Debutante Summer
When Daddy picked me up at NBU the last Saturday in May, he was too excited about a successful Bizway meeting he’d had in Roanoke the night before to notice the dull glaze over my eyes. Not that I would have let him see it anyway.
My daddy! He pulled me close with his stump and his arm on the front steps of Tully, where he had pulled the station wagon up to the loading zone and opened the wide, wood-paneled trunk door. He smelled like a mixture of aftershave and vitamins, and I would have wailed if I’d let my guard down. But I didn’t.
He’d gone back to the habit of pinning up the long sleeve of the amputated arm instead of wearing the prosthetic, and when he nuzzled my head, I could feel the safety pin and the fabric from his blue oxford across the back of my head and then on my ear when he pulled back to examine me.
It had been three weeks since the rape. I had failed most of my finals, jeopardizing my scholarship, and had managed to gain back a fair portion of the weight that I’d lost on the Tully Diet, and though he didn’t say a word, I could see a look of concern register on his face.
“You all right, sister?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. Just ready to get home.”
“Now, I never thought those words would come out of your mouth.”
Then he loaded our car with my typewriter, books, and hanging clothes, laying them carefully on top of the Bizway vitamins, air filters, and cleaning supplies that took up a good portion of the trunk.
There were no handsome young bucks carting my stuff down the three flights of stairs and into my car this time. Just my one-armed daddy and me, straining to carry the boxes of books and sweaters through the dorm doors as pockets of giggly freshmen hugged one another good-bye. I took one glance around at the colonnade and the grass, which seemed as though someone had spray-painted it a vibrant shade of jade each night while term papers and coffee beans danced in our heads. If I got word over the summer that my scholarship was gone, I’d probably never come back.
On the drive down the mountains, we listened to training cassettes of Bizway gems who had built lucrative businesses by signing up folks underneath them who purchased products. At one point Daddy pounded the steering wheel and said, “Now, doesn’t this excite you, Adelaide?”
Excite me? I thought. Winning the Nobel Prize in poetry wouldn’t excite me at this point. I was all but numb to the core.
As Daddy talked about the plan and how he wanted to make a run for it, wanted to become a diamond and collect a $12,000 paycheck every month (not to mention the speaking fees), I tuned out and wondered how I could avoid revealing to Mama and Juliabelle what had happened to me. They would be the two to sense that something was wrong, so I’d have to be a heck of an actress to convince them otherwise.
When we pulled into the driveway of my white clapboard house that afternoon, I was struck with the thick, moist air and the syrupy scent of jasmine that was in full bloom along the sides of the house and the front porch. Lou jumped up from the rocking chair and ran out to the car barefoot, her face lit up like a jack-o’-lantern.
“Adelaide!”
She ran up to the passenger side and put her hands on the window before she jumped up and down.
“She’s here!” she shouted to the house, and in seconds Mama and Dizzy were running down the porch, clapping and smiling and saying, “Welcome home!”
When I got out of the car, they crowded around me, even Dizzy, and embraced me. They smelled like perfume and tomatoes and cigarettes and pluff mud, and it was all I could do to bite my lip and try not to fall apart in front of them.
Daddy gave everyone a job in unpacking the car, so I was relieved that I didn’t have to look anyone in the eye too long.
It was Juliabelle who took notice of me a few minutes later. She caught my eye that afternoon as she was packing up Papa Great to move him out to Pawleys Island for the summer while Mae Mae and Mama went debbing with me. I was hauling two pillowcases of dirty clothes when I spotted her running across my grandparents’ front garden and over to mine to greet me. She had a Pyrex bowl full of pickled creek shrimp that she’d made for me.
“Adelaide!” she said. “Look at you, child!”
She hugged me, dirty clothes and all, rocking me back and forth in her skinny arms. I could feel her jaw working her bubble gum, and the sweet smell of it reminded me of all that was good about my home life.
I thought about the St. Christopher medal and the prayers she’d offered for me daily, and I vowed I would do all in my power to keep the awful secret of my defilement from her.
Then she cupped her pink palms around my flabby cheeks and took a look into my eyes. At first, I turned away toward Mama’s hydrangea blooms, but she wouldn’t let me loose. Then I glanced back at her and tried to make my face say, “Nothing. Nothing is wrong here.”
She stepped back and put a clenched fist over her mouth and blinked hard. It was the same thing I’d seen her do the summer she spotted a gator that had drifted out of the river and into the surf at Pawleys Island. And she had done it once when Papa Great told Mae Mae to fire the gardener who had shown up late.
“Adelaide,” she said through her lips, “you come talk to me when you can.”
I shook my head as though I hadn’t the faintest idea of what she was talking about and gulped back the tears. I had never been so relieved to see the round shadow of Papa Great as it surfaced on the driveway.
I turned away from her to greet him.
“Well, the college girl’s home,” he said, pinching his nostrils together before snorting once for good measure.
He patted my back, then looked me up and down and said, “Well, gotta lose that weight before the debutante ball. Adelaide Rutledge Graydon had a slim figure, you know?”
I didn’t know whether to slap him or hug him for changing the subject.
“Hope the year treated you right,” he said; then he looked over to the Cadillac that was packed to the brim with Co-Colas and bright linen blazers and fishing rods and buckets.
“’Bout ready to head on?” he said to Juliabelle.
