Cutting Teeth: A Novel (28 page)

Soon, Leigh, newly pregnant with Charlotte, was sitting at the kitchen table, after Chase had gone to bed, staring across the river at the buildings of lower Manhattan silhouetted against a dusty rose sky. Waiting for Tiffany to text her with intimate complaints about Michael, how he smothered her, how he rejected her
true self.
Leigh had responded, revealing how Brad constantly criticized her for being impatient with Chase.

He makes me feel like I’m a terrible mother. Though he doesn’t have a drop of patience himself!

Tiffany responded:

U r a great mom! And … my fave new mommy friend

What could Leigh do but text back:

ditto

She had erased her text history, even rebooted her phone, to ensure that Brad never read her silly declaration of love.

Two text-filled weeks later, Tiffany probed Leigh on topics as deep and dark as
what’s your greatest fear?

Tiffany shared first:

that I’ll die alone & everyone will forget me

Leigh knew she couldn’t share her greatest fear—that the truth about the money she’d stolen would be revealed—so she texted:

me too :-(

Tiffany’s question the next night was:

have u ever thought about spending ur life w/someone else?

Leigh curled up on the taupe leather chaise in her sitting room, fingers poised over her phone.

Yes I’d leave him. If I had $

With her confession, a blush spread like wildfire up her neck.

Thought you were loaded??!

It’s complicated.

She wanted to tell Tiffany the truth. Her family had been rich decades ago, but now they were rich in name only.

The two women texted through the cold winter nights and into spring. Some nights, Leigh’s hands grew slick with sweat on the overheated keys of her phone. As her naked newborn suckled at her breast, it seemed as if the world were asleep, except for Leigh and Tiffany, and Leigh’s little miracle, Charlotte.

On those text-filled nights that smelled of lilacs and linden blossoms, when time slowed and the spring air pressed in, warm and vibrating like a bear hug, Leigh wished she could tell Tiffany about her crime. Maybe, by proving its necessity to Tiffany, she could prove to herself it had been the only choice. Thieving from preschoolers
was
worth one perfect Charlotte Lambert Marshall. A second chance for Leigh to prove she wasn’t a rotten mommy after all.

Some nights, it was just one or two lines of text that lifted her, that felt like her salvation, a treat to carry her through the next day, until she was back in her leather chaise and texting with Tiffany, the branches outside her window black against the midnight sky.

Leigh: I’m such a bad mom

Tiffany: Me too :(

Leigh revealed secrets she hadn’t told Brad:

my father made me call him daddy. ugh. once he took me to a restaurant and i wore my white patent leather heels. i was so proud. But his secretary was there! he kissed her on the lips. the lips!! in front of me!!

Tiffany:

i’m so sorry. he’s a bastard. u r a better person than him.

And since the rhythm of their texting was tit for tat, it was Tiffany’s turn to share.

my stepbro & his creepy friends made me give them BJs in the woods behind the school when i was in 6th grade. so yeah, guess you could say i’m broken.;(

It was that winking sad face at the end of Tiffany’s confession that made Leigh type:

I wish I could kill them all for you.

That night, when Tiffany signed off, she wrote:

u r the best mommyfriend. i love u.

i love you,
Leigh had typed. She added a
xxxooo
before she tapped
SEND
.

In the morning, after these late-night texting sessions, as Leigh stirred one-half teaspoon of Splenda into her coffee, her sight blurred by fatigue, Brad joked about her
girlfriend
and their
text affair.
Although Leigh laughed and swatted him away, she knew it was a kind of love. A first love. Tiffany was the first, much more so than Brad, with whom she dared to share the ugliness of pretty and pleasant Leigh Penelope Lambert Marshall, of the Lamberts of Locust Valley, Long Island.

x marks the spot

Allie

Allie was watching
the boys on the deck while Susanna took a shower.

Dash and Levi ran their Hot Wheels across the top of the seawall, from one end of the deck to the other. This they repeated, along with the requisite
vroom vroom
sounds, while behind them, puddles of seawater on the beach glowed gold with the late-afternoon sun.

