High Socks

A large lady was struggling to get in the door when Jefferson got home. She wore what he assumed was typical Midwest attire; Bermuda shorts that showed off a second gut, high socks, and a Disneyland tee shirt. A camera dangled from a cord around her neck and when Jefferson looked back, he noticed that she was being followed by an even larger fellow with similar pink coloring and even higher socks. The large man carried several bags, all ludicrously oversized, while the large woman waddled her way towards the elevator.

The elevator. An elevator that could get stuck even at the mere suggestion that a small amount of weight might be placed nearby. After the movie crew incident, in which a man had been stuck in the shaft for nearly two hours being suffocated by a large chest of drawers, Jefferson knew better than to wait around with these amateurs.

As he moved towards the stairs, the woman pulled out a phone. “Honey, we’re here. We’re putting the bags in now.”

A family member. A Midwestern family member. One that knew about the elevators difficult ways and had already resigned to being too large to ride in it with her own bags. He offhandedly assumed they were related to Mr. Turtle.

At his landing, he heard a significant amount of “oof”-ing coming from the floor above. The sounds were coming from a woman, and for a moment he was left to wonder if Lucy, tough, Puerto Rican Lucy, was participating in an adult exchange program of some sort.

“Do you need a hand?” he tested into the dark stairway above, expecting to hear her booming voice curse in reply.

“Thanks I’m fine,” sang Liseli’s voice down the stairway.

Lucy was not participating in an adult exchange program, and it was then that Jefferson remembered that Mr. Turtle was from somewhere civilized like San Francisco or Philadelphia and was unlikely to have had parents in high socks.

Still, he could not fully believe that this combination of large Midwesterners that had led to the creation of Liseli, a slight, potentially anorexic dancer who quietly fluttered around the building and never made any sense. He decided to ask for clarification.

“Family visiting?,” he ventured into the stairs.

“Yup,” she replied just as her mother flew up by him, waving slightly from the window in the elevator door.

“Mom!” Liseli began as the door opened. “Have you lost weight?”