This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

  “Prepubescent female.”

  “Yeah?”

  “So sometimes it’s testosterone that makes people seem male, feel male, be male,” said Rosie-the-physician. “And you, you want to block it.”

  “That’s not what I want.”

  “It is, Penn. It’s what it means when you object to my telling her she can still change her mind.”

  “I don’t want anything. I want … I only want to do whatever’s best for her.”

  “Me too. Of course me too. If we knew what that was. But unfortunately, that exceeds my skill set. That’s not prognosis. That’s prognostication. We need a seer, not a doctor.”

  “Then that’s my skill set,” said Penn.

  “You can see the future?”

  “It’s the stuff of fairy tales, not hospitals.”

  “That’s a nicer place to be,” Rosie admitted, “but it’s not real.”

  “Sure it is,” said Penn. But Rosie rolled over and went to sleep.

  Who Knows?

  When the phone call came, Rosie was in with a sixty-two-year-old patient who was complaining of knee pain. She had been complaining of knee pain since Rosie met her four years earlier. The patient was a runner. She ran fifty, sixty, seventy miles a week. She ran every day. Some days, she ran twice. Run less, said Rosie. Every other day, swim instead or do yoga or lift weights. Run half as far and make up the rest with walking or a bike ride or, hell, sitting and reading a book. But the patient only ran more. And her knees hurt worse. Rosie had the conversation down by heart and was in the middle of the part that began, “As we get older, the lining in our joints begins to break down,” when Yvonne knocked on the door.

  “I’m with a patient,” Rosie said.

  “It’s Poppy,” said Yvonne.

  “On the phone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is it an emergency?”

  “She says no”—all those children and grandchildren, not to mention thirty-four years in a doctor’s office, had precision-tuned Yvonne’s urgency barometer—“but I’m not buying it.”

  When Rosie picked up the line, Poppy was silent. She could hear her breathing but that was it.

  “Poppy?”

  No answer.

  “Poppy? Are you there?”

  No answer.

  “Honey, are you okay?”

  Nothing.

  “Sweetheart? You’re scaring me.”

  And then, on the other end of Rosie’s phone, in the barest barely whisper of a breath, from a darkness that was very far away indeed, Poppy said, “Mom. They know.”

  Rosie did not ask what—she knew. She did not ask how—it did not matter yet. What she asked was who. Who knows?

  “Everyone,” Poppy only just managed. “Everyone knows.”

  “I’ll be right there,” said Rosie.

  Parenting in the Dark

  At school, Poppy had just finished hanging up her jacket and her backpack that morning when she turned around and found Marnie Alison and Jake Irving pretending to be trying not to let her see them laughing at her while actually making sure she—and everyone else around—saw them laughing at her. If she ignored them, she’d look like an idiot. If she asked them what they were laughing at, she’d look like an idiot. If she battered them both with her backpack until their noses spouted blood like whales, she’d get suspended. So she said as little as she could manage, barely a syllable, but it contained all the surrender of the Treaty of Versailles, which they were learning about in social studies. “What?”

  “We heard you’re a guy.” Marnie snickered.

  Poppy felt the blood leave her face, her head, her chest and legs, and gush away from her heart like an eruption. “What?” That syllable again, the one that said: Kick me.

  “We heard,” Jake fake whispered, “you have a giant dick.”

  “Actually, it’s probably a little one,” Marnie said to him.

  “Probably,” Jake agreed.

  “Care to comment?” Marnie wore mascara and purple eye shadow every day. Poppy wondered whether her parents allowed this or she put it on after she got to school. Small beads of black globbed the tips of her lashes, which made them look like tiny licorice lollipops.

  “I don’t have a … um…” Poppy could not bring herself to finish that sentence.

  Marnie and Jake looked at each other. “She says she doesn’t have an um,” Jake said to Marnie.

  “Then I guess she doesn’t have an um,” Marnie said back.

  “Unless she’s trying to hide her um. Or is embarrassed by her um. Or she knows her um is disgusting.”