“Yes, sir,” she said as he started back toward the car.
“Come visit us when you get a break from all the parties, Adelaide,” he said.
Juliabelle put her long fingers back on my chin. “I’ll give you a few days. But then I ’spect you to come out to the island and talk.”
I looked beyond her at the two fingers of smog billowing out of the paper mill and then down at the cracks in the driveway where the spider grass was pushing through the bricks and oyster shells. Papa Great was starting the engine, and she reached to the top of the station wagon where she’d rested the bowl of shrimp, handed it to me, and walked back across the garden.
Before I could stop them, tears were streaming down my face, but Daddy was so busy telling Mama about the Bizway meeting that Lou was the only one to notice me.
“A-Ad?” she said. “What’s wrong?” She looked up at me with three pronounced worry lines across her shining forehead.
“Just missed you is all,” I said. Then I handed her a pillowcase of laundry. “Want to help me wash clothes?”
I didn’t look back at the Cadillac as it drove out of the historic district and toward the bridge. But I could imagine Juliabelle in the backseat by the fishing tackle, her big dark eyes bearing down on me.
When I walked into the house, Daddy was throwing one of Mama’s ripe tomatoes against the wall in the kitchen. It hit the bright striped wallpaper by the pantry and slid down the blue and yellow lines, landing right at Mama’s feet.
“You’re a fool to jeopardize your job, Zane Piper,” Mama was whispering harshly to him. “When he finds out, then you tell me where we’ll be!”
They both looked up at me as I tried to make myself scarce and head toward the stairwell.
“Adelaide,” Mama called to me in a sweet, strained voice, “I’ll have your lunch ready in just a minute, darlin’.”
It helped to be home for the summer. There were times when I could forget for whole minutes about what happened with Devon Hunt on the campus hillside, but the anxiety never left me completely. I could get lost watching the dust dance in the morning sun that poured through my bedroom window or Mama tending to her tomato vines, but when someone tapped on my door with a breakfast invitation, dread seized me once again. It ran up my spine and made every muscle in my back tighten.
When I looked out into the kudzu-covered field that met my backyard and ate everything but the marsh, I remembered learning in a high-school botany class that the unyielding vine grows a foot each day during the summer months and sixty feet each year, snuffing the life out of trees that need sunlight and overtaking any abandoned vehicle or building in its path. I knew I was a meager tree in the center of that field, and I had no way of stopping the vine of fear from darkening my days.
Ruthie and I were glad to have left that dank dorm room with all its bad memories and move on to our debutante summers. Ruthie would be receiving tea and chicken salad at her own “coming out” luncheons at the Country Club of North Carolina, while Jif and I did the same in the handful of once-grand homes that lined Third Avenue in downtown Williamstown.
In a sense, our transition into womanhood (which was what the debutante season was supposed to be about) was a thick piece of iced pound cake. There was a certain charade about this rite of passage passed down from our English ancestors, but we had it easy compared to girls in other cultures or other time periods. We didn’t have to bind our feet like a Chinese girl in the thirteenth century or mutilate our bodies like the young women in the northern and western parts of Africa do even today. Instead, we just learned to ballroom dance, socialize, eat mayonnaise-laden chicken salad at the country club, and write warm and witty thank-you notes on monogrammed stationery.
To the South of the 1990s, this was what prepared you for becoming a grown lady in good standing. And this summer was all about social engagements of every sort, where we were to gain confidence in each facet of Southern etiquette—to include table manners and small talk with little old ladies who were most proud to have an opportunity to put their fine china and silver to use. It was a tradition that had been passed down since the plantation days, and, like the Confederacy, it would not be forgotten.
The Williamstown summer debutante season was our formal introduction to society, and it concluded with a ball the following Christmas, where we would first lift our floor-length white gowns with the tips of our long kid gloves to curtsy in front of our parents and grandparents and then march up and down the corridors of the Magnolia Club as if to say, “Here is the next generation of well-bred Southern ladies! We’re of age, so have at us!”
“How was your first year at Nathaniel Buxton?” Mrs. Zapes asked me during the first luncheon of the season.
“It was good,” I flat-out lied. I knew it just wouldn’t do to say, “Horrible. The classes were monotonous, the students took no interest in me, and to top it all off, I was raped by my one and only date a few weeks before the year concluded. By July, I’ll know for sure if I’ve lost my scholarship, so chew on that with your chicken salad and fruit tarts, Mrs. Zapes!”
I caught my eye in the gilded mirror of the musty drawing room. I felt ridiculous in the paper-white dress and patent-leather flats that Mama insisted I wear. I looked like a doily or a handkerchief in one of Mrs. Zapes’s beaded purses.
“That’s a fine institution,” the widowed Mrs. Kitteridge chimed in. “My husband, Padgett, was proud to call NBU his alma mater, and I can still remember my first dance with him there at the Heritage Ball beneath the starry Virginia sky. What a romantic evening that was!”
“But did you all hear the awful news about the Carpenter boy who was in school up there?” Miss Pringle crooned. She was the old maid of the town and loved to talk about other people’s business, particularly their falls from grace. “Juanita, their next-door neighbor, says his mama has not taken a single visitor. Says she’s utterly inconsolable, bless her heart.”
