This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

  The four doctors were equal partners, kept equal hours, did equal amounts of voluminous paperwork, attended conferences and taught workshops together, and shared companionably in all the other tasks that went into maintaining a small practice. Elizabeth was quiet and pleasant, kind without being sugary, politely inquiring after one’s weekend without diving into anyone’s business. She came in, saw patients, exchanged small talk in the break room, and went home to a life her partners knew nothing about. Rosie adored her. She adored James even more. He was not quiet. He scuba dived in her life. But in exchange, he let her live vicariously through his: James and his husband happy-houred or fine-dined most nights after work. They went to the opera and the theatre and over to friends’ houses. They slept in on weekends and ate leisurely brunches while reading newspapers and books and exchanging philosophical ideas. They generally lived the life of childless newlyweds that seemed to Rosie a fantasy on par with anything you’d see at the movies. If you ever got to go to the movies. Which she did not.

  It was Howie who was the problem. Howie insisted on holding a meeting every Monday morning just in case any problems had arisen over the weekend. Howie outlawed paper down to the Post-it note so they could say their practice was green. He made everyone take home two thousand Band-Aids one weekend to marker on their URL so he could hand them out on Halloween. He guilted them into posting short, deep thoughts to a Twitter feed to show rival practices they were a force of cleverness. It was Howie who wanted them to call patients’ parents “Mom.” He wanted Rosie to be in charge of staff-appreciation breakfast and finding someone to update their website. He wanted Rosie to get Yvonne a gift from the practice to go with her holiday bonus. He wanted Rosie to go to Thailand for three months to staff a refugee clinic so he could list on their website that their doctors were sought after for volunteer work and international aid.

  Howie wanted to run a practice that could claim to accommodate employees’ families so he agreed, when Rosie was hired, to the flextime that was the only way she could get five children out of the house every morning. Though the office opened at nine, she didn’t see patients until ten. Though the other doctors saw their last patient of the day at four thirty, she saw hers at five thirty, which, as an added bonus, meant clients with jobs could also receive medical care. Howie agreed to this arrangement so as to seem like he cared about working parents, but he scheduled Monday Morning Meeting at eight thirty anyway and was surprised when Rosie failed most Mondays to get there in time.

  Howie was not her boss, but he was the one who started the practice and hired the rest of them. She didn’t want to make him angry. She certainly didn’t want to argue with him. She tried to be patient with the patients, to look appropriately concerned when they said they had a mosquito bite that was itchier than usual or their taste buds felt weird or that head lice was a problem one could reasonably expect a family doctor to handle. She tried to stay out of Howie’s way and say yes to as much as she could, to be the doctor they had hired her to be even though she feared she was a different sort of doctor altogether. Maybe it wasn’t the perfect job, but the hours were predictable and not in the middle of the night and included time to do paperwork and take a break for lunch and call home to check in between appointments, and very few patients came in screaming or gushing blood or sporting foreign objects sticking out from various regular and sometimes brand-new orifices. Maybe it wasn’t the perfect job, but it paid well and insured them all. Could they fire her for saying no to hosting breakfast or hiring a website updater? Could they fire her for having a family that required a flexible schedule and a daughter who wasn’t quite? She doubted it. But she didn’t want to find out.

  Fifty-Fifty

  Eventually, Rosie realized what it had taken a six-year-old Aggie less than an hour to suss. The great beauty of living next door to the Grandersons was their houses were really close together. Thus, the adults could have dinner in one and relegate all the children to the other. It was like the paragon of kids’ tables, the ultimate Platonic realization of the dream that was making everyone under eleven have Thanksgiving in the kitchen. They could have an actual adult dinner party without worrying the cheese plate would get knocked off the coffee table by someone trying, say, to jump rope in the living room. They could have a conversation and not be interrupted by shrieking from the kitchen, worrisome crashes from upstairs, soccer games near the breakfront, requests for hammers, matches, and Ping-Pong balls, or demands for additional food or different food or the removal of food from hair/rugs/underwear. They even sent Jupiter to the Grandersons’ some nights because, though she was better behaved than the kids, more than one glass of red wine had been swept off the coffee table by the enthusiasm of her tail.

