This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

  It was a torturous evening. It was worse, in fact, than the one it commemorated, Poppy’s first sleepover, its anguished waiting escalating in intensity the longer it went on, proving altogether more painful than Rosie’s quick final labor. The girls started with the baked brie and the Doritos, ignoring Penn’s neat baguette slices and scooping up fancy French cheese with neon orange triangles instead. Rosie, anxious to get on with things already, tried to serve the (such that it was) main course then, but Penn pointed out it was only four thirty, and Poppy whined, “Mom, we have so much to do.” They all four whirled up to her turret while Rosie cursed the stairs: she couldn’t hear what they were doing up there by pressing her ear to the door at the bottom of them. Lots of giggling. Lots of high-pitched joy. They came down and watched The Sound of Music. They wanted to make clothes out of the curtains, but Penn steered them toward marshmallow monsters—Poppy’s chosen craft—instead. More marshmallows turned into snacks than into monsters. Then Poppy opened presents, and then she consented to dinner: the sandwiches and sushi. Rigel and Orion did a magic show with a set they’d gotten several birthdays ago, supplemented by an actual hacksaw and a chocolate rabbit they did indeed saw in half and manage to reattach by licking the edges until they were sufficiently sticky. The girls giggled. Roo and Ben stayed in their basement and pretended none of the rest of them existed. Penn blew up a bunch of balloons for a lawless, anarchic game of balloon tag. And Rosie fretted.

  They called the older boys up for singing, cake, and ice cream. It was her first all-girls birthday, and Rosie was pleasantly surprised to see them actually sit and eat, quietly if not neatly, which would have been nice except she still had her own brood to contend with. Rigel balanced a piece of cake on the top hat Orion was wearing, which slid off onto Roo’s plate, which splattered ice cream onto Rigel’s present: orange knit party hats that looked to Rosie like yarmulkes. The twins held each other’s necks in the crooks of their elbows and rolled around on the kitchen floor for a bit, spreading dropped cake and ice cream into every corner and whipping Jupiter into a frenzy of barking and alarm. Rosie envied the dog, for whom it was socially acceptable to walk around whining ceaselessly when she was feeling anxious.

  When the girls started yawning, Penn lightly suggested it might be time to start thinking about getting ready for bed. Rosie wasn’t ready yet. She felt like she was breathing very quickly all of a sudden. She tried to look nonchalant while the girls trundled upstairs. Then she raced for the turret steps like an about-to-be-sawed-in-half chocolate rabbit. She climbed the stairs as quietly as she could, stopping halfway up, like Christopher Robin, trying not to pant and give herself away. She heard bags unzipping, kicked-off shoes whacking into the molding, clothes being shed, soft exclamation over Kim’s Seattle Storm pajamas and Natalie’s slippers shaped like bear feet. She strained but could not hear whether or not underwear was being removed. Why couldn’t underpants be louder? She heard Poppy’s dresser drawers open and shut, open and shut again. Suddenly, Poppy was walking back toward the stairs.

  Rosie cursed and ran full-tilt into her room where she flung herself onto the bed. Penn was already there, legs crossed at the ankle, one arm behind his head, the other holding the book he was reading. He looked quite pleased with himself.

  “One thousand in unmarked bills and you wear that worn-through Brewers T-shirt to bed for a week, and your secret’s safe with me,” he told Rosie out of the side of his mouth as Poppy walked into the room.

  “I can’t find any of my nightgowns,” Poppy said.

  “I think they’re all in the dryer, sweetie.” Penn smiled the smile of the innocent.

  Poppy wandered off to the laundry room and came back two minutes later in her flamingo nightgown. “Thanks, Daddy.”

  “Sure, baby. What’d you do with your clothes?”

  “Left them in a pile on the floor,” she admitted, then brightened, “but it’s my birthday.”

  “Then you get a pass.” He kissed her good night. “Have fun up there. Don’t stay up too late, or you’ll be too tired for Mickey Mouse pancakes in the morning.”

  Poppy raced upstairs to start year number seven.

