Adelaide Piper (24 page)

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 water 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.

After we anchored beneath a live oak tree on the edge of Goose Creek, he read poetry to me. Rather maudlin poems about nature and love, but still, the gesture was dear.

When he pulled a little blue box out of his back pocket, I was scared to death he might be proposing.

Oh, good gravy,
I thought as he snapped open the cover to reveal two perfectly round charcoal-pearl stud earrings. He handed them to me and said, “Three years isn't so long. And I'm not giving up now.”

He kissed me long and hard; then he pulled out a folded piece of notebook paper from his pocket and read a poem he had just composed himself.

Every now and then

While an oyster shell

Filters salt water

A few grains of sand come in.

After months of mud

The sand becomes a pearl.

Then I open the shell and find it.

Like my heart, it belongs to one girl.

I smiled at his sincere effort and blushed at the sentiment. No one had ever written me a poem. And even though this one was terrible, I hugged him hard and thanked him for how much he'd meant to me this summer.

After kissing Randy a final good-bye on Mae Mae's dock, I went for a last summer visit with Baby Peach and Georgianne; then I loaded my suitcases into Jif 's new car for our return to NBU.

The debs had gone on an informal farewell trip to Myrtle Beach the night before. Shannon had followed me onto my porch at the end of the night to ask me if I had gained any ground with
Mere Christianity
. Since my family turmoil, I had not cracked any book and had concluded that as wonderful an idea as it was, I just wasn't there yet.

“It's a lovely story,” I assured her as the fireflies lit up the yard. “It's a beautiful notion. I mean, to think that God could have become human and died for mankind so that we could be reunited with Him. But . . .”

“Okay,” Shannon said, unable to hold back a sigh. She seemed genuinely disappointed and concerned.

“I'm sorry to let you down, Shan. But hey, you can pray for me,”

I said, “that I will be able to function back at school and have a decent year there. My scholarship is in jeopardy, and heaven knows how freaked out I'm going to be when I get back there.”

“You know I will.”

“I know, Miss Holy Roller,” I said, hugging her before tugging on her ponytail. “You have a good year too.”

Shannon was headed back to the two-year women's college in North Carolina while applying to other colleges where she would finish. I had never heard of Wheaton, which was Shannon's first choice, but I could only imagine that it had a lot to do with religion.

Before the crowd broke up, Harriet gave us all an airbrushed T-shirt that she had snuck off and purchased while we stood in line at the Tilt-a-Whirl ride.

“Now, these are so deblike.” Jif snickered as she held up a black one with a pink-and-lavender beach scene and her name in a chalky yellow cursive across the chest.

We donned them and squeezed into my porch swing while Dizzy held the camera and Harriet hollered, “Say ‘cheesy'!”

12

Sophomores

A
s Jif and I made our way up the Blue Ridge Mountains, we learned every word to
Fun and Games
, the new Connells CD. It took our minds off our equally awkward family good-byes: I had learned on a trip downstairs for a late-night glass of water that Daddy was sleeping on the sofa, and Jif overheard her own mother in the bathroom after the farewell steak dinner refusing to come out until her husband agreed to schedule her for a tummy tuck before the deb ball.

“Marny,” Dr. Ferguson had called to her harshly, “if you don't stop this foolishness, I'm going to call a shrink.”

Marny Ferguson wanted Jif to have a car so that she could continue her beauty maintenance at a Roanoke salon, so she allowed her to take the candy-blue Mercedes to school.

“Nice wheels,” I said when Jif rolled into my driveway earlier that morning. I had thought Jif was going to be driving the old Ford station wagon she drove in high school.

“It sort of comes with strings,” Jif said as she helped me load my luggage into what little room was left in the trunk. (Jif was such a clotheshorse, but at least she wasn't stingy, and there were several tags hanging from suede jackets and cashmere sweaters that I looked forward to borrowing.)

“Let me guess,” I said. “You're going to have to be in pageant condition when you go home for Thanksgiving.”

“Something like that.”

“Your mama is so misguided,” I said, strapping myself into the passenger seat, “and I'm
not
going to let you puke your guts up all semester over this.”

Motioning to the fancy dashboard with all of its knobs and gadgets, I looked at Jif head-on until she acknowledged my stare. “We're talking about your body, here, Jennifer Ferguson. Your health and well-being. You're certifiable if you're willing to jeopardize that for a second!”

“Yep,” Jif said, nodding her head in a kind of resigned disgust at her mother's twisted priorities.