This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

  “I’m not allergic to raisins,” she said.

  “That’s a relief.” The man nodded approvingly.

  “I’m Rosie,” she added, and they lit up with relieved joy because it had never occurred to them to actually introduce themselves.

  “Oh, we’re Marginny and Frank Granderson,” the woman gushed, like the fact that they all three of them had names was too big a coincidence to be believed.

  “Marjorie?” Rosie must have misheard.

  “Marginny.” Marginny shrugged smugly, like this was a reasonable name, something to be proud of even, as if she’d had anything to do with it. (Which, who knew, she might have.) “My dad really loved gin. And my mom.”

  “Not that we’re big drinkers,” Frank reminded her.

  “We’re so pleased to meet you finally.” Had they been waiting?

  “Likewise,” Rosie said, and when no one had anything to add, sighed with relief, “Thanks for the welcome and the treats,” and started to close the door.

  Marginny and Frank leaned in together to peer behind her. “You solo?” Frank asked. “Awfully big van for one.”

  Rosie felt spied on already. “I don’t know where they all got off to”—she waved vaguely behind her without looking—“but they’re not allergic to raisins either.”

  “All?” Marginny inquired brightly.

  “Penn, my husband. And five kids.”

  They clasped their hands to their chests simultaneously. “Five?” Frank grinned. “Wow. I bet you’re from the Midwest.”

  Rosie hated to admit this was true, but she could not relocate Wisconsin.

  “We have two ourselves,” Marginny confided. “Girls. Cayenne’s just about to start eighth grade. Aggie’s going into first.”

  Cayenne, Aggie, and Marginny? Did they make these names up? How was she ever going to remember them?

  “And yours?” Frank prompted.

  “Five boys,” Rosie said automatically, then checked herself. “Well, four and a half.”

  “You’re pregnant?” Marginny guessed.

  “God forbid.” Rosie tried to stuff some of her sweaty hair back into her sweaty ponytail. “Roo and Ben are going into eighth grade too. Orion and Rigel are going into sixth. Poppy’s our youngest. He’ll be starting first grade.”

  “You said…” Marginny looked confused.

  Rosie blushed deeply and hoped it looked like she was just flushed from unpacking boxes. “Poppy, uh…” It was at that instant, and not an instant before, that Rosie realized they’d needed a plan for this moment. In Madison, for better and for worse, everyone knew, so there was no need to tell. These people standing on her front porch had been in her life for all of six awkward minutes, and so far she wasn’t terribly fond of them. Telling them about Poppy and Claude, all the heartache and confusion and sorting and decision making, all the hoping and leaping, was too intimate by half. She supposed she couldn’t introduce her nascent daughter with, “This is Poppy. She has a penis,” but clearly they needed some way in. In the moment, Rosie finally settled on, “Poppy used to be a boy.”

  “Used to be a…” Marginny trailed off.

  “Poppy was born as Claude. Well, not born as. You know. We named her that in the hospital. Him.” She laughed nervously. Now who was babbling? “So for a few years she was Claude. He was Claude. We thought she was Claude. When he wanted to wear dresses, well, at first I guess we thought it was just a phase.” Why was she telling them all this? “I mean dress-up, pretend play, make believe … boys will be boys, you know?” They did not look as if they did know. “But it turned out it wasn’t a phase. Deep down, he feels like a girl. She feels like a girl. She is a girl. So that’s what we did.”

  “Did?” It was like some tiny creature inside their faces had turned the light off.

  “It’s a long story,” Rosie admitted.

  “You, um … turned your son into a girl?” Frank finally managed.

  “Not turned him into.” As with so many disasters, it seemed the only way forward was deeper. “More like accepted who he—she—already was.”

  They were silent for a moment, taking that in, which Rosie supposed was fair enough; she just wondered if they couldn’t do it elsewhere.

  “We saw this drag show once at a bar in Capitol Hill,” Frank said hopefully. “Is it like that?”

  “It is nothing like that,” said Rosie.

  Then, of course, the back door opened. “Good news, Mom,” Orion called. “The sandwich place at the bottom of the hill gets their cheese from Wisconsin.”

