Cutting Teeth: A Novel

by Julia Fierro

  “You can’t be the princess every time,” Rip said. “You have to take turns.”

  eat your heart out

  Tiffany

  Tiffany had loved her mother’s white leather dress.

  “Zip me, baby,” her mother had said as she had tugged the dress on over her black push-up bra, and Tiffany, just eight years old, had stood on tiptoes to make the zipper glide right to the top.

  “I could pass for your sister in this.” Her mother turned her padded shoulders and smoothed the leather that clung to her hips as she examined herself in the mirror. “Don’t you think, Tiff?”

  “Totally,” Tiffany said because she knew that was what her mother wanted to hear.

  “It’s going to be a good night,” her mother said with a deep and hopeful exhale.

  Tiffany’s mother always left the house looking perfect on a first date. Not a crease in her dress. Not a scuff on her matching white pumps. Not a crimp in her blown-out and hairspray-stiffened hair. She smelled of Jean Naté body wash and Chloé perfume. Tiffany could still taste the mint on her mother’s lips as she kissed her good night, before her mother climbed into whatever pickup truck, Bronco, or Trans Am her date was driving.

  When Tiffany’s father came home after two years in the service and set up a mechanic’s garage in the front yard of their small house in their small town on the North Fork of Long Island, he’d gotten himself a new girlfriend, a waitress from the BBQ place on Main Street who lined her lips with brown pencil and who he took out around town.

  “So that every goddamn pair of eyes on the North Fork sees them,” Tiffany’s mother complained.

  One Friday afternoon, when Tiffany, a fourth grader, had come home from school, her mother was gone. Her father’s explanation was “she run out on us,” and Tiffany had no choice but to believe him and guess that her mother had taken the white leather dress with her. Tiffany only saw her a few times a year after that—on holidays, on her birthday. She never saw the white leather dress again.

  Now, as Tiffany looked into the dusty mirror of Nicole’s parents’ guest bedroom and tweezed a rogue hair from her eyebrow, she could still smell that leather. How silly she’d been, she thought, believing that damn dress the be-all and end-all, when it was the tackiest thing on earth.

  She thought of Rip, whom she’d been trying not to think of, still not sure what he made (or she made, for that matter) of the scene in the kitchen the day before. She couldn’t tell if he’d been avoiding her all day, or if it was just the routine chaos of the kids, and so many people, then Susanna—Tiffany had to stop from laughing—puking on the beach, plus Nicole’s fretting and Michael’s drinking too much.

  Rip wouldn’t mind seeing her in that white leather dress. That she knew.

  She froze, listening, the tweezers poised in midair. She had thought she heard Harper’s giggle out on the beach. Like chimes in the breeze. They sure had been gone long enough, she thought with a tingle of worry. She knocked back the rest of the wine, and it slid warm and spicy down her throat.

  She dabbed golden droplets of Rodin face oil on her chin, her cheeks, and her forehead with a tiny glass wand. It cost $150 an ounce, which she had charged to her secret MasterCard. Worth every penny.

  After applying primer, foundation, powder, blush, and eye makeup—the steps necessary in creating a dewy, natural-looking complexion—she painted her lips with Tom Ford’s Cherry Lush, $45 a tube, a birthday gift from old Suzie Harcourt, Tiffany’s own former good employer. Years ago, when Tiffany had stepped off the Greyhound bus for the second time—her first stab at NYC life having been a failure—and into the grime-coated Port Authority, a twenty-two-year-old worth less than $200, she’d been struck lucky, hired by society semidiva Suzie Harcourt, nee Vanderly, whose twins Tiffany would nanny on the Upper East Side until Harper was born. Suzie taught Tiffany all she’d need to know to blend in with women several tax brackets above the couples who filled the beach house that weekend. Suzie had taught her to be a class chameleon, and Tiffany had learned that florals and plaids could go together if you had enough blue blood flowing through your veins, that straight hair vs. curly spoke of refinement, and that anything frosted, bleached, or acid-washed was out of the question, a blinking red sign you were trash.