  “Thank you,” Rosie breathed. She closed her eyes. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  “No problem,” said Penn. “You get a pass too.”

  And she thought: just that simple. And she thought: problem solved. But the problem was just beginning.

  * * *

  Rosie imagined she’d have a year—until Poppy turned eight—to recover, but Poppy and Aggie had discovered sleepovers to be even better than their chapter books purported. Having broken the parental seal, they could no longer be deterred. Rosie’s reprieve lasted all of a week, and this time was worse because this time was at Aggie’s house. At Aggie’s house, Penn couldn’t spirit all Poppy’s sleepwear into the laundry, not that that was likely to work again at home either. At Aggie’s house, Rosie couldn’t barge in if necessary with some absurd but (alas) believable motherly bullshit like “At our house, we change in private.”

  Rosie wondered if it was too late to invoke a rule that Friday was the Sabbath and they should all go to shul rather than attend sleepovers. Penn thought it probably was. In fact, Penn had a whole different point, which was that Rigel and Orion were going to the movies with Larry and Harry, Ben was playing miniature golf with the rest of the debate team, and Roo was highly unlikely to emerge from the basement under any circumstances. If Poppy were sleeping next door, they’d essentially have the house to themselves for the night, and since Rosie was walking around strategically naked all the time, he had some thoughts as to what they might do with it.

  While Penn made this case and Rosie panicked, Poppy packed. The fact that she was going just next door didn’t mean packing wasn’t part of the ritual. Poppy packed Alice and Miss Marple. She packed two games, a bottle of green glitter toenail polish, and a bag of Orion’s costumes in case they wanted to play dress-up. To this modest assemblage, Rosie added a pair of underwear, a skirt, a T-shirt, a nightgown, and a toothbrush with the weepy foreboding of a mother sending a soldier off to war.

  She sat Poppy down on her bed then kneeled at her feet. This time, she was a little better prepared. “When you change into your nightgown tonight, baby, you need to do it somewhere private. You know?”

  “Yeah?” Poppy didn’t sound sure.

  “Sweetheart, Aggie doesn’t know you have a penis, and she would probably be really confused to see it, so you either have to tell her or just excuse yourself and go into the bathroom and change.”

  “Okay,” said Poppy.

  “Which?”

  “Which what?”

  “Which do you prefer? Should we tell Aggie? She’s such a good friend, baby. You could tell her, and then she’d know, and everything would be fine. You could decide to tell other friends too, or if you told Aggie not to tell anyone else, you know she wouldn’t.”

  “What about Nicky?” Barely a whisper.

  “Nicky?”

  “Remember how Nicky used to be my best friend and then he found out about me, and he was so grossed out he tried to shoot Daddy?”

  Rosie rocked back on her heels and waited for the breath to return to her lungs. How had Poppy’s memory twisted that story into this? And when? How long had she been carrying this version around? “Oh, sweetheart, no. Nicky was your friend. He was little, but he loved you in his way. It was his father who didn’t understand. Nicky didn’t try to shoot Daddy. Nicky’s daddy didn’t even try to shoot Daddy.”

  “But after he found out, he didn’t want to be my friend anymore.”

  Rosie nodded and said nothing. This wasn’t entirely untrue. And what was true was probably even harder to understand.

  “What if Aggie doesn’t want to be my friend when she finds out I’m really a boy?”

  “Are you really a boy?” Rosie asked gently.

  “No.” The first sure thing out of Poppy’s mouth so far. “I’m not, Mama.”

&nbs
p; “No, you’re not. So Aggie won’t think that. We can explain it to her anytime. We can go over right now and tell Aggie together what a wonderful, brave, amazing little girl you are.”

  “I don’t want her to think there’s anything weird about me.”

  “Why?” said Rosie. “There’s plenty that’s weird about her.”

  “Exactly,” said Poppy. “She’s the weird one. I’m the normal one. That’s the way we like it.”