  “And it’s at the bottom of the hill,” Rigel added, “so it’s an easy walk.”

  “Only if you want to move in,” Ben said. And when that seemed to elucidate nothing, “Otherwise it’s uphill on the way home.”

  Roo rolled his eyes. Penn piled what looked to be lunch for forty into Poppy’s arms so that his could be free to greet the Grandersons.

  “We live next door.” Marginny went back to the beginning. “We came over to welcome you. And to invite you to an end-of-summer barbecue at our house tomorrow. The whole neighborhood will be there. You’ll be able to meet everyone all at once.”

  Rosie was exhausted just thinking about it and began to brainstorm ways to politely decline.

  “We’d be delighted,” said Penn.

  * * *

  It was ten o’clock, late for company, when the doorbell rang for the fourth time. Penn and Rosie paused the movie they were collapsed in front of to open the door to an embarrassed-looking Marginny. Rosie had known the woman for all of a quarter of an hour so far, but she could already tell she didn’t embarrass easily. This did not bode well.

  “Settling in okay?” Marginny seemed to be holding her breath.

  “Slowly,” said Penn.

  Rosie winced at several loud, heavy thumps coming from somewhere upstairs. “We have lots of hands, but it’s an open question if that makes unpacking harder or easier.”

  “I thought you were going to say harder or much harder.” Marginny’s smile, mom to mom, was genuine all of a sudden. Rosie wondered, for the first time, if she might actually like the woman. “Listen, I wanted to … not apologize for Frank this morning, but, you know, I hope he didn’t offend you. Talking about the drag show and everything. He was just … taken aback. We both were.”

  “Sorry it was so awkward,” said Rosie. “I think I might need practice. You’re the first people we’ve known who haven’t … known.”

  “Yeah. So about that,” and Rosie braced herself in case she might have to stop liking Marginny as soon as she’d started, “I just wanted you to know that we decided not to tell our kids.”

  “Tell them what?” said Penn.

  “About Poppy.” Rosie answered without looking at him. She felt his arm go around her waist.

  “It just seems like it would be unnecessarily confusing for them.” Marginny was twisting her fingers together like braids. “Why tell them just to ask them to forget? We’d have to explain and explain just to get them to understand and then we’d have to explain and explain about how they can never mention it again. So we thought isn’t it best to just let nature take its course?”

  “Nature?” Rosie and Penn said together.

  “As long as we don’t say anything, our girls will look at yours and just naturally think of her as one of them. That’s what everyone wants, right?”

  “I guess so.” Rosie wasn’t sure what her objection was, but it felt like there must be one.

  “Anyway, I just thought I should let you know.” Marginny smiled that genuine smile again. “May these be the most awkward conversations we ever have.”

  And how could Rosie object to that?

  * * *

  “You told them?” Penn unwound his arm from her waist as soon as the door was closed.

  “Yeah? Was I not supposed to?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought this through I guess.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Why’d you tell them?”r />
  “It’s the truth?” said Rosie. It came out as a question.

  “It’s not really.”

  “It’s not?”

  “That she’s really a boy?” said Penn. “She’s not really a boy.”

  “I didn’t say she was really a boy. I said she used to be a boy.”

  “That’s not entirely true either.”

  “What would you have said?” Rosie asked.

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing. I would have just said, ‘This is my daughter, Poppy.’”

  Rosie thought about Jane Doe bleeding to death in her hands. Rosie thought about Chad Perry’s fingers jerking back from what they found under her skirt like he’d pricked them on a witch’s spindle. If you didn’t tell people to begin with, you never knew when they might find out. “They’d realize. Eventually.”

  “How?”

  “That’s what worries me.”

  “It’s been a long time since we had neighbors,” Penn allowed, “but I don’t think one generally sees them naked.”

  “So we just don’t tell anybody?”

  “I don’t know. How was the conversation?”

  “Terrible,” she admitted. “Weird. Awkward. Embarrassing for everyone.”

  “Want to have it forty or fifty more times this week? With everyone we meet at the barbecue, on the playground at school, all the kids’ new friends and their parents?”

  “I do not.”

