Adelaide Piper

by Beth Webb Hart

  Calculus,

  thou art

  loathsome.

  “I can’t come in your room past midnight anymore,” Jif said to me as we walked toward the science building one blustery November morning. “It’s too tempting, what with Ruthie ordering all of that fast food late at night. Does she know how bad it is to go to sleep having just ingested that many calories?”

  Jif lifted her hand up like a claw and grabbed her own backside. “It’s like asking a clump of lard to attach itself to your derriere.”

  “I don’t know what’s with her,” I said. “It’s the sleeping that gets me. She makes me feel weird if I turn on the light after supper to study. She groans and puts the pillow over her head, and it’s not even time for Wheel of Fortune.”

  “Does she ever crack a book these days?”

  “Hardly,” I said. “Maybe she’s depressed. I mean, she gets sort of weepy sometimes when Tag calls. Think they’re on the brink of a breakup or something?”

  “Fat and lazy is how I would diagnose her condition,” Jif said. (She had no sympathy for unexplained weight gain.) “See if you can get to the bottom of it, Adelaide, before she’s too slothlike to curtsy at her deb ball.”

  As if Ruthie sensed our growing concern, she seemed to take great pains to avoid Jif and me during the remainder of the semester. She was asleep before I came back from the library most evenings, and she drove her car places late at night to get her fast-food fix. I dreamed about derivatives and logarithms as the stench of vinegar fries or chili dogs wafted across my sheets. And whenever the opportunity to talk presented itself, Ruthie packed her bags and headed down the mountains to Chapel Hill again.

  Just before finals in early December, Ruthie seemed to fall into a real depression. It happened the day we all received our fine linen invitation to the State of North Carolina Debutante Ball, where Ruthie and six other young ladies from well-bred families across the state would make their debut at the beautiful Mountain View City Club in Charlotte. Her incessant munchies ceased after that day, and she didn’t take calls in our room from Tag Eisley. Instead, she’d sneak down to the end of the hall and enclose herself in the phone booth, where they’d whisper well after I fell asleep.

  One morning on our way to Intermediate French, I described to Ruthie the emerald dress I’d bought for her deb ball.

  “Jif ’s going too,” I said. “You know we wouldn’t miss it.”

  Suddenly, Ruthie stopped in midstride along the path to the language building, sat down on a bench, and said plainly to me, “I’m pregnant.”

  Then her eyes brimmed with giant tears and her face went as red and contorted as a rotten tomato.

  Not again, I thought to myself as I pictured Georgianne unwrapping those Pyrex dishes after the summer of our high school graduation.

  Taking my place on the bench next to Ruthie, I rubbed the back of her head as she hovered over a little pool of tears that was forming on the sidewalk.

  But then, and quite by surprise, I almost grinned when I pictured Baby Peach and his sticky little hands grabbing everything in sight: the remote control, a picture frame, the crystal candy bowl. As I was making the mental leap, with a kind of ease, to my roommate’s wedding, Ruthie blurted out, “Tag wants me to abort.”

  The bell tower on the front quad rang out, declaring that we would certainly miss Intermediate French for the day. As grieved as I was about the premature turn my roommate’s life would surely take toward domesticity, the notion of abortion shocked me even more. It made my stomach turn.

  I had not considered abortion as an actual option for a pregnant woman in my circle of friends. Just the word sent shivers of dread up my spine.

  “What do you want, Ruthie?”

  “I want to keep Tag,” she said as she crunched an orange maple leaf under her tennis shoe. “And I want for this never to have happened. I want things to continue the way I had planned—make my debut, graduate, marry Tag, maybe go to graduate school, then start a family.”

  I could tell that Ruthie was utterly tormented by her condition. She loathed what was taking place inside her, and she could hardly stand to be in her own skin.

  After an official test at the college health center, Nurse Eugenia made the call to the Roanoke clinic and set the appointment for the second week of December. Exam week.

