Cutting Teeth: A Novel

by Julia Fierro

  Allie waited until noon to leave, certain the other kids were down for their naps, a few of the parents bound to be indisposed, fallen asleep at their children’s sides. She wanted to suffer as few good-byes as possible, not wanting to go through the whole mommies double-cheek kissing/waving ta-ta to each other’s children routine.

  Susanna started the engine and tugged the seat belt over her belly.

  “You sure you’re okay to drive?” Allie asked from where she sat in the back between the sleeping boys. The front seat was stuffed with the bags of produce, and the car smelled like damp earth and overripe strawberries.

  “Please say maybe,” Susanna said quietly. “Please?”

  Allie sighed. “I already did.”

  “Again? Please.”

  “Okay,” Allie said to the swollen face of the woman looking at her from the rearview mirror. A face she barely recognized. “Maybe.”

  Allie tugged on the sleeping boys’ harnesses one more time to make sure they were secure. The boys’ heads had fallen forward, their chins touching their chests at an awkward angle that looked painful. She lifted one boy’s head, and then the other, her fingers gripping gently as she held their heads upright.

  She would hold them like that for the rest of the trip, she told herself, even after her arms began to shake and her muscles began to burn. She would never let go.

  Her fingertips rested over each boy’s artery. The thrum of their even pulses became a chant. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

  ever after

  Nicole

  Nicole rearranged her mother’s Madame Alexander dolls for the third time. Had Marie Antoinette stood next to Little Bo Peep, with her dust-crusted curls, or had Scarlett O’Hara, in her sun-faded green gown, stood between them? Nicole had to get it right or her mother might suspect that ten adults and a gaggle of children had stayed there for the weekend. Then her mother would have questions and ask in that voice full of suspicion, the one that had always made Nicole confess, What have you been up to, Nicole Marie? No matter how hard she tried, she knew she’d spill over and the fear and shame would cascade over her lips and she would tell all; the Web bots and The End and her selfish lies, and her mother would admonish Nicole in her Queens-tinged sneer, Snap out of it, Nicole. Get ahold of yourself. You’re a mother now, for Chrissakes. Your children need you!

  Her mother was right, Nicole thought as she looked out the tall windows of her parents’ bedroom. A storm was coming and the sea reflected the dark gray clouds above. The white-capped waves flung themselves at the seawall, a concussion that made the floor under her feet shudder. She flinched as a spray of frothy seawater smacked into the windows of the ground floor.

  She heard shouting and Wyatt appeared on the deck below, his too-long brown hair bouncing, followed by Chase and Hank, all of them half-naked and squealing with glee as water leapt over the seawall.

  “No,” she said, her breath catching in her throat as she slammed an open hand against the thick glass. Didn’t they know how dangerous it was?

  She banged the heel of her hand against the window until her palm stung. The sea roared and the waves rocked against the boulders. Dear God, she thought, knowing there was no way they’d hear her.

  She didn’t sense Josh until he was just behind her, his warm breath on the back of her neck. She lowered her heels and let her arms fall at her sides in surrender. She rested her forehead against the cool glass of the window, fogged by her handprint.

  “Ha,” she said weakly. “You caught me. I guess some things never change.”

  “They’re okay,” Josh said. “You’re okay.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  She was looking at him now and felt her eyes squinting and knew she looked mean. “You don’t understand what it’s like. To be so fucking scared all the time.”

  Josh gripped her wrists, and she imagined she heard her bones crunching. He shook her, hard enough that an earring flew from one earlobe and landed with a ping on her mother’s lacquered dresser.

  “Don’t you think I’m scared, too?”

  He held her wrists apart, and she thought he might lift her off the ground.

  “One day,” he said, “you wake up, and your kid’s anxiety is giving you anxiety. But—you say fuck you to your own fears. Now, you are a grown-up.”

  She saw the lines around his eyes, the sagging skin under his jaw. She smelled beer on his breath.

