THAT AFTERNOON 25 page

“But . . . is she? Could she be improving?”

“I’ve seen this before, Eugenia. Sometimes people get a burst of strength. It’s a gift from God, I guess. So they can go on and finish their business. But that’s all it is, honey. Don’t expect anything more.”

“But did you see her color? She looks so much better and she’s keeping the food—”

He shakes his head. “Just try and keep her comfortable.”

On THE FIRST FRIDAY OF 1964, I can’t wait any longer. I stretch the phone into the pantry. Mother is asleep, after having eaten a second bowl of oatmeal. Her door is open so I can hear her, in case she calls.

“Elaine Stein’s office.”

“Hello, it’s Eugenia Phelan, calling long-distance. Is she available?”

“I’m sorry, Miss Phelan, but Missus Stein isn’t taking any calls regarding her manuscript selection.”

“Oh. But . . . can you at least tell me if she received it? I mailed it just before the deadline and—”

“One moment please.”

The phone goes silent, and a minute or so later she comes back.

“I can confirm that we did receive your package at some point during the holidays. Someone from our office will notify you after Missus Stein has made her decision. Thank you for calling.”

I hear the line on the other end click.

A FEW NIGHTS LATER, after a riveting afternoon answering Miss Myrna letters, Stuart and I sit in the relaxing room. I’m glad to see him and to eradicate, for a while, the deadly silence of the house. We sit quietly, watching television. A Tareyton ad comes on, the one where the girl smoking the cigarette has a black eye—Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch!

Stuart and I have been seeing each other once a week now. We went to a movie after Christmas and once to dinner in town, but usually he comes out to the house because I don’t want to leave Mother. He is hesitant around me, kind of respectfully shy. There is a patience in his eyes that replaces my own panic that I felt with him before. We don’t talk about anything serious. He tells me stories about the summer, during college, he spent working on the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. The showers were saltwater. The ocean was crystal clear blue to the bottom. The other men were doing this brutal work to feed their families while Stuart, a rich kid with rich parents, had college to go back to. It was the first time, he said, he’d really had to work hard.

“I’m glad I drilled on the rig back then. I couldn’t go off and do it now,” he’d said, like it was ages ago and not five years back. He seems older than I remember.

“Why couldn’t you do it now?” I asked, because I am looking for a future for myself. I like to hear about the possibilities of others.

He furrowed his brow at me. “Because I couldn’t leave you.”

I tucked this away, afraid to admit how good it was to hear it.

The commercial is over and we watch the news report. There is a skirmish in Vietnam. The reporter seems to thinks it’ll be solved without much fuss.

“Listen,” Stuart says after a while of silence between us. “I didn’t want to bring this up before but . . . I know what people are saying in town. About you. And I don’t care. I just want you to know that.”

My first thought is the book. He’s heard something. My entire body goes tense. “What did you hear?”

“You know. About that trick you played on Hilly.”

I relax some, but not completely. I’ve never talked to anyone about this except Hilly herself. I wonder if Hilly ever called him like she’d threatened.

“And I could see how people would take it, think you’re some kind of crazy liberal, involved in all that mess.”

I study my hands, still wary of what he might have heard, and a little irritated too. “How do you know,” I ask, “what I’m involved in?”

“Because I know you, Skeeter,” he says softly. “You’re too smart to get mixed up in anything like that. And I told them, too.”

I nod, try to smile. Despite what he thinks he “knows” about me, I can’t help but appreciate that someone out there cares enough to stand up for me.

“We don’t have to talk about this again,” he says. “I just wanted you to know. That’s all.”

On SATURDAY EVENING, I say good night to Mother. I have a long coat on so she can’t see my outfit. I keep the lights off so she can’t comment on my hair. Very little has changed with her health. She doesn’t seem to be getting any worse—the vomiting is still at bay—but her skin is grayish white. Her hair has started to fall out. I hold her hands, brush her cheek.

“Daddy, you’ll call the restaurant if you need me?”

“I will, Skeeter. Go have some fun.”

