Adelaide Piper

by Beth Webb Hart

  Could the chasm

  between us

  be bridged

  with two

  slats of

  wood?

  The Cold War ended later that week while my sisters and I drank cherry icees with Daddy in the backyard by the crab dock. We were listening to the proposal of the Western Alliance over a fuzzy portable radio as Daddy shot off the leftover Roman candles from the Fourth of July out over the marsh.

  He was all excited. Uncle Tinka had just gone platinum, and he’d be next with just two more in his downline. He’d just returned from a convention in Atlanta where they gave him a standing ovation when he came out dressed in his star-studded marine uniform, his sleeve folded up to his ribs to show the sacrifice he had made. After that convention, several groups were calling to ask him to speak at seminars and meetings come fall. They ate up his Vietnam War stories, and they could easily weave his message of courage and hope into their own agendas.

  But as the world looked forward to its newfound peace, the Piper family’s pockets of resistance were gaining strength, and the first battle of a domestic war that would last for years was about to be waged.

  It began on August 10, the same day that a letter from NBU arrived stating that because of my poor second-semester grades, my $6,000-a-year scholarship was in jeopardy. I had one semester of grace to pull up my GPA. After that, my parents would have to come up with the extra money to pay the full bill or I would have to transfer.

  While Uncle Tinka had pushed Daddy hard to build his own line in Bizway, Mama lost any interest she ever had in the venture after attending a second convention at an Orlando resort where wives flaunted three-carat diamonds and husbands drove fully loaded limousines up to the front of the meeting room so that folks could gawk at their glittery wealth.

  “Sure, they’re rich,” Mama told Daddy that night as they peered out their fourth-floor hotel window and watched the fireworks display from the Magic Kingdom light up the sky with its dazzling purple-and-gold fire. “But they pop their gum, and their mascara is all lumpy, and they’re all overweight even though they’re pushing vitamins and health shakes. Something doesn’t add up here. And I’m tired of paying fifteen dollars for a hamburger in this godforsaken world of faux.”

  “You know what your problem is?” Daddy had said. “You’re a small-town snob. Can’t you for once try to let me dream a little, here?”

  Mama had recently warned Daddy again not to upset his father (and employer) by admitting he was fully committed to the pyramid business. It was true that the American textiles industry was slowly collapsing because of cheap labor forces overseas, but Papa Great didn’t see it that way.

  Daddy had moved on in Bizway against his bride’s wishes, and his plan was to work the business on the side until he could get free from the parental hooks that had kept him in an office job most of his adult life.

  But on that swarmy summer night of August, Papa Great marched right up to the steps of my home with an ultimatum:

  “Zane, you’re going to be out of a job in two weeks if you continue in this harebrained pursuit,” he hollered in the foyer. He had refused an iced tea or a seat in the living room. His face was red and bloated, and he pinched his nose so hard I thought steam might pour out of his ears.

  “Papa, come on,” Daddy said. “I’ve tried it your way for years, and you know I’m no good to the mill.”

  Papa Great glanced up to find Lou and me leaning over the banister, listening. He pointed up the stairwell in our direction while continuing to stare Daddy down. “And I will not put up the remainder of your eldest daughter’s inflated college tuition, either.”

  Daddy rubbed his cheek with his stub. “You son of a—”

  “I’m meeting with my attorney in two weeks to revise my will.”

  He turned back around as Mama cried out, “Wait, Papa!”

  “No, Greta,” he said, shaking his head. “You just tell your husband I sure hope it’s worth it.” Then he slammed the front door and shuffled toward the Cadillac, and I wondered where Mae Mae and Juliabelle were and if they’d had any idea what he was up to.

  Before I knew it, I grabbed one of my Norton anthologies, opened my bedroom window, and threw it at him. “Hog!” I shouted.

  It hit his right shoulder as he walked across the lawn.

  He stopped in his tracks to look up at me.

  I had my hands on my hips, and I strained to see the whites of his eyes.

