nonfiction by megan mandrachio

Mangoes: A Memoir Told through the Taste of a Fruit

I have always loved the sour, unripened mango. The sour, unripened mango, with a splash of hot sauce, a pinch of salt, and a dash of alguashte. The sour, unripened mango, with a splash of hot sauce, a pinch of salt, and a dash of ground pumpkin seeds, bagged by a woman who only wanted 25 cents for it, in the country where my mother had lived most of her life before she left to become an American. Its taste paints a portrait of her in my mind, one that shows a little more teeth when the backdrop is the land she grew up on with bare feet and plantains for breakfast. I see the runny mascara on her hooded lids, from sweating in the heat, mezclado with tears of laughter, and her tanned skin creasing at the dimples she has passed down to me.

I watch her twisting and knotting the plastic bag, then rolling it between the palms of her hands. The bag of yellowish-green turns a bright red as the sauce paints each shred of fruit with its heat. She gnaws off one end of the bag and spits out the nip of plastic with grace. Mangoes bleed through the cavity with her puckered-lip squeezes; her hand pushing the fruit as if she were emptying a flattened tube of toothpaste. Sometimes, she speaks loudly in between chews, but does so with a distinctive softness, saying something that exudes a warmth. Even when she throws her head back laughing, it looks gentle. And perhaps, that is why I only ever can envision her smiling—it's something you remember.

When my mother left El Salvador in her early twenties with a fiancé visa, she sat on her first plane ride with the images of New York City pieced together from translated movies where lips never moved at the same pace as the voices that would speak out of them. I was yet to be formed in all aspects of the word. 

Before I had caused her elote cravings, the strong aversion towards the smell of her neighbor’s cooking, and fainting during church services, she had been far from the mango trees that inhabit the cracks in, what was now, her childhood home. She had felt the cold of winter and touch of snow for the first time, with only my father there—the gringo she had spotted sleeping during his layover in the waiting area of the San Salvador airport where she had worked. The one who had come up to her before his flight scrambling the only Spanish words he knew, hoping through his thick accent he was asking for her phone number. It worked. He worked hard, extremely hard, to eventually hold her and then hold her while holding me, inside of a warm apartment in Flushing, Queens.

As soon as my mother could, she carried me on a plane to her birthplace to feel the warm abrazos from those that took turns holding me. Once I was able to not only hear, but listen, Spanglish flooded my ears. I riddled my mother with new words, I corrected my father’s misjudgment of platano for a banana, and I grew as a concoction of them.

Years later, I would continue to travel back to the Salvadoran warmth where my mother learned how to flinch at helicopter sounds. I was a tourist sleeping in her childhood bedroom, the closest thing to her that one could be, yet so far away from anything that had frightened her growing up. I still go back, returning to a place where sweet and sour mangoes taste the same as they do in my mind. The memories I recall when I long for their tang while staring at the large, red, overripe, too-sweet fruits under the mango signs at the city grocery store. They sit next to the oranges and apples on crates in a cold, bright store where the freezers buzz louder the closer you walk towards them. Where it's almost impossible to envision the mangoes ever being connected to a tree. The taste hardly ever comes close to the ones unattainable without a flight and a drive to my grandparent's peach-colored adobe house with their car parked in the living room behind the sofa, and the smell of burning firewood permeating the air.

When my grandparents come to the states to visit, the scent of their homeland seeps from their luggage. My grandmother opens her suitcase, letting the aroma diffuse into the suburban air. As weeks of their visit unfold, the fragrance gradually dissipates, leaving behind a lingering trace of our roots.

El olor swirls around me as if it’s been just walked through by oxen tugging barrels of hay under morning light, parade dancers smiling while catching the beat of drums and trumpets, guitar players' rounded mouths serenading drunken slow dances, women balancing water barrels atop the flattest parts of their heads, and the smell of my grandmother's perfume blended with the sweat from the warmth of the sun hugging her too tightly in her clothing. 

She pulls out a jar of tiny mangoes for me.

I take a bite into the fruit that has spent days off its mother tree and hours peeled from its stem and skin. It tastes as it should. A mango that has been picked, overlooked by inmigración, and has clung to freshness for me to relish. Yet, it lacks a flavor, un sabor too intricate to capture in a brine-soaked jar. It yearns for hot toes on cold tile, the rhythmic plucking of guitars, my mother dancing with my father, my grandmother dancing with my grandfather, my uncles and aunts dancing with their children—my cousins.

I'm sure my mother tastes it too, savoring the absence in some intricate and profound way that even I cannot fully grasp. Simply put, I miss those mangoes.