Adelaide Piper (6 page)

“I've heard them all from D-Dizzy, a-anyway,” she'd answer, then, “Don't w-worry, I w-won't say them, Ad.”

Now I pulled out my new journal and began to write poetry. This was one way to scratch the itch, and a marvelous method of escape.

The journal was a graduation present from Shannon Pitts, that former best friend who went born-again Christian on me two summers ago at a Young Life retreat in Colorado. Shannon tenaciously evangelized even our most minor conversations, and it was downright wearisome.

“Thank God she chose the women's college in North Carolina,”

Jif had said, “so we can have a break from her!” Otherwise, every college question or problem would have been answered by her rote, Holy Roller lingo: “Give it to God . . . Take it to the Cross . . .” What in the world did
that
mean, anyway?

And what about this: Shannon talked about Jesus as if He'd just left the room. As if He had been sitting with us, drinking a Co-Cola, and walked to the kitchen to get some tortilla chips! I was bewildered by the nonchalance with which she referred to the Son of God. It was startling, if not irreverent. Who would dare to assume that they knew
Him
in such an
intimate
way?

Goodness knows
I
wasn't on a first-name basis with the guy. I'd heard about Him at the High Episcopal church my family attended, with a Communion that was more fashion show than sacred. I could remember praying when I was a young girl. I could even recall a kind of supernatural peace when I lay in bed at night and recounted my day —the things I did right, the things I did wrong, and the things I would try to do right tomorrow. It was my own little litany of repentance, and it brought me a wonderful kind of lightness at the end of each day. But I gave it up somewhere around adolescence when my body changed and my mind raced and the itch gnawed away at me. Instead, I filled myself with schoolwork and poetry and crushes on teachers or upperclassmen who had a little something going on upstairs.

Nonetheless, it was nice of Shannon to notice how I spent my time these days—writing. No one else seemed to. I'd spent this last summer once again at the Governor's School at the College of Charleston, where my favorite professor, Penelope Russo, gave me fresh insight into my craft. I had learned from Penelope (she let us call her by her first name) that poems didn't have to rhyme or have punctuation and that short stories could transport you anyplace in the world: the streets of Harlem, a café in a Paris alleyway, or even a foxhole in Vietnam, where my own daddy lost his arm and two friends when a well-aimed grenade was hurled their direction.

Penelope Russo had taught me more than just the art of writing— she had taught me how to look within my heart and examine the itch. How to pin it under a microscope and probe at it with the point of a pencil. And for me to name what I longed for on paper provided some relief, and for that I was immeasurably grateful.

I scribbled down a poem as the wagon steamed up the foothills of the Blue Ridge, looking up every few minutes to see if I could lay eyes on the “You are now leaving South Carolina” sign.

Good-bye Williamstown.

Farewell gloom

in the window

of a mill village

home.

Every mile

toward Virginia

takes me closer

to what has to be

my destiny.

Thank God they let us retake those SATs because of the noise of the elementary-school carnival last autumn,
I thought. On the second try, I had purchased those Kaplan books and stared at vocabulary words and algebra problems until I could hardly see straight. I raised my score 240 points, which opened a spot with a minor scholarship for me at NBU, the small and prestigious liberal arts college “nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains,” as the brochure boasted. Now I was bound for an institution that judges, senators, and Pulitzer prize–winning authors were proud to call their alma mater.

I'd had to do some fancy footwork to convince my parents that this was a better opportunity than the full scholarship I received to the University of South Carolina. I can remember walking the magnolia-lined brick path up to Papa Great and Mae Mae's front door for a change, to sit down in their living room and ask if they would further convince my parents by splitting the remainder of the tuition bill of my academic dream. Thankfully, the old pig considered it a good investment in family relations (i.e., another way to keep Daddy happy and working at the mill), and so they agreed to contribute. Sometimes I felt a tinge of guilt knowing this would hem Daddy in to his mill job another four years, but I was in claw-my-way-out mode, and nothing short of an act of God could stop me.

