This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

  For an instant, everything went still, and everyone took a step back from the table, hands raised, like they’d uncovered a bomb. Everyone’s first thought was that it must have been the EMT’s first day or that some idiot in campus security had interrupted a theme party of some sort and failed to realize this guy was in costume. But Rosie saw it right away, not only why this patient-with-a-penis had been taken to be female but also what had happened to her, why she was here. Someone opened the door and shouted out into the hallway, “Jane Doe’s a John Doe.” In that blink of a heartbeat while everyone in the room reordered what they knew and then got right back to work, Rosie saw the whole thing.

  She saw Jane Doe at home getting ready for the fraternity party, her first maybe, putting on her sequined top, trying a few different skirts until she found the right one, the one tight enough to be feminine but loose enough to hide her secret, practicing in the heels (heels she loved more than it seemed like shoes should be loved, heels which, despite being a size 12 extra wide, still looked like real women’s shoes), getting the hair and the makeup exactly right (not garish, just natural, but with a little extra to hide the whiskers), looking at her terrified self in the mirror, reminding herself that most students at a party would be too drunk to look closely and plus it would be dark, that no one knew her here, she could start over, she could be anyone she wanted.

  Rosie saw Jane teeter into the party. It was outside on the lawn behind the fraternity house and in full swing by the time she got there. Jane stood in the doorway to the backyard and took a deep breath: beer, potato chips, watermelon, sweat, her own perfume, her own fear. Vomit, or maybe she was just imagining that. She stepped onto the lawn and turned her ankle over. Shit. She’d been a college student for fifteen minutes, and already she’d blown her cover and would have to spend the semester on crutches besides. She was an idiot to think she could go out in heels.

  But then, a miracle. A hand, tender, on the soft skin under her upper arm, thumb rubbing gentle circles.

  “You okay?” He was, of course he was, blond, not dirty blond like the boys back home in Pennsylvania, blond like glowing, like an angel. Or maybe just like a Wisconsinite—what did she know? And, also like a glowing Wisconsinite angel, he was beautiful.

  “Um … yeah?”

  “I told those guys they had to clean up the yard before people came over.” The angel bent to pick up what she’d tripped over. Jane was so happy it hadn’t been the heels, it didn’t strike her as at all weird there was a package of once frozen waffles lying in the grass. “Breakfast.” The angel grinned sheepishly. “Now with lawn care.”

  She laughed—spontaneously and like a girl—and it felt like the first time she had ever laughed, like she was a three-month-old laughing for the very first time. And his face lit up when she did like he understood the wonder of it perfectly. He left one hand where it was on her arm but held the other out for her to—she reminded herself urgently—grasp, not shake. “Chad,” he said.

  “Jane,” said Jane Doe.

  “Let me guess,” said Chad. “You’re one of those overeager, too-smart-for-your-own-good freshman girls who think they can get a head start on college by taking summer classes, like, the minute they graduate from high school.”

  “I guess?”

  “Good. I love girls like that.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. I like my ladies smart.”

  “You do?”

  “And hey, I get it. Couldn’t wait to get out of your lame parents’ house, away from your lame high school friends, out of your lame hometown?”

  She nodded. He did get it.

  “Well, welcome to college. Let’s get you a beer.”

  He did. He got her a slice of watermelon and a beer. Then another. And one after that. She assumed he was the gatekeeper, that he’d go back to the door or drift away to talk to people he knew or flirt with other girls he didn’t, but he stuck by her side all evening. “This is my friend Jane,” he’d say to everyone they met, and she wondered if this was what life would be like from now on. Maybe all these years it had been just this simple: put on a dress, introduce yourself as Jane, and suddenly you matched, you fit, you had fun, you felt right instead of awkward, you were the truth instead of a lie. Her real life had arrived finally, and here she was at its very start, peering over the edge. It was worth it, maybe, all the pain that came before if it brought her to this wondrous place.

