Кэтрин Стокетт – The Help / Прислуга. Книга для чтения на английском языке (страница 18)
It takes me a few seconds to realize what we’re talking about here.
“Aibileen,” I say, trying to catch her eye. “You really think Constantine was fired?”
But Aibileen’s face has gone blank as the blue sky. “I must be misrememoring,” she says and I can tell she thinks she’s said too much to a white woman.
We hear Mae Mobley calling out and Aibileen excuses herself and heads through the swinging door. A few seconds pass before I have the sense to go home.
When I walk in the house ten minutes later, Mother is reading at the dining room table.
“Mother,” I say, clutching my notebook to my chest, “did you
“Did I…
“Eugenia, I told you, her sister was sick so she went up to Chicago to live with her people,” she says. “Why? Who told you different?”
I would never in a million years tell her it was Aibileen. “I heard it this afternoon. In town.”
“Who would talk about such a thing?” Mother narrows her eyes behind her reading glasses. “It must’ve been one of the other Nigras.”
“What did you
Mother licks her lips, gives me a good, long look over her bifocals. “You wouldn’t understand, Eugenia. Not until you’ve hired help of your own.”
“You…
“It doesn’t matter. It’s behind me now[58] and I just won’t think about it another minute.”
“Mother, she raised me. You tell me right now what happened!” I’m disgusted by the squeakiness of my voice, the childish sound of my demands.
Mother raises her eyebrows at my tone, takes her glasses off. “It was nothing but a colored thing. And that’s all I’m saying.” She puts her glasses back on and lifts her DAR sheet to her eyes.
I’m shaking, I’m so mad. I pound my way up the stairs. I sit at my typewriter, stunned that my mother could cast off someone who’d done her the biggest favor of her life, raise her children, teach me kindness and self-respect. I stare across my room at the rose wallpaper, the eyelet curtains, the yellowing photographs so familiar they are nearly contemptible.
Constantine worked for our family for twenty-nine years.
For the next week, Daddy rises before dawn. I wake to truck motors, the noise of the cotton pickers, the hollers to hurry. The fields are brown and crisp with dead cotton stalks, defoliated so the machines can get to the bolls. Cotton harvest is here.
Daddy doesn’t even stop for church during harvest time, but on Sunday night, I catch him in the dusky hall, between his supper and sleep. “Daddy?” I ask. “Will you tell me what happened to Constantine?”
He is so dog-tired, he sighs before he answers.
“How could Mother fire her, Daddy?”
“What? Darlin’, Constantine quit. You know your mother would never fire her.” He looks disappointed in me for asking such a thing.
“Do you know where she went? Or have her address?”
He shakes his head no. “Ask your mama, she’ll know.” He pats my shoulder. “People move on, Skeeter. But I wish she’d stayed down here with us.”
He wanders down the hall to bed. He is too honest a man to hide things so I know he doesn’t have any more facts about it than I do.
That week and every week, sometimes twice, I stop by Elizabeth’s to talk to Aibileen. Each time, Elizabeth looks a little warier. The longer I stay in the kitchen, the more chores Elizabeth comes up with until I leave: the doorknobs need polishing, the top of the refrigerator needs dusting, Mae Mobley’s fingernails could use a trim[59]. Aibileen is no more than cordial with me, nervous, stands at the kitchen sink and never stops working. It’s not long before I am ahead of copy and Mister Golden seems pleased with the column, the first two of which only took me about twenty minutes to write.
And every week, I ask Aibileen about Constantine. Can’t she get her address for me? Can’t she tell me anything about why she got fired? Was there a big to-do[60], because I just can’t imagine Constantine saying
It hardly matters, though, because all Aibileen will do is shrug at me, say she don’t know nothing.
One afternoon, after asking Aibileen how to get out tough tub rings (never having scrubbed a bathtub in my life), I come home. I walk past the relaxing room. The television set is on and I glance at it. Pascagoula’s standing about five inches away from the screen. I hear the words
I watch the television, riveted. Yet I am neither thrilled nor disappointed by the news that they might let a colored man into Ole Miss, just surprised. Pascagoula, though, is breathing so loud I can hear her. She stands stock-still, not aware I am behind her. Roger Sticker, our local reporter, is nervous, smiling, talking fast. “President Kennedy has ordered the governor to step aside[61] for James Meredith, I repeat, the President of the United —”
“Eugenia, Pascagoula! Turn that set off right this minute!”
Pascagoula jerks around to see me and Mother. She rushes out of the room, her eyes to the floor.
“Now, I won’t have it[62], Eugenia,” Mother whispers. “I won’t have you encouraging them like that.”
“Encouraging? It’s nationwide news, Mama.”
Mother sniffs. “It is not appropriate for the two of you to watch together,” and she flips the channel, stops on an afternoon rerun of Lawrence Welk.
“Look, isn’t this so much nicer?”
On a hot Saturday in late September, the cotton fields chopped and empty, Daddy carries a new RCA color television set into the house. He moves the black-and-white one to the kitchen. Smiling and proud, he plugs the new TV into the wall of the relaxing room. The Ole Miss versus LSU football game blares through the house for the rest of the afternoon.
Mama, of course, is glued to the color picture, oohing and aahing at the vibrant reds and blues of the team. She and Daddy live by Rebel football. She’s dressed up in red wool pants despite the sweltering heat and has Daddy’s old Kappa Alpha blanket draped on the chair. No one mentions James Meredith, the colored student they let in.
I take the Cadillac and head into town. Mother finds it inexplicable that I don’t want to watch my
Aibileen lets me in and I follow her back to the kitchen. She seems only the smallest bit more relaxed in Elizabeth’s empty house. She eyes the kitchen table, like she wants to sit today. But when I ask her, she answers, “No, I’m fine. You go head.” She takes a tomato from a pan in the sink and starts to peel it with a knife.
So I lean against the counter and present the latest conundrum: how to keep the dogs from getting into your trashcans outside. Because your lazy husband forgets to put it out on the right pick-up day. Since he drinks all that damn beer.
“Just pour some pneumonia in that garbage. Dogs won’t so much as wink at them cans.” I jot it down, amending it to ammonia, and pick out the next letter. When I look up, Aibileen’s kind of smiling at me.
“I don’t mean nothing disrespectful, Miss Skeeter, but… ain’t it kind a strange you being the new Miss Myrna when you don’t know nothing about housekeeping?”
She didn’t say it the way Mother did, a month ago. I find myself laughing instead, and I tell her what I’ve told no one else, about the phone calls and the résumé I’d sent to Harper & Row. That I want to be a writer. The advice I received from Elaine Stein. It’s nice to tell somebody.
Aibileen nods, turns her knife around another soft red tomato. “My boy Treelore, he like to write.”
“I didn’t know you had a son.”
“He dead. Two years now.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I say and for a moment it’s just Preacher Green in the room, the soft pat of tomato skins against the sink.
“Made straight As on ever English test he take. Then later, when he grown, he pick himself up a typewriter and start working on a idea…” The pin-tucked shoulders of her uniform slump down. “Say he gone write himself a book.”
“What kind of idea?” I ask. “I mean, if you don’t mind telling…”
Aibileen says nothing for a while. Keeps peeling tomatoes around and around. “He read this book call