Cutting Teeth: A Novel

by Julia Fierro

  When Tiffany spoke, Leigh thought she might have flinched.

  “Once again,” Tiffany announced. “Your Tibetan Mary Poppins saves the day.”

  Leigh could feel the blush coming, the heat starting between her breasts and clawing up her neck.

  She had shared that once, in a late-night text to Tiffany, confessing that she thought of Tenzin as her Tibetan Mary Poppins.

  Charlotte let out a sudden, piercing cry.

  “She must be getting a tooth,” Leigh said.

  “Well,” Grace said as she dabbed at a spot on Hank’s cheek, “at least these guys are done with teething.”

  “Actually,” said Tiffany, “that’s not true. I read a fascinating article in Holistic Health about how kids keep cutting teeth until they’re teenagers.” She drew the next word out syllable by syllable. “Nev-er-end-ing.”

  Grace peered out the windows looking onto the deck. “Where could they be? Rip said they’d canoe for an hour, max. It’s been way longer.”

  “Oh, come on, Grace,” Tiffany said. “He deserves a break now and then, doesn’t he?” She took a sip of her gin and tonic and lifted it toward Grace. “Cheers.”

  Leigh scanned the room. Where was Chase? She spotted him by the door to the kitchen. Doing his own thing—Brad’s code for Chase dazing out. Chase lay flat on his stomach, pulling a shoelace he had removed from who-knows-whose shoes and hooked around the wheel of one of his cars, inching it forward at a snail’s pace, watching the wheels turn as if some mystery were about to reveal itself. It was one of few activities that slowed him down, and his concentration was sharp. She could make out the drool glistening on his lip.

  “How you doing, Chase, honey?”

  She hadn’t expected an answer. She knew that in a room full of noise, the rapid-fire chitchat of adults and cries of children, her voice was one sound melting into an ocean of sound.

  This was the child who shrieked when the apartment door buzzed. Who froze when the street sweeper churned down the street, and for whom the grinding frequency of a vacuum cleaner, a blender or a lawn mower was a torment. Once, in the Bloomingdales’ powder room, Leigh had used the automatic hand dryer. Poor Chase, almost four years old and recently potty-trained, had peed his pants.

  Good boy, she thought now, you do what you need to do to block it out.

  “Mommy’s going to get you some food, okay?”

  “Popcorn,” he demanded.

  “We’ll see what Mama Nicole has. Just watch out for mommies going in and out of the kitchen, okay?”

  His eyes were fixed on the slow-turning tires of his car.

  “Chase? Chase. Answer me, please.”

  He was far away.

  She was about to turn to the pantry when she saw Susanna waddling in through the front door.

  “We’re back,” Susanna sang, and the twins’ heads perked as though they were two pups.

  Susanna’s arms were hung with bags of groceries, and Leigh saw that the bags blocked the pregnant woman’s already limited view.

  Chase was stretched out right in front of Susanna’s path. Sure to make her trip and fall.

  “Chase!” Leigh yelled. “Watch out!”

  She rushed over and nudged him with her foot. Although it may have been closer to a kick, she realized just seconds later when Chase began to wail.

  “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”

  The children froze, staring at her.

  “Did Mama Leigh kick Chase?” Dash asked, fear in his voice.

  “No!” Leigh said. “I just moved him out of the way with my foot.”

  “MOM-MEEEEEEE!” Chase writhed on the floor. Leigh couldn’t move, feeling every eye in the room locked on her.

  “I’m sorry, baby.” She squatted, but Tenzin was already there, folding Chase into her long brown arms.

  “I’m sorry,” Leigh said again, this time to Tenzin. The last four years had felt like a never-ending string of apologies to, and for, Chase.

  “Don’t worry,” Tenzin said, reaching up to pat Leigh’s arm as Tenzin rocked Chase on the floor. “Incidents happen.” Leigh guessed that the woman meant accidents but she would never correct her.

  Charlotte began to cry, and Leigh was grateful; this was a distress she knew how to remedy. She left Tenzin and Chase on the floor and settled on the sofa to nurse. The thrum of the milk’s letdown brought relief. At least I can do this.

  The children were shooed outside after bathroom visits for a little playtime on the deck before bathtime. Tenzin took Charlotte.

