Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

JANUARY 19, 1986

It was Sunday again. Evelyn and Ed Couch were getting ready to leave for the nursing home. She turned off the coffeepot and wished that she didn’t have to go, but Ed was so sensitive where his mother was concerned that she dare not refuse to go and at least say hello to her whiny, demanding mother-in-law. Going out there was like torture to her; she hated the smell of sickness and Lysol and death. It reminded her of her mother, of doctors and hospitals.

Evelyn had been forty when her mother died, and after that, the fear started. Now, when she read the morning paper, she turned immediately to the obituary column, even before she read her horoscope. She was always pleased when the person who had died had been in their seventies or eighties, and she loved it when the dear departed had been over ninety; it made her feel safe somehow. But when she read that they had died in their forties or fifties, it disturbed her all day, especially if, at the end of the obituary, the family had requested that a donation be sent to the cancer society. But what disturbed her the most was when the cause of death was not listed.

A short illness of what?

Died suddenly of what?

What kind of accident?

She wanted all the details in black and white. No guessing. And she loathed it when the family asked that a donation be made to the humane society. What did that mean? Rabies … dog bite … cat fever?

But lately, it had been mostly donations to the cancer society. She wondered why she had to live in a body that would get old and break down and feel pain. Why couldn’t she have been living inside a desk, a big sturdy desk? Or a stove? Or a washing machine? She would much rather have an ordinary repairman, like an electrician or a plumber, than a doctor work on her. While she had been in the throes of labor pains, Dr. Clyde, her obstetrician, had stood there and lied to her face. “Mrs. Couch, you’re going to forget these pains as soon as you see that baby of yours. So push a little harder. You won’t even remember this, trust me.”

WRONG! She remembered every pain, right down the line, and would not have had the second child if Ed had not insisted on trying for a boy.… Another lie exposed: The second one hurt as much as the first, maybe even more, because this time she knew what to expect. She was mad at Ed the whole nine months, and thank God she had Tommy, because this was it, as far as she was concerned.

Her whole life she’d been afraid of doctors. Then, wary, but now she hated, loathed, and despised them. Ever since that doctor had come swaggering into her mother’s hospital room with his chart that day …

This little tin God in the polyester suit and the three-pound shoes. So smug, so self-important, with the nurses fluttering around him like geisha girls. He had not even been her mother’s doctor; he was only making some other doctor’s rounds that morning. Evelyn had been standing there, holding her mother’s hand. When he came in, he did not bother to introduce himself.

She said, “Hello, Doctor. I’m her daughter, Evelyn Couch,”

Without taking his eyes off the chart, he said in a loud voice, “Your mother has a rapidly progressing cancer of the lung that has metastasized itself in the liver, pancreas, and spleen, with some indication of invasion into the bone marrow.”

Up until that very moment, her mother had not even known that she had cancer. Evelyn had not wanted her to know because her mother had been so scared. She would remember the look of sheer terror on her mother’s face as long as she lived, and that doctor, who continued on down the hall with his entourage.

Two days later, her mother went into a coma.

She could also never forget that gray, sterile, concrete-walled intensive care waiting room where she had spent all those weeks, frightened and confused, just like the rest of the ones waiting there; knowing that their loved one was lying just down the hall in a cold, sunless room, waiting to die.

Here they were, perfect strangers, in this small space, sharing what was probably the most intimate and painful moment of their lives, not knowing how to act or what to say. There were no rules of etiquette. Nobody had prepared them for this ordeal. Poor people, terrified like herself, trying to be brave, chatting on about their everyday lives, completely in shock, pretending everything was all right.

One family had been so frightened that they couldn’t bring themselves to accept the fact that the woman down the hall, dying, was their mother. They would always refer to her as “their patient,” and ask Evelyn how “her patient” was doing: to put the truth as far away from them as possible and try to ease the pain.

Every day they waited together, knowing the moment would come, that awful moment when they would be called upon to make “the decision” whether or not to turn the machines off …

“It’s for the best.”

“They’ll be much better off.”

“It’s what they would want.”

“The doctor says they’re already gone.”

“This is only a technicality.”

A technicality?

All those calm, adult discussions. When all she really wanted to do was scream for her momma, her sweet momma, the one person in the world who loved her better than anyone ever would or ever could.

That Saturday the doctor came to the waiting room and looked in. All eyes were on him and the conversation stopped. He glanced around the room.

