This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

  “Smell like?”

  “Well, it certainly doesn’t sound like anyone else’s business, does it? Don’t think of Poppy as Claude under wraps. Think of Poppy as a girl with a penis, a girl with an unusual medical history. Do you usually discuss what’s in children’s pants with the other moms on the playground?”

  “Not usually, no.”

  “And it doesn’t feel like anyone else’s business either, right? That’s your point. That it feels odd and awkward to tell.”

  “Right but—”

  “So I’m sniffing around, and it doesn’t have that whiff of Things We Share either.” Mr. Tongo made snuffling noises on the other end of the line to show that he was on the scent. “We discuss a lot of intimate things with our friends, but our genitals, and those of our children, are private. Many of my patients and clients—kids as well as their parents, people dealing with a whole range of conditions, not just this one—find they don’t want to explain themselves every time they meet someone new. They don’t want to be responsible for educating everyone they meet. They don’t consider what’s in their pants to be any of anyone else’s business.”

  “I guess not but—”

  “You have lots of opportunities there you never had in Wisconsin. You could go a whole winter without shoveling your walk. You could drink a cup of coffee that would occasion tears of joy. If you shed them out of doors in February, they would not freeze on your cheeks. What fun! And Poppy doesn’t have to be Poppy Who Used to Be Claude. She can be Just Poppy.”

  “But people need to know.”

  “Who does?

  “Everyone.”

  “Oh yes, I see,” said Mr. Tongo. “Everyone who?”

  “Her teachers. The school nurse. The parents of her playdates. Her soccer coach. Her ballet instructor. Our friends. Their kids. The boys’ friends. The parents of the boys’ friends—”

  “Why?” Mr. Tongo wondered.

  “Why?”

  “Yes, why do all those people need to know? What’s likely to happen at school that Poppy’s penis would make a difference to her first-grade teacher or the school nurse? What kind of playdates is this six-year-old going on that her friends’ parents need her whole medical history? Do you get her friends’ medical histories when they come over to play?”

  “No.”

  “No. So why do they need hers?”

  “Maybe it’s not that they have a need to know but a right to know.”

  “‘Right to know’ suggests you are being duplicitous, lying to people about something, masking certain truths. Are you duplicitous or lying?”

  “No?”

  “No. You’re not masking a truth. This is the truth. If you told people she was really a boy, that would be untrue. There’s nothing here anyone has a need or right to know. You’re not keeping secrets. You’re respecting your child’s right to privacy, which she has both need of and right to, just like the rest of us.”

  * * *

  In fact, it wasn’t just Poppy. Families who keep secrets don’t keep just one. They all guarded like garrisons stories of who they were, who they had been.

  At breakfast on the first morning of school, Rigel and Orion crafted a plan.

  “Let’s tell everyone we’re actually pirates,” said Rigel. “I’ll say my name is Blackbeard, and you can be Captain Hook.”

  “You don’t have a black beard.” Ben was disappointed to find they’d moved all the way across the country and his little brothers were still idiots. “And he doesn’t have a hook.”

  “I have a hook,” said Orion.

  “Is that why he’s called Blackbeard?” Blackbeard considered the matter. “I’ll be Stubble the Pirate.”

  Ben snorted. “You wish.”

  “Hint of Whiskers the Pirate? Dad gave me his old electric razor.”

  “But have you used it?”

  “I see your point.” Rigel’s hairless eleven-year-old face lit up. “I’ll be Nobeard the Pirate! Seattle is going to be so great.”

  Ben could be the smart one all anew. The move bought him another year of revelation. By the time he’d turned seven at home, everyone already knew he was smart, which made his being smart unimpressive. His tests actually came back with sighs from his teachers: “A+ as usual” or “Great work as always.” Now his papers came back breathless again with “Wow!”s and “Amazing!”s and invitations to join Advanced Placement classes and the Debate Club.

  And Poppy became Just Poppy. Not Poppy with a penis. Not Poppy who used to be Claude. Not Poppy who’s really a boy. Just Poppy.

