Cutting Teeth: A Novel (15 page)

He helped Hank position himself on the toilet seat and watched as the boy’s eyes neared the epiphany-like glaze that accompanied each bowel movement. Like pooping was a spiritual experience. Like the kid might start talking in tongues. Rip chuckled, congratulating himself on his ability to find humor in the mundane.

“Don’t. Laugh. At. Me,” Hank said as he strained. “Privacy. I need privacy!” he yelled.

Rip hurried out of the bathroom, shutting the door behind him, almost colliding with Grace in the hallway.

“What are you doing?” she whispered. Asking him—as usual, he thought—the obvious. “He’ll wake the other kids.”

Her hair was mussed. Her eyes puffy in the bright hall light.

“I hate it when you sneak up on me like that,” Rip said. “It’s creepy.” He smiled to show he was joking, but she glared at him.

The memory of Tiffany gripped him. Her back arching in pleasure. The ends of her dark curls tickling his mouth.

“Are you hearing me?” Grace said, returning him to the stuffy hallway. Like one of his wet dreams, Grace appearing just in time to spoil his climax.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Grace’s nostrils flared as she took a breath, preparing to speak, and Rip was certain she knew. Her eyes weren’t just swollen. They were ringed red. Had she been crying?

“Why don’t you ask your BFF mommy friend?” Grace said. “She seems to know sooo much about you. And me.” She took a shaky breath. “And our very private personal family life.”

His mouth opened, but he couldn’t speak. He heard himself say, “Wha? Wha?” Stuttering.

“Wait,” he got out. “What are you talking about? I have no idea.”

Grace interrupted him, her words launched by a breathy humph that made him feel as if he’d been blasted by hot wind.

“She just made me feel”—Grace paused—“like a really shitty mom.”

He heard the girl-like hurt in her voice and knew, with a cooling cascade of relief, Grace knew nothing of what had happened at the kitchen sink that afternoon. If she did, there’d be no room for sadness. Only anger.

“Grace, sweetie,” he said.

He cupped her elbows in his hands and drew her close, so her forehead rested on his chest. Groggy and loose-limbed, she let him. She shuddered—with a sob or a sigh, he wasn’t sure.

Hank yelled from the bathroom. “Come here. Daddy. I want you. Dah-day!”

“Forget it. She’s just an immature B-I-T-C-H,” Grace said as she lifted her head and pushed him toward the bathroom. “Hurry. Before our kid wakes the whole house and everyone
really
has a reason to hate me.”

“Why are you yelling, Henry?” Rip snapped, as the bathroom door shut behind him, but then he saw that Hank was leaning over, his chin almost touching his thick knees. His face twisted in pain.

Rip knelt, peering up through the boy’s glossy bangs.

“You having a tough time going, buddy?”

Hank let out a groan, and the vein in the center of his forehead wriggled.

“Oh, poor guy,” Rip soothed as he rubbed the back of Hank’s cold, sweaty neck.

After consoling Hank, and promising a good poop would make him feel better, Rip convinced him to lie back on the pilled bathroom rug. He helped Hank pull his knees to his chest, a bowel-loosening trick via their pediatrician.

They were in the bathroom for another half hour—the air sour with Hank’s intermittent farts. Rip scanned his memory to think of any slip of his (or Tiffany’s) that might have given their brief—whatever that was—away. Tiffany would never throw him under the bus, especially when nothing had happened. He thought of the playgroup mommies—Nicole, Susanna, Leigh. Oh God, he thought. Leigh. She’d have him ousted from the playgroup, never cc’ed on a group e-mail again, if she knew he’d even looked down Tiffany’s shirt—which, he had, of course, frequently. Hank would be devastated. And the new baby. Think of the loss he or she would suffer? What would Rip do without the playgroup? Who would he be? One of those aimless stay-at-home dads, the ones without a clique. He thought of them as floaters, hovering around the margins of the playground, like ships without a port to anchor in.

“
What
is going on in there?” Grace whispered through the door. Rip could hear the irritation tweaking her voice. Not
Is everything okay?
Or something comforting, like
You’ll feel better, Hank, honey.

