Cutting Teeth: A Novel (32 page)

No, Susanna decided. No reaction from the other shoppers. Just a slow, shuffled browsing in time to the mellow Muzak piped from some unknown place above. What song was it? She knew she had heard it before.

She entered an aisle. The order and predictability of the grid was a comfort, the very opposite of the fear she’d had as a little girl of losing her mother in what had felt like a never-ending maze of sky-high walls.

The brightly colored packages popped in Technicolor under the fluorescent lights. The endless assortment (who knew there were enough kinds of crackers to take up an entire aisle?) and the rainbow of little flags dotting the aisle with cheery optimism (
SALE! BUY ONE, GET TWO!
) emboldened Susanna, and she found a corner by the cereal boxes where her phone had three bars of access. She opened Citibank’s mobile app and made a transfer from their shared checking to her secret savings account.

$1,000. Click. Done.

The balance was now $5,250. Much better, Susanna thought.

She knew Allie would never know. Allie was too “artistic” to be bothered with the tedium of bill paying. Allie, who had her head up her ass these days, or to be more accurate, her phone in her face. E-mailing clients and instant messaging her agent. Texting her irresponsible, childless friends. Which Allie had the nerve to call networking! Maybe even, Susanna dared to think it, texting a lover? A student from one of her Parsons classes. Hadn’t Susanna been Allie’s student once?

No, Susanna thought, she would stay positive. Just as Tenzin had suggested that morning as they walked on the beach, a prebreakfast romp, the boys running ahead, sticks of driftwood raised above their sandy heads. The kind of nature-filled childhood they deserved.

“It is good for the baby,” Tenzin had said. “To stay calm. As the great Dalai Lama says,
Choose to be optimistic, it feels better.
”

This had filled Susanna with an instant panic. She had been so stressed, so worried, so angry all the time. What if it
had
hurt the baby?

“You will be okay,” Tenzin had said, as if she could read Susanna’s thoughts, rubbing Susanna’s newly rounded shoulders with her man-sized hand. “You are a good person. I can tell.”

Yes,
Susanna thought now as she maneuvered her belly through the aisles,
I am a good person.
Then she found her destination.

The produce glowed under the lights. The vegetables and fruit in the overpriced organic market in Brooklyn seem dull and shriveled in comparison. And the smells! Tomatoes that smelled of basil. Cantaloupes that smelled like honey. Peaches that actually smelled like peaches. The perfume felt like a hug from a great old friend. She hadn’t been able to walk past the grimy Met Food near their apartment in months. The stench of rotting food had made her gag. But this, this was heavenly, and it was as if the baby could smell it, too, because he/she jerked, and the skin of Susanna’s belly rippled with delight.

This was what she needed, what the boys needed, what their new baby needed, and even if Allie couldn’t see it, this was what Allie needed.

Fall was just around the corner, Susanna thought as she caressed the fuzzed skin of an apricot. The scent of wet leaves in the woods on a rainy day. The patter of drops on the roof, so present when there were no other sounds to drown it out—no sirens, no cab horns, no shouting on the street. The scent of fire smoke rising off crackling hearths and bonfires on the beach and fire pits in the backyard that had always reminded her of homecoming, of powder-puff football. She had been a runner-up for Homecoming Court queen her senior year, which had been one of the few backstory details she had kept from Allie, until Susanna’s mother had mentioned it at the first family dinner Allie had attended. As in, Susanna had translated to Allie later,
how could her precious baby girl Susie be a dyke, when she’d almost been the homecoming queen
?

She lifted a coconut and inhaled deeply. The coarse brown hairs tickled her nostrils. Sure, at home there were a few trees in the grassless yard two stories below them (not that they had access to it) and one cherry blossom in front, which, for a few glorious weeks in April, turned their parlor windows pink. How grateful she was to that little tree. That poor little tree scarred by bike chains and poisoned by dog piss, and whose thin branches were strangled by plastic shopping bags.

She shouldn’t have to feel that way about one little tree. It wasn’t natural, she thought as she grabbed an empty cart and began filling it with cartons of strawberries and blackberries, a cluster of perfectly ripe (not too ripe) bananas. Then mangoes and kiwis and even a passionfruit.

A pregnant woman, a woman brimming with the power of life, should grow her baby where the air at least
smelled
clean, where the sounds of nature weren’t overpowered by the sounds of man. In the city, she and the boys were locked in a cage; their apartment was less than a thousand square feet, after all. They were freed only by the occasional escape to the Hamptons, to the sprawling beach house that belonged to Mitzi, Allie’s publicist, where a congregation of childless artists oohed and aahed over the boys, ignoring Susanna, treating her like nothing more than a vessel. A chipped vase carrying the most exquisite flower.

“Babe?”

Allie’s gravelly voice returned Susanna to the Muzak, to the fluorescent lights, to the gleaming waxed floors, to the overhead mist drifting down toward the leafy greens. Her hands were filled with soft fragrant peaches, and she was crying.

“I know it,” she said to Allie.

“You know
what
?” Allie asked, taking a step toward her. “Are you okay?”

“The music playing right now,” Susanna said, through her tears. “It’s ‘Thank You.’ By Led Zeppelin. They played it at my senior prom.”

white lies

Leigh

Leigh sat on the lumpy sofa
in the main room and nursed a drowsy Charlotte. It was after the children’s dinnertime, and the room was filled with oversunned overtired children, and half-drunk mommies anxious to get food on the table before hunger spiked tantrums.

Leigh had to remind herself not to pick at her eyebrows. She had already worried a naked patch over her left eye that afternoon during the children’s naps, while her phone had buzzed again and again, skittering across the bedside table with Tiffany’s texts.