  But for all of that, it was Roo’s transformation that was most dramatic. He wasn’t a little boy after the move any more than Poppy was. He didn’t seem a man quite yet, but Rosie and Penn could see it in there, waiting, biding time in his face, making hard angles and hair where he’d been round and smooth just weeks before. He gave up football, he said, because practice was boring, but Rosie imagined it was because the team already had a quarterback and a backup quarterback and Roo worried he wasn’t as good. He gave up the flute, he said, because he didn’t like the band teacher, but Penn imagined it was because without football to balance it out, a woodwind section otherwise dominated by girls was asking a lot of the new guy. There already was the kid who always got elected president. He gave up football for sitting in his room sulking. He gave up leading all clubs except the Roo Is Really Pissed Off and Doesn’t Want to Talk About It Club. He gave up flautist for floutist. He was not a man, not remotely, but he wasn’t a little boy or even a big boy anymore either. Like Poppy, suddenly he was somewhere in between.

  Rosie and Penn had to box up their old lives too. After all the unpacking, it seemed wrong for Penn to be bubble wrapping and hole spackling and slicing the flesh on the underside of his thumbnail in an effort to pry picture hangers out of walls, but that’s just what he was doing. Rosie put pictures up first thing. She said it made it feel like home. She said who cares whether all the plates and books and winter clothes and old phone chargers stayed in boxes for a while; once the beds were made and the pictures hung, the place was yours. For three weeks after the move, Penn’s family montaged the walls, smiling down at him through time. Baby Roo dwarfed newborn Ben the day he came home from the hospital. Carmelo held one turkey-hatted twin on each knee on their third Thanksgiving. Rosie squeezed an arm around each of her parents at med school graduation. She smiled into Penn’s eyes from beneath a white veil, her top teeth sunk alluring into a lip that hadn’t been painted since, while he gazed back at her with awe and wonder, a photo that surely graced the walls of many homes yet still seemed not just miraculous but unique to him, like no one else had ever felt a love quite like that, like this. There were Halloween photos through the years in one of those patchwork frames—pirates and baseball players and magicians, four pumpkins and one Prince Grumwald. There were terrible class pictures he’d fought (and lost) against framing, one for each child for each school year, mugging boys grinning gappy and gappier smiles, hair spiked in more directions than a puffer fish. And, of course, pictures of Claude: infant Claude surrounded by brothers on his one-week birthday, baby Claude being lightly chewed by a yak at a petting zoo (not his person, just his jacket, the look of alarm on his tiny face too precious not to capture before resuming parental duties and removing bovid from child), mortar-boarded Claude at preschool graduation, two-year-old Claude one of eight Santas (Jupiter included) on one winter’s holiday card.

  The pictures collaged one soaring wall of the new house, family story, family history, hodgepodged love and time. Penn gazed up at them, helpless. Until everyone here knew Poppy’s provenance, the pictures had to go back in boxes because otherwise who was that fifth little boy with the serious eyes and the small smile? Because what kind of parents lovingly archived the childhoods of the first four kids and ignored the last? Because even though she’d know why, Penn could not bear for Poppy—or Claude—to be lost, banned from their merry band, not just homeless but pastless as well. Poppy’s childhood
did matter, and so did Claude’s, but Penn bubble wrapped them all back up anyway until he could find a way to tell this story.

  Rosie came home from work and took in the blank wall all alone. The farmhouse had lacked discrete spaces, especially on the main floor where the kitchen/living room/dining room sprawled into one. In this house, it was possible to come home and start unpacking family photos in the living room while Penn made dinner in the kitchen while the kids holed up in their own rooms and feel actually lonely.

  Penn came out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “You took down all the pictures.” Not accusation. Observation.

  “Had to.” He smiled sadly then added, “You can’t put them back up.”

  She nodded. “I miss them.”

  “The pictures?”

  “I miss … him,” Rosie amended.

  “Who?

  “Claude.”

  “She’s in her room playing with Aggie.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know. But it should be. Claude’s not gone.”

  “He’s changed.”

  “They’ve all changed,” said Penn. “They all change. Claude wouldn’t be the same kid he was in his baby pictures anyway. How is this different?”

  “We can’t put our family photos on the wall.”

  “Not yet,” said Penn.

  “When?” said Rosie.

