The Help (55 page)

“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

T
HE 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.

I put a apron on cause I got to hose them kids off. Then I’m on go in the garage, get my stockings on. Book coming out in four days. Ain’t a minute too soon.

WE BEEN living in ANTICIPATION. Me, Minny, Miss Skeeter, all the maids with stories in the book. Feel like we been waiting for some invisible pot a water to boil for the past seven months. After bout the third month a waiting, we just stopped talking about it. Got us too excited.

But for the past two weeks, I’ve had a secret joy and a secret dread both rattling inside a me that make waxing floors go even slower and washing underwear a uphill race. Ironing pleats turns into a eternity, but what can you do. We all pretty sure nothing’s gone be said about it right at first. Just like Miss Stein told Miss Skeeter, this book ain’t gone be no best-seller and to keep our “expectations low.” Miss Skeeter say maybe don’t spec nothing at all, that most Southern peoples is “repressed.” If they feel something, they might not say a word. Just hold they breath and wait for it to pass, like gas.