Adelaide Piper (28 page)

I was headed to USC. No doubt about it. But the weight of the world wasn't on me at the moment.

Was forgiveness real? I hoped it was. And I hoped Ruthie could find it before she cut her way up her arm and toward her own pounding chest.

Had I “accepted Jesus” last night, like those seemingly wacko tel-evangelists used to say as I flicked their voices away from me as fast as my remote control could carry them every Sunday morning since I could remember? Would my life be radically different from this point forward? Would I really care?

If I actually had been created for Someone's greater purpose, if my life was not really my own to begin with, then why not submit to the One who provided a way out of the pit?

As I walked by the gravel road that led to the campus graveyard on the next hillside, I felt that God had been drawing me to Him all along during the months following the rape. And maybe before that too. In every moment of wonder I had ever witnessed.

The snow was falling so fast now that the wall around the graves looked like a white gate surrounding a private garden.

I had been looking for a raison d'être when I went to college, and maybe I'd found it. It had been around me all of my life. If it had been a snake, it would have bitten me many times over. But now I could glimpse the dullest bit of it. I could put the pieces of all that I knew to be good together and barely see the edge of it.

I didn't really know how to pray or how to talk to God. I didn't even know much about the Bible except for the few stories I'd learned as a child. Of all these, I liked the miracle of the loaves and fishes best.

I remembered one morning in the run-down classroom at St. Anne's when our teacher dressed up like Jesus and put two goldfish crackers and three oyster crackers into a basket covered with a paper towel. She lifted the basket up to thank God for the food, and when she pulled it down, it was filled with hundreds of oyster crackers and goldfish. What a great surprise!

So, on my walk around the snow-dusted campus that day, all I saw were those pieces of bread that were broken and broken again to fill the stomachs of the hungry listeners.
Can you take this loaf?
I said of my life.
And use it?

I pictured each member of my family and their respective woes:

Dizzy with her sordid high school history and DUI charges, Lou with her speech impediment and lack of self-confidence, Mama's emotional distance, and Daddy's decision to step away from the family business no matter what it cost his marriage or his relationship with his parents. I named each of them and my concerns for them, and then I envisioned placing them on an altar as I walked.

And I thought about Brother Benton's family and Peter Carpenter spending the first of many Christmases in jail after his manslaughter conviction, and I placed him on that altar as well.

As I ascended to the colonnade and looked out over the Blue Ridge Mountains, I was stunned by the beauty of the light on the patches of white atop the great masses of jagged rock. It was as though I was seeing them for the first time.

14

I'm C-o-m-i-n-g Out

T
he next morning Jif and I made our way back down the mountains to Williamstown for the Christmas holiday and the Camellia Club Debutante Ball. I had said a final good-bye to my favorite professors.

On the way down the winding ridges, I told Jif about the last twenty-four hours, “No lie,” I said to her. “This God/Christ thing we've been hearing about all of our lives—I think Shannon was right all along.”

Jif rolled her eyes. “
Please
don't turn into a Bible beater on me,” she said. “I mean, don't misunderstand me; you sound better than you've sounded in months, and I'm happy that Ruthie's mom is clued in to the situation, but I don't want you to make my skin crawl the way Shannon used to. I mean, she totally changed, and we lost her.”

Jif was sincerely worried that my personality would be sucked out by this newfound faith. It was the very thing that I had worried about, too, and I wondered how to make sure that didn't happen.

“If I change, I think it will be for the better.”

“Time will tell,” Jif said as she gulped down her Diet Coke and offered me a stick of Dentyne.

Jif was looking better than ever—like a Victoria's Secret model minus the full-sized breasts. After her exams, she shifted into high gear with her Tully Dorm Diet. For over a week she had been drinking ice water and lemon-lime Gatorade and eating only celery sticks and an occasional Slim-Fast bar. You never caught her without a piece of gum in her mouth in a constant attempt to suppress her appetite. She had even climbed up Kiki Mountain twice and attended two aerobics classes a day to burn-baby-burn those calories away. To Ned Crater's dismay, she was turning the heads of many a frat boy as she strolled through campus during the last days of the semester in her snug size 2 blue jeans and midriff sweaters.

