Carribean Fragoza’s visceral short story collection, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, the December California Book Club selection, features 10 memorable stories that blend realistic situations with more-fantastical or -miraculous modes, in a corporeal style that calls up sensations of motherhood, both grotesque and sweet, and are all her own.
The book starts with the striking, knockout story “Lumberjack Mom.” It opens with a mysterious sentence that includes natural, domestic, and dramatic elements. “That spring, when the dormant roots and seeds started sprouting and our father stopped coming home, our mother took to the backyard with fervent urgency.” Immediately, we’re told it is spring, a season of growth, but Fragoza ties that time of vernal abundance to the narrator’s father not coming home. There’s a slight dissonance there when considering more-romantic images of spring. She puts growth and abandonment on equal footing in the subordinate clause, but the main clause concerns the mother, a mother we infer feels strongly—urgently—about the father not coming home.
Rather than delve into realistic or mundane details about why he hasn’t returned home—whether the cause is growing apart or an affair or boredom or mental health—Fragoza fleshes out for us a surreal image of a spring gone wild. Plants are not only flourishing but growing out of control in the family’s yard. She characterizes them intriguingly, alerting us that this is no ordinary gardening situation: “Grass spilled out of the hedges with despicable gusto.” With the repeated s sound in every noun, adjective, and verb, a sibilance threads through this sentence that’s reminiscent of sprinklers running. We’re outdoors, and there’s potential for pastoral beauty here. Grass calls up “green” and “growing,” two words to which it’s connected. But breaking up the modest, sturdy smoothness of the Germanic and Old English words are two disruptive Daffy Duck–style words with Latin roots—“despicable” and “gusto.”
And, likewise, the mother’s behavior regarding the backyard chaos is, by turns, diligent and slightly violent. She rips the weeds out “like clumps of hair.” The ground is likened to a scalp, hinting at an ancient image of a woman tearing out her hair while mourning but also startling us with a brutal image like something out of an ancient epic about war: “Fistfuls of roots dangling dirt and squirming worms like freshly torn scalps still steaming.” Again, there’s a return to poetic technique in the alliteration of “fistfuls” and “freshly” and “squirming,” “scalps,” “still,” and “steaming.” The mother is not passively weeping but waging some sort of unseen war.
Subsequently, however, it seems that we’re returned to the mode of domestic fiction, with its mundane concerns (the mother’s favorite tool is narrow-nosed pliers, and the lime tree, grown from seeds smuggled in from Mexico, doesn’t produce fruit), before a gentle, strange poetry suffuses the story. The children talk to their parents’ baby lime tree the way they would talk to a human baby, speaking in “sweet gibberish.”
The lime tree itself takes on symbolic possibilities, though the specifics of the broken marriage, a marriage of immigrants, to which the metaphor alludes remain slightly mysterious. Why the father left doesn’t matter; he left this behind. After the seeds were planted, the lime tree was allowed to grow in its own way, but left unpruned and without care, it overproduced hard limes that fall, spoiling the ground beneath it. Asked by the mother to prune it, the father instead ravages the lime tree with a machete, and it completely stops giving fruit. The intimation here is that the marriage ended because the father doesn’t want to be asked to care. To the children’s dismay, after his disappearance, the mother wants to chop the lime tree down.
She starts, however, by breaking defunct furniture kept in the yard, and only at the end of a long scene of destructive rampage does a glimpse of beauty emerge.
The narrator says, “Our mother, smiling sweated gold.” Here is a sentence that reminds us of fairy tales, in which gold is often important, but also calls up the bodily, the gross—the tangibility of sweat drenching her face. This respite in the story is short-lived. The old-fashioned imagery gives way to a comic-tinged contemporary scene in which the brother and narrator search the internet for instructions written for beginner lumberjacks. Chopping down trees, the mother discovers, is very different from chopping up furniture.
Cutting wood comes to represent the mother’s emotional journey as she assuages her disappointments with the father’s abandonment. However, the nature of these disappointments is, finally, more mysterious to us than her fairy-tale gesture of chopping furniture and trees.
Like this first tale, Fragoza’s other stories are marked by these reversals in mode. In traditional realism and drama, we’re accustomed to changing fortunes—a questing character who is ebulliently up in one scene may crash into failure in another. Fragoza’s reversals involve the movement of fabulist moments and imagery and realistic situations. She toggles back and forth, generating for the reader a sense of surreality and ambiguity. The intensity of the fables she plies accrue meaning that can feel more consequential and material than the ordinary, earthly circumstances alongside which they’re set.•
Join us on December 21 at 5 p.m., when Fragoza will appear in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Eat the Mouth That Feeds You. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
WHY READ THIS
Alta Journal books editor David L. Ulin recommends Fragoza’s collection, commenting, “All 10 narratives are so vivid, so distinctive; all 10 create universes of their own.” —Alta
WHY I WRITE
Fragoza says, “As a child, I discovered a clear and steady sense of who I was that I’ve only ever lost when I was distant from writing.” —Alta
OVERWHELMING SHADOW
Ulin reviews Harry N. MacLean’s Starkweather: The Untold Story of the Killing Spree That Changed America, which focuses on an eight-day murder spree in Nebraska and Wyoming, which was committed by a man who convinced his 14-year-old girlfriend to join him. MacLean’s argument, as Ulin sees it, is that the “murders represented a loss of innocence for the United States.” —Alta
DISTURBING BUT NECESSARY
Northern California book critic Jessica Ferri calls Molly, Blake Butler’s memoir of his marriage and his wife’s death by suicide, “terrifyingly intense and eerily spiritual” and the “best book I’ve read this year.” —Los Angeles Times
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