  Suzie had taught Tiffany about quality—of bedsheets, of furniture, of wine and cheese. Of clothes. Tiffany had put money aside each paycheck until she had enough to buy a Miu Miu dress at a chic, secondhand boutique, instead of spending it at Strawberry’s. Quality over quantity. Suzie’s voice still looped through Tiffany’s head. Suzie’s constant elocution corrections—Tiffany was a live-in, so they were together daily—had eradicated Tiffany’s nasal-heavy Long Island accent, and the woman’s stylist had colored Tiffany’s hair a blond that Suzie had praised as deliciously natural.

  Suzie had revealed to Tiffany the secret code; which colors to wear (black was always safe), books to read, movies to watch, magazines to peruse (Suzie’s word choice) at the salon. Tiffany had thrived, so much so that one night, four years ago, at a theater event (a British immersion play in which the audience had to wear white masks), Tiffany had made Michael fall in love with her. Michael, who had a degree from Syracuse, who ate sushi, who used words like woodsy, floral, and earthy when drinking wine, who dated women with trust funds, and who was pulling in close to a hundred thousand dollars a year. Michael, now her fiancé. Partner, she corrected herself. She had learned it was better to imply they were indifferent to marriage, on principle. Not that they’d dated for six months, then one morning the pink smiley face on the pregnancy test was staring up at her, expectantly.

  First, there’d been Suzie. Now there was Leigh, and Tiffany had moved up. Landing just a few floors shy of the penthouse, she thought as she slipped a loose emerald silk chiffon Isabel Marant dress over her head. The brilliant green made the summer highlights in her hair pop. The silver thread that wove through the toile pattern glittered as she rocked her hips from side to side. No one would guess that the dress was a hand-me-down from Leigh.

  Look at me now, Mama, Tiffany thought, as she often did, especially since she’d befriended Leigh. Leigh who gave her designer hand-me-downs—Rachel Comey pink marbled boots with stacked heels, a Marc Jacobs hobo bag made of buttery Italian leather. And there were the almost-full bottles of lotion from Molton Brown, and the bars of Red Flower soap, still in their exquisite boxes, so lovely Tiffany couldn’t bear to open them. She had chosen Leigh over all the mommy friends and acquaintances who had coveted Tenzin, who had asked, e-mailed, and texted Tiffany, their smiley-faced emoticons practically begging, to see if Tenzin had any hours available. Choosing Leigh to share Tenzin with had made Tiffany and Leigh equals, Tiffany thought.

  The soft silk shifted over her sunburned shoulders as she slipped her strappy heels on. After a few wobbly steps, she kicked them off. She was a little tipsy. She would go barefoot. Like a sprite in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Even if it was the end of summer, and even if no one, especially not that snobby bitch Susanna, would believe that Tiffany had ever read a Shakespeare play.

  She had nipped the “Susanna conflict” in the bud, Tiffany thought, congratulating herself. Susanna had seemed perfectly fine sitting next to her that afternoon on the deck. Friends turned into enemies and back to friends again. That ugly scene at the Jakewalk Bar forgotten. Fine, Tiffany thought, she had been flirting that night at the bar, but it was harmless. No one was going to die from a little whispering, a little touching, a little brush of her knee against the inside of a guy’s leg.

  She twirled from side to side in front of the dusty mirror so her skirt rippled up in the air. Look at me now, Mama. Buying lavender-infused truffles at the Chocolate Bar, and the same luxury scented candles that burned in the bathrooms of NYC’s elite. She used cloth napkins, employed a house-cleaner, and paid to have her eyebrows waxed. Move over Gatsby. She was practically a superyuppie.

  If Suzie and her Tory-Burch-sporting friends had known about Tiffany’s mo
ther and her morals and her white leather dress, they’d never have let her walk through the doorman-guarded lobbies of their luxury buildings. How their wrinkle-free foreheads would have cracked with concern if they’d known about her mother’s slutting around, not to mention her sister LeeAnn the meth-head, and Tiffany’s abortions. Tiffany knew rich women had abortions, but they didn’t have to drive to a clinic in the middle of a small town. They were chauffeured to dim and quiet parking garages in midtown and took an elevator to an office where they were the one and only guest. Their uterus was scooped clean as classical music played over an intercom, and they left almost as they came, sight unseen, not a peep to anyone. Money not only equaled time, Tiffany had learned, money meant privacy. Protection. And by the time Tiffany had met Suzie, she’d been screwing up for long enough and she was ready for a little protection, and a lot of change. She was ready to be born again. Into the light of DVF and Alexander Wang and Aqua di Parma. Amen.

