Cutting Teeth: A Novel

by Julia Fierro

  Tenzin would have to move into the house, Leigh thought, knowing that if there was one thing she’d make sure of, it would be this. Tenzin would be mother to her children when she was gone. They would sell the brownstone, cash in their stocks, hock her great-grandmother’s diamonds to ensure Tenzin was there. Leigh would give Tenzin anything, pay her any salary she wanted. Chase was not safe with Brad. Brad could barely help Chase put on his shoes without losing his patience and flinging a sneaker against the wall.

  She watched Chase and Levi run around the room, Raaaaargh, we’re dinosaurs! We going to eat you up!

  Chase was screeching now. I a T. rex! Grawr! Graaawr!

  “Too loud, Chase,” Leigh said.

  She imagined Tenzin and Chase and Charlotte living in the brownstone. Tenzin’s husband Lobsang, and their children, even Tenzin’s mother, a child-sized woman Leigh had seen only in photos. All living in the house Leigh had worked so hard to make beautiful. They were in the garden, lush and overgrown in the way Leigh liked it best, at the end of summer, the hydrangea in full bloom, the roses fragrant, bumblebees buzzing over the lavender. Tenzin had decorated the garden with stone Buddhas, and they peeked out from behind the ivy and the lilac trees, their eyes squinting with joy and their big bellies a promise of contentment. Charlotte had blond banana curls, and Chase was tall and handsome, his hair combed back to show the elegant slope of his forehead.

  Tenzin told stories to the children. Your mommy, my good employer. She talked of Leigh’s good heart, of her kind and gentle ways, as she had many times when comforting Leigh after she had lost her temper with Chase, after she had yelled at him, pushed him into a corner for a time-out, flung a toy at him in frustration, retreating to her room afterward, to her special leather chaise to weep alone. Tenzin found her every time and reunited her with her children, told her that all was good. That there was always a second chance. A do-over.

  Then Tiffany was there, standing so close that Leigh knew she could reach out and touch Tiffany’s tanned and sculpted leg.

  “When’re you guys heading back to the city?” Tiffany asked as she hovered over Leigh like a shadow, blocking her view of the rest of the room. “Should we do the aquarium tomorrow? Or the children’s museum?”

  As if nothing had happened. As if the return trip to Brooklyn would act as some reverse time machine, erasing the past three days.

  “I’m not sure,” Leigh started, prepared to make as believable a performance as possible. All she had to do was get back home, where she’d be safe. At least safe from Tiffany.

  Tenzin appeared with a fussing Charlotte. Her Tibetan Mary Poppins, Leigh thought, her heroine.

  “Baby Charlie wants some milky-milky!”

  Tiffany sighed and said, the sadness clear in her voice, “I love you, Tenzin.”

  She linked her long fingers in Tenzin’s short thick ones.

  Leigh wanted to tear their hands apart.

  Tiffany continued, “Every day I think about how I wish you could be with your family.”

  “Soon,” Tenzin said, “but for now, I have my friends.” She looked from Leigh to Tiffany and back to Leigh. “As the great Dalai Lama says, ‘If I am only happy for myself, many fewer chances for happiness. If I am happy when good things happen to other people, billions more chances to be happy!’”

  Chase raced past with a grawr!

  “My Chase needs me,” said Tenzin, and went to him.

  “Well,” Tiffany said, “shoot me a text, Leigh-Leigh. If you want to hang tomorrow? ’Kay?”

  Leigh looked into Tiffany’s mascara-smudged eyes.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Tiffany pulled her into a furtive hug. “Love you,” she said into Leigh’s ear, then twirled away from her, to the front door, where her Orla Kiely weekender bag (a gift from Leigh) lay next to Harper’s princess backpack. “Harp! Michael!” she called up the stairs. “Time to go!”

  After the three of them were gone, Leigh sat on the pilled couch, nursing Charlotte, thinking of how today was the last playdate Harper and Tiffany would have with her and Chase. Harper and Tiffany would never join their Friday afternoon playgroup again. Rip and Hank might playdate with them still, because Rip liked Tiffany’s boobs and drinking wine with her. But Leigh was certain the mommies were through with Tiffany after last night. Sure, they were all playing nice this morning, but Tiffany’s e-mail address would not be included the next time a playgroup invite made the rounds.

