This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

  “Penn, there are reasons they don’t do surgeries like this on minors, and only some of them are physical.” It felt like playing dirty to pull doctor rank, but this was important. “She cannot consent right now. She has to consent before procedures like these. So she has to wait. And so do you.”

  “This is our job as parents, Rosie. You didn’t say we couldn’t pull Roo’s wisdom teeth because he was a minor. You didn’t say Ben couldn’t get his ear pierced because he was only fifteen. As parents, we make a thousand decisions a year with life-altering impact whose implications our kids couldn’t possibly get their heads around. That’s our job. That’s what parenting is. We decided to move across the country via some insane calculus that concluded Poppy being safer outweighed Roo being crankier because Ben might be happier and Orion and Rigel were a wash. We had no idea if it would work. We had no idea if it was the best thing. We researched. We thought about it. We discussed. And we made the best guess we could with the information we had on behalf of our children whose lives we thus changed indelibly forever.”

  “Penn, tell me you see how vaginoplasty is different from ear piercing. Tell me you see how removing a penis is different from removing wisdom teeth. Tell me you see that equating gender reassignment with address reassignment is an absurd comparison.”

  “Of course. Clearly. I’m just saying we make decisions for our kids all the time. We do this because we know they aren’t as smart or experienced or informed as we are, so they can’t make these decisions for themselves. That’s what we’re supposed to do.”

  “You’re scaring the shit out of me, Penn.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re going too fast. She’s just decided to re-become Claude, and your response is to turn her into Linda Lovelace. Maybe she doesn’t mean it. Maybe she’s not really changing her mind. But we have to slow down and figure it out, let her figure it out. You’re ticking off boxes here because it’s something you can do, and I get that, believe me, but she’s got to be lost for a bit, and she can’t be lost if we’re leading her out of the woods.”

  “She isn’t lost, Rosie.” Penn took her hands and, though she tried, would not let her pull away. “We made this decision long ago. We made it when Claude was in kindergarten, and Poppy’s never regretted it, not for a day, and neither have I.”

  “Then why’d she shave her head?”

  “I don’t know.” His face looked worn, wan.

  “Penn, in so many ways, we’re so lucky. In so many ways, I’m grateful this is what our kid got, gender dysphoria instead of cancer or diabetes or heart disease or any of the other shit kids get. The treatment for those isn’t necessarily clearer. The drugs are harsher and the prognosis scarier and the options life-and-death but never black-and-white, and my heart breaks every time for those kids and those parents. But those are more or less medical issues. This is a medical issue, but mostly it’s a cultural issue. It’s a social issue and an emotional issue and a family dynamic issue and a community issue. Maybe we need to medically intervene so Poppy doesn’t grow a beard. Or maybe the world needs to learn to love a person with a beard who goes by ‘she’ and wears a skirt.”

  “But that’s not going to happen.” Penn spoke so softly she wouldn’t have heard him if she didn’t already know what he was going to say.

  “In which case maybe she—and you and I—need to learn to live in a world that refuses to accept a person with a beard who goes by ‘she’ and wears a skirt and be happy anyway. Maybe our response to that world should not necessarily be to drug and operate on our daughter.”

  “How?” He looked up at her. It felt like a long time since their eyes had met.

  “How what?”

  “How do we learn to live in that world and be happy anyway?”

  * * *

  Rosie woke from fitful sleep sometime well predawn to send Howie a text: WILL GO TO THAILAND. IF I CAN BRING POPPY.

  PART

  III

  Exit Rows

  They would have needed a new wardrobe anyway. The clinic did not allow skirts. The clinic did not have air conditioning. The clinic, the whole jungle really, was plagued by mosquitos. These few, small facts they managed to glean combined with the one that was readily available—that highs would hover in the mid to high 90s every day—meant they both needed all new clothes, and those clothes proved fortuitously androgynous: long cotton pants, breathable shirts with long sleeves, walking sandals, sunhats. The night before they left, Rosie packed for both of them, then knocked on the turret door.

  “So. Are you ready? Are you excited?” Rosie felt neither but tried to sound both, and when she got no response turned instead toward the practical. “I packed for you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Is there anything special you want to bring with us?”

