Bedtime stories were a group activity. And because showing the pictures all around to everyone involved a great deal of squirming and shoving and pinching and pushing and get-outta-my-ways and he-farted-on-mes and you-got-to-look-longer-than-I-dids, Penn often resorted to telling stories rather than reading them. He had a magic book he read from. It was an empty spiral notebook. He showed the boys it was blank so that there was no clamoring to see. And then he read it to them. Like magic.
In all, a successful bedtime and an accomplishment on par with finishing a particularly difficult chapter or a tax return. It wasn't diagnosing a pulmonary embolism, but it was not unimpressive, and it allowed a pulmonary embolism to be diagnosed. It could not, unfortunately, be followed up by work or by house cleaning, dish doing, lunchbox packing, exercising, or any of the other things that needed doing. Bedtime could only be followed by TV. Or drinking. On the night Claude became—the fruition of which, of course, would only make bedtime worse—Penn thought both at once sounded best and gave it a good try but was asleep on the couch before he was very far into either one.
“Girls in fairy tales are losers,” said Roo.
“No they aren't,” said Claude.
“Yes they are. Not like losers. Losers. Girls in fairy tales are always losing stuff.”
“Nuh-uh,” said Claude.
“Yuh-huh. They lose their way in the woods or their shoe on the step or their hair even though they're in a tower with no door and their hair is like literally attached to their head.”
“Or their voice,” Ben put in. “Or their freedom or their family or their name. Or their identity. Like she can't be a mermaid anymore.”
“Or they lose being awake,” said Roo. “And then they just sleep and sleep and sleep. Boooring.”
Claude started crying. “A princess could do cool stuff. A princess could be better than Grumwald. She wouldn't have to sleep or lose her shoe.”
“You’re a scientist, Rosie. Women aren’t scientists. So that goes in the boy column. You’re a doctor—an ER doctor, not a girly one like pediatrician or gynecology. So that goes in the boy column too. Your so-called husband is a writer, an artist, and not the kind who makes money. The other kind. He cooks dinner—” [...].
“Why are you using the boys’ bathroom?”
“Because I'm a boy?”
She took another deep breath. “Then why are you wearing a dress?”
Claude was confused. They'd been through this. “I like to wear a dress.”
“Little boys do not wear dresses.” Miss Appleton tried to channel her usual patience. “Little girls wear dresses. If you are a little boy, you can't wear a dress. If you are a little girl, you have to use the nurse’s bathroom.”
“But little girls use the girls' bathroom,” said Claude.
“But you're not a little girl,” Miss Appleton said through her teeth.
“Meaning if he thinks he is a girl, he has gender dysphoria, and we will accommodate that. If he just wants to wear a dress, he is being disruptive and must wear normal clothes.”
“I’m not sure either Claude or I even understand the distinction you’re making up as you go along here,” said Penn.
“It’s confusing,” the district representative acknowledged, “for Miss Appleton and for the children and clearly also for Claude. No one knows how to treat this child. Do we say he or she? Does Claude line up with the boys or the girls? Why is his hair still short? Why hasn’t he change his name?”
“He cannot be all of the above in kindergarten, and he cannot be none of the above in kindergarten. In kindergarten, a child can only be a he or a she, a boy or a girl. Kindergartens are not set up for ambiguity.”
“Maybe they should be,” said Penn. “The world is an ambiguous place.”
“Not for a five-year-old. For a five-year-old, the world is very black and white. It’s fair or it’s unfair. It’s fun or its torture. There are not disgusting cookies. There are not delicious vegetables.”
“Poppy,” he said. “I want my new name to be Poppy.”
“Poppy?” Rosie whispered.
“Carmy says Jews name their babies after dead people they love. I never met Poppy, but I love her anyway.”
“You do?” Rosie was full of wonder.
“Yeah. Because she liked dolls. And because she was your favorite. I like dolls. And I want to be your favorite.”
“You are my favorite.” She nuzzled into his neck.
“Do you think Poppy is a good name?”
“I think Poppy is a perfect name.”
Rosie hated that calendar. Penn adored it. To Penn, it represented a triumph, difficult things overcome and implemented. Maybe the transition from Claude had been daunting and fraught, but here was Poppy, loved, friended, present, no longer disappearing off the page. He considered the calendar a hard-won trophy. To Rosie, it bespoke people's cloying, pandering, PC bullshit and a strange Poppy cachet. Having status, she warned Penn, was not the same as having friends. Maybe parents just wanted their kids to invite Poppy over so they could gossip to their own friends or make a big show of being open-minded and tolerant. Maybe the kids wanted to play with Poppy because they were curious about him rather than because they liked him. And what would they do about invitations to sleepovers? What would they do when these kids stopped being sweet little kindergarteners and started being hormone-crazed, mean-spirited, cruel-intentioned, peer-pressuring, pill-popping, gun-toting teenagers?
“Did you threaten him?” said Penn.
“Who?”
“Poppy.”
“Ain’t a him, friend.”
“Did you threaten our child?” Rosie did not want to get diverted into semantics and pronoun battles. There was something more at stake here.
“I told him we don't play with faggots, we don't play with girls, we don't play with boys dressed as girls, and he was no longer welcome in our home or anywhere near my kid—not at the park, not at school, not on the playground, nowhere.”
The instant after that Chad’s hand recoiled and then all of him. He stumbled up and back and away. His look in that moment wasn’t anger. It was pain. He was hurt. That she’d lied? That she’d tricked him? That he’d liked someone—something—as disgusting as she was? Maybe he was hurt that he’d lost her. Maybe he didn’t have to. She reached out to explain. The words on her lips were, “I’m…” What? I’m sorry? I’m Jane? I’m not what you think?
