I can’t look at her. “I guess . . . in the garbage pail.”
“Please, do it now.” Miss Celia buries her head in her knees like she’s ashamed.
There’s not even a
we
now. Now it’s will
you
do it. Will
you
fish my dead baby out of that toilet bowl.
And what choice do I have?
I hear a whine come out of me. The tile floor is smashing against my fat. I shift, grunt, try to think it through. I mean, I’ve done worse than this, haven’t I? Nothing comes to mind, but there has to be something.
“Please,” Miss Celia says, “I can’t . . . look at it no more.”
“Alright.” I nod, like I know what I’m doing. “I’m on take care a this thing.”
I stand up, try to get practical. I know where I’ll put it—in the white garbage pail next to the toilet. Then throw the whole thing out. But what will I use to get it out with? My hand?
I bite my lip, try to stay calm. Maybe I should just wait. Maybe . . . maybe the doctor will want to take it with him when he comes! Examine it. If I can get Miss Celia off it a few minutes, maybe I won’t have to deal with it at all.
“We look after it in a minute,” I say in that reassuring voice. “How far along you think you was?” I ease closer to the bowl, don’t dare stop talking.
“Five months? I don’t know.” Miss Celia covers her face with a washrag. “I was taking a shower and I felt it pulling down, hurting. So I set on the toilet and it slipped out. Like it wanted
out of me
.” She starts sobbing again, her shoulders jerking forward over her body.
Carefully, I lower the toilet lid down and settle back on the floor.
“Like it’d rather be dead than stand being inside me another second.”
“Now you look a here, that’s just God’s way. Something ain’t going right in your innards, nature got to do something about it. Second time, you gone catch.” But then I think about those bottles and feel a ripple of anger.
“That was . . . the second time.”
“Oh Lordy.”
“We got married cause I was pregnant,” Miss Celia says, “but it . . . it slipped out too.”
I can’t hold it in another second. “Then why in the heck are you drinking? You know you can’t hold no baby with a pint of whiskey in you.”
“Whiskey?”
Oh please. I can’t even look at her with that “what-whiskey?” look. At least the smell’s not as bad with the lid closed. When is that fool doctor coming?
“You thought I was . . .” She shakes her head. “It’s catch tonic.” She closes her eyes. “From a Choctaw over in Feliciana Parish . . .”
“Choctaw?” I blink. She is stupider than I ever imagined. “You can’t trust them Indians. Don’t you know we poisoned their corn? What if she trying to poison you?”
“Doctor Tate said it’s just molasses and water,” she cries down into her towel. “But I had to try it. I
had
to.”
Well. I’m surprised by how loose my body goes, how relieved I am by this. “There’s nothing wrong with taking your time, Miss Celia. Believe me, I got five kids.”
“But Johnny wants kids now. Oh Minny.” She shakes her head. “What’s he going to do with me?”
“He gone get over it, that’s what. He gone forget these babies cause mens is real good at that. Get to hoping for the next one.”
“He doesn’t know about this one. Or the one before.”
“You said that’s why he married you.”
“That first time, he knew.” Miss Celia lets out a big sigh. “This time’s really the . . . fourth.”
She stops crying and I don’t have any good things left to say. For a minute, we’re just two people wondering why things are the way they are.
“I kept thinking,” she whispers, “if I was real still, if I brought somebody in to do the house and the cooking, maybe I could hold on to this one.” She cries down into her towel. “I wanted this baby to look just like Johnny.”
“Mister Johnny a good-looking man. Got good hair . . .”
Miss Celia lowers the towel from her face.
I wave my hand in the air, realize what I’ve just done. “I got to get some air. Hot in here.”
“How do you know . . .?”
I look around, try to think of a lie, but finally I just sigh. “He knows. Mister Johnny came home and found me.”
“What?”
“Yes’m. He tell me not to tell you so you go right on thinking he’s proud a you. He love you so much, Miss Celia. I seen it in his face how much.”
“But . . . how long has he known?”
“A few . . . months.”
“Months? Was he—was he upset that I’d lied?”
“Heck no. He even call me up at home a few weeks later to make sure I didn’t have no plans to quit. Say he afraid he gone starve if I left.”
“Oh Minny,” she cries. “I’m sorry. I’m real sorry about everything.”
