Cutting Teeth: A Novel (14 page)

Of all the American children she had cared for, she knew her Chase had the best heart. It was her duty to guide him through the betrayal of his body that told him to grab, hit, bite, that robbed him of his peace. And that of his mother. Tenzin knew he was a child of God. Full of light. He greeted her each afternoon with
I missed you, Tenzin,
and when she left at night, her legs throbbing from housework and piggyback rides, Chase stood at the tall parlor window, watching her standing on the street, so they could mime great big hugs. Chase was her
silver lining
.

“I can’t believe she’d stab you in the back like that.” Tiffany’s voice rose like a siren.

“That’s why they call them golden handcuffs, dude,” Rip boomed.

“Their oldest son just got the diagnosis,” Grace whispered. “He’s on the spectrum.”

“Well,” Nicole said, “the warning signs can differ from kid to kid. But they usually start with a sore throat.”

“And I was like,
no way
!” Tiffany’s face was shiny with sweat.

“There’s always strings attached, man,” Michael said.

“I’d give an arm and a leg for a country house,” Susanna sighed as her swollen fingers drew circles around her belly. “Someday.”

The mommies lived in the future, Tenzin thought.
Ever after.
Where they imagined they would have all they wanted. How could they when they wanted more and more? Their list of wants was a teetering, tottering tower, just one want away from crashing upon their pretty heads, the hair they had painted at the beauty shops with so many colors like the palette of the sun.

It was not for her to judge them, she reminded herself. She, like all men, was just one observer. It was not her place to tell them, as the benevolent Dalai Lama says,
Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions.

She walked up the stairs into the cool, still silence of children dreaming.

Strings attached. No picnic. An arm and a leg. To die for
 …
to die for
 …

silver lining

Rip

A more-than-buzzed Rip
tiptoed into the dark guest bedroom, the light from the hallway spilling onto the bed where Hank and Grace lay, Grace’s lustrous black hair fanned over Hank’s rising and falling chest. Rip closed the door slowly until he heard the click of the lock echo in the hallway, cursing under his breath when Hank moaned in his sleep. The only light in the room was the white pillow under his little family’s heads, glowing blue in the moonlight filtering through the thin shades. Rip peeled off his clothes, trying not to stumble despite the darkness and the spinning of his head. Why had he stayed behind with Michael after the rest had gone to bed? Why had he downed those shots—one after another, he and Michael toasting irreverently to:
health insurance! twenty-four-hour sushi delivery! the good old days!

Down to his boxers, Rip climbed into the cot next to the bed. The coils screeched under him, and he froze. The alcohol churned in his stomach, and he clutched a pillow against his gut. Their family doctor had diagnosed his nightly discomfort as irritable bowel syndrome. Grace’s mother had diagnosed it as—translated from Korean by Grace—
nervous American stomach.
His stomach felt extra nervous tonight as memories of that afternoon in the kitchen returned. The beads of sweat on the back of Tiffany’s neck as the steam had billowed up from the sink. He had wanted to taste them. The wet pop of her lips parting as she gasped. Had she gasped, he wondered, trying to remember, trying to hold on to consciousness, and as he crept into that netherworld of half sleep, half memory, he grew hard and hoped he would cross into a dreamworld where all that had not happened in the kitchen that afternoon could and would.

The dewy Tiffany-scented scene cracked with a high-pitched little-boy voice. Rip opened his eyes to the cool, still darkness, and Hank’s moon-shaped face looked down at him.

“Sleep with me, Daddy,” Hank demanded.

“This is a teeny tiny bed, buddy,” Rip protested, even as he was pulling back the thin blanket, making room for Hank.

Hank climbed in, and Rip was comforted by the familiar scent of jelly sandwiches and fruity shampoo.

“Pacis,” Hank demanded.

“Come on, now,” Rip whispered into the boy’s neck. “We talked about this. Pacis are for babies. Are you a baby?”

Rip knew Hank was thinking. The boy was silent, his breathing slowed.

“No. I a big boy.”

“And who uses pacis?” Rip asked again, adding gruffness to his voice.

“Babies,” Hank said before he hiccuped.

Rip knew a wail was imminent.

“Okay.” Rip sighed. And then added, his lips tickled by the soft fuzz of Hank’s earlobe, “Don’t tell Mommy.”

“’Kay, Daddy. Cross your heart,” Hank said. Rip heard the pacifier-anticipating glee in his boy’s voice. He knew Hank was smiling.