“Mrs. Couch, may I see you in my office for a moment, please?”

As she gathered her purse with shaky hands and pounding heart, the others looked at her in sympathy, and one woman touched her arm; but they were secretly relieved that it had not been them.

She felt as if she were in a dream and listened carefully to what he said. He made it seem so simple and so natural. “No point in prolonging it …”

He made perfect sense. She got up like a zombie and went home.

She thought she was ready to accept it, to let her go.

But then, nobody was ever really ready to turn off their mother’s machine, no matter what they thought; to turn off the light of their childhood and walk away, just as if they were turning out a light and leaving a room.

She could never forgive herself for not having the courage to go back over to the hospital and be with her mother. She still woke up crying over the guilt, and there was not a way in the world she could ever make up for it.

Maybe having gone through this had been the start of Evelyn’s fear of anything having to do with doctors or hospitals. She didn’t know; all she knew was that the thought of going to a doctor made her literally break out in a cold sweat and start to shake all over. And just the sound of the word cancer caused the hair on the back of her arms to stand up. She had stopped touching her breasts at all, anymore, because one time she had felt a lump and almost fainted. Fortunately, it turned out to be Kleenex that had stuck to her bra in the wash. She knew it was an unreasonable fear and that she really should go in for a checkup. They say you should have one every year. She knew she should do it, if not her her sake, for her children’s sake. She knew all that, but it didn’t make any difference. She’d had a few moments of bravery and made appointments for a checkup, but she always canceled them at the last minute.

The last time she had been to a doctor was six years ago, for a bladder infection. All she wanted was for the doctor to prescribe some antibiotics over the phone, but he made her come in and insisted on giving her a pelvic exam. Lying there with her feet in the stirrups, she wondered if there was anything worse than having some man you didn’t know reach inside of you, looking for things, like you were a grab-bag.

The doctor asked how long it had been since her last breast exam. Evelyn lied and said, “Three months ago.”

He said, “Well, as long as you’re here, I might as well do another one.”

She started talking a mile a minute to try and distract him, but in the middle of it, he said, “Uh-oh, I don’t like the feel of this.”

The days of waiting for the test results had been almost unbearable. She’d walked around in a nightmarish fog, praying and bargaining with a God she was not even sure she believed in. She promised, if he would only let her not have cancer, she would never complain about anything again. She would spend the rest of her life just being happy to be alive, doing good works for the poor, and going to church every day.

But the day after she found out she was fine and would not be dead soon, as she had imagined, she went back to being just like she was. Only now, after that scare, she was convinced that every pain was cancer, and if she went to the doctor to see if it was, she was sure that not only would it be true, but that he would listen with a stethoscope to her heart and rush her to the hospital for open-heart surgery before she could escape. She began living with one foot in the grave. When she looked at her palm, she even imagined that her life line was getting shorter.

She knew she couldn’t go through any more days of waiting for test results, and decided that she really did not want to know if anything was wrong, and preferred to drop dead in her tracks, never knowing.

This morning, as they drove out to the nursing home, she realized that her life was becoming unbearable. Every morning she would play games with herself, just to get her through the day. Like telling herself that today something wonderful was going to happen … that the next time the phone would ring, it would be good news that would change her life … or that she was going to get a surprise in the mail. But it was never anything but junk mail, a wrong number, a neighbor wanting something.

The quiet hysteria and awful despair had started when she finally began to realize that nothing was ever going to change, that nobody would be coming for her to take her away. She began to feel as if she were at the bottom of a well, screaming, no one to hear.

Lately, it had been an endless procession of long, black nights and gray mornings, when her sense of failure swept over her like a five-hundred-pound wave; and she was scared. But it wasn’t death that she feared. She had looked down into that black pit of death and had wanted to jump in, once too often. As a matter of fact, the thought began to appeal to her more and more.

She even knew how she would kill herself. It would be with a silver bullet. As round and as smooth as an ice-cold blue martini. She would place the gun in the freezer for a few hours before she did it, so it would feel frosty and cold against her head. She could almost feel the ice-cold bullet shooting through her hot, troubled brain, freezing the pain for good. The sound of the gun blast would be the last sound she would ever hear. And then … nothing. Maybe just the silent sound that a bird might hear, flying in the clean, cool air, high above the earth. The sweet, pure air of freedom.

No, it wasn’t death she was afraid of. It was this life of hers that was beginning to remind her of that gray intensive care waiting room.