Adelaide Piper (40 page)

21

The Singing Shoes

F
or the next month I boarded the subway and rode the forty-five minutes into the city to the office on K Street where Glenda, Tobias, and I fielded calls and researched campus policies on assault.

Everyone on my subway commute had to have been a government-employed accountant, I thought as they straightened their cheap ties and read their
Washington Post
s
.
I'd have preferred a straight shot into the inner city of Anacostia rather than the route from Vienna to McPherson Square. Just to glimpse a pocket of life. To see if the capital city had a soul.

After two weeks of meetings and long business lunches, Glenda presented me with a press release about my joining their team as well as my schedule of interviews. President Clinton was promising to sign the Violence Against Women Act, and NOW needed a handful of victims to speak before Congress, so Tobias was trying to arrange, through a sympathetic senator from his district, for me to be among that handful.

Glenda asked me to come up with an outline for my speech so we could present it first to Senator Carnes for his approval, and then she would coach me in the coming weeks before I gave my formal presentation on the Hill.

“Okay,” I said, surprised by my lack of enthusiasm about speaking in the most powerful place in the known world. When I went to my little corner of the one-room office to brainstorm, I spent half a day staring at a blank page on an old computer screen.

I felt all talked out on the subject of campus rape and especially my own story, and after three false starts, I excused myself and ran out to the coffeehouse around the corner to grab a cappuccino and sit in the park, where I read the national section of a
New York Times
that I found between two slats on a bench. While four television networks had agreed to post warnings on violent shows and the Supreme Court ruled on the proper use of scientific evidence in the courtroom, the mighty Mississippi River was swelling uncontrollably and a five-hundred-mile stretch from St. Louis to St. Paul was closed down.

As I read, I thought of Frankie working as a reporter for his uncle at the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
and Harriet in the Big Apple. She had gotten a job on the set of
Godspell
, which was playing in Soho, and she was having a ball as she served as the assistant director with one of her former professors. The professor had introduced her to Redemption Methodist, an exploding church that met in a downtown college auditorium and drew thousands of young professionals to its services. Harriet had sent me tapes of some of her pastor's sermons, but I hadn't had time to listen to them.

When I was on the streets of Washington, I felt best. Poems came to me instantly, and I scribbled them down in my little Rachel's Rape folder in my briefcase, though they had nothing to do with rape policy or even weddings and all to do with a deep-seated longing for something I couldn't quite name.

As I ride

the subway escalator

up to street level

the heat dissipates.

On the corner

there is the

grind and dribble

of an espresso

machine

and a man

still snoozing

on the grate

which catches

my heel

as I pass.

What was with me? It was a kind of restlessness. I had a strong desire to peel back the skin of the town to see if it had a pulse. I asked Tobias to take me to a poetry reading or out dancing or even to try a little exotic food sometime, but he was too busy assisting with the upcoming Violence Against Women Act to take a night off.

There was an Ethiopian restaurant that Dizzy had told me to try and a little place in Adams Morgan that was cooking the recipes from
Like Water for Chocolate
, a recent love story I'd devoured one night in the f.r.o.g. when I declined a dinner invitation from the Moores. (Instead of dining with the lackluster in-laws, I ate Nabs and drank Co-Cola and escaped into a beautiful Mexican world where unrequited love would not go quietly.)

“I'll go by myself, then,” I told him one night as he walked me to the subway after a long day of work.

“Adelaide, that's not safe. I don't want you riding on the subway after dark.”

Then I remembered Lazarus Greene from high school, and it took one call to information to get his voice on the other end of the line.

When we met at the Ethiopian restaurant, I threw my arms around him and he held me tightly for a moment. He still had that graceful gait, but he had filled out, and he pushed back his shoulders with a kind of self-assurance and strength. He sported a black oxford shirt and one small gold hoop earring in his left earlobe, and he had completely shaved the top of his head. It was smooth and perfect, like a bowling ball, and it caught the light of the afternoon sun as we sat beneath a blue café canopy and swept piles of beans and vegetables onto spongy bread out of a large, round pottery bowl.

