A Southern Girl: A Novel

by John Warley

  She liked the games our sons had liked at that age. When Coleman sat in his den chair, crossed his legs and she straddled his foot to ride the bucking bronco, she laughed as hard as they had laughed. At night, she insisted on playing “Superman.” Bathed and dressed for bed in feeted pajamas, she spread her arms as he held her aloft by material gathered behind her shoulders. Squeals of pleasure echoed through the house.

  By the time she entered preschool, her foreignness had become no more remarkable to Coleman than Josh’s cowlick or Steven’s slight overbite. When the Soviets shot down a Korean airliner, killing 269, the grim news stories reminded us that we had not given the country of her birth a thought in months. Shortly after that disaster, I planned a picnic. We would travel in separate cars, as I planned to go directly from the park to visit a sick friend. The boys were waiting in my car, and Coleman had just told me he would meet us there when Allie climbed into the front seat beside him. On the way, according to him, she said that her mother must have been poor.

  “What makes you think so?” he asked.

  “I just think so,” she said.

  When Barron Morris retired, the law firm fell into rare dissension. Coleman played the role of peacemaker until it became apparent that the competition for control would be bitter and protracted. He met with Harris Deas, a lawyer his age also impatient with the infighting, and together they formed Carter & Deas. The new firm prospered. When Sarah downsized to a small house on Sullivan’s Island, we moved into the house on Church Street.

  On Allie’s fifth birthday, I arranged for a pony. In the back yard, seven other children from her kindergarten class took turns being led. Allie returned to the line after each ride. She giggled with the waiting girls and ignored the two invited boys, who darted among them playing a form of tag that required a slap to the top of the head. But she kept an eye on the pony. By her third or fourth mount, she grew possessive, seeming to resent turns the others took and imagining that the pony responded when she approached, threw her leg over the pommel, gathered the reins, and planted her feet in the stirrups. When it was time for the cake and presents, she reluctantly went inside after I assured her the pony would be there when she finished. That Christmas, a pony topped her wish list. I prepared her for disappointment in a short, elementary lecture that was part economics, part zoning. Later, I reported to Coleman that the child was obsessed.

  “She wants pony books, pony videos, pony clothing. Maybe I’ll look into lessons. I think I’d like to ride as well.”

  “That’s a great idea,” he said, telling me it would be good for both of us.

  Mastering Charleston’s antiquated rules and conventions would challenge the most determined transplant and God knows I tried, genuflecting to customs, traditions and rules of etiquette centuries in the making, and little changed. Coleman had warned me that folks here believed “nothing should ever be done for the first time,” and how true that proved. I gave and attended teas. I took my turn on the garden tour and the open houses. I resisted the urge to crash after-dinner drinks in wood paneled libraries thick with cigar smoke and men. I fussed over debutantes. I kept track of invitations given and received with the precision of the most meticulousness accountant. I volunteered, donated, served, supported, venerated, and praised. I did these things and more for Coleman, for our sons, for the life and family we had resettled in Charleston. They were all part of the informal bargain struck in Virginia. “Lord, I’m mellowing,” I told a friend.

  To feed my inner rebel I relished tiny acts of defiance, venial as they seemed, which kept something within me alive. I refused to leave calling cards (“fucking absurd,” I muttered on more than one occasion). I refused to wear hats or white gloves (“people, it’s 1987, and it’s 98 degrees out there, for Chrissake”). Behind the walls, I sipped tea and re-read Camus, Virginia Woolf, and Garcia Marquez.

  For a time I looked at Allie as both a daughter and an ally. We had both been transplanted, seeking air, light and water in foreign soil. She was my comrade-in-arms, a fellow pilgrim on the humid, azalea-lined road the family had taken. Then, just after her seventh birthday, I came home to find the strains of Die Fledermaus blaring loudly from the study. Opening the door, I saw them waltzing on the hardwood floor, Coleman holding Allie with ballroom formality. She wore her soccer uniform. Her feet, clad in athletic socks, rested on the tops of his. “The perfect lead” he called it after they became aware of my presence. And I wondered, not for the first time, just whose ally the child was.

