End of Summer
The next day I drank a cup of Juliabelle’s water with my breakfast, and an hour later I found myself in the Harvest Time pastor’s office (which in its previous life had been a bathroom for the barbecue restaurant that the building once functioned as). The Pelzers had laid down some pieces of scrap carpet and hung a few cheesy sunset and rainbow posters on the tile walls, but there was still a floor drain in one corner of the office and a random sink beside Dale’s desk.
“C’mon in, girls,” Darla said to Shannon and me as she popped her bright blue chewing gum and patted the place beside her on the secondhand couch while Dale pushed his swivel chair from around his desk to face us.
“Hi there, Adelaide.” Dale extended his hand, and when he smiled, I could see that he needed braces something awful.
He popped a mint-flavored toothpick into his mouth and began to gnaw on it, and I could just hear Mae Mae whispering, “What terrible manners!” (I mean, these folk could give the Bizway diamonds a run for their money in the etiquette department.)
After a lengthy prayer in which Darla supported Dale’s words with several moans of agreement, Dale straightened out his blue jeans and leaned in toward us, saying, “Now, Shannon tells me you’re a thinker, and that’s a God-given blessing. You ask me your questions, and Darla and I’ll try to answer them the best we can. We’re not the sharpest tacks, but we believe we have the answer to life’s most important question. What’s been revealed to us is the truth of the Almighty, and it’s good news indeed, Miss Adelaide! As Christ Himself said in Matthew 11:25 and 26, ‘O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, thank you for hiding the truth from those who think themselves so wise and clever, and for revealing it to the childlike.’”
Darla offered a four-syllable “Amen” and began to roll her cheap beaded bracelets back and forth across her wrist as I found the right place in my journal.
What am I doing here? The sharp thought suddenly nipped at my mind as I looked down at my questions. Do I belong next to a lady who wears sparkly eye shadow at ten in the morning and a man who chews on mint toothpicks while he prays? Shouldn’t I have gone to St. Anne’s to ask these questions first before heading to this barbecue bathroom office?
Though it took me a little by surprise, something in me was utterly repelled by Dale and Darla’s evangelistic eagerness, and I had half a mind to just stand up and walk out. I didn’t think I could contain my disdain for whatever their message was and whatever they expected me to do about it.
This newfound contempt was a surprise. It was so real and forceful that I could hardly speak. I suddenly recalled this same kind of repulsion when I was ten and attending my last year at St. Anne’s vacation Bible school. How, when the music director asked us to sing a corny song about the steps of salvation and Jesus’s making a home in our hearts, I muttered, “I won’t do it,” then stole away to the bathroom, where I waited for the bell to ring.
I can say I’m sick, I thought as we all waited for me to read from my journal. I can tell Dale and Darla that I have just come down with a terrible virus and run out of the room and pretend to be nauseous.
Mustering up the strength to sell this lie, I gave a side glance to the dear friend of my childhood, the girl who had practically carried me through this painful summer with her steady love and support, and I realized I didn’t want to offend or hurt her. And what about Darla? The woman who had courageously spilled out her scandalous personal history a few weeks ago to me and a hundred other searching souls? The glow in her eyes burned even now.
Fighting off my rebellion, I rattled off my questions to Dale, who nodded as though they were thoughtful, but typical.
“Let me start with a visual analogy,” Dale said as he pulled over an easel with a small chalkboard attached to it. “All my answers to your questions are going to build on this, so I might as well go ahead and lay this down as our foundation.”
“Okay,” I said, and I was breathing a little easier even now. I liked the classroom approach and was entirely comfortable approaching this as a brain exercise.
Dale took out a broken piece of chalk and drew a horizontal line across the middle of the cracked board. Under the left side of the line he wrote “man,” and under the right side of the line he wrote “God.”
“In the beginning God and man were together.”
“Genesis,” Shannon said in an effort to anchor me.
“Oh, like the Garden of Eden,” I remarked.
“Yep,” Darla added as her jaw worked her gum over.
Next Dale erased the middle of the horizontal line. Then he drew a vertical line at the end of the word man and another at the beginning of the word God so that they became two separate entities with a great gap in between them. He slapped his jeans so that two small clouds of chalk dust rose from his hips; then he wrote the word sin in the gap and stated, “Then sin separated man from God.”
