This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

  “I’m not … we’re not…” They weren’t yet. But they would soon. And it would put an end to more than Ben’s innocence.

  “In that case”—Roo went back to his potato salads—“I don’t know what you see in her.”

  “You don’t know what anyone sees in anyone,” Ben pointed out. “You don’t like anybody.”

  “That’s true,” Roo agreed amiably. “People are annoying.”

  When he took Cayenne to homecoming seven weeks later, Ben commissioned Rigel to knit her a corsage. He thought she would want something different from the rosebud/baby’s breath combo every other girl got, and he thought she might appreciate that whereas those mortal floral arrangements wouldn’t last the night, a knit corsage lasts forever. Cayenne’s knit corsage did not last forever because it embarrassed her, and she flushed it down the gym toilet after the last slow song of the night, whereupon the toilets clogged and overflowed, and the after-party was cancelled.

  For the eleventh-grade barbecue, Ben decided their anniversary warranted celebration. It was three years since they met and one since she’d held his hand and fed him marshmallows, and he wasn’t about to let the fact that he couldn’t put an accurate label on the occasion get in the way of celebrating it. He read up on the matter and learned that the one-year anniversary gift was paper, so the night of the marshmallows he began, just in case they were together then and would still be together a year on. (Ben was a kid who planned ahead.) Every day, he folded one paper heart and one paper butterfly. By their junior-year barbecue, he had 365 paper hearts and 365 paper butterflies. He spilled them all into her room that afternoon, where they carpeted her dresser and nightstand, her bed and her desk, the piles of clothes, shoes, textbooks, notebooks, devices, and power cords buried on her floor like enemy mines. Then he dug underneath to await her arrival. She shrieked when she found him there, the first time from shock—only his face peeked out, and no one likes a disembodied head—the second with delight. Ben’s heart soared. She appreciated the gesture—maybe not the gesture itself but its lavishness, the evidence it presented of a mad obsession she had herself inspired—but she still refused to nail down the occasion or let Ben call her his girlfriend. And in other ways, the whole thing was a disaster: having buried her bed utterly, they couldn’t use it to celebrate.

  That night was a disaster in other ways as well, ways having nothing really to do with young love, and though no one realized it at the time, its impact was vast, and not just for them. While Ben and Cayenne were trying to find her bed, in the Grandersons’ yard out back, the annual barbecue had grown into a Scott-and-Zelda-level soiree. It was perfect Seattle summer weather, endless sunny afternoon cooling slowly into the need for a light sweater, dusk giving way to a crisp, clear night scented by the char of the grill, the flower of ripe peaches, the heady promise of butter and sugar. Logs in the fire pit popped and settled, cracking light and smoke into the twilight.

  For the kids, there was something particular about seeing one another outside the bounds of school rules, outside the bounds of home rules, but still in sight or hearing, if they weren’t careful, of their parents. They had parties, of course, when someone’s folks were out of town, or they all met up summer evenings at the beach. They spent hours on screens together outside anyone’s purview. So this was a different thing. Roo tried to decide whether it was more accurate or less, this version of his compatriots, Katie Ferguson without the cigarettes, Kyle Konner without the manic leaping off of anything more than four feet high, Gracey Meyer without the cursing.

  But if the proximity of parents turned their progeny toward adulthood, every year without fail the party turned the adults back to kids. Drinking foamy beer out of a plastic cup was somehow completely different from sharing a bottle or two of wine when Frank and Marginny came over for dinner. Penn wasn’t drunker but he felt drunker. He grabbed a water balloon out of Rigel’s hands as he ran by and tossed it at Poppy, who shrieked in indignation. The parents all roared with laughter. Rosie had come over before lunch to help Marginny devil eggs and just stayed, testing and retesting the sangria to see what it might need. Along the way, she’d lost her shoes somehow, and now her feet were one part flesh, three parts dirt, the Snoopy hat she’d stolen off Orion’s head lopsiding over her right eye. Partying with their kids made them less sober, less well behaved than they were with their neighbors the rest of the year. It was as if, observing their children even at half strength, they finally saw how it was done.

