Cutting Teeth: A Novel (21 page)

“You know,” she said, “when I was a kid, I didn’t really appreciate this place.” She nodded to the thick woods at the end of the beach that led to acres of tangled and marshy nature preserve. “The woods—especially at night—creeped me out. I had two cats go in there and never come back. Oliver and Casper.”

“Probably coons,” Tiffany said.

“The ocean scared me, too,” Nicole said. “It’s not like in a pool. You can’t see what’s under you.”

“I don’t know. I was a big-time skinny-dipper growing up out east,” Tiffany said, as she arched her back in a stretch. The black leather creaked. “So, I guess you weren’t?”

“Nope.” Nicole felt her urge to confess rising. Instead of washing her hands two dozen times a day, or obsessively organizing—habits she’d learned to kick—sometimes, reciting her fears momentarily freed her from them. “It started, maybe around when I was nine. On summer nights when the tide was highest, I’d come out here after my parents were asleep. And I’d dare myself to jump off the wall into the water.”

“You?” Tiffany said. “I’m impressed.”

The
you
stung Nicole, though she knew it shouldn’t be a surprise. She was scared of everything. Just as Josh had said in countless arguments.
Your life is one giant fucking phobia.

As if she needed to be reminded.

“Yep,” she lied. “I jumped in. And I made myself stay out there ’til I counted to a hundred. I treaded water with my heart pounding so fast I thought I’d drown.”

Details came to her, the way they once had when she was writing fiction.

“And there was this green stuff. Phosphorescence, I think it’s called. This green, glowy stuff that kind of, like, sparkles in the water at night. When you wave your arms around.”

Tiffany stood. She peeled off Michael’s jacket and let it fall to the deck with a leathery thud. “That’s all just lovely, Nic,” she said. “But if you’re going to keep avoiding my question, I think I’ll go for a swim.”

“What?”

Tiffany wriggled out of her sweatpants. Then she pulled off her shirt and stepped out of her underwear. “Obviously, you’re not going to tell me why you’ve been acting like such a freak all weekend. So I’m going to let you keep fretting, and I’ll keep enjoying myself.”

“Tiffany, seriously, what are you doing?”

Tiffany stepped toward the seawall. She was all pale curves except where her pubic hair formed a shadowy triangle. Tiffany was the only mom in the playgroup who’d had a vaginal birth. No pouch of hardened flab hanging like a shallow shelf over her vagina like the rest of them had, a vestige of their C-sections that no amount of exercise would banish.

“What are you doing? It’s freezing out here.” Nicole realized she was whispering, as if they were teenagers trespassing, pool hopping in a neighbor’s backyard.

“Your challenge,” Tiffany explained. “I’m supposed to count to a hundred, right?”

Nicole nodded, unable to speak.

The rocks.

“Don’t!” Nicole yelled as Tiffany climbed onto the seawall, her breasts swinging with the effort. “The rocks. You’ll kill yourself.”

Tiffany looked down at her. The wind whipped her dark hair.

She rose to her toes, her body a luminescent column, and dove into the black water.

Nicole ran to the seawall.

Tiffany’s face was a white oval bobbing in the black water.

Nicole flooded with relief.

“You’re the crazy one!” she yelled.

This time, when Nicole laughed, she meant it.

She tried to hold on to what was she was feeling. To make it last. The openness in her chest, like a door unlocked. The lift at her heels, as if she were standing taller, as if she, too, could climb onto the wall, strip away her layers, leap out over the water, and never land.

Fly to the moon.

Part 2

Saturday

Ok that’s it. I’m keeping my kids home today. No park, no playground.

