Sunday Dinner
by Adina-Marie Torres
University of the Incarnate Word
Adina-Marie Torres is a sophomore at the University of the Incarnate Word, graduating spring of 2025. She's a double major in Fashion Merchandising and English with a passion for the arts.
I can’t help but think about how you were always so mad at me. You told me to wash the dishes after Dad barbequed, but he never rinses his boards clean, so instead, they sit there: fermenting in the filth you and Dad created to serve up Sunday dinner.
I clean, half vomiting as I can’t wash the seasoning away. Thanksgiving’s leftover dishes already lay in their respective cabinets. Composed and sheltered until the next year when they’re forced to put on their performance again. My family and I are left with the reality of the season, half-baked pies, a sore football game, and couch conversations. The red dots from the chupacabra rub Dad uses to cover up the fatty meat stay stuck to the wood, permanently staining the grain of the cutting board.
Your blue ivory teacup, a gift from your mother, stands solely to the side, unwavering and towering above it all. There’s no chance of red staining. It sits atop the swirled saucer, blue ivory bordering the edges, keeping an appropriate distance between the marbled countertop, the barbeque grease, and the dirty sponge. A brown rim of spilled tea and cream encircles the teacup, threatening its pristine reign.
The teacup never experienced the dirt from the outdoors, the dirty spatulas, or the outside roll of napkins, all the dirt came from inside the house. There’s a stray curl, a grey one, and a speck of glitter that steeps in last night’s tea. It simmers in the concoction you made.
Who were you? Before you were a mother, before your mother wept as if you had died, but you were in college, engaged, and soon to be married. Sometimes I see her, the revealed parts of you, in between your rests between mother and person.
I glance towards the teabag, slowly molding in the leftover tea and spit-water you couldn’t drink. It keeps me company, the floral notes perfuming the air with your signature scent of disgust and judgment. Even the tea you made wasn’t worthy enough for you to enjoy, to sip all of it, drink it whole.
It’s just me and the off-brand Dawn.
Suddenly there’s you, all firm and no love. “If you’re not going to help provide dinner then you should at least clean the dishes properly.” Your nails grip my shoulder a little too hard. Perfect little ovals embed in my collarbone. The sting of your nails piercing through my sweater lingers when you leave.
I take a chance and glance up at your unwavering eyes. Brown, warm, and unfamiliar they stare, your lower lashes smeared with mascara and discarded mauve eyeshadow. They had that sort of love and resentment set in them, the kind of resentment all mothers are born with. They droop now, my mother’s eyes, once beautiful, fell heavy with the weight of the years, of children.
What did I do to you?
“If I were you, I’d quit gagging or these dishes won’t be clean in time for tea.” She’d whisper, already putting the teapot on the stove. The steam steadily starts to rise. There’s no silencing you. You stand a ways behind me, observing me, noticing me.
My hands falter against the cutting board and my ring fingernail breaks on the dirty sponge. My only maternal trait writhes its way out: the anger. My mother’s anger, her mother’s, all I know is that it’s birthed into me; storing their recycled pain in the space between my stomach and empty womb. It’s a miracle the board didn’t slip from my soapy fingers, too weak under the weight of the cutting board.
“My mother always hand-washed all her dishes, you will too.” You half-sing, another attempt to guide me, direct me, correct me. Another slip of the cutting board.
My nails scrape against the grain, the sensation of nails scratching the ridges of wood sends shivers through my body. I want to get rid of that feeling. The seasoning sticks under my nails, chupacabra rub staining my fingertips. I want to wipe it off, to grab more soap, to leave the fermenting fajita smell, and I want to be clean. The once inviting fajita scent runs rotten, and there you are. Whisking away to tell me I’m not doing it right.
“My mother always did it like this.”
“Well, if I were you, I would,”
I scrub the dishes raw, their vulnerable porcelain reflecting my image back at me. Water seeps into my sweater, irritating the skin underneath. I can’t help but gag. Dishwater always has a way of making you feel dirty. It itches like a wound you keep picking. The way it sinks into your skin, seasoning it with salmonella, crumbs, and saliva. The seasoning scrapes my skin and I want to be clean.
You take off your apron and pick up a tea towel. The teapot’s screeching. It’s ready. It’s ready. You set another dish down, pausing to let down the mess of curls that crown your head.
I see her, the woman you were, when you refuse to eat dinner before dessert, when you stay out all evening on the patio because the inside never felt like home. The tip of the pot rattles, the steam narrowly escaping. Your eyeliner, thick and dark to distract the sleepless nights with friends, with Dad, with Grandma crying in the living room. You were my age.
Even then I see her, on Saturday mornings when we’re on that God-awful floral couch that sits on the red carpet and you look so small. Grandma’s already ready, the tablescape set with blue ivory.
