This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

  Rosie was starting to have the same question. She was used to picking children up from playdates with bruised elbows and scraped shins, torn pants and reports of broken things and borderline behavior. She wasn’t used to her youngest having playdates at all, never mind coming home from them all smiles, suffused with quiet, almost private, joy. The moms would beam at Rosie. “She’s such a good girl.”

  “Who?” Rosie asked the first time.

  “She’s welcome anytime. She’s so well behaved.”

  Or they would lay a hand on her arm and say, “You’re so brave,” or “You’re such a good mother. You’re doing so well with all this.” Rosie appreciated the support but wasn’t sure parenting ever really qualified as brave—or maybe it always did—because it’s not like you had a choice. But what she would have chosen, she got too. Poppy’s hair was still short, but not short enough to prevent Rosie from plaiting two little braids every morning, one on each side, which Poppy tucked happily behind his ears.

  Some playdates went less well. Rosie and Penn kept a no-fly list of kids with whom Poppy could not play again. One playdate ended when Poppy and the other little girl were playing princesses, and the dad made a dirty joke about drag queens. That family went on the list. One mom peppered Rosie with questions every time they ran into each other on the playground after school as to the process of physically turning Claude into Poppy, which Penn wanted to excuse on the grounds that she was showing interest but which Rosie saw for what it was: impudent nosiness. Another family went on the list when Penn went to pick Poppy up and the mom and dad tag-teamed him to explain, politely, that God did not make mistakes, and since God had given Poppy a penis, he and Rosie were interfering with God’s plan. “And that’s … bad?” Penn guessed. He also guessed that if that family kept their own list, his name had just gone on it.

  Rosie tried not to let any of it get to her. She had too much to do without worrying about her kid’s friends’ parents’ ignorance. Her job wasn’t to educate them. Her job was just to raise her kid, all her kids. And work to feed them all. As she and Penn kept telling Poppy, you don’t have to like everyone. Find who’s fun and smart and safe, and stick with them.

  Which approach worked just fine until Nicky Calcutti. Nicky was Claude’s one friend from before, and Nicky seemed a little perplexed, a little put off, by the change. He was a quiet kid, which was probably what Claude had liked about him. He was unassuming. He didn’t wrestle or chase. He didn’t always have to have his way loudly. Mostly, the boys played next to each other, like toddlers, and that was fine with both of them. He’d been over once, since, to play with Poppy and had murmured to Rigel, “I never had a playdate with a girl before,” to which Rigel had replied, “Oh it’s great. Their rooms smell way better.” But Nicky did not seem mollified.

  “Maybe he’s taking this personally,” Penn guessed.

  “Like Claude becoming Poppy is a failure of Nicky’s manhood?” said Rosie.

  “Something like that.”

  “He’s five.”

  Five he may have been, but five turned out not to be too young to be offended or freaked out. Five turned out not to be too young for any number of sins. Rosie and Penn knew Nicky’s mom. After Claude’s announcement, she’d emailed Rosie to say she hoped the boys would still be friends. She asked if she could do anything to help. She promised peppermint ice cream—Claude’s favorite and Poppy’s as well—if Poppy would come over to play. Rosie dropped him off, stood in the door and chatted idly for a few minutes with Cindy Calcutti, and was in the art store buying supplies for a project Orion was doing about bats when her phone rang. Poppy was crying too hard to tell her what was wrong. Rosie was in her car and halfway to Nicky’s already before he even managed a wobbly, “Mom? Would you come get me?”

  Cindy Calcutti and Nick Calcutti Sr. were separated. Rosie gathered this was a no-way-in-hell-are-we-getting-back-together separation rather than the let’s-take-some-space-and-work-it-out kind but, having a much better grasp than other people on what was and wasn’t her business, declined to pry. She knew that Cindy was jockeying for full custody by sharing irreproachably during this trial period. If it was Nick’s day with his son, Cindy did not say Nicky has a playdate. Cindy went and got a manicure and let her erstwhile husband supervise.

