ANOTHER FAMILY WEEKEND

I don’t remember what I said, but I remember the glass of ice water my mother threw at my chest; I know the glass was full to the brim because she doesn’t drink water, only seltzer; “How can you not drink water,” I’ve asked her. She’s never answered me. She doesn’t feel the need to answer me. I think her seltzer-only philosophy has something to do with a Midwestern childhood full of soda pop and a Northeastern adulthood full of self-denial.

I remember the chill; I remember the goosebumps that settled into my arms as my sister, my father, and I decided to finish our meal anyway. The food had just arrived in front of us and my mother’s empty chair; we weren’t going to leave just because my mother had stormed out. I remember I found the goosebumps stupid, unnecessary; I know, I told my body, I feel the water, I don’t need you telling me I’m cold.

I don’t remember what I said. I have said so many awful things to her that I can’t recall those particular words. 

Even more than the chill, I remember how my clothes clung to my chest, how the vertical puddle crept down the length of the only button-down shirt I owned; I hated dressing up; I wore the button-down and khakis for my mother’s sake. My mother cared (and still cares) about dressing up and appearances and respectability politics and teeth and signs of wealth and not being both the only Latinx people in the room and the worst dressed. 

We had been sitting together at a brunch place in Providence, a fancy restaurant that doubled as an art store or gallery, or maybe it wasn’t a gallery but I remember these hilariously out-of-place modern art chandeliers. I especially remember one that looked like a horse eating a lion. These chandeliers hung above rather normal-looking black napkins and white tablecloths and white people and wood tables; everything was normal except for the art and the whiteness and the obvious fanciness of the place. The faux-rustic smell of the brick walls assured me that not a single dish on the menu would cost less than $8. I was right. 

I should mention that it was the Saturday of my college’s family weekend. It was the second family weekend cut short by a fight between me and my mother. 

Two waiters arrived with a stack of four black napkins: one for the table, two for the floor, and one for my chest. The waiters pretended they didn’t see anything even though they definitely saw everything; surely they blabbered on and on to the kitchen staff who didn’t get to witness the water-flinging themselves; if I know anything about service work, my family was the highlight of their day. Something to break up the monotony. I bet that flamboyant waiter with dyed teal hair reenacted everything to the chefs, who turned their backs to the food just in time for the teal hair guy to pantomime my mother’s dramatic toss of the water in slow-motion; I’m sure he ended the story with, “And I was like,” and an expression; I hope everyone laughed. 

I am grateful that my mother did not throw the glass too. 

I don’t want to paint myself as the victim. I have insulted my mother’s parenting in front of her abusive parents. Under my breath, I have cast every curse upon her; I have occasionally repeated those curses to her face. Though I don’t believe in God, I have prayed for her death; when her best friend died of cancer, I looked into the open casket and wished for a substitution. When I thought I had mono, just after the woman I had hooked up with the day before called to tell me she had been diagnosed with mono, I spat in my mother’s cup of seltzer. Twice. Most of her retaliations are probably earned.

+++

I remembered the brunch as I watched the Netflix series Sex Education. The show depicts one character in the fallout of her broken family. Her name is Maeve. 

I am not Maeve. Maeve has seen shit. Her mother was a drug addict, and she doesn’t talk about that. She calls a trailer park home now because she pays her own rent. She pretends not to care about anyone or anything, though she secretly loves books and the occasional human connection. 

We learn all this about Maeve in the third episode, when she needs someone to take her home from an abortion. She struggles to find anyone. It’s especially hard for her because she doesn’t like to ask anyone for help. 

As I watched the show, I wondered who I would call if I needed someone to take me home. Anyone but my parents, I decided. But I struggled to think of anyone in particular. I see a lot of myself in Maeve. 

But I have yet to tell you about the part of the brunch which made me carry great empathy for Maeve. The part that made me weep for her. 

  After my father and I scraped my mother’s poached eggs onto our plates, after I attempted to dry myself off in the bathroom with paper towels and a half-hearted limbo under the hand-dryer, after my sister finished her food silently, we left the restaurant. My mother called to ask where my sister and father were. She had ordered a ride to their car and sat there now, in the passenger seat, waiting to be driven home. My father spoke in that baby voice; he does this whenever my mother gets upset; when I say that my father is spineless, I state it as a fact, a perfectly neutral fact. He ordered an Uber to their car. 

While we waited outside, my sister pulled me aside.

