Cutting Teeth: A Novel

by Julia Fierro

  She knew she sounded like a spoiled brat. But, she thought, isn’t that just what she was?

  Her parents had moved to this affluent suburb so she’d come of age amid the privileged, so she’d adopt their manners, absorb their way of seeing the world, and she’d been damn good at it: pruning, reshaping herself, sprouting expectations and entitlement like new leafy branches.

  Was it any surprise she felt disappointed in her parents, who couldn’t splurge for family vacations—the whole clan flying to Turks and Caicos—or pay for preschool, or karate classes, or thirty-guest birthday parties for Wyatt? Who couldn’t “gift” them money for a down payment like so many of her friends’ parents had, because wasn’t that the only way one could afford a home these days, even on a decent salary like Josh earned?

  She plucked a plump purple-black fig from the tree and tore it open with her nails. She ate the sweet meat, made sweeter after she pulled on the joint and her mouth filled with smoke. The tiny seeds cracked between her teeth. Her father had eaten figs as a boy in southern Italy during the war—handfuls of them until he shit his pants, he’d told her. It was the only food left. And here she was, she thought, whining about family vacations.

  Times were relatively tough for everyone. She had seen the guilt flickering across even her wealthiest friends’ faces when the check came at the end of a pricey dinner out. But, still, they ate out, they vacationed at Club Med, they drove BMWs, Audis, and luxury SUVs, they hired women to clean their less-than-1,000-square-foot apartments. They bought handbags that cost double her parents’ weekly grocery bill. She knew she was just like them, living way beyond her means. Saving zilch. Acting as if the future would never arrive, with its overdue notice.

  She cringed when she thought of what the moms in the playgroup might have expected of her parents’ home, and the disappointment they had surely felt when they pulled up to the house. Nicole’s own apartment was tastefully decorated with midcentury pieces, including a pristine Danish teak dining table and two leather armchairs, perfectly worn. The look was minimalist, the very opposite of her parents’ home, with its mismatched furniture, the synthetic drapes her mother insisted on despite the way they blocked the view of the water. Too much light aggravates my uveitis, her mother complained. Nicole’s home smelled of sixty-five-dollar organic candles with scents like Moroccan mint tea and woodland violets, while her parents’ home, despite Nicole’s attempt to air it out, smelled of mildew and the sulfa pills her diabetic mother took for her urinary tract infections.

  Nicole was sure the mommies—especially Leigh, who had grown up summering out East at the Lambert clan’s country home—had imagined a scene out of Sex and the City. A turquoise pool vanishing into the horizon. There was a leaking kiddie pool. The mojitos Nicole had promised were poured from a scratched Tupperware pitcher, and her childhood Pac-Man and Smurfs sheets covered the guest beds instead of fresh white linens. Thank God she had found, and then hid, her mother’s feminine deodorant spray—guaranteed to alleviate vaginal odor!

  Yet, in the silvery night air, wrapped in the perfume of the fading honeysuckle, as Nicole looked up at the windows, warm portraits of light, and thought of the women and men who filled the house, she felt a glowing approval that made her blush. They liked her enough to travel all the way out to the Island, she thought, before quickly reprimanding herself for acting so junior-high.

  She spotted a light in the kitchen. Someone was awake, and they were downstairs. Only twenty yards from where she stood.

  She ducked behind the car, then slunk past the shed. She ran, hunched over, in and out of the shadows to the side of the house. She crouched under the deck stairs, the crushed shells cutting into her bare feet.

  As the sea air rippled through her thin shirt, Nicole relit and sucked greedily on the joint.

  no picnic

  Susanna

  Susanna had waited, curled up on the sofa, pretending to sleep, fearing Rip and Michael might never leave their shared bottle of booze. When they finally staggered upstairs, she had gone to the dark kitchen.

  Now sauerkraut dribbled down Susanna’s chin. She took a bite of a hot dog and dunked an onion ring in ketchup. Already, she could feel the acid mingling with the grease, all of it a roiling mess in the small pouch of a stomach perched atop her ballooning uterus. At thirty-five weeks, it seemed as if just two or three bites of food filled her. One too many detonated the heartburn. Sometimes, and especially after she binged, she stood over the toilet and stuck two fingers down her throat, hoping a good puke would extinguish the reflux.

