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.”
“
“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.
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
IT 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
