Broken Loaf
Early the next morning, I received a hysterical call from Harriet.
“Marguerite didn’t get out of bed when I called to her. An ambulance is here and taking her to Charleston.”
I rushed over to pick Harriet up, and we followed closely behind the flashing lights as she bit her nails and pushed back the tears with the backs of her hands.
It was a beautiful winter day. The white morning light was blinding as it burned through the cloud covering above the rickety, rust-encrusted Cooper River Bridge. One bump from a barge below, and it would surely collapse into the harbor.
We took our seats in the emergency waiting room of the Medical University amid a crying child who had stapled his fingers together, a homeless lady with three Piggly Wiggly bags of clothes, and a cheesy green-tinseled Christmas tree with plastic candy canes, as a jazzed-up rendition of “Walking in a Winter Wonderland” played over the intercom system. It was seventy degrees outside, and Charleston wouldn’t see a flake of snow for another ten years.
After three hours, the doctor came out to confirm that Marguerite had suffered a stroke, a fairly severe one, and her condition was uncertain. She was unconscious and had a week to regain consciousness before the likelihood of her coming around again became extremely slim.
Harriet called her mama at Betty Ford and her mama’s brother, Uncle Fin, who lived on a commune in Arizona. They were both indisposed, so they left the details in Harriet’s hands. She really was all alone.
I sat on a chair, thinking, God, give her strength.
The next thing I knew, Governor Maves, Marguerite’s cousin, walked in with his entourage and told Harriet he would put his assistant, Lester Hayes, in charge of the details.
“Don’t you worry,” he said to her. “Marguerite’s tough, and I’d bet the state she’ll pull through.”
Sure enough, Marguerite regained consciousness the next morning, Christmas Eve, and insisted with great vehemence that Harriet continue with the deb engagements and stop blubbering at her bedside.
I agreed to stay with Harriet in Marguerite’s house for the rest of the Christmas break. Harriet didn’t drive, so on Christmas Day I drove her in Marguerite’s silver-blue Cadillac to the hospital, where Father Simmons from St. Anne’s gave us Holy Communion at her bedside and we sang terrible a cappella renditions of “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” and “Joy to the World!”
By day Harriet and I would suck in our bellies for our final fittings, smile in front of the portrait taker, and practice our curtsies in front of the president of the Camellia Club, and at night we would sit on the porch, eat vegan pasta, and talk.
“You’re giving me the Heisman,” Randy said when he called to ask me out for the third time. “I really have something I want to show you.”
“We’ll have plenty of time together come January,” I assured him.
He knew about my failing grades, and he had put me in touch with a football player’s girlfriend who was looking for a roommate at USC.
Harriet and I conversed about literature, life, and God. She was open to the whole religion thing, and I read her the journal entries that I’d written to Mr. Lewis last semester, before giving her my copy of Mere Christianity. Harriet finished the book in less than twenty-four hours; then she made me drive her to the Williamstown Public Library, where she checked out The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters.
Harriet and I both had these overwhelming bursts of energy in the evenings that led up to the deb ball. We would drink wine from Marguerite’s cellar and cook casseroles and soups into the wee hours of the night, carefully packing them in the freezer for Marguerite upon her return from the Medical University (which wouldn’t be until after the New Year).
One night I wrote a letter to Peter Carpenter in which I told him that I missed him and hoped he was all right. Cringing, I even called his mama to ask for the penitentiary address.
“Marguerite is my little piece of mercy,” Harriet said suddenly, looking up from one of her Lewis books as I fumbled through the drawers for a stamp. “My undeserved gift from God.”
She put the book down and said, “I can’t do this, Adelaide. There’s too much water under my bridge.”
“Not true,” I said before opening the contemporary Bible Shannon had given me for Christmas to read aloud a passage from Hebrews I’d just stumbled upon: “‘Let us go right into the presence of God, with true hearts fully trusting him. For our evil consciences have been sprinkled with Christ’s blood to make us clean, and our bodies have been washed with pure water.’”
“Sprinkling? Full-fledged immersion wouldn’t get me clean!”
As two moths gathered around the porch light, Harriet spewed, “You know I’ve done drugs. Not just pot, but heavy stuff. And every now and then, I get this funny feeling in my gut and go to Hardee’s and get a big, juicy cheeseburger. Plus I’ve slept around.”
As Harriet watched the moths dance around the heat, she took a deep breath and kept going. “One time when I didn’t have a ride home from a show, I shacked up with a forty-year-old deadhead who ran the falafel stand, and I wound up with genital warts.” Then she raised her eyebrows as if she had trumped me and this sprinkling notion with just the beginning of her list.
She turned away from the light to look me head-on as she made her way farther down her list. “My oldest stepbrother—the one who ignores me—I even slept with him once. We were on a family ski trip in Austria, and we’d had too much to drink. I mean, that’s pretty bad, isn’t it?”
The moths were buzzing now, singeing their wings as they touched the bright light.
I didn’t know what to say, but that had never stopped me before.
“Well, it’s definitely not in the ‘all things bright and beautiful’ category, Harriet, but from all I can figure, there’s nothing that can’t be forgiven.”
“Oh, come on. Do you really buy that?”
As much as I could figure, with the exception of her relationship with Marguerite, Harriet had concluded that she wasn’t worth a thing, and it would take more than me to persuade her otherwise.
“Yeah, I do,” I said. “And a sin list as long as the Great Wall of China can’t nullify the sacrifice made on mankind’s behalf.”
Harriet crinkled her face. She inhaled several breaths of the winter air before shooting an arrow.
“Did you forgive that law student who raped you last spring?”
My face reddened. I didn’t know that Harriet knew about that, and I wondered if it was common knowledge. My throat burned with anger.
“Jif told me one night when I asked her why you always freaked out when someone came up behind you. It took me awhile to get it out of her, too, so don’t think that she’s spilling the beans around town.”
I thought for a moment about Harriet’s question. Had I forgiven Devon Hunt? No. And I wasn’t sure that I should. That sly predator.
“I haven’t gone that far,” I said to Harriet as I pulled a porch blanket tight around my shoulders. “Don’t know if I will.”
“Hey, I understand. I mean, I don’t know if I can forgive my mother for not being a mother. Truthfully, the worst thing I’ve ever done, if I had to name it, is wishing that she would die. I mean, I have fantasies about her drinking herself to death.”
My heart ached for Harriet. “I’m sorry” was all I knew to say.
“Yeah,” Harriet said as she flicked out the porch light. The two moths thumped their bodies against the hot bulb even after the glow had disappeared.
After we made our way up the grand staircase and to our separate rooms, I heard Harriet’s muffled cries from across the hall.
When I closed my eyes, I could still see Devon Hunt pinning my neck down with his forearm.
I had my own fantasy. The details weren’t clear, but I pictured him trapped in one of the old wooden coffins they buried Nathaniel Buxton in on the cemetery hill. A group of men had lowered him into the ground, and they were lifting their spades up and down as they covered the wooden case.
I was the only one who knew he was alive in there, but I didn’t tell a soul.