Baby Teeth

by Zoje Stage

  Hanna wasn’t sure whether to laugh or scowl. She didn’t like to be corrected. But she always enjoyed seeing Mommy like this, in her natural state of hating and giving up. If only Daddy could see it, then he’d understand that Mommy was phony. When he was around, Mommy was kissy and helpful. But it was an act she couldn’t keep up. If Hanna kept trying, Mommy’s face would dribble off and Daddy would shriek and toss her out of the house.

  Hanna experimented with sounds as she read through the paragraphs. “Nya. Bya. Fya. Pwa. Bwa. Dwa.” She liked how French they sounded. She turned it into a repetitive singsong. “Dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dwa bwa pwa. Mee mee mee mee mee mee mee mee nya fya bya.”

  Mommy glanced at her over her bucket of vinegar and water. “Little more reading, little less singing.”

  “Bee bee bee bee bee bee bee, laa laa laa laa laa laa laaaaaaaaah! Di dee do do di dee do di ba ba baaaaaaah!”

  “If you want to be vocal, say something. You’re only giving away the fact that you can say something.”

  Hanna squished her lips together and batted her eyelashes. Mommy glared at her for a moment and went back to scrubbing the already clean kitchen. What a dumbo.

  She liked how the Pyramids looked, but she wouldn’t want to live in one. No windows. Then she read that they were tombs for the Pharaohs. Homes for dead people. Weird. They were buried with gold and food. Weirder. Like dead people would wear jewelry and get hungry. It reminded her of some research she’d done online. On Daddy’s computer (because he let her use it sometimes). Fairy tales were full of ghosts and witches—people who weren’t like regular people, capable of fascinating and creepy things. Once she even wore a black dress and a pointy hat for Halloween. She was desperate to know But are they real? and heaped her library books about witches onto Daddy’s lap. He misunderstood. He patiently read them with her, but didn’t understand what she was trying to find out. She googled it on her own.

  Yes. Witches were real.

  There were lots of them, especially in the golden days. Her search on “real witches” led her to Mother Shipton and Agnes Sampson. She’d read about young girls who were burned alive or tossed into a river to drown, weighted with stones, while the stupid villagers cheered. Nobody liked witches, that much was clear, but Hanna couldn’t understand why. It made her giggle, thinking about the fun games she could play if she had a witch for a friend. Maybe such a friend could finally help her do what she’d struggled to do on her own: make Mommy go away and never come back. After digging around some more, curious about the witch hunts, she found a big list of people who were killed. One of them had a name she very much liked and still remembered—a pretty French name with soft letters, not like the ugly n’s that trampled through “Hanna Jensen.”

  She silently tested the words Marie-Anne Dufosset with her lips and tongue. Maybe if she repeated it enough, the French girl would come to her in spirit and be her bestest friend. She and Marie-Anne could make up songs and sing them together. Marie-Anne could teach her how to cast spells with the words no one else understood. Spells that would make Mommy’s heart explode.

  Marie-Anne Dufosset. Marie-Anne Dufosset.

  Ha, it worked! Marie-Anne helpfully instructed her on how to get her vocalization just right.

  “Nya nya, nya nya. Boo dee boo dee baaa! Bwa bwa bwa bwa loo lee loo lee laaa!”

  Mommy tilted her head. Hanna loved the look she gave her—the one that said I give up.

  “Fine.” She gathered up her bucket and sponge and, head held high, marched away. Up the space-age stairs and into the master bedroom.

  Hanna cackled. It was a start. They had made Mommy disappear.