“Yes,” Jif jumped in to save me from the conversation. “That was really awful, Miss Pringle. It looks like Peter made a very poor judgment call that will cost him dearly. But the NBU administration has taken great strides to enforce fraternity hazing rules so that nothing like that will ever happen again.” And then to Mrs. Kitteridge, “They still have the Heritage Ball and an outdoor dance floor on the front quad like always. My boyfriend, Ned, and I danced barefoot there into the early hours of the morning just a few months ago. You’re right; it was truly romantic.”
Jif. Ugh. She was charming, and everyone admired her. She was dressed to the nines in a blue linen pantsuit and strappy sandals that snaked their way up her ankles, and she brought to the deb parties a kind of style and freshness that I envied. How could she have come out of her freshman year at NBU unscathed? I wondered. Just three doors away on the same floor of the Tully dormitory, and we were in completely different places.
Jif ’s mama, Marny Ferguson, looked like a million bucks too. She had grown up in the mill village and had made her way out by becoming a beauty queen. First Miss Williamstown, then Miss South Carolina, but she downplayed this, as beauty queens weren’t necessarily debutante material—too made-up and flashy for a well-bred gal. But Marny’s life mission was to show the Mrs. Zapeses of the world that she did know the difference and was certainly able to ascend to the height of the social order of Williamstown.
She’d had the good sense to marry up with a local boy, Teddy Ferguson, while he was in medical school in Charleston. She persuaded him to switch his focus from pediatrics to plastic surgery, and he was given credit for improving the looks of every well-off woman in a sixty-mile radius of Williamstown. Thin as a rail and enjoying the benefits of her own first face-lift, she was sitting in the corner with a bird-sized plate of chicken salad, her tan Ferragamo shoes catching the sunlight.
Marny Ferguson was proud, it was easy to see, of the way NBU had sharpened Jif ’s sense of wit and style. She encouraged her to keep her freshman weight off by taking her to an aerobics class once a day, and she introduced her to the meal-replacement bars and shakes that were selling at the new health-food store outside Columbia. She had even bought Jif a snug and gorgeous designer deb dress from a pricey Atlanta boutique to entice her into keeping her weight down.
Mrs. Kitteridge patted her wrinkled lips with a monogrammed napkin and began again. “Of course, they weren’t admitting girls at the time my Padgett was there.”
“This conversation is dying a slow death,” my eyes said to Jif from across the drawing room.
“No, that didn’t happen until 1982,” said Jif, flicking a fruit fly off her tart before sighing and giving me an “I tried” look.
I scanned the room to see what the other debs were up to. What an odd assortment of girls we were. Poor Winkie Pride was caught between a conversation with her mother and the mayor’s wife, Flo Kuhn. Winkie had quite a flamboyant name for such a mouse of a young lady. She had been homeschooled all of her life and was still living with her folks and commuting to the USC satellite campus at Myrtle Beach. Whenever I spoke with her, she emitted a squeaky, nervous laugh, and she had a significantly delayed response to any question or comment I posed. It was downright work to carry on a conversation with her, and the worst part was that Winkie seemed to be all too aware of her verbal shortcomings. She had warm green eyes that pleaded, “Please don’t leave me here with no one to talk to,” but she had no idea how to help herself.
Now I could tell that Winkie was relieved to have caught the attention of Mrs. Zapes’s house cat, as this somehow excused her from conversing with anyone. She petted him the rest of the luncheon and whispered who knew what into his fuzzy ears.
Nan McCant was an excellent conversationalist, but she tended to get on my nerves. She attended Converse College and was as petite and preppy as they come with a round, cursive monogram on everything she owned, from her earrings to her pocketbook to the backs of her pastel sweater sets. Jif and I joked that Nan would have monogrammed the hood of her zippy white convertible if she could have. Of course, she couldn’t resist personalizing her license plate with KN ROSE (she had been chosen as the sweetheart of the Kappa Nu fraternity at Wofford College), and she frequently pulled out her framed picture of the frat composite to point to whatever boy had come up in her frivolous chitchat. And there was her photo in the center of the group of handsome young men, right between the cook and the mascot, a chocolate Labrador retriever named Leroy.
This left Jif and me as the last of three debs. Georgianne would have made four, but she was a mother to Baby Peach now and a wife to Peach Hickman, who worked at his daddy’s tractor company.
Georgianne’s mother declined any invitation to the events, and I was certain Georgianne never received one.
The third deb had not yet graced us with her presence, as she was on a trip to France with her family. Her name was Harriet von Hasselson Hartness, and Jif and I hadn’t laid eyes on her since she was in grade school. She was the granddaughter of Mrs. Marguerite Hartness, the wealthiest lady in town, who lived at the end of Third Street in the house where in 1825 the Marquis de Lafayette stood on the second-floor piazza in the dark of night to greet more than a thousand Williamstown residents during his tour of the thirteen states.
Harriet had grown up in some charming Connecticut town, and all we knew about her was that she went to the pricey (not to mention liberal ) Sarah Lawrence College outside Manhattan. Our imaginations had run wild with suppositions about the pretentious snob she would likely be.
“Harriet von Hasselson Hartness has a driver and a personal assistant who gives her manicures and massages,” Jif and I joked as we swung in the hammock at the end of my crab dock and flipped through Mae Mae’s fancy hand-me-down magazines.