Her gold table is hidden underneath the satin tablecloth, protecting it from our crumbs. She pours the tea, eyebrows furrowing, darkness growing behind her brass glasses. Her bowing head reveals a fading grey and brown hairline, you can almost see through her. Her plum lipstick creates a frown as her arms struggle under the weight of the pot.
She hesitates, a split moment in time, her lotioned loose arms fumbling for just a second. She stands, solely and unwavering, her plum lips resting back into its half-smile. English Breakfast streams slowly, steadily from the teapot, until it all pours out.
The English Breakfast steams cold, the teacups sit undrunk in the silence of our casual, comfortable conversations. We work to coexist in ourselves, the three of us. We live, intertwining our anger with the predesigned feminine hurt that comes with being a daughter in the reflection of your mother: I am everything you could’ve been and you might be all I’ll ever become. Mothers birth their pain instead of daughters, you see, with the pain already built inside of us.
No one controls my movement because I am scrubbing and you are talking and Dad’s watching football in the other room and I am scrubbing.
I try to find you. I do. Then suddenly, you’re upset because I don’t set the table properly, your forehead is in its permanent scowl, and I swear your hair greys. I can feel the tension headache coming on, a permanent black of brow and fury rests on my forehead. You tell me I will wrinkle.
We sit together on those Sundays, unmoving on the floral couch, the satin stitch weaving slowly into our backs as we sink slowly into the too-soft cushions. The teacup sits in your hands, Grandma places another one in mine. The teacup and the plate rub against each other, a sharp note cutting through library-like silence. The air freshener sings, the air stinging with spicy apple. You shrink up next to her, against the living pillar of disappointment.
I see all of you. The woman who drove hours to get me to the doctor. The one who doesn’t speak to me when I don’t win. The woman who says my name instead of the other daughter's when she’s in trouble.
The water splashes back at me. The pot is ready. Char fights its way back to me. It itches my arms. I need to get it off, I can’t scrub it off, the soap has been refilled with water too many times, and I want to be clean. I move the faucet to the hot water.
The teapot is singing and so are you. I see you. I see you whenever the neighbors play their music in earshot and suddenly you’re twenty-two, curls bouncing and you look younger than I ever did. That time a few weeks ago when you offered mimosas at Sunday brunch, though I wasn’t yet twenty-one. That year you spent in a holed-up apartment with Dad, because your mother couldn’t bear the sight of what was growing in you. The teacup rests and I can’t scrape off the dirt. It’s never coming off.
The water isn’t hot enough, char is bleeding into my skin and I want it to burn, “Let me do it,” you whisper, a glimpse of oval nails rescuing me. Warmth comes from outside the sink.
There’s you, savior, mother, the comfort only a child would know and an adult could never give. I was given to her, my mother, but she was never meant to be mine. Mothers don’t belong to their daughters. I can’t be clean. The cutting board falls. Hot water streams out from the spout and I burn her, my mother.
Her hands shoot back in pain. She cradles her hands to her chest. She envelops them, the coldness from her unburned skin working to heal what I hurt. She shrinks away. The teapot comes off the stove. If she hadn’t jerked away her hand, how long would I have let her burn? I don’t think I’ll ever know if I did it on purpose.
Do you still love me? Did you ever? Did you love me because you did or because you knew you were supposed to? Would you know the difference?
Her eyes meet mine, unfamiliar, a best friend who I could never tell anything to. We work to comfort each other. Two strangers encircling lifetimes of the same routine.
How much are we like them? Do I hurt you the way your mother hurt? Did she wave you away on your first day of college while she sat on that floral couch, realizing that twenty years passed and there she sat, proud and unforgiving? Does my laugh remind her of yours? When you thought learning the MTV music video dances would make your mother smile? I wonder how much of us we’ll leave in the next mother and daughter when we’re gone.
We’re silent, the two of us. Neither of us know what to do, I don’t think we ever did, really. We don’t say anything to each other. The evening passes the same way it usually does. Tea in hand, the blue ivory keeping a considerate distance from the end tables, but we sit together.
I picture you, counselor and consoler, a master’s degree in hand. No children in the house, only the children you claim in that sweet 8-4 o’clock window the school requires you to. You settle into the couch, comfortable and young. It’s the happiest I’d ever seen you.
I crack under the weight of my mother, and her mother, and her mother. That goddamn floral couch, swallowing up thirty years of mothers and daughters and girls forced to be women. I go away the next morning, back to the dorm, to the life my mother never got the chance to live, carrying the guilt inside me like the buckets of love promised to prodigal sons. She waves me goodbye, standing just outside the front door, her arm raised proudly to the sky with a sad smile in her eyes.
And I think Grandma was sad, because she was a mother and her daughter was going to be one too and I think she knew. That once you’re a mother that’s all you’ll ever be.