Adelaide Piper (16 page)

Nan McCant was an excellent conversationalist, but she tended to get on my nerves. She attended Converse College and was as petite and preppy as they come with a round, cursive monogram on everything she owned, from her earrings to her pocketbook to the backs of her pastel sweater sets. Jif and I joked that Nan would have monogrammed the hood of her zippy white convertible if she could have. Of course, she couldn't resist personalizing her license plate with KN ROSE (she had been chosen as the sweetheart of the Kappa Nu fraternity at Wofford College), and she frequently pulled out her framed picture of the frat composite to point to whatever boy had come up in her frivolous chitchat. And there was her photo in the center of the group of handsome young men, right between the cook and the mascot, a chocolate Labrador retriever named Leroy.

This left Jif and me as the last of three debs. Georgianne would have made four, but she was a mother to Baby Peach now and a wife to Peach Hickman, who worked at his daddy's tractor company.

Georgianne's mother declined any invitation to the events, and I was certain Georgianne never received one.

The third deb had not yet graced us with her presence, as she was on a trip to France with her family. Her name was Harriet von Hasselson Hartness, and Jif and I hadn't laid eyes on her since she was in grade school. She was the granddaughter of Mrs. Marguerite Hartness, the wealthiest lady in town, who lived at the end of Third Street in the house where in 1825 the Marquis de Lafayette stood on the second-floor piazza in the dark of night to greet more than a thousand Williamstown residents during his tour of the thirteen states.

Harriet had grown up in some charming Connecticut town, and all we knew about her was that she went to the pricey (not to mention
liberal
) Sarah Lawrence College outside Manhattan. Our imaginations had run wild with suppositions about the pretentious snob she would likely be.

“Harriet von Hasselson Hartness has a driver and a personal assistant who gives her manicures and massages,” Jif and I joked as we swung in the hammock at the end of my crab dock and flipped through Mae Mae's fancy hand-me-down magazines.

“Harriet buys all of her clothes from Neiman Marcus,” Jif said, pointing her finger at an ad in a
Town & Country
that was dated 1984.

“She has an account there,” I added, slapping at a giant mosquito that was nibbling on my knee. The air was still, and not a strand of the summer-green marsh grass was moving.

“Her thank-you note stationery is stamped with a family crest,” Jif joked, but I didn't even know what a family crest was.

“She has a tennis bracelet and a double strand of pearls that her grandmother bought for her in Japan,” I said, fanning the thick air. (I had heard about gifts like that from the Northeastern girls at NBU.)

So Harriet von Hasselson Hartness became a caricature of the ideal debutante. She was a modern-day princess with an endless supply of beauty, brains, and wealth. Moreover, she was everything that was beyond our grasp, and she grew larger than life each day she was absent from the social functions.

“She has thin ankles, and she wears a D-sized bra,” Jif said as we sipped on Cherry Cokes at Campbell's Pharmacy on Main Street one afternoon.

(We were B cups at best.)

“I've got it!” I said in an inspired moment, as a streak of ash from the steel mill descended upon the store window. “She didn't gain any weight her freshman year of college.”

“Oh, how I hate her!” Jif had screamed with a half-crazed laugh.

“You girls are so fortunate to live in the time that you do,” Mrs. Zapes said now, concluding the first luncheon of the season as she signaled someone in the kitchen. “You can go to the finest schools and expand your horizons in a way that we couldn't. Isn't that right, Edwina?”

“It's true,” Mrs. Kitteridge responded, and her eyes glazed over as she peered beyond my shoulder into some bygone daydream of how her life would have turned out if she'd been born in the generation the world was about to label “X.”

Would she have been sitting in this parlor, nibbling on chicken salad?
I had to wonder.
Or did she have her own itch that she couldn't quite get to? And now, in what could very well be the last decade of her life, has she resigned herself to the fact that she will never reach it?

Mrs. Kitteridge woke up from all the possibilities and wiped her watery eyes to look me straight in the face. “As they say, the world is your
oyster
, my dear.”

“That is what they say,” I responded, though my world had become a cramped cell with stone walls.

I suddenly jumped with fright when the housekeeper came up behind me with a silver tray full of teacups and saucers. My strawberry tart slid off my plate and landed upside down in my lap, leaving a dark smudge in the center of my paper-white dress.

The anxiety hatched all sorts of unfounded suspicions in my mind. I couldn't stand for someone to come up behind me without warning, and I
never
wanted to be left alone.

When the serviceman at the gas station filled my tank, I locked the doors. When I drove by the mobile home where I saw the woman harshly slapped a few summers ago, I picked up speed so that I could get by quickly. I avoided the mill village on the outskirts of town where the young woman had given me that haunting look on my way to college last summer, and when I had to go by there on a fishing trip with Daddy, I simply closed my eyes for a whole minute until it was out of sight.

I didn't like to drive by myself at night. I didn't like to be home alone. Ever. I wouldn't go to the movies by myself or loll about in the city library the way I had for so many summers, falling into one fictional world after another on the worn-out sofas that smelled of pencil lead and used books.

