I am not your Perfect Mexican Daughter

On Saturday morning, Amá is making flour tortillas. I can smell the dough and hear the rolling pin from my bedroom when I wake up. Sometimes Amá lies in bed all day, and other times she’s in a cooking-and-cleaning frenzy. It’s impossible to predict. I know she’s going to make me help her, so I stay in bed reading until she forces me to get up.

“Get up, huevona!” I hear her yelling from the other room. Amá calls me huevona all the time. She says I don’t have the right to be tired, because I don’t work cleaning houses all day like she does. I guess she has a point, but it’s a weird thing to call a girl if you really think about it. Huevos means “eggs,” so it means that your eggs (balls) are so big that they drag you down and make you lazy. Telling a girl her balls are too heavy is bizarre, but I never point this out because I know it will piss her off.

After I brush my teeth and wash my face, I go to the kitchen. Amá has already covered the table and counters with rolled-out tortillas. She’s bent over the table, stretching a little ball of dough into a perfect circle.

“Put on an apron, and start heating these up,” Amá says, pointing to the tortillas scattered throughout the kitchen.

“How do I know when they’re done?”

“You just know.”

“I don’t know what that means.”
“What kind of girl doesn’t know when a tortilla is done?”

She looks irritated already.

“Me. I don’t. Please just tell me.”

“You’ll figure it out. It’s common sense.”

I study the tortillas as they heat on the comal and try to flip them before they burn. When I turn the first one, I see that I’ve left it too long. That side is almost burned. Amá tells me that the second one is too pale, that I have to leave it on longer, but when I do, it gets too crisp. When I burn the third one completely, Amá sighs and tells me to roll them out instead, while she heats them. I take her rolling pin and try my best to shape the little balls into circles. Most of them end up in weird shapes, no matter how much I try to fix them.
“That one looks like a chancla,” Amá says, looking at my worst one.

“It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t look like a slipper. Jesus.”

I feel myself grow more and more frustrated. I take a deep breath. I don’t want to fight with her because I heard her crying in their bedroom last night.

“They have to be perfect.”

“Why? We’re just going to eat them. Why does it matter if they’re not in perfect shape?”

“If you’re going to do something, you have to do it right, or else you shouldn’t do it at all,” Amá says, turning back to the stove. “Olga’s were always so nice and round.”
“I don’t care about Olga’s tortillas,” I say, throwing off my apron. I’ve had enough. “I don’t care about any of this crap. I don’t see the point of going through all this trouble when we can buy them at the store.”

“Get back here,” Amá yells after me. “What kind of woman are you going to be if you can’t even make a tortilla?”