Julia Fierro - Cutting Teeth

Sure enough there were mocking responses, like, get a grip, sister and oh, God, it’s alarmist mom (she could hear the eye roll in that one) and the scathing quick, run to the supermarket and stock up, you stupid cunt, but there were also those who responded with a fear too suggestive of her own— oh, shit, maybe I should go to my mom’s in Jersey and first swine flu, now this? The sound of fear in another anonymous mother’s voice was enough for Nicole’s mind to grab and roll and knead until she could see the future clearly. The emptied supermarkets. The looters. The disease. The end.

She felt like a fool when she thought of it— the end of days . Like she was some right-wing evangelical. Or one of those people who believed the Mayan prediction that the world would end in 2012. But talk of the end was everywhere. Armageddon. Apocalypse. By flood. By tsunami. By flaming asteroid. Shortage of water and food was inevitable, claimed even the most rational voices on NPR — the only news (at Josh’s firm suggestion) Nicole allowed herself. Despite her news purge, she caught the headlines on the stand in front of the convenience store and watched snippets of the primetime news while on line at the pizzeria. The ads plastered across the subway walls announced new apocalyptic movies — via plague, zombies, earthquake, fire and/or ice. Novels set in dystopian landscapes lined the shelves of bookstores. Autism rates were skyrocketing, the ozone depleting, and you couldn’t eat a tuna sandwich because of the mercury. The world was a mess, and people were terrified; there was no denying it.

Despite her outward nonchalance (she had friends who actually called her laid-back), after Wyatt was born, when all she had at stake multiplied exponentially, she had come to see that terrible things — the witches and boogeymen of her childhood nightmares — could, and did, happen during the day. An airplane, once a benign sight, could slice open the world on a perfect blue morning. A pair of psychopaths could take a high school hostage as the lunch bell rang. You, yes you, could receive mail coated in white dust. You could be pushed into the path of the A train by God knows what kind of mentally deranged person. And what about that woman on the West Side who was walking her dog — electrocuted when she stepped on a seemingly innocent manhole cover?

Measles in Park Slope. Mumps in Midwood. And the bees were disappearing.

Years ago, in college, the dying bees had been the talk at parties while a blunt was passed, discussed with irreverence unique to youth. Now, years later, Nicole couldn’t stop worrying about the bees. Among other things.

It would be safer out on Long Island, wouldn’t it? She knew the idea of fleeing the city was ridiculous. Because of a computer’s prediction? So she revised. It would be good to get away. Yes, that was better. It was the Labor Day holiday, after all. Best to take advantage of the beach house while her parents were in Florida. To get a break from the end-of-summer heat that rose from beneath the sidewalks, sending cockroaches skittering to the surface after sunset. To squeeze in one last beach weekend before summer officially fled. And, she added, the playgroup would be so grateful.

For three years, Nicole, three other new moms, and one stay-at-home dad, had rotated hosting Friday afternoon play dates. Complete with wine and cheese for the parents, and goldfish crackers and juice boxes for the babies, now babies no more, all between three and four years old. The children had grown up together, taking first steps and uttering first words in each other’s company. She owed it to them, Nicole thought, to follow through on her promise of a weekend at the beach.

Nicole found her iPhone and tapped out a text:

Hey! Hope to see y’all on the Gold Coast tomorrow! Forecast: sunny days & breezy nights. We have a baby pool, floaties, & sand toys for kiddies!

Bring sweaters for bonfire on beach! Mojitos await you … xxxooo Nic

She then sent it to the whole playgroup: to Leigh (mommy to Chase and Charlotte), Rip (daddy to Hank), and Susanna (mommy to twins Dash and Levi). Even, after some thought, to Tiffany (mommy to Harper), who was a bit high maintenance and always in some kind of disagreement with one or another of the playgroup parents.

* * *

Nicole set Wyatt’s dinner (carefully cut pork cubes and steamed broccoli) in front of him and paused the episode of Blue’s Clues, breaking his iPad-induced trance.

“Don’t forget to take bites,” she sang. “Or I’ll have to turn off the show.”

“Okay,” Wyatt said as he stared at the iPad screen, waiting for the man who dressed like a boy to reappear.

“Mommy’s going to the bathroom. ’Kay?”

She locked herself in the bathroom, rolled a towel, and tucked it at the bottom of the door.

Fan on.

Window open.

She heard Wyatt on the other side of the wall, singing along with the man-boy on TV, trilling enthusiastically of the joys of brushing your teeth. Make them sparkle! Make them shine!

She steadied the glass pipe (purchased at Lollapalooza almost twenty years ago) on the sink and slipped the small purple plastic box — her weed-delivery guy’s signature — from the rolled-up socks she kept hidden in a box of tampons under the sink.

Opening the plastic purple box was part of her ritual. The smell, both sweet and sour, reminded her of the scent of good old clean dirt under a child’s nails on a midsummer afternoon.

She caught her reflection in the mirror. The bud was lifted to her nose, the red hairs glimmering as if coated with fine sugar. She would have laughed if she had been someone else, watching a grown woman prepare to get stoned with such ceremony. A mom. A thirty-five-year-old woman hiding in her bathroom.

She stuffed the pipe’s bowl with fluffy green buds, and before she lit up, she found the device, an invention reclaimed from her college days, which had taken her just a few minutes to re-create. The cardboard tube from a paper-towel roll, a scented dryer sheet taped over one end.

The first pull. The glass stem clicking against her teeth. The heat scratching at the back of her throat. The fullness of her lungs. The sense of safety was immediate, as if her body were saying, “Okay, now. There it is, Nicole. Oh. Kay.”

Nicole blew the smoke through the cardboard tube, and the bathroom smelled of fresh laundry.

They were tiny puffs. Little sips, really, she reassured herself. And what did it matter, when those tiny puffs chased away the worry that bullied her each day. She imagined the smoke’s curled fingers kneading her shoulders, her neck, her jaw, her brain, delivering the calm she needed but without the drab side effects that came with the Zoloft she’d started taking soon after Wyatt was born.

She had been so nervous to call the dealer’s pager number — a gift from her hairstylist. Nicole had held on to the Post-it note until, finally, three months ago, after she had stopped the Zoloft, the anxiety returning, flooding her system like a virus, she had made the call. Her fingers had fumbled when she opened the door for the delivery guy with his knapsack of purple plastic boxes, each packed with a cluster of dewy buds.

Five more pulls, each followed by a spritz from the fig-scented ambiance mist her acupuncturist had recommended. Five was her lucky number. It made her think of one person surrounded by two on each side. Protected.

Nicole was relaxed now. It felt as if the sharp edges of life had blurred, softened, been capped with those plastic triangles she had suctioned to the corners of the coffee table after Wyatt was born. Just to be safe.

With the premium red-haired marijuana ($85 a quarter ounce), Nicole felt okay. Like she could handle anything. In those few hours of weed-cushioned calm, she had started to think that maybe she could finish the novel she’d been working on for six years, maybe she could be a better mother, a better wife, and maybe, just maybe, she could stay off her meds. Josh had been insistent she stay on the Zoloft, despite her attempts at explaining how sluggish, how blah it made her feel. She hadn’t told him when she’d stopped taking it.