  He pulled her into his arms.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  “No,” she murmured back. “Don’t say sorry.”

  She would try harder to be a better wife and mother, she thought as she unfolded herself from his arms.

  She asked him (sweetly, she hoped) to go get Wyatt dressed.

  She had just a few more things to tidy up here, she promised, and she would join them downstairs.

  “It’s time to go home,” she said.

  * * *

  Nicole lit her last joint and stood in front of the windows, which were thick with gray-veined storm clouds. She watched the children down below on the deck, the muscles under their browned skin tensing as they anticipated the waves.

  She was waiting, too. What for, she did not know.

  It was true, what the experienced mothers at her tea party–themed baby shower, almost four years ago, had forewarned, with what, at the time, had seemed like kindheartedness. And just a dash of sarcasm.

  Life will never be the same, they told her.

  Now, in her own life after children, she wondered if there wasn’t a hint of something spiteful hiding behind those mothers’ chuckles. Her aunts, her older cousins, all of whom had birthed children, and who had brought her gifts of bottle warmers and onesies and diaper genies, who had oohed and aahed at unwrapped gifts with gasps that had seemed like nostalgic longing, but, Nicole knew now, were more the satisfied sighs of retribution. They were the toothless stepmothers and aging queens of fairy tales, envious of the virginal princess’s beauty. It’s your turn, sweetie.

  Nicole had brushed off their warnings (Sleep now, while you still can!) with a complacent smile, as if their prophecies were the hyperbole of old women, as if they were just remembering motherhood wrong. As her body had swelled with Wyatt, she’d created a dream collage of motherhood, pasted together with snippets from the natural birthing class she and Josh joined, the parenting books she read, the mother characters who had populated the movies and television shows she’d consumed in the last two decades. It was all the maternal material she had to learn from, after all. She hadn’t known any young mothers. Her aunts and older cousins were spread out across the East Coast. She saw them and their babies once a year at Christmas dinner. She’d never seen a baby latch on to its mother’s glistening nipple. Or projectile vomit. Or have its fingernails clipped. She knew nothing of the how-to of little children. Thirty-one when Wyatt was born, she had been the youngest mother she knew, the first of her friends to give birth into a world populated with ambitious women, for whom career was priority, a choice bolstered by their knowledge of the if-all-else-fails backup of fertility treatment. All you had to do was look around at the many sets of twins, and even triplets, whose SUV-like strollers crowded the sidewalks, and you felt certain that practically anyone could have a baby at any time if they wanted one.

  Those women at Nicole’s baby shower had been telling the truth. She knew that now. How had she been such a fool? Why hadn’t she been able to imagine the coming challenge? The foresight would have helped her prepare, maybe lessened the shock that was their first night home with Wyatt, when the baby cried hour after hour, despite the fresh diaper, the full bottle, the offered breast, the perfect swaddling technique, the shushing, rocking, and lullabies. She had listened to him cry while she stood in the hot shower, blood dripping down her thighs, blood that would drip out of her for six weeks after the birth. She remembered wishing she could stay in the bathroom, that she could lock herself in there. Forever.

  After three sleepless nights, she
’d been delirious, and had said to Josh, as if it were a new revelation, “We can’t do this!”

  “We don’t have a choice, Nic,” Josh had said. “We can’t return him.”

  It was a story they now told to their friends, most parents to little children, chuckling at their naïveté over a bottle of wine, on a night they’d booked a babysitter. They could look back on the terror they had felt (this tiny little life in their hands) and laugh because there had been so much to love since that first night. The warm doughy smell of Wyatt’s newborn scalp. His first belly laugh. The satisfied flutter of his lashes as her milk let down ten seconds after he latched on to her breast. The way he lifted his chin and closed his eyes when she buckled his scooter helmet, an invitation for a kiss she could not resist. The first time he had looked at her, and said, “You my best friend, Mama.”