I get in Stuart’s car and he takes me to the Robert E. Lee for dinner. The room is gaudy with gowns, red roses, silver service clinking. There is excitement in the air, the feeling that things are almost back to normal since President Kennedy died; 1964 is a fresh, new year. The glances our way are abundant.

“You look . . . different,” Stuart says. I can tell he’s been holding in this comment all night, and he seems more confused than impressed. “That dress, it’s so . . . short.”

I nod and push my hair back. The way he used to do.

This morning, I told Mother I was going shopping. She looked so tired though, I quickly changed my mind. “Maybe I shouldn’t go.”

But I’d already said it. Mother had me fetch the big checkbook. When I came back she tore out a blank check and then handed me a hundred-dollar bill she had folded in the side of her wallet. Just the word shopping seemed to’ve made her feel better.

“Don’t be frugal, now. And no slacks. Make sure Miss LaVole helps you.” She rested her head back in her pillows. “She knows how young girls should dress.”

But I couldn’t stand the thought of Miss LaVole’s wrinkled hands on my body, smelling of coffee and mothballs. I drove right through downtown and got on Highway 51 and headed for New Orleans. I drove through the guilt of leaving Mother for so long, knowing that Doctor Neal was coming by that afternoon and Daddy would be home all day with her.

Three hours later, I walked into Maison Blanche’s department store on Canal Street. I’d been there umpteen times with Mother and twice with Elizabeth and Hilly, but I was mesmerized by the vast white marble floors, the miles of hats and gloves and powdered ladies looking so happy, so healthy. Before I could ask for help, a thin man said, “Come with me, I have it all upstairs,” and whisked me in the elevator to the third floor, to a room called MODERN WOMEN’S WEAR.

“What is all this?” I asked. There were dozens of women and rock-and-roll playing and champagne glasses and bright glittering lights.

“Emilio Pucci, darling. Finally!” He stepped back from me and said, “Aren’t you here for the preview? You do have an invitation, don’t you?”

“Um, somewhere,” I said, but he lost interest as I faked through my handbag.

All around me, clothes looked like they’d sprouted roots and bloomed on their hangers. I thought of Miss LaVole and laughed. No easter-egg suits here. Flowers! Big bright stripes! And hemlines that showed several inches of thigh. It was electric and gorgeous and dizzying. This Emilio Pucci character must stick his finger in a socket every morning.

I bought with my blank check enough clothes to fill the back seat of the Cadillac. Then on Magazine Street, I paid forty-five dollars to have my hair lightened and trimmed and ironed straight. It had grown longer over the winter and was the color of dirty dishwater. By four o’clock I was driving back over the Lake Pontchartrain bridge with the radio playing a band called the Rolling Stones and the wind blowing through my satiny, straight hair, and I thought, Tonight, I’ll strip off all this armor and let it be as it was before with Stuart.

STUART and I eat our Chateaubriand, smiling, talking. He looks off at the other tables, commenting on people he knows. But no one gets up to tell us hello.

“Here’s to new beginnings,” Stuart says and raises his bourbon.

I nod, sort of wanting to tell him that all beginnings are new. Instead, I smile and toast with my second glass of wine. I’ve never really liked alcohol, until today.

After dinner, we walk out into the lobby and see Senator and Missus Whitworth at a table, having drinks. People are around them drinking and talking. They are home for the weekend, Stuart told me earlier, their first since they moved to Washington.

“Stuart, there are your parents. Should we go say hello?”

But Stuart steers me toward the door, practically pushes me outside.

“I don’t want Mother to see you in that short dress,” he says. “I mean, believe me, it looks great on you, but . . .” He looks down at the hemline. “Maybe that wasn’t the best choice for tonight.” On the ride home, I think of Elizabeth, in her curlers, afraid the bridge club would see me. Why is it that someone always seems to be ashamed of me?

By the time we make it back to Longleaf, it’s eleven o’clock. I smooth my dress, thinking Stuart is right. It is too short. The lights in my parents’ bedroom are off, so we sit on the sofa.