Tiffany knew,
Leigh thought now as the children’s whines rose slowly, like the distant rumbling of a storm approaching. There was an underlying hiss of threat in the last few texts, as if Tiffany was hinting at consequences much larger than a lost mommy friendship.

Before she could stop herself, Leigh’s hand was in her hair, one finger curling around a single strand at her temple and yanking.

The relief was immediate. A cooling pulse starting at the crown of her head at the root and flowing down through her arms. She turned to the windows—pinkish orange with the setting sun.

“Look, Charlie girl,” Leigh whispered to the baby, who was half-asleep, her suck waning. “I think it’s an egret. Or maybe a heron?”

The clouds reminded Leigh of day-old bruises, but she waved the image away. Tenzin would call those ugly thoughts and had told Leigh that she was a beautiful person who should have beautiful thoughts. Leigh wanted to believe her.

So she tried. She imagined one last trip with the children to the Lambert Sag Harbor country home, where she had spent her own childhood summers.

“Oh, yes,” she whispered to Charlotte, who startled, her hands lifting in the air in sleepy self-protection.

They would eat lettuce and radishes fresh from the kitchen garden and play in the sandbox Hugo, her father’s “man” and the caretaker of the country house, had built for Leigh and her sisters decades ago. Chase would learn to love the beach, and the salty sea air would calm his tics. All the hyperactivity in the world, Leigh thought, couldn’t make the sand any less soft, the sky any less big.

The children’s whining tore her from her fantasy. It was as if they could tell there were fewer parents to reprimand them. The dads were on their canoe trip. Like some male coming-of-age classic, Leigh thought. Susanna and Allie were food shopping for what everyone kept calling tonight’s feast and which Leigh was dreading. Just the idea of sharing physical space with Tiffany for one more night made Leigh’s eyebrows itch, as if they were asking her hands to crawl up and pluck each hair, one by one.

Grace entered the room, balancing a platter of white paper plates on her forearm. Each plate was topped with triangles of grilled cheese and a small mound of cut and steamed veggies. The children sat quietly, their heads peeking over the tabletop, as a plate was placed in front of each child.

Chase wrinkled his nose. “No sam-wiches,” he said, and looked up at Grace, offering her his plate.

Leigh saw the crease of annoyance around Grace’s mouth.

Chase’s eyes wandered the room until he found her. “It’s too hot, Mama.”

“Blow on it ’til it cools down. Count to twenty,” she said sweetly, hoping he wouldn’t ask her to leave the sofa. Her safe place, since the dining table was that much closer to the kitchen, where she could hear Tiffany’s voice, the way it swelled in conversation and fell quiet, and then swelled again to make a point. Enough to make a person feel seasick.

“They really are so cute sometimes,” Grace said.

“Who?” Leigh asked.

Grace laughed. “The kids, of course.”

“Yeah,” Nicole said as she hurried out of the kitchen to drop a pile of paper napkins in the center of the table, “
Sometimes
being the key word. But,” she paused, “I’m glad I made one.”

As Nicole and Grace laughed, Leigh noticed the glassiness of Nicole’s eyes. As if she were already drunk. Or on those pills that Tiffany was always gossiping about.
Nicole’s magic pink pills.

Grace, her hands on her hips, said, “They’re cutest when they’re unconscious,” bringing forth more laughter, even from Tiffany, who had slid into the room. Her sudden presence made Leigh sit a bit taller and tug the edges of her hooter-hider nursing cover more snugly over Charlotte’s head.

Some children are cuter than others, Leigh thought, and then wished she hadn’t. She was imagining what the other mommies were thinking about Chase. That although he was beautiful (it was undeniable—his long limbs, the gold flecks in his hair) he was not cute.

Leigh sunk into the sofa and closed her eyes. Images of a happy Chase danced across the screen of her mind, across the lawn of the Sag Harbor house. Chase, sun-kissed and salt-tousled, running barefoot over the flawless emerald carpet, and there was Tenzin, smiling as she ran behind him. Dear Tenzin was watching over Leigh’s children when Leigh could not, for she knew that in her fantasy she was in jail, somewhere far, far away, somewhere empty of green, of sea breezes, of children’s laughter.

The sound of Chase’s churning frustration returned her.

“I. Not. Hungry.” His voice drowned out Tenzin’s patient prodding.

At home, Leigh used television to coax him to eat, a technique a therapist had taught her. She paused the TV and refused to press
PLAY
until Chase took a bite, despite his little fists drumming the table. After he took a bite, the television show resumed, and this process was repeated until it felt like each meal was a marathon. Leigh would never have let the other mommies know she bribed Chase with TV in order to stuff a piece of (God forbid!) McDonald’s chicken nugget in his mouth, one of few foods in his rotation. Especially not Tiffany, who was maniacally pro-organic and anti-TV, often reminding the group that television-watching caused brain damage in children under five.

Chase leaned forward to sniff at the grilled cheese. Before she could stop herself, she was raising her voice, “Chase. Do
not
put your nose in the food.”

“I not hungry.”

“You have to eat. Or your tummy will hurt. Dash and Levi are eating. Don’t you want to be big like them? Are you a baby, or a big boy?”

“A big boy?” Chase said.

Levi laughed. “You a baby!”

Leigh saw it coming, a literal darkening of Chase’s face, as if blood had gathered under his forehead and cheeks. She stood, a pinch of pain where Charlotte’s mouth was still attached to her breast, and caught Chase’s arm before it landed on Levi’s head.

“Oh-kay! My big boy,” Tenzin said, and, as if reading Leigh’s mind, scooped Chase from his seat and carried him away.

Leigh sighed. “Thank you
so
much, Tenzin,” she said.

She could feel Tiffany watching her, so she kept her eyes on Charlotte, tucking her nipple back in the baby’s mouth, rocking back and forth as she perched on the edge of the sofa seat.

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.