“The Fall,” Shannon said, and I conjured up an image that had accompanied a John Milton poem in my freshman literature class.
“I get this,” I said. “What happened when Adam and Eve gave in to temptation. I mean, they got thrown out, right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Dale said. “They and all of their descendants.” Then he took his nubby chalk stick and pointed to himself, then Darla, then Shannon, then me.
Sin? I was mulling the archaic word over in my mind. I could already think of a few folks who surely did not have sin in them: (1) Mother Teresa; (2) Gandhi.
Now I was ready to stir the pot.
“Hear me out, now,” Dale said, raising his chalky fingertips. He clapped his hands together once, and the white dust lifted for a moment like a cloud of smoke before him.
“But God had a plan to bring you and me back to Him.” He drew a picture of a cross that filled in the schism so that one side could now get to the other.
“You mean Jesus?” I said.
“Jesus and what He did on the cross.”
“He died,” I said plainly, still not making the connection. Jesus-died-on-the-cross. These words were like wallpaper or a kind of white noise that had always been present in my small-town childhood. I had heard bits and pieces of the story over and over on the radio, in the pharmacy, in the strip mall, and at the gas stations, but it had never held any personal connection to me before. The words were part of the Williamstown culture, just another piece of the backwoods South, like tobacco or pork rinds, and I had always considered them as much superstition as anything else. In my mind, Jesus-died-on-the-cross was simply a notion that dim-witted folks relied on to get them through their hard and simple lives.
“Do you know what happened when Christ died?” Dale asked.
“I’m not sure I do,” I said sheepishly. I was embarrassed that I had never followed this story all the way to its conclusion. Had I been asleep my whole life?
“Well, God Almighty’s holy Son was sacrificed. He bore all of our sins—the ones from the beginning and the ones in the here and now and the ones to come—so that we could come back to God if we believe in what was accomplished on that cross.”
I thought for a moment. Then I took out my pencil and re-created the illustration in my journal. I had to admit, it was a beautiful story, if not compelling. But still, I kept my spoon in hand. Where was the catch?
Life was painful, I’d concluded after my freshman year at NBU. Life smacked you in the face and left you sitting on the side of a cemetery hill with shame and a potential disease invading your body and destroying the future you had worked so hard to protect. I feared that even with a seemingly pure and simple situation like this salvation one, there was a catch.
“Jesus paid the penalty, took the shackles off our feet, and allowed us to enter back into fellowship with our Maker,” Shannon added. Her voice cracked on the word Maker, and I could tell she was nervous. For years she’d been wanting to put a check by my name and write “saved” beside it.
“And not just that, darlin’,” Darla said as her bracelets clamored together with her excited arm motions. “In this act of mercy, Christ conquered death. He rose again on the third day, and we will rise, too, if we believe.”
Rise again? Hold on! I was just here to ask a few questions. I needed help coping with the here and now, not the afterlife.
“All who believe will have eternal life,” Dale added, and the light in his eyes was bursting into a flame. It wasn’t a Carrie horror-movie kind of fire, but rather a white light, like an electrical current, and I examined it with a kind of curiosity as it shot across his pupils.
He really believes this stuff.
“And in this next life,” Dale continued, “God will be with His people. ‘He will remove all of their sorrows, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. For the old world and its evils are gone forever.’”
“That’s from Revelation 21:4,” Shannon whispered to me, and I wrote it down as if it would be a question on a test, but in truth, I was confused. What would some of that electrical light cost me?
Let’s slow down, I thought. Maybe I want to keep my speedometer at zero after all.
“Back to the separation part,” I said in an effort to take this thing by the horns and stand nose to nose with it. “Do you mean to tell me that Mother Teresa is separated from God or that Hitler could have been forgiven if he had believed this in the last moments of his life?”
“Yes’m,” Dale said. “The Good Book says that no one is good—not even one. ‘For all have sinned; all fall short of God’s glorious standard.’”
“Romans chapter 3,” Shannon whispered again.
What an encyclopedia of Scripture quotes she was! Weird. I turned to look at her as though she had two heads, and she grinned back at me.
Dale pressed on with an article that he removed from his secondhand file cabinet. “Mother Teresa says there are five words that explain the reason she picks those little orphans up out of the gutter in Calcutta: ‘He Did This for Me.’”
“Really?” I said, raising my eyebrows as Dale handed me the article, where I read the very words he had highlighted.