“I'm glad you called,” he said. He put his elbows on the table and clenched his fingers together, staring me in the eye. “I'm moving next month, and I would have missed you. I've thought about you a lot over the last few years, Adelaide.”

“Really?” I said, grinning at his forthrightness and smooth grin.

“Yeah,” he said, rocking his ball of hands between us. “You had
guts
to take me to that senior dance back in high school. I was probably a fool to go, but it's one of my best memories from Williamstown. And it helped me to see I had to get
out
.”

“Yeah, well, you were the obvious choice,” I said. “Bright, humorous, and handsome.”

“So your fiancé must be all of those things?”

Mmm.
“Bright and handsome, yes. But he's a little more on the serious side, I'd say.”

“Well, it's a serious subject you guys are dealing with,” he said.

“Anyhow, most folks in DC are serious.”

“Or boring,” I said. “So where are you moving?”

“NYC. I was strong-armed by one of my English professors to be in a production of
Much Ado About Nothing
at the Kennedy Center my junior year, and it was the greatest thing I'd ever done. I had this epiphany, sort of, and I've been writing plays and acting in local productions since then. I still majored in journalism, but I want to give this theater thing a go and see what happens.”

“That is really cool,” I said. “My friend Harriet is in theater up there. I'll have to connect you.”

“Sure,” he said as he swiped the bill from the waitress before I had time to protest.

“You only go round once,” he said. “Might as well make it count.”

Lazarus walked me to the subway entrance that night, where a man playing the saxophone nodded as we exchanged numbers and hugged good-bye. Then he hopped on his bike and sped home toward his apartment on Volta Street. And I stood at the top of the escalator, watching him as he rounded the corner a few blocks down, dodging and ducking the honking cabs before pedaling smoothly away.

Like the kudzu that shrouds and distorts the trees and abandoned shacks along the Southern back roads, so the aftermath of an attack blurs the victim's sense of reality. She becomes a shaded tree buried in vines that keep her from seeing sunlight. But what about the kudzu itself? Does it know the damage it is doing?

The articles I was supposed to write for the Rachel's Rape newsletter became more and more creative, steeped in metaphor and symbolism, and, ultimately, tended to stray away from the subject.

“Your writing is beautiful,” Glenda warned, “but this is going out to policy makers and campus administrators, so try to keep it concrete, okay?”

“Sorry,” I said as Tobias and Glenda stormed up to the Hill to bend the ears of another congressman before the upcoming vote on the act.

I went back to the computer and changed the article to this:

Rachel's Rape supports victims and trains men in the prevention of sexual assault. We are proud to present the first national media campaign focusing on the role that men play in preventing crimes.

“Hello, Rachel's Rape,” I said as I looked up from my computer screen to answer the phone.

“A-de-laide?”

The Southern drawl was unmistakable.

“Randy?” I said. I hadn't heard from him since he'd hung up on me when I told him I was engaged. “How in the world are you?”

“Good. Real good,” he said. “How are you up there?”

“Oh, you know, it's kind of exciting working in the nation's capital and all.”

“I know you always wanted an adventure like that,” he said. “I'm proud of you.”

“You aren't angry?” I asked.

“Not anymore,” he said. “That's sort of why I'm calling.”

“What's going on?”

“I'm getting married, too, Adelaide,” he said.

My heart skipped a beat, and I felt the sting beneath my arms.

Like a true Southern girl, I faked enthusiasm. “That's great! Who's the lucky girl? The cheerleader I've been hearing rumors about?”

“Yeah. Dodi was a cheerleader last year. She's from Greeleyville.”

Dodi is her name? Oh, good grief! It might as well be “Perky.”

“Greeleyville,” I said. “The thriving metropolis. So when's the date?”

“I've got you beat there,” he said, a hint of sadistic pleasure in his voice. “July 30.”