  Jane was happy to stand next to Chad, his hand on the small of her back protectively, while he introduced her as “my friend Jane” all night or forever if he wanted. But eventually, she noticed the yard was almost empty. A few people lingered, laughing too loudly or kissing on a lawn chair, but mostly they were alone. She sat down on the back steps—she still loved the heels, but they were not comfortable—and he sat down next to her.

  “So, you want the good news?” he asked.

  There was more?

  “As luck would have it”—he jerked his head over his shoulder toward the house behind him without taking his eyes off her—“I have a bedroom right here.”

  She could not do that. She knew this. Do not go inside with him, Jane told herself sternly. It will be okay as long as you do not go inside. “It’s so nice out here. The fresh air. The stars.” It was true. There weren’t many stars but there were a few, and the night air was cool and smelled of summer and lake.

  “Then let’s stay here.” Chad smiled his perfect, glowing smile and put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. He kissed her on the mouth, just barely, her first kiss, and there was only one word in her head now: lucky. “I like you, Jane Doe,” he said.

  “I like you too,” she managed. He put a hand on her cheek and she flinched. Would he feel stubble?

  “What’s up?” He seemed genuinely concerned.

  “Oh, nothing. A bug,” she said, and he laughed and kissed her again, less gentle but better, more sure, and then there was his tongue, soft and sweet, and it was true what they said: she saw fireworks; she heard symphonies; she was aware of herself and him and nothing else in the world. She let herself have this. She let go of the worry and the doubt and the lying, the strain of pretending all the time. She let go of everything and just luxuriated in this, this perfect moment, this perfect night, her life finally arrived.

  And then she felt his hand on her leg, high, up under her skirt. For an instant, it was the most pleasure she’d known in her life. In the next instant, it turned to pure panic. And the next, knowledge, certain knowledge, in the moment before it happened, that she’d let it go too long, it was too late. She was Cinderella as the clock struck midnight, standing in her dirty work clothes between one life and the other, thinking, Goddammit, how could I have forgotten the only important thing there was to remember and gotten out of here five minutes ago? But when he found out, the prince didn’t care about who she had been, only who she had become, so maybe Chad would—

  The instant after that Chad’s hand recoiled and then all of him. He stumbled up and back and away. His look in that moment wasn’t anger. It was pain. He was hurt. That she’d lied? That she’d tricked him? That he’d liked someone—something—as disgusting as she was? Maybe he was hurt that he’d lost her. Maybe he didn’t have to. She reached out to explain. The words on her lips were, “I’m…” What? I’m sorry? I’m Jane? I’m not what you think?

  But she didn’t get them out. Whereas every moment leading up to this one this night stood crystalline and perfect, what happened next was a blur. He hit her across the mouth. He hit her face. He called out and lights went on in the house and guys came, guys arrived, one after another. They laughed. They yelled. They spit. They pushed her to the ground. They kicked her. She struggled. She fought back. She was strong. She had a single moment—just one—where she thought: I’m as strong as you are. One of them, maybe, but all of them together, no. Still, they must have been scared of her because feet turned to fists, and then someone pulled the knife out of the spent watermelon.


  And when she was done—stopped fighting back, stopped struggling, stopped moving even—they’d just left her. They thought, maybe, she was just hurt and would get up and limp home soon enough. They thought, maybe, she had had enough, and they were doing her a kindness by leaving her alone finally. They thought nothing at all—they were drunk and tired and ready now, after all the excitement of the evening, to go to sleep. They went inside and turned off their lights and slept like the guiltless. They did not hear the sirens. They did not hear the police banging on the front door. They did not hear their lives changing forever as well.

  Sometime between midnight and dawn, a campus cop had had the worst night of his career, hearing soft moaning, soft weeping behind the overflowing garbage cans in the alley behind the fraternities and deciding to investigate.

  Rosie saw all of this. She saw the whole thing. She saw it the moment she peeled back the clothes. The only thing she couldn’t figure was the barely gunshot wound. If they were going to shoot her, why not in the head, the heart? If they were going to kill her, why not kill her?

