The Help

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 naive 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.”