But that was merely a fringe benefit of her pursuit. She was doing all of this for her deb dress. And she was going to make it into that tiny frock if it was the last thing she did. I just hoped that her obsession would end as soon as she marched her bony little fanny down the aisle at the ball.

When I arrived home to a half-decorated Christmas tree and no one but Marmalade the cat to greet me, I wondered what was going on.

Dizzy and Lou pulled up in the station wagon just after I hauled my suitcase to my room and informed me that my folks were at a Bizway convention (Mama must have caved) in St. Louis and would be home late that evening.

I hugged them both as though I hadn't really seen them in years, and I took them out to the new all-you-can-eat pizza joint, where we feasted on pepperoni pizza and slices of chocolate-chip pie as we caught up. Lou was sweet Lou, with a much better command of words that started with
r
and
w
, thanks to the new speech therapist at her school. And Dizzy seemed a thousand times better. She was still dressed like a witch, but she had stayed off the sauce and attended her AA meetings regularly, and she had even gone down to Harvest Time for a few services. She didn't think college was for her, but she wanted to go to cooking school. In fact, she had been cooking up a storm on the nights she would have normally been out partying, and Lou attested to the fact that her fettuccine Alfredo and tiramisu were true culinary delights. (Only she described them as “really y-yummy.”) Dizzy had just applied to the Johnson & Wales Cooking College of Culinary Arts in Charleston, and if all went her way, she'd be enrolled come June.

As for Mama and Daddy, they were in a bad spot. Daddy was buying Bizway supplies like there was no tomorrow, and a box of vitamins or toilet paper or cleaning products arrived at our door daily as part of his building up the necessary points to make the next level— his part in becoming a “pro-sumer” instead of a “con-sumer.”

Every time Uncle Tinka invited him to a new town to speak about the business and tell his war story about getting the Purple Heart, or his football tales of scoring the winning touchdown against Clemson in the fall of 1967, he'd come home with a wad of cash and three or four names scribbled down on a receipt, and he'd hound those poor souls until they agreed to sign up under him or were forced to change their number.

He was 100 points away from going platinum, and he was pumped. It was all a great adrenaline rush for him, and he was completely sold out to it. However, Mama (who had agreed to attend a few more meetings for the sake of her marriage) continued to disdain the business. She hated traveling. It was not at all a part of the small-town life she had always wanted and managed to have until now. She hated speaking and wearing sequined dresses and learning about how many cars someone owned.

Worst of all, she hated the fact that her husband was no longer a workingman in the traditional sense. She hated that he didn't wear a coat and tie each day and play the role of Ward Cleaver that he'd happily obliged her before. Not to mention the fact that he was at home all day, in the domestic domain that was hers to control.

Papa Great was still livid about the whole thing. He'd never wanted his black sheep of an offspring, Tinka, to go into the seemingly crooked networking business, and he certainly didn't want his war-hero son, Zane, to follow the same path.

“Daddy doesn't give a hoot about what anybody thinks,” Dizzy said as Lou nodded in agreement while slurping down her second Co-Cola.

I guessed that he'd been doing what other people wanted for twenty-five years—and doing it with a good attitude, one might add.

But this was his moment to shine, and he would not be denied.

“Papa asked Randy to take Daddy's place,” Dizzy said.

“I had a feeling that was coming,” I said. “But he'll have to cool his jets till Randy graduates.”

When we returned home, Dizzy and Lou led me to a little shrine on the dining room table that Mama had created for my return. Next to a bouquet of fresh white roses and a pair of long kid gloves with pearl buttons, I saw first the framed invitation to the upcoming ball. The crest of the Camellia Club decorated the top line of the invitation, and below, in black engraving, it read:

The Governors of the Camellia Club
request the pleasure of your company
at their annual debutante ball
Saturday, the twenty-seventh of December
One thousand nine hundred and ninety
at eight o'clock
The Magnolia Club
Williamstown, South Carolina

And there was a thick linen insert with our names:

Miss Jennifer Louise Ferguson
Miss Harriet von Hasselson Hartness
Miss Nancy Whitmire McCant
Miss Adelaide Rutledge Graydon Piper
Miss Winifred Powell Pride

Also, there were less-formal invitations on little wooden picture holders to events that would take place over the next seven days before the ball: the curtsy tea, the final luncheon, a rehearsal dinner.

