When It Happens to You

by Molly Ringwald

  “Thank you,” he said.

  When he turned away from her, she felt herself exhale, not realizing that she had been holding her breath.

  “Where are they?” Phillip said.

  Hearing the panic in his voice, she ran toward the playground, scanning the monkey bars and jungle gyms.

  “Ollie!” she screamed. Frightened children looked up at her. She could feel her heart beating wildly and her stomach drop as though she were descending in the elevator in a skyscraper. Several kids scattered, running into the protective embraces of their multicultural nannies. She saw Phillip sprint in the direction of the stone bathroom fixtures on the other side of the playground, along the edge of the parking lot. Just as he reached the building, she saw the two kids run out, holding hands, with their fingers interlaced.

  Even from a distance, Marina could tell that the children had swapped clothing. Charlotte wore the gender-nonspecific tunic that she had purchased for Oliver in a store specializing in beachwear, while Oliver was dressed in Charlotte’s floral sundress and her pink patent-leather sandals, his hair unbraided and bunched into two ponytails. By the time Marina reached the children, Charlotte was crying, frightened by Phillip’s anger. He was on his knees holding her while she whimpered.

  Marina looked down at her son, who watched the father and daughter with an uncertain expression.

  “Ollie . . .”

  “We wanted to play opposites,” he told his mother quietly. “It’s opposite day.”

  “It’s okay, honey,” she said, running her hand up and down his neck.

  “It’s not okay,” Phillip said. “You don’t just run off without telling anyone.”

  In Phillip’s eyes she imagined that she could see the flicker of blame.

  “He’s right, Ollie,” Marina said. “You both scared us.”

  Charlotte kept her head buried in her father’s shoulder. “It was Ollie’s idea,” she heard her say in between sobs.

  Oliver grabbed on to his mother’s leg, blinking back tears himself. “It’s opposite day!” he said again.

  Marina remembered the things that they had left on the park bench. “Hey,” she said to Phillip, “Do you want me to take them into the bathroom and change them, and I’ll meet you at your car?”

  Phillip stood up, carrying Charlotte in his arms.

  “Can we just do the exchange later? She’ll kill me if I’m not there in the next few minutes.”

  Charlotte popped her head up. “Who’s going to kill you, Daddy?”

  “No one,” he said. He ran off in the direction of the car. Marina took her son’s hand, and together they walked back to the bench in rare silence.

  “Are you sure he was blaming you? Did he actually say it was your fault?”

  Marina perched on the kitchen island in Trudie’s restored Craftsman and watched her friend assemble a complicated pasta dish. Oliver played a game on Marina’s iPhone while lying on the living room couch; Trudie’s two girls were already asleep in their bedroom.

  “No,” Marina said. “He didn’t say it was my fault. He didn’t say it was anyone’s fault. But it was the way he looked at . . .” Marina didn’t say Oliver’s name, but she pointed in the direction of the living room.

  Trudie nodded. “Well, anytime kids take off their clothes . . .” She didn’t finish her sentence.

  Marina chewed on an olive and spit the pit in an ashtray with the words THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING written on it.

  “Please, Trudie. They’re six years old. What are they going to see?” She grabbed another olive. “And I think we all know that Ollie is not interested in Charlotte’s body. He wanted her clothes. He wanted the sundress with the flowers on it and the pink sandals. There’s no desire there. Or if there is desire, it’s the desire to look like her.”

  Trudie poured the pasta into a baking dish and refilled Marina’s glass.

  “Have you thought of taking him somewhere?” Trudie asked. “Like a therapist or something?”

  “To do what? What’s a therapist going to do? No one is going to convince him that he’s a boy. And I can’t make him a girl. He already resents me for it. It’s like he thinks it’s my fault that I gave birth to him and made him a boy.”

  She craned her head around to see if Oliver was eavesdropping. He seemed entirely absorbed in his game.