  Tiffany was seventeen when she’d made it out of her middle-of-fucking-nowhere hick town for the first ill-fated attempt at living the NYC dream. She’d been sick of her father taking half her waitressing paycheck for rent, sick of her friends crying about their loser boyfriends, sick of her stepbrother asking her to suck him off. For four years, she’d scraped by in the greatest city in the world. Bartending, dog walking, working in a souvenir shop in Times Square that sold the Statue of Liberty in a thousand different forms—soap holders, back scratchers, thermometers. Then one night, after a party in a factory loft in Williamsburg, where everyone was rolling on E and laying tabs of acid in the shape of blazing suns on their tongues, she had awoken in a dark room, on a stripped mattress that smelled like puke, unable to speak or move as some guy pounded his cock into her. She’d spent the rest of that night willing her body to move, begging her body to roll off the bed, sit up, (move, goddamnit!) and finally crawled to the door, only to realize she couldn’t turn the knob.

  Her body betrayed her.

  They came back. Maybe three, maybe four times that night. She’d never know how many times, how many guys, who. She’d never know if they had drugged her—she had taken the E and the acid herself. She went to parties in the months that followed and found herself staring at her feet, terrified to look up. What if they were sitting next to her, laughing at her in their heads, thinking of the way her tits had flapped around as they slammed into her? At the last party she went to, she had stumbled out and onto the dead street of a neighborhood she didn’t recognize. When she finally hailed a cab and made it back to her apartment, the sky a battered violet with the coming dawn, she stayed in her room, leaving only to go to the bathroom and to open the door for the delivery guy from the convenience store downstairs.

  Days passed.

  Her twenty-first birthday came and went.

  Then it was a week. Two.

  Her roommates in that mouse-infested loft in Williamsburg, all sweet suburban-bred girls whose parents, in Tiffany’s humble opinion, had loved them too much, had taken care of her. They fed her microwaved ramen from styrofoam bowls. They washed her clothes. They guided her to the already running shower and massaged shampoo into her hair. They stubbed out her Parliaments after she’d fallen asleep. But when the first of the month came, and then the seventh, and the fourteenth, and Tiffany still hadn’t slipped her portion of the rent into the envelope taped to the fridge, they asked her to leave.

  She knew she could have told them she had been raped. But because this wasn’t the first time she’d come to half-naked in a stranger’s bed, because it wasn’t the first time some guy had been inside her while she lay like a corpse, she didn’t.

  She ate her last bowl of ramen and swallowed her last Klonopin, a gift from her most recent ex, the prescription-drug dealer/Ivy League grad.

  Michael was three light-years away, Harper Rose, five. And there’d been nowhere else to go.

  So Tiffany had gone back to her middle-of-fucking-nowhere hometown, out on the end of Long Island. She crashed at an ex-boyfriend’s place. He was squatting in an unfinished house: pink insulation bulged through the beams in the ceiling. Her possessions had fit into two duffel bags and one cardboard box. They were her clothes, her grandmother’s faded quilt, a box of thick biographies she had loved as a girl (Marlon Brando, Anais Nin, Georgia O’Keefe) and the little pewter angel with stained-glass wings her mother had given her at her First Communion. There was a wordless fuck with the ex every night on the sunken couch (the price of rent), but she threw back two of his Xanax twenty minutes before and was half-asleep when he came inside her.

  She visited her father and stepmother Shelley over casserole dinners at their ramshackle house, a trailer with ill-proportioned adjoining rooms her father had built himself. The cracks in the wood were filled with tar, but the wind wrenched its way in.

