The Help

“Minny told me. I know why you don’t want to be friends with me.” Susie Pernell’s voice over the microphone announcing the winners grows louder, forcing Celia to raise her own voice. “I know you think me and Johnny went behind your back,” she yells, and there is laughter from the front of the room over some comment, and more applause. Just as Susie Pernell pauses over the microphone to look at her notes, Celia yells, “—but I got pregnant after you broke up.” The room echoes with the words. All is silent for a few long seconds.

The women around them wrinkle their noses, some start to laugh. “Johnny’s wife is d-r-u-n-k,” someone says.

Celia looks around her. She wipes at the sweat that’s beading on her makeuped forehead. “I don’t blame you for not liking me, not if you thought Johnny cheated on you with me.”

“Johnny never would’ve—”

“—and I’m sorry I said that, I thought you’d be tickled you won that pie.”

Hilly bends over, snatches her pearl button from the floor. She leans closer to Celia so no one else can hear. “You tell your Nigra maid if she tells anybody about that pie, I will make her suffer. You think you’re real cute signing me up for that auction, don’t you? What, you think you can blackmail your way into the League?”

“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.”

MINNY

chapter 26

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.”