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 – thoughtful, on the face of it. Mozelle Mason is a woman of means, self-made, with a will shrink-wrapped deliberately and excruciatingly round her slight but steely frame. Flinty and frugal, with a Pentecostal imperative, she had amassed a favored fortune. 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 tchotchkeobsessed can sate themselves with Precious Moments™, Hummel™, Lladro™, Swarovski™ etc., while waiting for a style–n-set in the beauty parlor at the rear: kind of a QVC meets PTL meets the Emerald City. 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 unbroken in her praying fists. 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, Marshall, Wise, Baker, and countless others. 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. In the latter years of my mother’s defiant and reckless independence, Mozelle became an unlikely benefactress-at-whim for her. She’d come by with home-cooked southern specialties on days I couldn’t be there. 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 pressurecooked 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, with the cornbread broken and smashed up in it. 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 everyone knows, is always the result of sin, so punishment had to be exacted. 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 the resentment she’d inspired. 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. Representing both a connection to the vanished churchworld of Mozelle’s memory, and serving as a sort of accessible missionary experiment, my mother drew by 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 made her living in a bathing suit. Gratitude and dread were inexorably joined in the receiving of Mozelle’s 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 the connection they represented. Though it was really an opportunity to badger, Mozelle’s conscious conceit was that by bringing Margaret food, she was faithfully executing a divine mission. In inverse proportion, my mother’s stubborn respect and insistence on upholding that historical tie was hers. The Old Testament’s Job confronted his accusing “friends” with the cruelty (and superficiality) of their counsel; Margaret embraced her tormentor. There is a point where cumulative, exponential shame ceases to be shame and becomes merely a quantum wormhole whose only conclusion is forgiveness. But what? Forgiveness for WHAT? forgiveness for Mozelle’s warped notion of an overdue vindication? for Dell’s abuse? for her own failures? I’ll call Mozelle from her room when I go tomorrow, hand Mom the phone, and go chat with the nurses ‘til I think she’s done.




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