Adelaide Piper (7 page)

Peter Carpenter is so alive,

Look at his pulse,

His geometrical drive!

Dizzy, sensing my crush, embarrassed me greatly by announcing during one of our lessons, “Sister says you're the best-looking guy in Williamstown!”

My face had lit up like a ripe tomato, but somehow, this moment sealed our friendship, and he always went out of his way to say hello to me on our summer breaks while he was mowing lawns or coaching the country-club swim team. He had even met with me and Daddy last October in the NBU snack bar after our campus tour. He bought us a Co-Cola and gave us pointers on my admissions interview while nodding out of the corner of his eye to an assortment of fraternity brothers and girls who meandered by, their backpacks hanging from one shoulder, their unwashed hair sticking up in all directions. I remembered wondering why they were all underdressed for the cold, whipping wind, in their tight midriff T-shirts and low-riding blue jeans. How I yearned to be one of them!

Now I had permed my hair just for Peter Carpenter, and I thought it looked nice despite Dizzy's reaction when I walked into the kitchen: “Figured you would have lost the poodle look by high school graduation.”

But it was 1989 and the era of big hair in Williamstown, South Carolina, and I thought I would knock Peter Carpenter's socks off with my curls and bubble gum–pink lipstick. I had daydreamed about our meeting all during the summer. I could picture us studying together on the college colonnade on a sunny afternoon or throwing snowballs at each other across the quadrangle when winter set in. I had high hopes for Peter Carpenter and my college social life.

These daydreams willed me to eat sparsely during the last two weeks in an effort to drop a size. It had been painful to drink water instead of Co-Cola, and eat Special K instead of pancakes and bacon, but it was worth it. Poor Mama was distraught when I wouldn't touch her tomato pie or Mexican casserole (my all-time favorites) during my last night as a permanent resident under her roof. But I took one look at the grease rising from the ground beef and cheese, pinched my waist, and said, “No way, Mama.” (Though late into the night, when everyone else was asleep except for my moaning belly, I snuck downstairs for a few cold bites of the leftovers and a bowl of Mama's delectable banana pudding.)

We'd been traveling awhile now, and I was still looking for that “You are now leaving South Carolina” sign. I wanted to put my eye on it.

I mean, South Carolina. Ugh. We're talking about a state where cockfighting is as common a crime as theft and where Strom Thurmond will never lose a senatorial election though the old geezer has made a pass at nearly every woman in the state. It's a world where blacks—and women, for that matter—are still secretly considered second-class citizens by some. There is a lingering prejudice that still has its hooks in the region. Ku Klux Klan descendants are still around—albeit tight-lipped. And the public education system ranks the lowest in the country.

Ah, but in her glory day she was a strong, feisty state. Standing up against the British and later the Union. Problem is, like an old lady with dementia, her rebel brand of courage seems to have perverted itself into a crusty pit of backwardness, and in a lot of ways she has failed to progress.

Except for making my debut, I didn't plan to come back. New York City is where I hoped to land. Mae Mae took me there when I was twelve, and I kissed the dirty sidewalk of Broadway and Lexington and said, “I'll be back!” before we hopped into a cab to go to the airport. In my mind's eye I was there, writing poem after poem on a dirty park bench in Washington Square about the Southern world from whence I came—its curse and its blessing. But, so help me God, I would no longer be
in
it.

Before I knew it, the station wagon had made its way up to the Blue Ridge Parkway, and I admired the gaping view of the valleys below while my ears popped from our ascent. There were cabins perched on the sides of the mountains and homemade signs for apple cider on the edge of the road. A mountain man was sitting on a wooden chair on the front porch of a run-down sweetshop at the top of a nearby hill. He stared through us at the clouds.

“It is burning
up
!” Dizzy shrieked before pulling the back of Mama's hair. “Ice Lady,
do
something.”

“Zane,” Mama said ever so gently as the wagon passed a sign that read “Welcome to the state of Tennessee.” “It is a bit hot.”

“Did that sign say Tennessee
,
Daddy?” I pointed out in horror.