I rub my eyes and yawn. When I open them, he’s holding a ring between his fingers.

“Oh . . . Jesus.”

“I was going to do it at the restaurant but . . .” He grins. “Here is better.”

I touch the ring. It is cold and gorgeous. Three rubies are set on both sides of the diamond. I look up at him, feeling very hot all of a sudden. I pull my sweater off my shoulders. I am smiling and about to cry at the same time.

“I have to tell you something, Stuart,” I blurt out. “Do you promise you won’t tell anyone?”

He stares at me and laughs. “Hang on, did you say yes?”

“Yes, but . . .” I have to know something first. “Can I just have your word?”

He sighs, looks disappointed that I’m ruining his moment. “Sure, you have my word.”

I am in shock from his proposal but I do my best to explain. Looking into his eyes, I spread out the facts and what details I can safely share about the book and what I’ve been doing over the past year. I leave out everyone’s name and I pause at the implication of this, knowing it’s not good. Even though he is asking to be my husband, I don’t know him enough to trust him completely.

“This is what you’ve been writing about for the past twelve months? Not . . . Jesus Christ?”

“No, Stuart. Not . . . Jesus.”

When I tell him that Hilly found the Jim Crow laws in my satchel, his chin drops and I can see that I’ve confirmed something Hilly already told him about me—something he had the naïve trust not to believe.

“The talk... in town. I told them they were dead wrong. But they were . . . right.”

When I tell him about the colored maids filing past me after the prayer meeting, I feel a swell of pride over what we’ve done. He looks down into his empty bourbon glass.

Then I tell him that the manuscript has been sent to New York. That if they decide to publish it, it would come out in, my guess is, eight months, maybe sooner. Right around the time, I think to myself, an engagement would turn into a wedding.

“It’s been written anonymously,” I say, “but with Hilly around, there’s still a good chance people will know it was me.”

But he’s not nodding his head or pushing my hair behind my ear and his grandmother’s ring is sitting on Mother’s velvet sofa like some ridiculous metaphor. We are both silent. His eyes don’t even meet mine. They stay a steady two inches to the right of my face.

After a minute, he says, “I just . . . I don’t understand why you would do this. Why do you even . . . care about this, Skeeter?”

I bristle, look down at the ring, so sharp and shiny.

“I didn’t . . . mean it like that,” he starts again. “What I mean is, things are fine around here. Why would you want to go stirring up trouble?”

I can tell, in his voice, he sincerely wants an answer from me. But how to explain it? He is a good man, Stuart. As much as I know that what I’ve done is right, I can still understand his confusion and doubt.

“I’m not making trouble, Stuart. The trouble is already here.”

But clearly, this isn’t the answer he is looking for. “I don’t know you.”

I look down, remembering that I’d thought this same thing only moments ago. “I guess we’ll have the rest of our lives to fix that,” I say, trying to smile.

“I don’t . . . think I can marry somebody I don’t know.”

I suck in a breath. My mouth opens but I can’t say anything for a little while.

“I had to tell you,” I say, more to myself than him. “You needed to know.”

He studies me for a few moments. “You have my word. I won’t tell anyone,” he says, and I believe him. He may be many things, Stuart, but he’s not a liar.

He stands up. He gives me one last, lost look. And then he picks up the ring and walks out.

THAT NIGHT, after Stuart has left, I wander from room to room, dry-mouthed, cold. Cold is what I’d prayed for when Stuart left me the first time. Cold is what I got.

At midnight, I hear Mother’s voice calling from her bedroom.

“Eugenia? Is that you?”

I walk down the hall. The door is half open and Mother is sitting up in her starchy white nightgown. Her hair is down around her shoulders. I am struck by how beautiful she looks. The back porch light is on, casting a white halo around her entire body. She smiles and her new dentures are still in, the ones Dr. Simon cast for her when her teeth starting eroding from the stomach acid. Her smile is whiter, even, than in her teen pageant pictures.

