Abuela vs. Mama V Shrunken First Semester chapter 7 by maximally

Victoria took the stairs the way she took every staircase, like a runway with somebody important waiting at the top.

 

“—lotion,” she was saying, before she even reached the landing. “The big one, with the pump. Since you’re always running out, sweetie. I swear I buy you a new bottle every other week, I don’t know what you do with it all—”

 

The door swung open on her hip.

 

She was hugging the bottle against her chest like a newborn. It was the Costco size, unscented, extra dry skin relief, with a pump on top as big as a fire hydrant valve. Her sunglasses were pushed up into her hair, her bangles jingled, and her car keys dangled off one finger.

 

She saw her mother first. Everybody always saw Lupe first. Lupe sat on the end of the bed in the pink housecoat, one slipper on and one big bare foot planted on the carpet, holding a yellow page that bled red ink.

 

Then Victoria followed the foot down to the floor.

 

Max was standing at the heel. He was three inches tall and naked, glistening from scalp to ankles like a glazed donut, with his hair stuck up in damp spikes, and his body had not gotten the news that the room was now full of people. He clapped both hands over his crotch. It wasn’t enough hands.

 

Beside him, the pink slipper lay sole-up on the carpet like a capsized rowboat.

 

Nobody said anything. Everybody looked at the lotion.

 

“…Max?” said Victoria.

 

“Hi, Mom.”

 

Behind her, Izzy drifted into the doorway with a Costco bag hanging off each wrist. Her eyes went from Lupe to the slipper to Max to the giant bottle in her mother’s arms, and her lips pressed together so hard they disappeared.

 

“Oh,” she said softly. “Oh, Mom.”

 

“Is that—Mamá, is that Max? Why is he—why is he three inches—why is he shiny?”

 

“Sweat,” said Lupe. “Mine. Mostly.”

 

Victoria made a noise like the Mercedes braking for a squirrel. She looked at Max’s hands. She looked at the pump. Max watched her put the two together, and he watched the exact second she wished she hadn’t.

 

She set the lotion down on his dresser very carefully, the way you’d put down something that might go off.

 

Then she lunged for him.

 

“Ah-ah.” Lupe didn’t move anything but one finger. “Sandals. He’s small, you’re clumsy.”

 

Victoria froze in mid-step with one sandal hovering above the carpet like a crane with a wrecking ball, and Max, who was standing directly underneath it, discovered he could still go paler.

 

“Mamá. What is happening. Why is your foot—why is he—what were you doing?”

 

“He rubbed my foot.” Lupe laid the list flat on her knee. “He’s rubbed my feet since he was fourteen. Sit down.”

 

“I’m not going to sit down—”

 

“Victoria. Sit.”

 

It was the voice that had cleared hallways in Queens for twenty-seven years. Victoria looked around for a chair, found the desk chair blocked by the laptop and a laundry mountain, and lowered herself into the only seat left: his beanbag. All six-foot-one of her folded into a sack of foam pellets bought for a fourteen-year-old boy. It sighed under her and kept sinking until her knees were up by her ears. Nobody in the history of the world had ever won an argument from a beanbag.

 

Izzy shifted in the doorway. “Should I, like, go?”

 

“Stay,” said Lupe. “You’re a witness.”

 

For half a blink, something sharp went across Izzy’s face. Then it was gone, and she leaned on the doorframe with her bags and her big worried eyes.

 

“How long,” Victoria said from the bottom of the beanbag.

 

“Since this morning.”

 

“This morning?” She tried to sit up and the beanbag swallowed her elbow. “I asked you. I stood at the bottom of those stairs and asked you if he was up.”

 

“He was up.”

 

“You said he was eating!”

 

“He was eating. A whole concha. Ask him.”

 

“I really did eat a whole—”

 

“Not now, sweetie.” Victoria pressed both palms over her eyes. “I went to Costco. My son was three inches tall upstairs, and I went to Costco. I stood in the tortilla aisle for ten minutes. I compared unit prices. Before that I was right downstairs, slamming cabinets, yelling at him that he was going to be late for his own goodbye dinner, and the whole time he was—he was—”

 

“Under my housecoat,” said Lupe.

 

“WHAT?”

