Adelaide Piper (31 page)

A little piece of biscuit was caught in the right corner of his lip, and he had cut his chin shaving, but he was still as handsome as ever.

“We need to talk.”

“After the ball,” I said, smiling at him. “I'm sorry I've been out of the loop. I promise you the whole day tomorrow.”

“Okay,” he said; then he lifted a piece of folded notebook paper out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me.

Oh heavens, another poem,
I thought.

“I'll read it while my hair is setting.”

“Okay.” He grinned. “I'll see you tonight on the red velvet.”

“It's a date.”

Harriet, Mama, and I each had a manicure, a makeover, and a hair-setting appointment with Felix Idlewine, the owner of the elegant Felix's Hair and Beauty Salon, who had recently taken up residence in a lovely Victorian home on the National Historic Registry. His assistant, Tanya, pushed down my cuticles as Harriet selected her makeup colors and Mama was over getting her shampoo. When my nails were dry, Felix led me over to a big leather chair, dipped my feet in a little whirlpool, and handed me a thick magazine that had all sorts of buns and French twists to choose from.

“Up,” he said, pulling my hair on top of my head. “Pick the style, and I'll make sure that beauty mark of yours can be seen. It makes you.”

“Thanks,” I said, rubbing my index finger over my jewel.

After I picked a French twist with subtle wisps framing the model's face, I pulled the note from Randy out of my pocket.

Sure enough, it was a poem.

What flower blooms in the thick of winter

To remind us that spring is coming?

Oh, camellia, you make the sacrifice!

Your white bloom fills my heart with hope!

Oh, good grief.

Randy was gifted at kicking the ball and catching spot-tailed bass in the creeks. He was good at looking good and being a gentleman who honored loyalty and faith above anything. But his poetry—oh, his poetry was so bad!

When we arrived at the Magnolia Club, perfect from the neck up but still in T-shirts and blue jeans with our slips in tow, that undercurrent of nervousness from yesterday's rehearsal had turned into a full-blown hurricane of anxiety.

Mrs. Kitteridge rushed us up the grand mahogany stairs to the dressing room, where she instructed the mothers and daughters to throw on their gowns and dash down to the ballroom for the group and family photo shoots.

“Only an hour and a half before the guests will arrive, ladies!” she cried.

And the mothers were worse than anyone as they hurriedly poured themselves into their girdles and barked grooming orders at their daughters.

“The only thing worse than a nervous deb is a menopausal mother of a deb,” said Harriet as she turned her back for me to button up her gown.

“You can say that again,” Jif said, dabbing her eyes after her mother's scornful words about a run in her hose.

Jif looked beautiful, but thin and weary. I walked over to her with a Kleenex and told her how stunning she was.

“What does that beauty queen want from me?” she muttered, blowing her nose before powdering it again.

“She wants to be you,” Harriet said.

Mrs. Kitteridge had brought her walkie-talkies from home—the ones she kept in her bedroom and kitchen to call her housekeeper up when need be. She set one of them in the deb dressing room and another outside the ballroom so that she could greet guests while reminding the girls of the ticking clock before the procession.

Now her stained-glass voice came over the fuzzy machine. “Ladies, please come down for your photos. Time is of the essence.”

As I made my way down the stairs, I stopped to peer into the candlelit ballroom at my parents, who were awaiting my arrival. Their handsome appearance simply took my breath away, and I had to get a good look at them before I was swooped up in their conversation.

Mama had never looked better. Not even in her wedding pictures. Her dress was wine colored with a satin off-the-shoulder neckline and a snug velvet bodice that showed off her petite figure. The double-strand pearls and teardrop earrings seemed to make her black eyes sparkle, and she looked like a precious gem that someone had carefully taken out of its case.

And Daddy looked so dapper in his white tie and tails, his hair greased back with a touch of pomade and his cheeks blushing with pride. He wore the prosthetic and the plastic cover instead of rolling up his arm sleeve and pinning it under his elbow. The white glove over the prosthetic cover made him look as though he had two healthy hands and arms. As if he could pick me up like when I was six and spin me around and around until we collapsed back into the salt water together.