  “This party gets better every year.” Rosie was sitting on a camping chair she was beginning to suspect she’d have trouble getting out of and trying to seamlessly reattach two egg halves.

  “It’s the s’mores.” Marginny poked Rosie’s elbow lovingly with her toe. “Actually, it might be the sangria.”

  “Hey, I’m performing surgery here. Your feet are filthy.”

  “Yours are worse.”

  Rosie pigeon-posed to affirm the truth of this then high-fived Marginny’s begrimed foot with her own.

  The kids were mostly gathered around the fire pit, eating sugar in a variety of guises, and contriving ways to be touching one another. Penn could hear Rigel and Orion arguing with Harry and Larry. It hadn’t seemed to Penn at first like that quadratic friendship would last. In the beginning, Harry and Larry had been wigged out by Orion’s costumes, by Rigel’s knitting, by their whole slightly odd, off family. Harry and Larry were a little normal for the Walsh-Adams clan. But it seemed instead that twindom was enough to keep them all together, that having another being in common was more common than anything else.

  “Remember when that dude turned into a bug?” Larry was saying.

  “That’s what the whole movie was about,” said Orion.

  “Yeah, but I mean the moment when he changed. He was all, ‘Aaaahhh, my arms, my legs, aaahhh.’”

  “Yeah?”

  “That was epic.”

  Penn winced. While he had to admit Captain Cockroach had turned a whole new generation of kids into Kafka fans, the resulting travesty bore so little resemblance to the original as to be a different thing altogether.

  “That happened to our dog,” said Larry.

  “Your dog turned into a cockroach?” Rigel sounded skeptical rather than awed, for which, from across the yard, Penn was grateful.

  “Other way around,” said Larry. “There was this huge spider in the kitchen, one of those really hairy ones, and when we tried to trap it, it crawled under the dishwasher, and the next day when we got home from school, there was a dog in the front yard, and she didn’t have a collar, and we posted signs around the neighborhood, but no one claimed her, and we never saw the spider again.”

  “So you think the dishwasher transformed the spider into a dog?” Rigel just wanted to make sure he was getting this.

  “Duh,” said Larry.

  “That’s stupid,” said his brother.

  “How else do you explain it?”

  “That’s like saying Mark used to be a bicycle,” said Harry. Mark was Harry’s iguana, which their father bought him when he accidentally ran over his bike.

  Then they all started laughing. “My skateboard used to be a potato,” said Larry, “because we stopped for French fries on the way to pick it up at the store.”

  “Orion’s butt used to be a tuba,” said Rigel, “and that’s why it makes those noises.”

  “Rigel’s feet used to be a porta-potty,” Orion countered, “and that’s why they smell like that.”

  “Harry used to be a monkey”—Larry was laughing so hard he was using a marshmallow to dab tears from his eyes—“and that’s why he’s so hairy.”

  “We all used to be monkeys, you moron,” Harry said.

  And Orion said, “Poppy used to be a boy.”

  Rosie and Penn froze. Marginny and Frank froze. Roo, Ben, Rigel, Orion, and Poppy all froze. They were spread all over the backyard—by the grill, by the keg, by the dessert table, by the fire pit, by the sprinkler. They were each in their own
conversation, their own world, but like dogs who listened, perpetually and without trying, for those few words they understood in the cacophony—sit, stay, walk, good girl—their ears all pricked for what would happen next. To Penn, it seemed like the whole party held its breath. To Poppy, it seemed like not just her family but the entire world had frozen, crystalized here in the very last moment in which it would be okay, and with the next breath, the next one, the next, her entire world would thaw apart. She wondered only at her slamming heart when everything else in the universe was so still. But Rosie saw. Rosie saw that Harry and Larry were laughing like the monkeys they used to be, that Harry and Larry were continuing to compare things to other things, that no one was paying any attention to their quadsome anyway, that Rigel, bless him, had jumped onto the back wall and was acting out Captain Cockroach’s transformation scene with great enthusiasm, that Orion, bless him too, face blanched white as his Snoopy hat, had leapt up alongside his brother, one of his many brothers, to play Captain Cockroach’s devastated fiancée, who had yet to learn to love the beast within. The world kept turning. The secret leaked but held.

