Cutting Teeth: A Novel

by Julia Fierro

  Rip was too mortified to speak. He was stuck in a boat in the middle of nowhere with a pissed-off dad, possibly drunk and practically a stranger. And Rip’s child, his precious only child, was with him.

  “Michael,” Rip said, but Michael ignored him, dipping his paddle into the water, stroking with a groan that escalated until Michael released with a grunt.

  Hank gripped Rip’s forearm, and Rip could feel the boy’s sweat-slick palm.

  “Daddy?” Hank said, and there was no need to say more. Rip knew what his son was feeling.

  “Can I have a turn paddling?” Harper asked.

  “Michael,” Rip said. He reached over Hank’s head to tap Michael’s sweat-soaked back.

  “Don’t touch me,” Michael said quietly. Rip sat back, shifting Hank so his son was as close as possible.

  They dug their paddles into the water until it felt to Rip like they were gouging at frozen earth. The back of Michael’s neck turned purple and Rip imagined the capillaries bursting under his own skin. The veins at his temples throbbed. But the canoe moved only what seemed like an inch every try.

  They did not speak. The birds called to each other—a sad and lonely plea that mimicked Hank’s whimpering. The drooping willow branches swayed in the breeze. The frogs croaked. More mechanically, Rip thought, than the way he’d imagined the frogs in the books he had read to Hank or in the cartoons the boy had watched. There was nothing natural about the sound. It reminded Rip of the buzz of a city-apartment doorbell, and he wished he and Hank were at home, and the apartment door was buzzing. Chinese food! Hank would shout joyfully, and they’d settle down to watch Toy Story 3 for the fortieth time, and Rip would cover Hank’s eyes with his own hands during the scary parts.

  Rip almost had to stop himself from laughing as they clawed and clawed at the water with the canoe barely moving. This is crazy. Just a silly misunderstanding. A temporary hell, he thought, like childbirth. All would be good in the end, once they got back and ate some food, had a few beers. He’d make Michael understand.

  He could smell the sour scent of his nervous sweat.

  The frogs and the cicadas grew louder. A relentless, grinding, buzzing chorus.

  Then he felt it. A hot trickle on his feet.

  Hank sighed. Rip caught the rising scent of his son’s urine.

  “It’s okay, my special guy,” he said. “Daddy’s here. He’s got you.”

  the grass is always greener

  Susanna

  The car ride to the supermarket had been puke-free. So far, Susanna thought.

  As Allie drove, Susanna listened to her talk a mile a minute about how intense the mommies were and what the hell were GMOs? And why was Tiffany so against GMOs? And what was up with Rip, could he be gay?

  Susanna nodded and answered in short responses. GMOS were Genetically Modified foods. Tiffany was an extreme domestic sancti-mommy. No, Rip was not gay. Just strange.

  She used the opportunity to check her savings account on her phone.

  The balance was $4,250. It wasn’t much, she thought, but her business was just getting off the ground. She’d scored her first big rental, a Swiss family with three kids under five, who would visit their Brooklyn cousins that fall and had booked a double stroller, three car seats, and two portable cribs. For a whole month! Things were sure to pick up in the spring, when the weather warmed.

  Then she remembered. There would be the baby to take care of, which would create at least a six-month distraction from building the business. She could hire a part-time babysitter. Tenzin was lovely—but that would spend money meant for their future home. If only Allie were more interested in pitching in with the child care. If only Allie were more interested in general. Honestly, Susanna thought, even the most disinterested daddies, like Nicole’s husband Josh, were more invested then Allie.

  The car hit a bump, and Susannah’s belly slapped against her thighs. Fuck! She rubbed her bump, an apology to the baby for the shock, and for swearing. Even if it was only in her head. She’d read many an article on pregnancy that warned stress and general negativity had a harmful effect on a life in utero. And although Susanna took little Tiffany said seriously, there was that study Tiffany had mentioned not long ago, linking stress to an elevated level of testosterone in a pregnant woman’s blood, which just might be responsible for the dramatic increase in Autism and ADHD. As Tiffany had lectured the rapt parents, Susanna had felt her heart beat faster, as if her body temperature were rising right then, as if she could feel her stress level rocketing. She had imagined the endorphins pinballing the testosterone, setting off a toxic rainstorm in her uterus.

