This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

  “We couldn’t be best friends.” Aggie flung her arm across her eyes. “If your parents didn’t beat the fifty-fifty and you were a boy, it would be the worst thing ever.”

  Poppy opened her mouth, and everyone waited. Roo looked at his feet. Ben looked at his feet. Rigel and Orion looked at each other’s feet. Cayenne narrowed her eyes at all of them. But Poppy swallowed and agreed wholeheartedly: “It would be the worst thing ever.”

  Annus Mirabilis

  Penn found himself thinking a lot about John Dryden. Dryden was one of those poets you read in graduate school but not in life. No one’s email signature was a Dryden quote. Anyone whose email signature was a Dryden quote hadn’t read the rest of the long, dry verse it came from. But Dryden had a poem: “Annus Mirabilis.” The year of wonders. It was a poem about England in 1666. England in 1666 was decidedly not having a year of wonders. England in 1666 had war, plague, and a three-day fire that destroyed most of London, plus Isaac Newton invented calculus, thereby making the lives of mathematically ungifted students immeasurably worse forever. But Dryden’s poem was about what a great year it was because it could have been worse. They lived to see 1667 after all. At least, everyone who read the poem did.

  Penn was trying to convince himself Roo was having an Annus Mirabilis. He was trying to value it because, though it was bad, it could have been worse. So far as Penn knew, Roo hadn’t set fire to anything, but otherwise, his seventeenth year had much in common with England 1666. He was at war (with his parents and siblings). He was with plague (lethargy, listlessness, an oppressive weariness with everyone and everything in the world). He wasn’t doing all that great in calculus.

  And the main problem Roo was having was indeed historical. His AP history teacher had tasked her students with “making a video presentation on a current issue currently impacting America.” Had Roo argued he shouldn’t have to do such a vague and poorly worded assignment, had he come to his father to allege that, by definition, current events weren’t history, at least not yet, Penn might have been sympathetic. But Roo did the assignment.

  Then he got an F.

  Then he refused to redo it.

  Then he forged his mother’s signature on the notice advising her of her son’s malfeasance.

  When they got the report card for the quarter, Penn and Rosie could not help noticing that Roo was failing history.

  Roo swore it had to be a typo. Roo admitted he had missed a quiz because he’d been at the dentist but that he’d made it up after school, and Mrs. Birkus probably just hadn’t graded it yet. Roo said he was doing well in everything else, except maybe calculus, so didn’t he deserve the benefit of the doubt? Roo said given that he was getting As and Bs in his other subjects, what were the odds he was getting an F in history?

  They turned out to be pretty high.

  When Rosie and Penn went in to meet with the teacher, Mrs. Birkus explained that Roo’s video was about the problems with allowing LGBT soldiers to serve openly in the armed forces.

  “Impossible,” Penn said confidently.

  “Alas, I’m afraid not.” Mrs. Birkus was used to disabusing parents of shiny impressions of their children.

  “You don’t understand. Roo’s not antigay. He can’t be because … Well, we know that he … You see at home…” Penn found there was no way to finish this sentence, but he was relieved anyway because clearly there had been some kind of misunderstanding here. “Anyway, trust me, there must be a mistake.”

  “Quite a few,” Mrs. Birkus allowed, “but not, apparently, the ones you imagine.”

  Then she showed them the video.

