Adelaide Piper

by Beth Webb Hart

  As I ride

  the subway escalator

  up to street level

  the heat dissipates.

  On the corner

  there is the

  grind and dribble

  of an espresso

  machine

  and a man

  still snoozing

  on the grate

  which catches

  my heel

  as I pass.

  What was with me? It was a kind of restlessness. I had a strong desire to peel back the skin of the town to see if it had a pulse. I asked Tobias to take me to a poetry reading or out dancing or even to try a little exotic food sometime, but he was too busy assisting with the upcoming Violence Against Women Act to take a night off.

  There was an Ethiopian restaurant that Dizzy had told me to try and a little place in Adams Morgan that was cooking the recipes from Like Water for Chocolate, a recent love story I’d devoured one night in the f.r.o.g. when I declined a dinner invitation from the Moores. (Instead of dining with the lackluster in-laws, I ate Nabs and drank Co-Cola and escaped into a beautiful Mexican world where unrequited love would not go quietly.)

  “I’ll go by myself, then,” I told him one night as he walked me to the subway after a long day of work.

  “Adelaide, that’s not safe. I don’t want you riding on the subway after dark.”

  Then I remembered Lazarus Greene from high school, and it took one call to information to get his voice on the other end of the line.

  When we met at the Ethiopian restaurant, I threw my arms around him and he held me tightly for a moment. He still had that graceful gait, but he had filled out, and he pushed back his shoulders with a kind of self-assurance and strength. He sported a black oxford shirt and one small gold hoop earring in his left earlobe, and he had completely shaved the top of his head. It was smooth and perfect, like a bowling ball, and it caught the light of the afternoon sun as we sat beneath a blue café canopy and swept piles of beans and vegetables onto spongy bread out of a large, round pottery bowl.

  “I’m glad you called,” he said. He put his elbows on the table and clenched his fingers together, staring me in the eye. “I’m moving next month, and I would have missed you. I’ve thought about you a lot over the last few years, Adelaide.”

  “Really?” I said, grinning at his forthrightness and smooth grin.

  “Yeah,” he said, rocking his ball of hands between us. “You had guts to take me to that senior dance back in high school. I was probably a fool to go, but it’s one of my best memories from Williamstown. And it helped me to see I had to get out.”

  “Yeah, well, you were the obvious choice,” I said. “Bright, humorous, and handsome.”

  “So your fiancé must be all of those things?”

  Mmm. “Bright and handsome, yes. But he’s a little more on the serious side, I’d say.”

  “Well, it’s a serious subject you guys are dealing with,” he said.

  “Anyhow, most folks in DC are serious.”

  “Or boring,” I said. “So where are you moving?”

  “NYC. I was strong-armed by one of my English professors to be in a production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Kennedy Center my junior year, and it was the greatest thing I’d ever done. I had this epiphany, sort of, and I’ve been writing plays and acting in local productions since then. I still majored in journalism, but I want to give this theater thing a go and see what happens.”

  “That is really cool,” I said. “My friend Harriet is in theater up there. I’ll have to connect you.”

  “Sure,” he said as he swiped the bill from the waitress before I had time to protest.

  “You only go round once,” he said. “Might as well make it count.”

  Lazarus walked me to the subway entrance that night, where a man playing the saxophone nodded as we exchanged numbers and hugged good-bye. Then he hopped on his bike and sped home toward his apartment on Volta Street. And I stood at the top of the escalator, watching him as he rounded the corner a few blocks down, dodging and ducking the honking cabs before pedaling smoothly away.

  Like the kudzu that shrouds and distorts the trees and abandoned shacks along the Southern back roads, so the aftermath of an attack blurs the victim’s sense of reality. She becomes a shaded tree buried in vines that keep her from seeing sunlight. But what about the kudzu itself? Does it know the damage it is doing?

  The articles I was supposed to write for the Rachel’s Rape newsletter became more and more creative, steeped in metaphor and symbolism, and, ultimately, tended to stray away from the subject.

