Adelaide Piper

by Beth Webb Hart

  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 g
raced 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 purp
ose 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.