  So she’d taken to apologizing to the baby each time she cursed. A miniantidote, she hoped. Just like the swear jar her Midwestern mother had kept on the corner of the kitchen counter. A nickel had clinked into the jar for every cussword.

  The automatic doors of the Shop & Stop whirred open, and Susanna was reminded of the magical efficiency of suburbia. Ice-cold central air. Starbucks drive-thrus.

  Allie veered left toward the dairy aisle and picked up her pace, waving her grocery list, “I’ll knock this out fast, babe. You just chill, and I’ll meet you at the checkout in a few, okay?”

  “Okay,” Susanna said as she eyed the few shoppers; an older woman in a housecoat and a few kids trailing their mother, their faces pressed to handheld video games. Had they heard Allie call her babe? Had they reacted? This wasn’t the city, after all, as Allie was always reminding her, using it as the principal reason they could not never ever move out of city; there wasn’t much love of gays in the ’burbs.

  No, Susanna decided. No reaction from the other shoppers. Just a slow, shuffled browsing in time to the mellow Muzak piped from some unknown place above. What song was it? She knew she had heard it before.

  She entered an aisle. The order and predictability of the grid was a comfort, the very opposite of the fear she’d had as a little girl of losing her mother in what had felt like a never-ending maze of sky-high walls.

  The brightly colored packages popped in Technicolor under the fluorescent lights. The endless assortment (who knew there were enough kinds of crackers to take up an entire aisle?) and the rainbow of little flags dotting the aisle with cheery optimism (SALE! BUY ONE, GET TWO!) emboldened Susanna, and she found a corner by the cereal boxes where her phone had three bars of access. She opened Citibank’s mobile app and made a transfer from their shared checking to her secret savings account.

  $1,000. Click. Done.

  The balance was now $5,250. Much better, Susanna thought.

  She knew Allie would never know. Allie was too “artistic” to be bothered with the tedium of bill paying. Allie, who had her head up her ass these days, or to be more accurate, her phone in her face. E-mailing clients and instant messaging her agent. Texting her irresponsible, childless friends. Which Allie had the nerve to call networking! Maybe even, Susanna dared to think it, texting a lover? A student from one of her Parsons classes. Hadn’t Susanna been Allie’s student once?

  No, Susanna thought, she would stay positive. Just as Tenzin had suggested that morning as they walked on the beach, a prebreakfast romp, the boys running ahead, sticks of driftwood raised above their sandy heads. The kind of nature-filled childhood they deserved.

  “It is good for the baby,” Tenzin had said. “To stay calm. As the great Dalai Lama says, Choose to be optimistic, it feels better.”

  This had filled Susanna with an instant panic. She had been so stressed, so worried, so angry all the time. What if it had hurt the baby?

  “You will be okay,” Tenzin had said, as if she could read Susanna’s thoughts, rubbing Susanna’s newly rounded shoulders with her man-sized hand. “You are a good person. I can tell.”

  Yes, Susanna thought now as she maneuvered her belly through the aisles, I am a good person. Then she found her destination.

  The produce glowed under the lights. The vegetables and fruit in the overpriced organic market in Brooklyn seem dull and shr
iveled in comparison. And the smells! Tomatoes that smelled of basil. Cantaloupes that smelled like honey. Peaches that actually smelled like peaches. The perfume felt like a hug from a great old friend. She hadn’t been able to walk past the grimy Met Food near their apartment in months. The stench of rotting food had made her gag. But this, this was heavenly, and it was as if the baby could smell it, too, because he/she jerked, and the skin of Susanna’s belly rippled with delight.

  This was what she needed, what the boys needed, what their new baby needed, and even if Allie couldn’t see it, this was what Allie needed.

  Fall was just around the corner, Susanna thought as she caressed the fuzzed skin of an apricot. The scent of wet leaves in the woods on a rainy day. The patter of drops on the roof, so present when there were no other sounds to drown it out—no sirens, no cab horns, no shouting on the street. The scent of fire smoke rising off crackling hearths and bonfires on the beach and fire pits in the backyard that had always reminded her of homecoming, of powder-puff football. She had been a runner-up for Homecoming Court queen her senior year, which had been one of the few backstory details she had kept from Allie, until Susanna’s mother had mentioned it at the first family dinner Allie had attended. As in, Susanna had translated to Allie later, how could her precious baby girl Susie be a dyke, when she’d almost been the homecoming queen?

