Kathryn Stockett - The Help

“What?”

“You tell me right this minute who else you’ve told ab—”

“I didn’t tell nobody nothing about a pie, I—”

“You liar ,” Hilly says, but she straightens quickly and smiles. “There’s Johnny. Johnny, I think your wife needs your attention .” Hilly flashes her eyes at the girls around them, as if they’re all in on a joke.

“Celia, what’s wrong?” Johnny says.

Celia scowls at him, then scowls at Hilly. “She’s not making sense, she called me a—a liar, and now she’s accusing me of signing her name on that pie and . . .” Celia stops, looks around like she recognizes no one around her. She has tears in her eyes. Then she groans and convulses. Vomit splatters onto the carpet.

“Oh shit!” Johnny says, pulling her back.

Celia pushes Johnny’s arm off her. She runs for the bathroom and he follows her.

Hilly’s hands are in fists. Her face is crimson, nearly the color of her dress. She marches over and grabs a waiter’s arm. “Get that cleaned up before it starts to smell.”

And then Hilly is surrounded by women, faces upturned, asking questions, arms out like they are trying to protect her.

“I heard Celia’s been battling with drinking, but this problem with lying now?” Hilly tells one of the Susies. It’s a rumor she’d intended to spread about Minny, in case the pie story ever got out. “What do they call that?”

“A compulsive liar?”

“That’s it, a compulsive liar.” Hilly walks off with the women. “Celia trapped him into that marriage, telling him she was pregnant. I guess she was a compulsive liar even back then.”

After Celia and Johnny leave, the party winds down quickly. Member wives look exhausted and tired of smiling. There is talk of the auction, of babysitters to get home to, but mostly of Celia Foote retching in the middle of it all.

When the room is nearly empty, at midnight, Hilly stands at the podium. She flips through the sheets of silent bids. Her lips move as she calculates. But she keeps looking off, shaking her head. Then she looks back down and curses because she has to start all over again.

“Hilly, I’m headed on back to your house.”

Hilly looks up from tallying. It is her mother, Missus Walters, looking even frailer than usual in her formalwear. She wears a floor-length gown, sky blue and beaded, from 1943. A white orchid wilts at her clavicle. A colored woman in a white uniform is attached to her side.

“Now, Mama, don’t you get in that refrigerator tonight. I won’t have you keeping me up all night with your indigestion. You go right to bed, you hear?”

“I can’t even have some of Minny’s pie?”

Hilly narrows her eyes at her mother. “That pie is in the garbage.”

“Well, why’d you throw it out? I won it just for you.”

Hilly is still a moment, letting this sink in. “ You? You signed me up?”

“I may not remember my name or what country I live in, but you and that pie is something I will never forget.”

“You—you old, useless . . .” Hilly throws down the papers she’s holding, scattering them everywhere.

Missus Walters turns and hobbles toward the door, the colored nurse in tow. “Well, call the papers, Bessie,” she says. “My daughter’s mad at me again.”

ON SATURDAY MORNING, I get up tired and sore. I walk in the kitchen where Sugar’s counting out her nine dollars and fifty cents, the money she earned at the Benefit last night. The phone rings and Sugar’s on it quicker than a grease fire. Sugar’s got a boyfriend and she doesn’t want her mama to know.

“Yessir,” Sugar whispers and hands me the phone.

“Hello?” I say.

“It’s Johnny Foote,” he says. “I’m up at deer camp but I just want you to know, Celia’s real upset. She had a rough time at the party last night.”

“Yessir, I know.”

“You heard, then, huh?” He sighs. “Well, keep an eye on her next week, will you, Minny? I’ll be gone and—I don’t know. Just call me if she doesn’t perk up. I’ll come home early if I need to.”

“I look after her. She gone be alright.”

I didn’t see myself what happened at the party, but I heard about it while I was doing dishes in the kitchen. All the servers were talking about it.

“You see that?” Farina said to me. “That big pink lady you work for, drunk as a Injun on payday.”

I looked up from my sink and saw Sugar headed straight for me with her hand up on her hip. “Yeah, Mama, she upchuck all over the floor. And everbody at the whole party see!” Then Sugar turned around, laughing with the others. She didn’t see the whap coming at her. Soapsuds flew through the air.

“You shut your mouth, Sugar.” I yanked her to the corner. “Don’t you never let me hear you talking bad about the lady who put food in your mouth, clothes on your back! You hear me?”

Sugar, she nodded and I went back to my dishes, but I heard her muttering. “ You do it, all the time. ”

I whipped around and put my finger in her face. “I got a right to. I earn it every day working for that crazy fool.”

WHEN I GET TO WORK on Monday, Miss Celia’s still laid up in bed with her face buried under the sheets.

“Morning, Miss Celia.”

But she just rolls over and won’t look at me.

At lunchtime, I take a tray of ham sandwiches to the bed.

“I’m not hungry,” she says and throws the pillow over her head.

I stand there looking at her, all mummified in the sheets.

“What you gone do, just lay there all day?” I ask, even though I’ve seen her do it plenty of times before. But this is different. There’s no goo on her skin or smile on her face.

“Please, just leave me alone.”

I start to tell her she needs to just get up, put on her tacky clothes, and forget about it, but the way she’s laying there so pitiful and poor, I keep quiet. I am not her psychiatrist and she’s not paying me to be one.

On Tuesday morning, Miss Celia’s still in the bed. Yesterday’s lunch tray’s on the floor without a single bite missing. She’s still in that ratty blue nightgown that looks left over from her Tunica County days, the gingham ruffle torn at the neck. Something that looks like charcoal stains on the front.

“Come on, lemme get to them sheets. Show bout to come on and Miss Julia gone be in trouble. You ain’t gone believe what that fool done yesterday with Doctor Bigmouth.”

But she just lays there.

Later on, I bring her a tray of chicken pot pie. Even though what I really want to do is tell Miss Celia to pull herself together and go in the kitchen and eat proper.

“Now, Miss Celia, I know it was terrible what happened at the Benefit. But you can’t set in here forever feeling sorry for yourself.”

Miss Celia gets up and locks herself in the bathroom.

I start stripping the bed. When I’m done, I pick up all the wet tissues and glasses off the nightstand. I see a stack of mail. At least the woman’s gotten up to go to the mailbox. I pick it up to wipe the table and there I see the letters H W H across the top of a card. Before I know it, I’ve read the whole note:

Dear Celia,

In lieu of reimbursing me for my dress you tore, we at the League would gladly receive a donation of no less than two hundred dollars. Furthermore, please withhold from volunteering for any nonmember activities in the future, as your name has been placed on a probationary list. Your cooperation in this matter is appreciated.

Do kindly make the check out to the Jackson League Chapter.

Sincerely,