Julia Fierro - Cutting Teeth

When his hand cupped her hip bone, they arched forward together, and Rip whispered, “Um,” and then she felt the wet warmth in her bikini bottom.

Just like that, he was gone, and there was cold empty space behind her, as though a gust of wind had picked him up and carried him out to sea. She turned in time to see Rip’s sandals disappear up the back stairs leading to the second floor.

* * *

Tiffany returned to the living room, her thighs tingling, the crotch of her bikini bottom damp. She wondered if she should change, then imagined Rip upstairs. Jerking himself off as he thought of her.

Dusk settled, and the crickets took up song, reminding Tiffany of back home. A hole-in-the-earth town another two-hour drive out east on the North Fork that stank of rotting clams and the potato chip factory on its shore. A memory she chased away with another swallow of wine before refreshing her drink at the makeshift bar Nicole had set up on a wobbly card table.

Rip returned, passing her on the way to the kitchen without a second look, asking the room, in typical Rip cheer, if anyone wanted another beer. It was easy to pretend things had never happened. She’d been practicing forgetting most of her life. She laughed at the melodrama of the thought — nothing had happened.

The children returned from baths just as the white moths began to flutter against the window screens. The boys rushed down the stairs in their tighty whiteys and undershirts — or, as Tiffany’s father had called them, wifebeaters. Tenzin had combed their wet hair back, slick and parted, and Tiffany thought they looked like an old photograph from Life magazine. A distant boat blew its horn, and the boys rushed to the window, their hands cupped against the glass reflecting black sky and silver sea. Then her Harper was there, leaping off the third step, the wide skirt of her nightgown a ballooning sail. Mommeee! Tiffany tried not to think about Rip, or Michael, or Grace, as she held her little girl, buried her face in Harper’s saltwater-crisp curls that smelled like sun and baby shampoo, and she remembered she was Mommy now, nothing like the old Tiffany, who put men and sex before everything else because she confused them with love — and, she thought (to be honest), because sex just felt fucking good.

Tiffany had bought Harper’s nightgown just for that weekend, knowing how Harper would look, the pure white cotton vibrating against Harper’s bronzed skin. The mommies’ eyes wide with envy of her girl. She had splurged nearly $200 on the dress of handspun organic cotton, using the MasterCard she kept hidden from Michael, tucked in the dusty breast-pump bag at the top of the closet.

“Aw, sugar,” Tiffany said, and dropped to her knees to flatten the wrinkles in the dress with her palm. “You look so pretty!”

Harper pushed her away with a sharp twist of her torso. “Mama, I don’t wanna look pretty. I wanna look cool!”

Tiffany released her, and the little girl skipped to join the boys, the hem of her dress fluttering like moth wings. “Let me see!”

Tiffany looked around the room, talking to no one and everyone at once, “My little prima donna.” So it was clear to all that she was a patient mother. A good mother.

The baths had soothed the little beasts, and they turned the pages of books lazily as they nibbled carrots and spooned yogurt. The mommies and daddies were loosening, too, Tiffany thought. Thanks to the wine. Even Grace, who acted as if their kitchen duel had never happened.

Michael built a fire, and trills of laughter rang through the cozy living room. Tiffany’s wineglass had been filled once, twice, then she lost count. The cool, salt-tinged air filled with bossa nova and she felt a thrill in her chest that meant she was buzzing. She felt as if she could sashay from person to person, light on the balls of her feet, and touch them with her magic, sugar-plum-fairy wand to make them love her.

Michael pulled her into his lap, and she stayed, even though it made her feel small, and these were surely not people who appreciated PDA. Tiffany had learned quickly that the urban sophisticates admired subtlety over all else. Anything loud, lewd, or lascivious should be filtered through irony or irreverence.

Susanna and Nicole were whispering, their foreheads nearly touching. Tiffany wondered if Nicole had really wanted to invite her that weekend. Leigh might have convinced Nicole, Tiffany thought, and reminded herself to be grateful for the bond she’d made with Leigh.

But if Leigh honestly loved her, then why was she so hesitant to loan Tenzin for three freaking hours a week? Maybe, Tiffany thought, she’d be doing Leigh a favor. Extra time with Chase might be what Leigh needed to accept that Chase would always be Chase.

Tiffany had seen many Chases. She thought of all the mothers who brought their “busy” sons to Tiff’s Riffs classes, those super sophisticated women with perfect hair, and perfect teeth — women so thin that Tiffany wondered if they ever ate. They were models of refinement. Their sons the very opposite. They had their lines memorized. He’s just so excitable! He’s a real boy-boy, never sits still! Tiffany had seen many boys like that, a year or two away from a diagnosis on the spectrum, from neurodevelopmental-pediatrician visits and tours of private schools specializing in behavioral disorders.

She was blessed with her girl. Her Harper. Her mind sailed into a harbor she seldom visited, where the waves were the same crimson as her wine, as dark as the blood that lines the womb, and she wondered if the babies she’d aborted had been boys. Maybe it had been for the best, she thought as she tipped the velvety wine back, back, back. Maybe Fate had intervened so that the baby she did choose to keep would be a girl.

In the mellowed light of the wine, the conversations dotting the room were each its own little planet, and Tiffany their sun. It was her energy making them spin, she thought, as she danced from one constellation of mommies to the next.

The babies wereupstairs asleep.

The mommies and daddies were in the living room, speaking with the excitement of children. Tenzin couldn’t capture the meaning of their conversation, only phrases and words.

She had made it a habit to repeat new words in her thoughts, reciting them to herself, to God, and to her children in India. To the memory of a free Tibet, where her great aunts still offered secret prayers to the supreme Buddha. She even practiced with her boy Chase.

Tenzin’s memory had improved in the three years and seven months she’d lived in America. She could hold many words in her head, carrying them on the long train ride from Brooklyn back to Queens, back to the apartment she shared with five other Tibetan women, most of them nannies like her. Each night, when she arrived home, she hurried to the envelope-sized electronic dictionary hidden under her pillow and unveiled the meaning of those words she had cupped in her mind all day.

Her favorites were the phrases that sounded like one thing, but meant another. Over the moon. Promise the moon. Once in a blue moon. Many moons ago.

Nicole had lined the dining table with the most precious cups Tenzin had ever seen. Thin glass globes that sat in the palm of a hand and long-stemmed ones that made Tenzin think of lilies. It was as if the liquid in each glass, like red and gold shifting seas, absorbed the candlelight of the living room. The mommies held them fearlessly but Tenzin had refused a glass offered by Tiffany. She was certain she would break so fine a thing. As if God himself had blown it with divine lips.

It had been Tiffany who had scratched at the door of the bedroom Tenzin was sharing with Leigh and the children, insisting Tenzin come down and join everyone else. Tenzin had whispered no, no, no as Charlotte and Chase’s snores hummed like tiny motors, but Tiffany’s desire burned brightest of all the mommies. Tiffany hated to be refused. Tiffany wanted Tenzin to be her bosom buddy .