  “I don’t know what to do with him.” She shook her head and drank deeply from her wineglass. “I really don’t.”

  Trudie set the timer on the oven and poured herself a glass of pinot noir.

  “I wouldn’t discount therapy. You know Ellie was seeing someone.”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” Marina said. “Why?”

  “Night terrors. She’d always been a perfect sleeper. We ‘Ferberized’ her just like we did Alice, and then out of the blue she started screaming at night. Sometimes two or three times a night.”

  “Jesus!” Marina said. “I had no idea.”

  Trudie shrugged. “Ron doesn’t want me to talk about it. I tell him it’s silly, I mean it’s the twenty-first century. Therapy is hardly taboo. But he says he doesn’t want to ‘pathologize’ our child.”

  “Sure, sure,” Marina said. “I can understand that.” She didn’t understand. But then again, she didn’t really understand what her friend even saw in her husband. Ron was a drip, Marina thought. But unlike most drips who at least manage to be innocuous in their drippiness, Ron asserted himself by thrusting his opinions on his gentle and conflict-avoidant wife.

  “It’s been months now, and Ellie’s sleeping through the night just fine again. Personally I think she was a miracle worker. I was at the end of my rope.”

  “Mommy?” Marina looked over at Oliver who stood in the doorway holding her cell phone out to her. “Charlotte’s daddy is on the phone. He wants to talk to you.”

  The smell of early blooming jasmine and honeysuckle lingered in the air as Marina sat on her porch with her laptop, distracting herself with work while she waited for Phillip. He had asked to see her, and she had told him to stop by after she put Oliver to bed. Picking up on her nervous energy, her son dragged out his bedtime even more than usual, begging for more pages to be read, more water to drink, and more trips to the bathroom after lights-out. Marina surreptitiously texted Phillip three times asking him to come later. After the last time, when he didn’t reply for ten minutes, she was afraid that he would cancel and found herself unjustly furious with her son.

  “Are you still mad at me, Mommy?” he asked. “I won’t do it again.”

  Marina took a deep breath and grabbed him in a tight embrace. “No, my love. I’m not mad. I just have work that I need to get to, that’s all.” She felt guilty for omitting the fact that she was expecting Phillip, but until she knew what the visit was about, she wasn’t comfortable mentioning it. Oliver was extremely possessive, never having had to share Marina with anyone. She hadn’t even spent the night with anyone since before he was born.

  Perched on the teak bench, she tried to concentrate on the catalog layout she was designing. A small soy-candle company had hired Marina to glamorize its image—to take it out of the crunchy patchouli-scented air of its origins and into something trendier and upmarket; but frustratingly the company kept asking her to go back and change the layouts every time she tried anything new. She was resizing the candles against different-colored backgrounds and fussing with the fonts when Phillip’s Volvo pulled up.

  “Hey,” he said as he walked toward her. He carried a six-pack of Heineken in his hand.

  Marina’s heart leaped into her throat, and all of the boldness and brashness that she relied upon with most everyone deserted her.

  “Hi, hi,” she said shyly. “I didn’t know this was bring-your-own-beer.” She snapped her laptop shut and tucked it under her arm. Phillip leaned back against a post and looked down at her through eyes half-closed.

  “Long day,” he said.

  “Yeah.” She wasn’t sure if he was referring to his day or hers. She got
up and took the six-pack from him. He seemed taller than she remembered, though most of the time they spent together they were seated in a playground. “Let me open one of these for you,” she said. “Unless you want to do it with your teeth and impress me.”

  “Oh, I would hope I could find other ways to impress you,” he said with a smile.

  Marina turned away from him and headed into the house. His comment set her mind into a flurry of interpretation. What did it mean? Did he mean . . . Was he just bantering? Are we flirting? She could feel her pulse quickening, and as much as she wanted to be near him, there was something about the proximity that felt sudden and painful. Like sticking your toes in ice-cold water before submerging yourself entirely. There is always that deliciously uncomfortable bit you need to get through.