  Rosie was close, but Penn was closer, so she called him from the car and sent him over. He was home with the boys, and though Roo and Ben were probably old enough, at twelve and thirteen, to babysit other people’s brothers, babysitting their own raised an entirely different set of issues. Penn piled them all into the van and pulled up at the Calcuttis’ mere moments before Rosie did. She had not, apparently, been obeying posted speed limits. Or stoplights.

  Poppy opened the door before they made it up the walk and ran, sobbing and full-tilt, toward them all. He’d disappeared within a circle of brothers before Nick Sr. made it to the front door. He was much larger than Penn, whose only regret was that he could not therefore meet the man quite eye to eye.

  “What on earth happened?” Rosie asked Nick, his son nowhere in evidence, hers having absorbed completely the other child who could answer that question.

  “Your kid’s a faggot, that’s what happened,” said Nick Calcutti Sr.

  Rosie turned on her heels and started back down the walk. She simply did not need to have this conversation with this man. He had managed, in one short sentence, to tell her everything she needed to know. But when she got back to Poppy and took him in her arms, he whispered, “He has a gun,” and then she could not in good conscience leave Nicky there.

  “Everyone in the car,” she said, and turned to face down Nick Calcutti Sr. with her husband.

  Nicky peeked out from behind his father’s legs. “Daddy says I’m not allowed to play with faggots, Mrs. Walsh. And I don’t want to anyway.”

  Nick spit between his teeth. “What you do with your kid is your own damn business, but it’s disgusting, and you better keep it far away from my son. Seems to me what you’re doing is child abuse, and you should go to jail, but what do I know? Don’t make no difference to me as long as you keep far away from Nicky. See, this is what I keep telling Cindy. She needs a man around the house to prevent bullshit like this from going down.”

  “Why does Poppy think you have a gun?” said Penn.

  “’Cause I do.”

  “How does he know that?”

  “’Cause I don’t keep it hidden. Two things a man should have: this”— here, he cupped his crotch in his hand and shoved it in Rosie’s general direction—“and this”—at which he pulled back his flannel shirt to reveal a gun in a holster behind his right hip.

  “Did you threaten him?” said Penn.

  “Who?”

  “Poppy.”

  “Ain’t a him, friend.”

  “Did you threaten our child?” Rosie did not want to get diverted into semantics and pronoun battles. There was something more at stake here.

  “I told him we don’t play with faggots, we don’t play with girls, we don’t play with boys dressed as girls, and he was no longer welcome in our home or anywhere near my kid—not at the park, not at school, not on the playground, nowhere.”

  Penn felt his brain flood with one desire only: to beat the shit out of this guy. That Penn was a lover not a fighter, a writer not a wrestler, seemed not to matter. Nor that he’d never been in a fistfight in his life. Nor that it was probably a bad idea to punch in the face a man whose face he couldn’t quite reach, its being several inches over his head, a face surrounded by forty extra pounds that Penn had not, a face backed up—as he’d been pointedly shown—by an actual gun. He tried to replace the vision of Nick’s bloody face with his own, Rosie looking down at it. He made himself imagine what Rosie would look like looking at him bleeding from a stomach wound in front of this asshole’s house.

  In contrast, Rosie had seen men with guns before. She’d cleaned up their messes in the ER. She’d treated them around the handcuffs with which they were locked t
o their gurneys. She’d saved their lives so they could be transferred from hospital to jail, patient to prisoner. She was afraid of men with guns. But she was not cowed by them.

  She dropped to a knee and peeked behind Nick Calcutti to his son. “Nicky, sweetie, are you okay?”

  “Yeah?”

  “When’s your mom getting home?”

  “She said eleven thirty, but she doesn’t like to drive when her nails are wet.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Nick Sr. was on to other complaints now. Forget his son’s transgender playmate, his wife’s manicure habit could not be more annoying. Then he came back to Penn, who remained an uncomfortably small number of inches from his chest. “I’ll thank you to get the hell off my property.”

  Penn opened his mouth to reply, but Rosie beat him to it. “We’d like nothing more. But we’ll stay with Nicky until Cindy gets home.”

  “You think I can’t take care of my own son?” Nick cut the few inches between his chest and Penn’s in half. “Coming from you, I take that as a compliment.”

  “As you wish,” said Rosie.