  “Your writing is beautiful,” Glenda warned, “but this is going out to policy makers and campus administrators, so try to keep it concrete, okay?”

  “Sorry,” I said as Tobias and Glenda stormed up to the Hill to bend the ears of another congressman before the upcoming vote on the act.

  I went back to the computer and changed the article to this:

  Rachel’s Rape supports victims and trains men in the prevention of sexual assault. We are proud to present the first national media campaign focusing on the role that men play in preventing crimes.

  “Hello, Rachel’s Rape,” I said as I looked up from my computer screen to answer the phone.

  “A-de-laide?”

  The Southern drawl was unmistakable.

  “Randy?” I said. I hadn’t heard from him since he’d hung up on me when I told him I was engaged. “How in the world are you?”

  “Good. Real good,” he said. “How are you up there?”

  “Oh, you know, it’s kind of exciting working in the nation’s capital and all.”

  “I know you always wanted an adventure like that,” he said. “I’m proud of you.”

  “You aren’t angry?” I asked.

  “Not anymore,” he said. “That’s sort of why I’m calling.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’m getting married, too, Adelaide,” he said.

  My heart skipped a beat, and I felt the sting beneath my arms.

  Like a true Southern girl, I faked enthusiasm. “That’s great! Who’s the lucky girl? The cheerleader I’ve been hearing rumors about?”

  “Yeah. Dodi was a cheerleader last year. She’s from Greeleyville.”

  Dodi is her name? Oh, good grief! It might as well be “Perky.”

  “Greeleyville,” I said. “The thriving metropolis. So when’s the date?”

  “I’ve got you beat there,” he said, a hint of sadistic pleasure in his voice. “July 30.”

  “Next July?” I asked.

  “No, this,” he said.

  “Good gravy, Randy! What—she knocked up?”

  “Actually, she is,” he said, and my face reddened with horror. That perky little cheerleader had his number, and there was no stopping this nuptial.

  “Now, I know what you’re thinking, ’cause I know you, Adelaide.

  You’re thinking, This is so Williamstown, and you might be right about that. This isn’t the way I always pictured things would end up, and that you well know. But this is the way things are, and after a lot of praying and talking to my folks, this is the right thing for me. She’s a good girl, and I love her. I wanted you to know before I told anyone else in the family.”

  I blew a long, deep breath of something between acceptance and resignation. Randy was the kind of guy who loved to do the right thing, and I adored him for that. What did I expect him to do, wait for me forever? What a selfish you-know-what I’d been.

  “I’m proud of you, Randy.”

  He chuckled faintly, as though he were on the other side of the world.

  “I miss you, Adelaide. I wish you the best.”

  “Don’t worry; I won’t come to the wedding. I know that would be too weird.”

  “Yeah, I think so,” he said.

  “But I want to kiss that baby one day.”

  “You bet,” he said. “He’ll be here in October. Good-bye, now.”

  My office
window faced the west side of the Hilton Hotel. Just above eye level I could see a housekeeping lady, fluffing up two pillows and folding down a bright blue bedspread before topping each side with a square of chocolate.

  She looked up and squinted her eyes to see me. I was peering from around the computer at her, wondering how I ended up in this little office with a view of the fifth floor of a hotel.

  When she looked away, I clutched the stapler by the phone and threw it, halfheartedly, at the wall behind me. It left a brown smudge above the fax machine before toppling off and into the recycling bin. Weeping into my palms, I pictured shucking oysters with Randy when I was thirteen and the cupola he’d built on top of his house that looked out across the sand dunes and into the Atlantic Ocean.

  In my mind’s eye I could see him cradling his baby boy in an elaborately embroidered christening gown, rocking him back and forth on the edge of Mae Mae’s garden as the palmetto fronds rustled against one another and the Spanish moss swayed in the harbor breeze.

