Track Mangoes

“May I take your picture?” Whitehead asked us from across the table at Thanksgiving dinner. He was a burly, balding man with a delicate pink button up and a pair of cleanly pressed chinos. Alison and I had sat down near the head, close to where the thin linen tablecloth barley met the mahogany edge. We sat there without much intention of talking to anyone, but as we soon discovered it was difficult avoiding all human interaction.

Alison invited me to spend a few days with her in Rochester Minnesota. So, when given the choice between staying at school and freeloading during the holiday, I chose the latter.

Rochester is the kind of town everyone knows about but has never been to. Situated an hour and a half by car south of Minneapolis, it’s the third largest city in Minnesota outside of the Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington metropolitan area. Perhaps most famously known as the home of the grandiose Mayo Clinic, downtown boasts a relatively impressive array of bars and restaurants while the surrounding residential neighborhoods are mostly quaint, upscale, and sprawling. It’s technically not a suburb, but anyone who has been there (and seen the boxy houses rolling on the hillsides) knows that it sure does look like one.

Alison did not hear Whitehead the first time around; she had been starring off at an old dog in the kitchen, wrapping her hair around her pinky finger, tilting her head to the side with a look of pained ennui on her face. I thought I heard a tiny gasp ejected from her lips when she turned back towards her dinner and saw Whitehead towering above us with a camera awkwardly poised at his face.

We leaned in, smiled, and the shutter clicked.

Whitehead is not part of Alison’s family, and as far as I know that was the first time the two had ever met. There were a lot of people Alison didn’t know at Thanksgiving, for the event wasn’t held at her house, or even a house of her relatives’, but Alison made a tradition of going to the neighbor’s every year, The Ulbricht’s.

The Ulbricht’s were a moderately wealthy couple, both doctors. Mr. Ulbricht was a foppy gentleman in a maroon sweater vest who made sure that everyone’s flute was never empty. Missus Ulbricht wore a knitted sweater underneath a red Christmas apron. They were, I imagine, a perfect sample of an aging Rochester couple—cute, happy, safe, and constantly throwing cocktail parties.

When asked why Alison went to Thanksgiving at the Ulbricht’s she always replied, “the oyster stuffing.”

Whitehead sat back down in his seat and grinned. He asked for our names. Alsion said hers first. When I said my name aloud he raised his eyebrows telling me that he probably would not be able to remember it, which I took to mean it was slightly too foreign. Later on he gave me an index card and told me to write it down.

When I asked Whitehead why he wanted to take our picture he explained, at length, that it was for a journalism project he was working on for his school, a prestigious east coast Ivy. Whitehead looked about ten years too old to be going to school, so I assumed he was doing graduate work. He told us that the project’s goal was to document different peoples’ experiences on Thanksgiving and that we were just the thing he was looking for. “You’re perfect,” he said. “You’re interesting.”

I’m not sure what Whitehead meant by “interesting,” and I was too shy to ask. After all, it was not my place to get offended, particularly when the hosts had been so kind in giving me champagne and appetizers of aged ham, provolone cheese, and access to a mound of crab dip the size of a premature baby. However, a quick look around the room could suggest a possible definition behind that loaded word.

Alison doesn’t dress like a normal twenty-one year old. She’s short and petite. Her hair is dyed dark brown, almost black. Her tortoise shell, square framed glasses sit on her peculiarly cute nose like a twig balancing on someone’s finger. She keeps a green scarf many sizes too big for her nuzzled around her neck. Her black pencil skirt tugs at her hips and presses up nicely against her pert buttocks. Her tiny legs, wrapped in grey stockings meant for an elderly woman, jut out from under the skirt as the limbs of a butterfly do from under its wings.

Alison was quite obviously the prettiest young-adult at Thanksgiving. Much prettier than the red head that recently completed the triathlon—she looked intimidating, and her wool slacks looked uncomfortable (it would not surprise me if they were either, for her face was constantly scrunched up like wad of paper). There was the broad shouldered Marine who constantly had a look of utter confusion on his face. There was the chubby seventeen year old swimmer who had hair that had been flat ironed so many times it looked as though it was going to fall apart at any moment.

So, what Whitehead may have meant by “interesting” was in fact an admission of Alison’s fascinating beauty. She’s naturally seductive, the kind of girl that could go days without showering and still look desirable. Besides, in a room full of crusty socialites it’s easy to see how Alison could be characterized as “interesting.” She’s a liberal arts college student. She’s in to photography and art. She loves Brazil. She has a wonderfully dry sense of cynicism. Of course, she’s “interesting.”

Oh yes, and then there’s me. I’m interesting because I’m not white. It’s the stock line I’ve had to repeat through the years: “Mymotherisfromamericabutmyfatherisfromnepal.” No matter how I spin it, or where I say it, the reaction tends to be generally the same. I haven’t the slightest clue how I wish people would react to me, and I certainly don’t expect something from them, mainly because I don’t know what it is exactly I want. But I can’t help this debilitating feeling of bitterness from rising up in me , boiling, ready to spit like a tea kettle. It never does. I don’t think it ever will.

I got up from the table to help myself to pie and coffee. The dog was still in the kitchen. I sat down next to him, sipping away. He looked like he didn’t want to be pet. This dog was so old, drooling, too tired to move. This dog looked like he wanted to be left alone. But I pet him anyway. I sipped my coffee again and grimaced. It was much, much too weak.