Julia Fierro - Cutting Teeth

In life before Wyatt and Zoloft, her favorite conversational adjectives had been “amazing” and “exquisite.” After Wyatt was born, when she’d fallen into what their pediatrician called the baby blues (she’d wanted to stab him every time he used the phrase), and accepted his prescription for Zoloft, she felt flat, like she’d been transformed into one of the one-dimensional stock characters she lectured against in the undergrad Creative Writing 101 classes she taught twice a week at City College. Where were her highs and lows, the dips and valleys that made life so varied, so interesting? Where was her material?

Writing was impossible. Even reading anything more challenging than a mediocre thriller felt intolerable. Why read when she could sit in front of the television in the few hours between when Wyatt fell asleep and when exhaustion defeated her?

The Z made everything feel so whatever, she had told her psychiatrist, Dr. Greenbaum, who claimed (with a condescending chuckle) that this middle zone was healthy. He suggested she experiment with lowering the Z, five milligrams at a time, to find a happy medium between anxious and sedated. But the lowering of the dose was like a drug in itself. With every five-milligram drop, Nicole could feel the lifting of her spirits (and she wasn’t one to use a cliché lightly).

Four months ago, in the height of the swine-flu panic, she had quit therapy. Without calling, without e-mailing. She deleted the messages Dr. Greenbaum left on her phone without listening to them, an action that gave her a deliciously empowering thrill. She was free of having to listen to her unlikable self in therapy as she recited the dreadful what-ifs circling her mind. What if Wyatt’s sore throat was the first symptom of h1n1? What if terrorists bombed Josh’s subway train? What if the lump in her neck was cancer?

She was down to only twenty-five milligrams of Z per day when her thoughts returned. Brilliant thoughts, genius even! A crystal-clear memory (her first kiss), a fantasy (her next novel idea), an observation (oh, how many people there are yearning their way through life).

Hello! Where have you been? Her thoughts hadn’t disappeared; they had been trapped under the mellowing blanket of Z. Under Wyatt’s whining, under the tinny songs his toys played over and over, under her own voice that was always prodding Wyatt. Use your words, honey. Use your words.

She decided she was through with medication, and despite the rocky months that followed, Josh’s complaints she was irritable, erratic, unstable — all those words starting with negative prefixes — she had stayed strong.

With a little help from the monthly delivery of purple plastic boxes.

* * *

The first text was from Susanna, mom to twins, who the parents in the playgroup called (with affection, of course) the lesbian mommy. Cheerful and rosy-cheeked, Susanna, Nicole thought, would’ve made a perfect soccer mom in another life, despite the fact that Allie, Susanna’s partner and some kind of visual artist, was Susanna’s opposite — pale, dangerously thin. Black turtlenecks. Black skinny jeans. Allie reminded Nicole of the goth kids who had moved like zombies through the corridors of her high school.

Susanna:

We’ll be there. Two newly hitched mommies and two little monsters arriving round 5!

Nicole:

congrats!!! glad Allie finally made an honest woman of you.;) see you tom!

Her phone buzzed with two more texts.

First Leigh, the playgroup’s resident debutante. A blue-blooded blonde, whose slim frame looked chic draped in just about anything. Cheap Old Navy, white jeans, horizontal stripes, even pastels — on Leigh everything looked designer. There was something a bit Grace Kelly-esque about Leigh, Nicole had always thought. Maybe if Grace Kelly were constipated.

Leigh:

Thank you, Nicole. Looking forward.

Rip, the playgroup’s only dad came next:

woo-hoo! we’ll bring the tequila. body shots!!

Nicole knew Rip was sure to show up in his uniform of frayed cargo shorts and faded tee. His straw fedora crushed over unruly brown curls. Rip’s hipster dad-look was cute. Carefully assembled to look as if it were not carefully assembled. But just when Nicole thought she saw a glimpse of something attractive in Rip, he ruined it with an overeager comment, like calling himself a feminist too often and with too much gusto. Or a careless mistake, like arriving sockless at playgroup (there was a strict no-shoe rule at all their homes) so they had to stare at his hairy toe knuckles all afternoon.

Last, came a text from Tiffany. Sultry and unpredictable, Tiffany was the wild card in the playgroup. She knew how to work her perfectly placed curves and rusty Aphrodite-length hair.

Tiffany:

oh sweetie. the serenity of the beach sounds divine. you are SO good to us.

* * *

Night had arrived at last. The ten to fifteen minutes before Josh arrived was Nicole’s favorite time, and although she knew it was wrong, this was when she loved Wyatt most, knowing that the day — and her shift — would soon end.

She missed him already, she thought, as she hovered over her little boy. His eyes were frozen to the iPad while Lightning McQueen raced across the screen.

“I like it when you are still,” she whispered as she knelt next to him, close enough to see his chest lift, his belly fill, with each breath, “That’s a Pablo Neruda poem. I gave it to a boy in college. The first boy I ever loved.”

She felt awkward, as if performing, but continued, “He broke my heart.”

She leaned forward, her nose and lips an inch from Wyatt’s cheek. It was a game she played to see how close she could get before he pushed her away. Her boy looked down his nose at her, his eyes nearly crossed, and said, “You’re a pretty girl, Mommy.”

He knew this always made her smile, and she knew he was hoping she’d say yes to more TV.

“Mmm,” she said. “You always smell good after your bath. Like a milkshake.”

“One more show, Mommy? Please?”

“Sure. Just one more before Daddy gets home.”

She stroked his cheek. As soft as a kitten’s ear.

“Mama’s going to take care of you, pumpkin. She’s never going to let anyone, or anything hurt you. Promise.”

“Okay, Mommy,” he said, nudging her away. “Can I watch Spider-Man ?”

Allie called the playgroupMommy Camp. This had made Susanna laugh at first, when they were new mothers juggling the fussy twin boys Susanna had birthed, when their clothes, the urban artist’s uniform of all black, showed every spot of spit-up and streak of snot. But lately, Allie’s jokes sounded, even to Allie, like the jabs of an outsider. Instead of life feeling like us vs. them, it felt like Allie vs. Susanna .

They had been driving for over an hour, Levi and Dash asleep in the backseat, when the map on Allie’s phone directed them off the main road. Susanna drove onto a causeway flanked by the wind-whipped waves of the Long Island Sound. The narrow road was dotted with trees; their branches stripped white, gnarled by the salt wind.

“You didn’t say the beach house was this far,” Allie said, as the sun bounced off the water, assaulting her eyes. She sank into the passenger seat and pulled the hood of her black sweatshirt over her head.

She had been up most of the night color-correcting a cover photo she’d shot for a Danish magazine. She was behind on the deadline after their three-day trip (with the boys, Susanna had insisted), to Massachusetts, where they’d been married at the Northampton town hall. Then Levi, the more demanding of their boys, had woken at four this morning, shuffling into their room, his thick honey-dusted hair spilling into his eyes. He had begged to join Susanna and Allie in their bed, and Susanna had relented. Not for the first time, Allie had thought about how Susanna coddled the twin who looked most like her. Susanna and Levi looked as if they belonged on a Swiss mountaintop, herding goats. Yodeling. Dash, the more diminutive twin, took after Allie, or at least after Eric, their beloved sperm donor and good friend whose appearance had matched Allie’s brother. Straight brown hair. Skin so pale you could see the green veins that crisscrossed his temples.