Baby Teeth

by Zoje Stage

  Hanna stopped, but kept out of range of Mommy’s touch.

  “I know you’re working on a drawing of Marie-Anne, for tomorrow’s fire. I know you’re … a little bit of a perfectionist? So if you need help—”

  “Mommy’s very good at drawing,” Daddy added.

  She considered the two of them, and Mommy’s offer. She’d tried again with her egg-shaped girl and it still barely looked like a person. Mommy wanted to help her—but more important, Daddy wanted her to accept Mommy’s help. She could see it all over his face. If Mommy participated in the drawing, a part of her would end up in the fire, too—the lines she drew on the page, and some of her cells that rubbed against it. Maybe she’d leave fingerprints behind. And when Hanna tossed the Mommy-confetti into the flames, her spell would be twice as strong. She stuck her finger in her mouth, feeling the ridges of the new tooth that was poking through her gum. And gave one assertive nod.

  * * *

  Daddy brought down one of Mommy’s sketchbooks and two sets of her pencils—one with lots of colors, and one in which the pencils all looked alike; Mommy said those were different shades of gray, rated by hardness.

  “The softer the graphite, the darker the line. So when you want just a very light sketch, you use a harder pencil.” She pointed to the 7H printed near its blunt end.

  Daddy set up his laptop on the kitchen counter, but kept glancing over at them. Hanna knew what he was thinking: some of the pencils were very sharp. She could stab them into the back of Mommy’s hand until it was stuck to the table. She grinned at him so he would know she was enjoying herself and wouldn’t cause Mommy any further harm. Yet.

  He winked at her, then grubbled up his eyebrows as he studied something on his screen.

  “Do you want to show me what you’ve drawn so far?”

  Hanna shook her head.

  “People are hard to draw.”

  Hanna nodded.

  “So I’ll show you how. And I’ll do it very lightly, and then you can color it in, or try it on your own, okay?”

  She sat on her knees and leaned on her elbows, her eyes on Mommy’s sketchbook.

  “So I like to start by drawing two little lines—just slashes, really. One here where the top of the head will be, and one here for the feet. This way, you know your whole figure will always fit on the page and you won’t run out of room. Then I make two more slashes—one near the middle, where the waist will be. And one up here for the shoulders.

  “I like to proportion a human figure off the size of the head. So I draw an oval for the head … and then a neck … and, including the head, the whole body will be about seven to eight ovals of about the same size.”

  She ogled at the shapes that emerged beneath Mommy’s pencil, so faint but confident.

  “So I draw three ovals beneath the neck, and there’s the torso—and you see the last oval straddles the line I drew for the waist. And then four ovals on either side of that. And these are the legs. Smaller sideways ovals for the feet.

  “Then I go back to the line I made for the shoulder. I draw a smaller circle on either side of the upper torso—those are the shoulders. And you see how they line up with the hips and legs? Then beneath the first shoulder I draw an oval—same size as the others. A little circle—that’s the elbow. Another oval, another little circle—that’s the hand.”

  She repeated her series of circles and ovals and created the right arm, and then sat back. Hanna’s eyes and mouth became big O’s. Like magic, Mommy had drawn a recognizable, well-proportioned human figure. She didn’t even mind the way Mommy was gazing on her, her face alert and pleased.

  Daddy came over and twirled a piece of Hanna’s hair in his finger. “Mommy’s pretty good at this, right? Älskling, we should find a spot for you to use as a studio. Even the upstairs hallway in front of the window, or up in my study.”

  Mommy beamed at him, but Hanna thought it was a terrible idea. The very thought of Mommy invading the best room in the house—Daddy’s room—made her want to tear up the sketch. But she didn’t. She needed it.

  “Do you want to try it?” Mommy asked as Daddy gave her shoulder a squeeze and returned to the counter and his work.

  Hanna shook her head and pointed to the colored pencils.

  “You just want to color it in?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay. Well then I’ll pick a slightly darker pencil”—she exchanged one gray pencil for another—“and sketch out some clothes, and it’ll be like a coloring book. What should she wear? Is she a girl of olden times? Does she wear a dress?”

