Cutting Teeth: A Novel

by Julia Fierro

Michael turned to face Rip. “Could you just tell him no?”

  Behind Michael’s casual grin, Rip sensed that Michael was annoyed.

  Rip knew Grace wouldn’t relent, and even if he argued with her, right there, in front of everyone, Hank would cry until Rip took him along. And he had traumatized the boy earlier with his insane reaction to the princess dress, hadn’t he? He owed it to Hank. He tried to find satisfaction in the fact that Hank felt safest when he was with him, his dad, but right now, it felt like a burden.

  “No, wait. We can go. We can take the canoe instead of the kayak!” Rip said, cringing at the desperate ring in his voice.

  “With Hank?” Michael said. His upper lip twitched enough that Rip could see the disgust. “Won’t he just cry?”

  A small flame of anger flared in Rip’s chest.

  Sensing his screwup, Michael added, “Cool. Let’s bring Harper, too.”

  After another twenty minutes of complications; searching for the kids’ life jackets, pulling the canoe out from under the deck, last-minute potty trips, and last-minute commands from the mommies—mostly Grace, who Rip could see was terrified with the idea of the kids going along—Harper and Hank took their seats, and Michael shoved the canoe into the water, the base grinding against the pebbles.

  Rip had wanted to be the one who shoved out, the one who the mommies would watch from the seawall, their delicate, manicured hands shielding their eyes, checking out his tanned leg muscles as they flexed with the effort. Instead, he walked behind Michael. They climbed in the boat once the water was chest high, and amidst Harper and Hank’s squeals, they set off.

  “And we are on our way!” Michael sang out.

  Harper whooped from the head of the boat.

  It wasn’t fair she got to sit in the very front, Rip thought as he rubbed Hank’s goose-pimpled arm. He wanted Hank to prove to Michael he could do more than just whine and cry. For Rip’s sake and for Hank’s own. Please, for the love of God, Hank, stay calm, Rip thought.

  The last time Rip had been in a canoe was at sleepaway camp as a kid, one of those Jewish camps where all the kids wept at the end of the session during the good-bye ceremony. Not Rip. He’d wanted to get back to his air-conditioned house, his Game Boy, and the privacy of his room, where he could masturbate when inspired.

  Paddling was not how Rip had remembered it. This was hard work, and the current made it feel as if they were pushing their way through pudding. He had imagined that he and Michael would have time to chat, to get to know each other a bit more, and he was hoping he’d get a chance to ask Michael for advice. Maybe another male perspective would help Rip find the way that would convince Grace to have another baby. Like a magic spell to transform her into a procreative believer.

  Rip’s palms stung by the time they’d made it out to the buoys where the Island residents docked their boats. The white cottages, squeezed side by side, stared at them from the shore with their sea-weathered faces. He spotted people lounging on the decks under striped umbrellas and wished he were there instead of here. Then he focused on the twitching muscles in Michael’s arms, and it gave him the strength, the competitive boost, to paddle faster.

  “Slow your roll back there, man,” Michael said without looking back. “Or you’ll be pooped before we make it around the bend.”

  Harper giggled. “Daddy said pooped!”

  “Poop. Poop,” Hank echoed, looking up at Rip with a grin.

  Rip smiled back although he felt a rising dread this trip had been a mistake.

  “Sure, boss,” Rip said with just enough attitude (he hoped) to send Michael a message.

  Nicole had suggested they paddle to the estuary. Rip was vaguely familiar with the term but had no idea what an estuary actually was. All they had to do, Nicole had explained, was paddle around the tip of the island. There, she had promised, they’d spot the families of swans that had made the secluded cove their home for generations.

  Michael led, directing Rip in a way that reminded him of Grace, and he wondered if the world wasn’t chock-full of micromanagers.

  “Don’t lean so hard to the left, partner,” Michael said. “Let’s try to paddle in sync,” and finally, what Rip felt was totally unacceptable, especially in front of the kids, “Can you pick up the pace a little? You’re paddling like a girl.”

  Michael followed the dig with a bark of a laugh before adding, “Just kidding, man.”

  Rip concentrated on the tip of the paddle polished white with wear, commanding himself to play it cool, brush it off; this was just how guys bonded. Through humiliation.