“Heck no, darlin',” Daddy answered. But I knew he was unreasonably optimistic and would not entertain the thought that we were headed up the parkway in the wrong direction.

It amazed me that after all he had lost, not one shred of doubt or pessimism entered his thoughts.

Zane Piper and Greta LeVan Wimmer had married in August 1968, two months after they graduated from the University of South Carolina. Zane had just signed a handsome contract with the Washington Redskins, but feeling a call to serve his country, he enlisted in the marines in September, and they shipped him off to Paris Island and then Vietnam, where he joined a reconnaissance group, some of whom had watched him play college ball on TV for years.

“Are you nuts, Piper?” Gil Galbraith, a fellow classmate, had asked him when their paths crossed on a base west of Chu Lai.

But while Uncle Tinka fled to Toronto to dodge the draft, Papa Great had greatly influenced Daddy's view of serving in the war. The Hog didn't serve in WWII because the Piper Mill made the fibers that went inside the military tires that served the war effort. And he deeply regretted not going over to the Pacific Theater. He had lost a brother and a cousin there, and somehow he was ashamed to stay in Williamstown making tires—coming home every night to Juliabelle's okra soup and pecan pie while his friends and brothers spilled their guts across the ocean to thwart the plans of the evil powers of the world.

When Daddy landed in the Boston airport on his journey home from Vietnam, he was shocked to see people his own age spitting on the troops as they walked through the gates. The antiwar protests had not yet reached the insulated life of Williamstown or the trenches of Than Khe, and he had no idea what their fury was about.

“They wouldn't spit on me, though,” he had recalled to me countless times on fishing trips off Pawleys Island and vacation drives to Myrtle Beach. He had given his arm and his football career to the war, and he reckoned their consciences wouldn't let them do that.

Anyhow, he told the Redskins he couldn't run the ball without an arm, and he took a job at the Piper Mill, where he pushed papers as a vice president and daydreamed about a life in which he didn't have to sit behind a desk and wear those uncomfortable coats and ties.

He would have loved to have been in sales, and I think that's why he was flirting with the idea of joining Uncle Tinka's Bizway venture. But Papa Great wouldn't have any part of his calling on businesses. My family was big-time in the little town of Williamstown, and Papa Great was grooming Daddy to be the president of the mill, though everyone knew that the Southern industry was dwindling as every sort of textile became cheaper to make overseas.

My daddy was bound by social status, parental control, and the limitations of only one working arm, but even with all these constraints, he was the most optimistic person I knew.

He could be happy and hopeful just sitting on our crab dock, drinking iced tea. He'd look around at one of his daughters or his petite, well-dressed wife and say, “We've got it good, don't we?” And then, “Let's go down to the Dairy Cream and get a sundae, just for the heck of it!”

“You're the one I'm countin' on,” he'd told me a few nights ago beneath the fluorescent light of the kitchen. I had forgone an evening of hanging out with Jif and Georgianne to finish my
Catcher in the Rye
novel because Penelope Russo had referred to it countless times in Governor's School. To my disappointment, it was a fatalistic novel about the loss of innocence of a teenage boy, and I hoped that every book didn't depress me this way. The thought dawned on me,
Could Penelope Russo not know the meaning of life?
But I pushed it aside to listen to Daddy.

“Lou has learning problems, and Dizzy is as wild as a goat, Adelaide.”

He shook his head and squeezed the top of my hand with his good arm. “Heck, I just want to get her to adulthood in one piece.”

He looked me square in the eye without a blink. “But
you're
the one who is going to make it, sister. I can just feel it, you know?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, and I wanted to believe him.

“Now, I know you like poems and that sort of thing, but you've got to promise your old man that you'll pick a solid major and get a job that can support your dreams: lawyer, doctor, you name it. You can have it all, baby—work, family, and poems—but you've got to get the solid stuff first, okay?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, turning my hand palm up to squeeze his back.

“Thing about it, I never understood that when I was your age. All I did was chase your mama and run the football, and it hurt me not to pay more attention to my books.” He tugged at his paisley tie to indicate his failure. “You want to have choices.”

“I understand, Daddy.”