  For seven days and nights, Ruthie begged me and Jif to go with her to the clinic. Jif had an easy out. Her chemistry final was the very hour of the appointment, and she couldn’t be two places at once.

  So I reluctantly agreed to go. Not only did I have no desire to partake in this course of action, but my calculus exam, the one that would decide the fate of my scholarship and my very future, was scheduled for that evening at six. The appointment was at two, and we would have to rush back in order for me to grab a bite at the snack bar and make it to my final.

  My heart ached for Ruthie, who grew more and more paralyzed as the appointment approached. Her study room was littered with used tissues, and she had already made a D on her first exam.

  “I can’t make it through this without someone there, Adelaide,” she had pleaded with me two nights before the appointment.

  By default I was that someone, since Tag was preparing to take his MCATs and Jif was due at an exam.

  The date of Ruthie’s debutante ball was approaching fast, and her breasts were swelling with life. I endured the hushed calls to Tag in the middle of the night that always ended in groans of despair. Twice I told Ruthie that she didn’t have to go through with it, that there were surely other options for her, such as adoption, but that seemed to make things worse, and she told me not to say that word again.

  “Make me do it,” she had whispered to me in our beds the night before our trip to the Roanoke clinic. “Be a friend, and make me go through with it, Adelaide, okay?”

  A voice let out a late-night study howl somewhere down the hall.

  The whole campus was wired with caffeine and candy.

  “All right,” I whispered, half exhausted from the whole ordeal and trying to keep my faculties collected But I was sad when those two small words left my mouth. Would I be the Gen-X depiction of Lady Macbeth tomorrow evening, unable to wash the spots off my hands? There seemed to be no way out of this trouble, and Ruthie was determined to cut off one of her own limbs in order to set herself free.

  Still, I tried not to get too wrapped up in it all. I had to focus if I was going to make the B needed to keep my grade point average in good standing with the scholarship requirements. This was it. All my years of study had come down to this, and I didn’t want to give my future away, either. Sitting in that clinic tomorrow would surely be the same as Ruthie sitting in the bathroom when I took my two-hour shower after my date with Devon Hunt. None of it was good. But I supposed we had to be there for each other if we were to survive. Right?

  Mr. Lewis, whom I hadn’t picked up in weeks, responded out of nowhere:

  There is Something which is directing the universe and which appears in me as a law urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong. (p. 22)

  His words surfaced momentarily as I tried to fall asleep. Now, how come I can never comprehend you when I want to, and then you pop up as familiar and easy as a country music song when I want to forget?

  I exerted my will and stuffed his words into the trash bin of my mind. Tomorrow night everything would be better, wouldn’t it? We were in a race, in survival mode, and we had to press on.

  When we arrived at the clinic, there were protesters holding graphic posters on the street beside the parking lot. Ruthie shielded her eyes with her hands and started to gag as the line reluctantly parted to let us drive in. I was sure that she wouldn’t be able to get sick. She had hardly consumed a morsel of food in the last several days and had taken only a few small sips of water just to keep her strength. How she hated the life that was thriving in her body.

  Tag’s check hadn’t arrived in time, so I had to as
k Mae Mae to wire me some money on the pretense that I needed a dress for the NBU Christmas ball. In fact, Whit, from my social justice class, had invited me, but I would wear my standby black dress from freshman year.

  Mae Mae was glad to help, but I learned during our conversation that Papa Great and Daddy hadn’t spoken in a month. “He’s lost his marbles over this pyramid scam,” Mae Mae told me. “But even so, we’re still your grandparents, and you can call on us with or without him in our good graces.”

  “Thanks, Mae Mae,” I said, though I really didn’t have time to dwell on the decaying condition of my family.

  Focus, I told myself. Roanoke clinic, calculus exam, then deal with the fam. Survival mode.

  Now, I was as frightened as Ruthie as we hurried out of our car and into the clinic, despite the piercing pleas of the protesters.

  “No!” they called to us. “Don’t end another life!”