  “All ums are disgusting.” Marnie pushed Jake, who pushed her back playfully like what they were doing here was a game rather than ruining Poppy’s careful, perfect life. Poppy followed them to their classroom and found her desk and tried to concentrate.

  At lunch, Aggie threw herself into her usual seat with her usual lunch tray with its usual offerings: rectangle of pizza, pile of French fries, Granny Smith apple, chocolate milk. “You are not even going to believe what they’re saying about you,” she reported as if what they were saying to other kids weren’t what they were also saying to Poppy. “Marnie Alison and Jake Irving are telling everyone you’re a guy.”

  Natalie snorted juice box through her nose, not because she was laughing but to show as clearly as she could how ludicrous she found this suggestion. Poppy saw this for the kindness it was. “As if. You’re the most popular girl in our grade. Marnie’s just jealous.”

  “And mean.” As she did every lunch, Kim was deconstructing her sandwich so she could eat in pieces—the meat then the cheese then the bread. “Marnie and Jake are jerks. No one cares what they say.”

  “But everyone’s talking about it,” Aggie reported soberly. “Cara Greenburg even asked me if I’d ever seen your thing when you slept over.”

  “Did you say, ‘Duh, of course not’?” Kim asked.

  “I said, ‘None of your business,’” said Aggie.

  “Which is true,” said Natalie, “but maybe if you told them they’d leave us alone.” PANK realized they were all in this together. If Poppy went down, they all would. That’s how being ten worked.

  “Told them what? I’ve never seen Poppy’s … thing.”

  “She doesn’t have a thing,” said Kim.

  “Maybe you could say, ‘We don’t stare at each other naked when we have sleepovers. What kind of sleepovers do you have?’” Natalie suggested. “Then they’d be embarrassed and just drop it.”

  “They aren’t going to drop it,” said Aggie.

  Then Keith Rice piped up from between Poppy’s legs under the table. “I see it! I see her thingy!”

  Poppy kicked him and then, when he scrambled away, they all four kicked him, and he crawled out, transparent shredded lettuce sticking to his knees, a French fry flat as fruit leather mashed into his shin, hands raised, and protesting, “I’m just doing research for an article. My readers have a right to know.” Keith kept an elementary school blog the rough equivalent of Page Six and used it as cover for all sorts of sins.

  Poppy was pretty sure he could not see her anything. She was wearing thick tights, and her legs had been crossed. But she was not completely sure.

  “Dirty perv,” said Kim. And then to Poppy, “Aren’t you eating?”

  Poppy’s whole self folded in half. She held her lunch bag in her lap, over her, well, thing, but she could not bring herself to open it. She shook her head.

  “Come on,” said Aggie. “Let’s go outside.”

  On the playground, PANK gathered around Poppy. “You’re so pretty,” they said. And “Of course you’re a girl,” they said. And “Marnie Alison is such a stupid jerk,” they said. And “People make up the weirdest things,” they said. What they did not say was, “Who cares what’s in your pants?” And they did not say, “It wouldn’t matter if you did have a penis. We would still love you.” And they also did not say, “We know you, and we know who you really are.” Poppy knew they didn’
t say these things because they didn’t know to say these things. But because they did not, she got scareder and scareder, and because she got scareder and scareder, her classmates started to believe that Marnie Alison, though a jerk, might be on to something. Otherwise, wouldn’t Poppy laugh about it, or say it was just stupid and funny, or go ahead and prove she was who they’d always thought she was?

  In gym, someone said, “Poppy, shouldn’t you be on the other side with the boys?” and everyone laughed.

  In health, when they broke up for sex ed, someone raised her hand and said, “Ms. Norton? I don’t feel comfortable with Poppy being here,” and everyone laughed.

  In math, Josh Edison complained the homework took forever, and Mr. Mohan said, “That’s why it’s called long division—it’s long.” No one laughed. Then someone said, “That’s what Poppy said,” and everyone laughed.

  That’s when Poppy packed up all her books right there in the middle of math and walked straight out of the classroom and down the fifth-grade hallway and out the front door of the school and called her mom.