It seemed to Allie that every little boy came with a penis and the uncanny ability to mimic car engines and machine guns.

“Mommy?” Levi asked. “We go play in the woods?”

“Aargh!” growled Dash as he squinted one eye and poked Levi with a driftwood stick. “We be pirates searching for buried treasure.”

“Yeah!” Levi cheered. “Pirates! Treasure!”

Allie looked to the thick, shadowy woods beyond the dunes, leading into hundreds of acres of protected state-park land.

She was only
in charge
until Susanna finished showering. Surely, she thought, she could manage not to fuck up in the next twenty minutes. Susanna’s water would break if she knew the boys had gone into tick-infested wilderness.

“No,” she said, as sweetly as she could. “We’ll go to the big park tomorrow when we get home. Okay?”

“They don’t got trees at that park,” Dash protested.

“Sorry, buddy,” Allie said. “We’ll get ice cream, too.”

“Chocolate?” Levi said.

“We can get ice cream anywhere,” Dash grumbled.

Allie looked at the fierce half. Her tough guy. The low orange sun simmered behind Dash, and the tips of his ears glowed pink. She wondered when his complaints had become so rational, so grown-up, and she wondered how long it would be until he was arguing with his mothers and winning.

“Well,” she said, “that’s technically true. But we’ll get chocolate-chocolate-chip.”

She pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head to blot the sun.

“Now Mommy needs to rest. Just for a few minutes. ’Kay?”

Allie eased down into the deck chair and stretched her legs. The rusty springs, missing their cushion, pinched through the pair of Susanna’s pants she’d been forced to wear after her jeans had been sprayed by Susanna’s puke on the beach. White. Of all colors. She hadn’t worn white since her First Communion. Allie figured it was the first time her hairy shins had seen sun in a decade, but there was no grown-up present to appreciate the joke.

After Susanna’s shower, the two of them were to drive to the store and shop for the “feast” everyone had been mentioning again and again until, Allie thought, they sounded like a bunch of geriatrics psyched for the early-bird special. The feast was the last major event Allie would have to endure before she could excuse herself for the night and retreat upstairs. She planned to pack their bags so they could leave early the next morning.

The weekend had been exactly the kind of experience Allie had tried to avoid the past four years of part-time motherhood. When the
Times
profiled Allie two months after the boys were born, she had watched as Susanna read. The Arts section had quivered between Susanna’s naked fingers—still so swollen from the pregnancy she couldn’t wear the commitment ring Allie had given her, fashioned from Allie’s grandmother’s diamond earrings. Susanna had been there from the start; the rented cameras, the shabby studio on the Lower East Side, back when cabbies refused to take you into Alphabet City. She wasn’t the first student Allie had slept with, but surely the first whose opinion of Allie’s work, and of Allie, mattered.

So when Susanna’s face crumpled as she read, a smear of disgust contorting Susanna’s mouth (a paintable mouth, Allie had flattered when wooing Susanna years before), a part of Allie ached.

When the critic had asked Allie about the new effect motherhood had on her work, she had replied, “I’m a part-time mommy but a full-time artist.”

The critic—an influential female photographer—had praised Allie’s honesty as an act of feminism.

“But isn’t it the truth?” Allie asked a sobbing Susanna, who hurried from the room, her puffy hands shielding her face.

The newspaper fell to the floor, and though Allie knew she should go to her wife, the mother of their children, instead she knelt and picked up the pages, gingerly. They were supposed to save them after all, frame them and hang them above the other interviews and reviews of Allie’s work they had collected, starting a decade before the twins were born, before the boys were even a thought in their minds. Or, at least, not a thought in Allie’s mind.

Though this part-time mommyness had been a blight the day the
Times
had finally, after so many years of dreaming, given her the Sunday Arts feature, it was exactly this that saved Allie, that allowed her to focus on her work and, although she would never admit it to Susanna, allowed her to forget the boys for hours at a time. It was the excuse she had when things with the boys went wrong on her watch, when one of her mistakes—too much ice cream at the park, a missed nap, or her temper lost—caused a minor disaster, usually Levi limp with wailing, Dash brooding and defiant.