  They gathered the last Saturday evening of every month. They alternated who cooked and who turned their house over to the children. They did it even when they were busy and work was crazy and life intervened. They did it even when Roo and Ben and Cayenne were old enough to babysit, and they could all have gone out to the movies instead. Rosie looked forward to it all month. When it was their turn to cook, she and Penn made elaborate, delicate dishes, too rich, too complicated, too expensive to waste on the everyday, to waste on the kids. They used their good china. They drank expensive wine. Someone went next door at five of every hour to check on the kids and make sure they hadn’t gone Lord of the Flies.

  “We should call it Dual Dinner,” said Ben.

  “Yes!” Rigel and Orion chorused. “We could get swords!”

  “Not duel.” Ben rolled his eyes. “Dual.”

  “Exactly!”

  And so Dueling Dinners were born. They were also the only evening all month the adults could have a conversation and not worry the kids would listen in or spy or overhear, so it was, in fairness, more or less appropriate one night, after squash soup, crepes stuffed with sole and crabmeat, chocolate soufflés, several bottles of Chardonnay, and an actual glass apiece of port even though none of them much cared for it, that Frank giggled drunkenly, “So. What happens when Poppy hits puberty?”

  Penn spilled his port all over Rosie’s grandmother’s tablecloth. Rosie thought this was unfortunate, less for the tablecloth, which was a bit overwrought faux-Victorian for her taste, and more because without the wine, how were they going to be drunk enough to have this conversation? Over the chaos of towels and seltzer and looking up what gets port out of lace, Frank slurred blanket apologies in all directions. “I’m really sorry, you guys. I didn’t know I shouldn’t ask that question. I thought maybe we were being rude not bringing it up. We didn’t want you to think we didn’t care. And we’ve sort of worried … well, we’ve sort of worried you guys wanted everyone to know and we put the kibosh on that before you even had a chance to decide.”

  Penn thought but did not say: You can ask us anything. That should have been true, but he wasn’t sure it was.

  Rosie thought but did not say: It was your fault. That shouldn’t have been true, but she wasn’t sure it wasn’t. She locked eyes with her husband. He felt like he was drawing breath from her lungs. She felt like he had lain down in the middle of the dining-room table and she’d opened his chest for surgery, that naked, that much of a look at what was supposed to stay inside and unseen. But surgery was familiar enough so once she began to explain, she wondered why it had ever seemed hard to her. It was clinical, medical, pharmacological, and she was a doctor. That was all. “Hormone blockers,” she said simply, and Penn grinned at her like she’d made a joke.

  “Hormone blockers?” Frank and Marginny sounded like they were auditioning for a bad sitcom.

  “We’ve been using these drugs for years,” Rosie the clinician explained, “to put a stop to what’s called Precocious Puberty. Sometimes we’ll see a little girl who has breast buds at six or a first-grade boy whose testes have already enlarged or who’s already sprouted pubic hair. These kids go on hormone blockers. The drug puts them on hold. It buys them time for everyone else to catch up. Then, when they reach
the age of nine or ten, we take them off the blockers, and they proceed through puberty normally with everybody else.”

  Penn looked giddy. Frank and Marginny looked like they were waiting for the punch line, so Rosie supplied it.

  “Poppy will probably go on the same drugs—”

  “Probably?” Penn broke in.

  “—when she’s eleven or twelve or so. They would prevent her male puberty. They’d shut down the whole system so she would stay a little girl.”

  Frank fake-gasped. “You can do a sex change on a minor?”