Rip rolled off the bed, crawling around the dresser until he found the diaper bag, and, at the bottom, the plastic baggie he’d hidden with the three pacifiers he’d sterilized before they left home. One for Hank’s mouth, one extra (just in case) and one for Hank’s nose. Hank liked to pop one in his mouth and half suction/half balance another on the bridge of his nose, switching the two until he fell asleep—a ritual Rip found both odd and ingenious.

He tucked the two pacifiers in Hank’s sticky palm.

The pacifiers were Rip’s golden ticket. Insurance. The one sure way to soothe Hank during a meltdown, and Rip knew
he
was the one who wasn’t ready to retire them.

“Arm around, Daddy. Arm around.”

The pacifier garbled his words, but Rip knew what Hank was saying. It was the same every night, and Rip knew he wouldn’t want it any other way. Rip curled his body around Hank until there wasn’t an inch between them. Like one teaspoon inside a tablespoon, he thought. Until his ass hung off the narrow cot, and there was room only for his breathing and Hank’s breathing. No room for thoughts of Tiffany.

“Okay, buddy,” Rip said, “Quiet down now. Sleep time.”

That was how Grace found them each night when she returned home from work, her suit wrinkled from the subway ride. She stood in the doorway, blew a kiss to Hank if he was awake, gave Rip a weak wave if Hank was asleep, then retreated to the living room, where Rip had placed a plate of food for her on the coffee table. Rip didn’t mind doing it all, or doing it alone. He relished the effect the nighttime rituals had on Hank, the predictability that made Hank’s limbs loosen and his eyes shine with security. Every parenting book Rip had read preached the importance of consistency, especially at bedtime. Rip fed, bathed, and dressed Hank for bed (always in that order), read him three books, and then they brushed their teeth together.

“Make sure you do your fives,” Rip said every night, which meant brushing for five seconds front, back and on each side.

Of course, Rip wasn’t beyond reminding Grace what a trial it was to be the sole caretaker day in and day out, but he did miss her. He missed the way she’d let him rest his head in the curve of her thigh while they watched movies. The thrill of spontaneous sex on a Saturday morning, followed by sleeping in past noon. But what else was there to miss? Certainly not the crap job at Goldman Sachs, a temp IT gig Grace had found him, with just enough responsibility that he’d been able to memorize his audition lines when his boss wasn’t hovering, but which had earned just enough to pay a quarter of their rent and tuition for his improv class at the Upright Citizens Brigade.

Now, as he breathed in the sugary scent of Hank, he knew there was little in life before Hank to be missed. Still, now that he was technically unemployed, Grace had begun to treat him like some loafer crashing on her couch, instead of the university-trained thespian she had met (and even admired, he’d once believed) in college. In conversation with other couples, and at painfully dull dinners with her colleagues, Grace explained that Rip was a “stay-at-home dad,” her manicured fingertips curling to indicate quotes. Her laugh was a quiet hiss that both included him and alienated him although he always laughed along, assuming this was the kind of teasing grown-up couples did.

At the small, New England, liberal arts college he and Grace had attended, Rip had felt as if he belonged. There, in a class of less than a hundred, he’d been the lead in every theater production—Seymour in
Little Shop of Horrors,
Pippin in
Pippin,
Tevye in
Fiddler on the Roof.
He’d been named
Most Musical
and
Most Likely to Be on TV.
Ever since, he’d been adrift in a world of cliques whose language he didn’t speak. Social life in college had been simpler—he had hung with a crowd and met Grace, a business major with an appreciation for the arts, who had made him believe his performance in
Jesus Christ Superstar
was something after all, that he might have a chance of making it in the city with its off-off Broadway theaters. After graduation, he’d shuffled from audition to audition, and in the post-9/11-economy slump, the only work he could find were temp gigs at Grace’s firm.

Then they couldn’t get pregnant. It wasn’t that Rip was sterile, the doctor explained, his sperm had
mobility issues.
Another man’s swimmers were pumped into his wife’s body. Some random dude’s discharge. Something Rip normally wiped away with paper towel, or washed off in the shower. Rip knew he should think of it as sacred stuff, the seed that sprouted life, but it felt dirty each time Grace was inseminated, and words like
cum
and
jism
filled his head. He secretly preferred the later in vitro procedures, though he knew it was more painful for Grace and a helluva lot more pricey, but at least some anonymous guy’s ejaculate wasn’t filling his wife’s holy harbor.