Rip was the one trapped in the bathroom. He was the one who made Hank’s lunch every day, making certain there wasn’t the tiniest hint of crust on his cheese sandwich, not a speck of skin on his sliced apples. He was the one who bought Hank new socks and underwear, who kept track of the sales on kids’ clothes at the Gap and Old Navy. It was Rip who had bought a lead test to check the water in their apartment, and even the water fountain at the playground—though he’d never admit that to Grace, certain she’d call him a worrywart. Rip remembered to cut Hank’s toenails. If it had been up to Grace, Rip thought, as Hank’s face turned purple from straining, the boy’s toenails would grow until they curled over his toes. Like some freak in the old
Guinness’ Book of World Records
Rip had loved as a kid.

Rip did it all alone. He needed the playgroup. They were his port and his anchor.

“Answer me, Richard,” Grace sang from the other side of the door. “Please.”

“Almost done,” Rip sang back, his jaw clenched. “Right, Hankster?”

“Don’t let him push too hard,” Grace said.

Always the manager, Rip thought.

“He’ll get another hemorrhoid,” Grace whispered as if it were a four-letter word.

He leaned his chin on Hank’s knees. Hank placed his warm hands on Rip’s cheeks.

“Daddy?”

“Yeah, my special guy?”

“It hurts.”

Rip winced. Still, he savored the yearning in Hank’s voice. His son wanted him. No. He needed him.

“I’m here for you, buddy,” Rip said. “Promise.”

“Forever and ever and the end of time?” Hank asked, his voice squeaking as he strained.

“You betcha.”

Finally, a small ball of tarlike foul-smelling poop plopped into the toilet.

“Daddy?”

“Yeah, bud?”

“Constipated poops smell worser than regular poops.”

“You got that right, stinker.”

on pins and needles

Nicole

The living room emptied,
the wine-drowsy moms and dads climbing the stairs in socked feet. As if, Nicole thought, they were teenagers sneaking in after curfew.

She checked the front windows of the house for movement before opening the trunk of her car and reaching over the duffel bags for the lever that released the lid over the spare tire. With a satisfying pop, the lid opened, leaving her just enough room to reach in and feel for the tampon box she had tucked into the center of the tire. She withdrew the three joints she’d rolled the night before while Josh and Wyatt had slept.

Her technique was improving. After several failed attempts, she’d found a site online with instructions on how to roll a traditional joint, including a few specialty rolls; the Saturday Night Special, the Magic Carpet, and what the site claimed was a favorite in the hash bars of Amsterdam, the Tulip. She had decided to stick with the classic basic, the Knee Trembler. At least until she could roll a joint that burned smooth.

The first hit was strong. When the smoke filled her lungs, she doubled over, coughing.
Fuck, fuck,
she whispered, checking the house through watering eyes.

She’d already thought of what to do if she got caught. Put on a sheepish smile and say she’d snuck a cigarette. To most of the moms (except Tiffany), a cigarette was an adventure. The mommies accepted the need for a bottle of wine here, half a Xanax there, to get through tough times, like when your child was going through a tantrum phase, a hitting phase, a waking-at-four-in-the-morning phase.

Nicole tucked the tampon box into one of the Go Bags and slowly shut the trunk.

She walked around the side of the house, past the piles of sand, shells, and seaweed that had washed through the seawall’s drainage holes in the last high tide, past the toolshed her father had decorated with the buoys and fishing net that washed ashore. A skeletal fence of silvery driftwood gleamed, anchored with thick, rusted nails (a childproofing hazard if she ever saw one), squaring off her father’s garden—a tangled mess of squash plants, bean vines, and black-eyed Susans.

It seemed to Nicole, that since her last visit six months ago, the house had aged twenty years. The white aluminum siding was rust-streaked, as if the salt water, in the last nor’easter, had given the house a manic embrace, digging its barnacled claws in as the tide pulled the storm back to sea. Her father’s purple petunias, potted in rusted, stewed-tomato cans, had shriveled. She thought about watering. But what did a few flowers matter when the rest was such a mess? The grass, bare in spots, was littered with sunbaked figs slashed in half by eager raccoon claws. Even in the night’s darkness, Nicole could make out the cloud of no-see-ums swarming the sweet, rotting mess.

She knew she should be grateful for her parents’ home.
How many city boys have a private beach on the weekends?
her mother shot back when Nicole complained about the toilets that backed up, the dust and grime and cobwebs and clutter. This, she thought, as she stepped over a twisted hunk of driftwood, was all the inheritance she’d get, and once the economic crisis had squatted on her parents’ doorstep, they’d had to sign off on a reverse mortgage. She’d have to repay the government. She’d have to buy this piece of junk.

