seen her for weeks and I can’t avoid speaking to her. I feel guilty that I haven’t been to see her. She grabs the back of her chair and raises herself up. She is six months pregnant, woozy from the pregnancy tranquilizers.
“How are you feeling?” I ask. Everything on her body is the same except her stomach is huge and swollen. “Is it any better this time?”
“God, no, it’s awful and I still have three months to go.”
We’re both quiet. Elizabeth burps faintly, looks at her watch. Finally, she picks up her bag, about to leave, but then she takes my hand. “I heard,” she whispers, “about you and Stuart. I’m so sorry.”
I look down. I’m not surprised she knows, only that it took this long for anyone to find out. I haven’t told anyone, but I guess Stuart has. Just this morning, I had to lie to Mother and tell her the Whitworths would be out of town on the twenty-fifth, Mother’s so-called date to have them over.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” I say. “I don’t like talking about it.”
“I understand. Oh shoot, I better go on, Raleigh’s probably having a fit by himself with her.” She gives a last look at Hilly. Hilly smiles and nods her excusal.
I gather my notes quickly, head for the door. Before I make it out, I hear her.
“Wait a sec, would you, Skeeter?”
I sigh, turn around and face Hilly. She’s wearing the navy blue sailor number, something you’d dress a five-year-old in. The pleats around her hips are stretched open like accordion bellows. The room is empty except for us now.
“Can we discuss this, please, ma’am?” She holds up the most recent newsletter and I know what’s coming.
“I can’t stay. Mother’s sick—”
“I told you five months ago to print my initiative and now another week has passed and you still haven’t followed my instructions.”
I stare at her and my anger is sudden, ferocious. Everything I’ve kept down for months rises and erupts in my throat.
“I will not print that initiative.”
She looks at me, holding very still. “I want that initiative in the newsletter before election time,” she says and points to the ceiling, “or I’m calling upstairs, missy.”
“If you try to throw me out of the League, I will dial up Genevieve von Hapsburg in New York City myself,” I hiss, because I happen to know Genevieve’s Hilly’s hero. She’s the youngest national League president in history, perhaps the only person in this world Hilly’s afraid of. But Hilly doesn’t even flinch.
“And tell her what, Skeeter? Tell her you’re not doing your job? Tell her you’re carrying around Negro activist materials?”
I’m too angry to let this unnerve me. “I want them back, Hilly. You took them and they don’t belong to you.”
“Of course I took them. You have no business carrying around something like that. What if somebody saw those things?”
“Who are you to say what I can and cannot carry ar—”
“It is my job, Skeeter! You know well as I do, people won’t buy so much as a slice of pound cake from an organization that harbors racial integrationists!”
“Hilly.” I just need to hear her say it. “Just who is all that pound cake money being raised for, anyway?”
She rolls her eyes. “The Poor Starving Children of Africa?”
I wait for her to catch the irony of this, that she’ll send money to colored people overseas, but not across town. But I get a better idea. “I’m going to call up Genevieve right now. I’m going to tell her what a hypocrite you are.”
Hilly straightens. I think for a second I’ve tapped a crack in her shell with those words. But then she licks her lips, takes a deep, noisy sniff.
“You know, it’s no wonder Stuart Whitworth dropped you.”
I keep my jaw clenched so that she cannot see the effect these words have on me. But inside, I am a slow, sliding scale. I feel everything inside of me slipping down into the floor. “I want those laws back,” I say, my voice shaking.
“Then print the initiative.”
I turn and walk out the door. I heave my satchel into the Cadillac and light a cigarette.
MOTHER’S LIGHT is Off when I get home and I’m grateful. I tiptoe down the hall, onto the back porch, easing the squeaky screen door closed. I sit down at my typewriter.
But I cannot type. I stare at the tiny gray squares of the back porch screen. I stare so hard, I slip through them. I feel something