The Governor's School, fashion magazines, and MTV—these were my only vistas into what lay beyond Williamstown. I was a bug in a jar, and I was counting on NBU to take the lid off so I could fly. I could hardly wait to register for classes, to smell the insides of the hardbound books that would expand my horizons.

And there was more that I would experience, I was sure. I might even fall in love in college with a bright and cultured Mr. Right. That's how my parents met, in fact. My mama, a socialite from Charleston, yearning for a slice of what she called the “All-American Life” (which I had come to realize was just an amalgamation of Southern culture and small-town charm), had fallen in love with Zane Piper, the star tailback of the University of South Carolina football team, their sophomore year. (He was a kind of legend, even today, because the Gamecocks have not had as good a season since his class graduated more than twenty years ago. Sometimes people came right up to him on the streets and said, “You were the one who gave us the taste of victory, Zane.” Or they honked and yelled, “Go, Gamecocks!” from their cars when he jogged along the interstate, his stump keeping time with his good arm.)

But I certainly wouldn't let romance knock me off track, as it had Georgianne Mayfield. Poor Georgianne, the honest winner of that valedictorian race of the Williamstown class of 1989, was about to give birth to her first child. She had been accepted at Princeton and Wellesley and even offered a full scholarship to Davidson, an above-average college in the right direction, but before she could make up her mind, she started feeling queasy in the morning and had to face the fact that her future would take a dramatically different turn.

It was Peach Hickman who had sucked my dear friend back into Williamstown with his good looks and his fifty-yard-line seats at the University of South Carolina football games. He was a junior at Carolina, but he came home every weekend, and Georgianne had thought it was so romantic the way he would pick her up on game days with a picnic basket filled with his mama's pickled okra and pimento cheese sandwiches. I tailgated with them on occasion in the corporate field where his daddy's tractor company was a sponsor. I did a lot of thumb twiddling and daydreaming as Peach and Georgianne threw the football back and forth and snuggled beneath the blankets when the temperature dropped.

Now Georgianne wouldn't be a scholar or a debutante. She'd married Peach Hickman just three weeks ago. Jif, Shannon, and I threw a bridal shower for her at the country club, and I cried tears of grief over her future with every Pyrex dish and cookbook that she unwrapped. I made such a scene that Georgianne pulled me into the powder room for a reprimand: “This is not a funeral, Adelaide. It's not even an original story, Miss Smarty-Pants Poet. You ought to know that much.

Now, buck up and give me a little support here!”

I nodded to appease her, but to me Georgianne was living the worst nightmare I could ever imagine. I did not know how I would survive the stifling life of casseroles and dirty diapers that awaited her.

Maybe it was a good thing that no boy at Williamstown High had ever asked me out.

Nobody in my class ever talked about sex. And no one's parents ever talked about it, and the school never talked about it, and neither did the church. So we were all clueless as to what it was all about and how a tragedy like this could sneak up on you unawares. I put it together—the mechanics of what actually happened between a man and a woman—in eighth grade after watching a
Little House on the Prairie
episode in which one of the town's girls was attacked by a man in a clown mask. It came to me like a great revelation at the end of the show, and I went and told Dizzy about how it must work. But, of course, she already knew all about it from a classmate named Angel who had spelled it out to her the summer before.

Not me. I would not succumb to this fate. In fact, if an NBU guy got the hots for me (and let me tell you, one had
better
!) I would keep him at arm's length until I knew where I wanted to go. I'd worked too hard to get caught in that old trap.

Yes, I was up for adventure, I longed for romance, and I wanted desperately to know the meaning behind the collage of terminology that spilled out of Penelope Russo's mouth: words like
postmodern
,
deconstructionists
,
existentialism
, or names like Kafka, Beckett, and Proust. I had to study Shakespeare—anyone who seemed remotely cultured was always quoting him. I had to read Virginia Woolf—heck, there was a whole play written about her! I had read it at Governor's School but had no idea what it was about.

