The Mango Cart
By
Jon Doughboy
Over fateful margarita bowls the size of milk pails at Mi Bandera he expected his friend to wax miserable about her latest break-up per usual but instead she launched into recapping her recent dream:
“Along a dim and dusty highway, I was shambling like some pathetic depression-era Okie,” she said, pausing for effect, for him to feel the dust, the dark, the pathos, inviting him into the dream.
“You were white?”
She slurped up neon green margarita, moving the miniature, decorative umbrella aside with her nose—an elegant, soft, strokable nose, and said “not just white, but pasty, like a little British prince, like a little inbred future monarch, and I come across a young black woman in a rainbow-colored poncho and she’s selling mangoes out of a shopping cart, like, I don’t know, two hundred mangoes, some ripe, some firm, and I’m thirsty all of a sudden, victim of a mighty thirst.”
“I like that,” he said, his own lips, heart and life parched, “‘a mighty thirst.’”
“Well, I didn’t, it was like I’d swallowed all the sand in the Sahara and the only thing within miles and miles with the least bit of moisture, aside from our bodies, mine and the mango seller’s, were the mangoes, so I start running my hands over them, like Tom Hanks with his coconuts in Castaway.”
“I’ve never seen Castaway.”
“You should because you sort of look like him.”
“Lost?”
“Handsome in a generic white way.”
“Generic?”
“It’s a compliment.” She nosed the umbrella once again.
He stirred his icy margarita slop thinking of Arctic explorers trapped by and in and between ice, forced to eat their dogs, losing fingers and feet to frostbite. The cold, unknown, hostile terrain. But they forged ahead nonetheless just as he must, upright and onward if alone, in love with her even though they’d been friends since elementary school when she used to smear her boogers on his forearm while they took turns reading Hatchet out loud, the plane going down, the pilot’s farty death throes. He’d grown to accept his status as dear, lifelong friend—accept, bemoan, even cherish—grown to appreciate how he outlasted all her boyfriends and girlfriends and one short-lived husband. But did he want to listen to her call him handsome in a generic way? No. And maybe she sensed this though he’d long suspected a certain willful ignorance on her part when it came to him and his unrequited feelings.
“I start running my hands along the mangoes, my pasty white dream hands, and the mangoes are still mangoes but they’re also simultaneously heads, not skulls, but heads complete with faces and features, noses, eyes, hair,” she said.
“I know what faces consist of.”
“I started to recognize them.”
“Were they generically handsome?”
She ignored him. “One was my uncle Seymour, the Jewish one, and he had payots, long, luxurious side curls even though in life—because he’s dead now, did I mention that? You knew that, right?—he wasn’t the least bit religious, and then his mango mouth starts moving, starts chanting something I can’t understand, maybe it’s Yiddish, maybe Hebrew or Old Aramaic, but I know it’s important, vital, life-changing content, world-changing truths. Then the old mango seller picks up Mango Seymour and hurls him behind her. I hear Mango Seymor chanting through the air and into the woods beyond the highway’s lights and before I can protest, not that I could have said much because remember my mouth is a desert, tongue dried like jerky, I hear another voice in the cart and one of the mangoes transforms into another head. Meanwhile there are no other cars on this highway, mind you. Not another soul. Just me and the mango seller and her cart, and its Darby, you remember her?”
He did. Darby the camp friend who became more than friends, a nemesis he only met once, after they’d graduated into lovers. Seeing them make out on a couch, the way their teeth pulled at each other’s lips, nearly broke him.
“Darby’s mango head is making kissing sounds at me and just as I bend to kiss her tropical fruit skin, this fucking mango seller grabs her and hurls her into the dark and I want to say something—”
He interrupted with forced cleverness. “Did the seller know Darby was rotten?”