  “Besides,” said Penn, “on sight, how do you tell the difference between the Cindy Calcuttis and the Nick Calcuttis?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How do you know before you tell them who’s going to say, ‘Okay, cool,’ and who’s going to be hateful and violent? Or who’s going to say, ‘Okay, cool’ and be secretly hateful and violent?” Penn pictured his imaginary gunshot wound. Penn pictured his fist slamming again and again into Nick Calcutti’s face.

  “You don’t know,” Rosie conceded.

  “I know this isn’t why we moved,” Penn said, “but it’s a nice bonus. Not everyone has to know. She can be just Poppy for a while. We can always tell people later.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know.” Penn shrugged. “Later. Once we’ve gotten to know them. When we know it’s safe. When the moment is right.”

  Maybe there was a moment when the moment was right, but over the years, Rosie and Penn realized the impossibility of finding it. For the first few thousand of them after they met someone, it was too soon, Poppy’s story too awkward and complicated, too intimate, too risky to share with new acquaintances. But by the time those acquaintances became close friends, it was too late. Perhaps there was a perfect moment in between, when you were close enough to tell but not so close it was problematic that you hadn’t done so already, but it was infinitesimal, too fleet and fleeting to pin down, visible not even in hindsight.

  “You can tell anytime,” Penn said, “but once people know, they can never unknow.”

  For such a short statement, it was astonishing how much of it proved untrue.

  * * *

  At the barbecue, Penn remembered what else neighbors can be: entertainers of your children. The Elliotts, two doors down across the street, had twin boys a month older than Rigel and Orion—Harry and Larry—and though Penn and Rosie secretly thought rhyming twins were unnecessarily confusing and the Elliotts secretly thought twins named after stars were unnecessarily abstruse, when Rosie checked on them later, she found all four in old Rigel-knit eye patches, huddled around a neighborhood (treasure) map all but dancing with delight. Cayenne Granderson had her mother’s open face and wide smile but her father’s erratic garrulousness. If Frank came off at first as awkward and off-putting, his daughter read as unpredictable and dangerous. Intriguingly dangerous. She introduced Roo and Ben to some of the older kids, and when Penn went to investigate, he found seven or eight of them piled on a blanket in the corner of the yard, one boy strumming pointlessly at a guitar, Cayenne with her head in Ben’s lap. Ben looked frozen, overcome with good fortune but terrified that if he moved so much as a toe she might realize what she was doing and get up and go away. (Penn, who had more experience with these things, noted that Cayenne didn’t look like she had any desire to go anywhere.) Roo was scowling at the guitarist, realizing for the first time that playing the flute at a neighbor’s barbecue in front of a bunch of new kids was unlikely to earn him the same cachet. (Penn, who had more experience with these things, bet that even though Roo had never touched a guitar in his life, he could still play better than this kid.)

  Poppy stood shyly behind her parents’ legs when they first walked in, her parents a little cowed themselves by the magnitude of living in an actual neighborhood. With actual neighbors.

  “We’re so glad you could come,” Marginny cooed.

  “So Poppy, are you hungry?” Frank bent down to peek at her behind Penn’s knees. Rosie held her breath. “Come meet Aggie.” He offered her a hand, but Poppy shook her head mutely. “Aggie,” he called, and a girl just Poppy’s age tumbled around from the side of the house in pigtails tied up with twist ties and a cape of plastic tablecloth that had lately been on the dessert buffet. She wore one yellow rain boot, one bare foot, and was dripping wet.

  “Why are you soaked?” Frank said. The girl smiled sagely as if this were one of the universe’s unknowable mysteries. Frank seemed to change his mind about wanting to know. “This is Poppy. She just moved in next door. She’s going into first grade too.”

  Aggie peered at her new neighbor. “Want to see my room?” She ran off at a wobble without waiting for an answer, it being, apparently, obvious, at least to the six-year-old set. Poppy ran off after her, laughing already. It was love at first sight.