  When she returned to the porch, Phillip was sitting on the bench. She handed him the beer and a glass and sat cross-legged beside him with a mug of peppermint tea.

  “You probably don’t want the glass,” she said.

  “Straight-from-the-bottle kind of guy,” he said. He took a swig and leaned back against the wall of the house. “It’s nice to hang out at night for once.”

  “Yeah, we’re really branching out,” Marina said. “Sitting on a completely different bench.”

  Phillip laughed. He looked at her sideways. “I like your hair like that. It’s funny, I always thought I would marry a redhead.”

  Marina touched her hair, piled up on top of her head and casually fastened with a pin.

  “I’m sorry I had to keep postponing,” Marina said. “It’s like Ollie has this sixth sense . . .”

  “I’m the one who wanted to apologize,” Phillip said, sitting forward and touching her knee. “I was a jerk today, when the kids—”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “I figured you were just stressed about your . . .”

  “Wife. She’s still my wife,” he said slowly, as if he was telling himself as much as her.

  “Right. Okay. I didn’t know what was going on with that. . . .” She felt a shock of embarrassment, suddenly realizing that perhaps this attraction she felt was entirely one-sided. “Well, apology accepted,” she said, trying to sound bright and carefree. “I know it’s late and if you need to—”

  “Marina, I really like you,” he interrupted. “A lot. Probably too much, considering that I’m a mess right now.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, feeling somehow both relieved and anxious at the same time. “Listen, you don’t have to explain anything. I know. I mean, I don’t know, but I can just imagine how messy these things are.”

  “I fucked up,” he said. “I fucked up in the most monumental, bastardly way.”

  “Is that even a word, ‘bastardly’?” she said.

  He ignored her and continued. It almost seemed like a recitation.

  “I hurt, my wife . . . I hurt . . . well, let’s just say that I have hurt and disappointed every woman that I have come into contact with—and I’m including my daughter in this—and I don’t want to do it anymore. I can’t do it anymore.”

  Marina nodded and blew on her tea before taking a sip.

  “I’m a big girl,” she said. “Well, actually I’m a size four, but . . .”

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?” He looked at her without a trace of irony. “I think it’s the not talking that got me into this shit mess I’m in now. And I like talking to you. I don’t want to lose that.”

  Marina felt dull with the loss of intrigue. He was being honest with her, and in her experience that usually didn’t come until months, even years, later, if ever. Her body suddenly felt cold even while her face seemed to burn with embarrassment.

  “I get that,” she said. “And thanks. You’re a good guy. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

  Phillip shook his head and she could see the sneer of self-loathing on his face. “Enough about me,” he said.

  “Hey, I have Charlotte’s dress,” she said. “And her shoes. Don’t let me forget to give those to you.”

  “So . . . what is going on there anyway? I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He shifted position on the bench. She could tell that he was searching for a way to broach the obvious.

  “With Oliver. The, uh, switching clothes. Is this something . . . new?” he asked.

  “No, I’d say this has been happening for a long time.”

  “And what does his father say about it? If it’s too personal, just tell me to shut up.”

  “His father doesn’t know. Or, more precisely, he doesn’t know that Oliver exists.” Marina drew her legs out from under her. They had fallen asleep, and she stomped her feet lightly on the wooden floor of the porch to wake them. “I met him when I was on vacation. He was a surf instructor. I only saw him for the weekend. Gorgeous man. Oliver looks exactly like him.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell him that he has a son?”

  She sipped her tea. It had gone from hot to cold with strange swiftness.

  “I almost did. When I was about eight months pregnant, I had the brilliant idea to call him. He had given me his number, and it seemed like the decent thing to do. I was pretty sure that he wouldn’t be interested in moving to the States, but I thought, someone’s having your kid, you never know. . . .”

  Phillip set his empty beer bottle on the floor next to him.

  “You want another?” she asked him

  “Later,” he said. “Go on.”