  Leigh caught her reflection in the tacky mirror on the wall opposite the sofa, cut into the shape of dolphins midair. There she saw Leigh the mother, the nurturer, her arms filled with new life, and she knew her choice had been worth all the terrible things lying in wait.

  She stroked the inside of her Charlotte’s arm, then her earlobe, the softest thing Leigh would ever feel, and the baby’s eyes fluttered, her suck slowing to a perfect rhythm, three light sucks, then a stronger suck, three light, one strong, three light, one strong …

  odd man (woman) out

  Tiffany

  As they drove farther west, the lush greenery was replaced by dull, brick apartment complexes and gas stations, and Tiffany had a rare pang of nostalgia for her hometown. The sea breeze and firefly-lit shore. The sound of boat horns in the night.

  She knew she would find another set of mommies. There were plenty of neighborhoods in the city where the sophisticated, educated, and wealthy families clustered, sucking dry the culture of the people they replaced. If there was one thing Suzie Harcourt had taught her, it was that women were the same, no matter what class they were born into. The rich ones were just more skilled at hiding their flaws.

  She had simply used up this particular Brooklyn neighborhood. Maybe they’d move over to Park Slope. Those mommies, in a neighborhood just a few subway stops away, were famous for their elevated domestic awareness. Maybe they were just the kind of motherhood companions she needed. She would find a group of women who took family life seriously. Who ate organic, who canned their own fruit and vegetables, who knit, and made their own soap and cleaning supplies from all-natural products. Mommies who weren’t afraid to breast-feed their preschoolers in public but wore the distinction with pride. Mommies who, like her, were doing it all. They were mothers, creators, community organizers, domestic dynamites, and entrepreneurs.

  Park Slope would be a trek for Rip. Maybe, if she moved, he and Hank would fade naturally from her life. She could still recall the taste of his tongue in her mouth the night before, and it made her nauseous.

  Other memories of last night repulsed her, too: Leigh’s hot breath on her neck, whispering, Your precious little Harper will never set foot in St. Ann’s.

  It didn’t matter, thought Tiffany as she listened to Harper snuffle sleepily in the backseat. She would find her Harper Rose a different school to attend. A better one. There was no way in hell she was going to bend to Leigh’s will and grovel for a second chance.

  Tiffany had learned at an early age, around fifth grade, when the girls began to play nasty—a clique welcoming a girl, then exiling her in one day—that it was simple. Girls just want to be loved. She knew that on the übercompetitive playgrounds of yuppie Brooklyn, one can always use another mommy friend. And she had her mommy pick up lines perfected. Most of Brooklyn’s brownstone neighborhoods were teeming with stay-at-home mommies who had put ambitious personal and professional lives on hold, to live what they (not she) came to see, with startling surprise, was a tedious life with little children. Chances were that a hint of weakness (ugh, what a day, Tiffany might say) exposed to the right person (preferably depressed) at the right moment (late in the day when they had the playground to themselves) could make even the most reserved mommy (Leigh) open up. The other mommy sighing and turning to Tiffany with a grateful smile to say, me too. A friendship born.

  They were visual artists, CEOs, playwrights, chefs, opera singers, and attorneys. They had worked at the UN, the Stock Exchange, Columbia University, and Lincoln Center. They were power-hun
gry women (and a few men) who had sacrificed hard-won careers. Women who had birthed their children one right after another. They’d had to because they had waited so long to do the baby-dance, and before they knew it, they were making six-figure salaries, nearing forty years old and childless. Tiffany saw how this made mommying harder, having to take care of two or three kids under the age of four. Wham bam, thank you, ma’am child-rearing, she called it, relieved, and even a bit gloating about the fact that, at thirty, she was considered a young mother. She saw the glint of envy in many a mother’s squint when they heard how young she was, when they realized that Tiffany could take motherhood nice and slow.

  As they drove up the steep ramp that skirted the ancient and crowded Calvary Cemetery, and the Manhattan skyline loomed so suddenly, Tiffany felt anything was possible. She had time. Time to repair before she became a mother to another child. As they took the exit for Brooklyn, the city of never-ending promise vanishing in the rearview, she started to plan. She would inject her family’s home with positivity. She wasn’t clueless—she knew who she was. To be honest, she didn’t believe that people could really change, but there was always trying.

