her eyes. She’s been so tired lately and her ulcers are getting worse. Doctor Neal said keeping the house cool would at least make her more comfortable.
“It’s not even on full blast,” I say and I turn it up a notch, to “2.” The air blows a little harder, grows colder, and we all three smile, our sweat evaporating from our foreheads.
“Well, heck, let’s just go all the way,” Daddy says, and turns it up to “3,” which is the highest, coldest, most wonderful setting of all, and Mother giggles. We stand with our mouths open like we could eat it. The lights brighten again, the whir grows louder, our smiles lift higher, and then it all stops dead. Dark.
“What . . . happened?” Mama says.
Daddy looks up at the ceiling. He walks out into the hall.
“Damn thing blew the current.”
Mother fans her handkerchief on her neck. “Well, good heavens, Carlton, go fix it.”
For an hour, I hear Daddy and Jameso throwing switches and clanking tools, boots knocking on the porch. After they’ve fixed it and I sit through a lecture from Daddy to never turn it to “3” again or it will blow the house to pieces, Mother and I watch as an icy mist grows on the windows. Mother dozes in her blue Queen Anne chair, her green blanket pulled to her chest. I wait until she is asleep, listening for the soft snore, the pucker of her forehead. On tiptoe, I turn out all the lamps, the television, every electricity sucker downstairs save the refrigerator. I stand in front of the window and unbutton my blouse. Carefully, I turn the dial to “3”. Because I long to feel nothing. I want to be frozen inside. I want the icy cold to blow directly on my heart.
The power blows out in about three seconds.
FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS, I submerge myself in the interviews. I keep my typewriter on the back porch and work most of the day long and into the night. The screens give the green yard and fields a hazy look. Sometimes I catch myself staring off at the fields, but I am not here. I am in the old Jackson kitchens with the maids, hot and sticky in their white uniforms. I feel the gentle bodies of white babies breathing against me. I feel what Constantine felt when Mother brought me home from the hospital and handed me over to her. I let their colored memories draw me out of my own miserable life.
“Skeeter, we haven’t heard from Stuart in weeks,” Mother says for the eighth time. “He’s not cross with you, now, is he?”
At the moment, I am writing the Miss Myrna column. Once ahead by three months, somehow I’ve managed to almost miss my deadline. “He’s fine, Mother. He doesn’t have to call every minute of the day.” But then I soften my voice. Every day she seems thinner. The sharpness of her collarbone is enough to tamp down my irritation at her comment. “He’s just traveling is all, Mama.”
This seems to placate her for the moment and I tell the same story to Elizabeth, with a few more details to Hilly, pinching my arm to bear her insipid smile. But I do not know what to tell myself. Stuart needs “space” and “time,” as if this were physics and not a human relationship.
So instead of feeling sorry for myself every minute of the day, I work. I type. I sweat. Who knew heartbreak would be so goddamn hot. When Mother’s lying down on her bed, I pull my chair up to the air conditioner and stare into it. In July, it becomes a silver shrine. I find Pascagoula pretending to dust with one hand, while holding up her hairbraids at the thing with the other. It’s not as if it’s a new invention, air-conditioning, but every store in town that has it puts a sign in the window, prints it on its ads because it is so vital. I make a cardboard sign for the Phelan house, place it on the front doorknob, NOW AIR-CONDITIONED. Mother smiles, but pretends she’s not amused.
On a rare evening home, I sit with Mother and Daddy at the dinner table. Mother nibbles on her supper. She spent the afternoon trying to keep me from finding out she’d been vomiting. She presses her fingers along the top of her nose to hold back her headache and says, “I was thinking about the twenty-fifth, do you think