  Penn shrugged—he didn’t know—and went back to the kitchen. Roo came upstairs, burrowed into the corner of the sofa, and just watched her. More and more he did this—came and watched and said nothing. She was grateful he still wanted to be near them, but she wished he would say something. And then sometimes he did and she wished that he wouldn’t.

  “Look what a cute baby you were.” She held out to him the gilded proof of his thirteen months of only childhood.

  “All babies are cute.”

  “You were cuter than most,” Rosie assured him. “I’m a connoisseur.”

  He looked for a long time at the frame in his hand. He did not raise his head when he said, “I thought the whole point of moving was it’s supposed to be so gay here.”

  “Gay?”

  “You know. Tolerant. Open-minded. Rainbow flaggy. Whatever.”

  “Well. That was part of it, yes.”

  “You wrecked our whole lives for this place.”

  Rosie concentrated on her pictures, waited for whatever was coming next.

  “So why are we keeping Claude this big secret?”

  “We’re not keeping it a secret.”

  “You’re hiding the family photos.”

  “We haven’t told anybody yet,” Rosie said. “We will. We just haven’t so far.”

  “If we didn’t need someplace gay, we could have just stayed where we were—”

  “It wasn’t safe there.”

  “Where we were happy,” said Roo.

  “We’ll be happy here,” said Rosie.

  “Not like this we won’t.” Roo slunk back to his basement.

  Rosie and Penn were still lost most of the time, never sure where was home or how to get there. Half their lives remained in boxes at that point. Plus Roo had been sulky and sullen all summer, gloomy since they announced the move, moody still now that they were here. And so she missed it, his warning, his fledgling teenage foresight that secrets are miserable things, that secrets, be they deliberate or accidental, will out, and then it won’t matter where you live, for no place anywhere can protect you from the power and the fallout of a secret once exploded.

  Rosie rehung the wedding photo and one of each kid. For Poppy, she chose Claude’s preschool graduation. Capped and gowned, you couldn’t really tell.

  Strategically Naked

  It didn’t seem like the person in Rosie and Penn’s life to whom they would be most grateful would be a six-year-old, but that’s what happened anyway. Every day, they gave silent, ecstatic thanks for Aggie Granderson. For starters, she made everyone crazy. There are few children more treasured than ill-behaved ones who belong to someone else. They had five, but Aggie was louder. They all woke up one morning before dawn to Aggie, inside and next door, banging cymbals and scream-singing, “Yankee Doodle went to town riding on a donkey/Stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaronkey” at the top of her six-year-old lungs. Penn smiled sleepily at his wife.

  “What are you so happy about?” Rosie groaned.

  “Two words,” said Penn. “Not. Ours.”

  They had five, but Aggie was wilder. Somehow when she was over, bowls of popcorn defenestrated, whole boxes of cereal were accidentally fed to, then extruded by, the dog, potted plants sprouted lamp cords, crudités, and, once, the business end of a rectal thermometer.

  They had four and a half boys, plus Penn, but in some ways, Aggie was maler than any of them. She was a girl who dug holes and ran hard and liked bugs and all that other tomboy shit, but it was more—or maybe less—than that. She’d dismantle toy trucks to build spaceships to fly dolls to day spas built inside killer volcanoes. You just couldn’t nail the kid down.

  And better than all those wonders, she lived next door. Poppy and Aggie were in and out of each other’s houses all weekend long. Penn came to greet the sight of Aggie at his dinner table as no more or less surprising than any of his other kids. Rosie started to habitually buy six of anything she was only planning to buy five of. Any given load of laundry was likely to have as many of Aggie’s clothes in it as Poppy’s. And because Aggie lived not just nearby, but very nearby, it was eleven months before Poppy proposed an overnight her parents couldn’t wriggle out of.

  “Can we have a sleepover?” the girls would chorus, and Penn would answer, “You can’t bring all your stuffies to Aggie’s, and if you pick and choose, some will have their feelings hurt. Wouldn’t it be better just to sleep at home tonight and keep peace in the Stuffie Kingdom?”

  Or Rosie would say, “The extra sheets are in the wash. How about Aggie just comes back first thing in the morning?”

  Or Marginny would show up in slippers after dark with a sleepy-looking Poppy, explaining, “We just thought the girls would have more fun hiking tomorrow if they both got a good night’s sleep in their own beds tonight.”

