Adelaide Piper (11 page)

Many of the boys looked green from the fraternity rush. After an hour, Frankie Wells excused himself from the gym, which was hot from all of our nervous energy, and went outside to get some fresh air. I could see him lying back on the emerald lawn, holding his head.

“You all right?” I asked stealing away for a moment to bring him a sip of water in a paper cone from the gym cooler.

He lifted his head and said, “Am I in hell?”

“Just college,” I said. He laughed and said, “Go on back in. If a KN sees me talking to you, he'll get me good tonight.”

Another freshman boy came out of the gym, put his head between his knees, and took deep breaths.

“That guy's on my hall,” said Frankie. “He's going for KN too. Hey, what's your name, bub?” he called over.

The boy wiped his watery eyes. “Brother,” he said. He picked at the sculpted green shrubs beneath the gym windows and spit. Then he kicked some wood chips over his mess and sucked on his teeth before coming over to lie down next to Frankie. “Brother Benton. I'm from Tuscaloosa. What about you?”

“Frankie Wells from Milledgeville, Georgia, bub. And this is Adelaide from South Carolina.”

I waved and offered him the last of the water as Frankie continued, “This rush is something, huh?”

“Tough,” he said with eyes to the ground. “But the KNs aren't as bad as the Sigma Alpha house. Those guys are from up north, and they really whip your tail. My roommate's still in bed. He couldn't even stand up this morning.”

“Man!” Frankie said. And as he said this, a coach from the athletic department knocked on the gym window with his fist and said, “The dean wants you all back inside.”

“Do y'all not find this such a cliché?” I asked, shaking my head and reaching out to Frankie Wells to help him up. “So, like,
Animal House
passé, you know?”

“I guess so, Miss Adelaide,” Frankie said, patting me on the back and chuckling at my Southern twist on a French word. “You're a philosophy major, right?”

Brother Benton sat up and looked at me for the first time and smiled. He looked like five miles of bad road, but he had dark curly hair and the greatest smile I think I'd ever seen. White teeth and a dimple on the right side of his cheek. His brown eyes were alive, and they glistened in the white light of this mountain morning.

“I'm just here to get my journalism degree,” Frankie said to both of us. “My uncle says if I make it here, he'll let me write for his newspaper in Atlanta.”

“Will you publish my poems?”

“Why not?” he said.

“What about you?” I said to Brother. “Are you prelaw like the rest of the frat boys?”

“Nah,” Brother said, shaking his brown curly hair.
“
Literature, my lady. Guess we're all left-brain folks. I'm going to write a novel and camp out in front of a publishing house until someone notices me.

But mostly I want to get out of Alabama.”

“If you survive rush,” I said, walking back to the watercooler to fill up the cone. “And if you want out of Alabama, I wonder
why
you're choosing to join the Southern fraternity.”

When I brought the water over to him, he flashed me that smile again.

“Same reason you were there the other night,” he said. “It's the only place I know someone from home.”

I blushed, glad to have been noticed by this handsome, literary freshman. Yes, this is what I'd expected from college—sailing out of the Williamstown Harbor and into the sea where the fish were bigger and brighter. At last!

As he took a sip, the coach tapped on the window again, and I said, “See y'all later.”

Before I opened the gym door, I overheard Brother say to Frankie, “I'm going to marry that poet, Wells. You wait and see.”

I smiled with my back to him and bit my bottom lip. How nice it was to be wanted!

Then I heard Frankie's reply. “Carpenter's got dibs on her. You'd better lay off for now.”

“I'll bide my time,” Brother Benton said. “We won't always be freshmen.”

It was at the class of '93 orientation social the next afternoon on the front quadrangle that Jif, Ruthie, and I were officially relegated to country bumpkins amid the naturally beautiful girls from the Northeast with their nature-oriented, androgynous names: Heath, Rivers, and Park.

They all looked like J.Crew models in those cropped oatmeal sweaters, worn blue jeans, and sporty hiking boots. Was it possible to have legs so long and thin? It must have been. And what about the golden (untreated) hair that draped their backs? Dern Dizzy had been right—not another perm in sight!

