The Help, Page 7

  juice running down my hand and me nearabout drunk on the butter smel , I am lost in a peach-peeling reverie. I don’t even notice the blue truck pul

  in.

  The man’s made it halfway up the walk by the time I look up. I catch a sliver of a white shirt, the variety of which I’m used to ironing every day,

  and the leg of a pair of khaki pants like I hang up in Mister Johnny’s closet. I choke on a yelp. My knife clatters in the sink.

  “Miss Celia!” I dash into her bedroom. “Mister Johnny home!”

  Miss Celia jumps out of bed faster than I’ve seen her move before. I turn around in an idiot circle. Where am I going? Which way do I go?

  What happened to my getaway plan? And then I snap into decision—the guest bathroom!

  I slip in and keep the door cracked. I crouch up on the toilet seat so he can’t see my feet under the door. It’s dark in here and hot. I feel like

  my head’s on fire. Sweat drips off my chin and splats on the floor. I feel sick by the thick smel of gardenia soaps by the sink.

  I hear footsteps. I hold my breath.

  The footsteps stop. My heart is thumping like a cat in a clothes dryer. What if Miss Celia pretends she doesn’t know me so she won’t get in

  trouble? Acts like I’m a burglar? Oh, I hate her! I hate that stupid woman!

  I listen, but al I can hear is my own panting. The thud-thud in my chest. My ankles hurt and creak, holding up my body like this.

  My eyes grow sharper in the dark. After a minute, I see myself in the mirror over the sink. Crouched like a fool on top of a white lady’s toilet.

  Look at me. Look what it’s come to for Minny Jackson to make a damn living.

  MISS SKEETER

  CHAPTER 5

  I DRIVE MY MAMA’S CADILLAC fast on the gravel road, headed home. Patsy Cline can’t even be heard on the radio anymore, for al the rocks banging the side of the car. Mother would be furious, but I just drive faster. I can’t stop thinking about what Hil y said to me today at bridge club.

  Hil y and Elizabeth and I have been best friends since Power Elementary. My favorite photograph is of the three of us sitting in the footbal

  stands in junior high, al jammed together, shoulder to shoulder. What makes the picture, though, is that the stands are completely empty around us.

  We sat close because we were close.

  At Ole Miss, Hil y and I roomed together for two years before she left to get married and I stayed on to graduate. I rol ed thirteen curlers in her

  hair every night at the Chi Omega house. But today, she threatened to throw me out of the League. Not that I care so much about the League, but I

  was hurt by how easily my friend would be wil ing to cast me aside.

  I turn up the lane that leads to Longleaf, my family’s cotton plantation. The gravel quiets to smooth, yel ow dust and I slow down before

  Mother sees how fast I’m driving. I pul up to the house and get out. Mother is rocking on the front porch.

  “Come sit, darling,” she says, waving me toward a rocking chair beside her. “Pascagoula’s just waxed the floors. Let them dry awhile.”

  “Alright, Mama.” I kiss her powdery cheek. But I don’t sit. I lean on the porch railing, look out on the three mossy oak trees in the front yard.

  Even though it’s only five minutes outside of town, most people consider this the country out here. Surrounding our yard lie ten thousand acres of

  Daddy’s cotton fields, the plants green and strong, tal as my waist. A few colored men sit under a distant shed, staring into the heat. Everyone is

  waiting for the same thing, for the cotton bol s to open.

  I think about how things are different between Hil y and me, since I came home from school. But who is the different person, her or me?

  “Did I tel you?” Mother says. “Fanny Peatrow got engaged.”

  “Good for Fanny.”

  “Not even a month after she got that tel er job at the Farmer’s Bank.”

  “That’s great, Mother.”

  “I know,” she says, and I turn to see one of those lightbulb-popping looks of hers. “Why don’t you go down to the bank and apply for a tel er

  job?”

  “I don’t want to be a bank tel er, Mama.”

  Mother sighs, narrows her eyes at the spaniel, Shelby, licking his nether parts. I eye the front door, tempted to ruin the clean floors anyway.

  We’ve had this conversation so many times.

  “Four years my daughter goes off to col ege and what does she come home with?” she asks.

  “A diploma?”

  “A pretty piece of paper,” Mother says.

  “I told you. I didn’t meet anybody I wanted to marry,” I say.