  Tobias was focused on the cause. Day and night he wanted to discuss it with me. It was the very air he breathed, and he longed for it to be mine too. But on the days that he and Glenda left for Capitol Hill, I would turn on the answering machine and escape down to a pay phone in the lobby of the Hilton at the end of the block, where I tried to contact Harriet, Ruthie, or Jif to see how they were doing. (Shannon was out of reach in Bogotá, and everyone missed her.)

  Occasionally I’d get Jif on the line, and she’d whine about how difficult the recovery from breast augmentation surgery was.

  “Was it worth it?” I asked one afternoon, rolling my eyes. I loved Jif, but I just hated how her mind worked.

  “Duh?” she answered with an unshakable faith. “They look great.

  You’re going to be seriously jealous.”

  “Oh brother.”

  But usually I didn’t get anyone on the phone, and instead I just sat down on the plush sofa and pretended that I was a tourist or the young wife of an ambassador. I’d order a white wine spritzer and watch the powerful patrons blaze in and out of the brass revolving doors in their muted silk ties and dark Italian shoes.

  When that got old, I’d loll around the nearest blocks, gawking at the guards in front of the White House and the busy businesspeople everywhere pounding the blocks with their heavy briefcases, as if they had in their possession the very solution for world peace.

  One afternoon, Tobias came up for air and took me out to look at potential newlywed apartments in Arlington.

  As we drove over the Fourteenth Street Bridge into Virginia and exited off the GW parkway, we circled one high-rise settlement after another on the fringe of the beltline. As far as I could see, Arlington had all the leftover remnants of what is bad about the city (littered roads and smoggy air), with none of the beauty or energy.

  “What’s wrong?” Tobias asked when I pooh-poohed three different shoe-box apartments on low floors of the square high-rises.

  The institutional-looking buildings reminded me of the communist housing that Harriet and I had seen on a train ride from Budapest to Prague two summers ago.

  “Can’t we find something with a smidge of character?” I asked.

  He bit the inside of his cheek and looked at me as though I were a riddle he couldn’t quite solve.

  One Thursday in late July, when I was to present my speech to Senator Carnes in hopes of serving as a witness for the upcoming hearing, Tobias and Glenda left before me for the Hill so that I could have some time to rehearse in the one-room suite before showtime.

  I started to practice, but when Mae Mae sent a mock-up of our wedding invitation through the fax machine for my approval, I tucked it in my briefcase and walked across K Street and into a lovely bookstore named Chapters. Randy’s wedding was tomorrow night, and I didn’t want to think about matrimony. My speech was polished, and I didn’t need to go over it. With a whole hour before I had to be on the Hill, I granted myself a momentary bookstore escape.

  The smell of Chapters reminded me of the NBU library, and I loved it. Tracing the outline of several new novels, I suddenly thought of Mr. Lewis and made my first journey over to the Chapters apologetics section.

  It had been awhile since I’d read the Bible or even prayed. Things had been moving so fast between preparing for my speech and making decisions about the wedding that somehow I had distanced myself from God, and the void that I had known before was beginning to open up again.

  Remember me, I thought I heard the third voice say as I picked up a copy of Mere Christianity and clutched it to my chest. Refresh my memory, I said. I’m already forgetting.

  I closed my eyes and tried to think where I’d put my journal from sophomore year. The one that recorded my grappling with Mr. Lewis as he persuaded me to believe. Suddenly I realized that I couldn’t recall one sentence or argument from those days, and I felt as frantic as a bee who is unable to enter the hive.

  When I opened my eyes, the room seemed to darken, and the floorboards seemed to shift beneath my feet. Steadying myself, I took a deep breath and looked around at shelf after shelf of books and then back across the street to my office. It was swampy in the midday heat of the city, and the window air-conditioning units were dropping cold water on the heads of the passersby.

  Before I knew it, a strangely familiar-looking young man in a suit and loose tie walked into the store and sat down at a table to thumb through a Washington Post. He took off his jacket, and two circles of sweat outlined his white shirt, and his hair fanned out at the ends like a rooster along the top of his collar.