He’d begun to wonder if he’d ever feel necessary again.

Then Hank was born, and with the mewling brown-skinned boy came a new life for Rip. Once Rip’s role officially cemented to stay-at-home dad (finally, he’d joked, he had a title!), he was needed day and night. Life-or-death needed. If not for Rip, baby Hank might have rolled over on his stomach and suffocated, succumbed to the mysterious SIDS the pediatricians spoke of in hushed tones.

Babies are the most helpless creatures in the world
, Rip had read in the go-to baby book, a loan from a fellow “primary caretaker” at his mommy and me yoga class. The author was a California pediatrician, who, in his author photo, held a serene infant swaddled like an Eskimo baby. The gist was that babies were born three months too early. They could barely handle learning to breathe, eat, and shit at the same time, so why would parents expect them to know how to fall asleep on their own, or soothe themselves?
Holy crap,
Rip had thought in genuine epiphany, and from that moment on, he had looked upon Hank with sympathy and was a true convert to the “attachment parenting” method. His sole mission was to soothe baby Hank. Hey, Rip remembered thinking, he needed a six-pack some days to soothe himself.

Rip wore the Baby Bjorn baby carrier most of each day, and after months of living life with Hank dangling from his chest, Rip wondered (not in front of Grace, of course) if he knew a little bit about what it might feel like to be pregnant.

He wore Hank on walks, on the subway, when he cooked, when he vacuumed, and even, on occasion, when he took a shit. Baby Hank was a whole lot happier. Rip had worn Hank every night from five to eight, what the veteran mommies at the playground called the witching hour, when, according to old-world maternal superstition, babies’ crankiness peaked. Rip and Hank bobbed to his old alt-rock mixed tapes as Hank fussed, farted, and face-mashed until he finally surrendered to sleep.

When he joined the playgroup after Hank’s six-month birthday, invited by Susanna, whom he’d met at the shrimp-level newborn swim classes at the Y, Rip was the sole stay-at-home-daddy, or SAHD. He’d quickly learned the lingo of the newest generation of connected mommies. For the first time in years, he knew what it was to belong, and he was still grateful to the mommies. Especially to Tiffany, who never failed to ask Rip how
he
was. Tiffany, with her oil-scented embraces and the reliability of her texts that made his phone dance all day, reminding him—even on lonely winter days, he and Hank stuck inside—he wasn’t alone. Tiffany’s smile. Her lips. Her tongue darting out to catch the cherry-flavored ice dripping off Harper’s Popsicle. Her hand reaching for him, pressing him into her. What if all those layers of clothes had disintegrated? His dick would have slid up and down, up and down, snug between her ass cheeks. Tiffany. Tiffany. Tiffany.

“Daddy,” Hank moaned.

Rip jolted, almost rolling off the cot.

“What? What is it?”

“My tummy feels sick.”

Rip sighed and rearranged himself, tugging at the elastic of his boxer briefs.

“Did you make a poo-poo today?”

“Um”—Hank hesitated—“no?”

“Okay, potty time,” Rip said, groaning as he slid off the cot and lifted the boy in his arms. His back was aching from the dozen piggyback rides he’d given that day, and from racing across the uneven sand as unofficial lifeguard. A night on an ancient metal cot certainly wouldn’t help.

“Okeydoke,” Rip said, trying to sound cheerful once he and Hank were in the small, pink-tiled bathroom whose fixtures were relics from the sixties. “Take off your ’jamas.”

“You help me,” Hank whined.

“Come on now, big boy.”

“But, I can’t.” Hank’s arms hung slack, zombielike.

Both he and Hank knew that if Grace were present, he wouldn’t give in, Rip thought, he would make Hank undress himself.

But she wasn’t there. She hardly ever was.

Rip tugged Hank’s
Toy Story 3
pajama pants down, and then his
Toy Story 2
underoos, careful not to slide the elastic over Hank’s penis. Rip had insisted on circumcision. He was a Jew (albeit a lackluster one), and he wanted his son’s junk to match his own. He’d stood strong against Grace’s insistence the circumcision was “mutilating” their child’s genitals, and every time he bathed Hank, helped him onto the toilet, or watched him run nude through the sprinklers in the backyard, he thought of how Grace had made him fight. And how he had won.