Adelaide Piper (38 page)

“I'm not going to attach myself to one of these beasts,” Jif whispered as we watched Porter run suddenly into the arms of her fiancé, an unshaven Sigma named Craig.

“Hey, what am I, canned spam?” Frankie said.

“What
are
you, Mr. Harmony?” Jif said. “That's the question we'd all like to know.”

Frankie grinned and kicked at the green grass. “Wouldn't you, Beauty Queen. So what kind of guy are you holding out for?”

“After being in New York that summer, I saw that our options can be a lot better if we're willing to bide our time.”

Ruthie, who ironically had her head on better than anyone else these days, said, “You know, I do think we should wait a few years.

We might not even know what we want yet.” She had not dated anyone seriously since Tag Eisley, but she exuded a rare kind of confidence and hope when it came to the subject. “It will happen.”

“It is a predicament, though, isn't it?” Jif said. “I mean, once we've graduated, we're off the parental and scholarly dole. We have to make it on our own as single women.”

“And men,” Frankie said.

Jif continued, “It's easy to see why folks want to go into it together.”

Of course, I was head over heels with Tobias and certainly fantasized about marrying him, though there were some things about him that were beginning to annoy me. First and foremost: his family. I met them for the first time over Thanksgiving break. Mr. and Mrs. Moore were benign, but they were astonishingly dull and somewhat morose. Each meal they had together was in near silence. All you could hear was the clink of flatware against porcelain and an occasional “Can you pass the salt?”

They had little to say to each other or to me, and this drove me wild. I had cleared my throat and tried to prod them into a conversation.

“Can you all explain to me the carpool lane into the beltline? I entered it by accident the other day and was afraid I'd get pulled over.”

“Gotta have three passengers to enter during rush hour,” Mr. Moore said between slurps of cranberry sauce. “Cuts down on vehicles in the city.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sounds like a worthy idea to me.”

Tobias grinned in my direction. The Moores cut their turkey, and I went in again.

“Have you all taken in the Warhol exhibit at the National Gallery?”

Chew. Chew. Swallow. Clink.

“Come again?” Mrs. Moore said.

“Warhol, you know? The
Campbell's Soup
,
Marilyn Monroe
,
Twelve Electric Chairs
works?”

“Yes, we're familiar,” she said. She studied me as though I had something black between my teeth. Mr. Moore cleared his throat and salted his potatoes.

“We've lived in Washington a long time,” he said.

Mrs. Moore nodded, and I rolled my eyes.

“Oh, so you guys are, like, over the exhibits of world-renowned artists?”

Swallow. Clink. Clink. Chuckle. Clearing of the throat. Silence.

“Was your family always this quiet?” I asked Tobias later as we walked around the cul-de-sacs of the Vienna, Virginia, suburb where he'd grown up. “Or are they still in some kind of zombielike mourning for Rachel?”

“Adelaide!” he said. It was the loudest I'd ever heard him. He crushed the breath mint in his mouth instead of his usual sucking it to smithereens. “They're my parents. They are what they are, and they always have been. They're good people, you know?”

“I'm sorry,” I said, a little surprised by my callousness. He had not yet had the opportunity to meet my folks, but I was relieved about that since they were in the middle of a bitter divorce (and fairly wacky to begin with).

He had met Dizzy, though, when she took a trip up to DC to study for a weekend with a pastry chef from the Vidalia restaurant. I had flown up to meet her, and we both stayed in Glenda's guest room, warm and snug in her aromatic digs. Tobias and I had taken her out to lunch during her class break. She had wanted to try the new Thai restaurant that the Vidalia chef had recommended, but since Tobias couldn't do Thai, we had settled for TGIFriday's and three orders of the grilled chicken salad.

“He's a nice guy,” Dizzy said that night as we were crawling into bed. “And hot too. But it's just . . .” Dizzy hesitated.

“What?” I asked.

“He's kinda bland. And he probably, like, hates his blandness, and that's why he's doing this whole “stop rape” thing. To break away from his sensitive-stomach self. You know?”