  * * *

  Rosie expected tears and yelling and cascades of snot, but what she got on the way home was a silence she did not press. When they walked in together—when Rosie should have been at work still, when Poppy should have been in math still—Penn took one look at his wife and daughter and knew what had happened, the form anyway if not the substance. They both looked sick, ashen, but he could see that this was not the flu, for Poppy would not meet his eyes, and Rosie’s, in the blink of their crossing, confirmed everything. They let Poppy go off alone to her room and quietly, heartrendingly shut her door.

  “How?” said Penn.

  “Don’t know,” said Rosie.

  “How is she?”

  “Don’t know that either.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Or that.”

  It did not matter how, really, but they still wanted to know. Had someone peeped into a bathroom stall at school? Had the principal hinted to a teacher who’d figured it out and told another teacher who was overheard in the staff room? Were the ten-year-olds who populated Poppy’s world somehow more perceptive than anyone gave them credit for?

  Or had someone told?

  They had a family meeting. There was no use pretending to Poppy this was not a big deal. She was living in the eye of it and knew better. There was no use acting as if this outing did not change all their lives because those lives were here, already changed. There was no use spreading blame, but that did not mean it was not worth asking the question. Did anyone want to confess to confessing, disclose their disclosure, transgress their transgression? No one did. “I’ll tutor you from home,” Ben offered, “until you’re ready for college. Then you can start over again. Again.” Roo rolled his eyes. Penn made pancakes for dinner, which no one much ate, but that was okay because he knew what was called for here wasn’t food but fairy tale. There was nothing like some other hapless kid getting boiled or eaten or turned into a tree to make your own life seem less terrible. There was nothing like the promise of magic to make okay even that which seemed like it would never be okay again.

  Penn had never tried to disguise the ways Grumwald’s adventures mirrored his kids’. Fairy tales aren’t about subtlety, after all, and teenagers will ignore a moral if you let them. Grumwald had been practicing a lot of safe sex lately (sex which was all the more gratifying because he’d waited until he found true love). He had gotten into his first-choice college by triple proofreading his application and not going to the movies with Cayenne the night before the SATs. If only Penn knew the moral of Poppy’s horrible day at school, he felt certain Grumwald and Stephanie could effectively impart it, but because he did not, he started at the end and worked backwards. Sometimes your secrets get out; sometimes the world seems like it’s ending; somehow it will all be okay.

  “Princess Stephanie was out with Grumwald’s study partner, Lloyd,” Penn began.

  “Lloyd?” Roo interrupted. “No one’s named Lloyd, Dad.”

  “Lloyd you object to,” Ben didn’t even look up from his phone, “but Grumwald you’re fine with?”

  Penn ignored them. The story wasn’t for them tonight; it was for Poppy. “Princess Stephanie and Lloyd were having a lovely dinner. But after the appetizers, the restaurant door slammed open, and a cold wind blew in, colder than Stephanie had ever felt, colder than real wind ever got, so she knew something was up. In walked a figure in a veil and dark cloak. All the lights went off. All the candles blew out. The air in the room turned to sludge, and Princess Stephanie found herself gasping for breath, panicked, so she didn’t even notice that no one else in the restaurant seemed to be having trouble breathing or seeing or keeping their candles lit. The cloaked figure came closer and closer, and it was the witch. The one who’d commanded Grumwald to harvest night fairy hair all those years ago. The one who’d given Steph magic beans when she needed them. The witch leaned right into her and said, ‘I know who you are,’ and Stephanie was afraid and said, ‘I’m Princess Stephanie,’ but the witch said, ‘I know your secrets, and I’ll tell everyone,’ and Princess Stephanie—”

  “No!” Poppy yelled.

  Rigel put down his history textbook to look at his sister. “It’s just a story.”

  “I don’t want this story,” said Poppy. “I want to go to bed.”

  “It has a happy ending,” Penn promised desperately. Princess Stephanie told Lloyd her secrets. Lloyd knew all about her but liked her anyway. There were cream puffs for dessert.