  “A girl?” Hank sang, smiling and shaking his head as if he was in on the joke. “Dad’s not a girl.”

  “Michael’s just being silly,” Rip said, when what he wanted to say was Michael’s just being an asshole.

  “Girls are cool,” Harper said.

  “They sure are, sweetie,” Michael said. “And boys and girls can be friends.”

  “You are my friend, Hah-per,” Hank said quietly.

  “And Mommy Tiffany and Daddy Rip are friends,” Michael said. “Isn’t that right, Daddy Rip?”

  “Sure we are,” Rip said, unnerved. “Our whole playgroup is pretty tight.”

  Michael didn’t answer. Rip listened to the sound of the paddles cutting through the water and worried: what was Michael implying? Could Tiffany have told him something, about what happened in the kitchen yesterday? Rip’s interaction with her had been limited all day, but it seemed normal enough. As if they’d simply go on with the monotony of little kid life—naps and snacks and trips to the potty—as if nothing had happened. Sure, Tiffany was wild and loved to see how far she could push boundaries, but would she really tell her fiancé about what had happened in the kitchen? Or what had almost happened, Rip corrected, because nothing had happened, had it? Okay, something had happened, he thought. A line had been crossed. Their bodies had reached for each other, and he knew she’d been as wet as he’d been hard, and he was growing hard in the canoe now just thinking about how nothing had happened, goddamnit. Especially, he told himself (convinced himself, by squeezing his thighs together and pushing his weight into the paddling), when you thought about what could have happened.

  In the twenty minutes it took to round the tip of the island, while Rip tried not to think about Tiffany and her breasts and the slight looseness in her bikini bottom where he had, earlier that day, on the deck while she lay on the lounger, glimpsed something inside, the children talked nonstop. They pointed out a school of silvery fish leaping into the air as the canoe glided past. They spotted an orange-and-black butterfly flitting over the dark blue water.

  “Wow, a monarch!” Hank whispered with awe. “What if he falls in, Daddy?”

  “He’ll be okay,” Rip said with a grunt. It was hard to talk and paddle at the same time without losing his breath. The wind had picked up, just enough to ruffle Hank’s hair a bit, but it felt as if they were pushing against a wall of water. Were they paddling against the current or what? Not like he would ask Michael and risk looking like a wuss.

  “Man, that kid’s smart,” Michael said. “He’ll be like a science teacher. Or some kind of tech geek who invents something and makes a billion.”

  Rip couldn’t help but feel it was a backhanded compliment. He knew all the hipsters were using the term geek like it was cool, but hadn’t those same hipsters just been geeks themselves back in the day, bullied and persecuted? Plus, it was killing him, the way Michael spoke, almost breezily, as if paddling were a piece of cake. Rip knew what the guys in their weight-lifting belts at Shitty Gym would think of him now, winded by a damn paddle.

  The trip was anything but peaceful, despite the gorgeous orange orb of the sun sinking into the horizon, and the clouds that hung low and pink, as if dazed by the sun’s beauteous exit. But the children talked incessantly. A bird! Look, a doggie on the beach! Are we almost there? When will we be there? Another bird! That’s onetwothreefourfive birds.

  “Hank. Harper,” Rip said
finally. “Let’s have a little quiet time, okay?”

  “They’re just being kids,” Michael said with a shrug.

  “Sorry,” Rip said, embarrassed he’d let himself come close to losing it, a term he’d used himself to criticize so many parents on the playgrounds of Brooklyn, mocking them for succumbing to the strain of wrangling a child under five. What was wrong with him?

  By the time they made it to the marshy estuary—really just a pond with a narrow link to the Sound—the sun had lost its fire. Under the canopy of the weeping willows that draped the pond’s shore, it felt as if night was much closer than he’d thought. What a relief it was to drop the paddle and massage his throbbing arms. The boat turned in a circle. So slowly, he didn’t realize the rotation until they were facing a different part of the woods ringing the pond. The air smelled damp and mossy, like the inside of a mushroom. Every minute or so, he had to swipe at a mosquito, bat it away from Hank, whose plump brown skin was a delicacy for the bloodsuckers.