What I did know was that there were mysteries all around me— and more than this, there were moments of downright splendor. Like when my daddy took me fishing in the Santee River by the old rice fields, and the sun set behind the cypress swamp, leaving a backdrop of red and orange, and the gnarled limbs of the oak trees reached up to the sky like open arms. Like when I found an abandoned kitten in the packing room at the mill and brought it home to our infertile house cat, Marmalade, whose breasts miraculously swelled with milk so that she could nurse him back to life.

And like the time I ate a bad oyster and my throat closed up so I could hardly breathe, and Juliabelle made Daddy drive me over to Berkeley County, where they carried me through the Francis Marion Forest and over to the artesian well by Huger Creek. Juliabelle filled an empty Co-Cola bottle with the water from the spigot, and when she handed it to me, she said, “Drink up. This is the tonic.” When that cool underground water coated my throat, I swear I could breathe again.

The explanation of such splendor and more opportunities to experience them had to be in books and colleges and heated discussions in coffeehouses, and NBU had to be the place where my journey would begin.

Penelope Russo had applauded the poem I wrote a few weeks ago at the end of my summer session:

There has to be more to this world

than climbing the Williamstown water tower

and drinking cheap, tasteless beer

at the end of the frontage road.

She'd asked me to read it during the closing ceremony of Governor's School in the College of Charleston auditorium. It upset my parents that I looked as though I was a drinker and a water-tower climber when, in fact, I couldn't stand the taste of beer or anything other than champagne, and I was hardly the daredevil, tower-climbing type. But my parents didn't understand that you could write something from the heart even though it wasn't from your own personal experience. I had concluded that Zane and Greta Piper were, sad to say, unenlightened.

Now, I was no fool. I realized that one could not mention the splendor of this world without acknowledging the sadness.

Just a mile from my home, I had once wandered over to Cousin Randy's farm when cows were being slaughtered. I could see the bloodstained walls of the cinder-block building and the carcasses piled up behind the barn with flies swirling around them in their buzzing frenzy. The smell made me so weak in the knees that I swore off hamburgers for a year.

And once, when I was cleaning up a back road for a school service project, I saw a man hit a woman so hard that her lip bled. When he walked to his truck to leave, the woman chased after him, hugging and kissing him and begging him to come back inside their mobile home, which he did.

And what about the old car in the kudzu-covered woods behind my house? Dizzy and I had found it one morning when we were playing hide-and-seek. It looked like those first Model Ts. There was a spring popping out of the backseat cushioning, spiderwebs around the steering wheel, and a woman's black high-heeled shoe caught in the door handle. What made someone abandon a car like that? Did they win the lottery? Did they fall into the swampy quicksand? Or had they been swept up in a hurricane, their remains spread out across the marsh, only to be picked apart by the vultures I saw from time to time circling the sky?

Definitive queries:

Is there a point

to my life?

Am I missing it?

Why so much brokenness

and wonder all

in the same place?

Give me

more,

more

splendor!

And less

of the cracked

and spoiled.

The problem was, I could not shake the feeling that I was created for a reason. That I had a specific role to play on the stage of the world, as Shakespeare (I think) suggested. But what? I could reel in daydreams about it for hours. Was this God's hand on my life, as Shannon had once argued? I had not ruled out that possibility. But the ivory tower was where I was going to look first, and as I watched the nose of our car tilt toward the mountains, my heart delighted to know I was moving closer to it, mile marker by mile marker.

Oh, and I couldn't wait for my sweet reunion with Peter Carpenter, an NBU student from Williamstown, who had promised to show me around once the fraternity rush that he was directing was over. Peter was two years my senior and as responsible and bright as they come. He had tutored me in geometry when I was a freshman in high school, and I'd had a huge crush on him. I can remember his rugged hands with the ruler and protractor, marking off the angles and degrees of squares and triangles. I could see a pulse in the vein on the side of his neck and composed a little poem in my head while we worked.