This is going to shatter the whole protagonist/antagonist literature prototype, I thought. I mean, if we’re all bad guys after all . . .
“And what about Hitler?” I said. “Do you mean to tell me that he was redeemable?”
“No question Hitler was evil,” Dale said. “Somewhere along the way he turned away from God and became a mighty instrument of the enemy, but to say that he couldn’t be saved would be to take away the value of the Cross, and I’m not gonna do that. So yes, Hitler was redeemable, but only the Lord knows if he chose that at the end.”
Darla then added, “We are made right in God’s sight when we trust in the shed blood of Christ to take away our sins.”
As Shannon cleared her throat to cite the Scripture, I whispered back a little too loudly, “Take it easy, Miss Bible Beater,” and we all broke out into laughter, relishing this moment of comic relief.
“It’s so simple,” I said.
Then Dale pulled out a book titled Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis and handed it to me. “The Lord’s given you a brain, and He wants you to use it, so try this on for size, and meet with me again when you come home during your next college break.” He threw his frayed toothpick into the trash and added, “This’ll be one for you to sink your teeth into. I never have gotten through it.”
C. S. Lewis. I had loved the Chronicles of Narnia as a girl and had passed them down to Lou last year and even read them with her from time to time. Then I remembered peering into that Bible study at NBU where they were reading a book by Lewis—The Great Divorce, I remembered.
“Let me leave you with this thought,” Dale said. He put his Bible down and rubbed his knees as he searched for the right words. “It’s good to think this through, but it’s also good to move ahead and commit when you sense it is right. You never know what tomorrow holds.”
Scare tactic, I thought, the repulsion making its way back into my throat. If this is an altar call, I’m not budging. (I was beginning to feel bipolar.) Clearing my throat, I looked away from Dale and became suddenly conscious of the ticking of a bright yellow “Smile, God loves you!” clock behind his head. I imagined it was a bomb that would detonate any second.
“Let me put it another way,” Dale said. “What could be bigger than eternal life, Adelaide? If you want to plan for your future, think about more than just the next seventy years. There was this bright fellow by the name of Pascal who came to the faith by seeing it in terms of a wager.”
Pascal’s wager. It sounded vaguely familiar, like a reference in a poem, but I couldn’t recall.
“Anyhow, what Pascal said was, ‘If God doesn’t exist, it doesn’t matter how you wager, ’cause there’s nothing to win after death and nothing to lose neither. But if God does exist, your only chance of winning an eternal life is to believe, and your only chance of losing it is to refuse to believe.’”
Then Dale pulled out another yellowed file that quoted Pascal. He scratched the back of his neck and read, “‘I should be much more afraid of being mistaken and then find out that Christianity is true than of being mistaken in believing it to be true.’”
That’s a thought, Mr. Toothpick, I thought. But then there’s that whole “surrender your life” thing that Shannon brought up before and Darla mentioned in her testimony. My life belongs to me, and I’m not going to hand it over.
Dale pointed the file at me and said, “I mean, if I’m wrong in believing, what did it hurt, but if I choose not to believe and I am wrong, what did I lose?”
“Everything,” I murmured. Still, I wasn’t going to budge. I looked into his fiery eyes head-on to let him know.
“But this is not wrong,” Dale concluded as he stared back at me. “It’s the truth, and we get confirmation of that every day of our lives.”
I practically felt a breeze from Darla’s and Shannon’s strong head-nodding beside me.
If God had been courting me all of my life, then the splendor part was all about Him. My search had been for Him all along. Though I considered that this could actually be true, I wasn’t ready to accept it.
I thanked Dale and Darla for their time and didn’t say much to Shannon on the ride home. But late that night, I wrote the first poem I’d written since April.
Could the chasm
between us
be bridged
with two
slats of
wood?
The Cold War ended later that week while my sisters and I drank cherry icees with Daddy in the backyard by the crab dock. We were listening to the proposal of the Western Alliance over a fuzzy portable radio as Daddy shot off the leftover Roman candles from the Fourth of July out over the marsh.
He was all excited. Uncle Tinka had just gone platinum, and he’d be next with just two more in his downline. He’d just returned from a convention in Atlanta where they gave him a standing ovation when he came out dressed in his star-studded marine uniform, his sleeve folded up to his ribs to show the sacrifice he had made. After that convention, several groups were calling to ask him to speak at seminars and meetings come fall. They ate up his Vietnam War stories, and they could easily weave his message of courage and hope into their own agendas.
