Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe Read online

  Mrs. Threadgoode stopped for a moment to take a sip from her cup, and reflected, “You know, this little coconut cake reminds me of the picnic, that awful day.

  “I was already engaged to Cleo, so I must have been seventeen at the time. It was a Saturday afternoon in June, and we had just had the best time at our BYO church picnic. The young people’s group from the Andalusia Baptist Church had ridden the train over for the day, and Momma and Sipsey had baked about ten coconut cakes for the occasion. The boys were wearing their white summer suits and Cleo had just gotten himself a brand-new straw hat from Poppa’s store, but for some reason, Buddy had talked Cleo into letting him wear his new hat on that day.

  “After the picnic, Essie Rue and I came home with the cake plates, and all the Threadgoode boys went down to the train station to see the group from Andalusia off, like they always did. Momma was out in the backyard with a pan, picking figs off her tree, and I was out there with her when it happened …

  “We heard the train start up, and just as it pulled out, the whistle blew. Then we heard the train screech and grind to a halt, and at the same moment we heard the girls screaming.

  “I looked at Momma, who all of a sudden clutched at her heart and fell down on her knees and cried out, ‘Oh no, not one of my babies! Dear God, not one of my babies!’

  “Poppa Threadgoode had heard the noise from the store and ran over to the station. I was on the front porch with Momma when the men came up the walk. The minute I saw that straw hat Edward was carrying, I knew it was Buddy.

  “He had been flirting around with that pretty Marie Miller that day, and as the train pulled away, he’d stepped on the track, tipped his hat, and flashed his lady’s smile at her; just as the whistle blew. They say he never even heard the train that was coming up behind him. Oh, how I wish to this day Cleo had never lent him that straw hat.”

  She shook her head. “You just don’t know, it liked to have killed us all. But the one that took it the hardest was Idgie. She must have been twelve or thirteen at the time, and had been over in Troutville playing ball when it happened. Cleo had to go over and get her.

  “You never saw anybody hurt so much. I thought she would die right along with him. It would break your heart to look at her. She ran away the day of the funeral. Just couldn’t stand it. And when she did come home, all she did was go upstairs and sit in Buddy’s room for hours on end, just sit up there in the dark. And when she couldn’t bear to be home any longer, she’d just take off and go stay with Sipsey over in Troutville

  … but she never did cry. She was too hurt to cry.… You know, a heart can be broken, but it keeps on beating, just the same.

  “Momma Threadgoode was worried sick over her, but Poppa said to let her go and do what she had to do. Course, she was never the same after that, not until she met Ruth, then she started getting back to her old self. But I know she never really got over Buddy … none of us did.

  “But, I don’t want to dwell on sad times. That wouldn’t be right. Besides, just like Idgie meeting Ruth, God never shuts a door unless he opens another, and I believe He must have sent Ruth over to stay with us that summer for a reason … ‘His Eye Is on the Sparrow, so I Know He Watches Me.’ ”

  DECEMBER 1, 1931

  Radio Star in Whistle Stop

  Hollywood has nothing on us. Our own Essie Rue Limeway, who is the organist for the Baptist church and the accompanist for the Jolly Belles Ladies’ Barber Shop Quartet, can be heard every morning at 6:30, this month, on “King Biscuit Time,” on W.A.P.I. radio, playing the piano on a commercial that she made for the Stanley Charles Organ and Piano Company. When Mr. Charles says, “Remember, folks, I’ll hold your organ or piano till Christmas,” that’s Essie Rue playing “Jingle Bells” in the background. So be sure and listen.

  Essie told me that Stanley Charles has entirely too many organs and pianos in stock this year, and needs to sell them in a hurry. Essie says, if you go in and mention her name that he will give you a discount. The store is located in downtown Birmingham, right at the streetcar stop, across from Gus’s Hot Dogs.

  By the way, the O fell off Opal’s Beauty Shop sign, and just missed hitting Biddie Louise Otis in the head. Opal says she is glad that she wasn’t hurt, but wasn’t it a coincidence that Mrs. Otis’s name started with an O too? Julian says he is fixing it sometime this week, but Biddie says she is going in the back door from now on.

