Cutting Teeth: A Novel

by Julia Fierro

  The cool blue light of the screen made Rip’s fingers on the keyboard glow alien-like. He logged onto TryingToConceive.com under the username Hanksdaddy76. He had visited the site daily the past few months, ever since Grace had given him a we’ll have to think about it shrug when he brought up having another baby.

  He had been surfing the net, googling “wife does not want another child” when he’d found TryingToConceive.com.

  A sense of belonging had blanketed him. His situation fit several of the forum categories. Trying to Conceive in Your 30’s or Trying to Conceive Baby #2 or Trying to Conceive with In Vitro. But the forum he longed to join, the one that reached out to him, whispering, we will understand, was:

  I’m Ready … He’s Not! (Do you want to TTC but don’t have the support of your partner?)

  Yes! He had wanted to post a confession full of exclamation points and capital letters, releasing the flood of resentment and shame he often hid from his friends, some of whom were still bachelors, and from his family, who seemed embarrassed by his infertility. He wanted to confess that if he were the woman (not that there was an unmanly bone in his body, he’d joke, wink wink), and if his husband didn’t want a baby, he would sabotage the birth control, poke holes in the condom with a pin.

  He had been wary about joining. Worried the women desperate to become mommies-to-be would resent his intrusion. The womb was the ticket, after all. In the end, it was the memory of the warm welcome the playgroup mommies had given him that bolstered his confidence, and he decided (at the risk of rejection) to remain honest, picking the über-revealing username Hanksdaddy76. He introduced himself in a post in the Newbies forum; he was a father who wanted to conceive, or at least have the right to try; there was nothing he wanted more than another child, and his wife was not on board.

  His first posting received over 2,000 views and 252 responses. Most were supportive and welcomed him, praising him for his dedication as a father. A few were cruel, calling him an imposter (even a misogynist!) and claiming he’d never understand what it meant to have a barren womb.

  Weeks went by, and he posted daily. He made friends, officially called girlfriends on the site. He and three other members even formed a group. They called themselves 3 women and a daddy.

  Rip learned everything about his new friends’ trials to conceive, much revealed by the icons (or blinkies) following each member’s signatures. The Addicted to the Stick blinkie was a pregnancy test icon that flashed from a − sign to a + sign. The Fertility Issues blinkie sported a bottle of pills and a hypodermic needle. There was an infinite variety of blinkies, including a dancing smiley face that did a robotic jig, and most women reserved this for when they finally got their positive pregnancy test.

  One of the women in his group—Mama2Angels—had miscarried three times. Mama2Angels’ username was followed by a stack of winged smiley faces, one for each of the babies she’d lost. In her most despairing posts, she referred to the column of angels as my poor lost babies, which overwhelmed Rip with self-loathing (how could he take Hank for granted?) and pity for poor Mama2Angels.

  Though Rip hated to admit it, as he signed in that night at the beach house, he hoped Mama2Angels wasn’t on. He knew her presence would dampen his already hopeless mood. Her baby angels with their flapping computerized wings, her long list of miscarriages and failed IVFs; it was like watching a baseball player with horrific stats take his place at bat.

  As soon as he logged on, he saw Mama2Angels was lurking, having posted in the Please Pray forum ten minutes earlier. Please Pray was where women requested prayers to be said in their name, for a conception, or for their new pregnancies to “stick”—a phrase that riddled the posts on the board, where Rip guessed most of the women had miscarried, many more than once.

  Rip saw that the other two women in their clique were also online. Hopeful80 popped up first. She’d been hanging out in the Two-Week Wait forum, where women in the two-week purgatory between ovulation and menstruation gathered, hoping their period (the witch was the members’ preferred pseudonym) didn’t show up.

  * * *

  HOPEFUL80 OMG!! This two-week wait is taking forever!!! Only symptoms are a pinching feeling on my right side and bloating. I really hope this is my month. Do you ladies (sorry, HANKSDADDY76! hee hee) think this sounds promising?

  * * *

  Me: 28 (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome)

  Dear Hubby: 30 (Normal Swimmers)

  Married: August 2007

  2 Fur Babies (Brandy & Bailey)

  TTC #1 since Nov. 2008

  Miscarriage 8/13/10 6w1d (ectopic) Looking more and more like IVF in 2012 …

  * * *

  MAMA2ANGELS I’ll pray for you, HOPEFUL80! Put your trust in the hands of God!

  * * *

  Me: 39

  Husband: 42

  June 2005—mc @ 6 weeks

  July 2007—mc @ 8 weeks

  March 2010—mc @ 9.5 weeks

  On the TTC journey as of January 2005

  XCITED_2BA_MOMMY Hi ladies and gentleman!

  Re: HOPEFUL80—Your symptoms seem promising!! Fingers crossed that the WITCH doesn’t arrive for you. She sure is one tricky lady! I had a chemical preg last month and it was so hard when the witch showed up two days later!!!

  Hoping for sticky beans this month!

  Me: 32

  Fiance: 38

  Daughter: Mackenzie DOB 5/22/07

  TTC #2 since December 2009

  Diagnosis: Unexplained infertility

  Member of “Clomid Chicks”

  HANKSDADDY76 ahem, ahem. hello, ladies! Poor Hank is all stopped up. Anybody know of a good natural remedy that can loosen my boy up?

  Me: 36

  My Wife: 35

  Son: Henry (aka Hank the Tank) DOB 8/3/2006 (IVF #3)

  TTC #2 since December 2009

  Diagnosis: Sperm mobility

  * * *

  The responses came rapid-fire, and Rip tapped the REFRESH button again and again (loud enough to make Grace stir on the bed) as post after post of suggestions appeared.

  A tablespoon of syrup, suggested Hopeful80.

  One teaspoon of ground flaxseeds sprinkled over his morning cereal, offered Xcited_2BA_Mommy.

  Fluids, fluids, fluids, Mama2Angels chanted.

  HANKSDADDY76 Thanks, future mommies! I knew you’d have great advice. OF COURSE, the wife was NOWHERE to be found when our poor son was in pain.

  MAMA2ANGELS Your son is blessed to have such a good-hearted daddy, HANKSDADDY76!!!

  XCITED_2BA_MOMMY Woot! Woot! You’re an honorary mommy.

  HOPEFUL80 HANKSDADDY76, I’m sorry to hear that. We can’t all be BORN TO PARENT.

  HANKSDADDY76 Thanks. Your comments mean so much. Just a few minutes with you ladies might be enough for your great mommy vibes to rub off on her.

  XCITED_2BA_MOMMY Send her to us HANKSDADDY76! We’ll whip her into shape LOL

  HANKSDADDY76 In OTHER news, I made a daddy friend today.

  HOPEFUL80 Swoon!!! Maybe … you can *borrow* some of his swimmers, HANKSDADDY76?

  HANKSDADDY76 Hahaha we’ll see. I just met the guy. Let me ask him on a date first! Thank you, ladies! Truckloads of BABYDUST your way!!!

  Rip signed off and erased the online history.

  He stood over Hank, whose soft whistling snores were so sweet, Rip knelt and kissed the boy’s cool forehead. He longed to wake his son and tell him what a great big brother he’d be. Hank was patient to a fault, and Rip imagined the two boys (in his fantasies, the second baby was a boy) wrestling in their apartment. Hank was all happy squeals as the slobbering toddling baby boy nibbled on Hank’s chin. The baby would be gushed over at playgroup, and now that Hank was off to full-time preschool next year, Rip and the new baby would settle into the routine Rip had treasured when Hank was an infant. Naps every three hours (a chance for Rip to take a little snooze and bake a loaf of gluten-free bread). Ready-made formula bottles (no messy finger foods until four months). Strolls in the park, where young
women in their mid-to-late twenties, their biological clocks recently wound, would stop to admire his baby, to place their hand gently on Rip’s arm, and coo, “oh, he’s sooooo cute,” as they buzzed with procreative hunger.

  Almost, Rip thought, as if it were the baby’s daddy they wanted.

  He thought about leaving Hank on the cot, squeezing in next to Grace on the bed. It was a full-size (their bed at home was a king) and he knew their bodies would press together, and maybe, just maybe. Then he heard the sound coming from next door.

  Moaning. Each long moan punctuated with a grunt.

  “What the fuck?” Grace muttered.

  He froze, standing over his wife, listening to Tiffany. And getting harder and harder.

  make-believe

  Leigh

  Leigh sat in the rocking chair in the corner of the guest bedroom and held a sleeping Chase in her lap.

  He had fallen asleep with his cheek pressed against her milk-heavy breasts. She was scared to move, in case she woke him and lost him to his bed, or Tenzin’s arms, which he often preferred. She felt like a teenage girl in bed with a slumbering boy for the first time—possessive, proud, and fearful. She rocked him and cuddled him the way she couldn’t—the way he wouldn’t let her—when he was awake.

  A sleeping Chase was easiest to love.

  The baby was asleep in the ancient crib in the corner. Tenzin was asleep on the air mattress under the window.

  Then Leigh heard it. A lowing. A moaning.

  Tiffany and Michael.

  Leave it to Tiffany to bring a little X-rated action into a family weekend. Leigh laughed, and her hand flew to cover her mouth. Just as quickly, she removed it. Tiffany had told her she had a radiant smile and shouldn’t hide it, the very opposite of what Leigh’s mother had told her—that her teeth were too large and she should do her best to smile close-mouthed in photos.

  She dared to lean over and brushed her lips across Chase’s, tasting strawberry-flavored toothpaste.

  Leigh had known Chase was different right away. She had been told by her birthing class instructor, and the how-to-parent books she’d read, that the first weeks of a baby’s life should be filled with quiet nursing, mother and baby dozing in bed, warm naked skin on warm naked skin, the sugary scent of breast milk on the baby’s breath. Baby’s eyes locked on Mama’s in an unconditional love–saturated gaze.

  Instead, they’d been filled with Chase’s cries. His mouth popping off her nipple again and again. His eyes hadn’t met hers. She had tried to stick with nursing. She had hired a lactation consultant. She wouldn’t be one of those women who abandoned breast-feeding after a few nipple sores, she told herself. She set her alarm every two hours and felt a nervous sweat spring out right before the alarm sounded, calling her to what felt like a doomed match.

  Leigh had tried to relax. She had even meditated, after the appointment with that French pediatrician with the shock of greasy hair, the one hipster parents raved about for his laissez-faire approach to children’s health. He had asked Leigh if, perhaps, her anxiety was the problem. She had believed him. She had blamed herself. And her breasts.

  She had heard about those “twice-exceptional” kids—who had delays and gifts. They might not be able to get along with classmates but they learned how to read at age two, and picked up Japanese by watching YouTube videos. Not Chase.

  Thank God he wasn’t autistic, she told herself on Chase’s “off” days—although there were times she wished he’d been diagnosed with something so they’d have a way to help him. To explain him. As her own mother had said once, in a casually observant tone Leigh would never forget, there was something just not right about Chase. And although Leigh knew Chase loved her, she still wished for his eyes to meet hers in that look the parenting books had promised, as if it would act as a marker, proof she’d fulfilled her maternal duties. She was lucky, she thought, if she could hold Chase’s attention for more than ten seconds these days.

  Stop, Leigh told herself, and laid her hand on Chase’s chest. It rose and fell in time with his breath and, it seemed, in time with the sigh of the waves below.

  Do-over.

  “Time for a do-over,” Tenzin often sang when Chase’s mood turned explosive, and he screeched and gnawed on his forearm with frustrated rage. Do-over, do-over, Tenzin sang until Leigh felt as if their four-story brownstone, the down payment had been a gift from her father on her wedding day, had been put under a spell. A happy enchantment.

  “Do-over,” she whispered in Chase’s ear now, picking away the strands of hair plastered to his sweaty cheek.

  What was it Tenzin had said a few weeks ago? When she walked in on Leigh in the master bathroom—the cuts Leigh had just made on her own upper thigh a pattern of bright red crisscrosses, the razor still in her hand?

  Leigh had watched Tenzin’s reflection quadruple in the wall-to-wall mirrors. Tenzin had spoken calmly, as if she hadn’t seen the blood rising, filling the paper-thin slashes until a drop rolled toward Leigh’s knee.

  “Your bad mood only serves your enemy.”

  Then Tenzin left. The click of the lock catching had seemed to multiply as it bounced off the hand-painted Italian tile, and Leigh had thought, absurdly, There she goes, quoting the Dalai Lama again.

  Leigh hadn’t understood at the time. Enemy? She knew who Chase’s enemy was, and when she thought of neurology, she imagined a posse of outlaws—black-toothed, greasy-haired, village-pillaging bad guys, running amok inside Chase’s brain.

  But this was serenity. Her still and silent boy. She examined every freckle on his long, tanned arms. She studied the purple veins branching across his eyelids. It was a chance for Leigh to be still, too. There was no one to impress. No one to apologize to. Just her and her sleeping beauty. A perfect Chase and a perfect Leigh.

  At least he had beauty, she thought. It just might be what saved him someday.

  She lifted his limp arm and let his palm fall flat on her cheek, sliding his hand up and down.

  “Mmm, gentle touch,” she whispered.

  As Chase accelerated toward boyhood, she feared his physical contact, rough and unpredictable. She tried not to flinch. Or pull away. Like that afternoon, when he’d jumped joyfully on the sofa downstairs, or on the beach afterward, when he had hugged her and squeezed until she had to peel him off her throbbing throat. All of this witnessed by the other mommies, so she had to hide her reaction, reminding Chase calmly, “Gentle touch.” She had seen Brad lose his temper and shout, “Jesus, Chase!” when during one of their “wrestling matches”—an assignment from Chase’s occupational therapist—Chase’s long limbs whacked Brad in the throat, or worse, in the groin.

  Chase’s therapists—the well-meaning young (and mostly childless) women who came into their home eight times a week and who insisted on calling Leigh and Brad “Mom” and “Dad”—told them Chase needed more “sensory feedback.” Deep bear hugs and pillow sandwiches and wrestling matches with Dad. They made it sound as if he needed a padded room.

  Give him what he needs, they said, as if offering a cure. Couldn’t they see she had needs too? Leigh needed to be able to hug her son when he was awake. But the only touch Chase accepted was the tight pressure of his weighted therapy vest and the rough-and-tumble wrestling.

  When her phone vibrated on the nightstand next to the rocking chair, Chase twitched and let out a whimper before his head fell back, openmouthed.

  It was a text from Tiffany. She texted Leigh this time every night, after Harper went down, after the bottle of Malbec had been drained, after she’d snuck a cigarette on her balcony (only six blocks from Leigh’s brownstone) overlooking the oil-coated Gowanus Canal. They’d text back and forth for hours sometimes, until Leigh’s fingers ached from typing on her keypad.

  Tiffany:

  get down here and save me you biotch. nicole’s whining again. but she’s got good weed!

  Leigh texted back, hoping Tiffany couldn’t tell she was lying, hoping the cringe she felt when Tiffany ta
lked about sex and drugs hadn’t infected her tone.

  ha! you are crazy. baby on my boob. rain check? xo

  Tiffany:

  um, ok. I guess. (; I need to talk to you 1st thing tom am about what time Tenzin can be w me on thursdays. k?

  Leigh didn’t respond, hoping that if she avoided the topic long enough, Tiffany would give up. Tiffany had backed her into a corner, and as hard as Leigh tried, she could not ignore the tremor of anger she felt. She tried to chalk it up to Tiff’s being tipsy, or her native tactlessness. After all, the woman had grown up practically feral somewhere in the farm country of Long Island. Terrible, awful things had happened to her. Tiffany had revealed snippets of her dark backstory in their late-night texts. Her abandonment by her mother at the fragile age of nine, her father’s alcoholism, the rape at a party after she moved to NYC, the drugs, the sex, the abortions.

  At first, Leigh had felt smothered under the weight of all that badness, but Tiff’s honesty about how utterly soiled and broken she was made Leigh feel safe. After Leigh had taken (at the time, she had thought of it as borrowing) the money from the fundraising-committee account, she began answering Tiffany’s texts more often. Leigh’s own crime paled a shade or two in the glaring light of poor messy foot-in-her-mouth Tiffany’s decades of error.

  Every time Tiffany teased Leigh about her family’s wealth—all those country-club and debutante jokes, and quips about sorority girls wearing pearls with their letter sweatshirts—Leigh wanted to tell Tiffany the truth. Her family had been rich decades ago, but now they were rich in name only. The family firm had nosedived in the crash of 2008, after Leigh’s father had invested big in subprime mortgages. Leigh lost the three-thousand-dollar monthly allowance her father had been depositing in an account under Leigh’s name since she went off to college. Brad had to scramble for extra work, consulting jobs he hated, and his resentment of Leigh, of her family, had built a wall between them. The slightest mention of having another baby, the costs of the IVF, set Brad into a rage, ranting about their maxed-out credit cards and mortgage payments, insisting they get back on their feet before spending more money on “getting” (he always used this verb, as if they were purchasing a child, Leigh thought) a baby, usually ending with the front door slamming, Leigh alone with Chase for hours.