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Tomato Girl
Jayne Pupek
Algonquin Books
 
Reviewer: Alice Osborn
 
 
          Jayne Pupek's Tomato Girl is ostensibly one more novel about a Southern girl growing up in a dysfunctional family, but it's so much more than another Secret Life of Bees or Ellen Foster. Creating a novel that is well-paced and authentic with vulnerable and memorable characters, Pupek throws the proverbial rocks up a tree at her protagonist, eleven year-old Ellie Sanders. Ellie lives with her mentally unstable mother, Julia, and her doting but adulterous father, Rupert, in racially-divided Granby, Virginia (a fictional town), in 1969. Throughout the book, Ellie's troubles never seem to relent, except when she lets the river take them away at the end.
 
          Tomato Girl begins with a brief prologue that introduces the adult Ellie who knows she must write down her past: "I need to tell what I remember. I need to tell the story of a girl whose world unraveled like a torn scarf...." Then we jump into the present-tense narration of young Ellie and her mother, Julia, at the market: "A lily caught in a hurricane was how Daddy described Mama. If we calmed the winds around her, she would be fine." But no matter how hard Rupert and his daughter try, the winds won't be calmed around Julia Sanders. After Julia smashes a yellow squash to the floor and yells in a shrill voice at the tomato seller, Ellie begins her tale of her father running off with a seventeen year-old epileptic incest survivor as her mother breastfeeds her dead baby brother in a jar. Then Pupek resumes the story thread of mother and daughter coming home from the market after the tomato incident. The novel sweeps to a close when Ellie is taken into foster care, and is told to let go of her troubles by Clara, an African American clairvoyant who saves Ellie's spiritual soul.

          The heart of the book takes place during Holy Week. On Palm Sunday, Ellie's pregnant mother falls down the cellar steps trying to retrieve an onion. Ellie believes this is her fault because she wanted to rush to her daddy's store and pick out a new Easter chick instead of getting her mother that onion. Ironically, at the book's end, Ellie fixes her mother an onion sandwhich before Julia hurts herself again. Onions and their layers represent Julia's multiple talents, as well as her beauty, intelligence and culture, which hardly anyone sees anymore since she stays mostly locked inside her home.
 
          Rupert Sanders manages the general store in town and has fallen in love with teenage Tess, the tomato girl, who sells him her home-grown produce. Rupert tries to second-guess his wife's manic moods, but he's growing weary of fetching her outside in her underwear and is captivated by Tess's beauty and honeysuckle perfume. After Julia falls, Rupert has Tess come home with him to help out with the household chores, which leads to tragedy for everyone involved. Ellie is now caught in the hurricane of her father's creation as she struggles to help her mother, compete for her father's love with Tess, and witness her mother attack Tess and her father, both verbally and physically. She manages to hold on because of her two constants: Jellybean, her Easter chick, and Mary Roberts, her know-it-all best friend, but these two don't remain by her side as the narrative unfolds. Jellybean becomes the stand-in Christ figure on Good Friday, and Mary breaks up with Ellie over her relationship with Clara. Ellie Sanders knows there are different rules between whites and blacks in her town, but that still doesn't make it right: "Mary doesn't understand that when you need somebody the way I need Clara, you don't care two sticks what color skin they live in." By the time Ellie makes it to Easter, her father has left town with Tess ("I screamed for my father, but he'd gone too far for my voice to bring back"), and her mother is unbuttoning her blouse for the married sheriff. On Easter Monday, Ellie gets her period and suffers further humilations before she lets Clara enfold her in a quilt of kindness and hope.

          Above all, Ellie wishes she could have a normal family and a normal life like Mary Roberts, even though Mary's mother is a meddlesome churchlady and her father is dead. Brave, outspoken and resourceful, Ellie never turns her back on gruesome situations that most adults would run away from. She saves her sewing money under her bed for emergencies, and knows how to feed herself and her mother from the meager supply of money they receive from Rupert after he leaves. Pupek could have rendered Ellie too perfect, but she avoids this trap by having Ellie keep her family secrets from trusted adults (besides Clara) who want to help her. Ellie also forgets to feed or accidentally drops Jellybean, like any stressed young child would do.
 
          Pupek is also a poet and her taut verbal skills shine throughout the novel, especially when Ellie uses analogies that connect the grownup world of abstract feelings and troublesome situations with quotidian objects in a child's world. When Tess takes over Ellie's home and supplants her mother's kitchen and sewing room with her own touches, Ellie says, "If I could have one wish at that moment it would be to see Tess disappear like a snowflake touching warm ground." Pupek's images are so well wrought—she offers smells, colors, tastes and texture. She uses sound almost as much as she uses sight. This is Ellie's first description of Tess: "'Hello' she said, her voice so small and airy it made me think of butterflies and garden fairies." In another scene, we're in Julia's kitchen before the storm:
 
While the radio announcer shouted out unbeatable deals at Emory's Buick, the beef bone boiled in the big black pot. Mama chopped carrots, potatoes, and celery stalks. The knife made a tapping sound on the cutting board, but Mama wasn't in one of her too-fast moods, so I didn't have to worry that she might cut her finger.

          Tomato Girl is a searing account of mental illness shattering a family and one child's determination to overcome her hard luck. Although I would have liked for Pupek to leave us with a less open ending, I appreciated her giving Ellie consistent, authentic emotions, especially when she must let go of her trauma. Pupek's attention to detail in her characters and settings allows us to enter Ellie's world and experience the universality of being a lost child at the mercy of grownups.

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