Everybody going to be dead one day,” Neil Gaiman once wrote. “Just give them time.” Considering our shared fate, how strange that American literature does not feature more gothic fiction. The accoutrements of death define landscape. The slaughterhouses, the prisons. Weapons manufacturers and the euphemisms of war. Doctors who do not listen. The poisons. The dead themselves, surely they walk among us asking to be heard?
Perhaps this is why Carribean Fragoza’s debut collection, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, offers such velvety relief. The book features 10 tales as different from one another as one California landscape from the next. Some tales unfold with the smooth polish of hard-won memory. Others are yoked together in the present, records of attempts at survival. Nearly all of them proceed as contagion plots: something happens and begins to get worse.
The contagion plot differs in crucial ways from one of redemption. Obviously, the ending. More important, for the feel of reading a story, a contagion plot can forgo the loss of innocence. It can let go of the bargaining with powerful forces that redemption plots often require. Crucially, contagion plots, especially the way Fragoza writes them, allow repetitions, loops of recurrence, and endlessness as their due—this produces a liberating effect.
“That spring, when the dormant roots and seeds started sprouting,” begins “Lumberjack Mom,” “and our father stopped coming home, our mother took to the backyard with fervent urgency.” The rest of the story, which feels catapulted from that gorgeous complex sentence, is essentially a description of things the narrator’s mother tugs, rips, and snips into obliteration from this garden. Eventually, she takes on a rotting old tree, after which she stands, heaving, her air coming in long drafts.
The word clean appears nearly 20 times in this small book. Narrators are forced to clean up messes at their jobs; mothers and grandmothers scrub floors. Over the course of the book, the scale of what it means to be clean escalates. Floors to be swept; teeth to be brushed, even with the charcoal of a burnt tortilla if one must; a baby’s body. In the bravura final story, “Me Muero,” narrated by a woman who has died, there is the body itself. She sits on a toilet while the rest of her organs pour out of her, “out my heart, out my brain. Out out out until I am purged clean, absolutely hollow and empty inside except the bones that hold the whole thing up.”
As an imagist, Fragoza has few equals in American literature. Eat the Mouth That Feeds You is full of arresting phrases, visual coins to spend in the complex field of family life, of mother-daughter relations, of loneliness and survival. One character observes her abusive boss, laid low by a man. “This was a lonely hunger,” she says, listening to the woman’s cries. “The kind that separates you from others.” The narrator, who is looking to leave her man behind, says: “You’d be surprised how little you need when you’re running for your life.”
There is a fugitive feeling to these stories—utopia can wait; desperation has its needs. This means momentum isn’t excitement; it’s a kind of primordial panic. A way of getting out in front of a collapsing vice. One of the best stories in the book, “The Vicious Ladies,” is an anthem to the way self-reliance meets compromise. The narrator sells hits off a nitrous bottle at parties, running the business part-time out of her dying mother’s house. She becomes part of a gang of sorts called the Vicious Ladies.
“I don’t know which is worse,” the narrator says, “my mother pacing around in the house like a caged parrot or the Ladies waiting for me like a car full of clown buzzards. I often think about escaping both, running into the shadows of the neighbors’ yards, hurtling over fences from one lawn to another until…well, I don’t know what. That’s part of the problem, I guess. I wouldn’t know what I would be running toward.”
The story revolves around two mother figures: the narrator’s actual mother and Samira, a kind of crime boss who operates in loco parentis, giving our heroine advice, drugs, a job, even a new bike at one point, as if she were 10 years old, not a woman in her 20s. Fragoza’s description of Samira steams with the force of a good noir villain.
I was swallowed into their circle of perfumed bodies, the jangle of gold hoops and glow-in-the-dark jewelry. The more I tried to push myself out, the closer Samira got…. She was a star that had imploded into itself and was the very substance of the void, made of nothing but the relentless suck of unsuspecting matter and energy. She sucked the light from everything and made it a reason to party.
What a stupendously beautiful and terrifying sentence that last one is, a kind of cosmological understanding of total inversion. One of the pleasures Eat the Mouth That Feeds You offers is the wisdom of its observers; they may not escape, but they are going to try, and they are damned sure going to record what bears down on them. One of the most vivid sensory impressions in this book is provided by the narrator of “Tortillas Burning,” who describes her husband coming home: “Martín, his father, now a name like flakes of rust on my tongue, would come home smelling like pig shit and beer, but it was his bad mood that bothered me the most.”
If there is comfort in this kind of clarity, it’s honesty. In “Me Muero,” that value enters the very syntax of Fragoza’s sentences. You hear the story, in all its transcendent strangeness, becoming normal, because so many other things have become normal. “It’s really not very different from being alive, actually,” the story’s narrator says calmly, describing her first experience of death. “I see it happen all the time, someone will say something but no one will hear them, mostly because they didn’t really believe anyone would in the first place. They are startled when someone happens to catch what they said.… I want someone to hear me.”
These stories replace death as the ultimate evil with a demon worse: the living death that Fragoza’s narrator describes. One of the scariest stories in the book is “Mysterious Bodies,” in which a woman tries to surface from the pharmacological haze she has been plunged into. In this context, so many stories in this book are contagion tales in which perhaps redemption isn’t possible, but the fact that they are here at all, the way in which they vibrate like impossible testimony, lends them the luminous power of something rescued from fire.
“I feel such sorrow when I think how horror imitates beauty,” the early Argentine gothic writer Silvina Ocampo wrote. Fragoza never gives in to this impulse. The situation and the escape are always separate in her work—and she never allows herself the temporary relief of epiphany. In this sense, her work joins a small high shelf of nearly apocalyptic fiction from the Americas—from the work of Joy Williams to that of Mariana Enriquez and the late Lucia Berlin, all work that it is a joy to read. Its point is not to brush us close to danger and relieve us of its burden but to relieve us of the burden of pretending it’s not there.•
Join us on December 21 at 5 p.m., when Fragoza will appear with Kelly Link and California Book Club host John Freeman to discuss Eat the Mouth That Feeds You. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
Unfortunately, our next CBC book, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, has fallen out of print. Please buy the book from Alibris or a local used bookstore of your choice.
