The Help (24 page)

“That’s fine,” he’ll say. “You fine?”

“I’m fine,” I say.

“Fine, then.” Before I leave, the fat receptionist hands me my ten-dollar check and that’s pretty much it for my Miss Myrna job.

The kitchen is hot, but I have to get out of my room, where all I do is worry because no other maids have agreed to work with us. Plus, I have to smoke in here because it’s about the only room in the house without a ceiling fan to blow ashes everywhere. When I was ten, Daddy tried to install one in the tin kitchen ceiling without asking Constantine. She’d pointed to it like he’d parked the Ford on the ceiling.

“It’s for you, Constantine, so you don’t get so hot being up in the kitchen all the time.”

“I ain’t working in no kitchen with no ceiling fan, Mister Carlton.”

“Sure you will. I’m just hooking up the current to it now.”

Daddy climbed down the ladder. Constantine filled a pot with water. “Go head,” she sighed. “Turn it on then.”

Daddy flipped the switch. In the seconds it took to really get going, cake flour blew up from the mixing bowl and swirled around the room, recipes flapped off the counter and caught fire on the stovetop. Constantine snatched the burning roll of parchment paper, quickly dipped it in the bucket of water. There’s still a hole where the ceiling fan hung for ten minutes.

In the newspaper, I see State Senator Whitworth pointing to an empty lot of land where they plan to build a new city coliseum. I turn the page. I hate being reminded of my date with Stuart Whitworth.

Pascagoula pads into the kitchen. I watch as she cuts out biscuits with a shot glass that’s never shot a thing but short dough. Behind me, the kitchen windows are propped open with Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogues. Pictures of two-dollar hand mixers and mail-order toys flutter in a breeze, swollen and puckered from a decade of rain.

Maybe I should just ask Pascagoula. Maybe Mother won’t find out.
But who am I kidding? Mother watches her every move and Pascagoula seems afraid of me anyway, like I might tell on her if she does something wrong. It could take years to break through that fear. My best sense tells me, leave Pascagoula out of this.

The phone rings like a fire alarm. Pascagoula clangs her spoon on the bowl and I grab the receiver before she can.

“Minny gone help us,” Aibileen whispers.

I slip into the pantry and sit on my flour can. I can’t speak for about five seconds. “When? When can she start?”

“Next Thursday. But she got some . . . requirements.”

“What are they?”

Aibileen pauses a moment. “She say she don’t want your Cadillac anywhere this side a the Woodrow Wilson bridge.”

“Alright,” I say. “I guess I could... drive the truck in.”

“And she say . . . she say you can’t set on the same side a the room as her. She want a be able to see you square on at all times.”

“I’ll . . . sit wherever she wants me to.”

Aibileen’s voice softens. “She just don’t know you, is all. Plus she ain’t got a real good history with white ladies.”

“Whatever I have to do, I’ll do it.”

I walk out of the pantry beaming, hang the phone up on the wall. Pascagoula is watching me, the shot glass in one hand, a raw biscuit in the other. She looks down quickly and goes back to her work.

 

 

 

TWO DAYS LATER, I tell Mother I’m going to pick up a new copy of the King James Bible since I’ve worn mine so thin and all. I also tell her I feel guilty driving the Cadillac what with all those poor starving babies in Africa and I’ve decided to take the old truck today. She narrows her eyes at me from her porch rocker. “Where exactly do you plan on buying this new Bible?”

I blink. “The . . . they ordered it for me. At the Canton church.”

She nods, watches me the entire time it takes to start the old truck.

I drive to Farish Street with a lawn mower in the back and a rusted-out floorboard. Under my feet, I can see flashes of pavement whiz by. But at least I’m not pulling a tractor.

Aibileen opens the door and I come in. In the back corner of the living room, Minny stands with her arms crossed over her huge bosom. I’ve met her the few times Hilly allowed Missus Walters to host bridge club. Minny and Aibileen are both still in their white uniforms.

“Hello,” I say from my side of the room. “Good to see you again.”

“Miss Skeeter.” Minny nods. She settles in a wooden chair Aibileen has brought out from the kitchen, and the frame creaks. I sit on the far end of the sofa. Aibileen sits on the other end of the sofa, between us.

