Booty-Off: Artie vs. Mama V Shrunken First Semester chapter 9 by maximally

Dinner was enchiladas, and Max ate his in the guest room.

Artemis brought it up on a saucer: one corner of a corner of tortilla, a smear of beans, a single shred of cheese that he had to hold with both hands like a rope. She’d made her own plate vegan, which meant she’d scraped the cheese off and replaced them with even more beans, and she sat cross-legged on the floor with her back against the bed and ate it with her fingers while he ate his on the nightstand.

Neither of them talked about the armpit.

She’d showered. That was the first thing she’d done after, before anything, before even putting him down anywhere but the nightstand. She’d come back in a towel with her hair wrapped up in a second towel, smelling like drugstore oatmeal soap, and she’d gotten dressed with her back to him without being asked. Black leggings. A huge gray T-shirt from some fundraiser that said VEGANS TASTE BETTER in bubble letters. She’d folded the tank top and put it in the hamper like she was putting away evidence.

Beside him, on the nightstand, was the list. Four ticks on it now: Izzy’s two in purple gel pen, by three and eleven, and Artie’s two in pencil, by four and five. He’d watched her make hers. He hadn’t said anything about that, either.

“Is it good?” she asked, around a mouthful.

“It’s an enchilada.”

“Yeah, but is it good. She does the green sauce now. She used to do red.” Artemis licked her thumb. “I think she switched because of your dad. He’s got a whole thing about acid reflux.”

“It’s good,” said Max, and it was, which annoyed him, because he wanted to be in a mood and the enchilada wasn’t letting him.

The window was open and the box fan was off, finally, and the guest room had dropped from oven to just regular hot. The light outside had gone orange and then pink. Downstairs, the dishwasher was running, and under it, the TV, and under that, faintly, Izzy laughing at something on her phone in the hall bathroom with the fan on, which was where she went to call people she didn’t want overheard.

*

The knock came at a quarter to nine.

It wasn’t a knock, really. It was three little taps with one fingernail, the way you’d tap on a fish tank. Then the doorknob turned, and stopped, because Artemis had locked it after Izzy, and had kept it locked since.

“Mija?” Victoria’s voice, through the door, was light and pleasant. “It’s just Mama.”

Artemis froze with a mouthful of enchilada halfway to her mouth.

“I’m—” She looked at Max. He looked back. “I’m changing, Tía.”

“You’re not changing. You changed an hour ago. I heard the shower.” A pause. “I brought you something.”

“I’m good! I ate!”

“Not for you.”

There was a small metallic sound on the other side of the door, which Max recognized instantly. It was the ring of keys from the junk drawer by the garage, the one with the spare for every room, the mailbox, the shed, and a car Victoria hadn’t owned since 2019.

“Tía, don’t—”

The lock clicked. The door opened.

Victoria stood in the hallway in her after-dinner clothes, which were not the same as her dinner clothes. She’d changed into a pair of wide-legged linen pants, cream-colored, and a silky camisole the color of a peach. Her hair was up in the claw clip. Her lipstick was fresh. In one hand, she had the key ring, hooked on one finger. In the other, she had a small saucer with a doily on it, and on the doily, a single cookie the size of a nickel, which she must have cut out of a regular cookie with something. A thimble, maybe. A bottle cap.

“For Max,” she said, and smiled at him over Artemis’s head. “Hi, baby. You didn’t come down for dessert.”

“He’s full,” said Artemis.

“Mm.” Victoria stepped inside, closed the door behind her with her hip, and set the saucer on the nightstand next to him. Up close, he could smell her: the perfume she wore on weekends, something with jasmine in it, and the faint warm smell of the kitchen still on her hands. Her bangles slid down her wrist and clinked. “Then he can have it later.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed.

The mattress dipped, and the nightstand didn’t move, but the bed tilted toward her far enough that Artemis, leaning back against it from the floor, slid a few inches sideways and had to catch herself.

