Tomato Girl

by Jayne Pupek

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

For eleven-year-old Ellie Sanders, her father has always been the rock that she could cling to when her mother's emotional troubles became too frightening. But when he comes under the thrall of the pretty teenager who raises vegetables and tomatoes for sale at the general store that he runs, Ellie sees her security slowly slipping away. Now she must be witness and warden to her mother's gradual slide into madness.

Told from Ellie's point of view, Tomato Girl takes the reader into the soul of a terrified young girl clinging desperately to childhood while being forced into adulthood years before she is ready. To save herself, she creates a secret world, a place in which her mother gets well, her father returns to being the man he was, and the Tomato Girl is banished forever. Tomato Girl marks the debut of a gifted and promising new author who has written a timeless Southern novel.

Release date: August 26, 2008

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 298

Sample

TODAY IS MARKET DAY. Not because it’s Tuesday. Not because fresh tomatoes were loaded into the wooden bins this morning. Today is market day because Daddy sent money.

The blue envelope came in yesterday’s mail. Inside, there was no letter like there had been for awhile, only three twenty-dollar bills folded into neat halves. I sat on the step and traced the paper spine with my fingers. I imagined Daddy’s thumb making the perfect crease, the oil and dirt pressed under his nail like a dark line. Now that he was hauling pulp wood, his hands would be splintered and red from rubbing against bark. Maybe another worker would let him borrow gloves. He’d left his one good pair in the shed.

Waiting for the mail is my job. Mama doesn’t want to see the letters from Daddy or even the envelopes. When the first one came, she stood in the middle of the sidewalk and ripped the paper into pieces. The day had been windy and sharp and the blue and green shreds floated on the air like insect wings. I chased each piece, then shoved them deep into my pocket and ran to Clara’s house.

Clara is a colored woman. And a clairvoyant. Some even say she’s a witch. Clara laughs at what people call her. She says if you get to be as old as she is without learning a trick or two, you haven’t been paying attention. For sure she knows magic. Not the rabbit-in-the-hat magic, but real magic. The kind that raises dead spirits and makes handsome men swoon over plain women. The magic that causes plums to ripen despite a hard frost. Magic that lets her see your future spelled out in brown tea leaves or in the lines crisscrossing your palm.

Even though Clara doesn’t live far, I’m not supposed to walk there alone, through the colored part of Granby. It’s not just a rule at my house, but one that everybody knows. We go to school with black children, and sometimes shop at the same stores, but most things are done as they always were, separately, with doctors and churches for whites and a different set for coloreds. No black man in his right mind would walk into a church full of whites. No white woman would dare let a colored doctor see her naked, or even let one give shots to her children to keep them safe from measles and smallpox.

“A white girl isn’t safe in a neighborhood full of colored boys,” Mary Roberts told me on the playground. I didn’t ask what black boys might do that white boys wouldn’t. I didn’t want to hear any stories to scare me away from Gratton Street. 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.

Before I go to Clara’s in the afternoons, I sit on the front porch steps until the postman comes. While I wait, I rest my satchel across my lap and practice fractions in my notebook or recite my spelling list: SORROW: S-O-R-R-O-W; TOMORROW: T-O-M-O-R-R-O-W. I go over my words until I can spell them by heart. Sometimes I read my lessons, sounding out the words I don’t know because I’m afraid to ask Mama. Her nerves are wound tight as a watch. I don’t want to upset her. She might cry or take off her clothes. I’m always afraid she’ll drop the baby.

Sometimes Mama does things to hurt herself. She gets carried away. Once while sitting at the kitchen table to write a grocery list, she scratched her wrist with the pencil until it bled. The more it bled, the deeper she pressed the lead point into her skin. Daddy had to wrestle the pencil from her, then bandage her wrist and give her a shot to calm her. I’m not strong like Daddy, and might not be able to stop her. Besides, now all the needles and medicines are gone. The sheriff took them when he came looking for Daddy.

Where Mama is concerned, preventing her bad moods is the key. “If we keep everything around Mama even and safe, she won’t sink too deep,” Daddy had said. A lily caught in a hurricane was how Daddy described Mama. If we calmed the winds around her, she would be fine.