  Those women whose girlhoods had been good—or at least good enough that they hadn’t run from them, she thought—they couldn’t see how easy it was to remake yourself. All you needed was a bus ticket, a few hundred bucks, and someone, preferably, the right someone—Suzie Harcourt, Michael, Leigh—to need you. She knew she was better than the other mommies in at least one way. Their worst fear was that they were bad mommies. Not her. No way in hell. That was one thing she didn’t have to question. She was a damn good mommy.

  safe and sound

  Rip

  “Snacks?” Grace asked.

  “Check,” Rip said.

  “Sippy cup?”

  “Check.”

  She went on and on, until Rip thought he would hurl the two suitcases out the window, stuffed with Grace’s outfits, and Hank’s—matching white seersucker pants and jacket, clothes that Hank hadn’t even worn. No wonder the kid had wanted a dress. Grace dressed Hank like he was her little doll, playing pretend when it suited her and, when bored, disappearing behind her bedroom door, the click of the lock a signal she’d had enough.

  He tried to remember the feeling he’d had the night before, when he had knelt by Hank’s cot and draped the pink princess dress over his sleeping son. A blanket fit for fairy-tale dreams, Rip had thought before kissing Hank’s forehead.

  Now, as he stood in front of the window, watching the seagulls drop claw-flailing crabs to their doom on the sea rocks, he couldn’t summon that feeling. That unconditional love. Wasn’t that what they called it in the parenting books, in therapy, and on TV talk shows? The all-consuming love that only a parent can have for their child? Wasn’t that what he’d felt last night as he sped around the moonlit curves of the road, the mosquitoes splattering against his windshield, as he burst through the doors of Target and into the blinding fluorescent light, as he raced down the aisles, ripped the princess dress from the rack, and threw it on the whirring checkout conveyor belt?

  “Extra pair of clothes?” Grace asked.

  He hated that she still made them pack an extra pair of clothes, in case Hank puked on the drive. It had only been that one time that Hank had gotten carsick, and it had been over a year ago. He was about to say no, to explain that he thought it unnecessary, open up what he knew would be a can-of-worms debate about an extra fucking pair of children’s clothes, when Grace said, “Hon? Did you hear me?”

  Rip turned from the window. He sat on the twin bed, the springs complaining. He let his head fall into his hands, and the skin of his forehead felt rough, so unlike Hank’s skin, as smooth as the fake satin of the boy’s new dress. When had he grown old? When had he turned into a cliché? It was one thing to be the only dad in a mommy group—his male cousins ribbed him about it every Passover, and Grace’s father barely looked at him, the disgust he felt for his son-in-law plain in the quick handshake that served as Rip’s only interaction with the man. But to fuck one of the moms in a shack at a family event? He had turned into one of those potbellied losers in a cheesy comedy, knee-deep in a midlife crisis, his pants around his ankles, his whining about how he couldn’t have the life he wanted. Boo-hoo-hoo.

  Rip pressed his fingers against his eyes, and bouquets of stars bloomed. He had shown Hank this trick not long ago, and they had sat on the couch, Hank a lump of warmth in Rip’s lap, each pressing his own fingers against his own eyelids, whispering wow and cool, until Grace, ranting about ophthalmologists and detached retinas, had made them stop.

  The bed dipped with a squeak, and he felt Grace next to him. Then her small hand was on his back, rubbing circles into his sweat-damp shirt.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  Her hand was on his, and he could feel the cool metal of the ring he had given her years before Hank, before infertility, when he had proposed to her at the Jersey Shore, her head in his lap, sand in her hair. He’d found the ring in a consignment shop in the Village, and he’d been certain it was beautiful. Perfect. It wasn’t until, weeks after Grace had said yes, his sister Melanie had seen the ring, and one afternoon, alone with Rip, had chuckled and asked how Grace liked it.

  When he didn’t get the joke, Melanie had said, “It’s like tanzanite or something, Ricky. Not a real diamond.”

  He looked at the diamond tennis bracelet that seemed to glow against Grace’s bronzed skin, at the two-carats glimmering in her earlobes. All jewelry she had bought for herself.