  “Hormone blockers just pause the system.” Rosie didn’t like having to dip into her reserves of patience for patients on the weekend. “The effects of these drugs are reversible. It’s puberty that’s not. That’s why the clock is ticking. We have to stop Poppy’s—well, really Claude’s—puberty before it starts. If we wait until Poppy’s no longer a minor, she’ll be six feet tall with whiskers and a broad, hairy chest and big hands and men’s size-twelve feet, and those never go away. At that point, we could load her up with all the estrogen we like, and she’d grow breasts and get rounder and her voice would soften, but she’d still be taller than every girlfriend she ever had. She’d still have to order all her heels online. She’d have to get electrolysis for the remnants left behind by every single chest hair, every mustache whisker, every bit of beard. She’d have to have surgery to shave down her Adam’s apple. The blockers put a stop to what can’t be undone later. Then, when she’s older and ready for estrogen, it’ll work better because it’ll have less to overcome. Or if she changes her mind, we’ve done nothing that’s not reversible—”

  “Changes her mind?” Penn interrupted.

  “—because as soon as you take them off the hormone blockers, patients’ bodies proceed normally through their natal puberty.”

  “But.” Marginny’s brow wrinkled. It was a sentence, not a preamble to one. It was entire. Later, Rosie was struck by how Marginny understood instinctively worries she could not explain to Penn, no matter which ways she tried.

  “Yes,” said Rosie. “But. But Aggie will turn into a young woman, and Poppy will still be a little girl. But everyone else in their class will become teenagers, and Poppy won’t quite. But kids with Precocious Puberty eventually mature physically and emotionally with everyone else at the normal age, but Poppy will stay prepubescent while everyone around her grows into young adults.”

  “Then … why?” Marginny asked.

  “It beats the shit out of the alternative,” said Penn. Even once he’d mastered the hows of secret keeping, he’d stayed on the listservs, the blogs and Instagram accounts and Twitter feeds, the YouTube channels with their pages and pages of comments. The kids who weren’t on blockers, puberty was killing them. The affirmed boys’ breasts were tumors, poisoning their bodies, growing malignantly as cancer. The affirmed girls studied their faces like maps for hints of hair, of bone spread beyond flesh. They could feel disloyal hormones blooming inside them, scattering indissoluble toxins like pollen into ill winds. They had, they harbored, such hatred, such revulsion for change as inevitable as seas, like their lives would be over if the tide came in, as it did, as it always did. The Internet was full of broken, breaking kids who spent their lives hiding beneath too many layers of too baggy clothes, beneath binders and tape and pads and straps. And those were the lucky ones because there were also the ones who tried simply to cut off the offending body parts. And there were the ones whose cuts did not stop there. There were not just a few. There were hundreds. There were thousands.

  “So these kids just get to pick who they are?” Frank searched for an apt metaphor and finally settled on, “It’s like a video game.”

  “No, it’s like a fairy tale,” said Penn. Rosie rolled her eyes at him. “Maybe you look like a filthy scullery maid, but inside, you’re really a princess, and if you’re good, you find the right grave to cry on or the right lamp to rub, and you become a princess on the outside too. You look like a frog, but kiss the right lips and you magically transform into the prince you’ve known yourself to be inside all along. If you’re good and worthy, you always get an outside to match your inside. Virtue leads straight to transformation; transformation leads instantly to happily ever after.”

  “It’s a long way off,” Rosie added. “A long, long, long way off.”

  “And no one,” Penn continued, as if Rosie hadn’t spoken at all, “is more good and worthy and virtuous than Poppy.”

  * * *

  Next door, Poppy was torturing the dogs. Orion, dressed as a yachtsman zombie himself, had also brought over his costume stash for the occasion, and Poppy and Aggie were trying to make the dogs do a play. Poppy had Jupiter in a vest Rigel had knit years earlier for ’80s day at school (so he could look like someone named Duckie from a movie called Pretty in Pink, though the vest looked neither pink nor ducklike to her) and Roverella girdled in six knit sweatbands, striping her middle like a zebra. She and Aggie were writing a play about neither ducks nor dogs nor zebras but rather Venus and Serena Williams teamed up to battle little green ball-shaped aliens. The dogs were doing great with the tennis balls but otherwise phoning it in.

