Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

MAY 9, 1949

Tonight, Grady Kilgore, Jack Butts, and Smokey Lonesome were in the cafe, giggling. This was the seventh week in a row that they had managed to put a whiz bomb in Reverend Scroggins’s car. But when Stump came out of the back room, all dressed up in his blue suit and blue bow tie, they stopped and decided to razz him for a while.

Grady waved at him. “Oh, usher, where’s my seat?”

Idgie said, “Come on, boys, let him alone. I think he looks handsome. He’s got a date with Peggy Hadley, Doc’s girl.”

Jack called out in a silly voice, “Oh, Doctor …”

Stump got himself a Coca-Cola and gave Idgie a dirty look. If it hadn’t been for her, he would not be stuck having to go to the Sweetheart Banquet with Peggy Hadley, a little girl he once had a crush on but had now outgrown. Peggy was two years younger than he was and wore glasses, and he had ignored her his entire high school career. But the minute she found out he was back from Georgia Tech for the summer, she went over and asked Idgie if she thought Stump would go to her Senior Sweetheart Banquet with her, and Idgie had graciously accepted.

Being a gentleman, he had figured that one night wouldn’t kill him—although at the moment he was not sure.

Idgie went over to the icebox in the kitchen and handed him a bouquet of tiny sweetheart roses. “Here, I went up to the big house today and cut some out in the backyard. Take these to her. Your mother loved those little things.”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh God! Aunt Idgie, why don’t you just go instead of me? You’ve planned the entire evening anyway.”

Stump turned to the gang at the table. “Hey, Grady! You wanna go?”

Grady shook his head. “Wish I could, but Gladys’d kill me if she ever caught me with a younger woman. But then, you don’t know anything about that. Just wait till you’re an old married man, like I am, boy. Besides, I ain’t the man I used to be.”

“Or ever was, for that matter,” Jack interjected.

They laughed, and Stump went out the door. “Well, I’m off. Guess I’ll see you afterwards.”

Every year, after the banquet, all the kids wound up at the cafe; and tonight was no exception. When Peggy came in, looking so pretty in her white eyelet dress, with her pink sweetheart roses pinned at the shoulder, Idgie said, “Thank God you’re all right. I’ve been worried to death about you.”

Peggy asked her why in the world would she be so worried.

“Didn’t you hear about that girl over in Birmingham, last week?” Idgie said. “She was so excited at her Sweetheart Banquet that while she was posing for her picture, all of a sudden she burned right up. A case of spontaneous combustion. In seconds she was gone. Nothing was left of her but her high heels. Her date had to take her home in a Dixie cup.”

Peggy, who had believed the story up to a point, said, “Oh, Idgie, you’re playing with me!”

Stump was glad when the evening was over and they were headed home. The fact that he had been a football hero the year before made him still subject to a lot of younger boys standing around staring at him and girls squealing and giggling when he said hello, or anything, for that matter.

He stopped the car in front of Peggy’s house and was getting ready to get out and go around and open her door when she took her glasses off, leaned over, and looked up at him with those big brown myopic Susan Hayward eyes of hers and said, “Well, good night.”

He looked down into those eyes, realizing that he had never seen them before: pools of velvet brown that he could have dived into and had a swim in. Her face was now a quarter of an inch from his, and he smelled the intoxicating scent of her White Shoulders perfume; in that moment she became Rita Hayworth in Gilda; no, Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice. And when he kissed her, it was the most passionate moment he had ever known.

That summer, the blue suit was trotted out regularly, and that fall it wound up in Columbus, Georgia, when they went over to the courthouse to get married. All Idgie ever said to him was “I told you so.”

After that, all Peggy ever had to do was take off her glasses and look up at him, and he was a goner.