  Instead of satisfying the children, the end of the journey sparked a new host of questions. Why are we stopping? What is this place? Where are the swans? You said there’d be swans. Where are the swan babies? Are there going to be swans, Daddy? Are we going back soon?

  Rip and Michael shushed them gently, reassured them again and again. They lied the harmless white lies of parenthood, like the swans are napping and maybe the swans are still on their summer vacations, which birthed even more questions like, Why do swans have to take naps? Where do swans go on vacation?

  Rip came up with a game. Count the trees. Count the different sounds of the birds. And when that was finished, count slowly all the way up to a hundred!

  “Anything can be a game,” he said, and winked at Michael, feeling like a parenting expert, “if you make it sound exciting.”

  This gave the two men a window of conversation. Michael turned to face him. The breeze had picked up, and the canoe was turning faster, and it felt disorienting as Rip thought, frantically, about what they should talk about. Time was ticking away. Soon the children would be bothering them again, destroying any chance there was to have a coherent—and just maybe—meaningful conversation. So he brought up an earlier topic, the one on which he and Michael had bonded the day before in their initial (and successful, he thought) tête-à-tête; what they hated about the playgrounds of brownstone Brooklyn.

  “So,” Rip said, cringing at how much he sounded like a gossip-hungry mommy, “what’s the worst parenting you’ve seen at the playground in our ’hood?”

  Michael guffawed, and it sent a cluster of birds shooting through the branches into the small patch of open sky above their heads.

  Harper and Hank paused their counting and looked up, their lips parted in surprise.

  “I saw some mom at Cobble Hill Park the other day,” Michael started.

  “Oh yeah,” Rip interrupted. “I know where this is going. That’s the swanky part of the neighborhood over there.”

  As if, Rip thought, Grace didn’t make close to three hundred thou a year. As if they didn’t own a three-bedroom apartment, renovated to boot.

  Harper renewed her counting, “Thirteen, fourteen.”

  Hank joined in and the children chanted in unison, “fifteen, sixteen, seventeen…”

  Michael continued, “This mom, at the park, she gave her daughter—a quiet little thing—a time-out for walking up the slide!” He huffed in disbelief.

  Together, the two dads shook their heads.

  “No way,” Rip said.

  “I mean, look,” Michael leaned over Harper so his face was just a few inches from Rip’s. His skin was a blueish gray in the fading light. Like he was telling a ghost story, Rip thought, and he felt the sudden chill on his bare arms. “I don’t let Harper climb up the slide if there’s a kid waiting to come down. But there was nobody up there. It was just plain gross.”

  Rip wished the way he talked was more like Michael’s; thoughtful, unhurried, like he had all the time in the world. Rip had always disliked his quirk of spewing forth anxiously. His jokes falling flat, so that sarcasm was taken seriously, missteps that pushed people away. All because he couldn’t just slow the fuck down and because, he thought now, he was worried no one would listen for very long. It had been an issue in his college acting classes, his habit of delivering his lines too fast.

  “Here’s my philosophy,” Rip said, his voice hushed, as if it was a secret. “It’s simple. Kids are kids. They don’t know what the hell they’re doing, and it’s our job to teach them. So they can go out into the real world someday and be functioning members of society. This”—he lifted his fingers in quotes—“we-got-to-share-everything rule is BS. Who shares everything in real life? The very opposite is the way life rolls!”

  Michael nodded. “Totally. You’re preaching to the choir, man.”

  “So why do we expect our kids to act more grown-up than grown-ups? Why do we get P-I-S-S-E-D when they freak out?”

  Rip was excited now, as if something truly wise was flowing from him. He straightened his back, and the canoe rocked gently from side to side. “What kind of unpredictable world is that for a kid? It’s psychologically traumatic, if you ask me. Like, Oh, hey, Tommy, I know that’s your most favorite car ever, but this kid here, who we don’t even know, is bawling his eyes out, and so you got to hand it over. Give it up. For the good of spoiled children everywhere. That’s just crazy.”

  Michael leaned over and squeezed Rip’s shoulder. So hard it felt good.

  “You got a good daddy here,” Michael said, looking down at Hank. “You’re a lucky boy.”

  “Yep,” Hank said.

  This was it, Rip thought. There couldn’t be any window opened wider.