  She lifted a coconut and inhaled deeply. The coarse brown hairs tickled her nostrils. Sure, at home there were a few trees in the grassless yard two stories below them (not that they had access to it) and one cherry blossom in front, which, for a few glorious weeks in April, turned their parlor windows pink. How grateful she was to that little tree. That poor little tree scarred by bike chains and poisoned by dog piss, and whose thin branches were strangled by plastic shopping bags.

  She shouldn’t have to feel that way about one little tree. It wasn’t natural, she thought as she grabbed an empty cart and began filling it with cartons of strawberries and blackberries, a cluster of perfectly ripe (not too ripe) bananas. Then mangoes and kiwis and even a passionfruit.

  A pregnant woman, a woman brimming with the power of life, should grow her baby where the air at least smelled clean, where the sounds of nature weren’t overpowered by the sounds of man. In the city, she and the boys were locked in a cage; their apartment was less than a thousand square feet, after all. They were freed only by the occasional escape to the Hamptons, to the sprawling beach house that belonged to Mitzi, Allie’s publicist, where a congregation of childless artists oohed and aahed over the boys, ignoring Susanna, treating her like nothing more than a vessel. A chipped vase carrying the most exquisite flower.

  “Babe?”

  Allie’s gravelly voice returned Susanna to the Muzak, to the fluorescent lights, to the gleaming waxed floors, to the overhead mist drifting down toward the leafy greens. Her hands were filled with soft fragrant peaches, and she was crying.

  “I know it,” she said to Allie.

  “You know what?” Allie asked, taking a step toward her. “Are you okay?”

  “The music playing right now,” Susanna said, through her tears. “It’s ‘Thank You.’ By Led Zeppelin. They played it at my senior prom.”

  white lies

  Leigh

  Leigh sat on the lumpy sofa in the main room and nursed a drowsy Charlotte. It was after the children’s dinnertime, and the room was filled with oversunned overtired children, and half-drunk mommies anxious to get food on the table before hunger spiked tantrums.

  Leigh had to remind herself not to pick at her eyebrows. She had already worried a naked patch over her left eye that afternoon during the children’s naps, while her phone had buzzed again and again, skittering across the bedside table with Tiffany’s texts.

  Tiffany knew, Leigh thought now as the children’s whines rose slowly, like the distant rumbling of a storm approaching. There was an underlying hiss of threat in the last few texts, as if Tiffany was hinting at consequences much larger than a lost mommy friendship.

  Before she could stop herself, Leigh’s hand was in her hair, one finger curling around a single strand at her temple and yanking.

  The relief was immediate. A cooling pulse starting at the crown of her head at the root and flowing down through her arms. She turned to the windows—pinkish orange with the setting sun.

  “Look, Charlie girl,” Leigh whispered to the baby, who was half-asleep, her suck waning. “I think it’s an egret. Or maybe a heron?”

  The clouds reminded Leigh of day-old bruises, but she waved the image away. Tenzin would call those ugly thoughts and had told Leigh that she was a beautiful person who should have beautiful thoughts. Leigh wanted to believe her.

  So she tried. She imagined one last trip with the children to the Lambert Sag Harbor country home, where she had spent her own childhood summers.

  “Oh, yes,” she whispered to Charlotte, who startled, her hands lifting in the air in sleepy self-protection.

  They would eat lettuce and radishes fresh from the kitchen garden and play in the sandbox Hugo, her father’s “man” and the caretaker of the country house, had built for Leigh and her sisters decades ago. Chase would learn to love the beach, and the salty sea air would calm his tics. All the hyperactivity in the world, Leigh thought, couldn’t make the sand any less soft, the sky any less big.

  The children’s whining tore her from her fantasy. It was as if they could tell there were fewer parents to reprimand them. The dads were on their canoe trip. Like some male coming-of-age classic, Leigh thought. Susanna and Allie were food shopping for what everyone kept calling tonight’s feast and which Leigh was dreading. Just the idea of sharing physical space with Tiffany for one more night made Leigh’s eyebrows itch, as if they were asking her hands to crawl up and pluck each hair, one by one.

