My Escapee: Stories

The Help

112 The Help / My nurse fell asleep taking a few deep breaths, like the steps that lead from the deck of a swimming pool into the water. I stayed awake what felt like most of the night,but was probably twenty- or thirty-minute patches here and there. Each time I opened my eyes I felt a weird alertness, as if I were taking a test.The sky was the color of milk in a blue plastic glass.In the morning, my nurse—whose uniform was stitched above the right-hand breast pocket with Bobbie Blunt—rose from the recliner and smoothed out her skirt. Her hair, pressed to the side of her head with frazzled wisps escaping, resembled the casually baroque style of many of the current movie stars. She told me I passed a restful night,that the expression on my face was first puzzled and then knowing, then placid, then beautiful . She was lying, of course, but I didn’t mind. She brought breakfast,lunch,and dinner to me,positioning the trays in order of consumption.“What are you going to do today?” she asked as she packed the blood pressure cuff and digital thermometer into her black bag. “Oh, I don’t know. Gather myself. Prepare.” She glanced around the barren room. “Really?” she said. The Help / 113 “Looks like you’re ready.” She’d never seen the basement, where I stowed most of my belongings when I came so close to dying. A waffle iron, dots of batter still stuck to its surface.A picnic hamper packed with rolled change and shearing scissors,a spiky clutch of earrings and a French press, all the breakable, inessential things I tended to first, in the confusion. Bobbie laced her spongy-soled shoes. When she left, I waved at the last minute too vigorously.She didn’t see me and I was chagrined at my own enthusiasm. “Nurse!” I called. The door shut but the screen stayed open—she’d paused, probably rummaging in her purse for the keys to her minivan, an unsteady looking vehicle with the wobbly tires of a tenspeed —making the half-exhalation it did when the delivery man propped a package there. I ordered almost everything: medical encyclopedias, sheets and pillowcases patterned with peonies (my favorite flower—they look exploded).The objects on my bedside table,those closest to me—water glass and jug, crossword puzzle, whatever book I was reading (usually a tale of family outrages written by the daughter of someone famous)—had acquired the bearing of items at a shrine,like the notes, class rings, and pictures of dead schoolchildren that mourners left behind,to have something to return to,presumably .Why did they all look alike, those capsized kids with their quickdarkhair?Braveryandfoolishnessandsomebony,remote quality linked them to each other, to their foreshortened fates. The screen door closed. I wondered what she would do if her van didn’t start, who she’d call. Oh nurse, I thought—for The Help 114 / I couldn’t bring myself to call her Bobbie, a stiff and sugary name—to what steady liberty is your life dedicated? Do ideas pulse inside you like toothaches? But the van started. She drove away. When I finished breakfast I decided to sit in the sun for a little while. I carried a plastic container of water outside, filled the birdbath,and lowered myself into a lawn chair.In the next yard, my neighbor was talking on the telephone. “My mom always told me,‘Cut your gelatin into cubes. Never give away something that you’ve gotten as a gift.A prayer lasts at least three full minutes.’She was full of cute ideas.”She raised her arm over her head and waved at me.“Nice to see you out!” she called. I waved back,just a little motion,like I was trying to cool off a forkful of food.The water in the birdbath shone dully. I remembered reading somewhere that the female mosquito needed a blood meal before she could lay her eggs, that it prepared the eggs for the challenge of being deposited in a thin film of dirty water, emboldened them, gave them strength. The phrase blood meal made me suspicious of the writer’s authority, for he seemed to revel in it, as if to make his subject more exciting.If I closed my eyes I could still see...