  “All that I can see you’ve gained from being away at that overpriced college is twenty pounds or so,” he said, sniffing in the humid air.

  I shifted my weight and did not take his bait.

  “You know what I think, Papa? I think my daddy would have had two good arms and a pro football career if it weren’t for you and your boorish expectations. It’s time you let him be.”

  He sneered, then spit on my anthology.

  “Uppity girl.” He kept his gaze on me and shook his head in a combination of disgust and disbelief.

  “Adelaide, don’t you dare talk to your grandfather that way!” Mama was calling from the front porch. “Papa, now, you come on back inside and let’s talk this out.”

  I gazed back at him.

  He rubbed his shoulder, then pulled his hand away. “She hit me,” he said to Mama, picking up the anthology and toting it to his car.

  Lou started to cry from somewhere behind me, and by the time I turned around to check on her, he was driving down the street over the bridge to Pawleys.

  If this wasn’t bad enough, in the late hours of that same night, Dizzy was arrested for driving under the influence while swerving home from an all-day party on the river at her crazy friend Angel’s house.

  Zane Piper was madder than a hornet’s nest when he wheeled the Country Squire out of the driveway to bail his wild child out of the city jail.

  “I’ve had it with this one,” he screamed after he hung up the phone from talking with a police officer. “She won’t be leaving this house for months!”

  Mama didn’t say anything back to him before he left. She was melting under the pressure of the first day of war, and she cried into her pillow for an hour before her husband and her lost daughter appeared at the front door with long-term consequences to face for their wayward choices.

  Poor Mama—all she wanted was a quiet, small-town life. An existence opposite her dysfunctional Charleston upbringing. Now nothing was going according to her plan, and she would have kissed Papa Great’s thick, jagged toenails before releasing her Piper family vision.

  You could hear a pin drop in the Piper house as Daddy locked the front door and turned off the last light at 3:00 a.m.

  “Get up to your room!” he said to Dizzy, and she plodded up the stairs. “I hope you like it up there, ’cause the only time you’re going to leave this house over the next three months is to go to school.”

  Lou woke up in all of the commotion, and I invited her to stay in my room for the rest of the night. When I went to invite Dizzy, I could not get her attention. Her door was locked, and she was blasting some kind of punk rock through her headphones.

  Over the next few days I pondered God and my choices for the coming year: transferring back to USC as Randy proposed or taking out loans to cover Papa Great’s half of my tuition, returning to NBU, and giving it another go. I had a call in to an admissions coordinator at Carolina, and she was working on piecing together some financial aid for me.

  Mama had sided with Papa Great and refused to join Daddy at any Bizway meeting or convention. Daddy made his choice too—he was making a run for this new career, with or without his inheritance or his wife’s support.

  How I had yearned to curl up in my mother’s arms on my last summer nights—to ask her about God and if I should accept the message that Dale and Darla had presented to me. I wanted to confide in Daddy as well, but he was distant and determined, making phone calls to vets and old football buddies, asking if he could come by and show them his new business plan.
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  Juliabelle was stuck out on the island with the old Hog, and I couldn’t get to her, either, so I drank the last of her tonic and hoped for the best. (Little did I know that she and Mae Mae were going to bat for me in more ways than one.)

  As my parents argued about the fate of Dizzy’s next year—a rehab camp, homeschooling, boarding school, and the like—I drove her to the first of many Alcoholics Anonymous meetings that Judge Snodgrass had required her to attend.

  “Will you come to the meeting?” Dizzy whispered to me. Her head was tilted toward the floorboard of the station wagon as we pulled into a space at Second Baptist Church. (She was not looking anyone in the eye these days.)

  “Sure,” I said, squeezing the back of my sister’s hand. I, of course, had a million things to do and life-altering decisions to make, but I couldn’t stand the thought of letting Dizzy down right now.