“Mama, what can I get you? Is it bad?”

“Come here, Eugenia. I want to tell you something.”

I go to her quietly. Daddy is a long sleeping lump, his back to her. And I think, I could tell her a better version of tonight. We all know there’s very little time. I could make her happy in her last days, pretend that the wedding is going to happen.

“I have something to tell you, too,” I say.

“Oh? You go first.”

“Stuart proposed,” I say, faking a smile. Then I panic, knowing she’ll ask to see the ring.

“I know,” she says.

“You do?”

She nods. “Of course. He came by here two weeks ago and asked Carlton and me for your hand.”

Two weeks ago? I almost laugh. Of course Mother was the first to know something so important. I’m happy she’s had so long to enjoy the news.

“And I have something to tell you,” she says. The glow around Mother is unearthly, phosphorescent. It’s from the porch light, but I wonder why I’ve never seen it before. She clasps my hand in the air with the healthy grip of a mother holding her newly engaged daughter. Daddy stirs, then sits straight up.

“What?” he gasps. “Are you sick?”

“No, Carlton. I’m fine. I told you.”

He nods numbly, closes his eyes, and is asleep before he has even lain down again.

“What’s your news, Mama?”

“I’ve had a long talk with your daddy and I have made a decision.”

“Oh God,” I sigh. I can just see her explaining it to Stuart when he asked for my hand. “Is this about the trust fund?”

“No, it’s not that,” she says and I think, Then it must be something about the wedding. I feel a shuddering sadness that Mother will not be here to plan my wedding, not only because she’ll be dead, but because there is no wedding. And yet, I also feel a horrifyingly guilty relief that I won’t have to go through this with her.

“Now I know you’ve noticed that things have been on the uptick these past few weeks,” she says. “And I know what Doctor Neal says, that it’s some kind of last strength, some nonsense ab—” She coughs and her thin body arches over like a shell. I give her a tissue and she frowns, dabs at her mouth.

“But as I said, I have made a decision.”

I nod, listening, with the same numbness as my father a moment ago.

“I have decided not to die.”

“Oh . . . Mama. God, please . . .”

“Too late,” she says, waving my hand away. “I’ve made my decision and that’s that.”

She slides her palms across each other, as if throwing the cancer away. Sitting straight and prim in her gown, the halo of light glowing around her hair, I can’t keep from rolling my eyes. How dumb of me. Of course Mother will be as obstinate about her death as she has been about every detail of her life.

THE DATE IS FRIDAY, JANUARY 18, 1964. I have on a black A-line dress. My fingernails are all bitten off. I will remember every detail of this day, I think, the way people are saying they’ll never forget what kind of sandwich they were eating, or the song on the radio, when they found out Kennedy was shot.

I walk into what has become such a familiar spot to me, the middle of Aibileen’s kitchen. It is already dark outside and the yellow bulb seems very bright. I look at Minny and she looks at me. Aibileen edges between us as if to block something.

“Harper and Row,” I say, “wants to publish it.”

Everyone is quiet. Even the flies stop buzzing.

“You kidding me,” says Minny.

“I spoke to her this afternoon.”

Aibileen lets out a whoop like I’ve never heard come out of her before. “Law, I can’t believe it!” she hollers, and then we are hugging, Aibileen and me, then Minny and Aibileen. Minny looks in my general direction.

“Sit down, y’all!” Aibileen says. “Tell me what she say? What a we do now? Law, I ain’t even got no coffee ready!”

We sit and they both stare at me, leaning forward. Aibileen’s eyes are big. I’ve been waiting at home with the news for four hours. Missus Stein told me, clearly, this is a very small deal. Keep our expectations between low and nonexistent. I feel obligated to communicate this to Aibileen so she doesn’t end up disappointed. I’ve hardly even figured out how I should feel about it myself.

“Listen, she said not to get too excited. That the number of copies they’re going to put out is going to be very, very small.”

I wait for Aibileen to frown, but she giggles. She tries to hide it with her hand.