Posted 9/4/2010    8:38am

(
14 replies
)

—where do you live? i feel like I should pack up the car and leave town    
8:38am

—huh???? what are you talking about?    
8:39am

—Anything new happen?    
8:40am

—all this discussion is making me nervous. WHAT is going on?    
8:41am

—because of the Webbot prediction?    
8:41am

—yes    
8:41am

—The market fell below 10000 two weeks ago. *IT* ALREADY HAPPENED.    
8:42am

—but today will be horrible.    
8:42am

—why?    
8:43am

     —cause that’s when it’s supposed to happen.    
8:43am

     —what’s supposed to happen?    
8:44am

        —THE END.    
8:46am

              —^^^just kidding    
8:47am

—Oh. My. GOD!!    
8:48am

golden handcuffs

Leigh

Leigh had always
been a good liar. Most of the lies leapt from her lips without thought or planning. Uninvited and, sometimes, unwanted, but she had always escaped detection. Who would suspect such a pleasant person—ever-smiling, neatly dressed, polite, and agreeable? She wasn’t one of those contrarian women, like Nicole or Susanna, who felt it their duty to have the last word, particularly if a man was involved. She had even changed her name to Marshall to appease Brad, a choice she knew the other mommies disapproved of.

Since Chase’s birth nearly four years ago, Leigh had felt as if the lies she had accumulated, stacked into a tower of infinite height, were teetering over her, and she had begun to fear she’d trip and fall, the lies smothering her.

Lately, she doubted every choice she made. There wasn’t enough time in the busy-ness of motherhood to weigh every consequence, and she felt herself spilling like a leaky milk carton—a spurt here, a drip there.

Two days earlier, Leigh, treasurer of the Fundraising Committee at Chase’s preschool, the Olive Tree Academy, had attended the first committee meeting of the year. Even before she’d conceived Chase, she had added their name to the waiting list for the co-operative school renowned for its donation drives and silent auctions that brought in close to a hundred thousand dollars a year.

The chairwoman of the Fundraising Committee, Kat Richards, had approached Leigh before the meeting, while the members sipped herbal tea and nibbled homemade orange-scented scones in the recreation room of the preschool. Kat, a pleasant woman, whom Leigh had found a touch too flaky to vote for, had asked if she and Leigh could set up a meeting to go over the latest financials.

“I keep making errors,” Kat said, “I just can’t get those numbers to fit.”

The woman twittered on as that hateful blush crawled up Leigh’s neck. She was certain her ears glowed pink. Like an alarm sounding.

“Of course, Kat,” she said. “How’s Monday work for you?”

The rec room had once been a benign place, even cheerful, where Leigh had volunteered to run a monthly bake sale and assisted in setting up the Fall Festival. But that night at the meeting, in the fluorescent light, the air damp with late summer heat, sweat pooling between her milk-heavy breasts, the room was vibrating danger. She had gripped the arms of her assigned chair. The fund-raising treasurer sat to the left of the chairwoman.

When it was Leigh’s turn to speak, she found her voice, and to her relief, was able to train her eyes on the number-filled sheet in her hands and share the latest fundraising-account financials. Her voice quivered, and she stopped to wipe sweat from her upper lip, joking that the postpartum hormones were still kicking her butt, which received nods of empathy from the other mothers, many of whom knew how long she had tried for a second child. They had comforted her when she’d miscarried, and had congratulated her when her Charlie girl, just a twelve-week-old fetus, stuck.

Leigh made it through the remainder of the meeting—Luisa Kaufman (mom to Leo and Lux) reminding the committee (again) of the harmful GMOs in their children’s food, quoting studies on the side effects of hormone-injected meat, such as boys growing breasts; Maggie Yun (mom to Izzie, Gus, and Anya) pleading for $5,000 to renovate the playground; Simon Clifton (dad to Posey), a stay-at-home dad active in the protests against idling ice-cream trucks at Carroll Park, suggesting a compost bin behind the school, to show the kids “green in action.” Leigh imagined rats the size of cats but applauded with the other parents.

By the end of the meeting, her fingers were itching to pluck her eyebrows. The ritual had brought comfort to her as a girl. Pluck. Pluck. The sting of each root dislodging from her scalp was a blessed distraction. Each as innocuous as a white lie. Her mother had driven all the way to the Evenhill Academy for Girls in New Hampshire to usher Leigh to dermatologists, neurologists, and finally to a psychologist on the Upper West Side.