  Leigh and Chase were left behind.

  “Sit here, honey. Please,” Leigh said to a puffy-eyed Chase, and patted the couch. He sat in a tense ball—his arms wrapped around his knees.

  She had read an article recently—maybe in Vogue—about facial symmetry playing a key role in attraction. It had animated a series of hopeful fantasies that shot through her thoughts, like one of the flipbooks Chase loved to thumb through at the bookstore.

  Chase in black tie. His prom date in chiffon.

  Chase tossing his mortarboard into the air at graduation.

  Chase kissing his bride at the altar in St. John’s Episcopal Church, where Brad had once kissed her.

  Someone will care for him, she had thought, wouldn’t they?

  They were alone, but instead of feeling the familiar unease, as if Chase’s restlessness were contagious, Leigh felt a sudden vibrating love. He was beautiful. His mournful eyes. His heart-shaped mouth. His face, even puffy with tears, was pure symmetry.

  “Chase, sweetie? Look at Mommy.”

  He ignored her, and she pulled him into her arms, his cheek hot against her chest. She held him there for as long as he would take it, until he cried let go, and the vein in his forehead bulged, as she whispered iloveyouiloveyouiloveyou into his pink ear, and I’m sorry, Mommy’s sorry, you know that, right?

  He wriggled free and ran to the screen door.

  “Chase,” she called. “Wait.”

  “What?” he said, impatient.

  “Mommy messed up.” Her voice almost cracked. “When I put my foot out. Do-over, please?”

  Even if he had wanted to comfort her, she knew he wouldn’t have known how. She had been elated the week before when he said helicopter for the first time.

  “You kick me, Mommy,” he said flatly, giving her the full eye contact he so often withheld.

  “It was an accident.” She stood and took a step toward him. Slowly. She knew from experience that if she moved too fast, he’d flee. “I was scared that you’d hurt Susanna.”

  He thought for a moment, studying his scuffed sandals.

  “I like Mama Susanna.”

  “Of course you do,” she said as she knelt, cupping his sharp little elbows in her hands.

  She wiped the tears from his sunburned cheeks, then his arms shot out, stick-thin but full of reflexive strength, and she fell back, her elbows scraping against the wood floor. A sob rose from her stomach.

  Then Tiffany’s voice was behind her. The cutesy tone Leigh had heard her use in music class a hundred times.

  “Good job using your words, Chase,” Tiffany said. “Right, Mommy?”

  Leigh swallowed her anger. “Yes. Good job, Chase.” She got to her feet, smoothing her pants, and then her hair.

  Chase looked from one woman to the other, and Leigh wondered if he was more aware than they appreciated. Maybe he was laughing at them and their silly games, and their failure to accept that children are not like the projects from life before. Leigh thought of her art history dissertation that had won high honors, her 4.2 GPA, the fifteen pounds she had dropped before her wedding, the perfect dinner parties she had hosted. Life before could be perfect, or at least seem so, if you worked hard enough or if you had enough money to hire someone else to do the work for you. She had had both. But no amount of work or money could fix the broken neurology in her son’s head.

  “Why don’t you go play with our friends outside, Chase?” Tiffany said. “They’re having lots
of fun.”

  “Oh-kay,” huffed Chase as he shuffled through the screen door.

  Leigh peeked out the window and watched him join the other children, who were attempting to play catch with a giant beach ball, coached by Nicole.

  “Poor Chasey,” Tiffany said.

  “I pushed him with my foot. I shouldn’t have. He was actually being so good. But can you imagine? If Susanna had fallen?”

  “But she didn’t. Like our sweet Tenzie would say, all is good.”

  Coming from Tiffany, Tenzin’s optimism sounded like mockery.

  “She’s fucking amazing,” Tiffany said, “Isn’t she? Tenzin, I mean.”

  “Yes,” Leigh said, lifting her chin so that she looked over Tiffany rather than at her, “she is.”

  “Fabulous,” Tiffany said with her half-shy girlish smile. “Then she was worth it.”

  Before Leigh could ask what she meant, Tiffany spoke again.

  “I talked to Michael,” she said as she swiveled from side to side in one of the little half pirouettes that had always, even in the bloom of their friendship, irritated Leigh.