  SUZETTE

  SHE TENDED TO the house as if it were a newborn, needing constant attention to thrive. She knew what squalor looked like—a grimy bucket or chipped bowl beneath every exposed pipe, every ceiling a topographic map of peeling paint—and as long as she was with Alex she need never see it again. To enjoy the tactile sensation, she went around the house barefoot, and the bathroom floor was her favorite: cool, smooth stone. The tingling against the soles of her feet traveled all the way up to her throbbing head, offering more relief than the Tylenol. In circular scrubs, she worked her way across the quartz countertop. Alex spared no expense to make the master bathroom the spa she longed for. A long trough sink. A soaking tub with sleek, oceanic curves, large enough for the two of them to share like a womb. The shower with its pair of rainfall nozzles, so they could stand together and close their eyes, transporting themselves to distant places—misty Ireland, balmy Thailand. Toilet. Bidet. A tall window, the bottom half frosted. Everything white. Everything clean. The only thing he hadn’t been able to give her was a skylight, because of his third-floor home office.

  It had been an extravagance: Gutting the whole house; reframing for larger, more efficient windows throughout; moving the interior stairwells. He’d only just started Jensen & Goldstein, but Pittsburgh was a hot market for homeowners and businesses wanting Scandinavian-inspired green renovations: the most modern finishes, state-of-the-art recycled materials, creatively readapted objects and architectural bits. They employed—and were hired by—bright young visionaries. The firm, and its reputation, grew quickly; they designed or rehabbed interesting homes and buildings all around the city. After their office was featured in a local newspaper, repurposing old churches became one of their specialties. So Alex turned the house that once looked so unimpressive, purchased right after their wedding when they were both twenty-six, into their dream home. They’d already decided they would have a child and Suzette would be a stay-at-home mom, at least for a few years.

  It was a mistake, she realized, to examine the mirror for smudges, because all she saw was herself. A charred but unexploded stick of dynamite. She peeled off her gloves. Smoothed down her hair. Fixed the smears of mascara. She took off her belt and lifted her dress to examine the healing scars. Three laparoscopic ones, each about an inch long, lay strategically around the newly remade one: The canyon of uneven flesh removed; the skin pulled together tight and stitched back up in a tidy line. It was better. Not better enough for a bikini, but maybe in its new form the old trauma would start to dissipate.

  She’d told Alex about her health problems on their second date, a picnic in the park, because they’d kissed after the first movie-pizza date, and she was afraid that if things grew more intimate he’d be repulsed by her scar. It was hard for him to understand everything at first, because he hadn’t been raised in such a dysfunctional household, but he listened, really listened. His attention was comforting, and she told her life story for the first time. How, at thirteen, the stomach pains started, followed by almost constant diarrhea. Her world spiraled downward.

  “My mother shrugged it off. Said it happened to her at the same age. Hormones.”

  “But … When you never got better?” Alex asked.

  “I didn’t think of it as being sick anymore. It became normal.”

  But what she and her mother called normal, other people called Crohn’s disease.

  She retreated from the world and became afraid of food; maybe if she stopped eating, her stomach would get better. But it didn’t. On the night before her seventeenth birthday, she lay awake as her intestines twisted and screamed with wrongness. Sometimes she wished she’d had the bravery to lie there and accept her slow and agonizing death. Instead, she awakened her mother.

  They arrived at the hospital, and her mother played her best parlor trick and transmogrified into a commonplace person. She wore nice clothes and a facial expression of parental concern. When the triage nurse asked how long Suzette had been having abdominal pain, she said it started overnight. Her mother, in her mother costume, nodded and asserted that it was out of the ordinary. “I brought her in straightaway.”

  Suzette declined to have her mother present for the exam.

  The doctors ravaged all her virginal orifices in search of a diagnosis. Suspecting appendicitis, they performed emergency surgery and f
ound her lower intestines in a knot.

  Her mother wasn’t there when she awakened in a dark room, a tube in her nose, her midsection alight with a throbbing exigence for which she had no words.

  Weeks later, when it seemed as if she’d recovered well, she developed a fistula—a slender channel that grew from the site of her bowel resection to the surface incision. She found herself on the operating table with a cloth across her eyes. They cut into her jugular and inserted a central line without anesthetic. “Young people can handle the pain,” the surgeon explained to someone she couldn’t see. She didn’t scream (though she wanted to). But she never forgot (though she wanted to). They put her to sleep a few minutes later to reopen her abdomen.