  It was late when they got home. Poppy stayed at Aggie’s. She had learned to protect her own secret for her own self, and maybe she felt safer there where the only person who could out her was under her control. The boys, all four of them, lingered in the living room, waiting for what would happen next. Rosie felt too tired to figure out what was appropriate here: comfort or castigate, clutch or shame. Did they dodge a bullet together? Was this something to recast as family lore, all relieved smiles, all head-shaking awe at their great escape? Or was this a moment for there-but-for-the-grace upbraiding? She remembered scolding Roo once for leaving scissors where just-walking twins could reach them. “But Mama,” Roo had turned a tearful face to her to wonder, “why are you mad?”

  “Rigel and Orion could have gotten very hurt.”

  “But they didn’t. Why aren’t you happy?”

  “I am happy, but I’m mad for next time.”

  “Mad for next time?”

  “Mad so there doesn’t have to be a next time.”

  Preventative madness? It had seemed to Roo at the time like madness indeed, and this felt like that: preventative madness, aftermath madness, madness in relief. Rosie wanted just to go to bed.

  Penn did not. “What were you thinking?” This without preamble and directionless, toward everyone in the room and no one in particular.

  Orion, tumbling over himself already: “I wasn’t thinking anything. It was an accident.”

  “An accident?”

  “I didn’t mean to.” His voice was shaking. His hands too. “It just popped out.”

  “How do you say something accidentally?”

  “Like one of those camisole thingies.”

  “Camisole thingies?”

  “Freudian slips,” Rigel translated. Penn often suspected Orion and Rigel of telepathy because simple twindom insufficiently explained how they understood the inanities that came out of each other’s mouths.

  “No,” said Penn. “Freudian slips are when you accidentally say what you actually mean rather than what you’re pretending to mean. Is that what happened here?”

  Orion looked cowed and miserable but mostly lost.

  Rigel put in, almost too quiet to hear, “It was just a good opportunity. You know?”

  His parents did not.

  “He could say it,” Roo explained, and his mother was surprised to hear his voice, “and it wouldn’t matter. For just a minute, it was like we didn’t all have to be carrying around this crazy secret.”

  Rosie and Penn found themselves looking at Ben as if he were the one who could tell them whether all this was true or just boyish bullshittery. “Secrets are heavy things,” he said, absolving neither his brothers nor his parents.

  “We have to be careful.” Penn struggled to keep his voice under control. “Now more than ever.”

  “Why now more than ever?” Roo’s lip curled like a caterpillar.

  “Because we’ve come this far,” said his father.

  “Yeah but if that’s true,” said Ben, “won’t it always be now more than ever? Won’t every day be more than the day before?”

  “Enough excuses.” Rosie was done with this conversation. “Orion, you were messing around with your friends, showing off, and you said something you shouldn’t have. It’s only luck this wasn’t much, much worse. It’s not your business; it’s Poppy’s. It’s not your life; it’s hers. Let’s not make this out to be gallantry. This was a warning shot, so heed it. Everyone else can keep their mouth shut. Everyone else has managed not to tell. You can too.”

  These were perfectly reasonable points. But in the end—somewhat before the end actually—a large percentage of them proved untrue.

  Transformation

  Parent time is like fairy time but real. It is magic without pixie dust and spells. It defies physics without bending the laws of time and space. It is that truism everyone offers but no one believes until after they have children: that time will actually speed, fleet enough to leave you jet-lagged and whiplashed and racing all at once. Your tiny, perfect baby nestles in your arms his first afternoon home, and then ten months later, he’s off to his senior year of high school. You give birth to twins so small and alike, they lie mirrored, each with a head in the palm of one hand while their toes reach only to the crooks of your elbows, but it’s only a year before they start looking at colleges. It is so impossible yet so universally experienced that magic is the only explanation. Except then there are also the excruciating rainy Sundays when the kids are whiny, bored, and beastly, and it takes a hundred hours to get from breakfast to bedtime, the long weekends when you wonder whose demonic idea it was to trap you in your home with your bevy of abominable children for a decade without school.