  When he sat back in the chair and folded the paper back, I remembered. It was Devon Hunt! What in the world was going on here?

  I shifted my weight back and forth for whole seconds. Then I marched right over, sat down in front of him, and pulled down the newspaper.

  He looked up at me in confusion. His eyes narrowed, and then it came to him, and his face morphed into the most terrified look I had ever seen.

  He knew me. And by the look on his face, he knew I had spoken publicly about that night on the graveside hill.

  My heart was thumping like a small bird’s, and I pulled a Rachel’s Rape brochure out of my briefcase and handed it to him.

  “Read this, why don’t you? And pass the word. Rape is a crime.”

  His neck stiffened, but his Adam’s apple moved up and down as he swallowed. His eyes didn’t follow me as I stood back up and walked toward the door. I still had a Lewis book in my hand, and the cashier said, “Would you like me to ring you up, ma’am?” as I headed toward the door.

  I pointed toward Devon at the table, his hands running through his damp hair.

  “He’ll take care of it,” I said, showing her the title.

  What a day, I thought as my stomach caught in my throat and I tried to calm my beating heart. Funny, I didn’t want to castrate Devon as Allison had suggested, and I didn’t want to forgive him the way I knew Shannon thought I should. But there was a deep-felt satisfaction in confronting him, and I might have reveled in it longer if I weren’t terribly confused about my feelings for Tobias and late for a meeting with a senator that had been set up for a month now.

  I had to get to the Hill, but I was so disoriented that I kept walking straight down K Street. Two blocks down from Chapters was the White House, where the controversial President Clinton was conducting business behind a wall of security, and across the park a homeless couple was rolling their supermarket cart of essentials under a shaded tree for a respite.

  As I watched a flock of pigeons take flight, I felt at war with myself, and I didn’t know what to do about it. I was going to be late for my appointment if I didn’t act fast, and so I walked out into the edge of the street and caught a cab over to meet Tobias and Glenda.

  They were waiting for me on the other side of a security checkpoint in the Russell Building, and I slid my briefcase through the metal detector as Tobias waved me by the guards and onto the elevators.


  When Senator Carnes’s aide came out to say that we would have to reschedule because of an emergency session that had just been called, Glenda stayed behind to see if she could pop her head into some other offices, and Tobias and I walked to the subway so that he could help me get off early to Vienna before a business meeting with NOW and a few other activists that he was conducting in his apartment later that evening.

  I held back from telling him about running into Devon. I was perturbed for some inexplicable reason, and when the escalator delivered us down to the subway, I could not suppress the desire to needle him.

  “I don’t know if I like living in Washington,” I said as he slid my subway pass through the slot and the wall opened to let me through.

  “We’re going to live in Arlington, and it’s much nicer there,” he said as he pushed through the doors after me.

  “No. I mean, I don’t know if I like this whole area. You know I always wanted to live in Manhattan.”

  “Manhattan?” he said, rubbing his forehead in disbelief. “Are you serious?”

  Then he took me gently by the arm and said through his concerned eyes, “That’s one of the most dangerous cities in the world, Adelaide.”

  “Would you ever go anywhere else?” I asked, staring back at his sweet eyes. “I mean, is Rachel’s Rape what we’re going to do for the rest of our lives?”

  “What are you saying, Adelaide?”

  “I don’t know,” I said as I twisted my engagement ring around on my finger. A part of me wanted to take it off and throw it onto the third rail of the subway to see if it would melt like the pocket watches in Dali’s The Persistence of Memory.

  “Is everything okay, sweetheart?” he asked, leaning into me and brushing a strand of hair out of my face.

  “I’m bored,” I said, looking up at him. “I feel empty and sad.”

  He had not noticed that we had entered the wrong platform and would be headed southeast on the green line toward the inner city of Anacostia if we hopped on the next approaching train, instead of west on the orange line toward the Virginia suburbs. He bit his bottom lip in distress over our conversation as a train made its way toward us.