Mayo [Amherst]

by Aileen Ma

An oddly nostalgic feeling washes over her as she closes her eyes, leans back against the sofa and just breathes in. Sweet relaxation. And strawberry scented shampoo. This has been the most hectic four weeks of her life, hectic in a fast paced overload of creative passion sort of hectic. Hectic as in so very completely worth sending in that scholarship application. Hectic as in why must all good things end.

Her eyes open, as if on cue, and gaze at the suite’s common area clock, conveniently straight ahead. Check-out time is 2 hours away, and already the emotions feel as if they are beginning to mix, ready to settle in.

She goes back to her own room to commence frantic last minute packing. Stuffs most of her clothes into the bright red borrowed suitcase by sheer force. Handles the various handouts, free-write notebooks and signed books carefully, resisting the temptation to open covers and begin reading. Then cracks. Cracks open the pages of Farewell Navigator and flips to her favorite story. Caught between the flurry of the pages, a slip of paper falls to the floor. She bends down to fish it up. Scrunches up her face in shades of confusion.

The innocent looking white paper betrays no signs of a struggle, nothing out of the ordinary. It only reads, Mayo.

Mayo. As soon as she whispers the word she remembers. Remembers the only negative things she’ll ever remember about the whole month in dreamy Amherst. How a week in, her face began to look strange in the mirror. Something an extra swab of toner couldn’t alter. Without any apparent reason. Until she realized, gazing around her mixed-genre classroom one day, that she was practically the only Asian American in the whole program. That Amherst was completely and diversely white, with a token Chinese Restaurant in the center of town to supply chop suey year round.

Reverse racism? her inner critic speaks. No, just hypersensitivity, that’s all. She replies. And some. What about the day of the fiction work shop she realized, that Derek, the imposing jock-type from New Jersey actually had the last name Loy, and spiky black hair to match it. How at that very same moment, it seemed, the class’s discussion went the route of racial stereotypes, and he supplied an example of his own. We white people sure love to have mayo on everything! He had exclaimed, with deafening laughter that the class soon joined in on. She closes her eyes and zeroes in on the memory. Catches a glimpse of something she had only sensed before. Somewhere between his laughter and words, a pause, and a look towards her. An apology? A statement?

She opens her eyes and tries to shake off the thoughts. She has always lived through inward memories it seems, and now she wishes that her way of living was less vivid. Less overpowering. Because all of these feelings had come from one single word. And every single syllable hurt.

Mayo. Mayo. Mayo. It sounded exactly like that word Auntee Lin used to say. The word for no, the expression for without.

Mei You.