she would be happy to know that her daughter was willing to puke up her lunch in the Magnolia Club bathroom to keep her weight down.

  I pictured the fashion magazines that Jif pored over regularly with the abnormally thin fashion models, and then I envisioned Jif ’s father with his scalpel, ready to slice her into perfection when it was time.

  “You could get that thing snipped,” she’d told me last March as I rubbed my jewel in the dorm-room mirror.

  She stood at the sink next to mine and examined her nose. “Dad will give me a nose job if I graduate cum laude.”

  “There is nothing wrong with your nose.”

  “Maybe a boob job, then,” she said, pushing out her thin chest. “So long as they don’t make me look fat.”

  What was more barbaric: a thirteenth-century Chinese girl bending the bones in her feet or a twentieth-century American slicing open her breasts and shoving water balloons inside them?

  “So what about meeting with the Pelzers?” Shannon asked as Jif and her mother pulled quickly out of the parking lot.

  “For Jif?”

  “No, for you,” Shannon said. “We’re celebrating your good news, remember? The summer is nearly over, and I want you to see them before you head on back to school.”

  While my grades were bad, I hadn’t gotten word about my scholarship, and I wondered where I’d be come fall. Lord of the Flies or the sweet and loyal arms of Randy, the Gamecock kicker?

  “All right,” I said, “I’ll meet with them, but I can’t promise that this whole thing is for me.”

  “I know,” she said, but I could tell that she was already hopeful her spiritual mentors would persuade me to take a walk down their well-worn path.

  When I walked out onto the terrace of the club, I spotted Mama waiting for us in the station wagon. She was writing down a grocery list of my favorite foods, since this was my last two weeks to be home (as far as she knew). As Shannon and I plopped down in the seat, the hot vinyl stuck to the backs of our legs. Mama patted me on the knee and said, “Now, think about all that you want to do before you head back to school. I want to have that Mexican casserole one night, and we could have your friends over for a picnic one afternoon. Randy said he wants to take you out someplace special.”

  I was thankful that Greta Piper was my mama. She was safe and caring, and she wanted me to be healthy and happy, and that was about it.

  “Want to cook out with us tonight?” she asked Shannon. “Zane wants to listen to the Braves game on the radio.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Shannon responded. Then I turned on the radio and found the new and horrendously maudlin Bette Midler song, “Wind Beneath My Wings.” Shannon and I belted it out all the way back to our neighborhood.

  Juliabelle was waiting for me on the back steps of my house when we pulled up. Papa Great had sent her to town to get some of Mama’s tomatoes, and she was sitting with her sun hat on her lap when we pulled up. She had a glaze of perspiration down her neck and a half-filled carton of water at her feet.

  “Not coming out, eh?” she said to me after Mama dropped me off and headed on to the Piggly Wiggly.

  “Sorry, Juliabelle,” I said, taking my place beside her on the steps. “I don’t want to talk. Nobody in the family knows. And I don’t want to upset you.”

  She bit her lip and crinkled her nose. She reached out to rub my
cheek and said, “That bad?”

  And when I felt the pads of her fingertips on my face, a grief rose up in my throat, and I went straight from composure to complete meltdown. My face turned darker than Mama’s ripest tomato, and I wept, hitting my fists on the brick steps until the skin on my knuckles was raw.

  She held my arms at my sides until I gave up my hitting and rested my head in her lap. As she rocked me, she spoke in a hushed tone, and her words were an entirely different language. A powerful one that moved fast and had a kind of strength to it, a language I could feel in my gut. I stopped my crying and listened. Her eyes were closed now, and a drop of perspiration from her chin dropped down on my forehead. I closed my eyes again, rested my head in her lap like when I was a girl, and let her strange words stream out of her mouth and wash over me like rain.

  How did she come upon that secret language? Was it making me feel better?

  Our breathing became synchronized as I listened, and I remembered where I had heard it before. It was during the one trip I’d ever taken to her house. I had been nine, and she was supposed to be keeping Dizzy, Lou, and me for a week while my folks and grandfolks went to a textile convention. Normally, she would have kept us at our house, but she was tending to her aunt Scripty, who had recently suffered a stroke, so we packed our bags and went to her house. She lived far down a dirt road off Route 39 on a bluff near the Santee River, in the same house where her mother used to live. (Her mother had worked for Mae Mae’s mother.) A few of her cousins had houses along the bluff, and they all had meticulous gardens with fences around them where they grew cantaloupe and honeydew melons as big as your head. And Juliabelle had woods behind her home, full of sweet grass that her husband, Nigel, and Aunt Scripty wove into baskets, which they sold at a roadside stand to the tourists driving from Charleston to Pawleys Island.

  Nigel would take us girls out into the woods in the early morning to gather the grass and the pine straw. And he’d climb up his ladder to the tops of the palmettos, where he’d throw down palm leaves we tried to catch in his big gray trash can. Then he’d tote us and his supplies over to the stand by the highway, where we’d play kick-the-can and eat melon and smile at the tourists who inspected the baskets as he’d pierce an opening in the center of the sweet grass knot and weave the palm leaves and pine straw through the coil.