 

“Okay.” Lupe took off her reading glasses, folded them, and hung them back on the chain. “From the beginning. My way. Pay attention, mija, there’s going to be a quiz.

 

“I drive six hours. I come up with the conchas. I sit on the bed.”

 

“You sat on him?”

 

“Next to him. The bed is empty, and my housecoat is yelling at me. So I look, and there he is. Nothing broken. He smells like a frat party.” She held up a finger. “We’ll come back to that. Then I think, okay. Who do I tell? You?” Lupe shrugged, and the whole housecoat shrugged with her. “You would cry for one hour, call six doctors, and then you would put him in your purse next to the Altoids.”

 

“I would not—”

 

“You’d totally put him in your purse,” said Izzy.

 

Victoria twisted around in the beanbag. “Baby, whose side are you on?”

 

“Then Isabella came upstairs,” Lupe went on, evenly, without a single bump in it. “She came to see if her brother was okay. She didn’t want to say anything. I made her say. She told me about a folder on his laptop.”

 

“I really didn’t want to,” Izzy murmured.

 

“That’s not—Mom, she—” Max took a step forward, hands still clamped in place, “—she didn’t just tell her, she—”

 

“Mijo. I’m talking.”

 

Lupe rested her left hand on the outside of the left pocket, where the red pen lived, and looked at the doorway for exactly one second, the way you check the clock during a test. Then she looked away.

 

“Then I opened the laptop.”

 

“You opened his laptop? Mamá, you can’t work the Roku.”

 

“I didn’t want to work the Roku.” Lupe smoothed the list on her knee. “And then Isabella made a list. To help. And then she unloaded the dishwasher.”

 

“Both racks,” said Izzy.

 

Victoria turned all the way around in the beanbag to look at her daughter, and her eyes had gone wet. “Baby,” she said. “That is so mature.”

 

“I just want him to be okay.”

 

Max stared at his stepsister. His stepsister didn’t look at him. She had gotten a standing ovation for the dishwasher, and she was going to stand there in it as long as anybody let her.

 

“And then I graded it,” said Lupe, “and then he did my foot, because Abuela was tense, and then you came home an hour early with that.”

 

Everybody looked at the dresser. The lotion sat there in the window light, huge and white and faintly glowing. From the floor it looked like a monument.

 

“Every other week,” Victoria said faintly. “I have bought that every other week for four years. I thought he had eczema. Mamá, I took him to a dermatologist. I paid a copay.”

 

“To be fair,” said Izzy, “Costco has a really good price on it.”

 

“It’s for my hands,” Max said. “It’s for my actual—they get dry—”

 

“Mm-hm,” said both women at once.

 

Victoria let her head fall back against the beanbag. For a while she just breathed at the ceiling fan. When her eyes found him again, her mascara had started to go.

 

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

 

“I tried, I was gonna, but she—”

 

“He was in my pocket,” said Lupe.

 

“So he went to you.” There it was. Max heard it change in her voice, the way milk turns: one sniff fine, the next sniff not. “Something happens to him, something huge, and he goes to you.”

 

“He didn’t go anywhere, mija. He’s three inches. I sat down and there he was.”

 

“He tells you things. Four years, all I get is ‘fine’ and the sound of his door. He tells you things, and he—” her eyes went to the bare foot on the carpet, the shine on the arch, the slipper lying on its back “—and he does that. For you. He has never once rubbed my feet. I’ve asked. Movie night, I put my feet right in his lap—”

 

“You don’t ask,” said Lupe. “You put them there and turn up the TV.”

 

Victoria opened her mouth.

 

Then she looked at him. Max saw something cross her face, quick, like headlights sliding across a ceiling. Movie nights. His ears going hot. The way he had never once, in four years, shoved her feet off the couch. For one second she looked like a woman remembering something she’d decided a long time ago not to think about.

 

Then she shoved it back wherever she kept those things, and the second was over.

 

“I want to see it,” she said.

 

“See what?”

 

“The folder.”

 

“No.”

 

“I’m his mother.” Victoria began the long, undignified process of climbing out of the beanbag. It took three tries. On the second, Izzy set down a Costco bag and gave her a hand, which Victoria took gratefully. “I bought that laptop. I am allowed to see what’s on that laptop.”