“So,” Victoria said brightly. “Izzy tells me you’ve started on the list?”

Artemis went red so fast it was like watching a thermometer.

“She what?”

“Oh, don’t be mad at her. She was very sweet about it.” Victoria crossed one leg over the other. “And she was right, wasn’t she? I could tell from her face.”

“She barged in,” said Artemis. “She came in without knocking and took my charger—”

“She told me that part too.” Victoria turned to Max and lowered her voice, kindly, the way she did when she was about to say something nobody wanted to hear. “Four, sweetie? Already? On the first day?”

Max wanted to die. He wanted the ceiling fan to fall on him.

“It wasn’t—” he said. “I didn’t—”

“Baby, I saw Izzy’s album. I read the list. Twice.” She said it gently. She reached over and smoothed his hair down with the pad of one finger, which was like being patted by a warm, perfumed log. “Mama doesn’t judge. I just think it’s interesting, that’s all. I think it’s interesting that we said greens first, all together, at the table, and then the first thing that happens is four.”

“Four is green,” said Artemis.

“I know four is green, mija. I’m saying it isn’t one.”

“One happened. I did one this morning.”

“And four this afternoon.” Victoria tilted her head. “And I’m guessing five, too, from what Izzy said about the smell up here.”

“Tía.”

“I’m not criticizing. You’re very thorough. You always were.” She smiled. “I just think you skipped somebody.”

There was a little pause. Max saw Artemis get it a half second before he did.

“Two,” Artemis said.

“Two,” Victoria agreed. She uncrossed her legs and smoothed the linen down over her thighs, palms flat, the way she smoothed tablecloths. “Which, if you’ll remember, Mama called.”

“You can’t call a list item,” said Artemis.

“I did call it. You were there. Everybody was there.”

“That doesn’t count! That was, like, a joke—”

“It wasn’t a joke to me.” Victoria looked down at Max. Her eyes were very warm and very dark and completely serious. “Was it a joke to you, baby?”

He opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

There wasn’t a right answer. If he said it was a joke, she’d be hurt, really hurt, in the shiny-eyed way that made you feel like you’d kicked something. If he said it wasn’t a joke, then he’d said it wasn’t a joke. And underneath both of those, in the place where the armpit had already been today, something small and traitorous had noticed that Victoria had changed into linen pants after dinner, the thin kind, the kind that showed everything when she sat down, and that she was sitting down right now, a foot away from him, and that the mattress was still slowly settling under her the way a waterbed settles after somebody gets in.

“Nobody’s doing two,” he said finally. “Two is no. Artie said two is no.”

“Artie might have said two was a no for Artie,” said Victoria. 

“Tía.”

“What?” Victoria spread her hands. Her bangles slid. “What, mija? You don’t want to, and that’s fine, nobody’s making you, you’re nineteen. I’m saying I do want to, and I’m his mother, and I’ve known this boy since he was fourteen and so skinny you could see his heart going. And it says gently.” She leaned over toward the nightstand. “You know Mama’s gentle, Max. You know that. Mama’s the gentlest person in this house.”

That was not true. Max had seen her parallel park.

“It’s not about that,” said Artemis.

“Then what’s it about?”

Artemis didn’t answer. She got up off the floor instead. She did it all at once, in one huge unfolding motion, knees and elbows and hair, until she was standing at her full height between the bed and the nightstand with her head maybe a foot from the ceiling fan and her shadow falling across Max and the saucer and the cookie and half of Victoria.

From down on the nightstand, she was a tower. Not like a building. Like a mountain that had weather. He could see the underside of her chin. “It’s about you,” she said, “trying to take him.”

The room got quiet.

“Mija,” Victoria said, after a second. “Nobody’s taking anybody.”

“You tried to take him this morning. At the table. You held your hand out for the list and you said he’d sleep in your room, and I said no, and you went downstairs and played Selena really loud for two hours.”

“I like Selena.”