  It was a family affair. It starred a great many of Poppy’s dolls and stuffies dressed in Orion’s costumes and Rigel’s knitting projects. Ben was the puppet master, wiggling each character before the camera in turn, his hand creeping occasionally (Rosie imagined, guiltily) into the shot. It began with Roo’s best movie trailer impersonation: “In a world where the US Army is the greatest fighting force on Earth, gays do not belong. The navy is navy, not rainbow-colored. There’s no trans in the air force, no lesbians in the marines, no bi in the sky.” The particulars of the plot were hard to follow, but eventually a camo-clad Alice and Miss Marple spent some time rolling around in a sandbox with guns (Penn was guessing pretzel rods) and then rolling around in a bed together until an apparent superior officer (a roll of paper towels in a naval cap of Orion’s decorated with a few of Ben’s debate ribbons) burst in on them screaming. “You [bleep]ing [bleep]ing [bleep]s don’t belong in this man’s army,” the paper-towel roll opined. “The [bleep]ing government in its [bleep]ing wisdom may disagree, but they’re not [bleep]ing running things around this [bleep]. I am. So they can suck my [bleep].” In the next scene, three Barbies dropped incendiaries (Penn was guessing raisins) from F-15s, destroying LEGO villages below, but when one of the Barbies donned men’s dress blues for a party that evening, five plastic soldiers Penn had never seen before in his life (they were Aggie’s) came out of nowhere, stripped the Barbie, and attacked her. Given the limitations of the medium, the precise nature of the action was not clear, but though TransBarbie eventually kicked the plastic soldiers’ bleeps, it was not without more language bluer than his uniform.

  “At least he bleeped himself out,” Penn offered.

  Mrs. Birkus was unimpressed.

  In the school parking lot, Penn was incredulous. “Roo can’t be homophobic. He can’t be antigay. He can’t possibly be antitrans and living in our household.”

  “Maybe that’s why,” Rosie said softly.

  “Does he need therapy?” Penn wasn’t listening to her. Penn wasn’t even listening to himself. “An intervention? A stint in the military himself?”

  “Maybe he didn’t mean it.”

  “It seemed pretty clear.” Penn was not keeping his voice down.

  “Did it?” It had seemed like an embarrassing mess to Rosie.

  “What is wrong with this boy?” Penn asked no one in particular. Milling-around high-schoolers stared at him disdainfully.

  “Let’s go home and ask him,” said his wife.

  At home, they sat Roo down at the homeworking table.

  “We saw your video.” Rosie dove right in. She didn’t want to give him another opportunity to lie to them.

  “Did you like it?” Roo sneered. It wasn’t the video that was going to cause his father to end his Annus Mirabilis. It was the smirk.

  “Did you?” Penn tried not to shriek. Roo’s left shoulder more shuddered than shrugged. The rest of his body curled into itself like a comma. “Because it seemed like a lot of work. Long way to go to make idiot points and stupid jokes.” Roo cringed, maybe at the idiot, maybe at the stupid, maybe at his father screaming like a lunatic. “Long way to go just to humiliate people.”

  “I wasn’t humiliating anyone.” Barely audible. To his belly button.

  “Never mind the message”—Rosie triaged the situation and began with the most straightforward, most apparent symptom—“did you imagine you were allowed to use language like that?”

  “That’s how soldiers talk,” Roo moped. “And I bleeped it out.”

  “Did you imagine you could simulate sex, violence, rape, I don’t even know what else, and that was going to be okay with your teacher or your parents?” Rosie continued.

  “You don’t get it. It’s not like when you were a kid. Sex and violence are what’s popular nowadays.”

  Rosie closed her eyes. “Why didn’t you just redo the project when Mrs. Birkus asked you to?”

  “I already did it.” Roo sat up only in order to be able to cross his arms over his chest. “If she didn’t like it, that’s her problem.”

  “No, I think it’s yours,” Penn said. And then, because he couldn’t help himself, “Do you even believe the argument you were making?”

  Roo rolled his eyes. “Would I have made it otherwise?”

  “You think LGBT soldiers in the armed forces pose a problem?”

  “Obviously,
” said Roo.

  Rosie shook her head. “I hate too cool for school.”

  “What the ass does that mean?”

  “Don’t say ‘ass,’ Roo,” Penn said resignedly.

  “It means,” Rosie overlapped, “that if you’re going to try, try. If you’re going to work hard, do it. Don’t work hard to make something that only looks like you don’t care and you didn’t try.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense—”

  “You’re sixteen,” said Rosie. “You’re too old to think saying bad words and showing plastic dolls naked makes you cool. It’s not cool to pull stupid shit just to get a rise out of everyone. It’s one thing to blow off the assignment. It’s so much worse to belittle everyone else’s.”