I clear my throat, produce a nervous smile. Minny doesn’t smile back. She is fat and short and strong. Her skin is blacker than Aibileen’s by ten shades, and shiny and taut, like a pair of new patent shoes.

“I already told Minny how we doing the stories,” Aibileen says to me. “You helping me write mine. And hers she gone tell you, while you write it down.”

“And Minny, everything you say here is in confidence,” I say. “You’ll get to read everything we—”

“What makes you think colored people need your help?” Minny stands up, chair scraping. “Why you even care about this? You
white
.”

I look at Aibileen. I’ve never had a colored person speak to me this way.

“We all working for the same thing here, Minny,” Aibileen says. “We just talking.”

“And what thing is that?” Minny says to me. “Maybe you just want me to tell you all this stuff so I get in trouble.” Minny points to the window. “Medgar Evers, the NAACP officer who live five minutes away, they blew up his carport last night. For
talking
.”

My face is burning red. I speak slowly. “We want to show your perspective . . . so people might understand what it’s like from your side. We—we hope it might change some things around here.”

“What you think you gone change with this? What law you want to reform so it say you got to be nice to your maid?”

“Now hold on,” I say, “I’m not trying to change any laws here. I’m just talking about attitudes and—”

“You know what’ll happen if people catch us? Forget the time I accidentally use the wrong changing room down at McRae’s women’s wear, I’d have
guns
pointing at my house.”

There’s a still, tight moment in the room with just the sound of the brown Timex clock ticking on the shelf.

“You don’t have to do this, Minny,” Aibileen says. “It’s alright if you want a change your mind.”

Slowly, warily, Minny settles again in her chair. “I do it. I just want a make sure she understand, this ain’t no
game
we playing here.”

I glance at Aibileen. She nods at me. I take a deep breath. My hands are shaking.

I start with the background questions and somehow we back our way into talking about Minny’s work. She looks at Aibileen as she talks, like she’s trying to forget I’m even in the room. I record everything she says, my pencil scratching as fast as I can move it. We thought it might be less formal than using the typewriter.

“Then they’s one job where I work late ever night. And you know what happened?”

“What’s . . . that?” I ask, even though she’s looking at Aibileen.

“
Oh, Minny,
” she cat-calls, “
you the best help we ever had. Big Minny, we gone keep you on forever.
Then one day she say she gone give me a week a paid vacation. I ain’t had no vacation, paid or unpaid, in my entire life. And when I pull up a week later to go back to work, they gone. Moved to Mobile. She tell somebody she scared I’d find new work before she move. Miss Lazy Fingers couldn’t go a day without having a maid waiting on her.”

She suddenly stands up, throws her bag on her arm. “I got to go. You giving me the heart palpitations talking bout this.” And out she goes, slamming the door behind her.

I look up, wipe the sweat off my temple.

“And that was a good mood,” Aibileen says.

chapter 13

F
OR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS, the three of us arrange ourselves in the same seats in Aibileen’s small, warm living room. Minny storms in mad, quiets down as she tells Aibileen her story, then rushes out in a rage as fast as she came in. I write down as much as I can.

When Minny lapses into news about Miss Celia—“She sneaking upstairs, think I don’t see her, but I know, that crazy lady up to something”—she always stops herself, the way Aibileen does when she speaks of Constantine. “That ain’t part a my story. You leave Miss Celia out a this.” She watches me until my writing stops.

Besides her furiousness at white people, Minny likes to talk about food. “Let’s see, I put the green beans in first, then I go on and get the pork chops going cause, mmm-mmm, I like my chops hot out the pan, you know.”

One day, while she’s saying, “. . . got a white baby on one arm, green beans in the pot—” she stops. Cocks her jaw at me. Taps her foot.

“Half this stuff don’t have nothing to do with colored rights. Ain’t but day-to-day business.” She eyes me up and down. “Look to me like you just writing
life
.”

I stop my pencil. She’s right. I realize that’s just what I wanted to do. I tell her, “I hope so.” She gets up and says she’s got more important things to worry about than what I’m hoping for.