Yes, we faced up to the fact that we were a sight that day on the green and handsome campus that surrounded us with its great history and wealth. We had attended the social all dressed up in bright pink and turquoise outfits with matching leather flats. I had tried to straighten my hair with Jif 's iron, but all that did was make it frizzy and then stiff as a corpse in its thick coat of hair spray. And the hot-pink glittery lipstick covering Ruthie's lips was like a sign that blinked
Redneck
with every smile she flashed.

Frankie and Brother were nowhere to be found. And the rest of the shabbishly preppy freshman boys gradually made their way to the fresh flock of earthy girls while a sophomore nerd named Ned Crater from Abingdon, Tennessee, cornered us with his inane tales of life on a tobacco farm and ended with a dinner invitation that extended only to Jif. Even in her bumpkin state, Jif 's blonde and blue-eyed beauty could be recognized (and Ned would make numerous attempts to win her affection during our freshman year and beyond).

Except for my brief rendezvous with Peter earlier in the week, I felt virtually invisible. I had never known this feeling back in Williamstown, and it stung my heart more than I could admit. Didn't anyone know that I was a published poet? That I gave the valedictorian address, attended Governor's School, and pondered the meaning of life in my journal late at night? I had thought that I was too good for the back-home set to pay them much attention, but now I was low man on the totem pole at NBU—Geechee and gaudy, with big brown hair and stubby legs.

At the end of the social, I ducked back into Tully, stopped to check myself in the hall bathroom, and for the first time in my life, looked in the mirror and experienced shame. I was horrified by my jewel, as if it were a final blow from the ugly stick, and from that day on I vowed to conceal it by coating it with makeup and fashioning my bangs just so until I could save enough money for Jif 's daddy (the only surgeon in town) to snip it off.

The next day I woke up early, showered, made another attempt to straighten my hair and tone down my makeup, and went straight over to the English department to a meeting that was set up with my preordained adviser, Dr. McSweeney. I had heard through the grapevine that he was elderly, formal, and had never quite gotten over the fact that NBU had decided to admit girls, so I wore a skirt and wrote my questions in as concise a manner as possible. I wanted to ask him about the creative writing workshop with Josiah Dirkas and where to begin with my literature studies. I had outlined all that I was interested in, from Shakespeare's theater to modern poetry, and I had already thumbed through the books in the college store, devouring the Emily Dickinson poems and one by Sylvia Plath in which a panther stalks her mind.

I didn't want to be late for my appointment, so I took a few sips of Diet Coke from the dorm kitchen and ate the remnants of a leftover bag of popcorn before I scurried over to the Humboldt Humanities Building on the colonnade. I sat on the bench of the quiet hall for whole minutes, daydreaming about Peter Carpenter, before I looked around at the quotes by C. S. Lewis and a photo of a large man named Chesterton. There were applications for a mission trip to Honduras on the bulletin board and a listing of all the chapel services as well as a student-run study of the book of John in the main hall on Monday nights.

Wait a minute.
A look of panic came over my face as a man in a green bow tie posted a course description titled “Religion and Social Justice” on the bulletin board. Then he turned around to greet me and said, “I'm Dr. Shaw. Can I help you?”

“Is this not the English department?” I asked, realizing that I was now five minutes late for my appointment with McSweeney.

He grimaced. “You went one floor too high. This is the third floor. English is on the second.”

“I'm late for my appointment with Dr. McSweeney.”

“Ah,” he said, understanding the panicked tone in my voice and nodding his head. “Let me show you to his office.”

He walked me down the stairs and into the English department.

“It makes sense if you think about it,” he said as he held open the door. “History's on the first floor—all that is past. English is on the second—man's reflection of his life experiences. Religious studies on the third and final floor—man's realization of what is above and beyond him.”

I nodded my head, still befuddled about being late to my appointment.

Unlike the religion department, the English department was crowded, and many nervous freshmen were milling about. A bearded man in Birkenstocks was wheeling his bicycle into his office, and an overweight, unkempt lady was smoking a cigarette while making copies and taking a slug from a twenty-ounce bottle of Diet Pepsi.