  “Oh, of course.” Roo’s sarcasm rose to a rhapsody. “I should have known. You’re not upset about my work. You’re upset about what everyone else thinks. I’m stunned.”

  “You can be as snotty as you like, Roo.” Penn had talked himself down a bit and was trying for icy calm over screeching hysteria. “We’re going to finish this conversation.”

  “That’s all you ever care about. What other people think of you. What other people think of your kids.” Roo’s face mirrored the ones who’d laughed at Penn derisively in the school parking lot. Apparently, this was what he was learning in tenth grade. “Well, I don’t care. Unlike everyone else in this family, I don’t lie about who I am or what I do.”

  Penn’s face turned red—so much for icy calm—and his mouth opened, but Rosie beat him to it. “You were asked why your report card listed an F in history.” She made sure to keep both the fury and the triumph out of her voice. “You said it was a typo. Was this the truth?”

  “No.” Roo pouted.

  “Did you miss a quiz while you were at the dentist, which you made up after school but which had not yet been graded?”

  “No.”

  “Did you, in fact, deserve the benefit of the doubt?”

  Roo shrugged his crossed arms.

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “Then it seems to me you do lie about who you are and what you do,” said Rosie.

  To which Penn added shrilly, “And that is not acceptable in this household.”

  “You guys are such hypocrites,” Roo muttered under his breath.

  “I’m sorry?” Penn said. “I couldn’t hear you,” even though he could.

  So Roo screamed. “How can you give me shit about lying? You two lie all the time. You lie every second of every day. Your whole stupid-ass life is a lie. You’re all ‘my daughter this’ and ‘my daughter that’ and, ‘At last! The perfect little girl I always dreamed of.’ You’re all, ‘Oh just don’t tell anyone about your sister, and that will be the truth.’ Well, it’s not the truth. It’s a lie. You’re lying to everyone you know. You’re making the rest of us lie too. You’re forcing your whole family to cover up your stupid-ass lies every single day. So I don’t know how you’re going to stand there and scold me for lying.”

  “We’re not going to scold you.” Rosie made herself speak calmly even though she was shaking like a windup toy. “We’re going to punish you.”

  “Living in this house is punishment enough.” Roo stormed down into his room.

  “Wishful thinking,” Penn called after him.

  * * *

  It was a soggy, sullen weekend. On Monday morning, Rosie was hyperventilating through the rain on the way to work. The perfect thing about the pink turret house was that it was only exactly 1.1 miles from work. Unfortunately, 1 mile of the 1.1 miles was straight up. She spent the climb gasping into the phone most days anyway, however, because otherwise when would she find time to talk to her mother?

  “Roo’s a homophobe,” she was sorry to report.

  “That doesn’t sound right,” said Carmelo.

  “I know,” Rosie panted. “But apparently it’s true. He did a presentation about sex, profanities, naked Barbies, and how gay and trans soldiers don’t belong in the military. So he failed history.”

  “School has changed a lot since you were a girl,” said Carmelo.

  “He failed the project, so he failed history, so he lied about failing history. So we grounded him.”

  “You didn’t expect him to own up to something like that, did you?”

  “I expected him not to do it in the first place.”

  “Oh, well that’s different. Are you mad about the sin or about the lie about the sin?”

  “Neither, I’m mad because when we confronted him about the sin and the lie about the sin, he said we were hypocrites because we lie all the time.”

  “About Poppy?”

  “About Poppy,” Rosie admitted. “He’s so mad about Poppy he’s become a bigot.”

  His grandmother wasn’t buying it. “Poor Roo. I wish I were there.” Carmelo still came up every summer, but now it was nearly Thanksgiving, and it had been months since she’d seen her babies.

  “He’s not mad we lied.” Rosie paused for breath and corrected the tense. “Lie.” She caught glimpses through dripping pine tree fingers of thinning fog wisping off the water, sound and scant sunlight backed by sea cliff and old-growth forest. It was a beautiful place to live, but maybe not if it only felt like home to everyone else in your family. “He’s mad we made him move to Seattle when he liked Wisconsin. He’s mad we made him live in the city when he liked his farm. We made him leave his football team and his orchestra and his friends and his presidencies.”