  Her “otherness” gradually, and at times painfully, asserted itself. In grammar school, her teacher asked each member of the class to identify their family heritage as part of a geography lesson. She replied “English and German,” an accurate answer as far as we were concerned: “A plus.” But a boy behind her laughed, and I feel sure the teacher thought she was being tactful when she suggested Korea. The child shook her head and said no, “English and German.”

  There was the day when I caught her posed in front of a hallway mirror. “Allie?”

  Without turning she said, “Yes, mom?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m … different.”

  “You’re beautiful.”

  “All moms say that.”

  “No, I mean it.”

  She returned her full attention to the mirror. Nearing it, her face three inches from the glass, she pulled at the corner of her left eye. “I don’t look like the girls at school.”

  I winced. That which I had forgotten, she was only now discovering. “Here we go,” I muttered inaudibly. But she drew back from the mirror, shrugged indifferently, and walked to the kitchen to make a sandwich.

  The truth is that, try as I did to empathize with all the assimilation issues I knew she must be wrestling with, I doubt I succeeded, and no amount of adoption literature—and I read it all—bridged certain gaps between the world she was born into and the one we brought her to. Yes, she and I were each in our own way transplants, outliers, but her challenges dwarfed mine and were made greater by the fact that she herself was undoubtedly unaware of many of them. A prepubescent child cannot articulate turmoil the source of which is only vaguely felt. As a parent, you look for clues to understanding what she herself cannot understand. You try to help solve a problem for someone who does not know they have a problem. For example, she never expressed curiosity about her birth family or Korea, nor did she appear to feel any affinity with the handful of Asians at her school. I saw this as a form of denial, a distancing that says to herself and those around her that she is the same as the rest of us. It must be the young mind’s defense against a dislocation that demands a more mature mind to cope with. I’ve read about parents who went to extraordinary lengths to immerse their Asian adoptees in their native culture, but I always believed that was a mistake, an end run around the instinctive defense. I guess time will tell.

  How would I have felt, transported to Asia as an infant and surrounded by people that looked like aliens? And we, the caregivers and nurturers, tell ourselves that we have given them a better life by adopting them because we know from reading and experience how harsh conditions are, especially for girls, in foreign countries where the supply of children so greatly exceeds the demand. But they don’t know that. They have not yet learned that girls are abandoned in landfills, or beside highways, or drowned as if they were a litter of unwanted kittens. They know only what they have until the self-awareness, the kind I witnessed that day when she stood at the mirror, tells them they are different in fundamental ways, which can trigger profound questions like, “Who am I? Where did I come from? Who are my parents?” And most critical, “Why was I abandoned?” For many of these children, those inquires are never answered. Some stop looking for answers. Would Allie be one of those?

  Her middle school years challenged all of us. Social cliques rule in those grades. She had friends, but the movers and shakers at Porter-Gaud kept her at arm’s length. We heard about sleepovers to which she was not invited,
and while she always protested that she didn’t care, we did. Bullies are endemic to every middle school, and although she never suffered physical abuse (that I learned of), she endured her share of mean jokes about chopsticks and kung fu and slanted eyes and fried rice. These taunts hurt, to the point of tears. She refused to ever use chopsticks and for a time she even disdained rice, a staple of the southern diet and a starch she had loved as a young girl. Her teachers wrote notes home expressing surprise she wasn’t doing better in math and science, when in fact she loved English and struggled with other subjects. This difficult passage was the only time I questioned my decision to avoid immersing her in Asian culture. At one point I suggested we go together to a Korean church newly organized in Charleston, and she responded by using a new phrase popular at her middle school: “no way.”

  If any boy showed interest in her, we heard about only one. She mentioned Tommy Worth, and the way she said his name told me she was in crush mode, that painful passage girls her age navigate as best they can. At the time, the poor girl had a mouthful of metal from braces plus some complexion issues. During a long walk on the beach, she confided that she thought he was going to kiss her but instead he asked if she had brothers or sisters in Korea. She told him she didn’t know. I dreaded the awkward dating years that lay ahead, but as things turned out I wasn’t destined to see them and would have given anything to be a witness.