Remembering what he taught me, I walk on tiptoes and speak in a low, soft voice. When washing dishes, I make sure not to let the pots and pans bang together. No running through the house or slamming doors. When the phone rings, I answer it before the third ring. I don’t ask for lunch money or help with homework. Because Mama is prone to headaches and the light makes them worse, it’s important to keep the lamps burning low and the curtains drawn shut. If someone comes to the door selling Grit papers or vacuum cleaners, I send them away in a hurry.

Most of all, I try not to mention Daddy, not even when his letters come. I put the money in her purse or in the cookie jar on top of the fridge, and keep his letters in a box under my bed. She never asks where the extra money comes from. Maybe she doesn’t even notice how we run so low only a few dollars are left, then there is suddenly money for the market. It is hard for her to know real from make-believe, so Mama makes sense of things in her own way.

On Saturdays when there’s no homework to keep me busy, I sit on the porch steps and wait. No matter how bored I get, I don’t go inside before the postman comes.

People walk by. Sometimes they wave, speak, or nod at me. Granby is a small town where everybody recognizes you. It’s common to stop and ask about the little details that make up a life: How is your garden? What do you think of the rain we’ve been having? Are you keeping up your grades in school? How is your mama getting on?

I don’t want them to ask about Mama or about Daddy. When they do, I just wave real small and look away. I can’t let them know about Mama’s moods, or how she keeps Baby Tom in a jar. I can’t tell them about the bad night with the spoon, or how Daddy ran off with Tess. Mary Roberts says people already know more than they say.

I keep to myself now more than ever.

To pass time, I gather the acorns that fell from the oak tree in our front yard. I count how many black ants cross the deep crack in the sidewalk. I say my ABC’s backwards or recite the names of flowers I know: aster, buttercup, daisy, pansy, tulip, snapdragon, rose … Sometimes I make up stories about girls with magic powers, girls who can fly over mountain peaks and bring lost fathers home.

Most days the mail brings bills, advertisements, and coupons—even free samples of soap—but no word from Daddy. On the days no blue envelope comes, I pretend Daddy is on his way back home, driving in his yellow Pontiac with the windows down and the radio playing loud.

When another day comes and I see the blue envelope, I go hide in the shed to cry because I know Daddy is not coming home that day.

Nearly all the mail still comes addressed to my father. Somebody sits at a desk and types “Mr. Rupert Sanders,” not knowing that he left. Even the newspaper carries his name. I’m saving the papers for him, stacking them in his toolshed where he’ll want to read them when he comes home. I’ve saved forty-one papers so far.

Sometimes it’s as if Daddy died, but there wasn’t a funeral. There’s no grave to visit.

Mary Roberts said mail came for her grandfather long after he died. “Papa even got Christmas cards,” she said, “and that was three months after we buried him.”

Mary gives me advice because that is what she does best. In the cafeteria this week she said I should tell people Daddy died because that would stop the rumors. People might even feel sorry for Mama and me. “You wouldn’t have to go over to that colored woman’s house anymore or eat her colored food. The church would take up an offering, and white ladies would bring cakes and casseroles,” she said.

“But I like going to Clara’s house. Besides, if I say Daddy died, how will I explain when he comes home?”

“My mother says your Daddy’s not coming home,” Mary whispered.

“He is, too!” I moved to another table and slammed my tray down so hard the red Jell-O spilled into the buttered corn.

Mary Roberts isn’t my friend anymore.

IN THE MARKET, Mama buys stale bread and brown eggs. She buys cabbages as twisted as a man’s fist. Red radishes the size of a doll’s heart.

I follow Mama as she weaves her way between the vegetable stands. If I stay close enough, and keep my arms to my sides, maybe I can disappear behind the dark curtains of her coat. Like a girl on a stage, I pretend my life belongs to someone else. This is not my life, I whisper.

But of course, I can’t even convince myself. This is the only life I know, this one that started when Daddy left. My old one is as far away as the stars. Maybe this new life is the real one and the life before only make believe.

Mama’s shoulders slump. She holds her elbows too far from her body. Her knuckles are white knots clutching a dirty handkerchief. The skin of her fingers is red and cracked because she has stopped buying bottles of Jergens. “Only the things we need,” she reminds me, rubbing her hands with spit.