  Hanna nodded enthusiastically and reached for a rusty-orange pencil. She pointed to her own head and then the head on the page.

  “Does she have red hair?”

  Big nod.

  “Well, I’ll draw an outline, and you can color it in.”

  It was going better than she ever could have expected. Faint memories swam in her mind of being very little. Mommy with a sketchbook on her lap. Showing Hanna a perfect rendering of the room they were sitting in. And sometime else, showing her a sketch of a child’s face—hers—intense but unsmiling. She hadn’t realized then that Mommy’s drawing was a real talent.

  She watched as her hand lightly skipped around the page, leaving behind textured clothing and beat-up shoes, loosely held fists and a stern face. She was particularly interested in the fleshy side of Mommy’s hand, the way it touched the paper but didn’t smear it, coating it with invisible bits of her skin. The fire would get a taste of her before Hanna mumbled the final words of her spell. Maybe Mommy would burst into flames with the drawing and the confetti. Spontaneous combustion. That happened once in a cartoon. Poof! A black cat turned into a black cloud. And then it disintegrated into a pool of ashes on the floor.

  When she tore the page from the sketchbook and handed it to her, Hanna was almost afraid to touch it. She wasn’t good at coloring and didn’t want to ruin Marie-Anne’s likeness—and she was certain they’d captured her likeness perfectly, from her thick hair to her tattered clothes. Like Marie-Anne had separated from Hanna and stood by the table to model for her own portrait. Once again, Daddy was right: sending Marie-Anne on her way would work better with such a realistic drawing. And maybe a part of him understood it would help get Mommy out of the way, too.

  She worked on small areas with as delicate a touch as she could manage. When she approved of a preliminary section, she went back in and made the color bolder. With tremendous pride, she stayed within the lines and Marie-Anne became even more lifelike. Mommy glanced over at her from time to time, encouraging her with compliments, but soon became absorbed in her own creation. They all worked on their individual projects, and Hanna felt as yellow as her favorite sunshiny pencil.

  Her family deserved a short hour of perfection.

  SUZETTE

  FOR THE SECOND day in a row, she sat at the table and had never been more grateful for the glass wall that filled the room with light, diffused but bright given the cloudiness of the day. Maybe the whole house would become her artist’s studio, maybe that had been its purpose all along. Sometimes she drew in her tiny sketchbook and sometimes in the big one, a foot and a half by two feet. But the standard-size one, in which she’d drawn an effigy for her daughter to burn, held no further interest. Her mind traveled to petite ideas—phantasmagoric animals with swirling horns and folded wings—or large ideas—shafts of light piercing a box or a room as if it had been attacked by arrows or a barrage of bullets—and nothing in between. She worked in pencil and charcoal and forgot about her feet, her daughter, her husband, and the ritual they would soon perform.

  Suzette sipped from the goblet, the champagne long since turned flat and warm, and noticed the halos of green leaves—the tops of eaten strawberries—left scattered on the plate. The champagne and strawberries appealed to her rejuvenated artistic side—like the emancipation of a suppressed debauchery—and she’d snacked on them throughout the day.

  Outside, Hanna ran around the yard g
athering twigs like they were Easter eggs, Hanukkah presents, wishes left by leprechauns. Alex did the heavy work, raking under the shrubs and trimming dead limbs from overhanging trees. He’d already gotten out their copper fire pit and placed it on its solitary stone paver. The patio chairs formed a triangle around the pit, drip-drying after he’d hosed away the winter grime. It felt a bit strange to be so unhelpful and removed from her family, yet she liked watching them from afar.

  She’d been surprised by Hanna’s attentiveness the previous day as she composed the effigy of Marie-Anne, and the girl’s determination to make her alive with color. Suzette took a picture of it when it was finished, a bit remorseful about having to burn it. After a hesitant start, Hanna colored very well. It made her wistful for all the projects she’d given up on when Hanna showed no interest. Valentine’s Day cards and Halloween decorations. Three-dimensional wonders made of recycled oatmeal canisters and egg cartons.

