The concerned sounds coming from your mother’s friends remind you of the calls of birds. They coo. They cry. They make there, there noises. Every little thing they do just sets your teeth on edge.

“I’m okay,” your mother says to them. “Really. I think we just need some mother-daughter time.”

Your grip on the edge of the counter tightens.

The noises grow softer as your mother pulls the door closed. Now it’s just the two of you.

You face off in this hidden, no-guests-allowed bathroom. When you were little, you called this The Fighting Bathroom; when you had company, that’s all your parents ever seemed to do in here.

Your mother studies you in the mirror, her arms crossed. After a pause, she says, “I don’t know why you had to make such a scene.”

“I didn’t make a scene,” you say.

She sniffs, disagreeing. “I don’t even know why you’re so mad at me.”

“I’m not mad,” you say.

You then make the grave mistake of glancing in the mirror as you speak, discovering that you are mad—or, at the very least, appear to be mad, which, in your mother’s eyes, is essentially the same as being mad, especially with guests in the house.

Your mother purses her lips. “It’s just a picture, Mo. It’s not going to kill you.”

“It could,” you say, grinding your words between your teeth.

A sigh from your mother. “Good Lord. How did you get to be so dramatic?”

You eye her. “It’s a real mystery.”

Your mother squints at you, her mouth twisted into a small red bud. Why she would wear lipstick in her own home, when hosting friends who knew her back when she was practically still in diapers, while eating a meal guaranteed to strip the color from her lips with just one swipe of a napkin, you have no idea.

“Your grandmother never would have put up with this kind of sass,” she says.

You set your jaw. “Then it’s a good thing she barely knew me.”

Your mother frowns. “Don’t say that. She knew you. She loved you.”

You flick your eyes to the wall.

You very much doubt that.

You barely remember your grandmother. Your strongest memory is of how much you hated the scent of her—linen and mothballs and old dryer sheets. You wondered, even at three or four or however old you were, if disliking the way she smelled made you a bad person.

Most of what you know about your grandmother comes from your own mother. Fun facts. Anecdotes. A whole lot of complaints. The only person who has ever caused your mother more grief than her own mother is, evidently, you.

“I just don’t understand,” your mother says. “You’re an adult now. Your skin cleared up. You got those curves you wanted so badly in middle school. You finally know what to do with your hair.”

You close your eyes. “Mom.”

“Why can’t you just take a picture with me?”

“Because,” you say, resisting the urge to slam your palms on the vanity like the theatre kid you never were, “I hate photos. You know that.”

You hold your breath, waiting for her to respond with her usual You got that from your grandmother, as if an aversion to taking photographs is a definitively inheritable trait.

You learned, very young, that your great-great-grandmother had been a picture bride. Born in Japan, she was hauled overseas and forced to marry a man living in Hawai‘i. It was a matchmaker who had paired them. A matchmaker who had doomed her.

Your great-grandmother and your grandmother were notoriously wary of photographs. While your mother’s friends endlessly whined about having to clean out their parents’ houses—What the hell am I supposed to do with all these bulky, dusty photo albums?—your mother fumed silently, peeling the pale veins off her lukewarm tangerine. Then, after jamming her thumb on the handheld phone’s red button, she would turn to you and begin waxing poetic about everything she never had.

I mean, I get it, she would say, despite clearly not getting it, or, at least, not forgiving anyone for it. She believed the women in her family held a trauma-informed grudge against photographs and therefore did their best to escape ever again being captured by a lens. Besides, she reasoned, photographs were needlessly expensive, what with the economic turmoil and a second worldwide war.

Like so many people of her generation, your mother responded to all of this by overcompensating.

From the day you were born, your life has been documented. Photos. Videos. Collages. Scrapbooks. You once saw a movie where an obsessive stalker covered his walls with newspaper clippings of his victim, and though your friends found the whole thing horrifying, you took one look at the stalker’s work and thought, Man, what an amateur.

The shelves, then drawers, then bins full of photo albums would have been bad enough. Unfortunately, with the rise of social media came the destruction of any semblance of privacy you could have hoped to have. For most of your adolescence, just about everything you did was documented on your mother’s public timeline, from your violin performances to your academic accolades to your badly lit prom photos, taken by your mother, who, despite her apparent interest in photography, always managed to insert a part of her thumb into the frame.

Jesus Christ, Mom, you said once, in the middle of one of your countless arguments. Are you going to tell everyone every time I use the bathroom too? Or are you going to lock THAT stuff behind a paywall?

This comment cut especially deep, given your mother’s recent failure to launch herself as a mommy influencer. Turns out if you’re not hot, blonde, and curvy with a cherub-faced angel of a child, no one really cares what you have to say about parenting.