“Harriet buys all of her clothes from Neiman Marcus,” Jif said, pointing her finger at an ad in a Town & Country that was dated 1984.
“She has an account there,” I added, slapping at a giant mosquito that was nibbling on my knee. The air was still, and not a strand of the summer-green marsh grass was moving.
“Her thank-you note stationery is stamped with a family crest,” Jif joked, but I didn’t even know what a family crest was.
“She has a tennis bracelet and a double strand of pearls that her grandmother bought for her in Japan,” I said, fanning the thick air. (I had heard about gifts like that from the Northeastern girls at NBU.)
So Harriet von Hasselson Hartness became a caricature of the ideal debutante. She was a modern-day princess with an endless supply of beauty, brains, and wealth. Moreover, she was everything that was beyond our grasp, and she grew larger than life each day she was absent from the social functions.
“She has thin ankles, and she wears a D-sized bra,” Jif said as we sipped on Cherry Cokes at Campbell’s Pharmacy on Main Street one afternoon.
(We were B cups at best.)
“I’ve got it!” I said in an inspired moment, as a streak of ash from the steel mill descended upon the store window. “She didn’t gain any weight her freshman year of college.”
“Oh, how I hate her!” Jif had screamed with a half-crazed laugh.
“You girls are so fortunate to live in the time that you do,” Mrs. Zapes said now, concluding the first luncheon of the season as she signaled someone in the kitchen. “You can go to the finest schools and expand your horizons in a way that we couldn’t. Isn’t that right, Edwina?”
“It’s true,” Mrs. Kitteridge responded, and her eyes glazed over as she peered beyond my shoulder into some bygone daydream of how her life would have turned out if she’d been born in the generation the world was about to label “X.”
Would she have been sitting in this parlor, nibbling on chicken salad? I had to wonder. Or did she have her own itch that she couldn’t quite get to? And now, in what could very well be the last decade of her life, has she resigned herself to the fact that she will never reach it?
Mrs. Kitteridge woke up from all the possibilities and wiped her watery eyes to look me straight in the face. “As they say, the world is your oyster, my dear.”
“That is what they say,” I responded, though my world had become a cramped cell with stone walls.
I suddenly jumped with fright when the housekeeper came up behind me with a silver tray full of teacups and saucers. My strawberry tart slid off my plate and landed upside down in my lap, leaving a dark smudge in the center of my paper-white dress.
The anxiety hatched all sorts of unfounded suspicions in my mind. I couldn’t stand for someone to come up behind me without warning, and I never wanted to be left alone.
When the serviceman at the gas station filled my tank, I locked the doors. When I drove by the mobile home where I saw the woman harshly slapped a few summers ago, I picked up speed so that I could get by quickly. I avoided the mill village on the outskirts of town where the young woman had given me that haunting look on my way to college last summer, and when I had to go by there on a fishing trip with Daddy, I simply closed my eyes for a whole minute until it was out of sight.
I didn’t like to drive by myself at night. I didn’t like to be home alone. Ever. I wouldn’t go to the movies by myself or loll about in the city library the way I had for so many summers, falling into one fictional world after another on the worn-out sofas that smelled of pencil lead and used books.
When I saw Averill Skaggs and Bubba Ratliff shuffling down Main Street in their mill uniforms, I ducked into Campbell’s and buried myself in a newspaper until they passed.
“What is with you?” Dizzy pried one evening after I begged her to stay home and play gin rummy.
“Well, Lou’s at a slumber party, and Mama and Daddy are going with Uncle Tinka to that Bizway meeting, and I just don’t want to be here by myself.”
“Adelaide, this is ridiculous,” Dizzy said as she pulled a cigarette out of her purse. Though she knew everyone was out for the evening, she looked behind both shoulders only to find Marmalade, the cat, stretching out her paws on the sofa. As she took her first drag, she said, “I just don’t get this, sis. Nine months ago you were the most independent girl I knew. You wanted to sail out into the world and make your way and become a great poet or something, and now you’re home from college and afraid to spend an evening alone in the house?”
Dizzy exhaled a cloud of smoke in my face and added, “This is Williamstown, for God’s sake! Nothing bad happens here, because nothing ever happens here! You remember that much, don’t you?”
My face flushed with frustration at my own absurd fear. “You’ve changed,” Dizzy said before ashing into a watery glass of orange juice that someone had left on the coffee table and pronouncing, “Something must have scared the socks off of you up there.”
I nodded, but I didn’t have the strength to recount my pain with my younger sister. I didn’t want anyone to know what had happened. It would have shattered my family’s image of me and made the debutante season, which Mae Mae and Mama cared so much about, seem like the farce that it already was for me.
As for Dizzy, I was supposed to be the positive role model on the path ahead of her. The wild child was still up to her tricks of partying well past her curfew, getting poor grades in school, and dressing (as Mae Mae had so aptly described it) “like death warmed over” in her Goth dresses and hair dyed the color of coal. I had watched her spend an hour in front of the mirror one morning as she powdered her face with stark white makeup and painted ebony circles around her eyes.
My folks told me plainly that they were counting on me to talk some sense into Dizzy over the summer. Next year, she would be in the twelfth grade, and this was her last chance to pull her grades up so that she could attend college.
As June passed, I lost my grip and began to blame myself for what Devon Hunt had done to me. How could I have been so dense as to assume that he had my best interests at heart when he took me up that hill to view the stars?