  When we walked into the smoke-filled church gymnasium where the AA meetings were held, I quickly sensed the energy that I had felt at Harvest Time during that dinner several weeks ago. Dizzy and I sat down in the back row of seats as several kind and weathered faces nodded in our direction and personal stories about the battle with the addiction were told over a cheap and crackly microphone.

  The AA steps were so reminiscent of my talks with Shannon and Dale and Darla that I was beginning to believe someone was trying to tell me something:

  1. Admit that you are powerless.

  2. Believe that a Power greater than yourself can restore you to sanity.

  3. Make a decision to turn your will and your life over to the care of God.

  4. Take a moral inventory of yourself.

  5. Admit to God, yourself, and others the exact nature of your wrongdoings.

  6. Become ready to have God remove all of these defects of character.

  7. Humbly ask Him to remove your shortcomings.

  8. Make a list of all persons you have harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all.

  9. Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

  10. Continue to take personal inventory, and when you are wrong promptly admit it.

  11. Seek through prayer and meditation to improve your conscious contact with God as you understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for you and the power to carry that out.

  12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, try to carry this message to others who are hurting and to practice these principles in all your affairs.

  The message was understandable. It was familiar to me by now, and yet I was not ready to take the leap of faith it required. It was as though I was aware of the battle that was being waged inside my mind, but I chose to side with the faithless faction because that came most naturally.

  As prideful as it sounds, I was not convinced that if I took a moral inventory of myself, it would come up in the red. I was a victim, after all. A victim of a horrible attack. And before that, I was a victor: an above-average poet on my way to a promising future. A sinner was not how I described myself, frankly. Sure, I’d made a mistake here and there, but the overall picture was good.

  Now Dizzy seemed lifeless in the meeting. She kept her head lowered and smoked the Marlboro Reds that had become her source of comfort and peace. If I was hard to reach, Dizzy was beyond the pale, and I feared that the only message my sis would receive in this meeting was that it was fine to chain-smoke and whine.

  On our way home, Dizzy turned up the dark music that she had slid into the cassette player and rubbed her temples.

  My folks had grounded her indefinitely until they came up with a plan to whip her into shape, and she hadn’t left the house for at least five days. Knowing what it felt like to want to crawl into a hole and wither away, I wanted to do something to express my sympathy. Suddenly I turned off the music, made a U-turn in the middle of our quiet neighborhood, and headed out toward Pawleys Island. Dizzy gave me an inquisitive look before returning her gaze to the floorboard.

  “Let’s go to the beach. You could use some fresh air and a last look at it before fall comes.”

  Dizzy gave a deep sigh of relief and seemed to relax into the seat for the first time since we’d left the house. She looked out the window as the late-afternoon sun left a pink glow on all the weathered homes and the palmetto trees bent at curious angles along the gravel road.

  We caught the end of the sunset when we parked at Boardwalk 11, and we scurried down to the gully’s edge to dip our feet into the soupy pool just in time to watch three terns flap toward their roost in the top of an abandoned boardwalk as the purple sky faded into black. We lay back on the sand in the dark as the ocean slapped the shore and just listened.

  The intracoastal waterway was the thoroughfare that had made Williamstown a wealthy shipping harbor during colonial times as the cotton, indigo, and rice were loaded here and carried on to Europe.

  And I thought about the four rivers that converged in the harbor and poured into the sea and the hurricanes that autumn brought and the ghost of the Gray Man that appeared before a storm to warn the residents to retreat.

  Then I squeezed Dizzy’s hand and said, “It sucks, but you’ll get through. Don’t roll over and die, sis.”

  “I’ve done worse than this,” Dizzy said through a guffaw. “I’ve got a lot to change if I want to get back up again.”

  “Eh, water under the bridge, right?”

  I tried to whitewash it, but Dizzy was ready to talk. It was as though she had weights on her chest, and she had to name them before she could consider lifting them off.

  “I’ve carried drugs for people in my car, Adelaide. Drugs to sell.