  “Thanks, man,” Rip said. “You saying that means a lot to me. ’Cause I think you’re an awesome dad, too.”

  Hank’s small, whining voice interrupted him, “Daddy? Daddy. I have to make a peepee.” Hank clutched at the crotch of his swimsuit.

  “Hold on, buddy,” Rip said, patting Hank on the shoulder. “We’re heading home real soon.” And then to Michael, “It means a lot, ’cause I’m in this total dilemma with Grace. Maybe you could help me out?”

  “Sure. Anything I can do,” Michael said as he turned to face front, gripping the paddle and lowering it into the still, blue water.

  Rip sighed. “I appreciate that. ’Cause here’s the situation. There’s nothing I want more in the world than…”

  Michael interrupted him, “Why don’t you get that paddle in the water, okay? We’ll talk on the way home. It’s getting dark.”

  “And dark-time,” Harper said, peeking around her father, her little fingers doing a creepy-crawly movement in front of her face toward a wide-eyed Hank, “Dark is when witches and monsters come.”

  “Daddy?” Hank mumbled, pressing into Rip’s stomach as he backed away from Harper.

  “Harper, sweetie, please don’t scare Hank,” Rip said. “So, like I told you, Michael. There’s nothing I … And we. Grace, too,” he lied. “There’s nothing we want more than a brother or sister for Hank. Like I said yesterday, on the deck”—he laughed nervously—“we have to use a D-O-N-O-R to get this show on the road. And, ugh, she hated going through the whole process at the clinic.”

  Michael grunted. “Man, the current is fierce back here. I can’t get the boat to move an inch.”

  Rip continued, “I’m cool with it, but it creeps Grace out, you know.”

  “Are you paddling?”

  Michael’s back arched, and Rip could see the effort he was using. The taut lines of his upper arm muscles gleamed in the alien blue light.

  Rip started to paddle, and the resistance almost yanked it from his hands.

  “It’s like we’re stuck,” Rip said. “Oh yeah, so”—he paused, trying to find the best way to explain what was a stomach-roiling humiliation, that his wife wasn’t just antibaby, but that he was starting to suspect she was antihim—“you think you could help me out? With Grace?
’Cause I’m at a loss, man.”

  Michael lifted the paddle and held it aloft, water dripping from it, cold and black. Michael sat unmoving, his head bent forward, until Hank turned to look up at Rip. The soft down on his son’s cheek glowed.

  “What’s wrong, Daddy?” Hank asked, and Rip could hear the terror in his boy’s voice, which sent a shiver of unease through Rip’s gut.

  “Michael?” Rip said. “What’s up?”

  “Are you asking me,” Michael said, so quietly Rip had to lean forward to hear, “what I think you are? You. Me. Grace”—his voice dropped to a whisper—“and a turkey baster?” Michael laughed, but there was an ugly kink in it. “Maybe a few scented candles and Sade on the iPod?”

  It took a moment for Rip to understand. Did Michael think he’d been suggesting a threesome? To squeeze some sperm out of Michael like he was a reproductive vending machine?

  Anxiety thrummed in Rip’s chest as he looked around them; at the still water and the blackening branches above and under and everywhere, like an enchanted forest had closed in around them, and the canoe felt too small and he thought they might be trapped there forever, spinning in lazy circles.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Michael said, and spat into the water.

  “Ew, Daddy!” Harper said.

  “Whoa,” Rip could barely speak. His mouth had gone dry. “Wait. I did not mean that, dude. You’re not hearing me right. Or I wasn’t making myself clear, I mean.”

  “I heard you fine,” Michael said. Rip could see the sweat blooming darkly under the back of Michael’s shirt. “You need a”—Michael paused, then finished the sentence as if he had a mouthful of bad food—“D-O-N-O-R.”

  “In a clinical setting!” Rip said. “A freaking doctor’s office. Not a bedroom!”

  “Do not”—Michael paused—“use language like that around my baby.”

  “I didn’t even mean you,” Rip said. “This is some crazy misunderstanding.”

  “We’re done talking about this. Done. Get your”—he looked over his shoulder, and Rip saw the rage in his clenched jaw, but then Michael paused, his eyes moving to Hank in Rip’s lap, and he spelled the next word—“F-U-C-K-I-N-G paddle in the water.”