There was a force at work in me, as voracious as the pollutants and the kudzu that were eating the town and even stronger than the fury I could once muster. I’d thought I would have vengeful fantasies of driving up to UVA Law and painting “rapist” across Devon’s apartment door, but I resented myself more than him. And this force convinced me that I would never be worth the attention of a man who would treat me decently. The diet pills, the laxative, the glass of wine—these were all really stupid steps that I took to contribute to what had happened. But worst of all, I had assumed something about his character— that he was nice and good and safe. I chided myself for how foolish I had been and concluded that the world was more dangerous and unpredictable than I had ever suspected.
I had lost something in addition to my virginity that spring. And something even more precious than my trust in my fellow man. I had lost the hope I once had for my purpose in this world, and I grieved this more than anything else. Before that dreadful night, my expectations for my future had made up my entire reason to exist, and now that they were gone, I didn’t know how to make my way without them.
So I avoided Juliabelle, Mama, and all mirrors, and I went through the motions. I wrote thank-you notes to Mrs. Zapes and Mrs. Kitteridge and everyone else who hosted a deb luncheon on the thick white stationery Mae Mae had selected for me. I invited my second cousin Randy to the coed deb events: the casino parties, cocktail parties, and shag parties. And I even let him kiss me from time to time while he talked on the front porch about saltwater fishing and turkey hunting and the future we could have together in Williamstown. I stopped short of telling him that I’d probably lose my NBU scholarship and join him at the state university, but with every hand squeeze and gaze into my eyes, I knew he was hoping that was how the next year would unfold. And sometimes I thought a life with him might be just fine. I even loosened up and drank cheap beer at the end of the frontage road with Jif and the others and laughed while the boys climbed the water tower for the umpteenth time.
But when the darkness came into my room late at night, I was haunted by thoughts that convinced me of my worthlessness. I hated being in my own skin, and I did not welcome the dawn or the new day set before me.
If there was an itch to be scratched or a void to be filled, I knew that I was so far away from it now that it would never be in my grasp again, and so every time I tried to write, even about my pain or self-hatred, the page came up empty. What did I have to say?
What a haughty joke of a third-string valedictorian I was, I thought as I drove by the old high school one morning on the way to a deb brunch.
Who was I? Nothing.
And where was I going? Nowhere.
At Mama’s strong suggestion, I did babysit for Willa, a three-year-old girl down the street, four days a week to earn some pocket money. Being around children eased the pain, if only for a moment. Their motives were pure, even their selfish ones, and their little minds were not jaded by the dark edges of the world around them. Willa didn’t know, for instance, that a trip through the woods in bare feet might result in a rattlesnake bite or that she could bust her head open if she jumped too closely to the edge of her bed. She didn’t know that a stranger could swoop her up off the sidewalk and do away with her before sunset in whatever wicked way he desired.
When I took Willa to pick some of Mama’s tomatoes and smell the flowers in Mae Mae’s rose garden, I chuckled to see how she planted her nose as deep as it could go into the center of an open bloom to enjoy the fragrance. All I could see was the back of her head and her little ears while she breathed in the yellow and pink blossoms that the summer heat had opened.
When I took Willa to the Kmart, I couldn’t stop her from waving to the stranger in line behind us. “I’m Willa,” she would say with a coquettish grin. Then she’d hold up her fingers and count. “And I’m one, two, three years old!”
One afternoon, a migrant worker who stood behind us in the checkout line grinned back at the little girl and whispered something in Spanish that I assumed was sinister. As he scratched his unshaven chin with the tips of his dirt-encrusted fingernails, I shot him a cold look before studying his face: small dark eyes, scar in the center of his nose, mullet.
“C’mon, let’s go,” I said sharply to Willa. Then I grabbed the receipt from the checkout lady and hurried past the candy machines and the grimy plastic rocking horse that I had told Willa she could ride after we’d finished our shopping.
When we were unlocking the car door, Willa cried, “Horsey ride!”
Then she threw her sippy cup onto the filthy asphalt that was cracking in the summer heat and screamed, “You promised horsey!”
“Not now, girl,” I said as I buckled her tightly into her car seat.
“You mustn’t talk to strangers, Willa. They’re dangerous.” Of course, Willa had no way of understanding, and she kicked and screamed in disappointment until we reached her neighborhood.
When we got home, I gave her a Popsicle as a consolation gift and rocked her on the porch until she fell asleep in my arms.
Willa was the only person I could stand coming into physical contact with. And I held the little girl tightly for the rest of the afternoon and wept in anger at the terror that now framed my thoughts.
I visited Georgianne and seven-month-old Baby Peach in the late afternoons. Georgianne lived out beyond the mill village in a new little subdivision where all of the cookie-cutter homes looked as though they were built out of paper and might tip over in the next big storm. We would sit on the back patio of the house and blow bubbles or fill a plastic pool with water and watch Baby Peach splash around in it until his fingertips shriveled up like raisins and the mosquitoes started to bite.
Neither of us talked about the elephants in the kitchen as Georgianne prepared a casserole in her Pyrex dish. That is, Georgianne’s derailed education and defunct debutante status and my nightmare of a first year as I continued my schooling and squinted in the spotlight of the Camellia Club of stinky old Williamstown.
