Ellie Sanders mama is crazy; this we find straight off in Tomato Girl, Jayne Pupek’s evocative first novel. It is hinted that her mama is so crazy she keeps a fetus in a jar. And she has spells, odd and scary ones that Ellie has no idea how to deal with. Ellie’s father, who seems to adore her and takes care of both her and her crazy mother, is beset by devils of his own, one of which comes in the form of a beautiful teenaged girl who sells tomatoes to the store that Ellie’s father manages.
The fact is that Ellie, at eleven, has seen more tragedy than a body should have to humanly bear, and yet we know from news stories daily that many many children like Ellie exist in the real world: essentially motherless, fatherless, besieged by problems beyond their years, and forced to cope with things that they are in no way prepared for.
Ellie’s world is that of the Deep South, presumably before integration took hold (although we aren’t told) because the separation between blacks and whites is clear and the old fashioned nature of the store her father works for, the school she attends, and the attentions of the local law to the problems of her family would not be possible even in small town America today. This hazy time period is a bit of a problem, however, even as we are told that the story takes place in the memory of a now-grown Ellie, who, staring at the jars of vegetables she has put up, recalls the horror of a youth gone from merely awry to terribly tragic.
Pupek begins Ellie’s story slowly, almost as if she is reluctant to reveal the horrors at all. Ellie sits and waits for a letter and cash money from her father who has, we learn, run off with the Tomato Girl. As her mother descends ever more into the madness that has taken hold of her, Ellie turns to her best friend Mary for advice. Mary is one of those friends we all had: the one who knows everything, or if she doesn’t, makes up convincing enough lies. (“I may have made better grades,” Ellie says, “but Mary understood all the things that really mattered. She knew about God, the blood curse, lesbians, and even how to tell if two people were in love. I guess when your mother doesn’t have moods, she has time to tell you things.”) For a while she provides Ellie with some semblance of normality, even as Ellie’s life is unraveling before her eyes.
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