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Fried Green Stigmata
Fried Green Stigmata
by Jan Whitehouse
7/30/2009
short-short fiction
I’d meant to tell her Mozelle’d called.
Since I’d flimflammed Mom into ("just for a while") leaving her home to come
live two hours away, closer to me, Mozelle kept up these days only by phone. If she
didn’t get hold of Margaret as quickly as she’d like, she’d call me, all worried –
deliberately and excruciatingly round her slight but steely frame. Flinty and frugal, with a
At this point, she’s at least 102 and in suspiciously Faustian good health. Against
nature and reason, she still works and wields authority as the proprietress of her two
stores, The Gold ‘n’ Comb and the Golden Gallery. Both are strokes of evangelical
entrepreneurial genius and are identical in concept: in the front half, the tchotchke-
Swarovski™ etc., while waiting for a style–n-set in the beauty parlor at the rear: kind of a
Mozelle’s disposition puts the “mean” in means. As is the wont of the pious-vain,
she could turn her convicting guns on any sinner / competitor / covenant sister – and
annihilate her prey with a damning and benign curse: “I’ll pray for you.” She was a peer
and fellow churchwoman of my grandmother, Dell, who’d been deceased since before
Watergate, (Dell called her Sister Mason, or really just Mason). Mozelle kept the circle
Dell had a curious, but come to find, common, practice of referring to other
women by their last names. This was a strategy that successfully deodorized the siren
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perfume of a beautiful first name. Ostensibly borne out of modesty, this practice
eliminated other women as potential rivals and served as a sort of Church-of-God burka.
This said, the point would be moot in Mozelle’s case, unless “Mozelle” sounds a lot more
alluring to you, dear reader, than it does to my ears. There were no Lydias, no Dorotheas,
no Thalias in her social orbit. This garden grew only sturdy Flerds, Lones, and Myrts.
Perhaps referring to last names was a kindness. Here’s an RC Cola toast to Teagues,
In that roll I mentioned Baker. Two things about Baker: of course, if you put a
gun to my head I wouldn’t be able to tell you her first name. Anyway, Baker’s son,
Eugene, shot his father for raping and abusing her. Details are sketchy, due to the whole
affair being buried in church gossip archives. Eugene rehabilitated at Massillon State
mental institution, returned to live with his mom and never worked again. The thanks you
get.
The meals themselves were the Three Faces of Betty Crocker (or Cracker?). From
Mozelle’s kitchen came down-home real-deal fare: fried green tomatoes, savory pressure-
cooked garden-grown green beans, and cornbread (to be crumbled into a tall tumbler of
buttermilk, thank you). A “garden dinner” was as close as you could get to healthy:
tomatoes, okra, corn, green beans and diced onions jumbled in a friendly mess on a plate,
These dishes were accepted with grace, genuine or feigned. You see Mom’d had
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the audacity to have fallen on, or plummet into - Hard Times. And Hard Times, as
It was a retribution come with the stern smile of a true believer. Mozelle would
extract the pound of flesh for my mother’s Jai-Alai debts, her dissipated, slovenly
lifestyle, and an unbecoming depression borne from her and my father’s divorce, some 25
years gone. There was no small amount of glee at the contrast between the condemned
building that was now my mother and the Grace Kelly refined glamour she’d possessed.
She was entirely oblivious to any assessment of herself as glamorous just as she was to
Mozelle demanded and got my mother’s Social Security card for her own use at
the local food pantry, on the premise of saving Margaret the trip, which had become too
much. Impersonating Christian charity, Mozelle forged this ongoing ransom with Mom,
very much against my wishes. Worth millions, Sister Mason thought nothing of
stockpiling the railroad ties of government cheese and cans of peanut butter for herself.
familiarity and some infamy. Mom had long since concluded that her keen sense of irony
was a mutant gene. It’d been bad enough she’d taught swimming which meant she’d
generosity because the dutiful Sister Mason was in the infantry as God’s Rod of
Judgment. The craned downward glare of her pinched profile explained that she was born
insulted.
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Like a heat-seeking missile, Sister Mason knew where my mother’s deeper wound
lay. She knew how to faithfully peel it back and salt it. Mozelle knew when to inflict
blame, pivot to the comforting balm of familiarity, and swap back to revile again. Lather,
rinse, repeat.
The meals came invoiced with guilt and shame. Mom endured the indignities and
soundly rebuked my objections to them; the proffered meals were not her incentive, but
Mozelle’s conscious conceit was that by bringing Margaret food, she was faithfully
The Old Testament’s Job confronted his accusing “friends” with the cruelty (and
becomes merely a quantum wormhole whose only conclusion is forgiveness. But what?
I’ll call Mozelle from her room when I go tomorrow, hand Mom the phone, and
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