  Late that night, after a movie and a skit and toenail painting and LEGO building and thirty-six rounds of Hangman, Aggie took off every stitch of clothing she had on, wandered around naked looking for something she might wear to bed, and eventually donned, commando, a four-sizes-too-big swimsuit cover-up of Cayenne’s. Poppy took her nightgown out of her bag, balled it up in her arms, and headed toward the bathroom.

  “You can just change in here,” Aggie assured her. “I’m not embarrassed.”

  “Oh,” said Poppy. “Thanks.”

  “Are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Embarrassed?”

  “No. But … Roverella’s watching me.” Roverella was Aggie’s family’s six-pound Chihuahua. Penn called it a hamster. It followed Aggie everywhere.

  Aggie giggled. “Roverella is a watchdog. She watches everything. She loves to see people in their nudies, so I guess you better change in the bathroom.”

  Poppy went off, relieved and pleased with herself. It was years before it struck Aggie as strange that someone would be embarrassed to change in front of a dog.

  Stalls

  In fact, for many years, accommodating Poppy boiled down really to the two percent of her life when she wasn’t wearing underpants. Even Claude had always peed sitting down, but everything else in that department involved an El Capitan–esque learning curve. Penn joined a listserv. Penn joined an online support group. Penn followed blogs and Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and Instagram accounts, YouTube channels and podcasts. There he learned the secrets to protecting secrets. He learned where you could buy penis-masking underpants (hell, he learned there were penis-masking underpants) to parade around in during sleepovers with everyone else so you didn’t have to blame the dog. He learned which ballet schools required bare leotards and which allowed wrap skirts overtop. He learned which day camps didn’t have swimming. He learned that he could tell Poppy’s principal, Mr. Menendez, just in case, but still insist that Poppy be allowed to use the girls’ bathroom. He learned that he could tell Mr. Menendez but say no when the man recommended also disclosing to the teachers, resource specialists, substitutes, aides, school nurse, and cafeteria staff. He learned that Poppy was entitled to join girls’ T-ball, girls’ soccer, girls’ tennis, girls’ swim team. If she did join swim team, he learned she was entitled to use the girls’ locker room. The best thing about girls’ bathrooms, so far as Penn could tell, was that stalls were requisite. Maybe lots of girls changed in the middle of the room, but everyone peed in a stall, and if you had to pee anyway, it only made sense you’d change in and out of your suit in there as well. Penn learned the Girl Scouts would have her even if they did know, but he didn’t tell them anyway.

  Penn could never get to the bottom of all there was to read about kids like his online—there was no bottom—but unfortunately, he tried anyway. This ate into his writing time. In the beginning, it had seemed Seattle would be great for the DN. There were wonderful bookstores and booksellers, libraries and librarians, writing classes and critique groups by the dozens. Because Rosie worked days instead of nights, he could work when she did instead of sleeping. And the weather in Seattle lent itself to novel writing: moody with low, gray clouds layered thick and full as a down comforter. He wrote lovely dark, wet prose that matched the weather.

  But unfortunately, sometimes he wore that dark, wet mood around the house as well because there just were not enough hours in the day. Elementary school didn’t start until nine thirty. High school got out at two. And in between, he also had laundry, also had a house to take care of, also had doctors’ appointments and grocery shopping and his writers’ group and to run Poppy’s cleats to school when she forgot it was a soccer day or Rigel’s permission slip when he forgot it was a field-trip day or Orion’s lunch when he forgot it was a lunch-eating day. Because the other thing that had changed when they moved was Rosie’s job security. UW Hospital knew her well, loved her much, and owed her more. Here, like the rest of them, she was the new kid again. She had to be impressive. She couldn’t take sick days or time off. She had to stay late because she couldn’t go early. Working days meant she wasn’t home during them to help. Penn was glad to pick up the parenting slack. But it did not leave much time to write. Especially when he couldn’t stop researching penis-masking underwear and its conceits.

