Julia Fierro - Cutting Teeth

Allie remained radiant. Although she was seven years older and did practically nothing to take care of herself. No exercise. No makeup. She hardly moisturized! Susanna imagined what everyone saw, especially Allie’s adoring Parsons students, who were perky-breasted and newly out, ready to spring into Susanna’s place as younger lover.

Allie was still beautiful. Unbroken.

It seemed as if even the twins’ eyes were all for Allie. Susanna had watched Dash lean into Allie, like a cat rubbing up against a visitor, asking to be stroked. Casanova, they called him because he sought female attention.

“Mommy,” Dash had said after Allie let him climb into her lap, “you’re a pretty girl. Like a princess.”

Susanna had to stop from laughing. He was certainly the first male to call Allie a princess. Allie, who was butch in appearance, in swagger, with her bowlegged gait, like that of a soccer player, and whose idea of “dressing up” was a plain silk tank with frayed skinny jeans and a dab of lipstick. But she knew what Dash had meant. Allie sparkled. Especially next to Susanna — Mama — in her baggy maternity dresses that could not hide the newly bulging saddlebags that made her feel squat. Ordinary. Like one of her middle-aged middle-American aunts.

This baby had also destroyed her love affair with New York City. The smells! Brooklyn would empty, she thought, as she dunked a cold french fry in mayo, there’d be a mass exodus to the suburbs if everyone had the superhuman smelling ability of a pregnant woman. If they could smell the filth that lay, like a sleeping demon, under their renovated brownstones and organically designed gardens.

There were whole blocks she had to avoid because of the stench that wafted up from the drains. She confined herself to the apartment on Tuesday and Friday nights, when the sidewalks were crowded with black garbage bags pulsing with odor. Safe in her scent-controlled apartment, Susanna fantasized about her someday home. Far enough outside the city for peace and quiet but also cushioned in one of the small liberal enclaves populated by those fleeing the city for a better life. They’d have a chicken coop (fresh eggs for breakfast), a kitchen garden, and honeybees. A wood-burning pizza oven on the redwood deck. Right next to the hot tub. But she had so much money to save, and she had to convince Allie to leave the city, all of which took energy she didn’t have, not when she was so sick, so weak, so scatterbrained.

Every Friday, $500 was deposited from her Babes-on-the-Go! business bank account into a savings account she had opened online. Allie didn’t need to know, Susanna told herself; Allie had a different definition of investment, which included a trip around the world with stops in Paris, Egypt, and Morocco to experience the art they had talked of so often before the boys were born and, Susanna thought with a twinge of guilt, they had spoken of less often after.

Susanna would certainly not let Allie spend the Babes-on-the-Go! earnings on frivolous things, not after she had toiled over those filthy strollers, pulling hair out of wheel spokes with a pair of tweezers, scrubbing car-seat cushions that smelled like spit-up. Susanna remembered that afternoon in the car — to think Allie actually thought she wanted to clean strollers, as if it were a hobby Allie was giving Susanna permission to dabble in!

It was Allie who kept them trapped in the city. City of Shriveled Produce. City of Foul Air. City of Obstacles, where a simple food shop became a test of endurance, navigating narrow supermarket aisles with the ever-jostling twins, and now her enormous belly. Screeching at the twins as she waddled to the park, their scooters zipping half a block ahead. Stop! Freeze! You stop or I’ll give you the biggest time-out ever! She longed to live somewhere where her neighbors weren’t a few feet away, witness to her shitty parenting.

Susanna knew she only had herself to blame. She had convinced Allie to have another baby. She hadn’t thought of her motivation at the time, but she’d had a lot of time to think in the last eight months, alone in the bathroom, her head hanging over the toilet, the overhead fan a meditative drone. She had nagged Allie. Think of the meaning it will add to your art. When Susanna had only wanted to keep her job. As mother. As main caregiver. What else could she do except mother and create mediocre art? She’d gone straight from high school to art school to Allie.

You don’t have to work, you can focus on your art, Allie had said when they’d first moved in together. Someone wanted to take care of her, Susanna remembered thinking — and they had lain in bed all day, the sun passing over the twisted white sheets and their naked, sweat-slick bodies as they planned their future. The art they would travel to experience, the art they would make together. Even then, Susanna hadn’t felt the passion for art that Allie did, but she knew Allie needed to see her as an artist. She wondered now if Allie loved Susie the painter more than Susanna the mother.

She had meant it that afternoon in the car. There wasn’t room for two artists in this family, not when one had photographs hanging in the Met, and had designed award-winning covers for Time and Newsweek, and it was this that had driven Susanna, over a year ago, to beg Allie to carry their next child. To take her turn. To make another baby for Susanna to mother.

The twins’ birth hadn’t transformed Allie into a mommy. Maybe, Susanna had hoped, carrying a baby would. Allie had agreed, though her resignation was clear, and she’d lasted for only two months of inseminations, which involved Eric jerking off into a sterile cup in one room of their apartment and Susanna transporting the cup to the bedroom, where among scented candles and Les Nubians on the iPod, Allie lay, waiting for Susanna to inject Eric’s sperm at the moment of climax.

After the second failed attempt, Susanna had done some googling and informed Allie that oral sex was off the plate for the next try. Apparently, she’d explained matter-of-factly, saliva could kill sperm. Who knew? And that had been that. A few hours later, Allie, her speech blurred by alcohol, had woken Susanna, and said, “There will be no more turkey basters in my vagina.”

Without pause, Susanna had said, “I’ll carry the baby. Your baby.”

At first, it had felt as if they were pioneering activists. There was nothing they couldn’t do! Allie had seemed excited, too, promising she would work her ass off to make the extra money they’d need for the egg extraction, the in vitro, the adoption fees, the works.

As Susanna rewrapped the food, replacing tops of containers and returning them to the overstuffed refrigerator, she caught a whiff of food gone bad and gagged. She froze, breathing rapid little yoga breaths through her nose. A bubble rose from her belly and escaped as a rumbling belch. The pressure was relieved. She turned to make her way up the stairs and caught sight of a figure, startling so she almost lost her footing.

An older woman with a tired slouch.

It was her reflection in the grease-stained mirror.

Hank was snoring softly;Nuk-nuk the bunny crushed by one plump arm.

Rip rolled out of the cot and tiptoed past the bed, where Grace lay still and unmoving. He slipped Grace’s laptop from her bag and set it on the dresser. So sleek, so untouched by grubby little hands. His own laptop, which Hank used to watch children’s shows on Netflix, was always sticky, the white handrest stained, the keyboard missing the letter H, which Hank had peeled away.

The cool blue light of the screen made Rip’s fingers on the keyboard glow alien-like. He logged onto TryingToConceive.com under the username Hanksdaddy76. He had visited the site daily the past few months, ever since Grace had given him a we’ll have to think about it shrug when he brought up having another baby.