  In the last eight months, Susanna’s world had been a rainbow of puke. Bright pink after she ate a pint of cherry-flavored ice cream. Speckled green after the spanakopita from the Mediterranean Kitchen down the block. And once, after the boys’ third birthday party, a rainbow of pastels from their Thomas the Train birthday cake.

  So, she had reasoned a few weeks ago, why not eat what she craved if puking was inevitable? As she stood in front of the open refrigerator in the beach house kitchen, the cold air spilling over her sweating body, she bit into a fat pickle, knowing it wouldn’t be long before it rose.

  She had vomited at least once a day for nine months. She no longer feared the heaving return. It had become part of the routine of everyday life. She woke. She ate breakfast. She puked. She brushed her teeth. She got the boys ready for preschool. Hadn’t she puked practically everywhere by now? Outside the F train Carroll Street stop, into the gutter in front of their building, in the bathroom at the hair salon. In practically every restroom of what used to be her favorite restaurants. She had puked in the ladies’ room at a Broadway show. At the spa midmassage. In a marble-floored bathroom stall the day before at the courthouse where they’d gotten married. She had even puked on Levi one night, as he lay sleeping in her arms. Once a week, he reminded her, “Mama? ‘Member when you throw up on me?”

  Dr. Patka, their diminutive obstetrician, insisted the vomiting was fine. It even had a long Latin name. Hyperemesis Gravidarum. Which, to Susanna, sounded anything but fine.

  Don’t worry, Dr. Patka soothed in her singsong, North Indian accent. The baby was gaining weight, the heartbeat perfect. As if throwing up every day for nine months was no big deal. Susanna fought the urge to defend herself. She wasn’t some wimpy prima donna. She’d been captain of the MacArthur High School field hockey team. She’d pierced her own belly button in college. She had tolerance. For pain. For Allie’s bullshit. For her parents’ disgust that she was gay. A pretty girl like you, her father had said, shaking his head, when she’d come out to them after college.

  But this was 247 days of retching until her throat was sore, heaving until she felt like she’d been kicked in the ribs. She had calculated it one night, as she sat in piss-soaked maternity sweatpants, her cheek resting on the puke-mottled lid of the toilet. And she still had a month to go.

  She had tried everything. The cotton seasickness wristbands whose pressure points were supposed to alleviate nausea. She had taken extra vitamin B-12, usually vomiting the pill along with milk she’d chased it with. And there were those darn Preggie Pops lollipops ($4.99 a box). Oh the promises those lollipops had made with that smiling pregnant woman on each wrapper. A natural way to ease nausea! Great for labor! Alleviates dry mouth! Quick energy boost! She had ordered a box from drugstore.com, tried one, and thrown the rest away.

  The OB nurse had given her a handout with yet another photo of a happy pregnant woman, her smile so placid that Susanna wanted to tear the paper into pieces, throw it in the toilet, and puke on it.

  SUGGESTED SNACKS FOR MORNING SICKNESS:

  Lemons (eat them, suck on them, sniff them)

  Ginger (ginger soda, ginger tea, ginger jam on toast, ginger snaps)

  Peppermint tea

  Crackers

  Jell-O

  Flavored Popsicles

  Pretzels

  It wasn’t morning sickness, Susanna thought. It was all-goddamn-day sickness. And peppermint tea was not a
snack.

  There were more DON’Ts in this pregnancy than DOs.

  Don’t eat spicy. Don’t eat greasy. Don’t eat foods with a strong odor. Don’t drink with your meals. Don’t overeat. Don’t nap after you eat.

  At first, she had followed these suggestions. She was a do-gooder after all, she thought as she squirted a zigzag of ketchup on the half-eaten hot dog. After the birth of the twins, Allie had started calling her Miss Goody Two-shoes, especially when Susanna insisted they stop swearing in front of the boys, they eat strictly organic, they try to be more positive, less cynical, have more fun. They were mommies now, after all.

  Susanna reached into the refrigerator (aha, Brie! Screw your no-soft-cheese rule, Dr. Patka), and the baby kicked hard, a low jab that made her lean on the cold freezer door for balance. She gave her belly a few firm pats, and shushed, “I know, sweetie, that lemonade’s got you all excited now.” The baby responded with a roll and Susanna’s thin tee shirt rippled.