“Tell me your name,” Dr. Shaw said as he knocked on McSweeney's closed door.

“Adelaide,” I said. “Adelaide Piper.”

From behind the thick door, someone cleared his throat and said, “You may enter.”

“Morning, Randolph,” Dr. Shaw said. “A Miss Adelaide Piper seemed to be turned around this morning and waiting to meet with you on the third floor. I'm just showing her down to your office.”

“I see,” said Dr. McSweeney. He motioned for me to enter, and I thanked Dr. Shaw before taking a seat on a wingback chair that swallowed me into its cracked, dark leather cushion. I looked up at Dr.

McSweeney, who was staring at my name and social security number.

“So you want to be an English major?” he said before looking up and flaring his nostrils at the sight of me. “Tell me, what's your area of interest?”

He looked like a bull with his ruddy face and bushy eyebrows. His head rested on his wide shoulders as though he had no neck at all, and I half expected steam to come out of his dark, round nostrils as he waited for my answer.

“Poetry,” I said, handing him my chapbook from the Governor's School.

He thumbed through the book before handing it back to me. I couldn't see his feet behind his stout mahogany desk, but in my mind's eye I pictured strong hooves scraping a hole in the worn Oriental rug.

“To begin with, contemporary poetry is like entering through the back door, don't you think?” He narrowed his eyes and furrowed his brow. “How can you presume to write poetry, Miss Adelaide, without a formal studying of the poets who came before you?”

Ugh. Dr. McSweeney. He was charging, and I hadn't even given him a reason to. What in the world could I say to chill this bull out? I needed him to sign off on the Dirkas workshop. I'd been pining over it all summer, and I had been reworking poems I could hardly wait to submit.

“Well, sir,” I said, “that's why I'm at NBU. To learn the background and take a crack at the present. Can't I do those simultaneously?”

He pushed his colorless lips to one side and brought his two index fingers up to them in mock contemplation.

“Miss Piper, Expository Writing is a freshman requirement. I recommend you take that as well as Seventeenth-Century Poetry. From there you can work your way up in chronological order. If you make it through,
then
I'd recommend taking a poetry workshop your junior year.”

“But—but I don't want to miss this Dirkas opportunity. I've been working toward it all summer. I can still take Seventeenth-Century Poetry and Expository Writing along with it.”

“It's an upper-level, and I think you should wait until you have a firm literature foundation to stand on. There will be other visiting writers.”

I shook my head in disbelief. Why couldn't I have gotten the crunchy Birkenstock professor for an adviser or the fat lady with the cigarette? What was this old bull (who should have been put out to pasture a decade ago) trying to do to me?

“You know, Miss Piper, there is nothing new under the sun. There are only new ways to say it. How do you know you're not mimicking someone who came before you, if you don't, in fact,
know
what came before you?”

I was more shocked than dismayed, and I couldn't think of a coherent rebuttal. “Point taken, Dr. McSweeney.”

“Then we're settled,” he said, signing his name to my class registration form. He nodded once before crossing through my name with a yellow highlighter and moving on to the next.

I stood and looked out the thick glass panes of his office window. To the right it was framed by a great Corinthian column, and to the left was a downward view of the quadrangle, with freshmen scurrying across with their registration papers. Beyond the canopy of pine lay the outer quadrangle where the steep and craggy mountain ridges pushed at the sky.

McSweeney cleared his throat as if to say, “Don't let the door hit you on the way out,” and I gathered my bag and walked solemnly across the threshold of his pen.

6

Ivory Tower

B
rother Benton died in the wee hours of a Sunday morning two weeks after classes started. Though the reports were somewhat inconsistent, the gist of the story was this: Brother was in the middle of the KN initiation weekend when he refused to walk across the quadrangle in nothing but an NBU baseball cap. For his insubordination, he was ordered to drink a pint of whiskey, after which he stumbled home arm in arm with Frankie, where they both collapsed in their respective dorm rooms on the third floor.