  * * *

  At work, Rosie might have told their secret but did not. There was no reason not to really. It was a small practice, and people who work in a medical office are nothing if not trained at keeping both personal data and body particulars under wraps. Yes, those wraps were made out of waxy, mortifying paper with strings no one could manage to tie, and yes, they gapped over exactly the bits patients wanted covered up. In the ER, you cut people out of their clothes or treated them over top, depending, so maybe it’s just that she wasn’t used to unwrapping patients like packets from the deli. But the gowns weren’t the only thing about West Hill Family Medical Center that required getting used to.

  The Monday after she survived Poppy’s seventh birthday, Rosie’s first patient of the day was three-year-old Bristol Wonks. Really it was Mrs. Wonks. Never mind her move to family practice, Rosie stuck by her refusal to call patients’ parents “Mom,” but she was required instead to use “Mrs.” She wondered what kind of mother would be offended that her kid’s pediatrician used her first name—it was like relocating to a nineteenth-century novel—but she settled for what she could live with. In fact, the whole job was like that. There was much that seemed pointless but was easier to consent to than fight, easier to adjust to than starvation owing to unemployment. The Wonks also fell into that category of people where Rosie couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t use the wife’s last name instead. Tradition is one thing, but who wanted to send her kid through life with a name like Bristol Wonks? There were so many things that befell your children you could not control. Why wouldn’t you do something about the one you could?

  “I’m worried about Bristol’s hearing.” Mrs. Wonks was speaking so quietly, Rosie began to worry about her own.

  “Do his ears hurt him?” Rosie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Wonks admitted.

  “Does he complain of soreness or pain?”

  “No, but he’s so little. Maybe he doesn’t have the words for it. Children with hearing loss often have difficulty with speech acquisition, you know.”

  Rosie did know. “Do you notice him pulling at them?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why are you covering his ears with your hands, Mrs. Wonks? Does that soothe Bristol?”

  “I don’t want him to hear us talking about him.” Mrs. Wonks tightened her earmuff vise. “I don’t want to hurt his feelings.”

  “But you brought him in today because you’re worried about his hearing.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Then why cover his ears?”

  “Just in case.”

  Rosie took a deep breath. “What makes you think he’s having trouble hearing?”

  “When I ask him to put away his LEGOs or finish his milk at dinner or clear his place or go put his shoes on, he doesn’t.”

  “Ahh.” The ER had ill equipped Rosie to ask her next question gently. “What makes you think, Mrs. Wonks, that the reason he doesn’t do those things is because he can’t hear you?”

  “He doesn’t even look up.” Mrs. Wonks held both hands open before her to mime such a preponderance of evidence. “It’s not like he says no or has a tantrum. He doesn’t even look at me.”

 
“Does he hear you when you ask if he wants an hour of screen time?”

  “I think he guesses what I’ve said because I have his device in my hand.”

  “Does he hear you when you ask if he wants to go out for ice cream?”

  “He does but—”

  “Bristol’s three, Mrs. Wonks. Unfortunately, it’s perfectly normal for him to refuse to do things he’s disinclined to do.”

  “He’s not refusing.”

  “He really might be.”

  “Pretending not to hear me would be lying.” Mrs. Wonks removed her hands from her son’s ears. “And Bristol does not lie to his mommy and daddy.”

  “What?” said Bristol. “Huh?”

  Rosie gave him a hearing test. To the shock of only Mrs. Wonks, Bristol’s ears were in perfect working condition.

  They’d been in Seattle nine months, and Rosie still wasn’t convinced this counted as practicing medicine. Her mistake had been seeded during panicked Wisconsin midnights, which had demanded any job rather than the right job. She’d been surprised to have gotten it, in fact. Her ER skill set—triage, diagnosis, mild grace under extreme pressure—seemed like it wouldn’t be much use to the group of three very nice family physicians—Howie, James, and Elizabeth—who welcomed her in and demanded, mostly, extreme grace under mild pressure. The practice was run by Yvonne, receptionist/organizer/miracle-worker, a woman who had more children than Rosie (six) and more grandchildren than seemed possible (fifteen) though, as she said to Rosie, “Do the math. It’ll terrify you.”