Red Wheelbarrow 2008 text FINAL REVISED.indd - De Anza College

you come to America, you should learn to speak American.” The list
went on. Although the state had apparently seen an influx of Hmong
and Somali immigrants in recent years, I rarely met another
brown person during my comings and goings in our suburban
community. I wasted more than a few idle moments wondering what
Hannah said about black people when I wasn’t around.
I know lots of people might think that some of the prostitutes
were probably minorities, but most of the folks who would make
that assumption either live on one of the coasts or watch too much
crime-drama TV. This was Minnesota. It’s not like L.A. or New York,
where a rainbow coalition of pretty young things flocks to the “Big
City,” then stumbles down some dark path littered with needles
and mean men. Most of the prostitutes I knew were Minnesota born
and raised. And like many other Minnesotans, they tended to come
from German and Scandinavian stock. Trish, for example, worried all
summer about getting sunburned. She was blonde and full-bodied,
but stopped just short of being fat. Sometimes she would come to
the desk and talk to me, vigorously applying sunscreen before she
went out to run errands or drum up business. She would bend over
to give her alabaster legs a good rubdown, her hands deftly whipping
around the fringes of her Daisy Dukes. Her voice floated up to me
from somewhere below the edge of the desk.
“Did you know that skin cancer is the most common form
of cancer in the United States? Or that a person’s risk of skin cancer
doubles if he or she has had five or more sunburns?” I stood on my
toes and leaned over the desk so that I could hear her better. Her legs
were long, and I suddenly found myself uncomfortably close to the
cottage cheese dimples that dotted her thighs. I drew back a little.
She straightened up and adjusted the brim of her widebrimmed
hat. “And furthermore,” she said, raising her eyebrows
with maternal concern, “melanoma is most deadly for cute brown
girls like you, because it’s more likely to go undetected.” She thrust
the sunscreen bottle forward. “Want some?”
“Uh, no thanks,” I said. “I’m gonna be indoors all day, and
the sun’ll go down in a couple of hours.” It was already after six, and
I would be the lone hotel employee on duty until 11:30, when the
night laundry guy arrived and I went home. Maybe it sounds nutty
to leave just one person in charge of an 88-room hotel, but truth be
told, there wasn’t much to do at night. Most of the heavy lifting
for check-out and check-in occurred in the morning and afternoon,
and once it got dark, foot traffic in the lobby slowed considerably. I
might give a guest extra towels, or hand a late arrival his room key.
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