“I look down and the cart is a clamor now, my father’s face in there, black but also mangoey, you know, a little orange, a little green, with his strong brow and kind eyes and even the acne scars high on his cheeks, and he’s giving me advice, unintelligible advice though somehow I know it’s the most useful advice I’ll ever hear, something definitive about being Black in America, about Being, period, capital B, something urgent. And there’s my ex-husband’s mango head too and he’s asking me for money, dinero, un poco, por favor, mi amor, and my old guru Keshawn is in there telling me about lost tribes and Deanna my cross-fit coach is in there and she’s saying my ass looks amazing but I still need to work on my snatch form and I can understand this for some reason, this bitch criticizing my form, but I can’t respond to anyone, mango after mango of old friends and lovers and relatives and teachers and bosses, because I’m so thirsty and the mango seller is grabbing them and chucking them before I can focus on any one mango face which is maddening because I know I have the perfect response to each if she would just give me the chance, do you know that feeling?”
“Being mad at a mango seller?”
“No, knowing just what to say, what you must say, but not having the chance, in fact seeing the chance come and go.”
His mouth was impossibly dry now, a windswept tundra, though he’d been working through his sugary margarita while she was telling him this, “maybe, yeah, maybe I can relate, a little.”
“I can’t tell you how sad it made me, all those heads, those mango heads of these important people in my life, getting chucked like trash, littering dark woods on some lonely, nameless highway in some dream-night, and then, heartache of all heartaches,” and here her voice actually caught in her throat but he couldn’t tell if it was the memory of the dream or a sliver of unblended ice in her margarita, “there are only two mangoes left and one is my mother.”
Her mother died when she was a teenager, suddenly, taken by a swift illness, and that loss loomed over her life ever since. He knew her mother too, knew her and loved her, a second mother to him, a dynamic woman, an art teacher, vibrant, full of laughs, full of life while she was alive.
“For some infuriating reason my mother is the only mango that isn’t talking, that isn’t saying anything. She’s just sitting there helpless in the bottom of the cart and of course the mango seller doesn’t care, she just grabs my mango mother and tosses her like all the rest into the night and I find my voice, finally, and I say, ‘I’ll kill you, you cunt, bring them back, bring her back, where’s my mother, my father,’ and I’m shaking the cart now, bouncing the final mango in there, when the mango seller suddenly disappears,” she said, clapping her hands and then showing her empty cupped palms to him.
“What do you mean, disappears?”
“Poof, presto, gone, all trace of her erased except her poncho which I put on because it’s cold, suddenly, darker than before, colder, and I’m all alone—”
“You’re not, though.”
“—and I want to venture off the road and into the dark to look for all those dear mangoes but I’m scared, terrified, because I can’t leave the road, leaving the road means death, so I start pushing the cart down the road towards who knows where and there’s one mango left just bouncing around in the cart, bruised and damaged, and I’m still thirsty but I don’t want to eat it because then I won’t have any mangoes. I’ll just be alone and maybe a little less thirsty but who knows how long this road is? How long the night, the dream? So we shuffle along together like this, the mango and me, shuffling forever,” then she finished the last of her margarita, a bit tipsy now, the straw gurgling up the neon green icy remains.
“What about the last mango? Whose face was it?”
She shrugged.
“Aren’t you curious?”
Another shrug. A round of shrugs for the bar. An empire of shrugs.
“How could you not want to know? What’s wrong with you? You call that a dream? You call that a story?” and he wasn’t saying this now, he was yelling. The waiter leaned on the end of the bar staring with professional concern while the other two customers at the high table in the corner cast him looks of drunken judgement.
“I don’t know what to call it, a dream, a vision, a nightmare, a prophesy, a visit to the astral plane. What do you think it means?”
She asked this question with an emphasis on the “you,” a weight on the “you,” a challenge and a threat and a suggestion and a plea and he didn’t know if it was the margarita or his best friend’s hazel eyes boring into him or the usual earth’s rotation just momentarily made apparent but he felt like the whole bar, his whole life, was a cart bouncing along a dark road somewhere. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