At the end of the meeting, the committee secretary, Marian Ravensberg, read the minutes back slowly, until Leigh feared she would stand on her chair and scream something outrageous like, you fucking fools! There’s no money for your stupid compost bin! Or she might run up to the loft and jump from the window looking out onto the rec room so she was a splatter of blood and crooked limbs on the waxed blond wood.

They were released. A quick wave good-bye and Leigh was out into the blue night, her engorged breasts aching as she ran home. She took the stoop steps two at a time until Tenzin stood before her, baby Charlotte in her arms.

All was well. All was as it should be. Mother and child. Small lips nuzzling at Leigh’s breast until the baby’s mouth caught her nipple and there was the pull of her suck and, finally, the release of milk, the letdown like a gentle current coursing through the blue veins branching across her breast. Leigh was reminded of the need this child (
child of my heart
) had for her, and only her. This was her redemption.

*   *   *

She sat in a deck chair, her feet on the seawall, the concrete biting into the back of her ankles. Still the same smooth muscles and delicate ankles that had made her proud to wear tennis whites to the Locust Valley Country Club as a girl. She rearranged the swaddle blanket over Charlotte, asleep except for the occasional suckle at Leigh’s nipple.

Leigh chewed her nails, her mother’s voice in her head.

Leigh, dear, no boy will want to hold your hand with those ragged fingernails.

She watched Tiffany run across the sand with the children down on the beach. Though it was only a little after nine and the morning sun weak, Tiffany wore a red-and-white, polka-dotted bikini. With her yoga-toned curves and her hair pulled into a ponytail, she reminded Leigh of one of those long-dead Vargas girls.

“Somebody decided to turn up the sun today, monkeys!” Tiffany’s voice rang with cheerleader-quality glee.

It was an energetic frolicking that had been foreign to Leigh for longer than she could remember. Surely, she must have moved like that before Chase had been born. Some of the other mommies had aged in life after children, even in their affluent neighborhood, with its countless yoga studios and salons and spas. With money came babysitters, and time away for the gym and private training sessions and hours sweating off pounds in the sweltering heat of a Bikram studio.

Tiffany was still beautiful, yes, but it wouldn’t last much longer, Leigh thought. Not if she kept filling her plate, as she had at breakfast that morning. Two thick pads of butter on her toast. Half & Half in her coffee. At that rate, Leigh thought, Tiffany would be just like the rest of them in five years.

The children scurried away from the seaweed-speckled foam of the waves, back onto the sand dotted with red, white, and blue inflatable beach balls, which they kicked, threw, covered with sand, and the most daring (Harper, of course), set afloat in the cold, dark water. Chase sat on his ball, rocking gently.

How foolish she’d been to think coming out to the beach house might make him happy. Chase couldn’t be content, or comfortable, anywhere, it seemed. Or was it her? Was her own unhappiness infecting him? When all she had ever wished for him was less suffering? If only everything would be okay. If only Monday’s meeting with the fund-raising-committee chairwoman went smoothly, she would be happy, she promised. She would make Chase happy.

But Leigh knew that wasn’t true. She knew they would take her to jail. A series of concerns popped into her head, all of which seemed trivial. But what was more important than preserving the children’s day-to-day life? How would breast-milk-exclusive Charlotte thrive? Who would remove all the tags in Chase’s clothing so not one stray thread rubbed against his skin? Who would remind him to howl like a baby wolf in the bathtub, chin lifted to the moon, so soap didn’t run into his eyes? And brush him with the soft-bristled surgical brush his occupational therapist had given Leigh? Up his back, over his shoulders, and down each arm, just the way he liked it, soothing him before bed.

That morning at breakfast, recharged after a good night’s sleep, as she had spooned scrambled eggs into Chase’s mouth and dabbed his smile with a napkin, the sea outside the window stretching endlessly under the bluest sky, she had felt hope.