“I think you do,” he said as he walked toward the den. “Now I'm going to get your mama to help me put on my fatigues and relax.”

(He could not unbutton his shirt without her help.) Then he turned back once as I stared at my letdown of a novel, and he said, “I love ya, sweetheart. And I'm pulling for you.”

When I looked up, he had walked out of the room.

Now Mama, whom Dizzy had unfairly nicknamed “Ice Lady,” handed each of us a cup of ice from the minicooler at her feet before consulting her map.

Her nickname came a few years back when she handed out icy treats at the Williamstown children's charity run. She stood at the corner of Main and Mill Street and gave Dixie cups of sweet crushed ice and frozen orange slices to the participants as they flew past. There was a picture of her on the front page of the state paper that was in town to cover the event.

“If it weren't for that ice lady,” one of the runners said, “I wouldn't have made it to the finish line.”

And there was a letter to the editor that read, “Thank you, ice lady!” and recounted one overheated woman's blurred vision during the race, cured only by the sweet, icy oranges that a lovely lady in a large straw hat handed to her at the busiest intersection in town.

But while I refused to call her by the nickname, I could see the second truth in it. Greta LeVan Piper was emotionally distant somehow. I couldn't remember her ever spontaneously hugging one of us—or Daddy, for that matter. And she didn't shower us with kisses or “I love yous” the way I saw some mamas do. Now, I knew we were her very life, but she showed it to us by what she
did
for us. Works of service—that was her love language.

“You have to admit she's kinda frigid,” Dizzy had said to me one afternoon when Daddy coaxed Mama to an overnight in Myrtle Beach to attend a Bizway meeting. She didn't want to go, and she was terrified that Papa Great might find out what they were up to. When she was leaving, she couldn't bring herself to kiss us good-bye, not even Lou, who had been stung by a bee on her top lip that afternoon. “Oh, girls,” she'd said, wringing her tough little hands. “I've made you spaghetti and a salad, and you can call Juliabelle if you need anything.”

“Loosen up and have some fun at MB, Mom!” Dizzy said.

“Yeah,” I said, putting my arm around Lou. “Take a walk on the beach and pretend you're on vacation.”

Mama shook her head in dismay and walked through the door, head down, before muttering, “Bye-bye.”

Now, I suspected that Mama had a story and a half to tell if she could ever get the words out. She was raised mostly by a nanny named Rosetta in the thick of Charleston high society. Her aristocratic mom was prone to nervous breakdowns, and her daddy, a famous German physician at the medical university, didn't pay her much mind. Mama hated even going back to the “Holy City” and asked me to take Zane to his doctor's appointments at the veterans hospital. She said that the Charleston skyline, with all of those steeples stabbing the clouds, just made her stomach turn.

Mama was also a master escape artist, and she had taught this craft to me, which I honed through my poetry and excessive daydreams. When my allergies flared up during childhood and I scratched the backs of my knees until they bled, Mama calmed my nerves by saying, “Imagine you are somewhere else, sweetheart. An opera singer on a stage, or a mermaid in a deep-sea cave.” And I could
do
it; I could nearly escape the present and go somewhere else in my mind. What a wonderful trick to be transported like that!

Once, during my third-grade bedtime routine, I asked her, “What is heaven like?” in expectation of a great imaginative journey. To my surprise, Mama stood gulping back tears and said, “I don't know. No one ever told me about it.” Then she scurried out of the room, sending Daddy in to kiss me good night.

Mama was an orphan in a sense, and she did all in her power not to make the same mistake with us. The dedication with which she approached her role as mother ranked head and shoulders above that of the other moms in town. She was always the first in line to pick us up from school. The napkins in our lunch boxes had stickers or smiley faces on them each day, along with a thought: “I am thinking about you!” Or “Smile!” Or “I love you.” (It was much easier to write it.)

Motherhood was the role she had always wanted. Domesticity was her territory, from the tomato vines to the laundry room, and she claimed it as best she could.

Maybe that's why Juliabelle was in my life. She was a widow, and she didn't have any children or grands of her own, and she never saw me that she didn't cup my face and tell me that she loved me.