  For three brisk autumn nights, she’d sat with her father and Shelley under the oak trees, the night smelling of low tide and fire smoke as they roasted chestnuts over the pit and talked of people in the town. Shelley filled her in on who had had married whom, who had whose baby, who had collected enough DUIs to send them to jail, who had finished at the community college and who had left for the city only to return less than a year later. As she listened to the lilting waltz of Shelley’s voice, Tiffany tried to remember how to talk in that way—maybe, she thought, it would help her tell them what had happened, why she’d had to surrender, come home—the slow-paced chitchat that mimicked the swaying branches above. She’d been practicing the speedy scrutinizing discourse of the young metropolitans for years, the quicksilver tongue that jumped from earnest to irreverent in a flash.

  As her father recounted the latest nor’easter and the damage done to the town bowling alley in the floods, Tiffany watched the gray-speckled gypsy moths flutter close to the flames, catching fire and diving, wings smoking, into the embers. She told her father that something bad had happened to her, had been done to her. She wanted her father to ask what? And wanted him to say, It’s okay, baby doll. You can tell your daddy. And then she’d tell him, and he’d hold her and stroke her hair, then promise he’d find those motherfuckers and tie them to a tree in the woods and cut off their dicks and feed them to the muskrats in the marsh.

  But her father didn’t ask. He made a sound—a hmmph—and after a few moments of nothing but twigs crackling and chestnut shells popping, he said, “Best to just move on. I told you to be careful,” he said. “That you’d never survive that rotten city.”

  “Maybe it’s me that’s rotten, Daddy,” she said, and looked at him, waiting.

  She felt a lift in her chest, like she was close to understanding something big, and she knew that even after all she’d ruined, the parts of her she’d let get dirty, she still wanted to live. If she could keep that feeling, she thought, she just might make it.

  “Thinking, thinking. Talking, talking,” her father said, as the flames sent shadows dancing across his fat cheeks. “Do you got to share every thought that passes between your ears?”

  Then she remembered the times her father had said to others—right in front of her, like she was invisible—“Tiff’s always thinking on things too much,” with an eye roll, his twang garbling the words, but not enough that Tiffany couldn’t hear the disgust beneath.

  Like he was apologizing for her.

  And Tiffany knew. She had to go back.

  Later that night, she walked the cracked road that led to town. Walked the three miles, the cold salt-filled wind of the nearby shore stinging her cheeks. She prayed to God as she walked, as her sweat-damp hair froze into solid strips. She slept on the chilled aluminum bench at the Greyhound stop, and when the bus pulled up, she left everything behind her, even her books, even her mother’s pewter angel. She’d had a little less than $200 in her pocket, enough for a ticket, a stale bagel sandwich, and three nights at a Times Square hostel.

  She wasn’t like the other mommies, she thought now as she stared at her image—that of a strong and beautiful woman in
her prime. They could feel safe in a godless world, so much so that they’d brag about it, as she had heard them do many times. It’s not like I believe in God or anything. Well, you know, I don’t believe in God, only in free will. Not believing in a higher power was a privilege, Tiffany knew. A woman had to have a shitload of self-esteem to walk around thinking she was the most important part of the world, that she called the shots, that she held the reins of her own fate.

  Tiffany opened her silk jewelry purse and found the two pink pills she had snuck from Nicole’s room that afternoon. Knowing Nicole, who’d been throwing these babies back every few hours since they’d arrived, she wouldn’t notice there were a couple missing. Knowing Nicole, Tiffany thought, it was a Xanax. And if not? C’est la vie. She threw one, then the other, into the back of her throat and swallowed it dry. The bitterness spiked her tongue just as her phone buzzed with a text.

  Another text from Leigh:

  Tiffany, answer me!!!

  Three exclamation points, Tiffany thought with approval, and when she looked in the mirror, she smiled, checking her teeth for lipstick.

  Her phone vibrated again.

  Please, Tiff. We’ve GOT to talk about this! In person. Like adults.

  It was only a matter of time—maybe even minutes—before Leigh gave in, before her resolve cracked, before she agreed to handing over Tenzin on Thursday afternoons.

  Tiffany knew how little it would take to ease Leigh’s stress. A single text, like:

  I’m sorry! I love you too, bff

  But she didn’t write it.

  It wasn’t the babysitting hours that held her back, or the fact that her music-class gig at Shabbat Tots was at stake—although the extra money would be nice. It was the principle. There was self-righteousness in Leigh’s refusal to share Tenzin, as if Leigh thought she was more deserving than Tiffany. Better.