“It’s all about putting yourself in a man-meeting situation where you can —”
“Mama,” I say, just wanting to end this conversation, “would it really be so terrible if I never met a husband?”
Mother clutches her bare arms as if made cold by the thought. “Don’t. Don’t say that, Eugenia. Why, every week I see another man in town over six feet and I think, If Eugenia would just try…” She presses her hand to her stomach, the very thought advancing her ulcers.
I slip off my flats and walk down the front porch steps, while Mother calls out for me to put my shoes back on, threatening ringworm, mosquito encephalitis. The inevitability of death by no shoes. Death by no husband. I shudder with the same left-behind feeling I’ve had since I graduated from college, three months ago. I’ve been dropped off in a place I do not belong anymore. Certainly not here with Mother and Daddy, maybe not even with Hilly and Elizabeth.
“…here you are twenty-three years old and I’d already had Carlton Jr. at your age…” Mother says.
I stand under the pink crape myrtle tree, watching Mother on the porch. The day lilies have lost their blooms. It is nearly September.
I was not a cute baby. When I was born, my older brother, Carlton, looked at me and declared to the hospital room, “It’s not a baby, it’s a skeeter!” and from there the name stuck. I was long and leggy and mosquito-thin, a record-breaking twenty-five inches at Baptist Hospital. The name grew even more accurate with my pointy, beak-like nose when I was a child. Mother’s spent my entire life trying to convince people to call me by my given name, Eugenia.
Mrs. Charlotte Boudreau Cantrelle Phelan does not like nicknames.
By sixteen I wasn’t just not pretty, I was painfully tall. The kind of tall that puts a girl in the back row of class pictures with the boys. The kind of tall where your mother spends her nights taking down hems[41], yanking at sweater sleeves, flattening your hair for dances you hadn’t been asked to, finally pressing the top of your head as if she could shrink you back to the years when she had to remind you to stand up straight. By the time I was seventeen, Mother would rather I suffered from apoplectic diarrhea than stand up straight. She was five-foot-four and first-runner-up as Miss South Carolina. She decided there was only one thing to do in a case like mine.
Mrs. Charlotte Phelan’s Guide to Husband-Hunting, Rule Number One: a pretty, petite girl should accentuate with makeup and good posture. A tall plain one, with a trust fund.
I was five-foot-eleven but I had twenty-five thousand cotton dollars in my name and if the beauty in that was not apparent then, by God, he wasn’t smart enough to be in the family anyway.
My childhood bedroom is the top floor of my parents’ house. It has white-frosting chair rails and pink cherubs in the molding. It’s papered in mint-green rosebuds. It is actually the attic with long, sloping walls, and I cannot stand straight in many places. The box-bay window makes the room look round. After Mother berates me about finding a husband every other day, I have to sleep in a wedding cake.
And yet, it is my sanctuary. The heat swells and gathers like a hot-air balloon up here, not exactly welcoming others. The stairs are narrow and difficult for parents to climb. Our previous maid, Constantine, used to stare those forward-sloping stairs down every day, like it was a battle between them. That was the only part I didn’t like about having the top floor of the house, that it separated me from my Constantine.
Three days after my conversation with Mother on the porch, I spread out the help-wanted ads from the Jackson Journal on my desk. All morning, Mother’s been following me around with a new hair-straightening thing while Daddy’s been on the front porch growling and goddamning the cotton fields because they’re melting like summer snow. Besides boll weevils, rain is just about the worst thing that can happen at harvest time. It’s hardly September but the fall drenches have already begun.
My red pen in hand, I scan the squat, single column under help wanted: female.
Kennington’s Dept. Str. seeks salesgirls w/poise, manners & a smile!
Trim, young secretary wanted. Typing not nec. Call Mr. Sanders. Jesus, if he doesn’t want her to type, what does he want her to do?
Jr. Stenographer wanted, Percy & Gray, LP, $1.25/hr. This is new. I draw a circle around it.
No one could argue that I hadn’t worked hard at Ole Miss. While my friends were out drinking rum and Cokes at Phi Delta Theta parties and pinning on mum corsages, I sat in the study parlor and wrote for hours – mostly term papers but also short stories, bad poetry, episodes of Dr. Kildare, Pall Mall jingles, letters of complaint, ransom notes, love letters to boys I’d seen in class but hadn’t had the nerve to speak to, all of which I never mailed. Sure, I dreamed of having football dates[42], but my real dream was that one day I would write something that people would actually read.
Fourth term of my senior year, I only applied to one job, but it was a good one, being six hundred miles away from Mississippi. Piling twenty-two dimes in the Oxford Mart pay phone, I’d inquired about an editor position at the Harper & Row publishing house on 33rd Street in Manhattan. I’d seen the ad in The New York Times down at the Ole Miss library and mailed them my résumé that very day. On a sprig of hope, I even called about an apartment listing on East 85th Street, a one-bedroom with hot plate for forty-five dollars a month. Delta Airlines told me a one-way ticket to Idlewild Airport would cost seventy-three dollars. I didn’t have the sense to apply for more than one job at a time and I never even heard back from them.
My eyes drift down to help wanted: male. There are at least four columns filled with bank managers, accountants, loan officers, cotton collate operators. On this side of the page, Percy & Gray, LP, is offering Jr. Stenographers fifty cents more an hour.
“Miss Skeeter, you got a phone call,” I hear Pascagoula holler at the bottom of the stairs.
I go downstairs to the only phone in the house. Pascagoula holds the phone out to me. She is as tiny as a child, not even five feet tall, and black as night. Her hair is curly around her head and her white uniform dress has been tailored to fit her short arms and legs.
“Miss Hilly on the phone for you,” she says, and hands it to me with a wet hand.
I sit at the white iron table. The kitchen is large and square and hot. Black-and-white linoleum tiles are cracked in places, worn thin in front of the sink. The new silver dishwashing machine sits in the middle of the room, attached to a hose stretched from the faucet.
“He’s coming next weekend,” Hilly says. “On Saturday night. You free?”
“Gee, let me check my calendar,” I say. All traces of our bridge-club argument are gone from Hilly’s voice. I’m suspicious but relieved.
“I can’t believe this is finally going to happen,” Hilly says, because she’s been trying to set me up[43] for months with her husband’s cousin. She’s intent on it even though he’s much too good-looking for me, not to mention a state senator’s son.
“Don’t you think we should… meet first?” I ask. “I mean, before we go out on an actual date?”
“Don’t be nervous. William and I will be right next to you the whole time.”
I sigh. The date’s been canceled twice already. I can only hope it’ll be put off again. And yet I’m flattered that Hilly has so much faith that someone like him would be interested in someone like me.
“Oh, and I need you to come on by and pick up these notes,” Hilly says. “I want my initiative in the next newsletter[44],