 

She shoved the laundry off the desk chair, sat, opened the lid and typed his password without even looking at the keys.

 

“Does everybody know my password?” Max said.

 

“Not now, sweetie.”

 

Lupe sighed through her nose. Then, flatly, like a woman reading the bus stops out loud: “Documents. School. Calc Two. Old Notes. Misc.”

 

Victoria clicked. And clicked. And clicked.

 

Max couldn’t see the screen from the floor. He could see his stepmother’s face in the blue glow, and that was enough. She didn’t gasp. She tilted her head and went into a kind of professional squint he had only ever seen her give magazines at the dentist.

 

“That one’s been shopped,” she said. “Check the knee. That’s two knees. I did a swimsuit catalog with a girl whose knee bent like that, and she was on crutches for a month.” Scroll. “And that one’s lit from below. Nobody looks good lit from below. Not even me.”

 

“Mija.”

 

“I’m looking, Mamá.”

 

She scrolled slower. Then slower than that. Her bangles stopped jingling.

 

“They all have hips,” she said.

 

Lupe said nothing.

 

“They all have—” Victoria leaned in. Max watched her hand come up off the trackpad and touch the stack of gold at her own wrist, very lightly, as though checking it was still there. “Mamá. That one has my arms. That one’s wearing my bangles. That’s—where did he even—”

 

“I noticed,” said Lupe.

 

In the doorway, Izzy moved one bag to her other wrist and didn’t come in. Max looked up, and realized his grandmother wasn’t watching the screen at all. She was watching the doorway.

 

“Don’t open the one with the numbers,” Lupe said.

 

Victoria opened the one with the numbers.

 

*

 

It took her a long time.

 

Max knew which panel she was on by her face. At the first one she made a sound like a laugh that had been shot down. At the second she put her hand over her mouth and kept it there. At the third her eyebrows went up and up, and she said, “Oh, he’s red,” in a small, appalled voice, and then she glanced down at the floor, where Max was redder.

 

At the fourth, she stopped.

 

She didn’t say anything for so long that the laptop fan kicked on. Then she read the speech bubble under her breath, the way you read a sign in a language you almost know.

 

“‘Grandma’s got you.’”

 

She turned in the chair and looked across the room at her mother.

 

Lupe sat on the end of the bed in the pink housecoat with her reading glasses on her chest, her red pen in her pocket, one bare foot on the carpet, and Max, who had sat down at some point because his legs had quit, leaning back against her heel like a kid against a tree.

 

Victoria looked from the screen to the room and back again, like a TSA agent checking a face against a passport.

 

“The robe’s the wrong color,” she said.

 

“Lavender,” said Lupe. “I know.”

 

Victoria looked back at the last panel.

 

“She’s not even holding on to him,” she said quietly.

 

“What?”

 

“In the last one. She’s not holding him. Not tight. He’s just—” she made a little shape in the air with her hand, like she was cupping something warm, “—staying.” She looked at Max for a long moment. “He never stays anywhere. With me, he goes upstairs.”

 

Nobody had anything to say to that, so for once nobody said anything.

 

Victoria shut the lid. Not hard. She closed it the way you close a nursery door on a baby that has finally gone down.

 

Lupe stood up, because the conversation was moving and she didn’t believe in having conversations sitting down once they moved. Victoria stood up too. Her sandal came down six inches from Max.

 

Lupe bent, scooped him off the carpet without looking, and dropped him down the front of her housecoat the way another woman would tuck a pen behind her ear.

 

He landed in hot, dark, rosewater-scented quiet, face to face with the gold cross.

 

Above him, the conversation went on as though nothing had happened.

 

“Now. About the list—”

 

“Mamá.” Victoria’s voice went up a full step. “What the hell?”

 

Max felt Lupe look down at her own neckline. He felt the pause while she noticed what her hands had done.

 

“You saw the folder,” Lupe said.

 

Victoria opened her mouth. Shut it. Opened it again.

 

“…That’s fair,” she said.

 

“Honestly, Mom?” said Izzy, from the doorway. “He’s, like, so much calmer in there. Abuela’s had him for one afternoon and she’s already, like, better at it than—” She stopped, left it dangling just long enough to count, and then waved a hand. “I mean not better. Just. She’s really good at it. Like, scary good.”