  “If you don’t get the fuck off my lawn,” Nick replied, “I’m calling the cops.”

  “Please,” said Penn. “Please call the cops.”

  Nick reached out with both hands and shoved Penn hard enough to knock him down. Maybe not hard enough. Maybe Penn was just surprised. Maybe Penn was just incredulous to find himself in a low-budget action film all of a sudden. Nick closed the gap he’d made between them by stepping up between Penn’s legs and standing over him. Rosie had taken out her phone and dialed the nine and the one in which tiny, tiny blink of time, Cindy pulled up, got out of her car, and came to understand what had transpired in an instant. It was not, unfortunately, her first time.

  “Cindy, he has a gun,” said Rosie.

  “I know.” Cindy’s eyes were on her husband, something more than rueful but nowhere close to fear. That’s when Rosie became angry. Cindy knew her husband had a gun, but she’d left Rosie’s child with him anyway. Cindy knew her husband was a sexist, bigoted asshole, and yet she’d gone to get her nails done. Cindy’s desire to play nicely in order to convince a judge to give her more time with her own child had put Rosie’s in significant danger. Rosie briefly wondered which was stronger: Nick Sr.’s loyalty to the mother of his son or Nick Sr.’s anger toward the mother of his son and how he might feel about Rosie borrowing his gun and shooting off one of Cindy’s newly lavender toes.

  Penn stood and brushed himself off. Rosie could think of not a single thing more to say. She turned, taking Penn’s hand as she did so, and headed back toward the van. She’d have to come back later for her car, but she could not imagine getting into it alone right now nor operating it, hard as she was shaking, nor watching her family head home without her. Cindy ushered her own family into her house.

  “Why do you let our son play with faggots and assholes?” Rosie heard Nick say just before the door closed.

  In the van, her phone buzzed almost instantly with an email from Cindy. The subject line said “Sorry:(”

  Rosie deleted it without reading.

  Shove

  On the way home from the Calcuttis’, they stopped for ice cream. Much as Rosie and Penn both felt as unhungry, at least for food, as they ever had in their lives, Penn’s offer to get soft serve was greeted from the backseat with the relief of refugees. If Dad wants ice cream, it must not have been the big deal it looked like it was through the windows. If Mom is willing to stop for treats on the way home, what happened to Poppy can’t have been that terrible. If they’re hungry—and for sugar—the kids had been worrying over nothing.

  The weather had turned finally. Winter had held on through the middle of May, but now, like an errant favorite uncle you forgave the moment he showed up, spring sunshine promised barbecues and fireflies and long days in the lake, and they could feel summer shimmering just in front of them. The warm wind meant a line at Señor Scoops. How this place stayed in business through the long winter Penn did not know. The boys went and begged everyone around them, “Are you using that chair?” in order to stake out space enough for all of them in the courtyard. Cherry blossoms blew against their ice cream cones and stuck. The whole world smelled of sunshine and soil and sugar. Soft serve was as effective a numbing agent as Rosie knew.

  She considered her husband. “That was very brave back there.”

  “Cowering in fear?”

  “That’s not what you did. You chose me. You chose us.”

  “I wanted there to be blood.”

  “I know.”

  “His. But I’d have settled for mine.”

  “I know.”

  “Instead I did nothing.”

  “Which was everything.” Rosie licked at the tendrils sprouting along her cone. “Thank you.”

  “Anytime,” said Penn.

  A stranger from whom they’d snagged a chair winked at him. “Beautiful family.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Lotta boys.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “She must feel pretty outgunned.” Penn looked puzzled so the stranger nodded at Poppy.

  “Her and me both,” said Penn.

  * * *

  On the last night of school, Rosie was at work, and Penn was doing bedtime. Grumwald’s friends were over, helping him pack. Grumwald was leaving his parents’ house to go make his way in the world. It seemed silly to the king and queen that he should do so. Grumwald didn’t need to earn any money, for the castle was his to live in as long as he liked. He didn’t need a job, for prince was job enough already. He didn’t need a way in the world. He needed a way to stay out of the world, to stay home, to stay put. But Grumwald had secrets which meant he had to go. And it was time.