  The Seoul Olympics gave us all a chance to see Korea, a land that struck me as vividly colorful, exotic, and intriguing. News coverage included reports of a temporary halt to international adoptions due to potential embarrassment, a loss of face, for the Korean people and their government since both were sensitive to the notion that orphaned children had become a leading export. Allie showed little interest, opting to do her homework during the evening broadcasts and asking me to let her know when the equestrian competition came on.

  The year 1989 brought the great hurricane. Like many in the city, we made the initial decision to ride it out at home. Sarah joined us as the barrier islands, vulnerable to even modest storms, evacuated. By the time the storm’s ferocity was appreciated, it was too late to leave the peninsula. Highways clogged. A neighbor who panicked at noon returned in the late afternoon, reporting a three hour wait on a single bridge, during which his car moved twenty feet. Allie, age ten, voiced her intent to stand on the sea wall to watch the whitecaps in the harbor. She had never experienced a hurricane, nor did she appreciate how winds that had two weeks before swirled off the African coast could be brought to such a pitched force and concentration as now approached Charleston. After Hugo, the mere word, “hurricane,” knotted her stomach. As the storm bore down, Josh laughed and talked on the phone with teenage indifference to danger, while Steven watched the news and repeated to us every precaution broadcast. They should store some water in the tub, he suggested. Fresh batteries for the flashlights would be prudent. A transistor radio. Pets should be brought inside, though we had none.

  Tornadoes plague Kansas, but not hurricanes, so I also had never witnessed a real one. By dusk, when the winds strengthened, I went to our room and stood at a window with the lights off. I studied the mammoth live oaks that bordered our property. They must be two hundred years old. Silhouetted by the fading light in the harbor, they spread stately arms over the yard and roof as if to guard the house and us from wind, from sea, from rain, from shelling by the Yankees, from all threats from any source. I found comfort in their presence. Like avuncular sentries they stood stolidly, too massive and too old to move or even to bend more than a few inches. From their muscled limbs hung Spanish moss, and it was the winds stirring this moss that first parted for me the atmospheric curtain hanging over the harbor, to reveal the power of the storm gathering behind it. Gently at first, but with ever increasing whips and lashes, moss blew toward me, the trees themselves hardly moving. But the storm was still a hundred miles offshore.

  I joined the family, gathered in front of a television. Coleman and I did our best to conceal nervousness, feeling the weight of our decision to ride it out at home and deriving no comfort from the presence of neighbors, equally regretting their decisions. “It will all blow over,” Coleman said breezily. Josh insisted that Bennie McNamara’s father had predicted five thousand deaths in the city just before the McNamaras pulled out for Greenville the day before. Steven looked at us for a more optimistic assessment. “Oh, bullshit,” I said, with more conviction than I felt. We ate dinner on trays, watching news reports track the storm. For a time, an impetuous northward veer promised to spare the city at the expense of points closer to Myrtle Beach. Just as suddenly, a westward turn fixed the city in the storm’s cross-hairs.

  I returned to our room. A window inches from my face began to vibrate. Rain pelted the window in sheets. An eerie moan rose and fell from outside. I could not locate its source, as if gusts of wind were being driven by a giant, unseen engine that whirled and whined in a growing mechanized frenzy. Darkness fell. In the house, all was quiet. Behind me, every security I had come to know, to rely upon, remained in place, calmly waiting. But outside, in the artificial light from the street, I saw the oaks begin to grow animated. Between torrents of rain, limbs begin to sway. Spanish moss clung stubbornly to branches that had been as much a home to it as this house was to us, but the wind howled louder, the branches bent, and the moss extended parallel to the ground before losing its grip and flying wildly into the night. The storm’s mounting fury took on a tribal arrhythmia. In my imagination, the street lights became fires on an aboriginal plain, with the oaks bending and swaying as I had never seen them do, warriors building up their wills to face some cataclysmic force just now making its way over Charleston’s horizon. My trance was interrupted by Allie, who stood in the doorway to ask me to call the stables to check on Libbie, her favorite pony, but by then lines were down. I went back to the window, willing myself to watch until the power went out in the city. When it did, I groped to the stairs, guided downward by the faint glow from an array of candles Coleman lit. We sat in the living room, listening to wind howl at an impossible pitch as a seventeen foot storm surge washed over Ft. Sumter.