  I knew that abortion was a hot political topic that sharply divided people, but it had never come across my small-town path, and I had never made my decision about it. Certainly, Ruthie’s body belonged to her, and she was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. But if I stopped for a moment to think about the other one—the little life growing quietly inside—I would make myself crazy.

  As we sat for two hours in the solemn waiting room, listening to the muffled pleas from the street, there was a sadness in the very air that was palpable. The receptionist’s face was like a cake that had fallen in on itself, and when she looked up to acknowledge the next people who walked through the door, her heavy eyes stared past them to a clock on the other side of the wall that ticked down her workday.

  No one in the waiting room spoke or looked one another in the eye. But with my peripheral vision, I made out the clientele. There was a sweet-looking preteen girl not much older than Lou who was sucking on a strand of hair, with a woman who must have been her young mother sitting beside her. What was her story? There was a middle-aged couple off to the corner who would not look up from their respective newsmagazines. And a young professional-looking lady dressed in a designer suit and sitting alone, preoccupied with her workload. She might have been a lawyer preparing for a case, I thought, as the woman scanned a variety of file folders before writing notes fast and furiously on a yellow legal pad.

  When a scantily dressed woman walked in with a bulging belly, bile rose in my throat. How far along was this one? Six months, perhaps. There was no denying it. The receptionist gave the woman a slow nod of familiarity and directed her to a seat across from me and Ruthie.

  What a messy world we live in, Mr. Lewis.

  Every now and then I was assaulted by the image of Baby Peach tottering around the patio, but I pushed it aside. This was hard.

  Much harder than I imagined it would be, but I had promised Ruthie I’d be here for her. My roommate was breaking down before my very eyes, and I earnestly believed that if she carried this life a moment longer, it would surely do her in.

  Plus, there was the calculus exam. I still did not grasp the logarithm rules, and I had to get them straight before 6:00 p.m.

  Another half hour passed before the thin door that led down the hallway opened and one of the New England beauties, Miranda Coates from NBU, scurried out as fast as her legs could carry her without looking at anything but the brown-and-purple pattern of the waiting-room carpet.

  I watched Miranda as she bolted through the door, down the stairs, and across the line of protesters into an SUV where a handsome boy sporting a Sigma baseball cap was waiting for her, the car idling. He reached across the seat to unlock her door. Then he tossed out his cigarette through a crack in the window, and I watched it roll into the gutter after they drove off, its thin curl of smoke wafting up into the air.

  Within minutes the nurse opened the door and called Ruthie’s name. Ruthie had been fidgeting, blowing her nose and scraping down her cuticles. She refused a sip of water or a bite of the granola bar I had brought along.

  When the nurse called Ruthie’s name a second time, I nudged her, and she seized my elbow, pleading, “Go with me.”

  “What?” I whispered. Surely Ruthie did not expect me to go beyond the waiting room with her. I couldn’t bear to be that close to the procedure. And I had to study. For heaven’s sake, I’d driven her here and crossed a line of protesters. She had to do the rest on her own.

  Without warning, Ruthie dragged me up to the door that the nurse held open. As we stood on the threshold, with the blank screen of an ultrasound machine to our left, Ruthie began to shudder at the droning noise of a device that was being used on a patient two doors down the hall. We could make out a faint whimper and a quick shriek, and with this Ruthie turned back and buried her head in my shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, you can’t bring a friend with you, hon,” the nurse said in a hushed tone. She patted Ruthie’s shoulder and added, “You’ll be fine.”

  Ruthie looked up to me and did not move for whole seconds. We were face-to-face, a few inches apart, and she was searching my eyes.

  I knew Ruthie was calling on me to address her second thoughts. To address the sound of that machine and the whimper of a woman on the other side of the procedure.

  “Don’t put this decision in my hands,” my eyes said back to my friend. I was scared and angry, and I resented the fact that she was calling on me in this way. I glanced back to my seat. To the pile of calculus books.