  Mother rises from her chair, comes close so I’l look her in her smooth, pretty face. She’s wearing a navy blue dress, narrow along her slim

  bones. As usual her lipstick is just so, but when she steps into the bright afternoon sun, I see dark stains, deep and dried, on the front of her clothes.

  I squint my eyes, trying to see if the stains are real y there. “Mama? Are you feeling bad?”

  “If you’d just show a little gumption, Eugenia—”

  “Your dress is al dirty on the front.”

  Mother crosses her arms. “Now, I talked to Fanny’s mother and she said Fanny was practical y swimming in opportunities once she got that

  job.”

  I drop the dress issue. I’l never be able to tel Mother I want to be a writer. She’l only turn it into yet another thing that separates me from the

  married girls. Nor can I tel her about Charles Gray, my math study partner last spring, at Ole Miss. How he’d gotten drunk senior year and kissed

  me and then squeezed my hand so hard it should’ve hurt but it didn’t, it felt wonderful the way he was holding me and looking into my eyes. And then

  he married five-foot Jenny Sprig.

  What I needed to do was find an apartment in town, the kind of building where single, plain girls lived, spinsters, secretaries, teachers. But

  the one time I had mentioned using money from my trust fund, Mother had cried—real tears. “That is not what that money’s for, Eugenia. To live in

  some rooming house with strange cooking smel s and stockings hanging out the window. And when the money runs out, what then? What wil you

  live on?” Then she’d draped a cold cloth on her head and gone to bed for the day.

  And now she’s gripping the rail, waiting to see if I’l do what fat Fanny Peatrow did to save herself. My own mother is looking at me as if I

  completely baffle her mind with my looks, my height, my hair. To say I have frizzy hair is an understatement. It is kinky, more pubic than cranial, and whitish blond, breaking off easily, like hay. My skin is fair and while some cal this creamy, it can look downright deathly when I’m serious, which is al the time. Also, there’s a slight bump of cartilage along the top of my nose. But my eyes are cornflower blue, like Mother’s. I’m told that’s my best feature.

  “It’s al about putting yourself in a man-meeting situation where you can—”

  “Mama,” I say, just wanting to end this conversation, “would it real y be so terrible if I never met a husband?”

  Mother clutches her bare arms as if made cold by the thought. “Don’t. Don’t say that, Eugenia. Why, every week I see another man in town

  over six feet and I think, If Eugenia would just try…” She presses her hand to her stomach, the very thought advancing her ulcers.

  I slip off my flats and walk down the front porch steps, while Mother cal s out for me to put my shoes back on, threatening ringworm, mosquito

  encephalitis. The inevitability of death by no shoes. Death by no husband. I shudder with the same left-behind feeling I’ve had since I graduated

  from col ege, three months ago. I’ve been dropped off in a place I do not belong anymore. Certainly not here with Mother and Daddy, maybe not

 
even with Hil y and Elizabeth.

  “…here you are twenty-three years old and I’d already had Carlton Jr. at your age…” Mother says.

  I stand under the pink crepe myrtle tree, watching Mother on the porch. The day lilies have lost their blooms. It is nearly September.

  I WAS NOT a cute baby. When I was born, my older brother, Carlton, looked at me and declared to the hospital room, “It’s not a baby, it’s a skeeter!”

  and from there the name stuck. I was long and leggy and mosquito-thin, a record-breaking twenty-five inches at Baptist Hospital. The name grew

  even more accurate with my pointy, beak-like nose when I was a child. Mother’s spent my entire life trying to convince people to cal me by my given

  name, Eugenia.

  Mrs. Charlotte Boudreau Cantrel e Phelan does not like nicknames.

  By sixteen I wasn’t just not pretty, I was painful y tal . The kind of tal that puts a girl in the back row of class pictures with the boys. The kind of tal where your mother spends her nights taking down hems, yanking at sweater sleeves, flattening your hair for dances you hadn’t been asked to,

  final y pressing the top of your head as if she could shrink you back to the years when she had to remind you to stand up straight. By the time I was

  seventeen, Mother would rather I suffered from apoplectic diarrhea than stand up straight. She was five-foot-four and first-runner-up as Miss South

  Carolina. She decided there was only one thing to do in a case like mine.

  Mrs. Charlotte Phelan’s Guide to Husband-Hunting, Rule Number One: a pretty, petite girl should accentuate with makeup and good

  posture. A tal plain one, with a trust fund.