  “No.”

  “I mean, I have all the essentials, but maybe you want to bring Alice and Miss Marple?”

  “I’m not a baby.”

  “Or a picture of your friends.”

  “I have no friends.”

  Rosie winced but plowed on. “I think I have all we need but one thing.”

  “What?”

  Rosie sat on the edge of the bed and took her baby’s hands and said as gently, gently, gently as she knew how, “I don’t know what to call you, my love.” Her love looked slapped but spellbound by something just over Rosie’s head. “Should I call you Claude or Poppy? Should you be my daughter or my son? You can be either one, and you know we’ll all support you. You know we’ll love you no matter what, no matter who. You have only to tell me: who do you want to be?”

  “It doesn’t matter who I want to be.”

  “Nothing matters but,” Rosie insisted.

  “It only matters who I am.”

  “And who is that?”

  “Claude.” He spat the name. “I have to be Claude.”

  “You don’t, sweetheart—”

  “I do. Claude is my punishment.”

  This child is only ten, Rosie’s breaking heart implored the universe. “What are you being punished for, my love?”

  “For lying to everyone. For pretending to be something I’m not.”

  “You aren’t lying. You aren’t pretending—”

  “Not anymore,” said Claude.

  * * *

  In the thirteen days that had passed since Rosie’s midnight text, Claude’s stubbly bald head had sprouted weak downy shoots, but he still looked like a cancer patient, and that’s what everyone assumed he was. Rosie had learned during Poppy-her-sister’s first round of chemo, and a thousand times since, that once one of your identities is sick, that’s the only one that matters. She knew the sympathetic looks she was getting were only because everyone assumed her child had cancer, but she didn’t care. She felt deserving of the kindness of strangers, in fragile need of a little extra space and succor, so she was grateful for their blessings, however misguided. Whether Claude could see everyone around him assuming he was dying, Rosie wasn’t sure, but that didn’t matter either. Claude felt like he was dying, so he’d have appreciated the conjectures, had he raised his eyes from the ground long enough to take them in. He did not.

  Rosie thought eighteen hours on an airplane was the perfect occasion for heartbreak anyway. Into every life, a certain amount of misery must fall, and if you could get some of it to coincide with the eighteen cramped, queasy hours you had to spend in coach, so much the better. Claude stared out the window with swollen red eyes, waved away all proffered food, chain-sipped ginger ale, and garnered sympathy for his mother.

  Rosie had sold the trip to Penn and Claude together. It’ll be an incredible opportunity, she’d said, to travel somewhere new, to see the world, to help those less fortunate.

  “No one is less fortunate than me,” said Claude.

  “Than I.” Penn did not care for “than” as a preposition.

  “You are healthy and strong and able”—Rosie felt there was more at stake here than grammar—“with food enou
gh and clean water, a safe neighborhood, a secure home, indoor plumbing, medicine when you need it, family and friends who love you, a world-class education, and a very cute dog. You are more fortunate than many, many people.”

  Claude rolled red-rimmed eyes. “If it means I don’t have to go back to school, I’ll go anywhere.”

  “That’s true too.” Rosie tried not to seem too eager. “This trip would allow you to take some time and perspective, to take a break from here.”

  “From here or from me?” Penn said.

  Claude looked up, alarmed. His parents didn’t fight often enough for it to be no big deal when they did. On the one hand, Rosie was gratified to see him notice something, anything, that wasn’t happening inside his own head. But this wasn’t a conversation to have in front of him, and they both dropped it. Later though, Penn said, “Thailand is a long way to go just to get out of an argument.”

  “That’s not why I’m going.”

  “Sure it is.”

  “I need to do something to mollify Howie.”

  “You never have before.”

  “That’s why. We can’t afford for me to lose this job.”

  “It’s never going to come to that, and you know it.”

  “It’s a good cause, Penn. The clinic serves Burmese refugees, undocumented residents, people from the hill tribes. It’s important work—”

  “In which you’ve shown no interest until this moment.”

  “It’s not that I wasn’t interested. It’s that it was never possible before with the kids and school and—”

  “What part of that has ceased to be true now?”

