Free The Help by Kathryn Stockett Page B

Elizabeth and I have been best friends since Power Elementary. My favorite photograph is of the three of us sitting in the football stands in junior high, all jammed together, shoulder to shoulder. What makes the picture, though, is that the stands are completely empty around us. We sat close because we were close.
    At Ole Miss, Hilly and I roomed together for two years before she left to get married and I stayed on to graduate. I rolled thirteen curlers in her hair every night at the Chi Omega house. But today, she threatened to throw me out of the League. Not that I care so much about the League, but I was hurt by how easily my friend would be willing to cast me aside.
    I turn up the lane that leads to Longleaf, my family’s cotton plantation. The gravel quiets to smooth, yellow dust and I slow down before Mother sees how fast I’m driving. I pull up to the house and get out. Mother is rocking on the front porch.
    “Come sit, darling,” she says, waving me toward a rocking chair beside her. “Pascagoula’s just waxed the floors. Let them dry awhile.”
    “Alright, Mama.” I kiss her powdery cheek. But I don’t sit. I lean on the porch railing, look out on the three mossy oak trees in the front yard. Even though it’s only five minutes outside of town, most people consider this the country out here. Surrounding our yard lie ten thousand acres of Daddy’s cotton fields, the plants green and strong, tall as my waist. A few colored men sit under a distant shed, staring into the heat. Everyone is waiting for the same thing, for the cotton bolls to open.
    I think about how things are different between Hilly and me, since I came home from school. But who is the different person, her or me?
    “Did I tell you?” Mother says. “Fanny Peatrow got engaged.”
    “Good for Fanny.”
    “Not even a month after she got that teller job at the Farmer’s Bank.”
    “That’s great, Mother.”
    “ I know,” she says, and I turn to see one of those lightbulb-popping looks of hers. “Why don’t you go down to the bank and apply for a teller job?”
    “I don’t want to be a bank teller, Mama.”
    Mother sighs, narrows her eyes at the spaniel, Shelby, licking his nether parts. I eye the front door, tempted to ruin the clean floors anyway. We’ve had this conversation so many times.
    “Four years my daughter goes off to college and what does she come home with?” she asks.
    “A diploma?”
    “A pretty piece of paper,” Mother says.
    “I told you. I didn’t meet anybody I wanted to marry,” I say.
    Mother rises from her chair, comes close so I’ll look her in her smooth, pretty face. She’s wearing a navy blue dress, narrow along her slim bones. As usual her lipstick is just so, but when she steps into the bright afternoon sun, I see dark stains, deep and dried, on the front of her clothes. I squint my eyes, trying to see if the stains are really there. “Mama? Are you feeling bad?”
    “If you’d just show a little gumption, Eugenia—”
    “Your dress is all dirty on the front.”
    Mother crosses her arms. “Now, I talked to Fanny’s mother and she said Fanny was practically swimming in opportunities once she got that job.”
    I drop the dress issue. I’ll never be able to tell Mother I want to be a writer. She’ll only turn it into yet another thing that separates me from the married girls. Nor can I tell her about Charles Gray, my math study partner last spring, at Ole Miss. How he’d gotten drunk senior year and kissed me and then squeezed my hand so hard it should’ve hurt but it didn’t, it felt wonderful the way he was holding me and looking into my eyes. And then he married five-foot Jenny Sprig.
    What I needed to do was find an apartment in town, the kind of building where single, plain girls lived, spinsters, secretaries, teachers. But the one time I had mentioned using money from my trust fund, Mother had cried—real tears. “That is not what that money’s for, Eugenia. To live in some