Unripe Mango
by Jinjia Grace Hu
My husband made me a mango crepe cake for our eleventh anniversary. “Eleven layers of crepes,” he says. “One for each year we’ve spent together.” There’s no doubt that he made the cake himself: the whipped cream is grainy, the edible flowers are topsy-turvy, and the assembly is the textbook definition of slipshod. The only silver lining is the diced mangoes, all the same size, quietly sitting next to each other like little yellow pearls strung on a necklace.
It would’ve been a sweet gesture if I weren’t allergic to mangoes.
Mango, the word that originally meant unripe fruit, is not unlike my marriage. Our marriage. It’s harder and harder for me to say our these days, round in both form and pronunciation, lodged at the bottom of my throat like a popcorn kernel. Obviously, eleven years is not long enough for a mango to ripen, or for a partner to remember a fatal allergy.
Joshua is cutting the cake now, dividing it into eight slices even though there are only two of us. When I first told my mom the marriage wasn’t working, she said it was because we didn’t have children. “Why do you think people have children?” she asked, then answered herself. “Because they need someone else to love!” Six years have passed since that conversation, along with five attempts at IVF and thirty Clomid tablets, but it’s still just the two of us, and the marriage is still not working.
Nothing is wrong with our marriage except that we don’t love each other. There’s no cheating; no abuse; no financial issues, which we’ve kept separate from the start; no sudden onset of deafening sleep apnea; or any other dramatic obstacles or traumatic trials like those my friends face. Joshua is a wonderful man, whom I respect, admire, and like as a friend. But love, like the growth of a mango tree, cannot be forced. I don’t love him, and he doesn’t love me—a fact I recognize and admit without hard feelings.
“Cheers to eleven years of partnership.” Joshua says, raising his glass.
“Cheers.” I smile.
“Steel anniversary,” he says. “Strong and firm, like our marriage.”
Steel is made by people. It’s not pure, not formed naturally, not even meant to exist, but it’s endurable, refusing to break even when you actually want it to, like the kettle in your childhood home that stubbornly witnessed you growing up.
“Strong and firm,” I repeat.
“Do you want to try the cake?” He looks at me expectantly.
We met freshman year, when everyone met everyone, and we got married when everyone else got married. Like two rootless lotuses floating abreast in a murky river, we let the current carry us and stayed together mindlessly. Is lack of love reason enough for a wish to divorce? My mother doesn’t think so; neither do my friends. They say, “You’re no longer twenty.” They say, “You watch too many rom-coms.” They say, “I wish I were you! Joshua’s a keeper.” They say, “Love’s overrated, and what are you going to do?” I don’t know what I’ll do if we eventually get divorced—an ignorance I once appreciated, but which now seems like no more than another unwise thought I have on a whim. When you chew a piece of gum for too long, people expect you to swallow it.
“Of course,” I reply, taking the slice of cake from him.
The mangoes, tucked between thin crepes, glisten, warm and yellow shafts of sunlight peeking through clouds. I should probably be grateful that he’s not trying to poison me, that he simply forgets. There are many married couples killing each other on the news these days, but his mistake is unintentional. Perhaps it’s even unfair to say he forgets I’m allergic to mangoes, as he never remembers in the first place, the way one doesn’t remember one’s second cousin’s fiancée is a vegetarian, or one’s nail artist’s aunt died in a car accident. The information is heard, then quickly slips away like sand through fingers.
“It’s good!” he says, not waiting for me. The whipped cream clings to the useless space between his upper lip and nose, and I have no intention of telling him or wiping it away. Let it be. When was the last time I touched his lips? We have sex but seldom kiss or hug, and even the sex has become more technical and detached lately because of IVF.
Holding the fork with all my fingers, I pierce the mango crepe cake. Eleven years of marriage. Written out, 11—a perfect pair of chopsticks on paper—are in fact two parallel lines that accompany each other but never touch.
He eats without looking at me, as we’ve already run out of things to say. I eat the cake, one bite after another, each larger than the last, until I finish the whole slice.
Swallow
by Jinjia Grace Hu
“What time is your flight tomorrow?” I ask as I let him take off my blouse.
“Sometime before noon,” he says. The sheet is silky but cold, like the grayish sky outside, carrying the late fall’s melancholy on its back. Late, but not too late. He takes my trembling hands. “Look at me,” he says.
I don’t move, self-conscious about the chipped nail polish on my index finger. I hope he hasn’t noticed. “Close your eyes,” I murmur. He hesitates but eventually obeys. I lean to kiss his lips—soft and moist like clouds before rain—his nose; and his right eyelid, where a beauty mark perches, where nature pecked him before I did.
“You’re so beautiful,” he says, his eyes still closed. I say nothing and smile, like I always do. Once, when we were idling around the playground after school, Naomi told me that quietness makes you desirable because it makes you attractive in men’s eyes. Real men, she added. Not the boys in our class. So I’ve been quiet, waiting for men to come to me, to knock on my door and tell me they desire me, that they want me, like a swallow wants spring, that I’m their home. I waited for them when I was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, and twenty. Then Naomi, who’s never quiet, married a man who desired her. Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, and twenty-six. No man came, and I said nothing.
Now, on the cold, silky sheet, sagging in the middle, I feel his body against mine, his breath close to my ear. Too close. A tingling sensation seizes me, though I’m not certain if it’s real. Where, if it’s real, does it come from? It scares me that this intoxicating feeling has been inside me all along, waiting to come out like a butterfly in a self-made chrysalis. He bites my earlobe, then moves down to my neck. I cover my breasts nervously before his tongue finds them, where his warm breath has already reached. “What’s wrong?” he asks.
“Nothing,” I say, trying to smile—more to reassure myself than him. It’s hard to tell who’s more nervous: me or my breasts. Both have waited quietly for twenty-seven years.
His body exudes the forcefulness born of his sex, the confidence born of his youth—still naive to this world’s disappointing truths and lies—and the dexterity born of his experience. I’m certain I’m not his first. He’s too fluent, too well-versed. Sex is his mother tongue, and love is his dialect.
“I love you more than a poet loves fall,” he says. “When will I see you again?”
“When the time is right,” I reply. Swallows leave and come back, but New York is full of pigeons. I arch my body to meet his desire, making myself a bridge connecting me of the past and me of the future. I moan before I cry, out of neither pain nor happiness, but to not be quiet. To never be quiet again.
About the Author
Jinjia Grace Hu was born in Nanjing, China, and lives in New York with her cat, Almond. She is an MFA candidate in creative writing at Columbia University, and you can find her on Instagram – @jiazizizi_grace.