She knew she sounded like a spoiled brat. But, she thought, isn’t that just what she was?

Her parents had moved to this affluent suburb so she’d come of age amid the privileged, so she’d adopt their manners, absorb their way of seeing the world, and she’d been damn good at it: pruning, reshaping herself, sprouting expectations and entitlement like new leafy branches.

Was it any surprise she felt disappointed in her parents, who couldn’t splurge for family vacations—the whole clan flying to Turks and Caicos—or pay for preschool, or karate classes, or thirty-guest birthday parties for Wyatt? Who couldn’t “gift” them money for a down payment like so many of her friends’ parents had, because wasn’t that the only way one could afford a home these days, even on a decent salary like Josh earned?

She plucked a plump purple-black fig from the tree and tore it open with her nails. She ate the sweet meat, made sweeter after she pulled on the joint and her mouth filled with smoke. The tiny seeds cracked between her teeth. Her father had eaten figs as a boy in southern Italy during the war—handfuls of them until he shit his pants, he’d told her. It was the only food left. And here she was, she thought, whining about family vacations.

Times were
relatively
tough for everyone. She had seen the guilt flickering across even her wealthiest friends’ faces when the check came at the end of a pricey dinner out. But, still, they ate out, they vacationed at Club Med, they drove BMWs, Audis, and luxury SUVs, they hired women to clean their less-than-1,000-square-foot apartments. They bought handbags that cost double her parents’ weekly grocery bill. She knew she was just like them, living way beyond her means. Saving zilch. Acting as if the future would never arrive, with its overdue notice.

She cringed when she thought of what the moms in the playgroup might have expected of her parents’ home, and the disappointment they had surely felt when they pulled up to the house. Nicole’s own apartment was tastefully decorated with midcentury pieces, including a pristine Danish teak dining table and two leather armchairs, perfectly worn. The look was minimalist, the very opposite of her parents’ home, with its mismatched furniture, the synthetic drapes her mother insisted on despite the way they blocked the view of the water.
Too much light aggravates my uveitis,
her mother complained. Nicole’s home smelled of sixty-five-dollar organic candles with scents like Moroccan mint tea and woodland violets, while her parents’ home, despite Nicole’s attempt to air it out, smelled of mildew and the sulfa pills her diabetic mother took for her urinary tract infections.

Nicole was sure the mommies—especially Leigh, who had grown up summering out East at the Lambert clan’s country home—had imagined a scene out of
Sex and the City.
A turquoise pool vanishing into the horizon. There was a leaking kiddie pool. The mojitos Nicole had promised were poured from a scratched Tupperware pitcher, and her childhood Pac-Man and Smurfs sheets covered the guest beds instead of fresh white linens. Thank God she had found, and then hid, her mother’s feminine deodorant spray—
guaranteed to alleviate vaginal odor!

Yet, in the silvery night air, wrapped in the perfume of the fading honeysuckle, as Nicole looked up at the windows, warm portraits of light, and thought of the women and men who filled the house, she felt a glowing approval that made her blush. They liked her enough to travel all the way out to the Island, she thought, before quickly reprimanding herself for acting so junior-high.

She spotted a light in the kitchen. Someone was awake, and they were downstairs. Only twenty yards from where she stood.

She ducked behind the car, then slunk past the shed. She ran, hunched over, in and out of the shadows to the side of the house. She crouched under the deck stairs, the crushed shells cutting into her bare feet.

As the sea air rippled through her thin shirt, Nicole relit and sucked greedily on the joint.

no picnic

Susanna

Susanna had waited,
curled up on the sofa, pretending to sleep, fearing Rip and Michael might never leave their shared bottle of booze. When they finally staggered upstairs, she had gone to the dark kitchen.

Now sauerkraut dribbled down Susanna’s chin. She took a bite of a hot dog and dunked an onion ring in ketchup. Already, she could feel the acid mingling with the grease, all of it a roiling mess in the small pouch of a stomach perched atop her ballooning uterus. At thirty-five weeks, it seemed as if just two or three bites of food filled her. One too many detonated the heartburn. Sometimes, and especially after she binged, she stood over the toilet and stuck two fingers down her throat, hoping a good puke would extinguish the reflux.