Julia Fierro - Cutting Teeth

Suzie had taught Tiffany about quality — of bedsheets, of furniture, of wine and cheese. Of clothes. Tiffany had put money aside each paycheck until she had enough to buy a Miu Miu dress at a chic, secondhand boutique, instead of spending it at Strawberry’s. Quality over quantity. Suzie’s voice still looped through Tiffany’s head. Suzie’s constant elocution corrections — Tiffany was a live-in, so they were together daily — had eradicated Tiffany’s nasal-heavy Long Island accent, and the woman’s stylist had colored Tiffany’s hair a blond that Suzie had praised as deliciously natural.

Suzie had revealed to Tiffany the secret code; which colors to wear (black was always safe), books to read, movies to watch, magazines to peruse (Suzie’s word choice) at the salon. Tiffany had thrived, so much so that one night, four years ago, at a theater event (a British immersion play in which the audience had to wear white masks), Tiffany had made Michael fall in love with her. Michael, who had a degree from Syracuse, who ate sushi, who used words like woodsy, floral, and earthy when drinking wine, who dated women with trust funds, and who was pulling in close to a hundred thousand dollars a year. Michael, now her fiancé. Partner, she corrected herself. She had learned it was better to imply they were indifferent to marriage, on principle. Not that they’d dated for six months, then one morning the pink smiley face on the pregnancy test was staring up at her, expectantly.

First, there’d been Suzie. Now there was Leigh, and Tiffany had moved up. Landing just a few floors shy of the penthouse, she thought as she slipped a loose emerald silk chiffon Isabel Marant dress over her head. The brilliant green made the summer highlights in her hair pop. The silver thread that wove through the toile pattern glittered as she rocked her hips from side to side. No one would guess that the dress was a hand-me-down from Leigh.

Look at me now, Mama, Tiffany thought, as she often did, especially since she’d befriended Leigh. Leigh who gave her designer hand-me-downs — Rachel Comey pink marbled boots with stacked heels, a Marc Jacobs hobo bag made of buttery Italian leather. And there were the almost-full bottles of lotion from Molton Brown, and the bars of Red Flower soap, still in their exquisite boxes, so lovely Tiffany couldn’t bear to open them. She had chosen Leigh over all the mommy friends and acquaintances who had coveted Tenzin, who had asked, e-mailed, and texted Tiffany, their smiley-faced emoticons practically begging, to see if Tenzin had any hours available. Choosing Leigh to share Tenzin with had made Tiffany and Leigh equals, Tiffany thought.

The soft silk shifted over her sunburned shoulders as she slipped her strappy heels on. After a few wobbly steps, she kicked them off. She was a little tipsy. She would go barefoot. Like a sprite in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Even if it was the end of summer, and even if no one, especially not that snobby bitch Susanna, would believe that Tiffany had ever read a Shakespeare play.

She had nipped the “Susanna conflict” in the bud, Tiffany thought, congratulating herself. Susanna had seemed perfectly fine sitting next to her that afternoon on the deck. Friends turned into enemies and back to friends again. That ugly scene at the Jakewalk Bar forgotten. Fine, Tiffany thought, she had been flirting that night at the bar, but it was harmless. No one was going to die from a little whispering, a little touching, a little brush of her knee against the inside of a guy’s leg.

She twirled from side to side in front of the dusty mirror so her skirt rippled up in the air. Look at me now, Mama. Buying lavender-infused truffles at the Chocolate Bar, and the same luxury scented candles that burned in the bathrooms of NYC’s elite. She used cloth napkins, employed a house-cleaner, and paid to have her eyebrows waxed. Move over Gatsby. She was practically a superyuppie.

If Suzie and her Tory-Burch-sporting friends had known about Tiffany’s mother and her morals and her white leather dress, they’d never have let her walk through the doorman-guarded lobbies of their luxury buildings. How their wrinkle-free foreheads would have cracked with concern if they’d known about her mother’s slutting around, not to mention her sister LeeAnn the meth-head, and Tiffany’s abortions. Tiffany knew rich women had abortions, but they didn’t have to drive to a clinic in the middle of a small town. They were chauffeured to dim and quiet parking garages in midtown and took an elevator to an office where they were the one and only guest. Their uterus was scooped clean as classical music played over an intercom, and they left almost as they came, sight unseen, not a peep to anyone. Money not only equaled time, Tiffany had learned, money meant privacy. Protection. And by the time Tiffany had met Suzie, she’d been screwing up for long enough and she was ready for a little protection, and a lot of change. She was ready to be born again. Into the light of DVF and Alexander Wang and Aqua di Parma. Amen.

Tiffany was seventeen when she’d made it out of her middle-of-fucking-nowhere hick town for the first ill-fated attempt at living the NYC dream. She’d been sick of her father taking half her waitressing paycheck for rent, sick of her friends crying about their loser boyfriends, sick of her stepbrother asking her to suck him off. For four years, she’d scraped by in the greatest city in the world. Bartending, dog walking, working in a souvenir shop in Times Square that sold the Statue of Liberty in a thousand different forms — soap holders, back scratchers, thermometers. Then one night, after a party in a factory loft in Williamsburg, where everyone was rolling on E and laying tabs of acid in the shape of blazing suns on their tongues, she had awoken in a dark room, on a stripped mattress that smelled like puke, unable to speak or move as some guy pounded his cock into her. She’d spent the rest of that night willing her body to move, begging her body to roll off the bed, sit up, ( move, goddamnit! ) and finally crawled to the door, only to realize she couldn’t turn the knob.

Her body betrayed her.

They came back. Maybe three, maybe four times that night. She’d never know how many times, how many guys, who. She’d never know if they had drugged her — she had taken the E and the acid herself. She went to parties in the months that followed and found herself staring at her feet, terrified to look up. What if they were sitting next to her, laughing at her in their heads, thinking of the way her tits had flapped around as they slammed into her? At the last party she went to, she had stumbled out and onto the dead street of a neighborhood she didn’t recognize. When she finally hailed a cab and made it back to her apartment, the sky a battered violet with the coming dawn, she stayed in her room, leaving only to go to the bathroom and to open the door for the delivery guy from the convenience store downstairs.

Days passed.

Her twenty-first birthday came and went.

Then it was a week. Two.

Her roommates in that mouse-infested loft in Williamsburg, all sweet suburban-bred girls whose parents, in Tiffany’s humble opinion, had loved them too much, had taken care of her. They fed her microwaved ramen from styrofoam bowls. They washed her clothes. They guided her to the already running shower and massaged shampoo into her hair. They stubbed out her Parliaments after she’d fallen asleep. But when the first of the month came, and then the seventh, and the fourteenth, and Tiffany still hadn’t slipped her portion of the rent into the envelope taped to the fridge, they asked her to leave.

She knew she could have told them she had been raped. But because this wasn’t the first time she’d come to half-naked in a stranger’s bed, because it wasn’t the first time some guy had been inside her while she lay like a corpse, she didn’t.