MANGOES | Rachel Prince
I stand outside my mother’s bedroom and wish I hated her.
I certainly have my reasons to, but none of them seem to stick because she is crumpled in bed like a handful of toothpicks, the duvet spread over her body like a used napkin. Clumps of her hair decorate the carpet and the pink floor of my bathroom, like tinsel during the holidays. It clings to my pants when I rise from couches to fetch her pills. Or sometimes I find thin little tangles on the granite countertop when I’m making pancakes from a box that will never taste quite the same as when she makes them. There is uneaten soup on the dresser, and I can see the way her scalp shines through the slant of sunlight peeking in through the gray curtain.
When I walk into the bedroom, she twists around to look at me. Her eyes gleam with a strange wetness. “I’m hungry.”
I move the blanket aside to adjust her shirt, which has edged its way up her belly and is now exposing her pale skin, stretched across her bones like tissue paper. I can count the ribs, and I’m suddenly tempted to place my fingers into the spaces between, maybe dig out the sweet memories.
Suddenly my eyes sting, and I head to the kitchen.
On Friday afternoons when I was a child and loved my mother, she’d come back from work – a tired nurse rolling like a stray marble around the psych ward – in her teal scrubs from the hospital, and she’d push her fingers into my ribcage, making me scream and laugh. Her hair smelled like coconuts and there was always so much of it, getting into my eyes and my mouth and tickling my chin and my neck, and I’d scream and try to bat it away. I would sink into the rolls of fat that surrounded her stomach and poke it with small chubby fingers, and she’d laugh loud enough to shake the house and lift me into the air.
On my birthday last June, I went out with my friends and stayed up late into the night. I licked frosting off my fingers and washed it down with tequila in the back of a minivan. I screamed my lungs off to old pop hits. I forgot I was a daughter, and only returned home at 2:00 in the morning the next day.
I staggered home with an empty stomach, too tired to cook. I came home to a mother who screamed that I was irresponsible and wild, never wanting to be home.
“Why did I even have a daughter who does not love me?” she demanded, a question neither of us had an answer to. Her sweatshirt hung off of her. She was as thin as a laundry line. She slammed the door to her bedroom, but in my room, there was a plate of meticulously sliced mangoes on my dresser.
Our favorite.
It’s the only thing we have in common, really. A strange love for the overwhelming, messy, irresistible sweetness. We’d sit in silence and eat mangoes together – at the table after dinner, out on the patio at sunset, or while watching Real Housewives. Mangoes made me forget the time she once told me I would never amount to anything, or the time I told her I wanted to die and she said “so what?” It made me forget the time when I crashed her car and came back with a bleeding forehead and she pushed me out the door screaming about how she never wanted to have a daughter so reckless. It made me forget the time when she said I was exactly like my father, so it was better if I disappeared.
Looking at my mother makes a part of me I didn’t even know belonged to me sting. But mangoes soothe the wound.
Standing in front of my mother these days, looking down at this rail-thin woman with eyes like mirrors makes me wish so desperately that I loved her now like I did as a child. It makes me wonder where it all went wrong. It could have been when she first saw my father in me: the sarcasm like a knife, the bitterness in my voice, the ability to swiftly pound flesh into pulp without batting an eyelash. Gradually, I realized there was just a husband-shaped hole in her heart, eroded away by him leaving and the desperate longing for love and the exhaustion of night shifts in the psych ward. A hole that all the mangoes in the world could not fill.
I return to my mother’s bedroom silently with a plate of sliced mangoes.
“Can I feed you the first piece?” she whispers.
It is not an “I love you” but it is close enough. I say yes.
When she places the mango into my mouth, the juices slither out over my lips and chin, and she wipes it with her hand. I feed her next, offering up the biggest piece, and her eyes light up when her teeth sink into it. She looks like a child as she gazes up at me, her collarbones sticking out like tree branches. The sunlight tints the mango juice on my fingers golden, and my mother rests her head on my shoulder. She’s weightless, but her pulp-covered fingers grip mine with surprising strength.
I sit holding her for a while, despite my arms cramping and starting to ache.
I desperately wish that I actually hated her, because then it might be easier to forget that later this year, she will leave an empty bedroom in this house and a mother-shaped hole in my heart.
No amount of mangoes will be able to soothe that wound.
Rachel Prince is a first-year medical student at Frank H. Netter MD School of Medicine. She serves on the editorial board of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine as well as Arbor Vitae, Netter's creative arts journal. She hopes to use her interest in writing and storytelling as a tool to amplify the voices of her patients, particularly those from vulnerable populations.