  ” “Well, that wasn’t exactly a brilliant thing to do, but just don’t do it again, okay?”

  “Taken Ecstasy,” Dizzy continued as we watched a barge stacked with red and black containers move out from the harbor and into the waterway. “And once, at Angel’s house, I did acid. They had to tie me down to the couch because I kept wanting to jump off of the balcony and grab the moon.”

  Holding Dizzy’s clammy hand, I rubbed my thumb across her knuckles.

  “Besides all that, I’ve, like, totally been with guys before,” she said before exhaling loudly.

  A fish tail skittered before our toes, and I bit my lip. What should I say?

  “Three,” Dizzy continued. “Two of whom I haven’t seen again.”

  The air was soft and moving enough to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and I heard the palm fronds knocking together behind us. A ghost crab scurried across the surf and into his hole. He went in and out again, staring us down with his beady raised eyes before moving sideways back toward the water.

  “I’ve driven drunk, stoned, plenty of times,” Dizzy continued. “I mowed down one of our neighbor’s mailboxes last year and dented the station wagon so bad that I had to beg my friends to hammer it out.”

  Then Dizzy started to weep. I couldn’t remember the last time my sister had let her guard down. My mind reeled with explanations: Dizzy had dyslexia like me, but hers had been a harder case to overcome, so she struggled in school. She had never found her niche in the academic or athletic worlds, and her class was made up of some world-class small-town losers.

  “I, like, could have hurt someone,” Dizzy said. “Driving as messed up as I was. Isn’t that scary?”

  “Yeah,” I said, dabbing my sister’s eyes with the arm of my blouse. “It can end here, though.”

  “Adelaide, do you believe in that greater Power stuff that they were talking about?”

  “I’m working on that,” I said. “I want to, but . . .”

  Dizzy threw an oyster shell into the water, kicked at it, and added, “You might not need it, but I do.”

  I splashed back at her, and she kicked a clump of sand onto my belly, and before I knew it we were in a saltwater war, and our clothes were soaking from the gray-green soup. Dizzy laughed for the first time in days as she sat up and cupped the wat
er in her hands. Then she poured it over my head.

  “Thanks for listening,” she said, and she looked up and met my eyes in the darkness. Her makeup was running, and she looked like a miniature Morticia Addams with a hangover.

  “I love you, Diz,” I said as I returned the head douse with a handful of water. “I want to help.”

  She stood first and pulled me up before throwing her arm over my shoulder. We walked back up the dunes to the station wagon, the sand clinging to our feet and ankles and our jeans making a squishing noise with each step.

  We drove home, wet and itchy, on one of the last nights of the summer of 1990, our backsides leaving dark impressions in the plush car seat. It was the season we would later look back to and remember that our lives began to take a drastic turn in an unalterable direction. The Pipers would not be the same again.

  As Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait dominated the television screen and the last debutante dress fitting was taken before Thanksgiving, Mae Mae came over and said, “Pack your bags for NBU!”

  “You know something I don’t?” I asked. She was grinning from ear to ear, though all the Lancôme foundation in the world couldn’t mask the gray bags under her eyes.

  “We’re back on for our half of the tuition,” she said, tilting her head from side to side and tapping her thumb and middle finger together like a belly dancer.

  “What about Papa Great?”

  “Well, he got hungry and gave in.”

  “Huh?”

  “Well,” she said, winking at me, “Juliabelle went on strike last week after he took your scholarship away, and he hasn’t had fried shrimp in seven days.”

  I smiled. “And what about you?” I said.

  “We’ve had a few words, but I know how to open his eyes.”

  Randy was disappointed, but he invited me on a boat ride the afternoon before I left. He brought a basket of wine and imported cheeses he’d bought in Charleston—stuff that I knew he never ate but thought I’d like.

  “Ooh, doggie,” he said when he bit into a piece of Stilton. He puckered his lips, drank a big gulp of wine, then pulled an anthology of Archibald Rutledge poems from the basket.