Julia Fierro - Cutting Teeth

Predictably, Nicole warned them about ticks. Leigh imagined fat, bloodsucking ticks clinging to every leaf, waiting to drop on the children, embed in their soft skin and infect them with Lyme’s Disease.

They filed back into the house and up the narrow stairs, stopping in each cramped room of the shabby beach house, which, Nicole informed with an eye roll and a disgusted chuckle, her parents had named Eden. Leigh assumed Nicole’s parents had believed that by decorating their home with eastern Long Island’s famous lighthouses (in the form of wallpaper, soap dispenser, lamps, and even salt and pepper shakers), they’d imbue it with the elegance and status of the Hamptons. She could only hope that Nicole’s parents would remain blissfully ignorant of their lack of taste. Although, with a daughter like Nicole, sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued, Leigh was sure their precious lighthouses had been critiqued often. Even then, Nicole served a healthy dose of condemnation.

“And this,” Nicole was saying, “is my parents’ library. The finest collection of Danielle Steel you’ll ever see!”

Leigh knew it must have taken courage for Nicole to invite them here. Nicole, the published novelist. Nicole, with her sophisticated academic friends. Leigh could barely follow some of their pompous Facebook conversations. Nicole, who was elitist about her claim that she was nonelitist. So why had Nicole invited them? It was the equivalent of (Leigh thought with a shudder) stripping naked, revealing every varicose vein and pucker of cellulite. For heaven’s sake, the bathroom reeked of old people’s urine, and the shower curtain was streaked with mold. If this had been her childhood home, her parents, Leigh would have kept her friends far far away.

Nicole hovered over herlaptop in the dim garage that smelled of fertilizer and gasoline. Sweat dripped from her chin onto the keyboard as she searched for a wireless signal, the splinters on her father’s nail-scarred workbench digging into her fleshy forearms. She felt that pulsing restlessness unique to plugged-in life. Those rare occasions you were cut off. Denied access. What if something did happen? Something the TV stations wouldn’t pick up until it was too late. Everyone knew Twitter was the most reliable source these days.

Finally, the five bars in the corner of her laptop screen glowed. She went straight to www.urbanmama.com and posted:

Any updates with this end-of-the-world Web bot thing?

posted 3:37pm

Nicole refreshed the site, her index finger tap-tap-tapping, looking up at the house only when she heard a dull thud or the muted squeal of a child.

Finally, a reply:

— what the hell are you talking about? 3:40pm

A moment of relief. It’s nothing, Nicole thought and even allowed a slow exhale.

But she refreshed the site. Just to be sure.

If only she had left it alone, closed her laptop, put it out of reach, and gone on with the weekend. Because there were more responses. Some anxious, Oh god, I can’t handle anything else. I was at the towers on 9/11 and I saw someone in another post say they were leaving the city, which brought forth multiple posts of what?! and wtf!

Of course, there were the naysayers, the responders who, in their breezy “whatever” tones, dismissed the slightest hint of hysteria.

Okay, conspiracy mom, relax and I bet you were stockpiling water and duct tape during Y2K.

And these rational voices calmed Nicole for a moment, enough that she could post once more. She had to. She had stockpiled supplies for Y2K. She still did. And look at what her single post had created. She owed it to these women to follow through.

Is something terrible going to happen tomorrow? Are these “Web bot” rumors true?

posted 3:48pm

(5 replies)

— no. relax. 3:50pm

— OMG. No. You’re FINE. 3:51pm

— yes. search Webbot 3:54pm

— can you really be this stupid? 3:56pm

— pay no attention to the fearmongers, sweetie. 3:57pm

Nicole stood in the driveway and searched the windows of the house before popping the trunk of the car.

There they were. The product of months of saving, researching, and purchasing, then organizing and reorganizing, until she was certain she had the best Go Bags in the tristate area, even more thorough than the official OEM (Office of Emergency Management) Ready New York! Go Bag.

She began her inventory, checking the items against the NYC.gov Disaster & Preparation Checklist. The iodine tablets, the “Space Emergency Blankets” and first-aid kit, the whistles and toilet paper and plastic plates and utensils, the camping stove and bottles of water and nonperishable food, including twelve cans of gluten-free organic Alphabet O’s from Trader Joe’s, Wyatt’s favorite. She had packed changes of clothes for all three of them and a few toy cars for Wyatt, as well as his lovey, a cuddle-worn blanket named Blue, which he’d given up a few weeks ago after several sleepless nights. There were matches and flashlights and packs of batteries, and an envelope with five hundred dollars cash. A to-go package of tampons. A thick paperback, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. The print was so small, she had added a magnifying glass. Not her ideal reading material, but more bang for the buck space-wise.

Nicole’s fingers dragged over each object as if, by touch alone, they imbued her with a kind of protection. A force field, Wyatt might say. Her sweet boy needed to organize the world into two ranks. He was always asking her if so-and-so (the gruff UPS guy, the angry taxi driver) was a good guy or a bad guy.

Entwined with this feeling of safety was self-loathing. How could an intelligent person buy all this crap? Yes, she was neurotic, she thought, as most creatives were, but she was a high-functioning member of society. She paid her bills on time, she made sure her child had all he needed to thrive, she taught at a well-regarded city college where her classes were among the students’ favorites. She was a professor, damnit. The trunk of this car belonged to a militia member of a paranoid fringe cult, not a liberal, educated upper-middle-class mother.

The checklist lay on top of the bags. She’d recently had the single page laminated at a drugstore, but she could see the creases where she had folded it time and time again. In the last few months, it had been massacred by check marks and scribbled notes.

She felt love for this list, which had, in many anxiety-flushed moments, comforted her. Now, in her parents’ driveway, she pressed it to her face and breathed deeply. The plastic was cool against her sunburned cheeks.

The Go Bags had taken her months to complete. First, she had saved the money, then she had spent it, using a PayPal account she had opened in her mother’s name, arranging for the items to be shipped to her parents’ house—$50 for an economy bottle of Cipro antibiotic, $250 worth of gas masks (+ extra charge for child-sized), $100 of Mylar blankets, $185 for the walkie-talkies.

She had scoured the Web each night after Josh and Wyatt had fallen asleep. Her insomnia had worsened in the winter, after the ice and salt had deepened the pothole in front of their building. In the early mornings, when Nicole finally made it to bed — the list of still-needed supplies running like ticker tape through her dream state — every garbage truck rumbling down Union Street felt like a test by a cruel god. Each time a truck hit the pothole, the echo of the metallic shudder flung her into consciousness, into a nightmarish light, the bed trembling under her. It took her a few seconds to realize it was the mellow light of dawn, not the blinding white of a nuclear blast.