  She remembered her first pregnancy with the twins with a nostalgic yearning. Despite the scheduled C-section (they were six pounds each) and double the hormones, the pregnancy had seemed effortless. Susanna had felt that proverbial glow, as if the life coiled within had painted every part of her, inside and out, with a magical luminescence.

  Friends said they’d never seen her so lovely and asked if they could paint her and photograph her. She had modeled nude for their friend Brett, a bisexual sculptor with a graying ponytail, and as the spotlight warmed her naked shoulders and the cool air hardened her nipples, Susanna had been certain she had never been so beautiful, because this beauty was necessary. Allie, and all of Susanna’s art school professors, had preached passion, guts, ferocity. Nothing as mundane as necessity. But every one of Susanna’s paintings paled next to the work of art she had become, and after the twins were born, the unthinkable happened—the photographs Allie had shot, some of which lined the walls of the country’s finest museums (and the walls of their lives), photographs that had once seemed like tiny miracles to Susanna, withered in the resplendent light of the double miracle of Levi and Dash.

  Now, in this pregnancy, Susanna felt shriveled. Unmiraculous. The tedium of slogging through each vomit-scented day, the hours of napping, the afternoons lying prone on the couch while the boys played Chuggington Traintastic Adventures on their iPads. Her once Pilates-toned muscles had slackened. Her skin was so dry, it itched, despite the cups of water she drank and the shea butter she lathered on before bed. What a waste of time, she thought, and quickly reminded herself it would be worth it in the end. Wouldn’t it? Wasn’t creating life enough?

  Allie remained radiant. Although she was seven years older and did practically nothing to take care of herself. No exercise. No makeup. She hardly moisturized! Susanna imagined what everyone saw, especially Allie’s adoring Parsons students, who were perky-breasted and newly out, ready to spring into Susanna’s place as younger lover.

  Allie was still beautiful. Unbroken.

  It seemed as if even the twins’ eyes were all for Allie. Susanna had watched Dash lean into Allie, like a cat rubbing up against a visitor, asking to be stroked. Casanova, they called him because he sought female attention.

  “Mommy,” Dash had said after Allie let him climb into her lap, “you’re a pretty girl. Like a princess.”

  Susanna had to stop from laughing. He was certainly the first male to call Allie a princess. Allie, who was butch in appearance, in swagger, with her bowlegged gait, like that of a soccer player, and whose idea of “dressing up” was a plain silk tank with frayed skinny jeans and a dab of lipstick. But she knew what Dash had meant. Allie sparkled. Especially next to Susanna—Mama—in her baggy maternity dresses that could not hide the newly bulging saddlebags that made her feel squat. Ordinary. Like one of her middle-aged middle-American aunts.

  This baby had also destroyed her love affair with New York City. The smells! Brooklyn would empty, she thought, as she dunked a cold french fry in mayo, there’d be a mass exodus to the suburbs if everyone had the superhuman smelling ability of a pregnant woman. If they could smell the filth that lay, like a sleeping demon, under their renovated brownstones and organically designed gardens.

  There were whole blocks she had to avoid because of the stench that wafted up from the drains. She confined herself to the apartment on Tuesday and Friday nights, when the sidewalks were crowded with black garbage bags pulsing with odor. Safe in her scent-controlled apartment, Susanna fantasized about her someday home. Far enough outside the city for peace and quiet but also cushioned in one of the small liberal enclaves populated by those fleeing the city for a better life. They’d have a chicken coop (fresh eggs for breakfast), a kitchen garden, and honeybees. A wood-burning pizza oven on the redwood deck. Right next to the hot tub. But she had so much money to save, and she had to convince Allie to leave the city, all of which took energy she didn’t have, not when she was so sick, so weak, so scatterbrained.

  Every Friday, $500 was deposited from her Babes-on-the-Go! business bank account into a savings account she had opened online. Allie didn’t need to know, Susanna told herself; Allie had a different definition of investment, which included a trip around the world with stops in Paris, Egypt, and Morocco to experience the art they had talked of so often before the boys were born and, Susanna thought with a twinge of guilt, they had spoken of less often after.