  … Dot Weems …

  P.S. Opal says she’s just got in a consignment of human hair ringlets … So if you have any place that needs a little more hair … she says to come on in …

  JANUARY 5, 1986

  Evelyn Couch had locked herself in her sewing room and was eating a second pint of Baskin-Robbins chocolate chip ice cream and staring at the table, piled high with the Butterick sewing patterns she had not touched since the day she had bought them in a fit of good intentions. Ed was in his den, busy watching his football game, and that was fine with her because, lately, he always looked at her whenever she had anything fattening to eat and said in mock surprise, “Is that on your diet?”

  She had lied to the boy at Baskin-Robbins. She told him the ice cream was for a party for her grandchildren. She didn’t even have grandchildren.

  Evelyn was forty-eight years old and she had gotten lost somewhere along the way.

  Things had changed so fast. While she had been raising the required two children—“a boy for him and a girl for me”—the world had become a different place, a place she didn’t know at all.

  She didn’t get the jokes anymore. They all seemed so mean, and she was still shocked at the language. Here she was, at her age, and she’d never said the f word. So she mostly watched old movies and reruns of The Lucy Show. When the Vietnam War was going on, she’d believed what Ed had told her, that it was a good and necessary war, and that anyone against it was a communist. But then, much later, when she finally decided that it may not have been such a good war, Jane Fonda had already moved on to her exercise class and nobody cared what Evelyn thought, anyway. She still held a grudge against Jane Fonda and wished she’d get off TV and stop slinging her skinny legs around all the time.

  Not that Evelyn hadn’t tried along the way. She had tried to raise her son to be sensitive, but Ed had scared her so bad, telling her that he would turn out to be a queer, she had backed off and lost contact with him. Even now her son seemed like a stranger to her.

  Both her children had passed her by. Her daughter, Janice, had known more about sex at fifteen than Evelyn did at this very minute. Something had gone wrong.

  When she was in high school, things had been so simple. There were the good girls and the bad girls, and everyone knew who was who. You were either a member of the “in” group or you were not. Evelyn had been in the golden circle; a cheerleader. She had not known the name of one person who was in the high school band or the boys in the pegged pants and their girl friends with the nylon see-through blouses and ankle bracelets. Her crowd had been the crew-cut, button-down madras shirt and pressed khakis for boys, and Ship ’n Shore blouses with circle pins for girls set. She and her girl friends smoked one Kent cigarette at their sorority meetings, and at a pajama party they maybe had a beer, but that was it. No petting below the neck.

  Later, she had felt like a fool going with her daughter to get her fitted for a diaphragm. Evelyn had waited until her wedding night.

  And what a shock. Nobody had told her how much it would hurt. She still didn’t enjoy sex. Every time she would start to relax, the bad-girl image would pop into her head.

  She had been a good girl, had always acted like a lady, never raised her voice, always deferred to everybody and everything. She had assumed that somewhere down the line there would be a reward for that; a prize. But when her daughter had asked her if she’d ever had sex with anyone but her husband and she’d answered, “No, of course not,” her daughter’s reply had been, “Oh Mother, how dumb. You don’t even know if he’s any good or not. How awful.”

/>   It was true. She didn’t know.

  So in the long run, it didn’t matter at all if you had been good or not. The girls in high school who had “gone all the way” had not wound up living in back alleys in shame and disgrace, like she thought they would; they wound up happily or unhappily married, just like the rest of them. So all that struggle to stay pure, the fear of being touched, the fear of driving a boy mad with passion by any gesture, and the ultimate fear—getting pregnant—all that wasted energy was for nothing. Now, movie stars were having children out of wedlock by the carload, and naming them names like Moonbeam or Sunfeather.

  And what was the reward for staying sober? She had always heard, There’s nothing worse than a woman drunk, and she never allowed herself more than one whiskey sour. Now, all the best people were waltzing into the Betty Ford Center, getting their pictures made, and having lots of parties thrown for them when they came out. She often wondered if Betty would take people who needed to lose twenty-five pounds.