My emotions were mixed as I watched Georgianne boil the macaroni for another batch of tuna surprise or wipe little Peach’s runny nose for the umpteenth time of the day.
As sad as I was for Georgianne’s change of plans, Baby Peach was a dear, and I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I even brought him gifts: a rattle from the dollar store or a stuffed animal from Kmart. It was obvious that he was going to be bright like his mother. He was so alert and already learning to crawl. Just yesterday he’d planted his fat little feet on the ground and lifted up his rear in a pike position as if he would prefer to walk if he could just get himself upright.
When Big Peach came home from work at the tractor company, he would kiss Georgianne softly and tickle his son’s underarms until he turned red in the face and wet his diaper. Georgianne never seemed to tire of lugging him back to the changing table or bathing him or reading him nonsensical books as he cackled in his crib before bedtime. Was the hole in Georgianne’s heart filled now? Was the itch scratched? At times it appeared so, but I didn’t have the nerve to ask her straight out.
Now Mama could tell that something was wrong, but she wasn’t very good at talking, so how could she pry when I was closed tighter than a periwinkle snail? Instead, she busied herself on my behalf by cooking my favorite summer dishes: tomato pie, sweet creamed corn, and peach ice cream. She cut beautiful blue hydrangea blooms from the yard and put them in a vase on my bedside table and invited me on a trip to the outlet mall in Myrtle Beach to shop for sundresses. I declined the invitation. There were too many mirrors in dressing rooms. And when it was just the two of us rocking in the hammock as the sun went down beyond the marsh, I couldn’t bear to explain my despair. It would break many places in Greta Piper’s carefully guarded heart.
My childhood friend Shannon also could tell that something was different, and she had the gumption to come right out with it.
Shannon was not an official debutante. Her parents were fairly new to town. That is, they arrived fifteen years ago. But she was invited to some of the social engagements because she was friends with me, Jif, and the others, and we often added her to the guest list.
Perhaps because Shannon had “found Jesus,” she knew how to cut right to the heart of any matter. So one day when she and I were in the powder room at the country club, full from shrimp salad and Jell-O molds, she asked me, “What’s wrong with you, Adelaide? Something has happened. I know it.”
I was so tired of pretending that I broke right down on the pink-and-green-striped love seat and went into a crying frenzy right by a rack of golf clubs.
“Can’t say,” I said to Shannon, who gently patted my shoulders until Mrs. Kitteridge came to the door to announce that our ride was waiting for us.
“That’s all right, Mrs. Kitteridge,” Shannon said. “We’ll just walk.”
And so we sauntered the two miles to our neighborhood together as I recounted what happened to me on that clear night in May and all the rest of what had burst my bubble last year at NBU while the pink sandals that Mama had just bought nipped sharply at my heels.
Shannon just listened and wept for me from time to time during the account. I was greatly relieved to tell the story to someone I trusted.
Shannon had been my closest childhood friend, and no matter how much of a Jesus freak she had become, she still had a backstage pass into my head.
“How awful, Adelaide,” Shannon said, “that you had to go through that. It was wrong. What that boy did to you was wrong. I’m so sorry.”
What-that-boy-did-to-you-was-wrong. These words were like a flashlight in the shadowy corridors of my mind. I had spent so much of the last two months blaming myself for what had happened, but to hear that it was someone else’s fault was a great reprieve. It felt true somehow.
And it was contrary to the voice that chided me most days and nights.
I watched a blue jay take flight from a magnolia tree, and a little piece of hope rose up inside me.
Shannon said, “I know I’ve pushed too hard on this religion thing with you before.” (We had missed the turn to Shannon’s house and were going to continue this conversation the six blocks more toward my home.) “But I earnestly believe that God can carry you through this.”
God, I thought to myself. I had a fuzzy memory of a sentimental Jesus cradling a lamb in His arms from a poster hanging in my childhood Sunday school class. I had not thought about Him in a long time, and I wondered if what Shannon anchored her life upon these days was actually real and could help me in some way.
I had resented my friend for overhauling her life a few years ago for what Jif and I called the “God Squad”—a group of college-aged men and women that dropped by our high school from time to time to invite the students to church and to mountain-climbing retreats at Windy Gap.
“Go, God! Beat the vices!” Jif and I cheered as we smoked cigarettes in her basement after the high school football games, and I imagined those zealous college folks jumping beneath Shannon’s window in cheerleading uniforms and megaphones, coaxing her into their fanatical game.
Shannon had been drawn to the God Squad almost instantly after a knee injury on the soccer field that would blow a month of her junior year of high school and cost her the athletic scholarship to Clemson she had always wanted. Members of the God Squad would show up in Shannon’s hospital room with her favorite candy bars and silly gag gifts. Then later, after she was on the mend, they carted her to the soccer games both in and out of town so that she could cheer her teammates on to the regional championships.
I had missed my best friend so much, had almost felt abandoned by her after her conversion. Shannon was no fun after that. She wouldn’t gossip or tell a dirty joke or go to an R-rated movie or smoke cigarettes with me from time to time in the basement of Jif ’s house. And she had evangelized up a storm whenever we were together. She carried a Bible around in her backpack, for goodness’ sake, and prayed out loud whenever I was worried about a test or having a bad hair day.
Finally, I avoided her at school and stopped returning her phone calls.
