War Starts

Grady Kilgore is in charge of the Whistle Stop draft board, and he says for all you boys to come on in and sign up and get it over with.

It seems like lately there's nothing but troop trains and tanks passing through. It makes you wonder where they are all from and where they are going.

Wilbur says the war won't last more than six months. I hope he's right for once.

The Jolly Belles Ladies' Barber Shop Quartet has been invited to attend the National Convention of Ladies' Barber Shop Quartets in Memphis, Tennessee, this spring, to perform their most popular rendition of "Dip Your Brush in Sunshine and Keep On Painting Away."

Reverend Scroggins asks, would the individual or individuals who are giving out his address and phone number to people looking for whiskey please stop, as his wife, Arna, is in the middle of a nervous condition and has broken out several times this week. Bobby Lee Scroggins joined the navy. By the way, that service star in the window over at the cafe is for Willie Boy Peavey, Onzell's and Big George's boy, who is the first colored soldier in Troutville to join up.

... Dot Weems...

P.S. Everybody is getting ready for the annual Christmas pageant and because of the shortage of men in our town, Opal, myself and Ninny Threadgoode have been cast as the three wise men.

AUGUST 8, 1986

After the boy at the supermarket had called her those names, Evelyn Couch had felt violated. Raped by words. Stripped of everything. She had always tried to keep this from happening to her, always been terrified of displeasing men, terrified of the names she would be called if she did. She had spent her life tiptoeing around them like someone lifting her skirt stepping through a cow pasture. She had always suspected that if provoked, those names were always close to the surface, ready to lash out and destroy her.

It had finally happened. But she was still alive. So she began to wonder. It was as if that boy's act of violence toward her had shocked her into finally looking at herself and asking the questions she had avoided for fear of the answers.

What was this power, this insidious threat, this invisible gun to her head that controlled her life... this terror of being called names?

She had stayed a virgin so she wouldn't be called a tramp or a slut; had married so she wouldn't be called an old maid; faked orgasms so she wouldn't be called frigid; had children so she wouldn't be called barren; had not been a feminist because she didn't want to be called queer and a man hater; never nagged or raised her voice so she wouldn't be called a bitch...

She had done all that and yet, still, this stranger had dragged her into the gutter with the names that men call women when they are angry.

Evelyn wondered; why always sexual names? And why, when men wanted to degrade other men, did they call them pussies? As if that was the worst thing in the world. What have we done to be' thought of that way? To be called cunt? People didn't call blacks names anymore, at least not to their faces. Italians weren't wops or dagos, and there were no more kikes, Japs, chinks, or spies in polite conversation. Everybody had a group to protest and stick up for them. But women were still being called names by men. Why? Where was our group? It's not fair. She was getting more upset by the minute. Evelyn thought, I wish Idgie had been with me. She would not have let that boy call her names. I'll bet she would have knocked him down.

Then she made herself stop thinking because, all of a sudden, she was experiencing a feeling that she had never felt before, and it scared her. And so, twenty years later than most women, Evelyn Couch was angry.

She was angry at herself for being so scared. Soon, all that belated anger began to express itself in a strange and peculiar way.

For the first time in her life, she wished she were a man. Not for the privilege of having the particular set of equipment that men hold so dear. No. She wanted a man's strength, so at the supermarket she could have beaten that name-calling punk to a pulp. Of course, she realized, had she been a man, she would not have been called those names in the first place. In her fantasies, she began to look like herself but with the strength of ten men. She became Superwoman. And in her mind, she beat that bad-mouthed boy over and over again, until he lay in the parking lot, broken and bleeding, begging for mercy. Hal!

Thus, in her forty-eighth year, the incredible secret life of Mrs. Evelyn Couch of Birmingham, Alabama, began.

...

Few people who saw this plump, pleasant-looking middle- aged, middle-class housewife out shopping or doing other me- everyday chores could guess that, in her imagination, she was machine-gunning the genitals of rapers and stomping abusive husbands to death in her specially designed wife-beater boots.

Evelyn had even made up a secret code name for herself... a name feared around the world: TOWANDA THE AVENGER!

And while Evelyn went about her business with a smile Towanda was busy poking child molesters with electric cattle prods until their hair stood on end. She placed tiny bombs inside Playboy and Penthouse magazines that would explode when they were opened. She gave dope dealers overdoses and left them in the streets to die; forced that doctor, who had told her mother she had cancer, to walk down the street naked while the entire medical profession, including dentists and oral hygienists, jeered and threw rocks. A merciful avenger, she always waited until he finished his walk and then beat his brains out with a sledgehammer.

Towanda was able to do anything she wanted. She went back in time and punched out the apostle Paul for writing that women should remain silent. Towanda went to Rome and kicked the pope off the throne and put a nun there, with the priests cooking and cleaning for her, for a change.

Towanda appeared on Meet the Press, and with a calm voice, a cool eye, and a wry smile, debated everyone who (disagreed with her until they became so defeated by her brilliance that they burst into tears and ran off the show. She went to Hollywood and ordered all the leading men to act opposite women of their own age, not twenty-year-old girls with perfect bodies. She allowed rats to chew all slumlords to death, and sent food and birth control methods, for men as well as women, to the poor people of the world.

And because of her vision and insight, she became known the world over as Towanda the Magnanimous, Righter of Wrongs and Queen without Compare.

Towanda ordained that: an equal number of men and women would be in the government and sit in on peace talks; she and her staff of crack chemical scientists would find a cure for cancer and invent a pill that would let you eat all you want and not gain weight; people would be forced to get a license to have children and must be found fit, financially and emotionally—no more starving or battered children. Jerry Falwell would be responsible for the raising of all illegitimate children who had no homes; no kittens or puppies would be put to sleep, and they would be given a state of their own, maybe New Mexico or Wyoming; teachers and nurses would receive the same salary as professional football players.

She would stop the construction of all condos, especially ones with red tile roofs; and Van Johnson would be given a show of his own... he was one of Towanda's favorites.

Graffiti offenders were to be dipped in a vat of indelible ink. No more children of famous parents could write books. And she'd personally see to it that all the sweet men and daddies, who had worked so hard, would each receive a trip to Hawaii and an outboard motor to go with it.

Towanda went to Madison Avenue and took control of all the fashion magazines; all models weighing under 135 were fired, and wrinkles suddenly became sexually desirable. Low- fat cottage cheese was banned from the land forever. Ditto, carrot sticks.

Why, just yesterday, Towanda had marched into the Pentagon, taken all the bombs and missiles away, and had given them toys to play with instead, while her sisters in Russia were doing the same thing. Then she went on the six o'clock nightly news and gave the entire military budget to all the people in the United States over sixty-five. Towanda would be so busy all day that Evelyn was exhausted by bedtime.

No wonder. Tonight, while Evelyn was cooking dinner, Towanda had just put a roomful of porno and child exploitation film producers to death. And later, as Evelyn was washing the dishes, Towanda was in the process of single-handedly blowing up the entire Middle East to prevent the Third World War. And so, when Ed yelled from the den for another beer, somehow, before Evelyn could stop her, Towanda yelled back, “SCREW YOU, ED!”

He very quietly got up from his recliner, and came into the kitchen.

“Evelyn, are you all right?”

FEBRUARY 9, 1943

Поиск по сайту: