Cutting Teeth: A Novel

by Julia Fierro

  She heard Rip call to the children in the living room with his signature gather together, gang!

  He began the round of that dreadful song, “Who Stole the Cookie from the Cookie Jar?” in a hushed stage whisper, and the children joined him, taking turns reciting the chorus, their voices amplifying, and by the time they reached the last child (Harper took the cookie from the cookie jar!), Nicole had found the stepstool.

  Who me? Yes you! Couldn’t be? Then who?

  She was clutching several of the knives in her hands and preparing to step onto the stool when the parents applauded. The boning knife slipped and stuck her finger.

  “Fuck.” She pinched her finger, and a small dome of blood rose. She sucked on it, her mouth filling with that hot, tinny taste that was like nothing else, when she felt the kitchen door swing closed.

  “You said a bad word.”

  Harper. The little girl’s hands were on her hips. One knobby Band-Aided knee jutting forward. Nicole followed Harper’s sharp blue eyes to the pile of knives on the counter. Nicole stepped forward, dropping to a crouch at Harper’s feet. Smiling.

  “Harper, sweetie…”

  The girl was gone. The breeze from the swinging doors rolled over Nicole, and she thought she might fall to her knees on the cold linoleum. Instead, she stood, climbed onto the step stool and slid each knife, as well as the parer, the apple cutter, even the blades from the Cuisinart, and finally the knife block (knockonwood knockonwood…) into the cupboard above the oven.

  She knew Josh would notice. He knew the signs that she was approaching an episode. He would find her and ask if she was doing it again. Was she having bad thoughts? Shortly after Wyatt was born—fucking baby blues, Nicole thought—Josh had to hide the knife block because every time she walked in the kitchen, the thought of slashing herself had popped into her mind, like an unwelcome squatter.

  Josh still brought up the knives in their couples’ therapy. As if he were outing her insanity to their therapist, Nicole thought. He knew it was the humiliation she wanted most to forget. Who, in their right mind, obsessed over household objects? The washing machine she feared would overflow, checking five times each cycle. Or faucets in the bathrooms, which she tightened and retightened before bed, in case one dripped, drop after drop accumulating until water cascaded through the ceiling of the room below.

  Are you having your thoughts? Josh would ask, as if their code could protect Wyatt from the obvious.

  Nicole stood by the kitchen door and listened.

  The children were silent. They must be eating. The only quiet moments she’d had in the last three and a half years were when Wyatt was eating or sleeping.

  She thought of the cache of Go Bags in the trunk of the car and wondered if she should visit. A dose of security. A little something to get her through the night. Instead, she poured herself some Prosecco and swallowed a whole Xanax.

  She returned to the living room, where Tenzin was leading the children in a merry game of Ring Around the Rosie. Nicole sat in her favorite chair, a high-backed midcentury piece of red-and-gold brocade that had belonged to Grandma Lois. The single soul in generations who’d possessed an inkling of taste, Nicole thought. She had loved that chair as a girl, crowning it the princess chair, and spent hours there, scribbling in her notebooks as stories unspooled—of unicorns, goblins, and fair-haired maidens stalked by hook-nosed witches. Stories of lost children in dark forests.

  Tenzin led the children in a wide circle around the living room. Nicole was walled in by their laughter. She remembered a lecture by one of her grad-school literature professors—a spinster with a romantic pouf of hair, who had reminded Nicole of the heroines in the turn-of-the-century novels that were the professor’s expertise. She had reveled in the gothic, and also in revealing how it threaded through today’s pop culture.

  Nicole itched to stand, to halt the children’s carefree song. Don’t you know, she wanted to tell Tenzin, that the ring—a red ring, a rosy ring—is the first sign of the plague? That pockets full of posies aren’t pretty flowers to wear in your hair, but sachets of herbs, to ward off infection? As for ashes, doesn’t it make you think of the burning of diseased corpses?

  She imagined herself saying, We will all fall down, clasping Tenzin’s arm, calling to the other mommies chitchatting on the deck about who knows what insignificant gripes. Death won’t be as fickle as us, Nicole would shout, with our never-ending wants and needs! Death loves all its victims. Rich and poor. Young and old.

  Instead, she sipped her Prosecco. She chided herself, calling herself names. Insane, melodramatic, and the worst; the word Josh hurtled at her in arguments. Sick. She snapped the rubber band around her wrist until she wore a red ring of inflamed skin like a bracelet.

  Ashes-ashes-we-all-fall-down!

  Please, Nicole. Web bots? You don’t even believe in God, how can you believe in prophetic computers?

  The children were still on the ground, giggling, Tenzin crouched in the middle of their circle, when Tiffany walked into the living room, an apple in one hand and a butter knife in the other.

  “What in the H-E-L-L happened to all the knives?” she asked.

  Nicole felt Josh’s eyes fall on her.

  “Anyone?” Tiffany said.

  Nicole chanted silently. Knock on wood, knock on wood, knock on wood …

  “Mama Nicole did it,” Harper said.

  The little girl was standing, pointing at Nicole.

  Mercifully, this was the moment the Xanax kicked in. Liquid calm.

  BFFs forever

  Leigh

  Tiffany had terrified Leigh at first. She was crass. She was a sloppy drunk, and burped and farted, and giggled excuse me in a sweet, childish voice that hinted at sex. Tiffany talked about sex often, which served as a reminder to Leigh that she herself was, as Brad had told her, so “fucking uptight.” Leigh had even considered dropping out of playgroup, making an excuse, like she’d registered for a Tumbling Tots class on Friday afternoons. She hadn’t felt a bond with any of the parents, though she liked Susanna, who was pretty and sweet, especially for a lesbian. Leigh had thought about inviting Susanna to lunch, but she worried she couldn’t relate to someone whose perspective just had to be so different from her own. Susanna was elegant. She looked like Natalie Wood. With an extra twenty pounds on her frame.

  Leigh knew Tiffany had grown up white trash. A phrase Leigh had heard Tiffany use to describe herself with obvious pride. She had boasted about her inspired decision to meld her and Michael’s last names (Zelinski and Romano) into a hybrid surname for Harper—Zelano—and if there was stronger proof that Harper’s mommy and daddy came from little, so little that they wouldn’t continue their ancestors’ names, Leigh couldn’t imagine what that might be.

  But Tiffany knew how to shop. Her clothes were boutique-quality. At least she was trying, Leigh thought, and began to feel sorry for Tiffany, who painted a childhood of neglect for the rapt parents at playgroup (all the product of privilege), a gritty tale of rural, working-class upbringing. Tiffany’s father was a mechanic, who ran a garage out of their front yard. Her stepbrother had kept a pet raccoon. Her sister was a methamphetamine addict, and Leigh had stopped herself from asking Tiffany if her sister’s teeth were all rotted out.

  There was also the near-miraculous way Tiffany engaged Chase. When she crouched at Chase’s eye level and looked straight into his eyes, Chase actually looked back, a marvel that nearly took Leigh’s breath away. So Leigh had not only stayed in the playgroup, she had signed up for one, then two Tiff’s Riffs music classes. Tiffany seemed unbothered by Chase’s behavior during class. The way he whirled his body around with little awareness there were other little bodies nearby. Tiffany gently redirected him when he mouthed the egg shakers and ran around the room in jagged circles instead of sitting and “participating.” Leigh was grateful Tiffany never snapped at Chase in frustration as former babysitters and therapists had. As Leigh herself did.

  Almost a year ago, Leigh’s
phone began buzzing nightly with Tiffany’s texts. At first they were short and playful, Tiffany’s syntax unmistakably alcohol-mussed. A joke about something stupid Rip had said at playgroup. Or Tiffany might send Leigh a message through Facebook, asking for her opinion on a hand-sewn quilt Tiffany had found on Etsy that she just had to have. Did Leigh like the cobalt or the tangerine color best?

  Soon, Leigh, newly pregnant with Charlotte, was sitting at the kitchen table, after Chase had gone to bed, staring across the river at the buildings of lower Manhattan silhouetted against a dusty rose sky. Waiting for Tiffany to text her with intimate complaints about Michael, how he smothered her, how he rejected her true self. Leigh had responded, revealing how Brad constantly criticized her for being impatient with Chase.

  He makes me feel like I’m a terrible mother. Though he doesn’t have a drop of patience himself!

  Tiffany responded:

  U r a great mom! And … my fave new mommy friend

  What could Leigh do but text back:

  ditto

  She had erased her text history, even rebooted her phone, to ensure that Brad never read her silly declaration of love.

  Two text-filled weeks later, Tiffany probed Leigh on topics as deep and dark as what’s your greatest fear?

  Tiffany shared first:

  that I’ll die alone & everyone will forget me

  Leigh knew she couldn’t share her greatest fear—that the truth about the money she’d stolen would be revealed—so she texted:

  me too :-(

  Tiffany’s question the next night was:

  have u ever thought about spending ur life w/someone else?

  Leigh curled up on the taupe leather chaise in her sitting room, fingers poised over her phone.

  Yes I’d leave him. If I had $

  With her confession, a blush spread like wildfire up her neck.

  Thought you were loaded??!

  It’s complicated.

  She wanted to tell Tiffany the truth. Her family had been rich decades ago, but now they were rich in name only.

  The two women texted through the cold winter nights and into spring. Some nights, Leigh’s hands grew slick with sweat on the overheated keys of her phone. As her naked newborn suckled at her breast, it seemed as if the world were asleep, except for Leigh and Tiffany, and Leigh’s little miracle, Charlotte.

  On those text-filled nights that smelled of lilacs and linden blossoms, when time slowed and the spring air pressed in, warm and vibrating like a bear hug, Leigh wished she could tell Tiffany about her crime. Maybe, by proving its necessity to Tiffany, she could prove to herself it had been the only choice. Thieving from preschoolers was worth one perfect Charlotte Lambert Marshall. A second chance for Leigh to prove she wasn’t a rotten mommy after all.

  Some nights, it was just one or two lines of text that lifted her, that felt like her salvation, a treat to carry her through the next day, until she was back in her leather chaise and texting with Tiffany, the branches outside her window black against the midnight sky.

  Leigh: I’m such a bad mom

  Tiffany: Me too :(

  Leigh revealed secrets she hadn’t told Brad:

  my father made me call him daddy. ugh. once he took me to a restaurant and i wore my white patent leather heels. i was so proud. But his secretary was there! he kissed her on the lips. the lips!! in front of me!!

  Tiffany:

  i’m so sorry. he’s a bastard. u r a better person than him.

  And since the rhythm of their texting was tit for tat, it was Tiffany’s turn to share.

  my stepbro & his creepy friends made me give them BJs in the woods behind the school when i was in 6th grade. so yeah, guess you could say i’m broken.;(

  It was that winking sad face at the end of Tiffany’s confession that made Leigh type:

  I wish I could kill them all for you.

  That night, when Tiffany signed off, she wrote:

  u r the best mommyfriend. i love u.

  i love you, Leigh had typed. She added a xxxooo before she tapped SEND.

  In the morning, after these late-night texting sessions, as Leigh stirred one-half teaspoon of Splenda into her coffee, her sight blurred by fatigue, Brad joked about her girlfriend and their text affair. Although Leigh laughed and swatted him away, she knew it was a kind of love. A first love. Tiffany was the first, much more so than Brad, with whom she dared to share the ugliness of pretty and pleasant Leigh Penelope Lambert Marshall, of the Lamberts of Locust Valley, Long Island.

  x marks the spot

  Allie

  Allie was watching the boys on the deck while Susanna took a shower.

  Dash and Levi ran their Hot Wheels across the top of the seawall, from one end of the deck to the other. This they repeated, along with the requisite vroom vroom sounds, while behind them, puddles of seawater on the beach glowed gold with the late-afternoon sun.

  It seemed to Allie that every little boy came with a penis and the uncanny ability to mimic car engines and machine guns.

  “Mommy?” Levi asked. “We go play in the woods?”

  “Aargh!” growled Dash as he squinted one eye and poked Levi with a driftwood stick. “We be pirates searching for buried treasure.”

  “Yeah!” Levi cheered. “Pirates! Treasure!”

  Allie looked to the thick, shadowy woods beyond the dunes, leading into hundreds of acres of protected state-park land.

  She was only in charge until Susanna finished showering. Surely, she thought, she could manage not to fuck up in the next twenty minutes. Susanna’s water would break if she knew the boys had gone into tick-infested wilderness.

  “No,” she said, as sweetly as she could. “We’ll go to the big park tomorrow when we get home. Okay?”

  “They don’t got trees at that park,” Dash protested.

  “Sorry, buddy,” Allie said. “We’ll get ice cream, too.”

  “Chocolate?” Levi said.

  “We can get ice cream anywhere,” Dash grumbled.

  Allie looked at the fierce half. Her tough guy. The low orange sun simmered behind Dash, and the tips of his ears glowed pink. She wondered when his complaints had become so rational, so grown-up, and she wondered how long it would be until he was arguing with his mothers and winning.

  “Well,” she said, “that’s technically true. But we’ll get chocolate-chocolate-chip.”

  She pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head to blot the sun.

  “Now Mommy needs to rest. Just for a few minutes. ’Kay?”

  Allie eased down into the deck chair and stretched her legs. The rusty springs, missing their cushion, pinched through the pair of Susanna’s pants she’d been forced to wear after her jeans had been sprayed by Susanna’s puke on the beach. White. Of all colors. She hadn’t worn white since her First Communion. Allie figured it was the first time her hairy shins had seen sun in a decade, but there was no grown-up present to appreciate the joke.

  After Susanna’s shower, the two of them were to drive to the store and shop for the “feast” everyone had been mentioning again and again until, Allie thought, they sounded like a bunch of geriatrics psyched for the early-bird special. The feast was the last major event Allie would have to endure before she could excuse herself for the night and retreat upstairs. She planned to pack their bags so they could leave early the next morning.

  The weekend had been exactly the kind of experience Allie had tried to avoid the past four years of part-time motherhood. When the Times profiled Allie two months after the boys were born, she had watched as Susanna read. The Arts section had quivered between Susanna’s naked fingers—still so swollen from the pregnancy she couldn’t wear the commitment ring Allie had given her, fashioned from Allie’s grandmother’s diamond earrings. Susanna had been there from the start; the rented cameras, the shabby studio on the Lower East Side, back when cabbies refused to take you into Alphabet City. She wasn’t the first student Allie had slept with, but surely the first whose opinion of Allie’s w
ork, and of Allie, mattered.

  So when Susanna’s face crumpled as she read, a smear of disgust contorting Susanna’s mouth (a paintable mouth, Allie had flattered when wooing Susanna years before), a part of Allie ached.

  When the critic had asked Allie about the new effect motherhood had on her work, she had replied, “I’m a part-time mommy but a full-time artist.”

  The critic—an influential female photographer—had praised Allie’s honesty as an act of feminism.

  “But isn’t it the truth?” Allie asked a sobbing Susanna, who hurried from the room, her puffy hands shielding her face.

  The newspaper fell to the floor, and though Allie knew she should go to her wife, the mother of their children, instead she knelt and picked up the pages, gingerly. They were supposed to save them after all, frame them and hang them above the other interviews and reviews of Allie’s work they had collected, starting a decade before the twins were born, before the boys were even a thought in their minds. Or, at least, not a thought in Allie’s mind.

  Though this part-time mommyness had been a blight the day the Times had finally, after so many years of dreaming, given her the Sunday Arts feature, it was exactly this that saved Allie, that allowed her to focus on her work and, although she would never admit it to Susanna, allowed her to forget the boys for hours at a time. It was the excuse she had when things with the boys went wrong on her watch, when one of her mistakes—too much ice cream at the park, a missed nap, or her temper lost—caused a minor disaster, usually Levi limp with wailing, Dash brooding and defiant.

  Allie could tell herself, “It’s okay. You’re just a part-time mom.”

  The vroom vroom sounds resumed, and Allie closed her eyes against the glare of the low sun.

  Just for a moment, she thought.

  When she woke, with a jerk that made the springs in the chair screech, Rip was squinting down at her.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  The boys. She gripped the ties of Rip’s life jacket to pull herself up out of the chair. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, for the purplish black sunspots to fade.