“You need to work on your relationship with Mom,” she said. “I know you don’t see her much now, and you have friends who support you, but when you graduate, you’ll see that the friends leave. They do. Only Mom and Dad will stay forever.” 

“Maybe,” I said.  

“Come on, Jaime,” she said. “You don’t want to be another one of those queer kids who doesn’t have a relationship with their parents.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s sad. They’re sad. Those people who say they have found families now. That they don’t need their blood families.” 

“But I am that. I already say that. I have a found family that supports me.” 

“What about our family, Jaime? Mom and Dad don’t support you? Who pays for you to come to this school?”

I didn’t say anything.

“People find new families because they get kicked out of their real ones. Because their parents will never speak to them again. It’s not that they would prefer not to see their families.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You’re still such an asshole,” she said. She walked away.

If I had to tell you what I said to my mother, I would guess something along these lines: If you don’t want to be here, why did you come; You’re so goddamn uptight; I wish we could act like a normal family; Can you please stop controlling what I eat; I don’t care.

I am not Maeve; she struggles with so much that I have never experienced. But when she wakes up in the hospital after her abortion, she wears a face I know too well, that I-don’t-feel-anything face, that face I wore when my sister exposed every reason I should be grateful. When I saw that face, I cried for Maeve. 

I cried a lot watching that episode of Sex Education. 

I didn’t just cry for Maeve. I cried for Eric too. Eric is the best friend of the main character, Otis; yes, Eric is the gay black best friend of the straight white protagonist; diversity in Sex Education is relegated to sidekicks; are we surprised? Eric and Otis formed a necessary alliance as two social outcasts. The screenwriters try to convince us that Eric is an outcast because he once got a boner while playing the French horn in middle school band, but I’m not convinced that’s enough reason for the charming Eric to get shoved into a locker by the school bully every morning. Eric needs to be developed more. 

In episode three, Eric invites his new friend from swing band to his house. She fetishizes him and asks if he wants to fuck; before she even asks, she has already taken off her top and bra. When he says no, she asks him about the portrait of Black Jesus in his room; she finds Jesus hot; she didn’t even know Jesus was Black.

Then she finds Eric’s closet full of women’s clothing.

“I’m not a ladyboy,” Eric says.

“Do you want to dress up?” she asks.

They do.

When Eric’s father opens the door, a tray of tea in hand, Eric and his new friend are wearing heavy makeup and dresses. They’re watching gay porn. At his father’s request, she leaves the house immediately.

The father looks disappointed, not angry. 

“Take that stuff off your face before your mother sees,” he says, and leaves the room.

Recently I figured out that I am not a man; I’m genderqueer; I haven’t told my family. When we pass androgynous people on the street, my mother says, “Is that a them?” 

My sister, who is marrying a trans man this summer, says, “I feel like those people are just confused. Or they’ll try out these pronouns until they graduate, then they’ll slip into he or she when it fits them.”

My father doesn’t say anything because whenever he opens his mouth to say something conservative, I fight with him.

If my father caught me wearing the glittering multichrome eyeshadow I wear every day while away from home, or maybe that skirt I keep tucked under my bed, he would say, “Take that stuff off before your mother sees.”

I cried a lot when I finished the episode. The person I was dating asked, “What’s wrong?”

“I just want Maeve to be happy,” I said, sobbing. “And I want Eric to be happy. I need them to be happy. I need them to live on their own and dress how they want and not take shit from anybody and not care what their parents say and be happy.”

If you asked, I would tell you I am happy; I bake egg custard tarts for fun; I have sleepovers with my best friend; most nights I read for pleasure; I write what I want to write; sometimes I go to therapy; I bike twenty-five minutes to a Latinx grocer to buy the best handmade tortillas in Providence; I spend time with my found family.

I know I sound like I am trying to convince myself.

I call my mother as little as I can, but I do call her. We don’t say “I love you,” but after we fight she sometimes texts me those words. Maybe to test whether or not I’ll say it back, maybe not. 

After my sister and father drove off, I started the long walk home; home as in my dorm; I didn’t ask them for a ride even though we were headed in the same direction; I walked like I knew where I was going; I walked home, still dripping wet, and tried not to cry too hard or too often for the rest of my life; I dried off along the way.  

AUTHOR: Jaime Serrato Marks is a nerd who likes to write about queerness, dungeons & dragons, open relationships, ice cream shops, and more. Jaime grew up in Brookline, MA and now lives in Boston and Providence.

ARTWORK: Angie Kang