“Maybe,” I said, my wall of defense hardening like the curved back of a fearful cat. “He's a good guy. You just aren't used to it, that's all.”

“C'mon, Adelaide,” Dizzy said. “He's totally bland. Not that that's bad. I mean, it's safe . . . and predictable. Is that what you want?”

The other thing that rankled me about his parents was that they were neat freaks and experts in emergency preparedness, like him. If he carried towelettes in his back pocket, then they carried thick cases of baby wipes and Spray 'n Wash sticks in their briefcases and glove compartments. For Christmas they had given me a car escape hammer complete with a knife to cut my seat belt if I were trapped in an accident and a flashlight to help me see if I were underwater. The end of the hammer had a sharp-pointed metal knob that would effectively break through the thick windshield glass to allow escape. I thought this was particularly strange, since I didn't own a car, and even if I did, I was sure I would have lost the little contraption somewhere beneath the floor mats before I ever needed to use it.

Their house was boring too. A split-level with orange brick, and each room was lined with IKEA plastic cabinets and furniture that had surely been ordered in one fell swoop from Rooms to Go.

They were both government employees. Mr. Moore was an upper-level administration manager at the IRS, and Mrs. Moore was in accounting at the Social Security Department. Tobias would have been an accountant, too, if it hadn't been for Rachel's rape and untimely death.

Now, Rachel, on the other hand, had obviously been the one in the family who had the spark. I could see it in their childhood photos, where she made funny faces, her bright eyes monopolizing the camera. She was a thespian. A singer. And an art history major with a trip lined up to study for a semester in Florence just after she took her own life.

Mr. Moore blew his nose and Mrs. Moore did her crossword puzzle that weekend as the clock ticked away the Thanksgiving holiday. And I could see why Tobias had chosen to break out of the mold when the opportunity presented itself.

But had he really done it? Sure, he lived in the edgy Adams Morgan, but his apartment was as stale and antiseptic as his folks's place. If you went into his closet, you could see every suit in a plastic casing spread inches apart from the others and each pair of loafers lined up on the floor, their open mouths reminding me of a choir practicing its scales.

“Do you see that?” I asked as I stared down at his cognac, black, and chocolate shoes.

“What?” he asked, following my eyes toward his closet.

“Your shoes—the way they're all lined up like that, they look like open mouths singing.”

He shook his head as if he didn't have the faintest idea what universe I was from.

To top it off, he had an equally boring roommate, Tom Rhys from Herndon, Pennsylvania, who was a public policy grad student at GW. Tom Rhys cleaned the apartment after breakfast every Saturday morning, and I always felt nauseous when I visited the place on the weekend because of the overwhelming fumes of Clorox and Comet seething up from the countertops.

Yes, the man who loved me was an activist with the soul of a bean counter, and sometimes I wondered how long before he'd revert completely back to the person he would have become had he not lost his sister.

When Tobias showed up unexpectedly on the NBU campus that April afternoon with a jewelry-box-shaped bulge in the side of his pants, I was floored.

We had been walking along the back quad when he simply knelt down on the knoll and proposed, just yards away from Ruthie's blooming tree.

“Adelaide, you know I'm in love with you. I believe in who you are, and your voice against violence is so sincere. Marry me and be my partner at Rachel's Rape as we fight this together.”

As he knelt there, completely unconcerned about the grass stain that was surely forming on the knee of his khakis, I could sense a small crowd of girls and guys gathering around campus to watch this proposal.

These snapshots flashed across my mind: Luigi's kiss, Randy's cupola, and Brother Benton's proclamation about winning my hand someday.

I was shocked that this was actually happening. It was unexpected.

My stomach was rising up to meet my throat.

I looked out at the folks on the quad, who were grinning and squeezing one another's arms in excitement. Then back to dear Tobias on his knee, looking up at me with those sensitive blue eyes that had shed many a tear over the victim letters I'd read to him over the course of the last several months.

Who'd have thought that I would be among those being proposed to before graduation? I could easily count my suitors on one hand my whole college career, and here I was with a handsome, tenderhearted twenty-six-year-old man who wanted to make me his wife.