  “And,” Leigh probed, “what did he say?”

  “We both agreed,” Tiffany said, “that the share isn’t the best idea anyway. ’Cause. Well, I don’t know how to say it exactly.”

  The hemming and hawing was unbearable.

  “Tiffany. What is it?”

  “Michael just doesn’t feel comfortable with Chase’s influence.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well”—Tiffany sighed deeply, hushing her voice, forcing Leigh to lean in—“he worries Chase is a bad influence on Harper. You know?”

  No, no, no, Leigh thought.

  “Chase is not the problem,” Leigh said. She was surprised to hear how even her voice sounded, especially when it felt as if so much blood was pooling in her head. Hot lakes of blood.

  “Oh, Leigh,” Tiffany said, “I know you think that.”

  Leigh knew she could do something terrible to this woman. She could slap her. She could pull her hair. She could drag her nails down her face and erase its cocksure sunniness. The certainty of what she was capable of was a shock, and for a second it was as if time slowed, the way it had when she’d crashed her dad’s car the night of Halloween her junior year, time slowing as the car spun out of control, movement sloshing as if she were underwater, followed by the electrifying zoom as time caught up to itself, launching her back into the moment.

  Before she could speak, the children’s voices rose.

  “I do, I do!”

  Leigh looked out the window and spotted Nicole standing in front of the seawall, waving two fistfuls of squeezable applesauce pouches.

  “Who wants dessert?” Nicole yelled cheerfully.

  The children were shrieking. Me! Me! Me!

  Like people stranded on a desert island, Leigh thought.

  “I need app-sauce!” Chase hollered.

  Leigh called through the window screen. “Tenzin, none for Chase, please.” Any sort of sugar before bedtime kept him up an extra hour.

  “Come on,” Tiffany mumbled. “Let him enjoy himself. Before it’s too late.”

  Leigh felt something soften inside her. Like the slippery queasiness she’d felt with Chase at the start of labor pains.

  What had Tiffany meant by before it’s too late?

  “App-sauce! App-sauce!” Chase cried.

  The children echoed him. Me too! Me too!

  The mothers answered in near-perfect unity,

  “How do you ask?”

  “Ask nicely, please?”

  “What’s the magic word?”

  Then the children in chorus: Please! Please! Please!

  When she looked up again, she saw Chase was already sucking on the small pouch of fruit puree. She imagined the fifteen grams of sugar coursing through him, heading for a massive orgy in his brain.

  stick-in-the-mud

  Rip

  They paddled and paddled, and still, the shoreline was not appearing. Probably going on an hour, Rip thought, his arms aching with every stroke. The current in the estuary was brutal. Harper and Hank wouldn’t stop whining. Michael’s grumbling swelled.

  “Sit down,” Rip commanded Hank each time the boy stood and did the saddest little terrified dance, his chubby legs pumping, his balled fists punching at the air.

  “I want to go home,” Hank cried. “Ho-o-o-me!”

  The lower half of the boy’s face was coated with tears and snot, and Rip had given up trying to wipe it away with his shirt. There were spots of blood dotting Hank’s own shirt where Rip had killed mosquitoes midsuck.

  For the first half hour, Harper had remained as nonchalant as usual, sitting so her head leaned against one side of the canoe and her feet on the other. Like they were on some peaceful fishing trip. But as soon as Michael starting swearing, his voice echoing against the wall of trees, birds scattering into the darkening sky, she had started to whimper, to call Mama, Mama in such a sweet and vulnerable voice, like the mew of a kitten, that Rip had wanted to cradle her in his arms.

  Not Michael, who seemed oblivious as he dug into the water with his paddle, trying to push off the bottom of whatever lay under the murky black water. Rip imagined that the veins in Michael’s forearms might pop through his skin.

  Michael hadn’t spoken to Rip for a good twenty minutes and was silent except for occasional explosive grunts and motherfuckers and Jesus fucking Christs. Rip had never heard anyone curse in front of little kids like that. Then Michael turned to look at Rip so suddenly that the canoe swayed, and the children yelped, clinging to the sides, their mouths stretched into gaping holes.

  “Michael,” Rip said as calmly as he could, because he was frightened, too. “Please, be careful.”