  The idea was to keep the incision open and let the fistula heal on its own. Shit and puss oozed through the hole for the better part of four years. Four years during which it seemed impossible that she would ever live a regular life, or do ordinary things like kiss a boy or have a job. She thought often about killing herself, but she developed a career plan and eventually got herself into art school. And then there was Alex.

  “If I hadn’t met you … The freakish existence of my life might have gone on forever.”

  He kissed her then, with tears in his eyes. And months later, he admitted that he fell in love with her on that second date, seeing her so vulnerable, and inspired by her astonishing resolve and inner strength.

  A light hand rapped on the other side of the door.

  Suzette clenched her jaw and shut her eyes. Go away. Go away. Please go away.

  Tap-tap-tap.

  “Just a minute.” She let the dress slip back down to her knees. Gave her right abdomen a comforting little rub to encourage the healing.

  Tap-tap-tap.

  “Mommy needs a minute.”

  Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap.

  She ripped open the door, her teeth bared. “What is so fucking important?”

  Her daughter looked so small. The picture of a good girl in a pretty dress. Her mouth hung open a bit, in fear or shock. The workbook dangled from Hanna’s left hand, and in her right fist she gripped the pencil.

  She’d only come to ask a question, to get help. A better mom would have known that. Or at least not have lost her temper so quickly.

  The brittle bones in Suzette’s chest collapsed. Even the easy things were hard. “I’ll be down in a minute. Sorry. Be right down to help you.”

  She shut the door and quickly locked it so Hanna wouldn’t see her cry.

  For several moments she paced, huffing in and out like a runner at the end of a race. Get it together. Get it together. Get it together. A twinge, electrical, poked beneath her incision like a warning. This is what anger, frustration, stress of any kind did to her: sent her body into overdrive, signaled the soldiers to come out and kill, and everything they shot was collateral damage. Life with an autoimmune disease. She couldn’t afford prolonged periods of distress, and she worried how her murky internalization of being Hanna’s frustrated mother was taking its toll.

  The ileostomy bag taunted her—I’ll make you more disgusting than you’ve ever been. You’ll have to handle a nub of your own intestine and make sure your bag of shit doesn’t overflow. How was she going to turn this around and not let it become her inevitable future? Being a stay-at-home mom was meant to be part of a low-stress solution; it wasn’t a choice made because she lacked drive or talent.

  When they met, before Alex had his own firm, she was an interior designer—as ambitious and adept with her work as Alex was with his. They were paired on a project, the green-loving newbies who clicked into a companionship that became inseparable. But the overtime and juggling of deadlines took its toll. It was her first career position. Her ambition started to crumble as her wretched bowels became more unpredictable. Shit shit shit.

  She didn’t need to work after they got engaged and she moved into his apartment. She thought she’d do some freelance work, but mostly she cooked and cleaned and waited for Alex to get home. Her Crohn’s quieted down. She started sketching again—not just elegantly functional interiors, but more-abstract things from her imagination. After starting Jensen & Goldstein, Alex brought her in as a consultant on a part-time basis and let her choose the projects that appealed to her. She credited him with loving her back to health.

  Then she got pregnant.

  She’d expected a spiritual revelation; instead, her pregnancy demarcated the beginning of an extended sense of loss. Loss of self. Loss of Alex as the sole and cherished member of her tribe. Loss of her regained health.

  Her body became more and more foreign, more and more distressed. In the middle months when she was meant to be gaining and expanding, all systems rebelled. She had so much cramping and diarrhea that she struggled to gain enough weight during the pregnancy. Dr. Stefanski advised her to double her daily intake of Imodium, but the drug he promised would help the most would have to wait: the biological injections were too dangerous to risk on a growing fetus. The exhaustion was so debilitating they considered hiring a full-time nanny if her health didn’t improve after the birth. She started to hope the baby would come early, not caring if it was slightly premature. She needed relief and wanted the medication, no matter how toxic.