Mama and Daddy rose to the occasion, and they appeared to be a couple with a picture-perfect marriage. How I wished that were so, and though it was out of my hands, I hoped what they had together would survive.

Heavens knew they had gone through worse than this. Once I snooped and read Mama's journal about the time when she knew Daddy was wounded in Vietnam and the trip she made to the hospital in Virginia to greet him and begin the long road of rehabilitation. She had seen other wives and girlfriends take one look at their husbands through the glass of the hospital window and run away, refusing to face their men and the mangled bodies they had come home in. But Greta was determined to love Zane, one arm or not, nervous breakdown or not, and she had done beautifully until this point in their lives.

I walked through the door and into the ballroom after Mrs. Kitteridge nudged me with her miniature flashlight, and I ran toward them and hugged them and took my place between them in front of the Christmas trees.

“You look radiant,” Daddy said as he beamed with pride before the flash.

“We love you,” Mama said, squeezing my waist, and we looked again toward the camera to document the moment.

Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed myself in the giant gilded mirror—my made-up face and artfully constructed French twist with little wisps framing my hairline and the back of my neck, then the silk cap sleeves and the one-hundred-year-old sweetheart bodice of lace and pearls from the late Adelaide Rutledge Graydon that the seamstress had measured over and over again at my fittings.

I didn't know if it was the dim light or the pride of standing by my handsome parents, but for the first time since I could remember, I felt beautiful.

“Thank God you're my date,” Randy said as he looked me up and down.

“Stop it,” I said.

He laughed and reached his elbow out for me to take. “Miss Adelaide Rutledge Piper, I am stupefied.”

“Thanks for being here, Randy,” I said to him. (I hadn't so much as sneezed his way in the last week.) “You look incredibly handsome in your white tie and tails.”

My parents hadn't officially weighed in on my romance with Randy, but I knew Daddy loved how he treated me, and he was grateful to Randy for considering filling his shoes at the Piper Mill.

All in all, he was a man after Daddy's own heart—the Gamecocks second-string kicker, though he hardly ever got called into the game. But when he did, he loved it. This fall he'd kicked the winning field goal against the University of Georgia and replayed the video for me and Dizzy over and over, saying, “Check me out now, gals. That form ain't too shabby, eh?”

As the camera flashed on all the smiling parents and debs, I noticed Harriet standing in the corner, staring at the ceiling and waiting until she would be called over for the group photo. Her escort, Rod, would be rushing in at the last minute from Blockbuster, and Marguerite and Governor Maves (who would stand in as her father) wouldn't arrive until the procession. No other family member was present for this photo op, but Mrs. Zapes suggested that she, Jif, and I have our picture taken together.

After all the photos, we debs were rounded up like cattle and hurried up the stairs to spend the last hour touching up before the guests arrived. We took off our gowns as instructed, then snacked on finger sandwiches and Co-Colas behind the heavy closed doors in our bras and slips.

The last half hour before we were to make our way down for the procession was chaotic and stressful. Our mothers were sent downstairs, which was probably for the best. Marny was about to drive Jif over the edge with her nitpicking. Jif ran to the bathroom and stayed there for a good fifteen minutes until eventually poor Winkie had to bang on the door, she had to go so bad. Finally, Jif came back with watery eyes and two breath mints in her mouth. Harriet's and my eyes met after sizing her up.

Next, Jif and I ran into a variety of cover-up and powder issues as we tried to conceal the top of Harriet's tattoo that peeked out from the center of her back when she lifted her dress to curtsy.

Perky Nan McCant seemed to be the only one taking the evening in stride. The whole Kappa Nu house from Wofford was going to be there to cheer her on, as well as a slew of Converse College comrades.

The weak link was Winkie. It was obvious that she was on the verge of an anxiety attack over her curtsy, and we all knew that her misstep could turn the elegant evening into a laughingstock, if only for a moment, if she tumbled again.

When Mrs. Kitteridge announced the ten-minute mark over the fuzz of her walkie-talkie, there was a flutter of last-minute grooming. Girls spit out their chewing gum in napkins and put the final coat of lipstick on before suiting themselves up again in their white gowns.