  “It’ll be good for her—him—whomever to see a little bit of the world,” Rosie stumbled. “Thailand is friendly, safe—”

  “Not as safe as here.”

  “We need to slow down. We all need to slow down. You need a break from researching vaginas. This child needs a break from school, from secret keeping, from Aggie, from this whole situation. This family needs a break from all the weight and drama—”

  “And you need a break from me,” said Penn.

  Rosie closed her eyes. “And I need a break from you.”

  He watched her behind her closed lids and said nothing for moments that stretched on like Wyoming highways. Then he walked away. So she was able to coincide heartache with international air travel as well.

  * * *

  She didn’t call Carmelo until she was actually at the airport. She didn’t want to be talked out of it. Predictably, her mother was full of being a mother.

  “What about malaria?” she led off.

  “We took drugs.”

  “What about typhoid?”

  “More drugs.”

  “What about that tropical fever?”

  “Dengue?”

  “Yeah, dengue.”

  “We’ll use DEET.”

  “Isn’t DEET bad for you?”

  “Not in small quantities.”

  “Are small quantities enough to prevent mosquito bites?”

  “We brought long sleeves.”

  “Won’t it be hot?”

  “You live in Phoenix, Mother.”

  “What about the boys?”

  “They’ll be fine.”

  “How long are you going for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What about Penn?”

  Ah. There was the rub. “He’ll be fine without me.”

  “But will you without him, dear?”

  A perfectly reasonable question. “He’s just … he’s writing a story instead of living our life.”

  “Maybe he’s doing both.”

  “He can’t do both, Mom. Both isn’t an option. They’re irreconcilable. Our kid is an actual person and therefore can’t be a character in a story. Penn thinks everything that’s wrong is just prelude to the magic, and one day soon, we’ll all get to forget what’s past and live happily ever after.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “Fantasies always do.”

  “Penn’s never been a realist, sweetie.”

  “Not being a realist doesn’t make reality go away,” Rosie shrilled. “The transformation on offer here isn’t magic. It isn’t instantaneous, and it isn’t painless. It’s years and years of frog kissing. It’s frog kissing for the rest of your life. It’s frog kissing with nasty side effects and unpredictable outcomes you can’t undo if you change your mind that results maybe in your being more princess and less scullery maid than before, but not quite in your being all princess and no scullery maid.”

  “What does Poppy say?”

  “Nothing.” The name was growing strange again to Rosie’s ears already. “Poppy’s gone, Mom. He wants to be Claude again.”

  “Wants to be?” Carmelo asked.

  “Wants to be. Has to be. Thinks he is. Thinks he should. Thinks he must. I don’t know.”

  “Have you asked her?”

  “Him,” Rosie corrected.

  “Have you asked?”

  “I’ve tried, Mom. He can’t tell me. Maybe he doesn’t know. He’s very sad.”

  “Isn’t that your answer then?” Carmelo wondered.

  “I don’t know either,” Rosie said, and then, softly, because she was trying to be an adult and not cry on the phone to her mother in the airport, “I’m very sad too.”

  Carmelo said nothing for a moment. Then she said, “What about elephant attacks?”

  “Elephant attacks?”

  “They have elephants in Thailand, dear, and they’re not repelled by DEET.”

  It seemed telling to Rosie that getting trampled by a five-ton animal came last on her mother’s list of concerns.

  But if she shared (some of) Carmelo’s worries, she was still finally going to Thailand, fulfilling a promise she’d made to her sister most of a lifetime ago. If she was unhappy about how she’d left things with Penn, about wanting, for the first time since they’d met, to be apart from him, she was still flying to far-off Asia with her youngest child. If she was worried about leaving the boys in their own precarious state, about choosing Claude over them again, about abandoning them to negotiate their daily lives without her for a little while, she was still road tripping with her baby. And if it wasn’t a road trip so much as transnavigated international journeying via hope, imagination, panic, and plane, that was also good, and she had learned over the years to take what she could get. She’d been dreaming of the trips she’d take with her daughter since her sister died, and if it wasn’t quite Poppy anymore and she came home with Claude instead, a prodigal son, well, it wouldn’t be the first time.