But all this is about more than doing with less. Mama has stopped combing her hair. She wears dresses that need hemming and stockings with holes. She doesn’t bathe, sing, or pay the bills anymore. At night, she paces the floor with Baby Tom in her arms and tries to nurse him at her breast.

Mama lifts a yellow squash, then tosses it aside. “Too ripe,” she snaps. She picks up another, presses her thumb into its pale skin, then drops it on the floor. Its narrow neck splits open to show raw, seedy insides.

I squeeze my eyes shut. These are pictures I don’t want to see: the yellow squash broken on the floor; Mama’s thin, bitten lips spilling dirty words; the other shoppers staring with wide eyes and open mouths.

I want to tell them that Mama won’t always be this way, but I say nothing. Gradually, the other shoppers turn away. They can’t keep staring; that would be rude. They return to their own shopping; they move to other aisles, carefully stepping around the smashed squash, choosing plums or cucumbers to avoid the bins near us.

For a moment, I think maybe someone will walk over and guide Mama to a quiet corner. Maybe someone will lead me to the red bench in front of the market where the newspaper is sold and the metal horse lets children ride his back. Maybe that same somebody will bring me a vanilla ice cream and tell me not to worry, that Mama will be back to her old self in the blink of an eye.

Wishing doesn’t make a thing so. No one comes forward to comfort Mama. No one asks her what’s the matter.

I nudge my mother. “Let’s leave, Mama.” I want to go home. I don’t want Mama to act this way in front of other people. It’s bad enough when there is no one but me to see. I don’t want everyone else to know. What if she mentions the baby in the jar? I can’t explain him away.

Mama motions me aside.

I follow her over to the dairy products where she frowns at the cartons of milk and the small blocks of cheese. She asks for half a pound of cheddar, thinly sliced, then demands the sheets of paper separating the slices be removed. “I can hardly afford the cheese,” she complains. “I won’t pay for your stinking wax paper.”

We go back to the produce section, where Mama squabbles with the vendor over the price of his tomatoes. “Look at these bruised skins! These soft spots gone to rot!”

I stand beside Mama and look down at my saddle shoes, the once white toes now scuffed and dirty. I’m embarrassed by Mama’s shrill voice. “Mister, your damn tomatoes are no good!”

I feel sorry for the vendor. His dark eyes narrow as he defends his prices. “There are no finer tomatoes in this town,” he cries. “And no fairer prices!”

It’s not your tomatoes, I want to tell him, but I can’t take his side. I remember the fight in the kitchen, and the girl with tomato lips who waited in Daddy’s car.

GOD DOESN’T LIKE selfish girls. Mrs. Roberts says so. And if anyone knows God’s likes and dislikes, it’s Mrs. Roberts. She sings in the choir, directs the Christmas pageant, and teaches Vacation Bible School the third week of every July. Her name tops the prayer chain, which means she is the first to know when trouble hits somebody’s life.

The pastor calls Mrs. Roberts a virtuous woman. I don’t know what that means, but she works hard to earn his praise. She reads through the entire Bible each year, following a schedule she keeps taped to her refrigerator. When I visit Mary, I check the schedule to see which chapter Mrs. Roberts is reading. Sure enough, if you look inside her Bible, the red ribbon bookmark is always on the right page. Even when she has the flu, or the electricity goes out in a storm, a virtuous woman does not neglect reading the Scriptures.

Mrs. Roberts passes on what she knows to anyone who will listen. I’ve learned a heap of things about God in the time I’ve spent at the Roberts’s house. For instance, when you disobey God, He sends bad things like plagues, locusts, and floods. “That’s to get your attention,” Mrs. Roberts says, “and to make you think twice.”

If you don’t take heed, the next time God might kill your baby. The only way to stop Him is to paint blood on your doors.

If you are a selfish and stubborn girl, God might send away your daddy, the way He did mine.

There is no end to what God can take from you.

I try not to be mad at God. I know I’m to blame. It’s my fault Mama twisted her back and the tomato girl came to stay. I didn’t help Mama like she asked. I’d only wanted to be left alone so I could hurry to the store to pick out my new chick.

My selfish ways turned God against me. Mrs. Roberts would say so.