“I been in worse situations.” I’m thinking about the blue hair dye. Eating lunch in the freezing cold. And right now. There’s still the baby in the toilet that someone’s going to have to deal with.
“I don’t know what to do, Minny.”
“Doctor Tate tell you to keep trying, then I guess you keep trying.”
“He hollers at me. Says I’m wasting my time in bed.” She shakes her head. “He’s a mean, awful man.”
She presses the towel hard against her eyes. “I can’t do this anymore.” And the harder she cries, the whiter she turns.
I try to feed her a few more sips of Co-Cola but she won’t take it. She can’t hardly lift her hand to wave it away.
“I’m going to . . . be sick. I’m—”
I grab the garbage can, watch as Miss Celia vomits over it. And then I feel something wet on me and I look down and the blood’s coming so fast now, it’s leaked over to where I’m sitting. Everytime she heaves, the blood pushes out of her. I know she losing more than a person can handle.
“Sit up, Miss Celia! Get a good breath, now,” I say, but she’s slumping against me.
“Nuh-uh, you don’t want a lay down. Come on.” I push her back up but she’s gone limp and I feel tears spring up in my eyes because that damn doctor should be here by now. He should’ve sent an ambulance and in the twenty-five years I’ve been cleaning houses nobody ever tells you what to do when your white lady keels over dead on top of you.
“Come on, Miss Celia!” I scream, but she’s a soft white lump next to me, and there is nothing I can do but sit and tremble and wait.
Many minutes pass before the back bell rings. I prop Miss Celia’s head on a towel, take off my shoes so I don’t track the blood over the house, and run for the door.
“She done passed out!” I tell the doctor, and the nurse pushes past me and heads to the back like she knows her way around. She pulls the smelling salts out and puts them under Miss Celia’s nose and Miss Celia jerks her head, lets out a little cry, and opens her eyes.
The nurse helps me get Miss Celia out of her bloody nightgown. She’s got her eyes open but can hardly stand up. I put old towels down in the bed and we lay her down. I go in the kitchen where Doctor Tate’s washing his hands.
“She in the bedroom,” I say.
Not the kitchen, you snake.
He’s in his fifties, Doctor Tate, and tops me by a good foot and a half. He has real white skin and this long, narrow face that shows no feelings at all. Finally he goes back to the bedroom.
Just before he opens the door, I touch him on the arm. “She don’t want her husband to know. He ain’t gone find out, is he?”
He looks at me like I’m a nigger and says, “You don’t think it’s his business?” He walks into the bedroom and shuts the door in my face.
I go to the kitchen and pace the floor. Half an hour passes, then an hour, and I’m worrying so hard that Mister Johnny’s going to come home and find out, worrying Doctor Tate will call him, worrying they’re going to leave that baby in the bowl for me to deal with, my head’s throbbing. Finally, I hear Doctor Tate open the door.
“She alright?”
“She’s hysterical. I gave her a pill to calm her down.”
The nurse walks around us and out the back door carrying a white tin box. I breathe out for what feels like the first time in hours.
“You watch her tomorrow,” he says and hands me a white paper bag. “Give her another pill if she gets too agitated. There’ll be more bleeding. But don’t call me up unless it’s heavy.”
“You ain’t really gone tell Mister Johnny bout this, are you, Doctor Tate?”
He lets out a sick hiss. “You make sure she doesn’t miss her appointment on Friday. I’m not driving all the way out here just because she’s too lazy to come in.”
He waltzes out and slams the door behind him.
The kitchen clock reads five o’clock. Mister Johnny’s going to be home in half an hour. I grab the Clorox and the rags and a bucket.
MISS SKEETER
chapter 19
I
T is 1963. The Space Age they’re calling it. A man has circled the earth in a rocketship. They’ve invented a pill so married women don’t have to get pregnant. A can of beer opens with a single finger instead of a can opener. Yet my parents’ house is still as hot as it was in 1899, the year Great-grandfather built it.
“Mama, please,” I beg, “when are we going to get air-conditioning?”
“We have survived this long without electric cool and I have no intentions of setting one of those tacky contraptions in my window.”