  Ben was making popcorn for the third time in three hours. They went through a lot of popcorn in the kid house. Rigel and Orion were choosing a movie for everyone to watch, a process of weight-and-measure evaluation akin to managing the debt crisis of a small nation. Roo and Cayenne were in the Grandersons’ basement waiting for everyone else to come back.

  “I heard you were fighting Derek McGuinness after school last week.” Cayenne was looking carefully between each of her toes, but Roo assumed she was talking to him anyway since he was the only one in the room. And since he had been fighting Derek McGuinness last week.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah you were?”

  “What do you care?”

  “Guys who fight are sexy.” Cayenne shrugged. “Not like guys who fight with knives or wrestling or if they just go around beating people up. But guys who fight just sometimes.” She paused to consider. “I bet Ben never fought anyone in his life.”

  “He fights me all the time,” said Roo.

  “Who wins?”

  Roo snorted.

  “I heard he called you gay and that’s why you kicked his ass.”

  Roo wouldn’t look at her. “I didn’t kick his ass.”

  “Did he call you gay?”

  “Among other things.”

  “Are you gay?”

  “None of your business.”

  “You can tell me if you are, you know. I don’t care. I have an uncle who’s gay. And I’m good at keeping secrets.” Roo looked up at her. “If you’re not though, you should tell me that too.”

  “Why?”

  She raised her eyes from her toes but not her head so that she was looking up at him through her lashes. “It opens up some options. For both of us.”

  When everyone came back downstairs, bedecked dogs included, to watch the movie Rigel and Orion had finally settled on, Cayenne wanted to play Spin the Bottle instead.

  “Uh, no?” Roo and Ben said together, their voices rising at the end as if there were a question. Roo’s was: Is this girl serious? Ben’s was: Why does she want to kiss anyone but me? Instead of working that out, he tackled Roo so they could wrestle out the jinx. Roo won.

  “Why not?” Cayenne looked incredulous that anyone would deny her anything.

  “Kissing is gross,” said Poppy.

  “There’s four of them and three of us,” said Cayenne. “We can sit boy girl boy girl. It’s perfect.”

  “If you’re heterosexist,” said Ben mildly.

  “Or incestuous,” said Roo, less mildly.

  “You can’t have everything.” Cayenne shrugged. “Maybe you’ll get lucky, and your spin will land on me.”

  “I don’t want to make out with you,” said Roo.

  “More than you want to make out with anyone else in this room,” said Rigel.

  “True
,” Roo admitted, “but not by much.”

  Aggie and Poppy didn’t really understand Spin the Bottle and weren’t interested in anyone kissing anyone, blood-related or otherwise, so maybe it was topical or maybe it came out of nowhere when Aggie turned suddenly to Poppy and said, “Do you think it’s weird your parents only had boys?” And Poppy’s heart stopped. “I mean until you.”

  “Your parents only had girls,” Poppy managed.

  “Yeah, but there’s only two of us. Your parents have tons. They must have thought they could only make boy babies.”

  “Fifty-fifty,” Ben said quickly and loudly, so quickly and loudly everyone stopped and looked at him until he made himself explain coolly, “Every pregnancy there’s a fifty-fifty chance the baby will be a boy, no matter how many boys have been born already. Even with four older brothers, when Poppy was born, there was a fifty-fifty chance she’d be a boy, and a fifty-fifty chance she’d be a girl.”

  This was true, so the Walsh-Adams clan tried to look believable.

  “What if you were a boy?” Aggie moaned. “That would be the worst.”

  “Why?” said Cayenne. “Boys are awesome.”

  “If you were a boy,” Aggie said to Poppy, caught up in the horror, “we couldn’t be rival princesses, we couldn’t have sleepovers, we couldn’t make the dogs make a play, we couldn’t paint each other’s toenails.”

  “Why not?” Orion wiggled his alternating green and black toes.

  “Yeah but you’re a zombie,” said Aggie.

  “A yachting zombie,” Orion corrected.

  “Boys could make dogs make a play,” said Rigel.