  The whole waiting room was staring at us now. We were a scene in an awful movie. The nurse was uncomfortable with the tension, and she tried to gently pull Ruthie farther down the hall.

  “Sit down here and make yourself more comfortable,” the nurse said, pointing to a reclining chair beside the ultrasound machine.

  Ruthie wouldn’t budge. Her eyes just kept pleading with mine.

  Now I was furious. The young professional woman cleared her throat in frustration at this drama, and that was all I needed to distance myself from the situation. This isn’t fair, I thought. I had reluctantly agreed to go along in a supporting role. Did Ruthie want me to suddenly make the decision for her?

  No, I thought, but I didn’t say it. This is between you and Tag, and I’m not going to decide for you.

  How I wanted to escape into the maze of calculus problems at my chair—the center of a mass of inertia of a solid, the flow of water through a river, the rate of growth of bacteria in a culture. My college career was on the line, and I had only a few hours before the final. What more did Ruthie want from me?

  “This way,” the nurse entreated.

  As Ruthie looked back at the nurse, I saw my way out, and I turned my back toward them and moved quickly to the waiting-room chair.

  I was already escaping in my mind. Reenacting the little trick Mama had taught me. This time I was following the shrill cry of little Lou’s voice down by the salt marsh behind our house. My baby sister had been playing there with a friend who had thrown a stick at a wasps’ nest, and they were both wailing at the multiple stings on their arms and legs.

  Ruthie took a step down the hall and then stopped to look back once more before the nurse pulled the door closed. I sensed her silent plea, but I didn’t have anything left to give her, so I took my seat, picked up my textbook, and began to examine the logarithm rules. I didn’t look up until I heard the door close and the muffled sound of two pairs of feet moving down the hallway.

  We know that men find themselves under a moral law, which they did not make, and cannot quite forget even when they try. (p. 20)

  As I stared at the dark grain of the closed door, I wondered, have I failed Ruthie and that little life inside her?

  Now I was finding it difficult to even breathe. I placed my calculus book on my lap and tried to focus, but I could not get through the first question.

  “‘I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.’” Shannon had recited those words from Deuteronomy to me last summer when I feared that the rest of my days were doomed by the anxiety that took control of me af
ter the rape. As I thought on the words, I became aware of a resounding thump in my ears.

  It was another hour before Ruthie emerged through the doorway. She was holding little round butter cookies, like the kind they served in Sunday school at St. Anne’s. She was drinking a Hi-C juice box and looked like a little girl, except for the two boxes of Anaprox and birth control pills that she carried in her other hand.

  She wept all the way home, writhing in pain and stopping at a gas station to puke up the butter cookies. Then she fell asleep in the bed and slept through dinner and on through the night while I failed my exam.

  “I did it,” Ruthie said to Tag when he called. I left the room to give them some privacy, but returned after hearing what sounded like Ruthie slamming the phone down on the floor.

  Something awful had happened in that clinic in Roanoke. She was worse than she was before, according to Jif, who had caught her in the bathroom pricking her finger with a razor and pinching the incision until it bled. Her sociology professor and then the chair of the department called to find out why she wasn’t showing up for her exams, but she refused to return their calls.

  And I was suffering too. I was confused and afraid to consider that I had messed up and harmed my friend when I should have had the gumption to reach out to her in the clinic and say, “If you’re unsure, don’t do it.” Or insisting, “There has to be another way through this.”

  Was there a darkness inside me that I had never faced before? I hadn’t meant anyone any harm, so why did I feel so sick inside?

  To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself? (p. 51) “Shannon,” I said aloud, my hands trembling across the open page of Lewis’s book.

  When she answered my call, I could barely speak.

  “Can we talk?” I said through my cracking voice. “I’m desperate.

  Please meet me somewhere.”

  She took a deep breath. She was probably in the middle of exams herself, but just as I was about to say, “Never mind,” she insisted, “I can meet you at the Appomattox truck stop off I-81. That’s about halfway for both of us.”