Julia Fierro - Cutting Teeth

“Would you rather do it?” Grace said. “I know I’m just the visitor here.”

“Don’t be silly!” Tiffany said. For fucksake, she thought.

“I’m sure you don’t need me.”

Tiffany sighed. “Grace,” she said, “let’s do this.”

As she and Grace moved toward the kitchen, Rip hurried over. Like some kind of servant, Tiffany thought.

“I’ll help out,” he said, his hand flat against Grace’s wide back, as if he were pushing both Grace and himself through the kitchen doors.

“No, no, no,” Tiffany said, turning him toward the main room and giving him a shove. “I know you have some important stuff you wanted to discuss with Michael.” She looked at Grace and winked. “Guy stuff,” she added in a dramatic whisper.

Rip slunk back to his chair, staring back at them and reminding Tiffany of the mangy shepherd-mix mutt they’d had for a while when she was a kid. The same hurt it wore when her shithead stepbrother gave it a kick.

“We’ll be fine, sweetie,” Tiffany soothed, fluttering her fingers at him. She felt Grace stiffen at her side. Sweetie. Tiffany stopped herself from blowing Rip a kiss.

Not only had Grace humiliated Tiffany when she’d been trying to help calm a hysterical Hank. Not only had the woman cut her down in front of the whole playgroup. Tiffany’s playgroup. She had then heard Grace ask the room, as if Tiffany and Harper (there was her little girl’s feelings to think of) were invisible, “What’s the normal age for kids to stop breast-feeding?”

Normal. A declaration of war.

Tiffany had waited for the perfect opportunity to enact revenge.

Which was now.

Of course, Tiffany thought, how could Grace know breast-feeding was a sore topic between Tiffany and Michael? That Michael had made a request (it felt more like a command) just last week that she quit nursing, which had boiled over into a three-day battle? Please stop, Michael had pleaded. Even if only (her jaw tightened at the memory) to return her breasts to him. He’d claimed it was having a negative effect on their intimacy. Simplistic psychobabble that sounded nothing like Michael. As if he’d googled “wife won’t stop nursing” and copied some pediatrician’s misogynistic advice verbatim.

She had admitted to the few times she’d accidentally sprayed him during sex, but that had been when Harper was a baby, Tiffany’s breasts engorged, the flow out of her control. And wasn’t there, she had pointed out, like a whole online-porn fetish based on lactating women?

Secretly, part of her was grateful to Michael. She knew nursing a preschooler was unnecessary. She wouldn’t call it “ridiculous” (Michael’s choice), but she’d wanted to wean for a few months — tired of Harper’s fingers pulling and tugging, trying to squeeze a few more drops from breasts that held little more than a few ounces each. Tiffany knew that if she’d made the decision herself, she’d have come to regret it, come to label it selfish, an abandonment of her baby, a failure at mothering. She knew she’d think, you are just like your goddamn mother. Michael had given her permission by demanding she stop. So she would play out her anger for a few more days — she couldn’t let him catch wind of her gratitude — and then she would quit, cold turkey, when they returned to Brooklyn. Or at least she told herself she would.

Now, in the small kitchen of the beach house, Tiffany stood a few feet away from Grace, whose breasts — Tiffany was sure of it — had never been put to their intended use. Rip had told Tiffany that Hank was a formula baby. Maybe, Tiffany allowed, Grace had nursed for a few weeks after Hank’s birth, until the nipple blisters and engorgement and performance anxiety had grown too challenging, then a plastic nipple replaced flesh, synthetic formula replaced mama-milk.

“How about you do the apples, and I’ll do the carrots?” Tiffany suggested, her voice bright and friendly as she unpacked the fruit and veggies that would accompany the small bowls of yogurt for the children’s prebedtime snack. As if they were two women in a television commercial advertising organic toddler snacks.

“Sure,” Grace said.

“Mmm,” Tiffany said with exaggerated pleasure (she still had the TV commercial in mind) as she pressed the bunch of carrots to her nose, her eyes squeezed shut. “Nothing better than fresh CSA veggies!”

“What’s CSA?” Grace asked casually as she sawed into an apple, straining to break the skin with the dull knife Tiffany had chosen for her.

“You’re kidding, right?” Tiffany stared at Grace with what she hoped would translate as shock.

She held the expression until Grace was forced to look at her and ask, “What?” with a catty little wave of her head.

“I thought you knew Rip was a member. You know? Of the Community Supported Agriculture group? That he, like, picks up a huge crate of ultrafresh locally grown food each week?”

“I do know,” Grace said, interrupting her. “I just didn’t know what it was called.”

“CSA,” Tiffany repeated.

“Yeah, CSA.”

“I’m sure you know how lucky you are,” Tiffany said over the swish of the faucet as she scrubbed the carrots with the EcoClean Bamboo Brush she’d brought from home, whose bristles were guaranteed to absorb 50 percent more of the toxins that lay in wait on the seemingly clean skin of a carrot or an apple. “Rip really, truly cares about what goes into his son’s body. Michael would feed Harper Cheetos and Kool-Aid if he had his way!”

“Oh, I sure am lucky all right,” Grace mumbled before letting out a long sigh, so full of quivering self-pity that Tiffany almost felt sorry for her.

As Tiffany sliced the carrots into neat two-inch-long sticks, she wondered if Grace’s sigh was meant as a surrender of sorts. Maybe Grace wasn’t a bitch after all but only wore a bitchy armor, as so many insecure mommies did. Maybe Tiffany had pierced its iron girdle, and they could even grow to be friends, brainstorm over the issue that consumed Rip day in and day out. And, Tiffany thought, surely drove Grace mad. If Michael started nagging Tiffany to have another baby before she was ready …

She imagined Rip, back in the living room, talking to Michael, nodding in that overeager way of his, all the while imagining how he’d love to siphon Michael’s sperm. The way Tiffany and her friends had stolen gas from their daddies’ pickups for the four-wheelers they took off-roading in the woods. She could still remember sucking on the thick plastic tube until golden gas sputtered up, gagging and growing dizzy as she stuffed the tube into the dented plastic milk jug they used as a gas canister.

Tiffany was about to introduce the topic of Rip’s bomblike biological tick — maybe she’d even be able to help Grace talk through it — when Grace’s voice cracked the silence.

“I’ve never met anyone named Tiffany before,” Grace said, and looked over at her with the most genuine smile the woman had worn all day. “Only read about them in romance novels,” she paused. “Or seen them on The Jerry Springer Show. ”

No, Tiffany thought. Grace was a self-righteous bitch after all.

“You know,” Tiffany said, pointing at the apple slices on the cutting board with the tip of her knife, close enough so the blade was an inch from Grace’s squat fingers, “Hank won’t eat that if there’s even a speck of peel on it. No way José! Not a speck. But you probably know that already.”

“He’s picky,” Grace said as she lifted a slice of apple and scrutinized it.

“Not just picky,” Tiffany said with a snort of a laugh.

“That’s what happens when your father insists on coddling you.” Grace sighed.