But as the world looked forward to its newfound peace, the Piper family’s pockets of resistance were gaining strength, and the first battle of a domestic war that would last for years was about to be waged.
It began on August 10, the same day that a letter from NBU arrived stating that because of my poor second-semester grades, my $6,000-a-year scholarship was in jeopardy. I had one semester of grace to pull up my GPA. After that, my parents would have to come up with the extra money to pay the full bill or I would have to transfer.
While Uncle Tinka had pushed Daddy hard to build his own line in Bizway, Mama lost any interest she ever had in the venture after attending a second convention at an Orlando resort where wives flaunted three-carat diamonds and husbands drove fully loaded limousines up to the front of the meeting room so that folks could gawk at their glittery wealth.
“Sure, they’re rich,” Mama told Daddy that night as they peered out their fourth-floor hotel window and watched the fireworks display from the Magic Kingdom light up the sky with its dazzling purple-and-gold fire. “But they pop their gum, and their mascara is all lumpy, and they’re all overweight even though they’re pushing vitamins and health shakes. Something doesn’t add up here. And I’m tired of paying fifteen dollars for a hamburger in this godforsaken world of faux.”
“You know what your problem is?” Daddy had said. “You’re a small-town snob. Can’t you for once try to let me dream a little, here?”
Mama had recently warned Daddy again not to upset his father (and employer) by admitting he was fully committed to the pyramid business. It was true that the American textiles industry was slowly collapsing because of cheap labor forces overseas, but Papa Great didn’t see it that way.
Daddy had moved on in Bizway against his bride’s wishes, and his plan was to work the business on the side until he could get free from the parental hooks that had kept him in an office job most of his adult life.
But on that swarmy summer night of August, Papa Great marched right up to the steps of my home with an ultimatum:
“Zane, you’re going to be out of a job in two weeks if you continue in this harebrained pursuit,” he hollered in the foyer. He had refused an iced tea or a seat in the living room. His face was red and bloated, and he pinched his nose so hard I thought steam might pour out of his ears.
“Papa, come on,” Daddy said. “I’ve tried it your way for years, and you know I’m no good to the mill.”
Papa Great glanced up to find Lou and me leaning over the banister, listening. He pointed up the stairwell in our direction while continuing to stare Daddy down. “And I will not put up the remainder of your eldest daughter’s inflated college tuition, either.”
Daddy rubbed his cheek with his stub. “You son of a—”
“I’m meeting with my attorney in two weeks to revise my will.”
He turned back around as Mama cried out, “Wait, Papa!”
“No, Greta,” he said, shaking his head. “You just tell your husband I sure hope it’s worth it.” Then he slammed the front door and shuffled toward the Cadillac, and I wondered where Mae Mae and Juliabelle were and if they’d had any idea what he was up to.
Before I knew it, I grabbed one of my Norton anthologies, opened my bedroom window, and threw it at him. “Hog!” I shouted.
It hit his right shoulder as he walked across the lawn.
He stopped in his tracks to look up at me.
I had my hands on my hips, and I strained to see the whites of his eyes.
“All that I can see you’ve gained from being away at that overpriced college is twenty pounds or so,” he said, sniffing in the humid air.
I shifted my weight and did not take his bait.
“You know what I think, Papa? I think my daddy would have had two good arms and a pro football career if it weren’t for you and your boorish expectations. It’s time you let him be.”
He sneered, then spit on my anthology.
“Uppity girl.” He kept his gaze on me and shook his head in a combination of disgust and disbelief.
“Adelaide, don’t you dare talk to your grandfather that way!” Mama was calling from the front porch. “Papa, now, you come on back inside and let’s talk this out.”
I gazed back at him.
He rubbed his shoulder, then pulled his hand away. “She hit me,” he said to Mama, picking up the anthology and toting it to his car.
Lou started to cry from somewhere behind me, and by the time I turned around to check on her, he was driving down the street over the bridge to Pawleys.
If this wasn’t bad enough, in the late hours of that same night, Dizzy was arrested for driving under the influence while swerving home from an all-day party on the river at her crazy friend Angel’s house.
Zane Piper was madder than a hornet’s nest when he wheeled the Country Squire out of the driveway to bail his wild child out of the city jail.