  In a five hour span, Hugo affected Charleston as the years of Civil War had affected it. The city was not the same on the morning of September 22, yet instead of redefining it the storm added a bold brush stroke to a patina of timelessness, much as the war had done. True, in the dawn hours, that brush stroke resembled one that Jackson Pollock might have inflicted—ancient trees uprooted, homes flooded, power lines strewn in psychotic confusion, roofs transported to neighboring municipalities, chimneys reduced to rubble, boats suddenly and violently drydocked in parking lots. While the loss of life never approached our neighbor’s rumored forecast, the storm did kill. Yet the defining landmarks remained. The steeple-graced skyline stood mussed but enduring. Historic homes along the Battery and throughout the city, rather than succumbing to condemnation, renewed themselves on a tide of insurance that flowed through after Hugo’s waters receded. In the weeks that followed, roofing nails became the gold standard to which the local currency was pegged.

  If I had a philosopher’s bone in my body, I would find a way to cast my time in front of the window, watching Hugo approach, as prescience, a harbinger of the news I got months later from my oncologist. I’d been feeling weak and sluggish for weeks, thinking I was perhaps anemic. When doubling up on vitamins and iron didn’t help, I blamed my thyroid. My stomach began to ache, and bouts of diarrhea became more frequent. Coleman asked if I was losing weight, and from the fit of certain outfits I knew I had. But the last thing I suspected, the. very. last. thing, was pancreatic cancer, and it was only following the tests and Dr. Jameson’s insistence that both Coleman and I come to his office that I knew something was very wrong. I left that office with a death sentence. Coleman knew it. I knew it. He put his arm around me and we walked to the parking lot in a daze. “Wait,” I said, as if remembering I’d left something in the oven, “I’m only thirty-eight. I have
children to raise …”

  But the disease did not wait. It progressed rapidly, an angry, aggressive invader that intended to kill me, and the sooner the better. For the next two years, chemotherapy and radiation made me really sick, to the only point in my life when I considered suicide. I honestly think I would have done it had not the prognosis, “perhaps six months,” been so imminent. Toward the end, attended by some wonderful hospice people who deserve laurels in the hereafter, I stayed at home, took morphine as sparingly as possible, and, as they say, put my affairs in order.

  As any mother would, I worried most about the children. Although quite nauseous, I attended Josh’s high school graduation and helped outfit his room at the University of South Carolina, where he is now a sophomore, essentially a grown man, which comforts me some. Steven, a senior in high school, still relies on me for advice with girls, and he distresses me because he refuses to believe all this is happening. I can’t believe it either. If I make it that long, I’ll be at his high school graduation if I have to watch it from a gurney.

  And then there is Allie. I know to feel guilt is insane, but I do, because I will be the second mother to abandon her. She spends hours in bed with me, holding me and hugging me and asking if she can do anything. No, dear, no one can do anything, Goddamnit.

  Coleman leaves for work late and comes home for long lunches, which he usually eats at my bedside. In the evening we watch the news together, although more often than not I drift off before the first commercial. World news doesn’t engage me much now, for obvious reasons. The news in my world revolves around graduations and weddings and grandchildren, and I won’t be here for any of it.

  Toward the very end—I sensed it coming—I gave him a letter I’d written to Allie, with explicit instructions to deliver it on an exceptional occasion; admission to college, engagement, wedding—the choice will of necessity be his. But special, I insisted. He took the letter with tears in his eyes, and we had a good cry over what was and might have been. He kept telling me he can’t do it without me, but I know he can. I’ve always known him better than he knows himself. And now I am tired and need to rest.