Gifts had arrived and were stacked behind the mounted invitations in polished white wrapping with white satin bows as if I were a virgin bride. I had to chuckle at the irony. I guessed the adults in my life didn't know that when a girl grows up in the postmodern, post–sexual revolution world, coming out often happens well before the ripe old age of twenty. Talk about a chasm.

Mama had even typed out my schedule for the next several days:

Wednesday: Dress fitting, 9:00 a.m.
Shoe fitting, 11:00 a.m.
Curtsy tea, 4:00 p.m.

Thursday: Haircut, 10:00 a.m.
Luncheon, noon

Friday: Christmas Saturday: Portrait sitting, 10:00 a.m.

Monday: Final fitting, 9:00 a.m.
Rehearsal, 4:00 p.m.
Rehearsal dinner, 6:00 p.m.

Tuesday: Manicure, 2:00 p.m. Makeup and hair, 3:00 p.m.
Debutante ball, 8:00 p.m.
(must arrive by 5:30 p.m. for group and family
photo session)
Breakfast, midnight

And she had laid out more of that white monogrammed stationery I would use to write thank-you notes to my hostesses and gift givers.

There was also a typed list of the family and friends who had responded to the ball invitation. My aunt Anna was actually traveling from Germany to make the event. And Daddy's kin from west Georgia too. Randy would be my escort, and I was relieved not to have to worry about him the way the other girls would about their out-of-town boyfriends coming in. I was looking forward to seeing him.

As I fingered the ball invitation and breathed in the thick perfume of the roses, I wondered what God thought about debutante balls and the formality and etiquette that went along with such social events.

God,
I thought.
I hope You don't mind my being a debutante, because I think Mama would truly flip if I refused to go through with this.

Late that evening, Randy called.

“I can't wait to see you!” he said. “When can you come with me out to the duck blind? You're going to love watching the birds come in to roost in the swamp.”

“Sounds buggy,” I said.

“No, they're gone for the winter. There's something I want to show you there. I can't wait to see you! When can I pick you up?”

I heard my parents pull up in the driveway, and I told Randy I'd call him tomorrow; then I ran down the stairs to greet them. There was nothing as comforting as the smell of Daddy's Aqua Velva aftershave and his prosthetic rubbing my back in a tight squeeze or Mama kissing my jewel as if I were the most precious treasure in the world.

I had much to tell them about my new faith and the likelihood of my transfer to USC, but they were so weary that they seemed relieved when I asked if they would rather catch up in the morning.

As I made my way back up the stairs and opened the confirmation Bible Juliabelle had given me, I heard my parents' angry words ricochet off the ceiling below. I couldn't make out what they were saying to each other, but I detected the harshness in Mama's voice, and when I woke early in the morning, I found Daddy, again, on the sofa, still wearing his travel clothes from the night before. I wondered what could make Mama so angry that she wouldn't help him unbutton his shirt and get into his pajamas.

In between my fitting and my curtsy tea, I made the rounds to my odd assortment of local buddies. I went first to Harvest Time to tell Dale and Darla about my newfound faith. They cheered and hugged me and called in Charlie Farley, who was in the receptionist area, answering the phone, and we all knelt down in the sanctuary to say a prayer of thanksgiving.

Dale and Darla sent me home with one of the hand-carved wooden crosses one of the migrant workers was making as a contribution to the church. I nailed it right over my bed beneath the print of Andrew Wyeth's
Christina's World
that Mama had framed for me a few years back. Christina looked paralyzed with fear as she sprawled across a field, looking at a drab farmhouse with dark windows in the distance. I imagined crawling into the painting and handing Christina the wooden cross. (Would I come down from this spiritual high?)