Stopping for a moment to hear the third voice, a silence reverberated through my chest. Nothing.

Tobias looked up at me with such longing and expectation. He was beginning to wobble a little, and I knew I had to respond before he lost his balance.

I nodded in agreement to his proposal before he had to put his hand down to steady himself. Then he stood and placed the perfectly sized diamond platinum ring on my finger before picking me up and swinging me around as the little clumps of onlookers clapped.

“No way!” Jif Ferguson said on her way to her chemistry class. She let out a joyful squeal, followed by laughter and then a shout. “Adelaide Piper is engaged to be married!”

20

Betrothed

W
hen I called my parents to announce my engagement, they were shocked.

“We haven't even met him!” Mama said, and Daddy gave a steamy “That boy didn't have the grace to come down here and ask me for your hand? I don't know what to make of all this, sister!”

I tried to calm their nerves. When they wanted second and third opinions, I asked Dizzy to vouch for Tobias, as well as Ruthie and Jif.

Mama's and Daddy's fears were assuaged when they rewound their videos of my
60 Minutes
segment and picked him out of the panel.

He impressed them both with his good looks and with his sense of duty to fight for others on behalf of his sister.

So, in the end, they decided to let me make my own decision about whom I wanted to marry.

It was strange to be planning a wedding when my parents' divorce was almost official. Like someone dying and being born on the same day. It reminded me of how my great-uncle Graydon had died in the same hospital on the same day that Dizzy was born.

“They passed each other on the way,” Mae Mae was fond of saying.

No, it didn't feel quite right to be picking out silver and china patterns when Mama and Daddy's court date was approaching at a rapid pace.

But Tobias wanted to be married before the New Year, and so the plans were well under way for a Christmas wedding at St. Anne's Episcopal Church and a reception at the Magnolia Club.

“Marrying a Yankee?” Papa Great said to me over the phone one morning when Mae Mae phoned me about the caterer. “Doesn't surprise me a bit.”

Mae Mae jerked the phone out of his hand and said, “Adelaide, don't you listen to him. Tobias sounds wonderful, and Juliabelle and I will see to it that this wedding will be among the most elegant Williamstown has ever witnessed.”

“Better now?” Juliabelle asked, picking up the phone somewhere else in the house. (We had never spoken long-distance before.)

“Yes, ma'am,” I said. “You're going to like this boy, Juliabelle. He's a sweetheart.”

“Well,” she said, chuckling with hope, “this family needs something good to worry on.”

Since I had so much on my plate with graduating and moving to Washington to start the new job at Rachel's Rape, I decided to leave the matter of the wedding in Mae Mae's capable hands. I was the first of the Williamstown debs in my set to get married, so my photo and engagement announcement were plastered on the front page of the local newspaper and listed as well in the state paper.

Eat your heart out, Papa Great and Averill Skaggs.

Harriet, Jif, Ruthie, and Georgianne agreed to be my bridesmaids, and Dizzy and Lou seemed happy to share the spotlight as the maids of honor. Jif had ordered several bridesmaid catalogs and circled some of the gowns she thought would be most flattering on the wide array of figures in the wedding party. She slipped them one by one under my dorm-room door so that when I returned from a night of thesis research in the library, I could hardly cross my threshold without slipping on the glossy pages.

I was thumbing through a book of Watters & Watters gowns one late April night when Dizzy called to say, “It's official. Mom and Dad are divorced.”

Was it April 25 already? I was angry at myself for not remembering the court date, and then I was surprised by the tears that followed. They flooded my eyes, and my whole body shook with grief. The pink and blue satin gowns in the magazine were turning a muddled shade of gray from my tears, and I wondered why this was hitting me so hard now. After all, it had been coming for more than a year.

“I freaked out too,” Dizzy said. “Bawled right into my baklava, and Professor Anatole, the pastry-making Nazi, told me to throw the whole dish out.”

I chuckled through my tears, but still it hurt. I supposed that no matter how old you are, when your parents decide to rip apart the one flesh that they once had become, you will inevitably find yourself in the center of the seam.