  “We’re not moving,” Michael mumbled as if lost in thought, still standing. “Maybe I should swim to the shore over there. Get help.” He pointed to the thick trees and lost his balance, the canoe rocking.

  “Daddy, don’t leave me!” Harper cried.

  Michael’s wide, unseeing eyes reminded Rip of the wacked-out junkies he’d seen on the F train.

  “Look at your daughter, Michael,” Rip soothed, despite his pulse making his ears throb. “Look at Harper. She’s scared.”

  Michael sat down, and the fruitless paddling resumed.

  Hank buried his face against Rip’s chest. Rip could tell that Hank was exhausted and close to falling asleep. He felt the boy’s warm breath, a near match to the sluggish pace of their paddling.

  With every excruciating minute, Rip’s anger at Michael escalated. Was now approaching fury. The panicked pace of his thoughts in time with the cicadas’ throbbing techno song. He hadn’t done anything to Michael. He’d simply let his guard down and asked him a sensitive question. Big fucking deal. Clearly, he’d misjudged Michael. Thought they were some sort of kindred spirits. Now, Rip sorely regretted opening his mouth. He issued a telepathic apology to Grace for disclosing so personal an issue to this asshole. He hoped to God, Michael, who now seemed shockingly unstable, didn’t say anything to Grace.

  When Hank woke, they had traveled only half the distance to the mouth of the estuary. Hank peered through eyes swollen with tears, saw the night sky, and let his head drop back. His wails echoed against the trees.

  “Stop crying, Hank!” Harper yelled although Rip could see that she, too, was on the verge of weeping.

  “Harper,” Rip said. “Leave Hank alone. Can’t you see he’s sad?”

  “Hank’s always sad,” she said.

  “That is not a nice thing to say,” Rip said.

  “Don’t talk to her like that,” Michael said without turning.

  “Look,” Rip started, daring to stick up for himself. If not for himself, then for his son. “I’m just reinforcing the rules that all the other mommies…”

  “Listen to yourself, man,” Michael said, turning to look at him over a sweat-soaked sleeve. “Calling yourself a mommy.”

 
; “I’m more of an M-O-M-M-Y,” Rip said as he stood, “than you’ll ever be a D-A-D-D-Y.”

  “I thought he wasn’t even Y-O-U-R-S,” Michael said coolly as he unfolded himself to stand.

  I thought Tiffany was your fiancée, Rip wanted to say. But then, she really wants to fuck me, so maybe you guys aren’t so exclusive?

  But he said nothing. The canoe shimmied hard to one side beneath him, and he put his arms out to balance.

  A few minutes later, something changed. Maybe the current switched, or the wind changed direction. Rip tried to think back to science classes he’d taken long ago. One minute, they were pushing against a wall, and the next, their paddles cut cleanly through the water and stroked effortlessly, pushing the boat forward in one smooth movement.

  In less than fifteen minutes, Nicole’s family beach house appeared on the shoreline, and Rip could have wept with gratitude. As he lifted a half-asleep, mosquito-bite-covered Hank from the boat, he noticed fireflies poking bright holes in the dark woods along the shore.

  “Look, buddy,” he said to Hank, pointing to the trees. “Over there. Fireflies.”

  “Cool!” Hank said, suddenly wide-awake. “You know, they were here even before dinosaurs.”

  “That’s right, my little man.”

  “It’s like they’re teeny tiny magic fairies,” Hank singsonged in that once-upon-a-time tone Rip knew the boy loved.

  Rip took his son’s hand and guided him up the path toward the deck. Michael and Harper followed a few paces behind.

  Hank turned to Harper. “Hah-per. I’ll be the sleeping princess. And you be the prince. Okay?”

  “No, I’m the princess,” Harper said.

  Michael cleared his throat, and Rip knew instantly that the man’s ahem was mocking Rip, was mocking his son.

  “No, me,” Hank said. “I’m the princess.”

  Rip heard the tremor of tears under his son’s proclamation.

  Harper began, “Boys can’t be…”

  Rip interrupted her. “Harper,” he warned with a new severity in his tone.

  No more Mama Rip, diaper-changer, boo-boo-kisser, nose-wiper, playground pal. And, he thought, pushover.