  Rosie and Penn met two Melissas, two Jennys, a Suzy and a Susan, a Mary, an Anne, and a Maryanne, a Kiki and a Mimi. They met Doug, Erik, Jason, Alex, Baylor, Aiden, Isaac, Gordon, Josh, and Cal. The names went in Penn’s ears and out Rosie’s. There were too many to stick. “Nice to meet you,” they said, over and over again. And “Five,” they answered all night long, and “Madison, Wisconsin,” and “Yes, we like it here so far.” And, pointing, “The turret house next door.” Rosie answered, “The neighborhood school,” which was met with delight, and “For work,” which was sort of true, and “Doctor. Family practice. Right at the top of the hill.” Penn answered, “Struggling writer,” and “No, you probably haven’t read anything I’ve written.” They answered, “Fourteen, thirteen, eleven, eleven, and six.” They answered, “Four boys and a girl.”

  Over two red plastic cups of very good sangria, one of the Melissas said to Rosie, “You must have been so glad to finally have a daughter.” She was drinking while rocking in place to keep her own pink-clad infant asleep in the sling on her chest.

  Rosie sipped and nodded. “We were thrilled. Just thrilled.” This was mostly true as well.

  The older kids stayed late at the party, but Rosie and Penn said their good nights in order to take their youngest home to bed.

  “Stories?” Poppy asked hopefully.

  “Tomorrow,” Penn promised. “It’s way, way past your bedtime tonight.”

  “Did you have fun?” Rosie tucked the sheets in all around the corners of the bed. It was too warm for a blanket.

  “So much,” said Poppy, and Penn and Rosie both looked hard at their baby, so fervent was this reply. “No one here knows. They say she and they say her, and it’s like they’re not even pretending, you know?”

  “They’re not,” Penn said.

  “It’s like I’m not even pretending too.” Poppy’s eyes were closing, sleepy-happy.

  “Well, no one here knows who we really are,” said Rosie.

  “No, it’s the opposite.” Her daughter shook her head happily. “It’s like they know exactly.”

  Poppy would have been asleep a minute later except there was a tap-tap-tapping behind her blinds. She opened them to see Aggie leaning out her own window to
poke at Poppy’s with a yardstick duct taped to the end of an umbrella. Their hill was so steep that Aggie’s second-floor window looked out over the roof of most of Poppy’s house, but Poppy’s turret put them feet from each other.

  “Hi.” Aggie grinned.

  “Hi.” Poppy rubbed her eyes, maybe because she was sleepy or maybe because she couldn’t believe luck as magical as this.

  “I’m so glad you moved here. We can be rival princesses in neighboring castles.” Aggie had been waiting a long time for someone sufficiently royal to move in next door. The previous occupants had been an elderly couple who used the turret for storage. “We can climb up and down each other’s hair.”

  “We can pass notes and letters,” Poppy wonder-whispered, “and spells.”

  “Or cupcakes,” said Aggie. “Like if you earn dessert and I don’t.”

  “We can trade books and dolls and cool rocks we find and pictures we draw back and forth.”

  “We can tell secrets,” said Aggie. “We can tell each other things we can’t tell anyone else in the whole world. Up here, no one will ever know.”

  Poppy went to bed tingling with happiness, ecstatic with impatience. She wondered how long she would have to wait before she had something secret to tell.

  Everyone Who?

  Mr. Tongo’s point was a little more on the nose: “It doesn’t smell like anyone else’s business.”

  Rosie had been sorry to leave her colleagues in the ER. She’d been sorry to leave her mentors and her residents, the nurses and the attendings, the place that had made her a doctor, and her home for so many years, but it was Mr. Tongo, with his peculiar wisdom and quirky comfort, to whom it was somehow hardest to say goodbye. Then, at her farewell party, he’d reminded her that he wasn’t officially her therapist or her social worker but in fact her friend, and this meant he could be in Seattle whenever she needed him.

  “Teleportation?” Rosie put nothing past Mr. Tongo.

  “Telephone.” He winked. “It’s only nineteenth-century technology, but it’s more effective because it’s not pretend.”

  Three weeks later, not even fully unpacked yet, she’d called him. Their life felt unfolded, a cardboard box they’d broken down and flattened back to a plain square then refolded into something unrecognizable. Rosie needed a voice of reason, no matter how unreasonable. And that was what he said: “It doesn’t smell like anyone else’s business.”