“Probably only a few thousand copies.”

Aibileen presses her hand harder against her lips.

“Pathetic . . . Missus Stein called it.”

Aibileen’s face is turning darker. She giggles again into her knuckles. Clearly she’s not getting this.

“And she said it’s one of the smallest advances she’s ever seen . . .” I am trying to be serious but I can’t because Aibileen is clearly about to burst. Tears are coming up in her eyes.

“How . . . small?” she asks behind her hand.

“Eight hundred dollars,” I say. “Divided thirteen ways.”

Aibileen splits open in laughter. I can’t help but laugh with her. But it makes no sense. A few thousand copies and $61.50 a person?

Tears run down Aibileen’s face and finally she just lays her head on the table. “I don’t know why I’m laughing. It just seem so funny all a sudden.”

Minny rolls her eyes at us. “I knew y’all crazy. Both a you.”

I do my best to tell them the details. I hadn’t acted much better on the phone with Missus Stein. She’d sounded so matter-of-fact, almost uninterested. And what did I do? Did I remain businesslike and ask pertinent questions? Did I thank her for taking on such a risky topic? No, instead of laughing, I started blubbering into the phone, crying like a kid getting a polio shot.

“Calm down, Miss Phelan,” she’d said, “this is hardly going to be a best-seller,” but I just kept crying while she fed me the details. “We’re only offering a four-hundred-dollar advance and then another four hundred dollars when it’s finished... are you . . . listening?”

“Ye-yes ma’am.”

“And there’s definitely some editing you have to do. The Sarah section is in the best shape,” she’d said, and I tell Aibileen this through her fits and snorts.

Aibileen sniffs, wipes her eyes, smiles. We finally calm down, drinking coffee that Minny had to get up and put on for us.

“She really likes Gertrude, too,” I say to Minny. I pick up the paper and read the quote I’d written so I wouldn’t forget it. “ ‘Gertrude is every Southern white woman’s nightmare. I adore her.’ ”

For a second, Minny actually looks me in the eye. Her face softens into a childlike smile. “She say that? Bout me?”

Aibileen laughs. “It’s like she know you from five hundred miles away.”

“She said it’ll be at least six months until it comes out. Sometime in August.”

Aibileen is still smiling, completely undeterred by anything I’ve said. And honestly, I’m grateful for this. I knew she’d be excited, but I was afraid she’d be a little disappointed, too. Seeing her makes me realize, I’m not disappointed at all. I’m just happy.

We sit and talk another few minutes, drinking coffee and tea, until I look at my watch. “I told Daddy I’d be home in an hour.” Daddy is at home with Mother. I took a risk and left him Aibileen’s number just in case, telling him I was going to visit a friend named Sarah.

They both walk me to the door, which is new for Minny. I tell Aibileen I’ll call her as soon as I get Missus Stein’s notes in the mail.

“So six months from now, we’ll finally know what’s gone happen,” Minny says, “good, bad, or nothing.”

“It might be nothing,” I say, wondering if anyone will even buy the book.

“Well, I’m counting on good,” Aibileen says.

Minny crosses her arms over her chest. “I better count on bad then. Somebody got to.”

Minny doesn’t look worried about book sales. She looks worried about what will happen when the women of Jackson read what we’ve written about them.

AIBILEEN

chapter 29

THE HEAT done seeped into everything. For a week now it’s been a hundred degrees and ninety-nine percent humidity. Get any wetter, we be swimming. Can’t get my sheets to dry on the line, my front door won’t close it done swell up so much. Sho nuff couldn’t get a meringue to whip. Even my church wig starting to frizz.

This morning, I can’t even get my hose on. My legs is too swollen. I figure I just do it when I get to Miss Leefolt’s, in the air-condition. It must be record heat, cause I been tending to white folks for forty-one years and this the first time in history I ever went to work without no hose on.