“Next July?” I asked.

“No, this,” he said.

“Good gravy, Randy! What—she knocked up?”

“Actually, she is,” he said, and my face reddened with horror. That perky little cheerleader had his number, and there was no stopping this nuptial.

“Now, I know what you're thinking, 'cause I know you, Adelaide.

You're thinking,
This is so Williamstown,
and you might be right about that. This isn't the way I always pictured things would end up, and that you well know. But this is the way things are, and after a lot of praying and talking to my folks, this is the right thing for me. She's a good girl, and I love her. I wanted you to know before I told anyone else in the family.”

I blew a long, deep breath of something between acceptance and resignation. Randy was the kind of guy who loved to do the right thing, and I adored him for that. What did I expect him to do, wait for me forever? What a selfish you-know-what I'd been.

“I'm proud of you, Randy.”

He chuckled faintly, as though he were on the other side of the world.

“I miss you, Adelaide. I wish you the best.”

“Don't worry; I won't come to the wedding. I know that would be too weird.”

“Yeah, I think so,” he said.

“But I want to kiss that baby one day.”

“You bet,” he said. “He'll be here in October. Good-bye, now.”

My office window faced the west side of the Hilton Hotel. Just above eye level I could see a housekeeping lady, fluffing up two pillows and folding down a bright blue bedspread before topping each side with a square of chocolate.

She looked up and squinted her eyes to see me. I was peering from around the computer at her, wondering how I ended up in this little office with a view of the fifth floor of a hotel.

When she looked away, I clutched the stapler by the phone and threw it, halfheartedly, at the wall behind me. It left a brown smudge above the fax machine before toppling off and into the recycling bin. Weeping into my palms, I pictured shucking oysters with Randy when I was thirteen and the cupola he'd built on top of his house that looked out across the sand dunes and into the Atlantic Ocean.

In my mind's eye I could see him cradling his baby boy in an elaborately embroidered christening gown, rocking him back and forth on the edge of Mae Mae's garden as the palmetto fronds rustled against one another and the Spanish moss swayed in the harbor breeze.

Tobias was focused on the cause. Day and night he wanted to discuss it with me. It was the very air he breathed, and he longed for it to be mine too. But on the days that he and Glenda left for Capitol Hill, I would turn on the answering machine and escape down to a pay phone in the lobby of the Hilton at the end of the block, where I tried to contact Harriet, Ruthie, or Jif to see how they were doing. (Shannon was out of reach in Bogotá, and everyone missed her.)

Occasionally I'd get Jif on the line, and she'd whine about how difficult the recovery from breast augmentation surgery was.

“Was it worth it?” I asked one afternoon, rolling my eyes. I loved Jif, but I just hated how her mind worked.

“Duh?” she answered with an unshakable faith. “They look great.

You're going to be seriously jealous.”

“Oh brother.”

But usually I didn't get anyone on the phone, and instead I just sat down on the plush sofa and pretended that I was a tourist or the young wife of an ambassador. I'd order a white wine spritzer and watch the powerful patrons blaze in and out of the brass revolving doors in their muted silk ties and dark Italian shoes.

When that got old, I'd loll around the nearest blocks, gawking at the guards in front of the White House and the busy businesspeople everywhere pounding the blocks with their heavy briefcases, as if they had in their possession the very solution for world peace.

One afternoon, Tobias came up for air and took me out to look at potential newlywed apartments in Arlington.

As we drove over the Fourteenth Street Bridge into Virginia and exited off the GW parkway, we circled one high-rise settlement after another on the fringe of the beltline. As far as I could see, Arlington had all the leftover remnants of what is bad about the city (littered roads and smoggy air), with none of the beauty or energy.

“What's wrong?” Tobias asked when I pooh-poohed three different shoe-box apartments on low floors of the square high-rises.

The institutional-looking buildings reminded me of the communist housing that Harriet and I had seen on a train ride from Budapest to Prague two summers ago.