  Her daughter had given her a puff of a marijuana cigarette once, but after all the hot pads on the counter started walking toward her, she got scared and never tried it again. So dope was out.

  Evelyn wondered where her group was, the place where she fit in …

  About ten years ago, when Ed had started seeing a woman he worked with down at the insurance company, she had attended a group called the Complete Woman, to try and save her marriage. She wasn’t sure she loved Ed all that much, but she loved him just enough to not want to lose him. Besides, what would she do? She had lived with him as long as she had lived with her parents. The organization believed that women could find complete happiness if they, in turn, would dedicate their entire lives to just making their man happy.

  Their leader had informed them that all the rich and successful career women out there who appeared to be so happy were, in reality, terribly lonely and miserable and secretly envied them their happy Christian homes.

  It was a stretch to imagine that Barbara Walters might want to give it all up for Ed Couch, but Evelyn tried her hardest. Of course, even though she was not religious, it was a comfort to know that the Bible backed her up in being a doormat. Hadn’t the apostle St. Paul said for women not to usurp power over the men but to be in silence?

  So, hoping she was on the right track, she started up the ladder on The Ten Steps to Complete Happiness. She tried step number one and met Ed at the front door nude, wrapped in Saran wrap. But Ed had been horrified: He’d jumped inside the house and slammed the door. “Jesus Christ, Evelyn! What if I had been the paper boy! Have you gone insane?”

  So she never tried step number two: going to his office dressed as a prostitute.

  But pretty soon, the group leader, Nadine Fingerhutt, got a divorce and had to go to work, so the group just sort of fizzled out. Then, after a while, Ed stopped seeing that woman and things settled down.

  Later on, still looking, she had tried to get involved with the Women’s Community Center. She liked what they stood for but secretly wished they would wear just a little lipstick and shave their legs. She had been the only one in the room in full makeup, wearing pantyhose and earrings. She had wanted to belong, but when the woman suggested that next week they bring a mirror so they could all study their vaginas, she never went back.

  Ed said that those women were nothing but a bunch of frustrated old maids and too ugly to get a man anyway. So there she was, too bored for Tupperware parties and too scared to look at her own vagina.

  The night she and Ed went to their thirtieth high school reunion, she had been hoping she’d find someone to talk to about what she was feeling. But all the other women there were just as confused as she was, and held on to their husbands and their drinks to keep themselves from disappearing. Their generation seemed to be on a fence, not knowing which way to jump.

  After the reunion, she would sit for hours looking at all her school pictures, and she began to drive by the places where she used to live, over and over.

  Ed was no help. Lately, he had started acting more and more like his daddy, trying to behave like he thought the man of the house should. He had become more closed off as the years went by, and on Saturdays he would wander around the Home Improvement Center alone, for hours; looking for something, but he didn’t know what. He hunted and fished and watched his football games like the other men, but she began to suspect that he, too, was just playing a part.

  Evelyn stared into the empty ice cream carton and wondered where the smiling girl in the school pictures had gone.

  NOVEMBER 2, 1932

  Whistle Stop Pig Club Started

  Due to the encouragement of the Alabama Extension Service, a local pig club has been formed. Anyone wanting information is to call Mrs. Bertha Vick at home. Bertha said that a Miss Zula Hight of Kittrel, North Carolina, earned a pure-bred Registered China Pig in just seven days, and Bertha said that you could do the same thing if you just put your mind to it. She said to own a pure-bred pig is a mark of distinction for you and your community and will start you on the road to prosperity. It will mean the laying of a foundation for a comfortable income for you all of your life, and when old age overtakes you.

  Idgie just got her brand-new Philco radio at the cafe, and says anybody wanting to hear “Amos ‘n’ Andy,” or any other program, is welcome to come in and need not order anything to eat. She says the sound is good at night especially.

  By the way, does anybody know how to get rid of dog tracks in cement? If so, call me up or come by the post office and tell me.

  … Dot Weems …

  JANUARY 12, 1986

  Evelyn opened her purse and gave Mrs. Threadgoode one of the pimiento-cheese sandwiches she had wrapped in wax paper, and brought from home.