“I’ve had it with this one,” he screamed after he hung up the phone from talking with a police officer. “She won’t be leaving this house for months!”
Mama didn’t say anything back to him before he left. She was melting under the pressure of the first day of war, and she cried into her pillow for an hour before her husband and her lost daughter appeared at the front door with long-term consequences to face for their wayward choices.
Poor Mama—all she wanted was a quiet, small-town life. An existence opposite her dysfunctional Charleston upbringing. Now nothing was going according to her plan, and she would have kissed Papa Great’s thick, jagged toenails before releasing her Piper family vision.
You could hear a pin drop in the Piper house as Daddy locked the front door and turned off the last light at 3:00 a.m.
“Get up to your room!” he said to Dizzy, and she plodded up the stairs. “I hope you like it up there, ’cause the only time you’re going to leave this house over the next three months is to go to school.”
Lou woke up in all of the commotion, and I invited her to stay in my room for the rest of the night. When I went to invite Dizzy, I could not get her attention. Her door was locked, and she was blasting some kind of punk rock through her headphones.
Over the next few days I pondered God and my choices for the coming year: transferring back to USC as Randy proposed or taking out loans to cover Papa Great’s half of my tuition, returning to NBU, and giving it another go. I had a call in to an admissions coordinator at Carolina, and she was working on piecing together some financial aid for me.
Mama had sided with Papa Great and refused to join Daddy at any Bizway meeting or convention. Daddy made his choice too—he was making a run for this new career, with or without his inheritance or his wife’s support.
How I had yearned to curl up in my mother’s arms on my last summer nights—to ask her about God and if I should accept the message that Dale and Darla had presented to me. I wanted to confide in Daddy as well, but he was distant and determined, making phone calls to vets and old football buddies, asking if he could come by and show them his new business plan.
Juliabelle was stuck out on the island with the old Hog, and I couldn’t get to her, either, so I drank the last of her tonic and hoped for the best. (Little did I know that she and Mae Mae were going to bat for me in more ways than one.)
As my parents argued about the fate of Dizzy’s next year—a rehab camp, homeschooling, boarding school, and the like—I drove her to the first of many Alcoholics Anonymous meetings that Judge Snodgrass had required her to attend.
“Will you come to the meeting?” Dizzy whispered to me. Her head was tilted toward the floorboard of the station wagon as we pulled into a space at Second Baptist Church. (She was not looking anyone in the eye these days.)
“Sure,” I said, squeezing the back of my sister’s hand. I, of course, had a million things to do and life-altering decisions to make, but I couldn’t stand the thought of letting Dizzy down right now.
When we walked into the smoke-filled church gymnasium where the AA meetings were held, I quickly sensed the energy that I had felt at Harvest Time during that dinner several weeks ago. Dizzy and I sat down in the back row of seats as several kind and weathered faces nodded in our direction and personal stories about the battle with the addiction were told over a cheap and crackly microphone.
The AA steps were so reminiscent of my talks with Shannon and Dale and Darla that I was beginning to believe someone was trying to tell me something:
1. Admit that you are powerless.
2. Believe that a Power greater than yourself can restore you to sanity.
3. Make a decision to turn your will and your life over to the care of God.
4. Take a moral inventory of yourself.
5. Admit to God, yourself, and others the exact nature of your wrongdoings.
6. Become ready to have God remove all of these defects of character.
7. Humbly ask Him to remove your shortcomings.
8. Make a list of all persons you have harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all.
9. Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continue to take personal inventory, and when you are wrong promptly admit it.
11. Seek through prayer and meditation to improve your conscious contact with God as you understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for you and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, try to carry this message to others who are hurting and to practice these principles in all your affairs.
The message was understandable. It was familiar to me by now, and yet I was not ready to take the leap of faith it required. It was as though I was aware of the battle that was being waged inside my mind, but I chose to side with the faithless faction because that came most naturally.
As prideful as it sounds, I was not convinced that if I took a moral inventory of myself, it would come up in the red. I was a victim, after all. A victim of a horrible attack. And before that, I was a victor: an above-average poet on my way to a promising future. A sinner was not how I described myself, frankly. Sure, I’d made a mistake here and there, but the overall picture was good.