  There were the nights she had watched him fall asleep, his eyelids like a shade slowly drawn. When he slipped into slumber, his breath deepening, diminishing, she tortured herself with the thought that he was gone forever—all for that moment of ecstasy when she thought, no! he was still with her, and they had so many years ahead. They—the new life that was their little family—had just begun.

  Before had become a powerful word. One that needed no explanation when you were talking to another parent to a child under five. In life after children, Nicole often felt as if she were a character in a story; sometimes fraught with urgent meaning (fevers, falls, first steps), where time sped by, so fleeting that it made her crave for more life, for a hundred years even. Mostly, the story slogged along in monotonous tedium (diaper rashes, runny noses, potty-training purgatory).

  Four years ago, she had woken groggy and sore, three layers of her body sliced open during the last-minute Caesarean that had interrupted Wyatt’s birth. She rose as if still dreaming, into a new story, one that came prepopulated. She hadn’t chosen these mommies and daddies. They were just the players that came with Wyatt. She had spent hours and hours with them only because they shared the story, which was a comedy, and occasionally, a tragedy. A story about loving little children.

  What fools we are, she thought, to love something so brief, so fragile, as life. And especially that handful of sweet, little-children years. For all their complaining, Nicole knew that every mommy and daddy chided themselves each time they took these years for granted. It might be the best time of their lives. What else was there, after this? Freedom, sure. But for what? For ambition? For career? To grow old? To scrapbook, to join a book club, or garden or journal or renovate? Was that what she was waiting for?

  Nicole knew there would be no more Friday afternoon playgroups. Excuses would be made. Lingering fevers, pediatrician appointments, nap-scheduling conflicts. The end hadn’t come after all, but another had, and she felt certain she was to blame.

  Epilogue

  Three Weeks Later

  lucky break

  Rip

  * * *

  HANKSDADDY76 BIG NEWS! I’m starting the TWO-WEEK-WAIT! Anyone else?? Could use buddies to chat with to get through this brutal wait! How early have people started feeling symptoms? How soon can implantation start?

  It’s been 4+ years since I had a baby. I’m rusty, girls!

  * * *

  Me: 36

  My Wife: 35

  Son: Henry (aka Hank the Tank) DOB 8/3/2006 (IVF #3)

  TTC #2 since December 2009

  Diagnosis: Sperm mobility

  * * *

  HOPEFUL80 OMG!!

  That is the best news EVER, HANKSDADDY76!!!!!

  No one deserves to be a daddy more than you!

  How many days ’til you can take a preg test?

  Fingers crossed that you get a BIG FAT ++++++++++++++++++++

  * * *

  Me: 28 (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome)

  Dear Hubby: 30 (Normal Swimmers)

  Married: August 2007

  2 Fur Babies (Brandy & Bailey)

  TTC #1 since Nov. 2008

  Miscarriage 8/13/10 6w1d (ectopic) Looking more and more like IVF in 2012 …

  * * *

  MAMA2ANGELS I’ll pray for sticky beans for you, HANKSDADDY76. Put your trust in the hands of God!

  Blessings to you and your wife. Bet your little guy is excited to be a big brother (God willing!)

  * * *

  Me: 39

  Husband: 42

  June 2005—mc @ 6 weeks

  July 2007—mc @ 8 weeks

  March 2010—mc @ 9.5 weeks

  On the TTC journey as of January 2005

  * * *

  HANKSDADDY76 Ladies! What would I do without you?

  Re: MAMA2ANGELS—thanks for the prayers. I need them!

  Things are a little complicated these days.

  But all is good! I might have a bundle of joy on the way.

  Let’s just say a VERY good friend may turn out to be the surrogate mama of my dreams.

  Let’s hope that evil witch doesn’t show up.

  * * *

  Me: 36

  My Wife: 35

  Son: Henry (aka Hank the Tank) DOB 8/3/2006 (IVF #3)

  TTC #2 since December 2009

  Diagnosis: Sperm mobility

  * * *

  XCITED_2BA_MOMMY Hot damn! Daddy has a bun in the oven. Spill the beans on this mysterious mama, buddy!!