  Mrs. Threadgoode was delighted. “Oh, thank you! I love a good pimiento-cheese sandwich. In fact, I love anything to eat that’s a pretty color. Don’t you think pimiento cheese has a pretty color? It’s so cheery. I like a red pepper, too, and I used to love candied apples, but I cain’t eat them anymore, because of my teeth. Come to think of it, I like anything that’s red.” She thought for a minute.

  “We had a red hen named Sister, once, and every time I’d go in the backyard, I’d say, ‘Sister, don’t you peck my toes, girl, or I’ll fry you up with dumplings,’ and she’d cock her head and walk sideways away from me. She’d peck everybody else except me and my little boy, Albert. We never could eat that hen, even during the Depression. She died of old age. When I get to heaven, with all my people, I hope Sister and Cookie the raccoon is gonna be there. I know old Sipsey’s gonna be there.

  “I don’t have any idea where Sipsey came from … you never know where colored people come from. She was about ten or eleven when she started working for Momma Threadgoode. She’d walked over from Troutville, the colored quarters across the tracks, and said her name was Sipsey Peavey and she was lookin’ for a job, and Momma just kept her. She helped raise all the Threadgoode children.

  “Sipsey was a skinny little thing, and funny. She had all those old-timy colored superstitions. Her mother’d been a slave, and she was scared to death of spells … told Momma that her neighbor in Troutville had put yellow conjure powder in this man’s shoes every night, and had caused him to lose his functions. But the thing she was the most deathly afraid of in the world was the heads of animals. If you brought her a chicken or a fish or if Big George killed a hog, she wouldn’t touch it or cook it until she’d buried the head out in the garden. She said that if you didn’t bury the head, the spirit of that animal would enter your body and cause you to go completely insane. One time, Poppa forgot and brought some hog’s-head cheese in the house, and Sipsey ran home, screaming like a banshee, and wouldn’t come back until the place had been conjured by a friend of hers. She must have buried hundreds of heads out in the garden. But you know, we got the biggest tomatoes and okra and squash in town because of it!” She laughed. “Buddy used to call it the fish-head garden.

  “But, with all of he
r spooky ways, there wasn’t a better cook in the state of Alabama. Even at eleven, they say she could make the most delicious biscuits and gravy, cobbler, fried chicken, turnip greens, and black-eyed peas. And her dumplings were so light they would float in the air and you’d have to catch ’em to eat ’em. All the recipes that were used at the cafe were hers. She taught Idgie and Ruth everything they knew about cooking.

  “I don’t know why Sipsey never had any children of her own. You never saw anybody love babies more than Sipsey did. All the colored women in Troutville would leave their babies with Sipsey overnight when they wanted to go out and have a good time. They knew she’d take good care of them. Sipsey said nothing made her happier than to have a little baby to rock. She’d rock those little babies and sing to them all night long, sometimes two at a time, and just pine away for one of her own.

  “Then, one afternoon in November, right around Thanksgiving—Momma said it was freezing cold outside and all the trees were bare—Sipsey was upstairs making the beds, when a friend of hers from the colored church came in the backyard, hollering up to her. Her friend was all excited and told her that there was a girl from Birmingham down at the train station that was giving away a baby. And she said to hurry up ‘cause the train was fixin’ to leave.

  “With that, Sipsey ran downstairs as fast as she could with nothing on but a thin dress and her apron. When she ran through the back door, Momma Threadgoode said she yelled at her to put her coat on, but she called back, ‘I don’ have time, Miz Threadgoode. I got to go get me that baby,’ and was gone in a flash. Momma stood on the back porch and waited, and pretty soon she saw the train pull away, and here came Sipsey, grinning from ear to ear, her legs all scratched and bleeding from running through the briars, carrying the fattest, blackest little baby boy, all wrapped up in a towel that said HOTEL DIXIE, MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE. Sipsey said that gal had been on her way back home and had told Sipsey she didn’t dare show up with a baby, ’cause her husband had been in jail for three years.