  But she’d never stopped wearing his fake diamond ring.

  “Yes,” he finally answered. “I’m okay.”

  They sat on the bed, and the kaleidoscopic shapes he’d seen with his eyes closed slowly faded. They kept holding hands as Hank played on the floor with his plastic animals. It was one of those sets Rip brought on car trips—an emergency tantrum antidote, a plastic tube that held three of each kind of animal. Small, medium, and large. Hank named them Hank, Mama, and Daddy.

  The princess dress was too large. One side of the lace-trimmed collar slipped down Hank’s shoulder. The skirt covered everything but the scuffed toes of Hank’s sneakers. He’d have to get it shortened, Rip thought, or do it himself.

  “Waah, waah. I sad,” Hank said in a soft voice, as the baby elephant hid its trunk under its mother’s wide belly.

  “What’s wrong, baby?” the medium-sized elephant asked the littlest in a mommylike falsetto, tipping its trunk.

  Then Hank’s face crumpled so completely, so authentically, it nearly drained Rip’s breath. “I miss my mommy and daddy,” the baby elephant squeaked.

  “Don’t worry,” boomed the biggest elephant in a Papa Bear bass. “We are here. We will take care of you.”

  “Hug. Hug. Hug,” Hank said in each of the voices, delicately tipping the elephants’ trunks so they touched in three quick kisses.

  Rip stood, his hip bumping the night table.

  He wanted to turn to Grace, take both her hands in his, imprison her in his desperation, plead, How can we not have more children? How can you not want to freeze this time in life? These oh-so-brief sweet years when we are so adored, so loved, that all sadness relates to one thing—the absence of us!

  Rip knew he would have that urge again, and again, that it might never leave him.

  Fuck it, he thought. I’m good at this. At being a parent. At unconditional love. Just as Allie had told him the day before on the beach. No one—no daddy, no nanny, no mommy—could squash a tantrum as quickly as Daddy Rip. Tomorrow, he would call Ruth, their couples’ therapist, and make an appointment. There was a lot to discuss, although there were also secrets he knew he would keep from Grace. Forever, if it meant keeping his family, and helping it to multiply.

  He was hungry for time to pass, eager to return home, unpack the car, carry the flush-cheeked and sleeping Hank from the car to bed—one of Rip’s favorite rituals. He would set up the kitchen for the next day’s br
eakfast, two big bowls and one small for cereal, coffee in the filter, timer on, Hank’s clothes unpacked, refolded, and put away, an outfit laid out for Hank to wear to his soccer class tomorrow. He would log onto TryingToConceive.com and consult with his girls. He would start researching the sperm bank Allie had told him about.

  He and Allie had really bonded, he thought as he rubbed his phone in his pocket where her contact info was held, like a tiny little present.

  promise the moon

  Allie

  That morning, after Susanna had wept over the dew, she continued to behave like a child. Sulking. Whining. Nagging Allie, while not helping her pack. As Allie stuffed clothes at random into their bags, trying to keep the peace between Dash and Levi (no TV when we get home if you don’t cut that out, no iPad if I see you hit your brother one more time), Susanna droned on weepily about the stench of Brooklyn, about the inadequate life they were giving their children, alternating her lamenting with her usual trips to the bathroom.

  Allie was sure the rest of the house could hear Susanna’s pleading. She wouldn’t let up: Couldn’t Allie just think about leaving the city? Couldn’t she just entertain the idea? Finally, when Susanna asked for what felt like the hundredth time—“Couldn’t you just say maybe? Not yes. Just maybe?”—Allie had stuffed the rest of the boys’ clothes in the suitcase, pulled her leather boots on over bare feet, and said, without looking at Susanna, “Okay! Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” Susanna croaked.

  Allie wondered where that firecracker of a girl with her cocky little ponytail had gone.

  “Maybe,” Allie repeated, though she knew, and she sure as hell hoped Susanna knew, that maybe, in this case, meant never. She (they, she corrected) needed to go back home. Because that’s what it was, she thought. Their home. Even the stench of garbage simmering in the late-summer heat, the cockroaches that skittered across the sidewalk on humid nights, the sirens and the exhaust and the dog shit that made every stroll with the boys feel like a booby-trapped obstacle course.