  Away

  The plane was cramped, freezing, and boring, the flight longer than long division, and nearly the moment he landed in Bangkok, Claude longed to be back aboard like the time he (well, Poppy) had fallen out of a whale-watching kayak into Puget Sound. On the plane he had personal space, cold soda of which his mother was apparently allowing him an unlimited amount, and a bathroom with toilet paper. And though the plane bathroom smelled like a bathroom, the rest of the plane did not smell like a bathroom. All of Bangkok smelled like a bathroom, none of it had toilet paper, and the temperature had been nice for about sixty seconds while the icicles from the airplane thawed off, and then he became as hot as he had ever been in his life, not hot like when he visited Carmy in Phoenix, hot like wet, like in a bathtub, like one minute he was dry and the next he had sweat shooting out of him in all directions like a spastic sprinkler.

  Claude was not remotely ready to rejoin the real world, but fortunately, Bangkok bore little resemblance to it. He tried to keep not caring about anything, but it was hard. The sidewalks were invisible, so full of people he could only guess there were sidewalks underneath them. The cars were all hot pink and gloss turquoise and neon green. The buses were multistory, like squat apartment buildings on wheels. Squadrons of scooters weaved in and out and between and around everyone like a plague of insects. The scooters had whole families piled on board, the dad wearing a helmet, t
he mom and the kids and the babies bareheaded and sandwiched in and looking unfazed by the heat or the smell or the fact that their dad didn’t care about their heads as much as his. When Claude stared at these sweaty families as they squeezed by his air-conditioned van, the kids would wave and smile at him, the moms and dads too. In fact, it seemed like everyone in Thailand wanted to look right into his eyes and smile at him. They wanted to ask if he was okay and if he was happy and if he needed anything. Yes, he needed extra strength air-conditioning, toilet paper, and some personal space. And helmets maybe for the little kids on the scooters.

  There were stray dogs everywhere who looked sweet but who his mother absolutely forbade him to touch, and since this was unlike his mother, he listened. There were malls that took up all four corners of the intersections, connected by hamster habitrails over the streets. There were whole restaurants right in the middle of the sidewalk that looked like hot-dog stands except they sold complicated noodle soups or fried bananas wrapped in puffy dough or a whole giant deep-fried fish sprinkled with millions of colorful toppings like a sundae. And there were little tables and seats right there in the middle of the sidewalk too, which made sense since you could eat a hot dog on the way to catch your bus but you couldn’t walk while eating soup or a fish sundae, but it meant you had to somehow weave your way around all the people and all the dogs and all the tables and chairs too.

  They spent the night on the nineteenth floor of a fancy hotel Claude was too tired to enjoy. (Like some kind of strange enchantment, two days had passed since they left home, but he hadn’t been to bed yet.) Then first thing the next morning they went with Ling, their guide, to a market to get supplies for the clinic. His mother seemed tired and overwhelmed and trying too hard. She kept fake laughing and making comments like, “Sweetie, look at those tubs of fish,” as if Poppy-the-ichthyologist would be cheered to see them twisting over and around one another, fighting to get under too little water, or “Mmm, smell those spices,” as if Claude-the-child-baker would be cheered by the rounded piles of curry big as basketballs, or “Oh wow! Giant bins of bugs!” as if anyone would be cheered by bins of bugs. As if they were on vacation having the time of their lives instead of running away from home. He let his mother hold his hand though because the market in Bangkok made the sidewalks in Bangkok seem deserted and because beneath his new sandals it was wet and slippery, a surface somewhere between ground and floor. Claude smelled dry blood and wet blood. He smelled sweating people and rotting fruit and mothballs. He smelled diesel because, impossibly, the scooters were allowed to drive right down the middle of aisles narrow as straws. There were pastel strands of sugar like night-fairy hair. There were small plastic bags filled with syrup, ice, and fruit, which people dangled by their handles and sipped through a straw. There were greens of every shade, shape, and size, including one that Ling explained was used to cure heartbreak. Claude wondered what it was about him that suggested he needed it. His mother smiled sadly at him and squeezed his hand but managed not to say anything out loud.