AFTER LUNCH, MISS WILDER, my teacher, sits at her desk and reads aloud, mostly stories about orphaned deer or shipwrecked families. These stories are sometimes sad, but hold my attention. I can imagine being right in them.

Fridays are different. On Fridays, we write our own stories. “Every story,” Miss Wilder explains, “is like a circle. Every story has a beginning and an end. The secret is to close your eyes, see a picture, then open your eyes and write what you see. Find the beginning and the rest of the story will follow.”

When I close my eyes, I see Mama standing at the stove, a clean white apron tied around her waist. This is where my story begins, with Mama making beef stew for Sunday’s supper.

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. There are days when Mama shouldn’t handle knives, and Daddy used to sometimes wrap them in newspapers or towels and hide them. There hadn’t been any days like that in quite some time.

“Ellie, can you run downstairs and fetch me an onion?”

I stood at the back door, pulling my sweater over my head. “Mama! The new chicks are coming today! I’ll miss the truck if I don’t get down there.”

Mama turned down the radio and smiled. “Oh, all right! Such a tomboy I’ve raised. What kind of wife will you make, Ellie?”

“I’m never getting married, Mama!” I hated boys. They smelled bad and liked to spit in the bushes behind Daddy’s store. I could hardly believe my father had once been a boy, but Mama showed me a picture of him at age twelve. He had too many freckles, short greased hair, and large teeth shaped like border stones.

“Oh, I see. You say that now, but you wait …”

“Mama!”

“Go on, then.” She swatted my behind with her dishrag. “I’ll get the onion myself. And tell your father not to be late for supper.” She opened the top cabinet above the stove and handed me an empty oatmeal box.

Mama saved every kind of box, jar, and can. She used these as hiding places for her special things. Sometimes Daddy found her treasures and took them back to the store because she hadn’t paid for them. Mostly she kept ink pens, stockings, and sewing goods. He ignored those because they cost so little, but the jewelry, perfume, and fur stole had to be returned. Sometimes she’d cry hard enough that Daddy would work out an agreement with the shop owner to pay for it, but usually, Mama just pouted, or said she hadn’t really wanted the thing anyway.

“Have Daddy saw this in half,” Mama explained, “and poke holes in the lid. Put some brown paper in the bottom. It should do nicely for your chick.”

I kissed Mama’s soft, warm cheek and ran out the door.

Overhead, dove-gray clouds hung in the sky. A few cool raindrops hit my face.

If I ran as fast as I could, I’d make it to the store before the Easter chicks arrived.

DADDY WAS STACKING cans of paint in a pyramid along the wall when I plowed through the front door. “There’s my girl,” he said and smiled at me.

Back then nobody else in the world was his girl. Only me.

I locked my arms around Daddy’s thick neck and kissed his rough, salty face. “I haven’t missed the truck, have I, Daddy?”

“No, should pull up any minute. Here, you help me sort the new brushes until Mr. Nelson comes.” He pointed to the cardboard box on the floor. An open flap showed a box full of red- and black-handled brushes, their fine white bristles wrapped in clear plastic.

I loved Daddy’s store. He didn’t really own it, Mr. Morgan did, but Mr. Morgan hardly stopped by anymore because of his arthritis. Daddy ran it for him, and I thought of the store as ours. I spent hours after school sweeping the narrow aisles, sorting shiny nails and bolts into their bins, hanging new paint brushes on hooks. Sometimes I closed my eyes and wandered the aisles like I was blind, naming things just by touch and smell. This was a world where I felt safe, like being wrapped in a favorite blanket. Here everything had its own special place, and no one broke into tears for no reason or hurt themselves on purpose. This was a place like school, where things happened the way you expected, and the day at hand was much like the day before it. Each spring I watered seedlings and pulled dead buds. I arranged snapdragons in rows near the counter where we sold seed packets. We carried green hoses that hung on the wall like vines, and shiny watering cans with thick gray spouts. As soon as the frosts passed, we stocked more gardening supplies, and right after that the first produce came. Daddy bought from local people: flowers from the colored women on Gratton Street, corn from the sheriff’s brother, and fancy mushrooms from the minister’s wife.