  “He thinks you chose Poppy over him,” Carmelo said.

  “We didn’t.”

  “I know, dear.”

  “We didn’t.”

  “Does he?”

  “It’s been more than two years. It’s time to get over it. We moved because it wasn’t safe enough there. Not for any of them. If we’d said, ‘Wisconsin’s too dangerous for Poppy, but you we’ll risk,’ then he’d have reason to feel slighted. We thought here was better for everyone. We thought he was funny and friendly and outgoing so he’d be fine.”

  “What happened?”

  “We were wrong.”

  “Not wrong,” said Carmelo. “Just not right yet.”

  “Maybe but—”

  “Parents choose one kid over another all the time.”

  “That’s not what we—”

  “You missed most of seventh grade while your sister was sick.” Her mother talked right over her protestations. “You spent most of year twelve in a hospital room. At a time when I felt bad about everything, that was just one more layer of guilt. I had to let it go. Poppy needed extra care, and she needed her big sister with her. Daddy and I needed you there too, needed to not worry about school and homework and Girl Scouts and parent-teacher conferences. You didn’t need much of anything right then. When your needs arose, afterwards, then they got addressed. It’s a good thing people’s needs don’t all arise at the same time; otherwise we wouldn’t be able to meet them all. When you left Wisconsin, it was Poppy’s turn. Roo’s is coming.”

  It was. It was closer than anyone thought.

  Preventative Madness

  Ben’s secret was this: he was in love with Cayenne. It was a secret for a number of reasons. One was he was embarrassed: it was such a cliché to fall in love with the girl next door. Another was he had been in love with her since the moment he met her at that barbecue in her backyard the weekend before they started eighth grade, and sometimes she loved him back and sometimes she did not. Best he could tell, her feelings toward him were unpredictable as weather and just as out of his control. He couldn’t tell people she was his girlfriend because unless she was standing next to him at the time, he couldn’t be sure whether it was true. Maybe that wasn’t secret keeping; maybe he just didn’t know. He had successfully passed off his relationship with Cayenne thus far as, variously, she was just his next door neighbor, he was just being friendly, she needed help with algebra, he had to go over there anyway to drag Poppy away from Aggie before they became conjoined twins, t
heir parents were having dinner so they really had no choice. So another reason he didn’t tell was he didn’t want to tip his hand. But mostly it was this: Ben was supposed to be the smart one, and loving Cayenne was stupid. He was smart enough to see that; he just wasn’t smart enough to do anything about it.

  There was also this: he was used to keeping secrets.

  At the barbecue the weekend before ninth grade, the one year anniversary of the day they met, not that he was counting, she ignored him and stayed in her room by herself, even though it was one of those freak Seattle summer weekends where it’s ninety-five degrees and no one has air conditioning and spending a summer afternoon inside is like napping in your microwave. At the tenth-grade barbecue, she held his hand and fed him s’mores and kept pulling her sweater on and off revealing glimpses of her belly button while she let him lick melted marshmallow off her fingers. So you see how smart had really nothing to do with it.

  “What do you see in her?” Roo asked that evening over six different kinds of potato salad.

  “What?” Playing dumb did not work for Ben, but that’s what he went with anyway. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not asking if you like her.” Roo sighed and rolled his eyes as if he weren’t the one who’d brought it up in the first place. “I know you like her. We all know you like her. The entire world knows.” So apparently it wasn’t that much of a secret after all. “I’m saying why.”

  “I mean she’s nice enough—”

  “No she isn’t.”

  “—but we’re not…” Ben’s face looked like he had dunked it in the sangria.

  Roo peered at him. “Is it convenience?”

  “What?”

  “Because she’s right next door?”

  “No,” Ben said vehemently. Whatever else it was, loving Cayenne was not convenient.

  “Do you sneak out to meet her in the middle of the night?”

  “We share a room.”

  “I sleep,” Roo sniffed.

  “Me too.”

  “But I might not if I had a better option.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like getting laid next door in the middle of the night.”