Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

AUGUST 15, 1986

Geneene, the black nurse who prided herself on being as tough as nails, but really wasn’t, said she was tired. She was working a double shift today, and she had come in their room to sit down for a minute and have a cigarette. Mrs. Otis was down the hall in her arts and crafts class, so Mrs. Threadgoode was happy for the company.

“You know that woman I talk to on Sundays?”

Geneene said, “What woman?”

“Evelyn.”

“Who?”

“She’s that little plump gray-haired woman. Evelyn … Evelyn Couch … Mrs. Couch’s daughter-in-law.”

“Oh. Yes.”

“She told me ever since that man called her names at the Pigley-Wigley, she just hates people. I told her, I said, ‘Oh honey, it does no good to hate. It’ll do nothing but turn your heart into a bitter root. People cain’t help being what they are any more than a skunk can help being a skunk. Don’t you think if they had their choice they would rather be something else? Sure they would. People are just weak.’

“Evelyn said there are times when she is even beginning to hate her husband. He’ll be sitting around doing nothing, looking at his football games or talking on the phone, and she has this terrible desire to hit him in the head with a baseball bat, for no reason. Poor little Evelyn, she thinks she’s the only person in the world that ever had an ugly thought. I told her, her problem is just a natural thing that happens with couples after they’ve been together so long.

“I remember when Cleo got his first set of dentures he was so proud of. They’d make this clicking sound every time he’d take a bite of food, and it just grated on my nerves so bad that there’d be some nights I’d just have to get up from the table to keep myself from saying something … and I loved that man better than anything in the world. But you go through a period when you start to get on one another’s nerves. And then, one day—now, I don’t know if his teeth stopped clicking on their own or if I just got used to it or what—but it never bothered me another time. You have that kind of thing happen in the best of families.

“You take Idgie and Ruth. Now, you never saw two people more devoted to each other than they were, but even the two of them went through a period when they had their little problems. Ruth moved in with us once. I never knew what it was about, nor did I ask, because it was none of my business, but I think it was because she didn’t like Idgie goin’ over to the river, where Eva Bates lived. Said she felt that maybe Eva encouraged Idgie to drink too much for her own good. And it was true.

“But like I told Evelyn, everybody has their little quirks.

“Poor little Evelyn, I worry about her. That menapause has hit her with a vengeance! She said, not only does she want to hit Ed in the head, but lately, she’s having fantasies in her mind where she dresses up in black clothes and goes out at night and kills all the bad people with a machine gun. Can you imagine?

“I said, ‘Honey, you been looking at too many TV shows. You just get those thoughts out of your mind right now! Besides, it’s not up to us to judge other people. It says right there in the Bible, as plain as the nose on your face, that on Judgment Day Jesus is going to come down with a host of angels to judge the quick and the dead.’

“Evelyn asked me who the quick were, and do you know, for the life of me, I couldn’t tell her!”