Julia Fierro - Cutting Teeth

Oh, how hot she’d been for Jay Gatsby. Exactly her kind of guy. He came from nothing and made himself into everything, with his rainbow of silk shirts and his library of wall-to-wall books. She’d thought of him many nights her freshman year of high school as she lay on the bathroom floor (the only room in her father’s double-wide with a lock), her cheek pressed into the pilled bathroom rug that stank of mildew, her breath held so her father and stepmother wouldn’t hear as her knees knocked against the cold tile and her hips thrust into the hand she pressed tight over her white cotton panties and the circling wave of heat stirred inside her until it overflowed.

She had tried to tell her mother about the book, during one of their two-hour-long custodial visits, she and her mother in the one-bedroom rental near the school where her mother worked as a lunch aide. What a stupid child she’d been, she thought now, remembering how she’d started to read her mother a passage from the book, how she’d prefaced it by explaining the book was meaningful to her, the kind of sharing that pervy Mr. Jones, the state-mandated social worker, urged her to do in the visits with her mother.

“Girl,” her mother had interrupted, “I don’t got time for meaning. I got three jobs to work.”

Tiffany’s foot was pulsing now and she imagined the blood seeping out, trickling down the leg of the lounge, then across the deck floor to the drainage holes, stuffed with sand and pebbles and dried seaweed, mingling with the sea.

Look at me now, Mama. I was one of them. And now I’ve gone and fucked it all up. It’s exhausting, Mama. The never-ending thinking and wondering. Worrying. Did so-and-so really have fun at the playdate? If yes, then why hadn’t they texted to set up another date? Would there be birthday-party invites and a spot at the hoity-toity mommy and me, a step closer to the even hoitier-toitier preschool? Will I be good enough for them, Mama? Will they let me in, Mama? Will they love me?

She looked away from the star-pocked sky, let her knees fall together, and leaned over to vomit onto the deck floor.

As soon as the rangershad disappeared into the woods — like a legion of warring soldiers with their chained beasts — Nicole slipped out of Josh’s arms and walked to the edge of the path. “Wait!” he had called to her, but she looked back at him and smiled, saying, “Don’t worry. I know these woods,” before stepping into the labyrinth of branches.

He had let her go, she thought now as she ran, leaping over tree roots. He had believed in her, and this filled her with an adrenaline-like rush, and she ran faster, her hands held out in front of her to bat away twigs and tear through spiderwebs.

Nothing bad is happening, nothing bad is happening, she chanted between panting, so that her voice bounced off the hulking trees, their branches black against the moon-bright sky. She tried not to think of the fairy tales she’d told Wyatt, the ones he begged for because they were the scariest. His favorites, once her own, were about little children lost in the woods, far from Mommy and Daddy, alone in a test of life or death. Would they choose the house made of candy, where a witch’s bone-melting hot oven awaited? Would they befriend the blood-thirsty wolf on their way to Grandma’s house? Or would they remember what their mothers had taught them, that there was so much to fear in the woods, that you must always be on guard, watching, waiting for danger.

These were her woods, after all. The woods of her childhood. Her summer playland. She and her brother had spent each dew-filled morning to cooling, firefly-flecked dusk in the state park’s thousand acres. They were explorers searching for treasure, using her father’s rusted machete to hack through the jungle, really a tangle of vines and shrubs, of bramble and bittersweet. They took turns being Indiana Jones (the other his sidekick) in pursuit of the Holy Grail, villains hot on their heels. When the sun was high, they sat in the shade of a flowering dogwood on rocks carpeted with soft green lichens. They ate pimento-and-bologna sandwiches with dirt-streaked fingers and chugged from a thermos of powdered lemonade.

They cooled off with a quick dip in the Sound, then back to the park, to lie on their stomachs at the lip of the pond and name the spring peepers and bullfrogs; the Eastern painted turtles and blue-gilled sunfish, and to claw through the mud in search of baby dragonflies, sea worms, and leeches. They turned on their backs and watched the Rough-winged swallows feed midair on dragonflies and damselflies.

At the end of every summer day, when she exited the woods, her sneakers slung over a shoulder, her bare feet sinking into soft, night-cooled sand — her body bug-bitten, thorn-torn, dirt- and sweat-streaked, and sore, Nicole had felt relief, but with relief, a loss. She had trudged up the dunes toward the warm glow of her parents’ house, the scent of roasting chicken and onions in the wind, comforted by the thought that the woods would always be there. Tomorrow and the next day.

She had felt safe in those woods, she thought now as she ran along the trail. She laughed aloud, so it echoed off the canopy and sounded like the distant giggling of a child. A Great Horned called from above and she responded, just as she and her brother had many times in the gloaming of her childhood, “hoo-hoo, hooooo, hoo-hoo!” She raised her arms so that her fingers grazed the leaves as she ran. Sassafras, red maple, pepperbush, blackgum.

Nothing bad is happening, she was whispering under her ragged breath when she found Dash curled at the foot of an old elm tree. His arms were wrapped around his knees, his teeth chattering, his face moon-white. When she shined the spotlight on him, he shielded his eyes with a hand and let a keening wail loose, his head thrown back. As if he were begging the trees, the stars — her mother’s angels — for aid.

“Don’t worry,” Nicole lied, “there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

* * *

Nicole stood on the seawall in her underwear and bra, her clothes in a tangled pile on the deck. The wind pinpricked her naked skin. She slipped the rubber band off her wrist, pulled it tight between two fingers, and let go, shooting it into the dark night.

She dove and the icy water stole her breath and she turned upside down and around, her arms reaching, fingers clawing, the pebbles and sand churning, stinging her skin, and she couldn’t tell if she was swimming up or down.

She opened her eyes.

The blue-green light crawled along her arms. She looked up and found the surface and dug into the water above her head, following the glow that sparked at her reaching fingertips.

It’s 12:00. We made it Web bot.

Posted 9/5/2010 12:01am

( 7 replies )

— Welcome back to reality, sister. 12:04am

— Whatcha gonna do with all that duct tape now? 12:07am

— she’ll save it for Dec 21, 2012 (; 12:08am

— I’ll say one thing for Webbot. It made a 500-point dow drop seem not so bad. 12:09am

— you are an idiot 12:11am

— Just promise not to believe in shit like that anymore, okay? & that includes astrology. 12:12am

— I bought bottled water because of you!! Gawdamnit! 12:20am

Allie woke chilled, the cool sea air tickling her bare legs. She reached for the blanket and felt a rumpled sheet instead of Susanna’s warm body. She bolted upright, and her head swam.