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’!”
12
Sophomores
As Jif and I made our way up the Blue Ridge Mountains, we learned every word to Fun and Games, the new Connells CD. It took our minds off our equally awkward family good-byes: I had learned on a trip downstairs for a late-night glass of water that Daddy was sleeping on the sofa, and Jif overheard her own mother in the bathroom after the farewell steak dinner refusing to come out until her husband agreed to schedule her for a tummy tuck before the deb ball.
“Marny,” Dr. Ferguson had called to her harshly, “if you don’t stop this foolishness, I’m going to call a shrink.”
Marny Ferguson wanted Jif to have a car so that she could continue her beauty maintenance at a Roanoke salon, so she allowed her to take the candy-blue Mercedes to school.
“Nice wheels,” I said when Jif rolled into my driveway earlier that morning. I had thought Jif was going to be driving the old Ford station wagon she drove in high school.
“It sort of comes with strings,” Jif said as she helped me load my luggage into what little room was left in the trunk. (Jif was such a clotheshorse, but at least she wasn’t stingy, and there were several tags hanging from suede jackets and cashmere sweaters that I looked forward to borrowing.)
“Let me guess,” I said. “You’re going to have to be in pageant condition when you go home for Thanksgiving.”
“Something like that.”
“Your mama is so misguided,” I said, strapping myself into the passenger seat, “and I’m not going to let you puke your guts up all semester over this.”
Motioning to the fancy dashboard with all of its knobs and gadgets, I looked at Jif head-on until she acknowledged my stare. “We’re talking about your body, here, Jennifer Ferguson. Your health and well-being. You’re certifiable if you’re willing to jeopardize that for a second!”
“Yep,” Jif said, nodding her head in a kind of resigned disgust at her mother’s twisted priorities.
“Getting sick to lose weight is playing with fire,” I said, waving away the Slim-Fast bar she offered on our way out of Williamstown. “You know that.”
Before we veered onto the highway, I turned to face the old mill houses. Thankfully, there was no haunting face staring back at me. In fact, there were hints of life: a red geranium hanging on a front porch, a tricycle at the side door, and even a patch of grass here and there that softened the view of the shotgun homes, propped crudely on cinder blocks. What had changed—the village or my point of view?
Word around town was that Averill Skaggs had just married Charlene Roe, and I wondered if they were building their home here as their parents had. I half hoped to see them as I looked, but I didn’t.
When we reached the picturesque NBU campus, Frankie was waiting for us on the piazza. He was leaning against a column smoking a cigarette, which was nearly a prerequisite for the campus newspaper staff that he had been invited to join. He hugged me hard after our car pulled onto the quadrangle lawn, then took my largest bag and said, “Let’s get a cup of joe after y’all unload.”
When we reached the top of the grand staircase to our sophomore dorm, we were thrilled to be reunited with Ruthie, who had shared a summer similar to ours as a deb in Gastonia and Charlotte.
We’d moved up to West, an eighteenth-century dorm that faced the quad with an awe-inspiring view of the Blue Ridge and glorious afternoon sunlight. Things would have to be better this year, I proclaimed as we sipped our cappuccinos on the second-floor piazza and watched as wide-eyed freshmen walked fretfully back and forth between the building pillars, looking for their orientation classes as the upperclass frat boys sat on rocking chairs, scoping out the fresh meat.
In my caffeine rush, I leaned over the banister and shouted:
Freshman meat
do beware
poachers seek
to devour
you rare!
Frankie bounded up and grasped the pillar beside me as a few folks stopped and took notice.
“It’s the truth!” he said, shouting down on the emerald lawn.
“Those Greeks’ll eat you for lunch. Don’t say you weren’t warned.”
Some upperclassman called back “Freak show!” to us, and some of the frat boys rolled their eyes, but a few of the KNs who knew Frankie from last year nodded to one another and discreetly made their way off the quad.
Daddy had told me plainly that if I didn’t raise my grades by the end of the semester, my scholarship would be withdrawn and I would have to transfer to USC. There would be no asking Papa Great for the extra money, no matter how hard Juliabelle and Mae Mae striked.
