SoMa Literary Review - Mac 'n' Cheese

Mac 'n' Cheese

By Paul Doucet

As a young man, Scott Carlson got called at whenever he walked down Mission Street in San Francisco . "Pinche guero!" "Puto...pendejo!" Scott was pretty sure what all those things meant. “Shh! Shh! Wait till this undercover cop walks by.” Being nothing he could do about his gentrified features, nor anything anybody could give to make him change them, Scott would grin, and continue walking. This method never provoked more than words.

From Mission Street , he'd hang left on Army Street where his girlfriend lived. There was a door in the courtyard of her family's apartment that gave him direct access into her room, which allowed him to bypass the large family, whom Scott never once met. When he reached her bedroom he'd then typically fail to germinate his cloudy, white seed in his girlfriend's Latin fanny.

After the new millennium Scott had a new attitude towards women, but only in the sense that he now preferred those who looked and acted exactly like he did. He met a gorgeous, dexterous woman with a large head through some friends, and the two had a daughter -- a beautiful and dexterous girl with a large head full of dark-red hair -- whom they named Caroline.

One evening after work, Scott picked up the four-year-old Caroline at her mom's so he could have his daughter for the weekend. They stopped off at Safeway on the way to his apartment to pick up food.

"So what do you want for dinner?" asked Scott.

"Umm," said Caroline. "Macaroni and cheese!"

"Then macaroni it is."

As they checked out, Caroline spotted a cartoonish doll among the impulse items. She tried to sneak the doll into the shopping basket, but Scott put it back. "But I want it!" she sulked. Scott stood by his decision.

When they got to the Safeway parking lot, Caroline stopped walking, and cried, "Stranger! Stranger!" and pointed at her dad. Scott tensed into a fighting stance, then scooped up his bobble-headed daughter, and tickled her in his arms. She was possessed with laughter -- the kind of excitement adults can't possibly feel, knowing more about what to expect from their environments.

Scott and his daughter left for his car, she under one arm, and the groceries under the other. Nobody who'd witnessed the scene did anything more than give Scott a shrewd glance, which was just the kind of apathy and confusion he'd learned to expect from people.

Scott wasn't grossly outsmarted by his own child until much later, when Caroline was a teenager. One Saturday afternoon Scott came back from his softball game and found Caroline sitting on his couch with a boy. The young couple was watching TV.

"Oh, hey, dad. How was the game?" said Caroline.

"Fine. Who's this?"

"Oh, this is Esteban."

Esteban sprang up off the couch to give Scott a handshake.

"Pleased to meet you, Dr. C," said the boy.

Scott waited until the next morning at breakfast to voice his growing concerns to Caroline.

"That boy you were with, does he go to school with you?"

"He goes to Mission High."

"Looks like a gangster," said Scott.

"Jesus, dad! Just because he's a Mexican-American. You're such a racist. I'm going to mom's!"

Then Caroline ran straight to Esteban's, to spend time with his large family, learn how to pronounce menudo and flautas properly, and absorb a culture that was not her own.

Paul Doucet lives in San Francisco. He works for his dad, Michael, in Albany, CA .