“It’s my birthday,” your mother says now. “Can’t you do this one thing for me?”

You open your mouth to point out that you already got her a present. Something much more useful than some stupid picture she’ll post online, then forget about until one of her friends accidentally revives the post years later, thinking it’s brand new.

“You’re going to regret it one day,” your mother adds.

Your mouth hangs open for a moment. Then you ask, “Regret what?”

Returning her gaze to the mirror, she leans forward and studies her face. She runs a finger along the wrinkles she insists grow deeper every day, because of you.

“Not having pictures,” she says. “You’re going to wake up someday and realize you have nothing to show for your life.”

Your stomach clenches. Your heart sinks. You bite hard on the tip of your tongue.

Your mother pauses. Then, straightening up, she says, in a tone equal parts apologetic and defensive, “I didn’t mean it like that.”

No. Of course not. She didn’t mean to reference, once again, that you are not getting married. Not having children. Not planning on sticking around for very much longer.

“I just,” she says, the words blending together in a quasi-sigh, “don’t want you to lose all this history.”

Why not? Why does it matter? Isn’t it all going to end with you?

Not the world, necessarily; you aren’t egotistical enough to think you will singlehandedly cause the apocalypse.

Your family, though. Your blood. You feel more than a little guilty for it, for letting your great-great-grandmother’s sacrifice go to waste, but you also know the only way you would ever get married is if it’s through some method as arbitrary as that of picture brides.

“I’m more of a ‘live in the moment’ kind of person,” you say dryly.

“Then act like it,” your mother says. “Take a picture with me. Years from now, when I’m dead and gone—”

“Mom.”

“—you’ll be happy you did.”

“And if I’m not?”

She thinks for a moment. “I guess you can say you told me so. I’ll be dead, so I might not hear you, but you’ll still get the satisfaction of knowing you were right.”

You stare at the washcloth hanging from the rack, studying the fuzz like you’re reading tea leaves. You hate knowing she’ll be gone one day. It sickens you, the thought of logging into some social media site you don’t even enjoy using, just to get bombarded by photos of your dead mother. You can’t imagine a single scenario in which you will ever want to look at her again. Why bother? You’ll see her every time you close your eyes.

She takes your hand. Her skin is warm. “Just take a picture with me. I won’t even post it anywhere, if you don’t want me to.”

Your eyes rise from her hand to her face. For most of your life, you looked so much like your father. One of your mother’s friends said, Well, at least he knows you didn’t cheat, and though your mother laughed, her voice pitched up to match those of her friends, you never quite got over that. As if your mother would ever do something like that.

You and your mother have never understood each other. She certainly didn’t understand you when you, freshly sixteen, begged her to let you get your first tattoo.

You think your great-great-grandmother came to America for THIS? she shouted.

Sometimes, you think your neighbors hate you. Either that, or they call each other over and chow down on popcorn, turning off the TV to enjoy a little live theatre instead.

You ended up getting a tattoo later, at twenty, while you were away in New York for college. Your mother doesn’t know. You don’t plan on telling her. Yet from time to time, you wonder if this would be the one thing she would find too shameful to share.

“Come on,” she says. “Just for me. This once.”

You take a deep breath. “Okay. For you.”

She breaks into a grin.

She’s looking more and more like her mother these days, you realize. Her mother who looked like her own mother, who also looked like her mother.

Your mother takes your other hand and guides you back into the hall.

Do I disappoint you? you ask her in your head.

She looks back at you, her eyes wide, and for a moment, you’re sure you’ve spoken aloud.

“What?” you ask.

She grins.

“I’m so happy” is all she says.

You wonder if, in that picture sent to the matchmaker, your great-great-grandmother was smiling. If she was, did her husband like it? Did he fall in love with her right then?

You keep your eyes on your mother. You’re on the brink of tears. The only reason you don’t lose it is because of all her friends, a bunch of women in their sixties floating around her like butterflies.

“There, there,” they all say. “Come, come, now. Sit, sit.”

Your mother holds up her phone. “Someone take a picture of us, please.”

Her friends flock around you, fighting to be the one to snap the photo of you two. One woman finally manages to emerge victorious, lifting the phone like it’s a used T-shirt thrown into a concert crowd.

“Hurry, hurry,” your mother says, “before Mo changes her mind.”

Her friends steps back. Raises the phone. Moves a little to the right.

“Smile,” your mother’s friends say, their voices melding into one.

You rest a hand on your mother’s knee, your cheeks aching. They must be speaking to her. After all, you’ve been smiling at her this whole time.

diaspora (if applicable) family Litro USA memory mother daughter second person short story