deluged with projects from our own list of authors and journalists. If you’re a nobody, as you are, Miss Phelan, before the twenty-first is your window. Your only window.”
I swallow, “I don’t know if . . .”
“By the way, was that your mother you were speaking to? Do you still live at home?”
I try to think of a lie—she’s just visiting, she’s sick, she’s passing through, because I do not want Missus Stein to know that I’ve done nothing with my life. But then I sigh. “Yes, I still live at home.”
“And the Negro woman who raised you, I’m assuming she’s still there?”
“No, she’s gone.”
“Mmm. Too bad. Do you know what happened to her? It’s just occurred to me, you’ll need a section about your own maid.”
I close my eyes, fighting frustration. “I don’t . . . know, honestly.”
“Well, find out and definitely get that in. It’ll add something personal to all this.”
“Yes ma’am,” I say, even though I have no idea how I’ll finish two maids in time, much less write stories about Constantine. Just the thought of writing about her makes me wish, deeply, that she was here now.
“Goodbye, Miss Phelan. I hope you make the deadline,” she says, but before she hangs up, she mutters, “and for God’s sake, you’re a twenty-four-year-old educated woman. Go get an apartment.”
I GET Off THE PHONE, stunned by the news of the deadline and Missus Stein’s insistence to get Constantine in the book. I know I need to get to work immediately, but I check on Mother in her bedroom. In the past three months, her ulcers have gotten much worse. She’s lost more weight and can’t get through two days without vomiting. Even Doctor Neal looked surprised when I brought her in for her appointment last week.
Mother eyes me up and down from her bed. “Don’t you have bridge club today?”
“It’s canceled. Elizabeth’s baby is colicky,” I lie. So many lies have been told, the room is thick with them. “How are you feeling?” I ask. The old white enamel bowl is next to her on the bed. “Have you been sick?”
“I’m fine. Don’t wrinkle your forehead like that, Eugenia. It’s not good for your complexion.”
Mother still doesn’t know that I’ve been kicked out of bridge club or that Patsy Joiner got a new tennis partner. I don’t get invited to cocktail parties or baby showers anymore, or any functions where Hilly will be there. Except the League. At meetings, girls are short, to the point with me when discussing newsletter business. I try to convince myself I don’t care. I fix myself at my typewriter and don’t leave most days. I tell myself, that’s what you get when you put thirty-one toilets on the most popular girl’s front yard. People tend to treat you a little differently than before.
IT Was ALMOST FOUR MONTHS ago that the door was sealed shut between Hilly and me, a door made of ice so thick it would take a hundred Mississippi summers to melt it. It’s not as if I hadn’t expected consequences. I just hadn’t thought they’d last so long.
Hilly’s voice over the phone was gravelly sounding, low, like she’d been yelling all morning. “You are sick,” she hissed at me. “Do not speak to me, do not look at me. Do not say hello to my children.”
“Technically it was a typo, Hilly,” was all I could think to say.
“I am going over to Senator Whitworth’s house myself and telling him you, Skeeter Phelan, will be a blight on his campaign in Washington. A wart on the face of his reputation if Stuart ever associates with you again!”
I cringed at the mention of his name, even though we’d been broken up for weeks by then. I could imagine him looking away, not caring what I did anymore.
“You turned my yard into some kind of a sideshow,” Hilly’d said. “Just how long have you been planning to humiliate my family?”
What Hilly didn’t understand was, I hadn’t planned it at all. When I started typing out her bathroom initiative for the newsletter, typing words like disease and protect yourself and you’re welcome!, it was like something cracked open inside of me, not unlike a watermelon, cool and soothing and sweet. I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it. I’d paid Pascagoula’s brothers twenty-five dollars each to put those junkyard pots onto Hilly’s lawn and they were scared, but willing