“You played ‘Como la Flor’ four times, Tía.”

Victoria’s mouth went thin for a second. Then it went pleasant again, which was worse. “I’m just trying to help.”

“I know.” Artemis’s voice cracked a little. “I know you are. That’s why it’s hard.”

She looked down at Max. He looked up at her. It was a long way, and she looked very tired, and very young, and like she was doing math in her head that she didn’t like the answer to.

He knew what she was going to say before she said it. He knew because he’d seen it at the table that morning, when she’d folded the list up and put it in her pocket instead of handing it over. She didn’t want him. She’d told him five times today she didn’t want him like that. But she wanted Victoria to have him even less, and that was a different thing, and it was going to win.

“Artie,” he said. “Don’t.”

“I’m doing two,” said Artemis.

Victoria blinked. “You said you weren’t ready.”

“I wasn’t. I’m still not.” Artemis pulled the list off the nightstand and unfolded it. “But it says gently, and I can do gently, and I’m the one who has the list. So I’m doing it. Not you.” She looked at Victoria, and then quickly away, like it was too much to look at her for long. “Sorry. I’m sorry. But it’s gonna be me.”

“Mija—”

“It’s his list.”

“It’s Izzy’s list,” said Max, very loudly, from the nightstand, and both of them looked at him the way you look at a dog that has started talking at a dinner party, with a kind of tender alarm. “She made it. She wrote it. Nobody has to do anything on it because it isn’t real—”

“Baby,” Victoria said softly.

“I know,” said Artemis softly, at the same time.

Neither of them said anything after that. They didn’t have to. They’d both seen the album and read the list.

He shut his mouth.

Artemis took that as a yes, or as the closest thing to a yes that she was going to get, which was, he realized with a sinking feeling, exactly what the screenshots had told her to do.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Okay.” She put the list down on the dresser, face-up, smoothed it flat. Then she turned around, so her back was to the bed, and to Victoria, and to him, and hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her leggings, and stopped.

“Can you not look, Tía?”

“I’ve changed your diapers, mija.”

“I was two.”

“I still remember.”

“Tía.”

“Fine, fine.” Victoria covered her eyes with one hand, theatrically, bangles sliding down to her elbow. Max could see her peeking between two fingers. Artemis could probably see it too. She did it anyway.

The leggings came down.

Not all the way. Just to the tops of her thighs, rolled, the black fabric bunched in a thick band under the curve of her butt like a belt that had slipped. She was wearing plain gray underwear, cotton, the kind that came in a pack of six, and she hesitated with her thumbs in the waistband of that, too, and then didn’t, and then did, just a little, just enough that the top of the underwear slid down and the gray cotton was stretched thin across the lower half and the upper half was just her.

From the nightstand, it filled the whole world.

He’d seen it before. He’d seen it at breakfast, when she’d been in the black pants, two bags of wet sand. But he’d never seen it like this: bare, enormous, freckled, pale as the inside of a shell, the shelf-like ass that every woman in this family seemed to have been issued at birth and that Artemis had somehow gotten an extra size of on top. There were two dimples low on her back like thumbprints in dough. There was a faint red line across both cheeks from the elastic. There was a single long scratch, healing, from a cat or a fence or a co-op couch spring, and a tiny tattoo of a crescent moon on the left side, high up, the kind you got at eighteen and told your aunt about never.

“Oh, another tattoo,” said Victoria, through her fingers.

“Tía, you said you weren’t looking!”

“I’m not! I’m not. It’s very cute, mija. It’s tasteful.”

Artemis made a noise like a teakettle.

Max sat on the nightstand next to a nickel-sized cookie and stared up at the moon.

His face was hot. His whole body was hot. He’d thought that after the armpit, after the afternoon, there would be nothing left in him that could still be embarrassed, that he’d used it all up. He’d been wrong. There was a whole second tank. The traitorous small thing in him was wide awake and taking notes, and he hated it, and he couldn’t stop it, and he knew, he knew, that both of the women in this room were going to be able to tell.