  “So I called the number, and this little girl answers the phone. With a high squeaky voice, and that accent? I should have just hung up right then. But like an idiot, I wasn’t thinking it through. ‘May I speak to James?’ I ask. The girl tells me that her father isn’t there, and she puts her mother on the phone.”

  “Oh Jesus,” Phillip said.

  “Yeah. I don’t know why, but I don’t hang up. And then this woman tells me that her name is Tamsin and asks me why I want to talk to her husband.”

  “What did you say?”

  Marina pulled up her legs and wrapped her arms around her knees.

  “I said . . . I said that he was my teacher a few months ago and that I wanted to thank him.” Marina laughed and shook her head. “It was the only thing I could think of. So she asked me my name, and I told her.”

  “You gave her your real name?” Phillip asked

  “Yep. ‘Well, Marina, I will tell him,’ she says. ‘But he has many students, so I doubt he will remember you.’ I thanked her, and just before I hung up, I asked her how many kids she had. Three. He had three little girls.”

  They were quiet for a moment and listened to a car alarm sounding in the distance. Phillip cleared his throat. “What are you going to do about the, uh, what do you call it? The wanting to be a girl? Is this okay to talk about? I don’t want to if . . .”

  “No,” Marina said. “God no. I want to talk about it. I don’t know what to do. He is a girl.”

  “Well, right now he wants to be a girl, that’s clear,” Phillip said. “But who knows how he’s going to feel later?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” she replied, unconvinced. “Honestly, though, I’m pretty certain this is here to stay. It’s just who he is. I feel like people look at me like I’m encouraging it, or somehow I’m making him this way. Do you know how many stupid boys’ things I’ve bought him? How many cars and trucks and airplanes? The footballs and baseball bats? This isn’t even counting the crap that my family buys him. I’ve told them to stop wasting their money, but every birthday and Christmas, Ollie gets a big ol’ testosterone-laden present.”

  Phillip laughed. “What do you do with them?”

  “He throws them away,” she said. “Or he hides them.”

  She and Phillip lingered on the porch together for another hour. They talked about her son, her failed relationships, his daughter, his wife, his former mistress, his job, and all of the mistakes they had made and if not vowed then at least hoped never to repeat. And before parting,
against their better judgment, they shared a lonely kiss that they both knew, as soon as it was over, would be added to the long list of regrets.

  The next Sunday morning Marina and Oliver went to the park alone. It was Charlotte’s weekend with her mother, and Phillip told Marina that he would be in Chicago on an extended business trip. Marina halfheartedly attempted to scare up a playdate for her son, but this day, like so many others before it, all of his classmates were otherwise engaged. She tried not to think that it was related to Oliver’s increasing insistence on passing as a girl—after all, she had specifically sought out the most progressive school possible, in a city more tolerant than most. Regardless, it seemed that the older Oliver became, the less he was invited to playdates. When Marina asked his teacher, a thirty-five-year primary-school veteran, whether Oliver was being shunned by his classmates, Mercedes reassured Marina that he had plenty of friends, boys as well as girls. She then proceeded to detail the school’s mission of tolerance and diversity—a lecture that Marina had heard many times before and no longer found reassuring.

  “But why doesn’t anyone call us for playdates?” Marina asked. “It’s like they think that he has a disease and they’re afraid their kid is going to catch it.”

  Mercedes clicked her tongue and insisted that there was only acceptance from his classmates. Before Marina left, however, Mercedes delicately broached the idea of Marina taking Oliver to see a “gender specialist” referred by the school counselor.

  At the park, Oliver rode his purple bike beside Marina. The weather had cooled considerably, and as a compromise to Marina’s insistence that he wear a hoodie over his favorite pink-striped “Wonder Bunny” T-shirt and leggings underneath his shorts, Oliver was allowed to borrow one of Marina’s scarfs. He tied the long flowing scarf around his waist, knotting it on the side to lie over his shorts as a makeshift skirt.