Cutting Teeth: A Novel (2 page)

She was about to turn to the sick child’s mother, to ask,
Did you feel that,
when something changed. What exactly, she couldn’t say, but it was there, an offness that reminded Nicole of the light right before an eclipse, an otherworldly light, and she kept asking herself
What is it? What is it? What is happening?
She lunged for the chains of Wyatt’s swing, jerking him up and out so fast his foot caught in the seat and he fell to the ground, his plump fingers splayed in the dirt.
This is it, this is it.
The panic buzzed in her chest, and there was a sudden adjustment in her vision, like she could see through goddamned walls.

It was only the pink chemical blush of the overhead streetlamps coming on. A child behind her yelled
pretty, lights,
and Nicole heard comfort in the little girl’s voice. She, too, wanted to be fearless.

She pressed Wyatt’s face to her chest, hiding that silent openmouthed wail, the precursor to great gulping cries. She shushed him, whispering, “Sorry, baby, sorry.”

Nicole let out a shuddering sigh as Wyatt’s screams arrived. Yes, she thought, what a relief it would be to go away that weekend. Even if there was just a tiny chance those silly end-of-the-world predictions might come true. At least her little boy would not be in the city when it happened.

Web bots predict a catastrophic event on September 4

Posted 9/1/2010    8:43pm

(18 replies)

—what is web bots?    
8:43pm

—they’re predicting something for THIS Saturday? creepy.    
8:46pm

—for real?    
8:48pm

—on Labor Day Weekend? Bummer.    
8:48pm

—Here is a link:
www.webbotpredictions.com
    
8:49pm

—shit. really really wish I hadn’t read that.    
8:55pm

—this is freaking me out.    
9:30pm

—you’re all egging each other on into hysteria. chill the fuck out.    
9:33pm

—things do not feel right to me.    
10:28pm

—me too. my hubby is making fun of me, but I can’t

help it. I am scared.    
10:31pm

—put on your tinfoil hat, sister.    
10:34pm

—can someone summarize the impending crisis, please?     
10:46pm

—RE: summary (from the site) “The sort of agony, grief, and pain felt in the six days following 9/11 will be felt for five and a half months”    
10:48pm

—Where do you find this shit?    
10:52pm

—yeesh. wtf is this?    
10:58pm

—scary    
11:04pm

—who/what are the web bots?    
11:09pm

—is it safe in NYC? should we evacuate?    
11:11pm

The last post, at 11:11
P.M.
, had been Nicole’s.

As a child, at elementary-school sleepovers, she and her girlfriends had made a wish when the clock struck 11:11, as if the synchronicity was unique to them, a sign fortune was on their side. For each and every wish: at 11:11, at the side of a fountain with a handful of coins in her sweaty little hand, and with the sharp intake of breath before extinguishing her birthday candles, she said the same wish. More of a plea.
Dear God, please keep me safe. Please don’t let anyone or anything bad hurt me.

She still whispered the words every night before bed. When Wyatt was born almost four years earlier, the
me
had turned into
us.

But when Nicole had read about the Web bot prediction the night before, and the rumor that something truly terrible would happen, there had been nothing she could tell herself (
nothing bad is happening, nothing bad is happening
) to calm her instinct to flee.

She’d been visiting urbanmama.com; reading, posting a few comments, as was her nightly ritual, to see what the mommies’ hot topics were that day (to circumcise or
not
to circumcise, breast vs. the bottle, time-out vs. talk-it-out), and to check if there was news of (
fingers crossed
!) openings in that year’s highly coveted Pre-K at the local public school.

Wyatt and Josh were forgotten, but for the whistling of their snores. After midnight, it felt to Nicole as if an enchantment had fallen over the city. The screech of the bus banished, the car horns muted, even the trucks rumbling over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway subdued into a soft tremor under her feet. She knew she should go to bed, that she’d wake tired and irritable, but in this newish mommy life, the sacrifice of sleep for a few hours of still and silent solitude was worth the exhaustion.

As a child growing up in the outer suburbs, on a wooded road without streetlamps, Nicole had feared the night. Loathed the open-ended
what-ifs
darkness invited. Her phobia had worsened over the years until she grew to fear even the darkness of a familiar room, the fumbling for the light switch that seemed to ridicule her vulnerability.

Now, the night was her refuge.

The day was for doing. For organizing and reorganizing. For finagling. For dealing with Wyatt’s tantrums and his resistance to eating vegetables, to dressing himself, to wiping his own butt. The negotiations.
Yes, you can play with Mommy’s tweezers if you promise to take your nap. Sure, you can cover yourself in Band-Aids, as long as you eat your broccoli.

Daytime had expectations of Nicole. She had to drop Wyatt off at preschool (two hours of respite, just enough time to take a shower and clean the apartment), usher him to karate, toddler tom-tom drumming class, and playdates. Each interaction felt fraught with the possibility of conflict—with other mothers, between Wyatt and other children, and, of course, with Wyatt himself. Although Nicole knew that life with one healthy (knock on wood) child was a relatively easy one (what about those Orthodox women she saw on the train, seven children in tow?), it often felt as if even the most simple tasks were a test to prove to herself that she was a good mother after all.

By the end of the long day, when Josh finally returned from work, she heard a tone in her voice (he was always complaining about her tone)—a pathetic desperation. As if she were an impoverished third-world mother with a disease-riddled baby. As if she had to roam the streets begging and whoring herself to put food in her children’s bloated bellies. As if she, a privileged American housewife, had just narrowly escaped disaster. Which was, she thought, exactly who she was, and exactly how she felt.

When they returned home from the playground—Wyatt still pouting after his fall from the swing, “Mommy, you hurt me,” he said—Nicole was already longing for the night. But the late-summer, late-afternoon light was still strong as it streamed through their windows. Josh would not be home for another three hours.

They performed the routine stripping of clothes, both she and Wyatt down to their underwear (you never knew where a pair of bedbugs might lurk these days). She heated up a vacuum-packed roast from Trader Joe’s and lip-synced to an entire Raffi album, which made Wyatt laugh and finally stop complaining about his boo-boo and the tear in his karate pants.

Nicole had sworn to herself she wouldn’t go online, she wouldn’t google “Web bot end-of-world prediction,” she wouldn’t reread the warnings on urbanmama.com.

Then she was logging on, posting a few benign questions about alternative preschools in her neighborhood (
best Montessori in Cobble Hill? thx!)
, switching pediatricians
(Dr. Zimmerman’s office smells like puke!)
, and a request for advice on a good handheld vacuum. Then she found herself tapping the refresh button on her laptop, waiting, waiting for someone to respond to her new post titled
end-of-world stuff serious??
And, in what she hoped would read as a self-deprecating tone,
neurotic mama freaked about world ending this weekend.

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!