  But a sleepover—and with her new friends Natalie and Kim too, not just Aggie—was the only thing Poppy wanted for her seventh birthday. She wanted a sleepover plus baked brie, pimento cheese sandwiches, spicy tuna rolls, Doritos, ginger ale, and, of course, cake and ice cream, plus a pass on all fruits and vegetables for a thirty-six-hour period to include the whole of her birthday plus half the next day as well. Rosie and Penn found they could not reasonably object to any of that. A girl has only one seventh birthday, after all.

  They didn’t want to scare her, but they wanted her to be prepared. They didn’t want to make her feel unsafe, but they wanted to protect her. They didn’t want to suggest to her that her body needed hiding. But unfortunately it did.

  “Where will you change into PJs?” Rosie asked, lightly, while hanging streamers, as if this question were no more or less significant than what kind of frosting Poppy wanted on her cake.

  “I dunno,” said Poppy. “Can we do a craft too?”

  “Sure,” said Rosie. “How about the bathroom?”

  “For the craft?”

  “How about you change in the bathroom?”

  “A bathroom craft would be awesome. Like those crayons you use in the tub. Or toilet decorating.”

  “I just think … you know girls at sleepovers often … I think Kim and Natalie and Aggie might want to change out of their clothes and into their PJs right in your turret, so I’m just a little worried that…” What? What was she just a little worried that? Probably the girls would pull nightgowns or pajamas on over their underwear, right? They might even fall asleep in their clothes if she was lucky. Still, she’d seen what came from not having a plan, and she wanted to be prepared. “You could just say you’re shy.”

&n
bsp; “I’m not shy.”

  “But I mean to explain why you have to change alone in the bathroom.”

  Poppy looked up from her crepe-paper bows for the first time. “I have to be alone?”

  “Well, because your friends don’t know … you know … quite who you are.”

  “Who I am?”

  “I mean they know you, of course, but they don’t know. You know?”

  Poppy looked confused. “Are you being silly, Mama?” She concluded her mother was just teasing her and broke into a huge almost-seven-year-old smile. “Don’t worry. This is going to be the best sleepover ever.”

  But Rosie worried anyway. “What are we going to do?” She was whipping green cream-cheese frosting, as instructed.

  “See how it plays out?” Penn guessed.

  She pointed a whisk at him. “You’re the one who wants to keep this thing a secret.”

  “I don’t want to keep this thing a secret. We have all, prudently, agreed to this approach for this moment. For good reasons.”

  “But it’s like she didn’t even know what I was talking about. It’s like she’s forgotten she’s really a boy.”

  “She’s not really a boy.”

  “Yes, right, I know, I know. But you know what I mean. It’s like she’s forgotten she has a penis.”

  “When you own a penis”—Penn glanced down at his authoritatively—“you never forget.”

  “She’s forgotten that a penis isn’t what she’s supposed to have,” Rosie persisted. Maybe she couldn’t quite articulate it, but she knew the point was valid. “She’s forgotten her friends have—and are expecting—something else.”

  Rosie had taken to trying to walk around naked more, but it was hard. For one thing, there was the mob of teenage boys in her house. For another, there were the neighbors. The problem was the kids saw each other naked all the time, changing in and out of swimsuits and sports gear and school clothes and pajamas, and Poppy therefore had the impression that she was totally normal. Everyone had toes. Everyone had elbows. Everyone had a penis. Maybe it lacked subtlety, but Rosie thought “show don’t tell” was the best way to disabuse Poppy of this last point. She sat in the bath until her fingers wrinkled into origami so that she could be getting out of it just when Poppy wandered in looking for glue sticks. She threw her workout clothes in the wash with the towels then changed for yoga right when Poppy was gathering supplies for the beach. It was weird—not to mention chilly—but how better, in a houseful of penises, to show Poppy that while there was nothing wrong with her body, for a girl it was pretty unusual? But it seemed not to make an impression. Very nearly seven-year-old Poppy’s body looked no more like adult Penn’s than adult Rosie’s when you got right down to it. She was grateful, really, that Poppy didn’t understand. But she was also panicked, really, that Poppy didn’t understand.