  “How will you learn to be king if you go?” Grumwald’s father and mother pled.

  “How will I learn to be king if I stay? I have to go.”

  “Go where?” his parents moaned.

  “Away.”

  “But if you don’t have anywhere specific you need to be, why can’t you just be here?”

  “Here is the only where that’s not away,” Grumwald explained. “Away is anywhere that is not here. So that’s where I must be.”

  Even though they were the queen and king, his parents were confounded, as parents of young people—not too young, Penn emphasized—are meant to be. They were worried about him being anywhere but there, Away as he called it. They could not find Away on any map, though they called in their atlas maker and made him do a thorough search. Grumwald was a little worried too, truth be told, but he had to go. He also knew some things his parents did not, and these things gave him strength. He knew he had infinite stories to see him through, words without end to light his way, to tell him out of any danger, to heal all wounds and mend all hurts, to take any unsavory ending and make it not an end at all but just a way station on the way away. And he had Princess Stephanie for when a princess was called for, as they sometimes are. Between them, they had a prince and a princess, a storyteller and a fairy wrangler, a star lighter and a secret keeper, so Grumwald felt his way was, if not firmly paved, at least densely pebbled, and that was as good a start as one could wish for.

  At the hospital, when the call came in, Rosie was eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the break room (peanut butter being allowed in the hospital where there were, among other things, any number of ways to effectively treat anaphylactic shock). Anna Gravitz, the nurse who’d answered the phone, put her head and nothing else in the door, always a bad sign because if it weren’t about to be a total shit storm, Anna would have put her whole self in, like at the end of the Hokey Pokey, and told Rosie all about the French featherweight lifting champion who had been her pen pal in fifth grade, come to visit in January, and never left. Instead she said, “Heads up. GSW on her way in from campus. Security found her, not Madison PD. She was in the yard back behind some fraternity party. Been down more than an hour they think. Wilson says you’re up.”
r />   Rosie sighed and swallowed the rest of her sandwich. It had been a pleasant four minutes of middle-of-the-night dinner break. The ones who came in from campus were always a whole different ball game. For one, they often had complicating factors—drugs or alcohol in their systems, or they hadn’t slept for a week writing a paper they’d had all semester to work on but had only just started, or they hadn’t eaten for a week in order to fit into some dress for a sorority formal. For another, asking them didn’t necessarily help you figure out what was going on. They lied habitually. They lied in case you were going to call their parents or tell their RA or get their adviser to put them on probation. They lied out of habit because they were so used to playing up the boring stories and down the libelous ones. But mostly they were different because they were accompanied by a circus. An injury to a field hockey player was likely to occasion all the players and coaches—from both teams—to set up camp in the emergency room. Weeping roommates and frantic phone calls from parents went without saying. Rival lovers, often only just learning of each other’s existence, sometimes came a-wooing as well. Like Penn before them, no one could ever be convinced to leave, to wait at home, that there was nothing they could do here and they were very in the way. Staying equaled fidelity and faith, true friendship and true love. Leaving betrayed perfidy and doubt, wavering fear, which, to the college-aged mind, had no place in a hospital. Had they asked the adults in the room, the wounded worriers ten years their senior who waited for news of aged parents or broken kids, they’d have gotten this advice: if you get the chance to leave, take it. But the college students never asked anyone’s advice.

  Summer session used to be quiet but had been revving up the last few years. There were fewer minor injuries perhaps, but what came in was often a disaster. Rosie was prepared then for a circus. But nothing like the one she got.

  The GSW came in unconscious and pale, intubated, blood everywhere, and swollen as hell. From the gurney as she was rushed inside, she did not look to Rosie like a gunshot victim. She looked like she’d been hit by a bus. Rosie listened hurriedly to her chest, shone a penlight in each eye, scanned her quickly to see where all the blood was coming from. It was coming from everywhere. Her clothes were sodden with it, but when they peeled them back to find the patient below, Rosie was initially relieved to find that the gunshot wound was small. The bullet had entered the left shoulder and exited cleanly. So where was all the blood coming from? Then she took in contusions, puncture wounds, visibly broken bones. And a penis.