 

“Thank you, Isabella,” said Victoria, in a voice that meant the opposite.

 

Lupe didn’t say anything. But Max, packed against her breastbone, felt her take a long breath that lifted him a full inch and kept him there. He knew exactly what Izzy was doing. From the way that breath was going, he was pretty sure Lupe knew too.

 

It was landing anyway.

 

*

 

“Okay,” Victoria said. “The list. Let me see the list.”

 

Lupe unfolded it and held it up at arm’s length, facing out, at a careful height—the way, Max imagined, she had held up failing tests on conference night: you can look. You can’t touch.

 

Victoria looked. She didn’t reach for it. Max could see her hands wanting to, folded tight together at her waist, and staying there.

 

“‘Abuela decides,’” she read.

 

“Mm-hm.”

 

“Since when does Abuela decide?”

 

“Since lunch.”

 

“‘Already assigned’? Assigned to who?”

 

“Whom.”

 

“To whom, Mamá.”

 

Lupe pointed her chin at the slipper on the carpet.

 

Victoria’s eyes went down the page. They stopped. “You wrote free next to—”

 

“Am I wrong?”

 

Victoria’s face went through every Thanksgiving of her life. “…No.”

 

“And we’ll see? We’ll see about butt? Mamá. I am butt.”

 

“Everybody in this family is butt, mija. That’s why we’ll see.”

 

Victoria’s finger came up, stopped an inch short of the paper, and pointed instead. “And what is this? This box? ‘Maybe mine. Later.’ What does later mean?”

 

“It means later.”

 

“And why is there a check mark next to—”

 

Lupe peeled her collar away from her chest with one finger, so Victoria could look down and see her son, shiny as a fishing lure, sitting on her mother’s chest in the shade of a gold cross. Then she let it close again.

 

Victoria put her hand flat over her own eyes for a moment.

 

“Okay,” she said through her fingers. “Okay. Here’s what’s fair. I’m his mother. That’s my—”

 

“It’s technically my list,” said Izzy.

 

“Not now, baby.”

 

“Quiet, mija.”

 

Izzy went quiet, and leaned back on the doorframe, and looked extremely satisfied about something.

 

“I’ll take half,” said Victoria.

 

“Half,” said Lupe.

 

“Half. You can have the yellow. Fine. The yellow is—whatever the yellow is, you’re welcome to it. I’ll take the green. The green is basically just being a mom.”

 

“Feet are assigned.”

 

“He has two hands, Mamá. You have two feet. I have two feet. That’s math.”

 

“That’s not math,” said Lupe. “That’s greed.”

 

Max got both elbows over the rim of the neckline and hauled his face up into the light. “Can I just say something? Because technically it’s kind of my—”

 

“Sweetie, the grown-ups are talking.”

 

“Shh.” One fingertip pressed him back into the warm dark like a cork into a bottle.

 

Down there, alone with the cross, Max sat down hard and hid his whole head in his arms. Above him he could hear everything: his stepmother breathing hard through her nose, the Costco bags creaking on Izzy’s wrists, the lotion pump squeaking.

 

The lotion pump.

 

He wriggled back up just in time to see Lupe, with the list still in her other hand, work a fat white palmful into the cracked heel of her bare foot, slow and thoughtful, the way she rubbed in hand cream at red lights.

 

“That was for Max,” said Victoria.

 

“Max isn’t running out of anything today.” Lupe capped the pump with her thumb. “It’s good lotion, mija. You always buy the good kind.”

 

Victoria opened her mouth to be insulted, found a compliment in the way, and shut it again.

 

She held out her hand. Not to grab. Palm up, open, flat, the way a kid holds out a hand at the end of the year to get her confiscated phone back. Six-foot-one in her Costco sandals, and for one second she looked about twelve.

 

In the doorway, Izzy worried her lip ring between her teeth and waited, with the easy patience of a girl who had money on both horses.

 

Lupe looked at the list. She looked at her daughter’s open hand. Then she looked down the front of her housecoat at Max, who had given up and was sitting on the gold cross like a park bench.

 

“This is a parent-teacher conference,” said Lupe. “And in my classroom, the teacher talks last.”

 

She drew a breath.