  Later, when the whole story came out, or as much of it as could be pieced together, it turned out it was Chad who’d gotten the gun, that having kicked off what quickly got out of control, he couldn’t get his fraternity brothers off Jane Doe. He screamed and pulled at the backs of their shirts and tried to push them off her and away, but they wouldn’t listen anymore, couldn’t listen anymore, and so he’d gone into the house and into the room of a brother he knew kept a handgun in his nightstand. He’d meant to fire it into the air or something to get everyone’s attention, but he missed. It was his first time with a gun. An inch to the left, and it would have been over instantly. He’d very nearly killed Jane Doe. He’d very nearly killed her anyway. He’d also very nearly saved her life. But not quite.

  Mapping

  Rosie had a map and a headache. For the latter, she had taken an aspirin she didn’t have the remotest hope would work. For the former, she had three different colors of highlighters and the opposite kind of hope—the impossibly high kind, the this-will-solve-everything kind, the kind where you fix the problem you can instead of the problem you can’t. It was sometime after three, maybe four. The kids would be up soon, she knew. She should go to bed, she also knew. But she had not been sleeping well. She had not been sleeping at all, and better to get up and do something—anything—than to lie there and think about why.

  So she got up and spent midnights and after with her map. It was the whole of the United States, road and topographic. Fully unfolded, it took up the entire dining-room table, but she didn’t need it fully unfolded. For a while, the middle five pleats had stayed closed, but that left a bumpy mass in the center that sometimes made her color coding awkward. Eventually, she got a scissor and cut them away, carefully laying tape along only the back so that she could use her pens and markers wherever she needed without interference. She was on her second map, in fact, the first having become too messy with notes and arrows and big and bigger Xs.

  Penn said, “Come to bed.” Penn said, “Eschew the crazy,” because he thought phrasing it quirkily might make her laugh and soften—while still planting—the suggestion that she was being insane. Penn said, “Madison is perfect. It’s liberal and beautiful. It’s broad-minded with smart, educated citizens and world-class medical facilities.” Penn said, “You can’t control everything. Anywhere you live, there will be some bad people. Anywhere you live, shit will occasionally happen.” But Rosie knew Penn said these things because Penn was a poet and a storyteller and a disciple of the cult of narrative theory, a grown man who still believed in fairy tales and happy endings. For her, diagnosis and treatment were much more clinical propositions. She assessed the infirmity as she always did: initial presentation, physical exam, symptom analysis. She took into account patient history and environmental factors. She developed a treatment plan.

  What was clear was that they could not raise this child here. They could not raise these children here. They had to go Away. Madison was open and accepting and tolerant, yes, but tolerance was bullshit. Fuck tolerance. Madison was tolerant, except for when it wasn’t. Madison was tolerant, unless you strayed so much as a mile outside in any direction or invited people from outside in—Chad Perry was from Kenosha, it turned out—and then it didn’t work, did it? Poppy wasn’t something to be tolerated like when you got a cold, and yes it was annoying, and no you weren’t going to die, so buy some tissues and a book about zombies, and get in bed for two days. Head colds should be tolerated. Children should be celebrated. That’s when she took scissors to the middle of country and most of the south as well so that her new map of the United States looked like a foreshortened frowny face, its middle fused, its bottom, except at the very edges, excised. Her mother made an impassioned plea for Phoenix. Her mother sent articles and emails about the Phoenix gay pride festival, about a trans boy in a Phoenix high school who’d been named homecoming king by his peers, about the importance of family and especially grandmothers in kids’ lives, about the weather in February (sunny every day, highs in the 70s), about the ways in which her daughter was putting the mental in judgmental when she suggested that everyone living more than one hundred miles from an ocean was a bigot. Rosie deleted them without reading.