And so, as July wanes on, I am forced from my attic bedroom to a cot on the screened back porch. When we were kids, Constantine used to sleep out here with Carlton and me in the summer, when Mama and Daddy went to out-of-town weddings. Constantine slept in an old-fashioned white nightgown up to her chin and down to her toes even though it’d be hot as Hades. She used to sing to us so we’d go to sleep. Her voice was so beautiful I couldn’t understand how she’d never had lessons. Mother had always told me a person can’t learn anything without proper lessons. It’s just unreal to me that she was here, right here on this porch, and now she’s not. And no one will tell me a thing. I wonder if I’ll ever see her again.
Next to my cot, now, my typewriter sits on a rusted, white enamel washtable. Underneath is my red satchel. I take Daddy’s hankie and wipe my forehead, press salted ice to my wrists. Even on the back porch, the Avery Lumber Company temperature dial rises from 89 to 96 to a nice round 100 degrees. Luckily, Stuart doesn’t come over during the day, when the heat is at its worst.
I stare at my typewriter with nothing to do, nothing to write. Minny’s stories are finished and typed already. It’s a wretched feeling. Two weeks ago, Aibileen told me that Yule May, Hilly’s maid, might help us, that she shows a little more interest every time Aibileen talks to her. But with Medgar Evers’s murder and colored people getting arrested and beat by the police, I’m sure she’s scared to death by now.
Maybe I ought to go over to Hilly’s and ask Yule May myself. But no, Aibileen’s right, I’d probably scare her even more and ruin any chance we have.
Under the house, the dogs yawn, whine in the heat. One lets out a half-hearted woof as Daddy’s field workers, five Negroes, pull up in a truckbed. The men jump from the tailgate, hoofing up dust when they hit the dirt. They stand a moment, dead-faced, stupefied. The foreman drags a red cloth across his black forehead, his lips, his neck. It is so recklessly hot, I don’t know how they can stand baking out there in the sun.
In a rare breeze, my copy of
Life
magazine flutters. Audrey Hepburn smiles on the cover, no sweat beading on her upper lip. I pick it up and finger the wrinkled pages, flip to the story on the Soviet Space Girl. I already know what’s on the next page. Behind her face is a picture of Carl Roberts, a colored schoolteacher from Pelahatchie, forty miles from here. “In April, Carl Roberts told Washington reporters what it means to be a black man in Mississippi, calling the governor ‘a pathetic man with the morals of a streetwalker. ’ Roberts was found cattle-branded and hung from a pecan tree.”
They’d killed Carl Roberts for speaking out, for
talking
. I think about how easy I thought it would be, three months ago, to get a dozen maids to talk to me. Like they’d just been waiting, all this time, to spill their stories to a white woman. How stupid I’d been.
When I can’t take the heat another second, I go sit in the only cool place on Longleaf. I turn on the ignition and roll up the windows, pull my dress up around my underwear and let the bi-level blow on me full blast. As I lean my head back, the world drifts away, tinged by the smell of Freon and Cadillac leather. I hear a truck pull up into the front drive but I don’t open my eyes. A second later, my passenger door opens.
“Damn it feels good in here.”
I push my dress down. “What are you doing here?”
Stuart shuts the door, kisses me quickly on the lips. “I only have a minute. I have to head down to the coast for a meeting.”
“For how long?”
“Three days. I’ve got to catch some fella on the Mississippi Oil and Gas Board. I wish I’d known about it sooner.”
He reaches out and takes my hand and I smile. We’ve been going out twice a week for two months now if you don’t count the horror date. I guess that’s considered a short time to other girls. But it’s the longest thing that’s ever happened to me, and right now it feels like the best.
“Wanna come?” he says.
“To Biloxi? Right now?”
“Right now,” he says and puts his cool palm on my leg. As always, I jump a little. I look down at his hand, then up to make sure Mother’s not spying on us.
“Come on, it’s too damn hot here. I’m staying at the Edgewater, right on the beach.”
I laugh and it feels good after all the worrying I’ve done these past weeks. “You mean, at the Edgewater . . . together? In the same room?”
He nods. “Think you can get away?”
Elizabeth would be mortified by the thought of sharing a room with a man before she was married, Hilly would tell me I was stupid to even consider it. They’d held on to their virginity with the fierceness of children refusing to share their toys. And yet, I consider it.