  But Poppy said, “I hate happy endings.”

  “No one hates happy endings,” said her father.

  “They’re so fake.”

  “It’s a fairy tale.”

  “So?” She looked as tired as Penn had ever seen her.

  “So it’s supposed to be magical and wonderful. It’s supposed to be made up.”

  “Yeah, but if it’s not real, then what’s even the point?” She wiped tears out of already swollen eyes.

  “Oh baby,” he whispered, “it’s real.”

  “You just said it was made up.”

  “Just because it’s made up, doesn’t mean it isn’t real,” said Penn. “Made up is the most powerful real there is.”

  * * *

  “It was me. Mom? Dad? Are you awake? It was me.”

  They were awake. They could not sleep. They were lying together in the dark, turned toward each other, unseeing, unsleeping.

  “It was me.” Ben was whispering, in part because it was the middle of the night and in part because it was too awful to say out loud. “I told Cayenne. Over the summer. I told her she could never, ever tell anyone no matter what. She swore she never would. She was really … convincing. I can’t believe she told. I should never have trusted her.” However things turned out, Ben was right about that last part. He confessed he told, but he did not confess he did it so she would love him back (he didn’t think of it like that). He did not confess he didn’t truly love her after all (he didn’t know that yet). He left out the part about the sex. But he told them the rest of it.

  Parenting in the dark was something Rosie remembered from when they were babies. It was all so much harder in the middle of the night. In the dark, you couldn’t see them clearly, the pallor of their skin, the brightness of their eyes. When they cried during the day, she could tell from another room if the hurt was physical or emotional, to be attended or ignored. But after midnight, all cries were cries of terror, all augured alarm. Were they warm from fever or from sleep? Confused by nightmare or premonition? Might there actually be someone hiding in the closet? You couldn’t treat patients in the dark of course, but Rosie had always imagined ERs were so well lit because during the day, fear stayed at bay and sensible perspective reigned. In the dark, only the horror stories rang true.

  Rosie tried to triage this situation. She wasn’t used to Ben being in trouble. She thought he probably deserved clemency as a first-time offender. But on the other hand, Ben wa
s smart enough to know better, so perhaps it was more just to hold him to a higher standard of accountability. Did she admonish Ben for telling Cayenne (of all people) even though he clearly realized it was stupid? Did she impress upon him the enormity of his sin, the great harm he’d done his sister, his family, even though he plainly knew? Or the opposite—should she comfort him that it wasn’t his fault really, that all secrets out eventually, that he hadn’t completely ruined Poppy’s life? That when they’d chosen the path of secrecy they’d known its terminus to begin with?

  Penn opened his mouth to ask Ben how hard it was to keep his closed, how hard it could possibly be to not tell this one thing, when he realized the answer to his question. It was very hard. It had not occurred to him, until Ben told his story, that Poppy’s secret could not be kept alone. Not telling about Poppy, he understood for the first time, meant not telling about Nick Calcutti, not telling about Jane Doe, not telling about Madison and how they’d loved it there and why they left, not telling about baby Claude and the joy of his childhood and the way he completed their family. For the first time, Penn understood that all that not-telling was hard as diamonds and just as surely flawed.

  But before either Penn or Rosie could sort the shadows and decide what to do about Ben and Cayenne, it got more complicated. Ben was not the only one. They came in the middle of the night, in the dark, one after another, like dreams.

  “I said it to Derek McGuinness one time while I was kicking his ass.” Roo was distraught enough not to notice Ben in the dark already in his parents’ bedroom. “I didn’t think he was paying attention, but I guess he was. I didn’t think he’d know what I was talking about, but I guess he did. While I was punching him in the head I was also saying, ‘That’s. My. Sister. You’re. Talking. About. Asshole.’”

  “Don’t say ‘ass,’ Roo.” There were so many things to object to here, Penn defaulted back to the one that was familiar.

  “‘That’s my sister you’re talking about, Hole,’” Roo amended, and then added miserably, “It was a crime of passion.”

  “Mine too,” Ben nodded, also miserably.