THE NEXT EVENING, I’m working upstairs in my room, banging the keys on my Corona. Suddenly I hear Mother hit the stairs running. In two seconds she’s made it in my room. “Eugenia!” she whispers.

I stand so fast my chair teeters, trying to guard the contents of my typewriter. “Yes ma’am?”

“Now don’t panic but there is a man—a very
tall
man—downstairs to see you.”

“Who?”

“He says his name is Stuart
Whit
worth.”

“What?”

“He said y’all spent an evening together awhile back but how can that be, I didn’t know anything—”

“Christ.”

“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, Eugenia Phelan. Just put some lipstick on.”

“Believe me, Mama,” I say, putting on lipstick anyway. “Jesus wouldn’t like him either.”

I brush my hair because I know it’s awful. I even wash the typewriter ink and correcting fluid off my hands and elbows. But I won’t change clothes, not for him.

Mother gives me a quick up and down in my dungarees and Daddy’s old button-up white shirt. “Is he a Greenwood Whitworth or a Natchez?”

“He’s the state senator’s son.”

Mother’s jaw drops so far it hits her string of pearls. I go down the stairs, past the assembly of our childhood portraits. Pictures of Carlton line the wall, taken up until about the day before yesterday. Pictures of me stop when I was twelve. “Mother, give us some privacy.” I watch as she slowly drags herself back to her room, glancing over her shoulder before she disappears.

I walk out onto the porch, and there he is. Three months after our date, there is Stuart Whitworth himself, standing on my front porch in khaki pants and a blue coat and a red tie like he’s ready for Sunday dinner.

Asshole.

“What brings you here?” I ask. I don’t smile though. I’m not smiling at him.

“I just . . . I wanted to drop by.”

“Well. Can I get you a drink?” I ask. “Or should I just get you the entire bottle of Old Kentucky?”

He frowns. His nose and forehead are pink, like he’s been working in the sun. “Look, I know it was . . . a long while back, but I came out here to say I’m sorry.”

“Who sent you—Hilly? William?” There are eight empty rocking chairs on my porch. I don’t ask him to sit in any of them.

He looks off at the west cotton field where the sun is dipping into the dirt. He shoves his hands down in his front pockets like a twelve-year-old boy. “I know I was... rude that night, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot and . . .”

I laugh then. I’m just so embarrassed that he would come out here and have me relive it.

“Now look,” he says, “I told Hilly ten times I wasn’t ready to go out on any date. I wasn’t even close to being ready . . .”

I grit my teeth. I can’t
believe
I feel the heat of tears; the date was months ago. But I remember how secondhand I’d felt that night, how ridiculously fixed up I’d gotten for him. “Then why’d you even show up?”

“I don’t know.” He shakes his head. “You know how Hilly can be.”

I stand there waiting for whatever it is he’s here for. He runs a hand through his light brown hair. It is almost wiry it’s so thick. He looks tired.

I look away because he’s cute in an overgrown boy kind of way and it’s not something I want to be thinking right now. I want him to leave—I don’t want to feel this awful feeling again, yet I hear myself saying, “What do you mean, not ready?”

“Just not ready. Not after what happened.”

I stare at him. “You want me to guess?”

“Me and Patricia van Devender. We got engaged last year and then . . . I thought you knew.”

He sinks down in a rocking chair. I don’t sit next to him. But I don’t tell him to leave either.

“What, she ran off with someone else?”

“Shoot.” He drops his head down into his hands, mumbles, “That’d be a goddamn Mardi Gras party compared to what happened.”

I don’t let myself say to him what I’d like to, that he probably deserved whatever she did, but he’s just too pathetic-looking. Now that all his good ole boy, tough bourbon talk has evaporated, I wonder if he’s this pathetic all the time.

“We’d been dating since we were fifteen. You know how it is, when you’ve been steady with somebody that long.”

And I don’t know why I admit this, except that I simply have nothing to lose. “Actually, I wouldn’t know,” I say. “I’ve never dated anybody.”

He looks up at me, kind of laughs. “Well, that must be it, then.”

“Be what?” I steel myself, recalling fertilizer and tractor references.

“You’re . . . different. I’ve never met anybody that said exactly what they were thinking. Not a woman, anyway.”