  They were all of them, even Poppy, still little boys in Rosie’s eyes, never mind four-fifths of them were now eight-plus inches taller than she was with voices deep as wells. That was something she would explain to people about Poppy if she ever actually decided to explain to people about Poppy instead of keeping her a secret: your babies are always your babies. Roo and Ben were nearly six feet tall with limbs like giraffe legs and wingspans that augured flight. Fourteen-year-old Rigel appeared no more like baby Rigel, fourteen-year-old Orion like toddler Orion, than Poppy did like little Claude. But those tiny boys, those tiny bundles of baby, were right there before her every morning over breakfast and every evening over dinner and every time they woke up sick in the middle of the night or came home with some school miracle accomplished or ranged into moments of stumbling maturity. Poppy’s transformation, she would have told people, if she told people, was no more miraculous or astonishing or, frankly, absurd, than any of the others, nor any more apparent to her rainbow mama eyes. Parent time is magic: downtempo and supersonic all at once, witch’s time, sorcerer hours. Suddenly, while you aren’t paying attention, everything’s changed.

  Poppy was about to start fourth grade, the twins ninth, Roo and Ben their junior years of high school. On the way to work, Rosie considered that she had only two more years with her whole tribe, and then she’d be down to three. She had only two more years—after a dozen of them—with a child in elementary school. Only two more Halloween parades. Only two more turkeys shaped like hands. She could scarcely imagine a holiday season without “Up on the Rooftop” stuck in her head, but she looked forward to trying it out. The weather was all turquoise sky, sunshine spread wide and warm like butter on new rolls, dappling shadows that somehow made clear it was the end of summer not the beginning, back to school not semester’s end.

  They had a pediatrician of course. And a dentist. Jupiter had a vet, especially as her muzzle grayed and her hearing went and it took a full minute to get up from her bed for a walk. The twins had an orthodontist. Ben had an optometrist and an allergist. Roo had an orthopedist from the time he broke his wrist skiing the first winter after they moved, overconfident that his Wis
consin snow experience trumped his classmates’ rain, forgetting their Washington mountain experience trumped his Midwestern flat. Poppy, in the years to come, would have a whole host of ists and ologists. But Rosie and Penn stuck with Mr. Tongo.

  They met with him online, rather than over the phone, so he could see their faces and they his and anything else he wanted to show them: to no one’s surprise, Mr. Tongo was a fan of the visual aid. He still favored his giant exercise balls over actual office chairs, and it gave Rosie and Penn the impression he was talking to them from a train, bouncing lightly up and down, rolling occasionally side to side. Then suddenly he would break off and rush about the room, in and out of the shot, on and off the screen, pulling books off shelves or models out of drawers or standing on the desk to make a point, even though that meant they could only see his shoes and the bottoms of his trousers.

  This day, Rosie and Penn at first thought they’d clicked the wrong contact, for when they connected, the window opened onto what seemed to be a preschool classroom, pastel wooden alphabet blocks stacked into high-rises and skyscrapers, a city of wobbly block towers.

  “Mr. Tongo?” Penn ventured.

  No answer.

  “Mr. Tongo,” Rosie called. All these years later, they still did not call him by his first name.

  Still no answer.

  “Is the Wi-Fi wonky?” Penn wondered. “Or maybe it’s a glitch on his end?”

  “Disconnect and try again,” said Rosie.

  Suddenly, they heard a roar. Godzilla lumbered into view. He lurched into one precarious building and another, turning all to ruin, before mounting one of the rubbled piles and facing the camera triumphantly. Around his neck hung a sign in Mr. Tongo’s neat block handwriting. It read: PUBERTY.

  Godzilla was menacing enough until Mr. Tongo’s face loomed three times larger at his side looking ready to accept his Oscar nomination.

  “Hi, Mr. Tongo,” Penn and Rosie chorused from somewhere between bemused and wary.