In the midst of this last-minute rush, I looked over to Jif. As if in slow motion, I could see her eyes suddenly glaze over before she swayed once, then flat-out fainted into the communal vanity, sending two containers of powder, one open tube of lipstick, and a recently coated blush brush flying across the room.

The blush brush landed in the center of Nan's gown as Winkie was buttoning her up, and it left a streak of dark pink and beige from her hips down to the floor.

Nan shrieked with horror as I picked Jif up off the Oriental rug. Harriet ran to get a wet towel and the smelling salts from the first-aid kit in the bathroom as Winkie tried to calm Nan down.

She was literally shaking with rage.

“My gown! My gown!” Nan screamed as tears brimmed in the corners of her eyes. “Curse you, Jif Ferguson,” she said in her direction as Jif started to regain consciousness. “You probably haven't eaten in the last forty-eight hours, and now you've gone and ruined my gown, not to mention my entire night!”

Winkie started to look as though she might pass out, too, when she realized that the stick of dark pink lipstick had gotten caught in the back of her dress and left a smudge the size of a plum on her derriere. Jif sat up after another whiff of the smelling salts as Mrs. Kitteridge fired the five-minute warning for the presentation over the walkie-talkie.

I stuffed a pimento cheese finger sandwich into Jif 's mouth as I ordered Nan and Winkie to dig for the extra tube of concealer Mama had hidden in my bag.

“Everyone just get a grip!” I said. “The lights are dim down there, and you know our parents are so anxious themselves, they won't notice a thing. Beige is better than red, so let's do the best we can with this.”
God, help us!

As we paired up and coated the stains with a layer of concealer goo, the walkie-talkie sputtered before Mrs. Kitteridge called, “One minute until presentation time, debutantes. Come down, now!”

I looked around at the group of young ladies before me. Quite frankly, they all looked pretty good. And even though the circles of concealer stood out on the white dresses, a strange peace had entered the room.

Winkie looked at the front of Nan's gown and said, “It's not that bad.

Half of it is in the fold.”

Nan breathed a sigh and apologized for what she had said about Jif.

“Yours has faded some,” Harriet said, opening the back of Winkie's dress. “Like Adelaide said, it's dark down there.”

“Let's go!” I said, stuffing another pimento cheese sandwich down Jif 's throat before taking my place in back of the line.

Jif wiped her mouth and walked to her position at the front with a sure-footed strength from her brief bites of sustenance.

As we all made our way down the mahogany stairs, I thought about Christ's very first miracle. I had just read about it in the Gospel of John earlier in the week. How He turned the water into wine at His mother's urging to spare a newlywed couple from their first social embarrassment.

Who knows, maybe God does care about these silly little details,
I thought as I made my way behind the others and down the velvet-lined stairs before Mrs. Kitteridge handed me a bouquet of white roses, their stems wrapped in white satin.

“I'm a convert,” Harriet whispered back to me before we lined up in the hallway to make our grand entrance.

“Are you joking?” I said.

“No. It happened when we were getting our hair done this afternoon. Sort of like C. S. Lewis on his ride to the zoo. When I walked into Felix's salon, I was agnostic, and by the time I walked out, I was a Christian.”

“C'mon,” I said, squeezing her shoulder. “Tell the truth.”

“Well,” she said, blowing a piece of hair out of her face, “I figured, what do I have to lose? Marguerite's sick, and everything else has gone down the crapper, so why fight something that's going to be positive in my life?”

I nodded as the orchestra finished “The Rite of Spring” in the ballroom.

“It was hubris that was keeping me at bay,” Harriet added.

Mrs. Kitteridge was whispering directions to Jif, so we knew we had a few more minutes until showtime.

“Elaborate,” I said as Mrs. Zapes and a few other older ladies lined us up and positioned us just so. Bitsy Stillwell wiped another crumb out of the corner of Jif 's mouth with her handkerchief and asked Nan to blot her lips because they were too glossy.

“It was pride that said, ‘You're too bad to be forgiven.' I mean, who am I to think that the sacrifice isn't powerful enough to cleanse me? So I said, ‘Okay, God is sacred, so why shouldn't He have a crack at this?'”