  * * *

  Me: 32

  Fiance: 38

  Daughter: Mackenzie DOB 5/22/07

  TTC #2 since December 2009

  Diagnosis: Unexplained infertility

  Member of “Clomid Chicks”

  * * *

  HANKSDADDY76 Re: XCITED_2BA_MOMMY—All in good time!

  10 minus 2 days and counting … More soon …

  In the meantime, say it with me, ladies: STICKY BABY DUST! STICKY BABY DUST!

  * * *

  acknowledgments

  Endless gratitude to my ideal readers, the two women who believed in and accepted my complicated characters with open arms: Maria Massie, my brilliant agent, who made everything possible; and Elizabeth Beier, my literary fairy godmother, and the most charming and enthusiastic of editors, for her relentless optimism, boundless vocabulary, warmth, wit, and genius.

  Caeli Wolfson Widger—my constant reader and my literary kindred spirit—you made this novel sing with your generous, and always spot-on, edits. Heather Aimee O’Neill, thank you, dear friend, for luring me back into writing.

  To everyone at St. Martin’s Press—you are as fabulous as the building that houses you, and the most hardworking and patient team an author can ask for, especially Michelle Richter, whose honesty and humor kept me grounded. Stephanie Hargadon, Angelique Giammarino, Anya Lichenstein, and Dori Weintraub—I owe you a lifetime of hand-delivered cupcakes.

  Thank you to Cutting Teeth’s earliest readers, whose generosity and kind words reminded me why I write: Emma Straub, Megan Abbott, Karen Thompson Walker, Therese Anne Fowler, Joyce Johnson, Michele Filgate, Deborah Copaken Kogan, and Bret Anthony Johnston.

  Twelve years worth of gratitude to the two thousand five hundred students and instructors who have passed through the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop since 2002, and a very special thank-you to my own students. I am grateful for every workshop around my kitchen table with the talented and compassionate writers who helped me believe, with a religious fervor, that anything is possible.

  I owe much of my motivation in finishing Cutting Teeth to the incredible community of writers in NYC. Thank you to all the reading series, bookstores, festivals, conferences, and literary organizations that hosted me in the last three years. Reading my work aloud revved my engine each and every time, and kept me bashing on.

  Thank you to Scott Adkins and Jennifer Cody Epstein of the Brooklyn Writers Space, my home away from home, and 24/7 quiet haven; to BookCourt for making me feel like family and giving the Sackett Street Writers’ community a beautiful place to thrive; and to WORD bookstore for the kind of support a debut novelist can only dream of.

  T
hank you to my teachers: Harvey Grossinger, the very first to believe in my writing; Ethan Canin, Frank Conroy, Jo Haxton, Chris Offutt, and Marilynne Robinson, who saw a glimpse of the writer I could be and gave me the confidence I needed to find her.

  Sam Chang, Connie Brothers, Deb West, Jan Lacina Zenisek, and everyone at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, thank you for the greatest gift a writer can ask for—the time to write and the permission to believe in myself.

  Thank you to my family and friends who never quit believing in me, even when I worked so hard to convince them to, especially Karen and Howie Feinstein, Matt Mahurin, Lisa Desimini, Aimee Phan, Lena Kaminsky, Amy Shearn, and Penina Roth.

  To the two women who have cared for my children with selfless dedication, I am forever grateful: Anna Bauman, without whom this book would never have been written, and Samten Choden, who gave me the peace of mind to return to writing.

  Thank you to all my children’s teachers, and especially to Shahna Paul, who taught me to be a better parent in a difficult time.

  To my mother, the strongest person I know and the first to teach me how to tell a story; and my father, a survivor, an artist, who can put his hands into the hearth without a single burn. To my brother, my constant companion and a wonderful father.

  Mille grazie to all the Fierros, who gave me a rich history of stories to tell, and to all the women who came before me on both sides of my family, strong, smart, creative, but without the time and privilege to tell their stories. I write for you.