Now Dizzy seemed lifeless in the meeting. She kept her head lowered and smoked the Marlboro Reds that had become her source of comfort and peace. If I was hard to reach, Dizzy was beyond the pale, and I feared that the only message my sis would receive in this meeting was that it was fine to chain-smoke and whine.
On our way home, Dizzy turned up the dark music that she had slid into the cassette player and rubbed her temples.
My folks had grounded her indefinitely until they came up with a plan to whip her into shape, and she hadn’t left the house for at least five days. Knowing what it felt like to want to crawl into a hole and wither away, I wanted to do something to express my sympathy. Suddenly I turned off the music, made a U-turn in the middle of our quiet neighborhood, and headed out toward Pawleys Island. Dizzy gave me an inquisitive look before returning her gaze to the floorboard.
“Let’s go to the beach. You could use some fresh air and a last look at it before fall comes.”
Dizzy gave a deep sigh of relief and seemed to relax into the seat for the first time since we’d left the house. She looked out the window as the late-afternoon sun left a pink glow on all the weathered homes and the palmetto trees bent at curious angles along the gravel road.
We caught the end of the sunset when we parked at Boardwalk 11, and we scurried down to the gully’s edge to dip our feet into the soupy pool just in time to watch three terns flap toward their roost in the top of an abandoned boardwalk as the purple sky faded into black. We lay back on the sand in the dark as the ocean slapped the shore and just listened.
The intracoastal waterway was the thoroughfare that had made Williamstown a wealthy shipping harbor during colonial times as the cotton, indigo, and rice were loaded here and carried on to Europe.
And I thought about the four rivers that converged in the harbor and poured into the sea and the hurricanes that autumn brought and the ghost of the Gray Man that appeared before a storm to warn the residents to retreat.
Then I squeezed Dizzy’s hand and said, “It sucks, but you’ll get through. Don’t roll over and die, sis.”
“I’ve done worse than this,” Dizzy said through a guffaw. “I’ve got a lot to change if I want to get back up again.”
“Eh, water under the bridge, right?”
I tried to whitewash it, but Dizzy was ready to talk. It was as though she had weights on her chest, and she had to name them before she could consider lifting them off.
“I’ve carried drugs for people in my car, Adelaide. Drugs to sell.
” “Well, that wasn’t exactly a brilliant thing to do, but just don’t do it again, okay?”
“Taken Ecstasy,” Dizzy continued as we watched a barge stacked with red and black containers move out from the harbor and into the waterway. “And once, at Angel’s house, I did acid. They had to tie me down to the couch because I kept wanting to jump off of the balcony and grab the moon.”
Holding Dizzy’s clammy hand, I rubbed my thumb across her knuckles.
“Besides all that, I’ve, like, totally been with guys before,” she said before exhaling loudly.
A fish tail skittered before our toes, and I bit my lip. What should I say?
“Three,” Dizzy continued. “Two of whom I haven’t seen again.”
The air was soft and moving enough to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and I heard the palm fronds knocking together behind us. A ghost crab scurried across the surf and into his hole. He went in and out again, staring us down with his beady raised eyes before moving sideways back toward the water.
“I’ve driven drunk, stoned, plenty of times,” Dizzy continued. “I mowed down one of our neighbor’s mailboxes last year and dented the station wagon so bad that I had to beg my friends to hammer it out.”
Then Dizzy started to weep. I couldn’t remember the last time my sister had let her guard down. My mind reeled with explanations: Dizzy had dyslexia like me, but hers had been a harder case to overcome, so she struggled in school. She had never found her niche in the academic or athletic worlds, and her class was made up of some world-class small-town losers.
“I, like, could have hurt someone,” Dizzy said. “Driving as messed up as I was. Isn’t that scary?”
“Yeah,” I said, dabbing my sister’s eyes with the arm of my blouse. “It can end here, though.”
“Adelaide, do you believe in that greater Power stuff that they were talking about?”
“I’m working on that,” I said. “I want to, but . . .”
Dizzy threw an oyster shell into the water, kicked at it, and added, “You might not need it, but I do.”
I splashed back at her, and she kicked a clump of sand onto my belly, and before I knew it we were in a saltwater war, and our clothes were soaking from the gray-green soup. Dizzy laughed for the first time in days as she sat up and cupped the water in her hands. Then she poured it over my head.
“Thanks for listening,” she said, and she looked up and met my eyes in the darkness. Her makeup was running, and she looked like a miniature Morticia Addams with a hangover.