  A part of her hoped it was the beginning of better things to come. Another part of her worried that her parental license would soon be revoked—especially if Hanna ended up being diagnosed with something Suzette should have recognized sooner. But mostly, she couldn’t shake the unease that the weekend had gone too well, too smoothly. It was odd timing—and odd circumstances—for family bonding.

  She didn’t like the clippers that Alex used on the trees; it was too easy to imagine someone—Marie-Anne/Hanna—using them to snip off one or all of her fingers. But Alex swore he’d lock them back in the toolshed when he was finished. He was so happy in his element, and she could hear him humming, mumbling the words of “Vintern Rasat”—the folk song he would boom in his baritone when it was time to lay the first log on the fire.

  They came in sweating and smiling, with pungent earth embedded in their hands, their clothes. It reminded her that she intended, every spring, to plant vegetables, but somehow never did. Hanna hopped on one foot as he sang, “Himlen ler i vårens ljusa kvällar, solen kysser liv i skog och sjö…” He raced her upstairs, challenging her to see which one could get cleaned up and changed first.

  Suzette sniffed her armpits. Her natural smell was barely masked by the powdery perfume of her deodorant. She hadn’t showered in days, and didn’t really want to soften the comforting scabs that had formed on the soles of her feet. She couldn’t remember when last she had gone so long without cleaning—herself, or some part of the house. The thought wasn’t unappealing that vines could grow up through the floors, snake along the walls, fill the house like a jungle. And she, in her rags, could climb them and find a perch on the ceiling. In that savagely deconstructed domesticity, there’d be no need to speak. She’d reek of musk and Alex would fuck her from behind. Maybe there’d even be a place for Hanna there, barking like a chimpanzee, a wild child, a happy pet.

  She closed her sketchbooks and repackaged all the supplies, tingling with the mindfulness that the weekend had changed her. Without the damage to her feet she would have bustled around with her everyday obsessions. The calamity of their failed parenting would have pressed in, suffocating her. Maybe it was the tipsiness of a day spent sipping champagne, but it felt manageable now; they would survive this. She would selfishly shut doors, or leave things undone, to have her hands look as they did now. Blackened by her art.

  She gazed at them as if they were sculptures, not her own body. These were hands that did important things. These hands followed the will of vision, of spontaneity. They caressed dreams from the dark fold.

  Had she wanted something once? Other than stability? The reassurance of one person’s infallible love? These filthy hands were up to the task of finding out.

  Her feet, however, were not. She stood, intent on hobbling over to the sink, but immediately collapsed back in the chair. Her hands would dirty everything—the crutches, the dish towels. She continued gazing at her hands as she waited to ask Alex for help.

  * * *

  In the university town of Lund, where Alex grew up, people would drink and barbecue during the day, then wait until the sun slipped below the horizon before lighting the bonfires. At the Jensen home in Pittsburgh, they started feasting too late and burning too early. Theirs was a supper celebration, a picnic around their own portable hearth.

  Bathed and freshly dressed in gray comfy pants and a pale blue zip-up jacket, Suzette sat planted in her chair, facing the back of the house, her crutches on the ground beside her. They were all too buoyant. Her own pent-up energy could be explained by so much sitting; she fought the urge to spring up and help lay the kindling, help prepare the food, help bring out the plates. Alex’s energy might be explained by his verve for the holiday—the Swedes liked their festivities, even ones who had been removed from their culture for nearly twenty years. Hanna followed her father like a devoted puppy, keen to everything he asked her to do. She carried out the Brita pitcher, followed by two bottles of their preferred red wine, setting them on a folding table just beyond the double doors. She brought out a serving spoon for the cucumber salad, cloth napkins, the corkscrew for the wine—each item retrieved and placed one at a time before she bounded back in to take Alex’s next order.

  Suzette wasn’t altogether happy to see her daughter’s slavish devotion to her husband. The weekend seemed to have eased his fear and confusion, and she found his optimism—his belief in Hanna’s remorse—unsettling. Hanna hadn’t done anything wretched for two whole days, but they couldn’t use that as a barometer.

