“You don’t seem mad,” I risk, pulling out a papa. I bite into it and let the hot carne burn the roof of my mouth.
“I was mad. No, actually, I’ve been mad. I had a rough term, was worried about the department letting me go because of the specificity of my experience. But I made it through. And on the night my colleagues and I are celebrating the relief of making it another term closer to tenure, my typically lovely, obedient, and polite daughter dumps her drink onto one of my best students. And then she refuses to apologize or even explain herself to me. She tells her father though, specifically asking him to keep her reasons from me. She shuts me off; he shuts me out. We no longer joke together about her crushes or her friends’ drama.” She takes another bite. “You know, my other friends with kids always tell me they’re jealous of how comfortable you are with me and your father. And after the way most of my family reacted to me marrying Miguel and having you, I treasured that relationship.” She dips her head, shielding her eyes with her free hand. “As a parent, all you want is to do right by your kids. I always thought your father and I did right by you. But now you’re having screaming matches with your best friend in the middle of the night and ditching school and … kissing girls? And you’re about to move away and go be an adult, and I have no idea how to talk to you about it.”
She’s crying now, looking unbelievably young, and I’m so consumed by shock, I don’t react. I swallow the last of my papa, the mound of crusted mashed potatoes sliding roughly down my throat as I watch my mother weep into her pale hands.
“It’s not an explanation, or an excuse, I know. But what you heard last night … it’s not unrelated to what happened with Jeremiah.
“He made homophobic comments.” My chest loosens. “He was talking about that Hamlet adaptation where Hamlet and Ophelia are lesbians, and he … he said things he shouldn’t have.”
She furrows her brows. “So you dumped your drink on him?”
A laugh breaks free from my lips. “I did. And I didn’t want you to know that what he said made me that upset, because I didn’t want you to know that I took it personally.”
She nods and bites her lip. “So, um … so, you’re a lesbian?”
“No, I still like boys,” I say with a smile. “But I think I can like girls too. Probably any gender. I don’t know if gender even matters anymore.”
“But why wouldn’t you tell me this?”
“I didn’t want you to see me differently. I don’t know how to be anyone besides that lovely, obedient, polite daughter you mentioned,” I admit, whisper-quiet. “I don’t know how to not live up to that.”
“You don’t clean your room, have never cooked a real meal for yourself, and you snap back at us way more than we should allow.” Mom laughs and looks up. Tears blur my vision. “You’re really not as perfect as I’m giving you credit for.”
She’s joking now, but I ignore the temptation to let the serious moment pass. “I don’t tell you everything, Mom,” I confess, and she nods sadly, like she realized this long ago but is only now accepting it. “I try to, but it’s hard.” I want to say that she doesn’t want to hear that Sammie gets intense whenever he’s sad. That Lindsay had a pregnancy scare last year after a one-night stand with a boy from another school, and that I was more worried about what it meant that she told Agatha weeks before she told me than I was about the actual pregnancy. That I’m absolutely scared shitless about going to college and growing up and not having the same little life I’ve always had. But instead, I say, “I don’t want to be your boy-crazy Ophelia anymore.”
She flinches, and I feel it, deep within my own chest, like her heart and mine are still connected in some maternal, fetal way. I watch in horror as my deepest fear comes true, that this’ll be the thing we can’t come back from. That one day we will be just like her and most of her cousins and aunts and uncles, passive and shallow in their love for one another, as if they never shared a family tree at all. Just like Talia and Dani.
But she recovers in a second, and when she smiles, quivering mouth and pink eyes, she looks resolute more than disappointed. “Have I ever told you that I was torn between naming you Ophelia or Juliet?” she asks, somewhat wistfully.
I nod. She mentioned it on a near daily basis when I was in the third grade and a boy named Romeo transferred to our school. You two could’ve been so cute, she cooed. It was the one time she rallied for a boy more than she now does for Sammie. It was also the one time I didn’t tell her about a crush I had on a boy, like even then I dreaded being too similar to her expectations.
“Did I ever tell you why I chose Ophelia though?”
“No,” I admit, surprised I never asked. “I always figured you wanted something more unique. Or that Dad vetoed Juliet.” Dad never wanted to watch adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, claiming it was too tragic for him. The irony of him still loving Hamlet isn’t lost on me.
She laughs. “No, he always knew it was my dream to name a child after one of them. Juliet and Ophelia were always my favorite because they are two of the most quickly dismissed among people who refuse to dig past the surface narrative. Juliet is remembered as a foolish teenage girl who threw away her life for a boy she hardly knew, and Ophelia is remembered more for her virginity and inability to accept Hamlet’s rejection than anything else.”
“Great legacies you left me.”
“But that’s not who those girls were,” she corrects firmly. “Romeo was just as much a hopeless romantic as Juliet, and they gave their lives to show the world that true love mattered more than senseless hatred. Juliet cared enough about her family to die so they could live brighter, wiser lives. I respected her as a character for being more mature than most give her credit for.”
“Then why’d you pick Ophelia?” I ask, dusting my hands against my jeans. She narrows her eyes at the crumbs I’m spreading in the car, but keeps going.
“Ophelia was all those things too. But she also wore her heart on her sleeve. She wasn’t ‘mad’ in her final scene; she was grieving without shame. She was begging for someone to hear her desperation beneath the offered flowers.” She exhales shakily and takes my hands, not unlike the way Wesley had, gently, like she fears I’ll pull away if she’s too firm. “When you fell in love with gardening and roses, I took it as a sign that I made the right choice on your name. And I never wanted to be like Juliet’s or Ophelia’s parents and get in the way of your happiness, so I tried to encourage your crushes and romantic tendencies. I never meant for you to follow in Ophelia’s footsteps by struggling so much with love you felt you had to hide. I didn’t mean for her suffering to become your legacy too.”