  I was five-foot-eleven but I had twenty-five thousand cotton dol ars in my name and if the beauty in that was not apparent then, by God, he

  wasn’t smart enough to be in the family anyway.

  MY CHILDHOOD BEDROOM is the top floor of my parents’ house. It has white-frosting chair rails and pink cherubs in the molding. It’s papered in mint green rosebuds. It is actual y the attic with long, sloping wal s, and I cannot stand straight in many places. The box bay window makes the room look round.

  After Mother berates me about finding a husband every other day, I have to sleep in a wedding cake.

  And yet, it is my sanctuary. The heat swel s and gathers like a hot-air bal oon up here, not exactly welcoming others. The stairs are narrow

  and difficult for parents to climb. Our previous maid, Constantine, used to stare those forward-sloping stairs down every day, like it was a battle

  between them. That was the only part I didn’t like about having the top floor of the house, that it separated me from my Constantine.

  Three days after my conversation with Mother on the porch, I spread out the help-wanted ads from the Jackson Journal on my desk. Al

  morning, Mother’s been fol owing me around with a new hair-straightening thing while Daddy’s been on the front porch growling and goddamning

  the cotton fields because they’re melting like summer snow. Besides bol weevils, rain is just about the worst thing that can happen at harvest time.

  It’s hardly September but the fal drenches have already begun.

  My red pen in hand, I scan the squat, single column under HELP WANTED: FEMALE.

  Kennington’s Dept. Str. seeks salesgirls w/poise, manners & a smile!

  Trim, young secretary wanted. Typing not nec. Call Mr. Sanders. Jesus, if he doesn’t want her to type, what does he want her to do?

  Jr. Stenographer wanted, Percy & Gray, LP, $1.25/hr. This is new. I draw a circle around it.

  No one could argue that I hadn’t worked hard at Ole Miss. While my friends were out drinking rum and Cokes at Phi Delta Theta parties and

  pinning on mum corsages, I sat in the study parlor and wrote for hours—mostly term papers but also short stories, bad poetry, episodes of Dr.

  Kildare, Pal Mal jingles, letters of complaint, ransom notes, love letters to boys I’d seen in class but hadn’t had the nerve to speak to, al of which I never mailed. Sure, I dreamed of having footbal dates, but my real dream was that one day I would write something that people would actual y read.

  Fourth term of my senior year, I only applied to one job, but it was a good one, being six hundred miles away from Mississippi. Piling twenty-

  two dimes in the Oxford Mart pay phone, I’d inquired about an editor position at the Harper & Row publishing house on 33rd Street in Manhattan. I’d seen the ad in The New York Times down at the Ole Miss library and mailed them my résumé that very day. On a sprig of hope, I even cal ed about an apartment listing on East 85th Street, a one-bedroom with hot plate for forty-five dol ars a month. Delta Airlines told me a one-way ticket to

  Idlewild Airport would cost seventy-three dol ars. I didn’t have the sense to apply for more than one job at a time and I never even heard back from

  them.

  My eyes drift down to HELP WANTED: MALE. There are at least four columns fil ed with bank managers, accountants, loan officers, cotton col ate

  operators. On this side of the page, Percy & Gray, LP, is offering Jr. Stenographers fifty cents more an hour.

  “MISS SKEETER, you got a phone cal ,” I hear Pascagoula hol er at the bottom of the stairs.

  I go downstairs to the only phone in the house. Pascagoula holds the phone out to me. She is as tiny as a child, not even five feet tal , and

  black as night. Her hair is curly around her head and her white uniform dress has been tailored to fit her short arms and legs.

  “Miss Hil y on the phone for you,” she says, and hands it to me with a wet hand.

  I sit at the white iron table. The kitchen is large and square and hot.

  Black-and-white linoleum tiles are cracked in places, worn thin in front of the sink. The new silver dishwashing machine sits in the middle of

  the room, attached to a hose stretched from the faucet.

  “He’s coming next weekend,” Hil y says. “On Saturday night. You free?”

  “Gee, let me check my calendar,” I say. Al traces of our bridge-club argument are gone from Hil y’s voice. I’m suspicious but relieved.

  “I can’t believe this is finally going to happen,” Hil y says, because she’s been trying to set me up for months with her husband’s cousin.

  She’s intent on it even though he’s much too good-looking for me, not to mention a state senator’s son.

  “Don’t you think we should…meet first?” I ask. “I mean, before we go out on an actual date?”