“He’s the one, Ad,” Shannon said now. “He can restore your soul with a new kind of peace.”
Peace. Despite her Bible-thumping diatribe, this was a word I had gained a much greater appreciation for now that I was without a shred of it. I woke up more than once in the middle of the night in a panic that made my heart beat madly until I oriented myself in the blackness of my hometown bedroom by making out the silhouettes of my bookshelf: my Madame Alexander dolls and a framed print of the Charleston High Battery where I’d taken many long walks during summers at Governor’s School. On my bedside table I’d see the form of the small King James Bible—a baptism gift—with its silver pages that stuck together and my name embossed in gold on the bottom right cover. If Mama had left the porch light on for the night, the silver pages would glisten faintly in the darkness. I was not sure if I had ever opened it.
It was a long walk, and my new sandals were now pinching my toes and tightening around my ankles. Stopping to loosen them, I saw the glint of light during our heart-to-heart quickly eclipsed by something else—the voice that told me I was of no significance and responsible for my violation had returned, and it overshadowed the glimpse of hope I was squinting to see.
“I don’t know about that stuff,” I said to Shannon as we reached the driveway to my home.
Shannon looked dejected. Her life had changed forever at the Young Life camp in Colorado where she had so often told me that she officially “accepted Christ.” She would have walked all the way to the country club and back to continue our discussion and share her true love with me. She was more excited than Uncle Tinka with his Bizway plan.
I was thankful for her friendship; it was a safe place to reveal what was going on in my heart. But I couldn’t see entertaining all of that born-again Christian strangeness at a time like this. Aside from Shannon and the God Squad that had taken her away, all I knew about vocal Christians were misfits and hypocrites like Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker or the strange man on the television on Sunday morning who interrupted whatever I had hoped to watch with his dramatic preaching and healing scenes that seemed more theatrical than holy. Papa Great had been ripped off by a preacher at a tent revival outside Williamstown, and he vowed never to attend church again. And it was common knowledge that Father Henderson, the former rector of St. Anne’s Episcopal Church, had a history of slipping into the strip clubs outside Myrtle Beach.
But most of all, I didn’t want to give up my life—the way I felt Shannon had a few years back. It would not be me to refer to Jesus as though He were sitting right beside me, stroking the strands of my hair. It would feel silly to pray that my jewel would fade away or that I would write a good English paper or have a nice time at the deb luncheons. In my heart of hearts, I sensed that I would have to give up too much to follow Shannon’s path, and my heart recoiled at the very idea of it.
All too aware of my vulnerable state, I feared being sucked into something that would leave me worse off than before.
“I’m just in a tough spot,” I said, “but I’ll find my way through.”
“A Rescuer exists,” Shannon said lovingly to me as she patted my shoulders. “I’m not going to push, Ad. That’s backfired in the past, I’ll admit, but I’m here to tell you about it any time of the day or night.”
“Thanks,” I said, suddenly recalling those countless summer hours we’d spent in Shannon’s garage, reenacting Charlotte’s Web during our elementary years. And how, after reading Black Beauty, we spent most of fourth grade pretending that we were horses and whinnying around the playground in our shared imaginary world during recess. We had even started our first periods within weeks of each other the summer between sixth and seventh grades.
“I guess we’re women now,” I had said to Shannon when Mama took us to the Kmart to pick out maxi pads.
“Yep!” Shannon said, giggling as she placed the bulky plastic package in our cart. “It’s official.”
Then we asked Mama to buy us a Diet Coke as we stood in the checkout line, forsaking our usual childhood request for a candy bar.
We slurped the bitter drink all the way home, wincing at the aftertaste as if to toast our bodies, which were quietly undergoing the great transformation beneath our T-shirts and cutoff shorts.
I wanted to be a child again. Wanted to be swinging in the hammock with Juliabelle or in Shannon’s garage, pretending to be Charlotte weaving Wilbur out of a fix with two simple words. But who could turn back the clock? Or better yet, allow me a second go at things? If only I could blot out the last year and start over. But I was spoiled. A strawberry tart stain on a white dress. Not just my body, but my mind too. My thoughts were out of control, and there was no way I could bridle them, much less express them on paper in what I had hoped would be my life’s purpose.
I hugged my sweet, familiar friend at the edge of my driveway as the bees buzzed in and out of Mama’s hydrangea blooms.
“Just let me melt down from time to time.”
“Count on it,” Shannon said. “You’re a bright and wonderful person, Adelaide.”
“I thought I was headed somewhere,” I said, moving toward the front steps of her home. “What a fool I am.”
“But if you’d just—”
Stepping toward the threshold, my ears shut down. I waved a final time, then walked into the house, the straps from my pink sandals popping the blisters beneath my heels.
“Adelaide!” Mama exclaimed. “You’ve scuffed up your new shoes, and you’re bleeding on the Oriental rug. Run to the kitchen, sweetheart. I’ll meet you there.”
That night, Mama reluctantly agreed to host a dinner with what Daddy excitedly called some “Bizway diamonds” from Conway. I assumed that this meant some folks who had made it to the top of the business, but I kept picturing them as large round-cut stones who’d pierce the fabric of our antique chairs when they sat down to teach Daddy and Uncle Tinka the tricks of the trade.
“Pick the seven most influential people you know,” said one of the diamonds, named Big Bugs Murphy.