  Susanna would certainly not let Allie spend the Babes-on-the-Go! earnings on frivolous things, not after she had toiled over those filthy strollers, pulling hair out of wheel spokes with a pair of tweezers, scrubbing car-seat cushions that smelled like spit-up. Susanna remembered that afternoon in the car—to think Allie actually thought she wanted to clean strollers, as if it were a hobby Allie was giving Susanna permission to dabble in!

  It was Allie who kept them trapped in the city. City of Shriveled Produce. City of Foul Air. City of Obstacles, where a simple food shop became a test of endurance, navigating narrow supermarket aisles with the ever-jostling twins, and now her enormous belly. Screeching at the twins as she waddled to the park, their scooters zipping half a block ahead. Stop! Freeze! You stop or I’ll give you the biggest time-out ever! She longed to live somewhere where her neighbors weren’t a few feet away, witness to her shitty parenting.

  Susanna knew she only had herself to blame. She had convinced Allie to have another baby. She hadn’t thought of her motivation at the time, but she’d had a lot of time to think in the last eight months, alone in the bathroom, her head hanging over the toilet, the overhead fan a meditative drone. She had nagged Allie. Think of the meaning it will add to your art. When Susanna had only wanted to keep her job. As mother. As main caregiver. What else could she do except mother and create mediocre art? She’d gone straight from high school to art school to Allie.

  You don’t have to work, you can focus on your art, Allie had said when they’d first moved in together. Someone wanted to take care of her, Susanna remembered thinking—and they had lain in bed all day, the sun passing over the twisted white sheets and their naked, sweat-slick bodies as they planned their future. The art they would travel to experience, the art they would make together. Even then, Susanna hadn’t felt the passion for art that Allie did, but she knew Allie needed to see her as an artist. She wondered now if Allie loved Susie the painter more than Susanna the mother.

  She had meant it that afternoon in the car. There wasn’t room for two artists in this family, not when one had photographs hanging in the Met, and had designed award-winning covers for Time and Newsweek, and it was this that had driven Susanna, over a year ago, to beg Allie to carry their next child. To take her turn. To make another baby for Susanna to mother.

  The twins’ birth hadn’t transformed Allie into a mommy. Maybe, Susanna had hoped, carrying a baby would. Allie had agreed, though her resignation was clear, and she’d lasted for only two months of inseminations, which involved Eric jerking off into a sterile cup in one room of their apartment and Susanna transporti
ng the cup to the bedroom, where among scented candles and Les Nubians on the iPod, Allie lay, waiting for Susanna to inject Eric’s sperm at the moment of climax.

  After the second failed attempt, Susanna had done some googling and informed Allie that oral sex was off the plate for the next try. Apparently, she’d explained matter-of-factly, saliva could kill sperm. Who knew? And that had been that. A few hours later, Allie, her speech blurred by alcohol, had woken Susanna, and said, “There will be no more turkey basters in my vagina.”

  Without pause, Susanna had said, “I’ll carry the baby. Your baby.”

  At first, it had felt as if they were pioneering activists. There was nothing they couldn’t do! Allie had seemed excited, too, promising she would work her ass off to make the extra money they’d need for the egg extraction, the in vitro, the adoption fees, the works.

  As Susanna rewrapped the food, replacing tops of containers and returning them to the overstuffed refrigerator, she caught a whiff of food gone bad and gagged. She froze, breathing rapid little yoga breaths through her nose. A bubble rose from her belly and escaped as a rumbling belch. The pressure was relieved. She turned to make her way up the stairs and caught sight of a figure, startling so she almost lost her footing.

  An older woman with a tired slouch.

  It was her reflection in the grease-stained mirror.

  the chicken before the egg

  Rip

  Hank was snoring softly; Nuk-nuk the bunny crushed by one plump arm.

  Rip rolled out of the cot and tiptoed past the bed, where Grace lay still and unmoving. He slipped Grace’s laptop from her bag and set it on the dresser. So sleek, so untouched by grubby little hands. His own laptop, which Hank used to watch children’s shows on Netflix, was always sticky, the white handrest stained, the keyboard missing the letter H, which Hank had peeled away.