I had done well my freshman year before I botched my exams last spring, and I knew that I could make the grades with the exception of the mid-level calculus class that my liberal arts scholarship required. Tapping into that side of my brain was seriously tough for me, but I vowed to focus on the strange
little Greek and geometrical shapes in those orderly algebraic patterns until my eyes throbbed with exhaustion. I had come too far to give up what I hoped were still positive opportunities for me here. For better or worse, NBU was my yellow brick road.
The semester got off to a good start. I kept myself away from the gravelly road that led to the graveyard. I didn’t want to reopen that wound, because I had to stay sane in order to remain focused. Bury it, I told myself. Put it six feet under just like the Founding Father himself, Nathaniel Buxton, whose corpse was enclosed in that hill. Not to mention his favorite horse as well as his wife and children.
From time to time I thought I saw the silhouette of Devon Hunt out of the corner of my eye, and one night when walking by the provost’s house on the way to class, I relished a fantasy that involved climbing the latticework to his bedroom window, cocking Juliabelle’s shotgun, and pointing it toward his private parts while he slept.
Thankfully, my workload didn’t seem to be as difficult as expected, and most evenings I had energy and time to spare, so I began reading the book Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis that Dale Pelzer had given me.
As soon as I read the first chapter, I was riveted. Lewis’s words were a wrecking ball, smashing through the walls in my mind. It was like a beautiful secret—this window into a brilliant and reluctant convert’s head, and I came to savor those moments when I could curl up in a rocking chair on the quad or in one of the plush library sofas that overlooked the mountain stream and ingest his argument for the faith.
I bought a brown leather journal for such occasions and became determined to pin down what he was saying, to wrap my brain around the message. How I loved having to read the page over again before comprehending it. And when it finally set in, I would copy the idea down and then respond:
There is a Law of Human Nature that is pressing in on us, but none of us are keeping it. We have failed to practice for ourselves the kind of behavior that we expect of other people. (p. 6)
First, [the human race] is haunted by the idea of a sort of behavior they ought to practise, what you might call fair play, or decency or morality, or the Law of Nature. Second [they are haunted by the fact] that they did not do so. (p. 13)
Mr. Lewis,
Do you mean to tell me that there is a universal moral code? And that a blueprint exists somewhere in the back of each of our minds?
I find that I do not exist on my own, that I am under a law; that somebody or something wants me to behave in a certain way. (p. 21)
I’m not an atheist. I mean, I don’t think it’s all a mistake. I’m just not ready to commit. Also, I don’t think I’m all that bad, either. I try hard to be good, and usually I think that I am. Is that really obnoxious of me?
When I got the nerve to ask Lewis the question that had been eating at me since the rape—that is, why does a supposedly good God allow suffering?—here is how he responded:
You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will . . . A great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again. (p. 33)
And then:
This is a good world that has gone wrong, but still retains the memory of what it ought to have been. (p. 37)
Why did it go wrong?
Christianity agrees with dualism that this universe is in a war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel. (p. 40)
So we’re on the foe’s turf. That could explain a lot. I have to admit I’m rather snobby about this whole Christianity thing. My take has been that it is backwoods, cryptic, and superstitious. Not to mention, a social embarrassment. Am I wrong?
About Christ who claimed to be God, I copied down Lewis’s words:
You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. (p. 45)
Or you can just step away for a little while. Get busy with other things. Take your toe out of the water because you aren’t ready for full immersion.
Sorry, you dear and charming Englishman, but I’m not going to lay down my arms just yet.
I came to love my one-way conversations with Mr. Lewis. He was fascinating and convincing, but like an ill child who refuses his medicine, I remained stiff-necked.
Then the thought crossed my mind that there might be other respected writers who shared Lewis’s view. In my creative nonfiction class, we had begun reading the Pulitzer prize–winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, in which a writer with a microscope on the natural world discovers wonder and God-created miracles at every turn. Upon further research on these lively nights in the library, I discovered that there were other notable writers who aligned themselves with Mr. Lewis’s beliefs: Leo Tolstoy, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, and Harriet’s beloved Flannery O’Connor.
“Can you say obsessed?” Frankie whispered in my ear one Thursday night while I was intently writing in my journal. (We’d look for each other in the library around midnight to take a walk.)