“I love you, Diz,” I said as I returned the head douse with a handful of water. “I want to help.”
She stood first and pulled me up before throwing her arm over my shoulder. We walked back up the dunes to the station wagon, the sand clinging to our feet and ankles and our jeans making a squishing noise with each step.
We drove home, wet and itchy, on one of the last nights of the summer of 1990, our backsides leaving dark impressions in the plush car seat. It was the season we would later look back to and remember that our lives began to take a drastic turn in an unalterable direction. The Pipers would not be the same again.
As Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait dominated the television screen and the last debutante dress fitting was taken before Thanksgiving, Mae Mae came over and said, “Pack your bags for NBU!”
“You know something I don’t?” I asked. She was grinning from ear to ear, though all the Lancôme foundation in the world couldn’t mask the gray bags under her eyes.
“We’re back on for our half of the tuition,” she said, tilting her head from side to side and tapping her thumb and middle finger together like a belly dancer.
“What about Papa Great?”
“Well, he got hungry and gave in.”
“Huh?”
“Well,” she said, winking at me, “Juliabelle went on strike last week after he took your scholarship away, and he hasn’t had fried shrimp in seven days.”
I smiled. “And what about you?” I said.
“We’ve had a few words, but I know how to open his eyes.”
Randy was disappointed, but he invited me on a boat ride the afternoon before I left. He brought a basket of wine and imported cheeses he’d bought in Charleston—stuff that I knew he never ate but thought I’d like.
“Ooh, doggie,” he said when he bit into a piece of Stilton. He puckered his lips, drank a big gulp of wine, then pulled an anthology of Archibald Rutledge poems from the basket.
After we anchored beneath a live oak tree on the edge of Goose Creek, he read poetry to me. Rather maudlin poems about nature and love, but still, the gesture was dear.
When he pulled a little blue box out of his back pocket, I was scared to death he might be proposing.
Oh, good gravy, I thought as he snapped open the cover to reveal two perfectly round charcoal-pearl stud earrings. He handed them to me and said, “Three years isn’t so long. And I’m not giving up now.”
He kissed me long and hard; then he pulled out a folded piece of notebook paper from his pocket and read a poem he had just composed himself.
Every now and then
While an oyster shell
Filters salt water
A few grains of sand come in.
After months of mud
The sand becomes a pearl.
Then I open the shell and find it.
Like my heart, it belongs to one girl.
I smiled at his sincere effort and blushed at the sentiment. No one had ever written me a poem. And even though this one was terrible, I hugged him hard and thanked him for how much he’d meant to me this summer.
After kissing Randy a final good-bye on Mae Mae’s dock, I went for a last summer visit with Baby Peach and Georgianne; then I loaded my suitcases into Jif ’s new car for our return to NBU.
The debs had gone on an informal farewell trip to Myrtle Beach the night before. Shannon had followed me onto my porch at the end of the night to ask me if I had gained any ground with Mere Christianity. Since my family turmoil, I had not cracked any book and had concluded that as wonderful an idea as it was, I just wasn’t there yet.
“It’s a lovely story,” I assured her as the fireflies lit up the yard. “It’s a beautiful notion. I mean, to think that God could have become human and died for mankind so that we could be reunited with Him. But . . .”
“Okay,” Shannon said, unable to hold back a sigh. She seemed genuinely disappointed and concerned.
“I’m sorry to let you down, Shan. But hey, you can pray for me,”
I said, “that I will be able to function back at school and have a decent year there. My scholarship is in jeopardy, and heaven knows how freaked out I’m going to be when I get back there.”
“You know I will.”
“I know, Miss Holy Roller,” I said, hugging her before tugging on her ponytail. “You have a good year too.”
Shannon was headed back to the two-year women’s college in North Carolina while applying to other colleges where she would finish. I had never heard of Wheaton, which was Shannon’s first choice, but I could only imagine that it had a lot to do with religion.
Before the crowd broke up, Harriet gave us all an airbrushed T-shirt that she had snuck off and purchased while we stood in line at the Tilt-a-Whirl ride.
“Now, these are so deblike.” Jif snickered as she held up a black one with a pink-and-lavender beach scene and her name in a chalky yellow cursive across the chest.
We donned them and squeezed into my porch swing while Dizzy held the camera and Harriet hollered, “Say ‘cheesy’!”