He and his wife had driven up in the longest Mercedes I had ever seen. It took up half the driveway with its sleek white body and gold hubcaps that looked like the big coins I got for Willa at the Chuck E. Cheese in Myrtle Beach.
Mama feigned interest in the discussion, though I could tell she was more preoccupied with the fact that Bugs kept his elbows on the table and slurped his she-crab soup through the gap between his teeth. And when Mama served the beef tenderloin, Big Bugs’s wife, Belinda, removed a piece of neon-green chewing gum from her mouth and set it on the side of Mama’s gold-rimmed bone china plate. Good gravy, what manners!
Escaping to my room with a slice of mud pie, I heard them slowly migrate to the living room, where they talked vitamins and acquiring points and graduating first to precious metals and then to gems.
I couldn’t resist pulling out my journal that night and searching my desk drawer for a nice ink pen to write with. Instead of thoughts or poems, I wrote questions about the God whom Shannon had brought up to me that afternoon. The God on the shoulder of St. Christopher on the medal I carried despite my unbelief. The God I had prayed to as a little girl each night and sang to with all my might during the one week of vacation Bible school I attended in grade school. The God someone—whoever had given me the silver-paged Bible—had hoped I’d get to know.
Yes, there was a part of me that worked to resist Him, but Shannon had infected me with the idea of hope this afternoon, and I felt an undeniable draw to dissect the idea with the tip of my pencil.
As I wrote, I felt sure that my questions were nothing new under the sun, but naming them kept me from exploring Shannon’s post-saved world.
1. If there is a good and powerful God, how come there is so much pain and grief in the world? Even good people suffer (i.e., war and Daddy’s lost arm and lost friends; Cousin Mina, whose one and only child was stillborn; Brother Benton, who died in the name of fraternity hazing; and Peter Carpenter, who didn’t mean to hurt anyone).
2. Why is it such a mystery—the whole Jesus Messiah thing? The language is so cryptic. Why can’t they just say it in plain English?
3. What about Genesis? If the world is only 7,000 years old, then how do you explain the Tyrannosaurus rex?
4. I mean, Jonah and the whale? Noah’s ark? What is a thinking mind supposed to do with these tall tales?
5. Is every other religion wrong? Do you mean to tell me that the Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus are all barking up the wrong trees?
6. And what about all of those bloodthirsty Crusades? Not to mention the modern-day hypocrites who steal money and molest children.
7. What does that horrific-sounding “die to self” phrase mean?
Closing my journal, I glanced over at that fancy Bible on my dresser. I flipped it open and saw the words scratched on one of the thin paper pages in Mae Mae’s handwriting, “To Adelaide on the day of her christening. From Juliabelle, November 1981.”
Juliabelle! She was stuck on Pawleys with Papa Great, and it was up to me to go out and see her. She must be worried sick.
I slid my finger down the silver pages before opening the book at random to a page full of thees and thous and verbs that ended in -eth. “Can’t be worse than Chaucer,” I murmured as I read the first verse of St. John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
“Okay, definitely cryptic, but I like the poetry.” I flipped through the chapter, and something stopped me at the reddish-orange words of Christ at the top of a page in the same Gospel, and I read the question that was asked to some crippled man at a pool in a place called Bethesda: “Wilt thou be made whole?”
My spirit quickened at the question. A sick body might be made well, but what about a crushed heart?
I jumped down the page and read more of the orange words: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.”
Looking up from the book and into the mirror above my bureau, I guessed Mama and Daddy had bid the precious stones farewell. The house was quiet except for the faint sound of the eleven o’clock news in the den. And there was a distant ringing in my ears, but it grew closer as I stared back down at the words in red.
Suddenly, the ringing enveloped me. It was like a tingling heat that started at the back of my head and worked its way down to the backs of my knees. I wanted to collapse into the arms of it, but I didn’t have the faintest idea how.
“‘Passed from death unto life’?” I said aloud in a doubtful tone, but even through my sarcasm, I couldn’t shake the sense that something was standing right behind me. Breathing on me. I looked back only to find the clouded eyes of my collection of dolls staring dully in my direction.
Then I went to my window to look out into the shadowy marsh surrounding Williamstown. In the corner of the sill, a large banana spider was tearing down part of its dusty web and reconstructing it again with fresh strands of transparent silk.
The phone rang, and I answered it.
“It’s Shannon.”
“Hey,” I said.
“Just wanted to check on you.”
“I’m okay.”
“I’m here,” Shannon said.
“Thank God,” I said.
“Now you’re talking.”
I fell into the pillows on my bed and sighed.
“Wanna go with me to church on Wednesday?” Shannon slipped in without warning. “There’s this lady who is giving her testimony, and I know how you love a good story.”
“Not yet.”
“Well, at least you didn’t say, ‘No, never.’”
I grinned at just the idea of passing from death to life. Oh, that it were real. That it could actually be true. Then I rested in the comforting lull of my childhood friend’s voice as we chattered on about Bonnie Raitt’s Nick of Time album and the Fourth of July coon-dog parade and a day trip we might take to the boardwalk in Myrtle Beach.
When we hung up, I put the journal on top of my bedside table and attached the nice ink pen to a clean page. If more questions woke me up in the wee hours, I would pen them down before they slipped through the dusty web of my mind and out into the thick black of the summer night.