  Alex proudly carried out the food: the cucumber salad that he’d made himself, sliced rye bread with both butter and cream cheese, steamed asparagus, a big platter of cured salmon and pickled herring flanked by sliced tomatoes and onions. He’d ducked out to their favorite deli that morning to procure the fish. She remembered being shocked the first time he’d said the Swedish word for salmon—lax—as it sounded almost like lox, a Jewish staple of her childhood. He’d come to adopt lox as a favorite, even though it wasn’t the smoked salmon of his youth, and he, too, marveled that the Jews and Swedes enjoyed so many crossovers in their taste for “stinky fishes.” They were having rye bread instead of bagels, but their open-faced sandwiches would be a blend of their two cultures.

  “Light the fire, then eat?” he asked.

  “Sounds good. Pretty hungry.” Her stomach growled in confirmation. She gave silent thanks to the gods and goddesses of intestinal matters that the new medication had kicked in. Her helplessness would have been worse if she’d needed Alex to help her to the toilet every hour.

  The kindling was ready; all he had to do was strike a match. Hanna huddled beside him, hands on her knees and her face too near the copper pit. He gently guided her back toward her chair.

  “Not so close, lilla gumman.”

  The dry leaves caught right away, and fed the slender twigs.

  “You have your fire stick?”

  Hanna ran over to the pile of wood and grabbed a stick that had been whittled of its branches.

  “We’ll just poke it a little as we lay some bigger wood on,” he whispered, like the process was so delicate and the fire would expire if he raised his voice.

  She watched her daughter stab the fire tentatively with her special stick. Suzette’s body tightened, and she had the instinct to move her chair back, away from the growing flames. Alex kept a hand on Hanna’s free arm, keeping her safe.

  When the fire became a sure thing, he deposited Hanna into her chair and went to get the first real log.

  “Vintern rasat ut bland våra fjällar, drivans blommor smälta ned och dö…”

  Suzette grinned. Alex had an imperfect voice, but he sang with exuberance. She clapped her hands to the beat of his music, wishing she’d made more effort to learn the whole song. She felt a moment of pride for her family, celebrating spring on an overcast, soon-to-chill evening, feasting and singing in spite of the troubles they faced. She joined in for the last few lines, which, in their repetition, she’d learned over the years.

  “… se dem än som i min barndoms stunder föl
ja bäckens dans till klarnad sjö…”

  His face lit up as she sang along. Hanna bounced a little in her chair.

  When they finished singing, they all clapped. Suzette was struck, again, by the abnormal normality of the entire weekend. Were they all merely acting?

  Alex served the food. He brought her over a generous, but not heaping plate, cognizant of her never fully robust appetite. He set wine and water at her feet, served in identical fat-bottomed tumblers.

  “Tack så mycket,” she said. He kissed her forehead and went back to load up a plate for himself.

  As they ate, Alex periodically tended the fire, prodding it with his own stripped-down stick, rearranging the branches and logs.

  Hanna nibbled on bread coated with a thick layer of cream cheese, and ate both the cucumber salad and tomato slices with her fingers. Only Alex ate the pickled herring, which he gobbled up in big mouthfuls, murmuring with delight.

  “Mm, mm, mums!”

  Suzette enjoyed her open-faced lox sandwich, chewing slowly, as the dancing fire lured her into a contemplative daze.

  She reflected on a dream she’d had the night before. In it, a friend she hadn’t seen since elementary school—now grown up—told her to keep an eye out for Greta, a young woman unknown to Suzette who was asleep in another room.

  “She’s blind, but she won’t admit it,” said the friend, heading for the door.

  Apparently they all lived together in an apartment that, in the way of dreams, was excessively large and both resplendent and run-down, with damask-upholstered curving couches and ceilings rotten with water stains.

  “Greta needs assistance, but don’t be fooled by her confidence.” And the friend left.

  Dream-Suzette waited for the mysterious Greta to emerge, and when she did, she realized the full extent of Greta’s disabilities. Emaciated and petite, the young woman looked as if she’d been consumed in a fire. The flames had eaten away most of her feet leaving only nubs, and all her exposed, scarred skin lay in pink folds. Atop her head she wore a synthetic cherry-colored wig, and her eyes had melted in the fire; what Suzette saw in Greta’s face were glass prosthetics.