  “Don’t be nervous. Wil iam and I wil be right next to you the whole time.”

  I sigh. The date’s been canceled twice already. I can only hope it’l be put off again. And yet I’m flattered that Hil y has so much faith that

  someone like him would be interested in someone like me.

  “Oh, and I need you to come on by and pick up these notes,” Hil y says. “I want my initiative in the next newsletter, a ful page next to the

  photo ops.”

  I pause. “The bathroom thing?” Even though it was only a few days ago that she’d brought this up at bridge club, I’d hoped it was forgotten.

  “It’s cal ed the Home Help Sanitation Initiative— William Junior you get down or I will snatch you baldheaded Yule May get in here—and I

  want it in this week.”

  I am editor of the League newsletter. But Hil y is president. And she’s trying to tel me what to print.

  “I’l see. I don’t know if there’s room,” I lie.

  From the sink, Pascagoula sneaks a look at me, as if she can hear what Hil y’s saying. I look over at Constantine’s bathroom, now

  Pascagoula’s. It’s off the kitchen. The door’s half open and I can see a tiny room with a toilet, a pul string flusher at the top, a bulb with a yel owing plastic shade. The smal corner sink hardly holds a glass of water. I’ve never once been inside. When we were kids, Mother told us she’d spank us

  i
f we went in Constantine’s bathroom. I miss Constantine more than anything I’ve ever missed in my life.

  “Then make room,” Hil y says, “because this is pretty darn important.”

  CONSTANTINE LIVED ABOUT A MILE from our house, in a smal Negro neighborhood cal ed Hotstack, named after the tar plant that used to operate back there.

  The road to Hotstack runs along the north side of our farm, and for as long as I can remember, colored kids have walked and played along that mile

  stretch, kicking at the red dust, making their way toward the big County Road 49 to catch a ride.

  I used to walk that hot mile myself, when I was a girl. If I begged and practiced my catechism, Mother would sometimes let me go home with

  Constantine on Friday afternoons. After twenty minutes of walking slow, we’d pass the colored five-and-dime store, then a grocer with hens laying in

  back, and al along the way, dozens of shacky-looking roadside houses with tin roofs and slanting porches, along with a yel ow one that everybody

  said sold whiskey from the back door. It was a thril to be in such a different world and I’d feel a prickly awareness of how good my shoes were, how

  clean my white pinafore dress that Constantine had ironed for me. The closer we got to Constantine’s house, the more she’d smile.

  “Hi-do, Carl Bird,” Constantine’d hol er at the root-sel ing man sitting in his rocking chair on the back of his pickup. Bags of sassafras and

  licorice root and birdeye vine sat open for bargaining, and by the time we poked around those a minute, Constantine’s whole body’d be rambling

  and loose in the joints. Constantine wasn’t just tal , she was stout. She was also wide in the hips and her knees gave her trouble al the time. At the stump on her corner, she would stick a pinch of Happy Days snuff in her lip and spit juice straight as an arrow. She’d let me look at the black

  powder in its round tin, but say, “Don’t tel your mama, now.”

  There were always dogs, hol ow-stomached and mangy, laid out in the road. From a porch a young colored woman named Cat-Bite would

  hol er, “Miss Skeeter! Tel your daddy hey for me. Tel him I’s doing fine.” My own daddy gave her that name years ago. Drove by and saw a rabid

  cat attacking a little colored girl. “That cat near about ate her up,” Daddy’d told me afterward. He’d kil ed the cat, carried the girl to the doctor, and set her up for the twenty-one days of rabies shots.

  A little farther on, we’d get to Constantine’s house. It had three rooms and no rugs and I’d look at the single photograph she had, of a white

  girl she told me she looked after for twenty years over in Port Gibson. I was pretty sure I knew everything about Constantine—she had one sister

  and grew up on a sharecropping farm in Corinth, Mississippi. Both her parents were dead. She didn’t eat pork as a rule and wore a size sixteen

  dress and a size ten ladies’ shoe. But I used to stare at the toothy smile of that child in the picture, a little jealous, wondering why she didn’t have a picture of me up too.

  Sometimes two girls from next door would come over to play with me, named Mary Nel and Mary Roan. They were so black I couldn’t tel

  them apart and cal ed them both just Mary.

  “Be nice to the little colored girls when you’re down there,” Mother said to me one time and I remember looking at her funny, saying, “Why

  wouldn’t I be?” But Mother never explained.