But Miss Leefolt’s house be hotter than my own. “Aibileen, go on and get the tea brewed and... salad plates . . . wipe them down now . . .” She ain’t even come in the kitchen today. She in the living room and she done pull a chair next to the wall vent, so what’s left a the air-condition blowing up her slip. That’s all she got on, her full slip and her earrings. I wait on white ladies who walk right out the bedroom wearing nothing but they personality, but Miss Leefolt don’t do like that.

Ever once in a while, that air-condition motor go phheeewww. Like it just giving up. Miss Leefolt call the repairman twice now and he say he coming, but I bet he ain’t. Too hot.

“And don’t forget... that silver thingamajig—cornichon server, it’s in the . . .”

But she give up before she finish, like it’s too hot to even tell me what to do. And you know that be hot. Seem like everbody in town got the heat-crazies. Go out on the street and it feel real still, eerie, like right before a tornado hit. Or maybe it’s just me, jittery cause a the book. It’s coming out on Friday.

“You think we ought a cancel bridge club?” I ask her from the kitchen. Bridge club changed to Mondays now and the ladies gone be here in twenty minutes.

“No. Everything’s . . . already done,” she say, but I know she ain’t thinking straight.

“I’ll try to whip the cream again. Then I got to go in the garage. Get my hose on.”

“Oh don’t worry about it, Aibileen. It’s too hot for stockings.” Miss Leefolt finally get up from that wall vent, drag herself on in the kitchen, flapping a Chow-Chow Chinese Restaurant fan. “Oh God, it must be fifteen degrees hotter in the kitchen than it is in the dining room!”

“Oven a be off in a minute. Kids gone out back to play.”

Miss Leefolt look out the window at the kids playing in the sprinkler. Mae Mobley down to just her underpants, Ross—I call him Li’l Man—he in his diaper. He ain’t even a year old yet and already he walking like a big boy. He never even crawled.

“I don’t see how they can stand it out there,” Miss Leefolt say.

Mae Mobley love playing with her little brother, looking after him like she his mama. But Mae Mobley don’t get to stay home with us all day no more. My Baby Girl go to the Broadmoore Baptist Pre-School ever morning. Today be Labor Day, though, a holiday for the rest a the world, so no class today. I’m glad too. I don’t know how many days I got left with her.

“Look at them out there,” Miss Leefolt say and I come over to the window where she standing. The sprinkler be blooming up into the treetops, making them rainbows. Mae Mobley got Li’l Man by the hands and they standing under the sprinkles with they eyes closed like they being baptized.

“They are really something special,” she say, sighing, like she just now figuring this out.

“They sure is,” I say and I spec we bout shared us a moment, me and Miss Leefolt, looking out the window at the kids we both love. It makes me wonder if things done changed just a little. It is 1964 after all. Downtown, they letting Negroes set at the Woolworth counter.

I get a real heartsick feeling then, wondering if I gone too far. Cause after the book come out, if folks find out it was us, I probably never get to see these kids again. What if I don’t even get to tell Mae Mobley goodbye, and that she a fine girl, one last time? And Li’l Man? Who gone tell him the story a the Green Martian Luther King?

I already been through all this with myself, twenty times over. But today it’s just starting to feel so real. I touch the window pane like I be touching them. If she find out . . . oh, I’m gone miss these kids.

I look over and see Miss Leefolt’s eyes done wandered down to my bare legs. I think she curious, you know. I bet she ain’t never seen bare black legs up close before. But then, I see she frowning. She look up at Mae Mobley, give her that same hateful frown. Baby Girl done smeared mud and grass all across her front. Now she decorating her brother with it like he a pig in a sty and I see that old disgust Miss Leefolt got for her own daughter. Not for Li’l Man, just Mae Mobley. Saved up special for her.

“She’s ruining the yard!” Miss Leefolt say.

“I go get em. I take care—”

“And I can’t have you serving us like that, with your—your legs showing!”

“I tole you—”

“Hilly’s going to be here in five minutes and she’s messed up everything!” she screech. I guess Mae Mobley hear her through the window cause she look over at us, frozen. Smile fades. After a second, she start wiping the mud off her face real slow.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 658