When I saw Averill Skaggs and Bubba Ratliff shuffling down Main Street in their mill uniforms, I ducked into Campbell's and buried myself in a newspaper until they passed.

“What is
with
you?” Dizzy pried one evening after I begged her to stay home and play gin rummy.

“Well, Lou's at a slumber party, and Mama and Daddy are going with Uncle Tinka to that Bizway meeting, and I just don't want to be here by myself.”

“Adelaide, this is ridiculous,” Dizzy said as she pulled a cigarette out of her purse. Though she knew everyone was out for the evening, she looked behind both shoulders only to find Marmalade, the cat, stretching out her paws on the sofa. As she took her first drag, she said, “I just don't get this, sis. Nine months ago you were the most independent girl I knew. You wanted to sail out into the world and make your way and become a great poet or something, and now you're home from college and afraid to spend an evening alone in the house?”

Dizzy exhaled a cloud of smoke in my face and added, “This is Williamstown, for God's sake! Nothing bad happens here, because nothing
ever
happens here! You remember that much, don't you?”

My face flushed with frustration at my own absurd fear. “You've changed,” Dizzy said before ashing into a watery glass of orange juice that someone had left on the coffee table and pronouncing, “Something must have scared the socks off of you up there.”

I nodded, but I didn't have the strength to recount my pain with my younger sister. I didn't want
anyone
to know what had happened. It would have shattered my family's image of me and made the debutante season, which Mae Mae and Mama cared so much about, seem like the farce that it already was for me.

As for Dizzy, I was supposed to be the positive role model on the path ahead of her. The wild child was still up to her tricks of partying well past her curfew, getting poor grades in school, and dressing (as Mae Mae had so aptly described it) “like death warmed over” in her Goth dresses and hair dyed the color of coal. I had watched her spend an hour in front of the mirror one morning as she powdered her face with stark white makeup and painted ebony circles around her eyes.

My folks told me plainly that they were counting on me to talk some sense into Dizzy over the summer. Next year, she would be in the twelfth grade, and this was her last chance to pull her grades up so that she could attend college.

As June passed, I lost my grip and began to blame myself for what Devon Hunt had done to me. How could I have been so dense as to assume that he had my best interests at heart when he took me up that hill to view the stars?

There was a force at work in me, as voracious as the pollutants and the kudzu that were eating the town and even stronger than the fury I could once muster. I'd thought I would have vengeful fantasies of driving up to UVA Law and painting “rapist” across Devon's apartment door, but I resented myself more than him. And this force convinced me that I would never be worth the attention of a man who would treat me decently. The diet pills, the laxative, the glass of wine—these were all really stupid steps that I took to contribute to what had happened. But worst of all, I had assumed something about his character— that he was nice and good and safe. I chided myself for how foolish I had been and concluded that the world was more dangerous and unpredictable than I had ever suspected.

I had lost something in addition to my virginity that spring. And something even more precious than my trust in my fellow man. I had lost the hope I once had for my purpose in this world, and I grieved this more than anything else. Before that dreadful night, my expectations for my future had made up my entire reason to exist, and now that they were gone, I didn't know how to make my way without them.

So I avoided Juliabelle, Mama, and all mirrors, and I went through the motions. I wrote thank-you notes to Mrs. Zapes and Mrs. Kitteridge and everyone else who hosted a deb luncheon on the thick white stationery Mae Mae had selected for me. I invited my second cousin Randy to the coed deb events: the casino parties, cocktail parties, and shag parties. And I even let him kiss me from time to time while he talked on the front porch about saltwater fishing and turkey hunting and the future we could have together in Williamstown. I stopped short of telling him that I'd probably lose my NBU scholarship and join him at the state university, but with every hand squeeze and gaze into my eyes, I knew he was hoping that was how the next year would unfold. And sometimes I thought a life with him might be just fine. I even loosened up and drank cheap beer at the end of the frontage road with Jif and the others and laughed while the boys climbed the water tower for the umpteenth time.

But when the darkness came into my room late at night, I was haunted by thoughts that convinced me of my worthlessness. I hated being in my own skin, and I did not welcome the dawn or the new day set before me.

If there was an itch to be scratched or a void to be filled, I knew that I was so far away from it now that it would never be in my grasp again, and so every time I tried to write, even about my pain or self-hatred, the page came up empty. What did
I
have to say?

What a haughty joke of a third-string valedictorian I was,
I thought as I drove by the old high school one morning on the way to a deb brunch.

Who
was
I?
Nothing.

A
nd
where
was I going?
Nowhere
.

At Mama's strong suggestion, I did babysit for Willa, a three-year-old girl down the street, four days a week to earn some pocket money. Being around children eased the pain, if only for a moment. Their motives were pure, even their selfish ones, and their little minds were not jaded by the dark edges of the world around them. Willa didn't know, for instance, that a trip through the woods in bare feet might result in a rattlesnake bite or that she could bust her head open if she jumped too closely to the edge of her bed. She didn't know that a stranger could swoop her up off the sidewalk and do away with her before sunset in whatever wicked way he desired.

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.