“Gently,” Artemis said to the dresser. Her voice wobbled. “Okay? I’m gonna sit really, really gently. You tap twice if it’s too much. Same as the arm.”

“Artie, you don’t have to do this.”

“I know.”

“You don’t want to do this.”

She didn’t answer that. She just looked over her shoulder at him, down past the huge freckled slope of her own hip, and her face was bright red and her eyes were bright and absolutely stubborn, the most Vasquez he’d ever seen her look. 

“Can I pick you up?” she asked.

She never got to.

Behind her, the bed creaked, long and low, like a ship.

“You know what,” Victoria said, in a thoughtful, reasonable voice, “I don’t think this should be a competition.”

Artemis turned around so fast she nearly fell over her own leggings.

Victoria had stood up. She was standing at the foot of the bed with her back to both of them, the way Artemis had been, and she had already undone the little side button on the linen pants. Max hadn’t heard it. Nobody had heard it. He’d been looking at Artie’s moon.

“Tía—”

“It’s not a competition, mija. I’m not trying to take anything.” The zipper went down. It was a very short zipper. “You said it yourself. You’re not ready. You’re shaking. Look at you, you’re shaking.” She hooked her thumbs into the waistband, red nails against the cream linen. “So Mama will go too. That’s all. That way you’re not alone, and nobody gets left out, and Max gets to decide.” She glanced over her shoulder, past Artemis, down at the nightstand, and gave him a small, warm, motherly smile. “Don’t you, baby?”

“I don’t want to decide,” said Max. “I want to be normal again.”

“I know, sweetie.” The linen dropped.

It went all the way. It pooled around her ankles, cream on the cream carpet. Under it, she was wearing a pair of peach satin panties, the same shade as the camisole, because of course they matched. Victoria matched for errands. The satin was cut high and narrow in the back, and it wasn’t doing very much, and what it wasn’t doing it wasn’t doing over an amount of ass that made the afternoon’s mountains look like foothills.

Artemis stared at her aunt. Her mouth was open.

“Get on the bed, mija,” said Victoria comfortably, and got on the bed.

She did it the way she did everything at home, gracefully and with total confidence that the furniture would hold. She climbed up onto the mattress on her knees, walked forward, and settled down on all fours with her forearms on the pillows and her cheek resting on one hand, facing the headboard. Which meant her back was to the room. Which meant that from the nightstand, at almost exactly eye level, the whole peach-satin moon of Victoria’s ass was rising over the edge of the comforter like a sunrise.

She wiggled, once, to get comfortable. The bed swayed.

“Come on,” she said to the headboard. “Before Izzy comes back up.”

Artemis looked at Max.

He couldn’t tell what was in her face. Horror, mostly. And something else under it, the stubborn thing, the thing that had kept the list in her pocket all day, that had kept her arm up for an hour in a ninety-eight-degree room because she’d said she would. She looked at her aunt on the bed. She looked at him. She looked at the list on the dresser, at the purple 2, at the word GENTLY written in letters so big they took up two lines.

Then she kicked her leggings the rest of the way off, climbed onto the bed beside her aunt, and got down on all fours too.

The mattress groaned under both of them. The headboard knocked the wall, once. Somewhere downstairs, the dishwasher changed cycles.

And Max sat on the nightstand, next to a cookie he was never going to eat, and looked up at two of them.

They were side by side, almost touching, hip to giant hip. On the left, gray cotton halfway down, pale and freckled and enormous, the little crescent moon, the red elastic line, trembling very slightly because the person it belonged to was trying very hard to keep it together. On the right, peach satin, darker and rounder and somehow even bigger, perfectly still, perfectly patient, a woman who had been waiting all day and could wait a few minutes more. Two Vasquez shelf asses, filling the whole end of the bed and the whole of his sky, and over the top of them, far away, two faces turned back over two shoulders to look at him.