  She tried, during her worst moments, to hold on to the earliest days, the glorious days. When she and Alex beamed with radiant light. Their love had created a living, breathing creature who would someday hold the universe in its eyes and look at everything with wonder. But when it reached a size that she could feel within her, it seemed not like a baby but like a mass. And then they made the mistake of rewatching Alien and she burst into tears, knowing that’s how her baby would emerge, a monster that would tear her apart.

  “It’s just the Crohn’s, she’s fine,” Alex cooed, drying her tears, caressing her extended mound. “Right after she’s born, we’ll get you on the new meds.”

  As much as Alex tried to comfort her, she couldn’t stop the flashbacks, not when a pregnancy was, after all, a medical ordeal. Not a spiritual awakening.

  She dreaded all the necessary doctor appointments where she was supposed to surrender her own privacy and fears of being tortured for the benefit of the baby. Like it was already someone else’s body and their needs superseded her own. The minute she felt herself getting selfish and resentful, she thought: this is how it started, how my mother came to hate the responsibilities of motherhood. And then she’d have a change of heart and embrace her precious, fragile creature, and of course she’d do whatever it took. Endure the indignities of invasive exams because her beloved baby monster needed her, and she would prove that her instincts were strong, in spite of learning nothing from her own mother. Nothing but what not to do. Suzette vowed—with a savagery that put a spark of fear in Alex’s eyes—she’d never be a mother who dismissed her child’s pain. She’d never not care, she’d never be indifferent toward her child’s quality of life.

  “Of course you’re not like that,” he said. “You’re a loving, talented, wonderful woman—you’ll be a wonderful mother. Full of love and life.”

  But it was his love that created her life. Did she have enough of her own love to spare? The baby wasn’t supposed to remind her of an internal mass of pooling waste. The forty weeks weren’t supposed to be remembered for the new pains of a Crohn’s flare-up, or the demanding medical regimen that modernity required. She told Alex many times she wished they could go rent a farm, and while harvesting the cabbages she’d squat in the earth and give birth. In the end, she had her epidural and pushed like a champ, and it was worth it for the look on Alex’s face as he held their newborn daughter in his arms. The moment sealed it for him: Hanna was perfect, and Suzette his hero. In the years since, she did everything possible not to disrupt his mirage of familial tranquility; at least one of them was consistently happy.

  Her health and digestion improved dramatically after starting the injections, but it remained a source of guilt that she’d never nursed Hanna. What unintention
al harm might her baby have suffered? Might Hanna have developed differently with the early benefits of her milk’s precious antibodies? Suzette tried to compensate by laser-focusing her love as she fed Hanna a bottle. She cherished Hanna’s infancy. By the time Hanna was three months old, she prided herself on her knack for mothering. Baby Hanna was like an ever-changing work of art, with those expressive eyes, her little eyebrows that wiggled with concern.

  It should have kept getting better as Hanna grew into a toddler and started establishing her own identity. She and Alex prepared themselves for tantrums and rebelliousness, and looked forward to hearing her say “No!” and “Mine!” But while the tantrums started on schedule, other milestones were left behind. At first, when they started to worry about her verbal skills, helping Hanna gave Suzette a purpose unlike anything she’d ever experienced. She worked with Hanna every day, enunciating words, trying to make fun games out of teaching her. But more often than not, Hanna stared at her with an unnervingly skeptical look, then burst into smiles when Alex entered the room. Suzette tried for a long time, but as the years went on the constant failure was a punch to the gut. A gut that couldn’t take much more trauma.

  She pulled the rubber gloves back on. Sometimes she wished she had a full rubber bodysuit. It was armor against the germs—the drug compromised her immune system—but more important, the gloves made her feel purposeful. They symbolized hard work and productivity, cleanliness, and ultimately beauty. It was something she strove for, physical perfection. Her own might always be flawed (though she compensated as best she could), but the house was something she could master. Through the effort, she manifested her worth.

  She set the bucket on the floor and got down on her hands and knees. And scrubbed along the path where she had paced, erasing her own invisible footprints.