  Grace entered the room, balancing a platter of white paper plates on her forearm. Each plate was topped with triangles of grilled cheese and a small mound of cut and steamed veggies. The children sat quietly, their heads peeking over the tabletop, as a plate was placed in front of each child.

  Chase wrinkled his nose. “No sam-wiches,” he said, and looked up at Grace, offering her his plate.

  Leigh saw the crease of annoyance around Grace’s mouth.

  Chase’s eyes wandered the room until he found her. “It’s too hot, Mama.”

  “Blow on it ’til it cools down. Count to twenty,” she said sweetly, hoping he wouldn’t ask her to leave the sofa. Her safe place, since the dining table was that much closer to the kitchen, where she could hear Tiffany’s voice, the way it swelled in conversation and fell quiet, and then swelled again to make a point. Enough to make a person feel seasick.

  “They really are so cute sometimes,” Grace said.

  “Who?” Leigh asked.

  Grace laughed. “The kids, of course.”

  “Yeah,” Nicole said as she hurried out of the kitchen to drop a pile of paper napkins in the center of the table, “Sometimes being the key word. But,” she paused, “I’m glad I made one.”

  As Nicole and Grace laughed, Leigh noticed the glassiness of Nicole’s eyes. As if she were already drunk. Or on those pills that Tiffany was always gossiping about. Nicole’s magic pink pills.

  Grace, her hands on her hips, said, “They’re cutest when they’re unconscious,” bringing forth more laughter, even from Tiffany, who had slid into the room. Her sudden presence made Leigh sit a bit taller and tug the edges of her hooter-hider nursing cover more snugly over Charlotte’s head.

  Some children are cuter than others, Leigh thought, and then wished she hadn’t. She was imagining what the other mommies were thinking about Chase. That although he was beautiful (it was undeniable—his long limbs, the gold flecks in his hair) he was not cute.

  Leigh sunk into the sofa and closed her eyes. Images of a happy Chase danced across the screen of her mind, across the lawn of the Sag Harbor house. Chase, sun-kissed and salt-tousled, running barefoot over the flawless emerald carpet, and there wa
s Tenzin, smiling as she ran behind him. Dear Tenzin was watching over Leigh’s children when Leigh could not, for she knew that in her fantasy she was in jail, somewhere far, far away, somewhere empty of green, of sea breezes, of children’s laughter.

  The sound of Chase’s churning frustration returned her.

  “I. Not. Hungry.” His voice drowned out Tenzin’s patient prodding.

  At home, Leigh used television to coax him to eat, a technique a therapist had taught her. She paused the TV and refused to press PLAY until Chase took a bite, despite his little fists drumming the table. After he took a bite, the television show resumed, and this process was repeated until it felt like each meal was a marathon. Leigh would never have let the other mommies know she bribed Chase with TV in order to stuff a piece of (God forbid!) McDonald’s chicken nugget in his mouth, one of few foods in his rotation. Especially not Tiffany, who was maniacally pro-organic and anti-TV, often reminding the group that television-watching caused brain damage in children under five.

  Chase leaned forward to sniff at the grilled cheese. Before she could stop herself, she was raising her voice, “Chase. Do not put your nose in the food.”

  “I not hungry.”

  “You have to eat. Or your tummy will hurt. Dash and Levi are eating. Don’t you want to be big like them? Are you a baby, or a big boy?”

  “A big boy?” Chase said.

  Levi laughed. “You a baby!”

  Leigh saw it coming, a literal darkening of Chase’s face, as if blood had gathered under his forehead and cheeks. She stood, a pinch of pain where Charlotte’s mouth was still attached to her breast, and caught Chase’s arm before it landed on Levi’s head.

  “Oh-kay! My big boy,” Tenzin said, and, as if reading Leigh’s mind, scooped Chase from his seat and carried him away.

  Leigh sighed. “Thank you so much, Tenzin,” she said.

  She could feel Tiffany watching her, so she kept her eyes on Charlotte, tucking her nipple back in the baby’s mouth, rocking back and forth as she perched on the edge of the sofa seat.