Most everything else came from the tomato girl. She kept Daddy’s store stocked in fresh vegetables all spring and summer. In the fall and winter, she brought in jars of sweet pickles, corn relish, and tomato preserves. Whenever she showed up with more produce, I placed it in the baskets so the nicest vegetables were on top, throwing away any with worm holes or bruises. In the front window, the sun ripened her tomatoes, turning them a deep red.

Everyone in town loved her tomatoes. Rumor was she spread blood and coffee grounds on her garden every full moon to make her tomatoes ripe and extra sweet. Other folks said it was her tears that gave them their unusual taste. She was rumored to be orphaned and infirm, but nothing people said about her made much sense to me. I listened to what people said, but wasn’t sure which parts to believe.

Sometimes when the store wasn’t too busy, Daddy let me work the cash register. I remembered to thank folks for shopping at Morgan’s General, but often made mistakes giving them change. Most of the customers helped me when I lost count, but I still almost gave up. “There’s too many ways to make a dollar,” I complained. Daddy made me keep at it though. “You can’t quit when things get a little tough, Ellie. You must keep at them until you get them right.”

A job he never had to tell me to do twice was tending the Easter chicks.

They usually arrived one week before Easter. One hundred of them. Most were dyed blue or pink, because people like things to make sense that way, blue for boys and pink for girls. But some of the chicks were purple, orange, and green, and those were my favorites. Daddy called them the Life Savers chicks because they matched the candies.

My father had built a special glass display case at the front of the store, tall enough for small children to see into, but not reach inside. The display case stayed there all year, but we changed it each season. During the summer, Daddy filled the case with white play sand and added toy buckets and bright beach balls. In the fall, we placed pumpkins and leaves inside. When December came, we set up a village snow scene with a train and painted houses, some with tiny wreaths pinned to their front doors. Daddy always said I had Mama’s knack for making things look pretty.

In April, Daddy cleaned the display case and lined the bottom with newspapers and pine shavings for the Easter chicks. My job was to feed and water the chicks, then change their dirty newspapers and bedding. Each chick had to be cleaned with a soft cloth or brush if it got dried corn mash or poop on its down feathers. Their tiny nostrils had to be kept perfectly clear, so they could breathe, which was sometimes a hard job because chicks are messy when they eat, dipping their little heads too far into the bowl.

I loved the way the chicks smelled, like corn and baking soda, and how they stood on pipe-cleaner legs while they pecked at my hands with their little orange beaks. Whenever I came near them, they chirped, fluffing up their soft down. Within a few days, they took me for their mother, peeping when they heard my voice or footsteps.

As Easter neared and mothers and fathers scooped up chicks to fill baskets, my brood became smaller. Any that were left, Daddy bartered away. Sometimes he traded them for birdhouses made by the blind carpenter on Gale Street. Once or twice he’d given them to shopkeepers who overlooked Mama’s borrowing without asking. Most often, my unsold chicks went to the tomato girl, a trade for her spring produce.

This year, Daddy said if I kept his secret, I could keep a chick for my own.

THE BIG BLUE farm truck pulled up in front of the store. “They’re here,” Daddy called to me as he walked outside. I left my paintbrushes in their cardboard box and followed him.

He and Mr. Nelson stood on the stoop and talked about the weather for what seemed like forever. Mr. Nelson explained that on his way there he’d had to stop to wrap tarp around his flatbed to keep his turkeys from drowning. “They turn their heads right up in the rain,” he said, tilting his head to show us. “The only thing dumber than a bird in rain is a man in love,” Mr. Nelson joked.

My father didn’t laugh.

A few minutes later, Daddy and Mr. Nelson carried in four wooden crates, each holding twenty-five dyed chicks. Daddy turned on the heating lamp and left me to move the tiny chicks into their new home. They would go on sale tomorrow, and I knew that immediately my little brood would begin to dwindle. For the rest of today, though, they were all mine. Daddy never sold them until he saw that they could stand and eat on their own. Any that seemed too weak would be kept in a box in the back office and fed a special gruel with powdered vitamins mixed into it.

While Daddy locked the cash register, I knelt next to my chicks. They felt a bit damp from the rain, and I quickly moved them to their place under the lamp to prevent a chill from settling into. . .