  The sky-scraping, difference-celebrating, coast-abutting megacities were tempting with all their cutting-edge medical facilities and pride parades and diversity. But Rosie wasn’t so crazy, at least not yet, as to believe her multitudes could do with that little space. They needed more grass and less concrete, more meandering and less high rising, and even if they had been willing to live in one, they could not afford an apartment for seven on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The leap from tolerant to celebrated turned out to be an expensive one. So she kept looking.

  When cajoling optimism didn’t work, Penn switched rallying cries. “We can’t give up and slink away,” he said. “That’s letting the bastards win. We’re stronger than that.”

  “They beat her to death,” Rosie answered.

  “You have a job you love.”

  “He threatened our child with a gun,” his wife replied.

  “The kids love it here.”

  “In front of our whole family.”

  “You can’t leave because of one horrible, drunken fraternity party,” said Penn. “You can’t leave because of one terrible playdate.”

  “You can’t stay,” said Rosie, “knowing what happens here.”

  “You can’t uproot a whole seven-person family because of the needs of just one of them,” said Penn, and it wasn’t clear whether the “just one” in question referred to Poppy, with his need to be somewhere he could be who he was, or Rosie, with her need to be Away, but that was how Penn lost the argument regardless because of course you could uproot a whole family of seven for the needs of just one of them because that’s what family means.

  And so it was that one predawn morning, she found it, the perfect course of treatment, the antiserum for all the Nick Calcuttis in the world and all the Chad Perrys and all the nightmare fraternity parties as well: Seattle. Seattle was so far past tolerant that heterosexual reviewers complained they felt awkward holding hands at some brunch places and were treated rudely by the waitstaff. Seattle had not just therapists and doctors touting transgender expertise but acupuncturists, nutritionists, and yoga studios as well. Would eating more grapefruit and less gluten help Poppy be a celebrated human? Rosie had no idea. Which was why she suddenly felt she needed a transgender nutritionist who did. Seattle had space—mountains and lakes and ocean and beaches, parks with paths through old-growth forests, skiing and scuba and ferries to nearby islands. And there was a job. It wasn’t an ER job, but private practice might be nice for a change now that the kids were all in school and she didn’t need to work nights. She could sleep instead. And she’d be able to because picking Seattle would get rid of her map and her highlighters and all her late-night searches.

  Seattle also had a house
that was almost if not quite big enough and that they could almost if not quite afford—if they were careful, if she got the job, if their farmhouse went for what it should, given what a perfect place it was to live if only you didn’t mind threatening playdates and murderous fraternities in your practically backyard. Rosie looked at the house online night after night. The school district got high marks. There were parks and beaches nearby. Roo and Ben could share the basement. Rigel and Orion could have their own rooms for a change. They could convert the garage for her mother to come up in the summers.

  The house had a turret with a pink-painted attic bedroom, and the school had a skateboarding club, so Poppy was sold. Rosie bought Rigel and Orion wetsuits, and the twins spent hours online looking at pictures of what lived underneath Puget Sound: giant octopuses who changed colors like Gobstoppers and spotted ratfish with eyes like puppies and wolf eels that looked like old men who’d forgotten to put their teeth in. Ben required no convincing at all, for he knew Seattle to be a city where someone with smarts and computer savvy who had skipped the sixth grade would be treated not like a nerdy dweeb but rather like a nerdy demigod, a hero among middle-schoolers.

  Penn needed no convincing in the end either, for he had learned about leaving. He learned it from Grumwald, who went Away even though he had a castle and a kingship calling him to stay. He learned it from Nick Calcutti, who had fairly begged every fiber of Penn’s being to stay and fight, but every fiber of Penn’s being mustered all its strength and insisted upon leaving anyway. He learned it from Claude, who’d known leaving was only making room for someone else. He learned, finally, that when the ER doctor comes into the waiting room and tells you you can go, you can, you should, you had to go. Leaving wasn’t weak, and it wasn’t giving up. It was brave and hard fought, a transition like any other, difficult and scary and probably necessary in the end. Fighting it only delayed the inevitable. And as far as transitions in his family went, Wisconsin to Washington wasn’t very far at all.