“Let’s take off. I need a smoke.”
He was on a high this particular night. The paper had been put to bed hours earlier, and he needed to blow off some steam.
Regardless of what Harry had said to Sally earlier in the year in their famous movie, Frankie was my friend, and so far the sex thing hadn’t gotten in the way. He knew about Randy, who was now mailing me a poem at least once a week despite his hectic travel schedule with the football team. In the verses Randy likened me to the moonlight or a magnolia bloom or a fiery fall leaf. (Randy. Humph. I think there’s room for just one poet in a relationship, don’t you?)
But even though Frankie and I shared a lot, I never could bring myself to tell him what happened to me on my date last spring, and he didn’t invite me to where he went on weekend nights with the newspaper staff, who were an oddball combination of activists, hotheads, and Harmony Society members. Frankie was a social misfit.
He wasn’t in a frat, and he wasn’t an athlete, so he’d become more and more linked with the fringe groups that bound together for survival.
“So, you finding religion?” he asked as he lit up his cigarette, grabbed my elbow, and began walking around the quad.
“Just exploring.”
“More power to you,” he said. Then he read me the three articles he’d written in the paper: one about campus recycling, one about a student who spent his summer working in a shelter for battered women in Philadelphia, and one about Iraq’s military buildup in Kuwait.
He walked me back to the sofas in the library and lay down on the adjoining one to sleep. “Wake me up when you’re ready to go.”
Frankie. Hmm. Was he an active member of Harmony or just a really nice guy? The jury was still out.
Ah. Back to Lewis. When I opened the book, I could not help but feel that yearning I had felt that night in my room when I dusted off my childhood Bible for the first time and made out the mysterious messages in the book of John.
On weekend nights, while others were blowing it out on frat row, I found myself at the apologetics section in the library, where I would rub my fingers over the books that would come next: The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, A Grief Observed, Surprised by Joy. Part of me wanted to devour them whole, make them settle in my innermost parts, and another part of me wanted to sample them and spit them right back out again as if they were one tray on a never-ending spiritual buffet.
I stared for whole minutes at Lewis’s photograph on the first page of Mere Christianity—the warm eyes surrounded by fleshy circles of late-night thought and the itchy tweed jacket that surely smelled of pipe and English mist.
I am smitten
with a deceased
Englishman
whose words
are more
than manna.
It was not unlike me t
o become enamored with dead writers. Once I wrote a love letter to William Faulkner in which I confessed that if he invited me to the Yoknapatawpha County in his mind, I would make a life refilling the ink and stroking the top of his wide forehead as he foretold our region’s doom. And when I chose to save a cockroach that scurried across my Governor’s School classroom, I wrote a poem to Kafka in which I kissed the roach and became transported to early twentieth-century Prague and into the arms of a dark, delicate Jewish man.
But this new literary flame was pointing me and the rest of the sad world to a Source that was alive. A Source he claimed was at work even in the loss of his mother at a young age or the horrors of a world war in which he had served, and I couldn’t help but hope that this Force was seeking me out against all odds as it had him.
Those evenings when Frankie and I would push through the library doors and out into the crisp darkness of the Virginia nights, I looked up at the very same star-studded sky I had watched with Devon Hunt on the worst evening of my life, and I wondered if my true suitor was this Force in the universe that was pressing in on me, and more specifically (as Mr. Lewis was persuading me), this Jewish carpenter who was either a madman or a Savior who laid down His life nearly two thousand years ago.
Yes, I might be destined to fall for a dead writer. (It was safer that way.) But this one, this Jewish carpenter, claimed to be alive somewhere out there in the night sky. Not just alive, but resurrected and sitting at the right hand of God.
Ruthie continued to steal away most weekends to Chapel Hill to see Tag Eisley. Exhausted from either her arrival or her preparation to depart again, she would draw all of the blinds and turn off the lights so that she could sleep most hours of the day and night. Between classes, she would sleep, before dinner she would sleep, and when she finally seemed to rouse herself from her cavelike condition around midnight, she’d order a pizza or Chinese takeout, which she scarfed down like there was no tomorrow while I held my nose and memorized my exponent rules or conducted my convergence tests.
Adelaide Piper Page 19