But she didn’t get them out. Whereas every moment leading up to this one this night stood crystalline and perfect, what happened next was a blur. He hit her across the mouth. He hit her face. He called out and lights went on in the house and guys came, guys arrived, one after another. They laughed. They yelled. They spit. They pushed her to the ground. They kicked her. She struggled. She fought back. She was strong. She had a single moment—just one—where she thought: I’m as strong as you are. One of them, maybe, but all of them together, no. Still, they must have been scared of her because feet turned to fists, and then someone pulled the knife out of the spent watermelon.
Later, when the whole story came out, or as much of it as could be pieced together, it turned out it was Chad who'd gotten the gun, that having kicked off what quickly got out of control, he couldn't get his fraternity brothers off Jane Doe. He screamed and pulled at the backs of their shirts and tried to push them off her and away, but they wouldn't listen anymore, couldn't listen anymore, and so he'd gone into the house and into the room of a brother he knew kept a handgun in his nightstand. He'd meant to fire it into the air or something to get everyone's attention, but he missed. It was his first time with a gun. An inch to the left, and it would have been over instantly. He’d very nearly killed Jane Doe. He'd very nearly killed her anyway. He'd also very nearly saved her life. But not quite.
“Well, it certainly doesn’t sound like any else’s business, does it? Don’t think of Poppy as Claude under wraps. Think of Poppy as girl with a penis, a girl with an unusual medical history. Do you usually discuss what’s in children’s pants with the other moms on the playground?”
They had four and a half boys, plus Penn, but in some ways, Aggie was maler than any of them. She was a girl who dug holes and ran hard and liked bugs and all that other tomboy shit, but it was more—or maybe less—than that. She'd dismantle toy trucks to build spaceships to fly dolls to day spas built inside killer volcanoes. You just couldn't nail the kid down.
“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.”
“You know, it used to be there were no transgender kids. Your son would come to you in a dress, and you'd say, ‘No son of mine!’ or ‘Boys don't wear dresses!’ and that would be the end of it. That kid would grow up, and if he made it through childhood and if he made it through puberty and if he made it through young adulthood, maybe, if he were lucky, he’d eventually find his way to a community of people who understood what no one ever had, and he would slowly change his clothes and hair, and he would slowly change his name and pronouns, and he would slowly test the waters of being female, and over years and decades, he might become a she. Or he might kill himself long before he got there. The rate of suicide for these kids is over forty percent, you know.”
“The rest of us manage to balance work and family.” He wasn't yelling; he was scolding, which was worse. “It's not fair that we should suffer because you are incapable of doing so.”
Rosie rolled her eyes. “How are you suffering, Howie?”
“I have to recap Monday Morning Meeting before I've even gotten through it. And I have to take shit if you're asked to do one thing outside seeing patients.”
“I'm pretty sure I'm the one taking shit, but I'll be in charge of breakfast again.”
“Attagirl.”
“I’m not a girl.”
Ben was a smart guy, yes, with an off-the-charts IQ and a double-stacked bookcase, but he was still sixteen. And he'd been patient for a very long time. That and he saw something his parents did not, which was that when something was this significant, this consequential, you didn’t keep it from someone you loved, even if that someone was Cayenne Granderson.
“I don’t want anything. I want . . . I only want to do whatever’s best for her.”
“Me too. Of course mc 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 nice place to be,” Rosie admitted, “but it’s not real.”
“Sure it is,” said Penn. But Rosic rolled over and went to sleep.
“Listen Rosie, I know you've got some shit going on at home. I don't want to bust your balls. But you're just not pulling your weight around here.”
“Howie, how am I not pulling my weight around here? I keep thirty-five appointment hours every week, same as you. I maintain emergency appointment slots and on-call hours, same as you. My patient load is full, same as yours.”
“How can you say you’re keeping thirty-five patient hours every week? You've cancelled all your appointments since Monday.”
“Once. One week. This week I've had to cancel appointments—all of which have been rescheduled, and for each of which will I carve out time. In the four years I've been working here, this is the first time I've had to reschedule more than a day's worth of appointments. People get sick, Howie, people's families get sick, even doctors’. That's why we have sick leave and personal leave and family leave.”
“Is that what's happened this week? Sick kid?”
Rosie nodded but failed to elaborate.
“Penn can't take care of this? He doesn't even work.”
“I thought maybe it would be like when you do an experiment in science and you make it so the results are fair.”
Penn's eyebrows reached for each other. “Blind?”
“I thought since they were little kids and they never met me before if they could tell I was a boy I must be a boy, but if they thought I was a girl, then maybe...”
But Claude felt better. He realized this was what his father had been up to all these years, not entertaining his children but perfecting his world. If you wrote your own characters, they didn’t disappoint you like real people did. If you told your own story you got to pick your ending. Just being yourself never worked, but if you made yourself up, you got to be exactly who you knew yourself to be.
“Very shelter life in palace so ignorant of poverty, sickness, old age, death. Then he go out into world and learn. Then he help. That is important part. Once he learn, he listen and tell, he help. He leave family, leave palace, leave being a prince.” Rosie nodded along. This part sounded familiar. “He learn about the world and the people. He meditate to learn to be. He give up all food and water and house, but then his body too loud to achieve peace so he learn again: too little as bad as too much. He teach, tell his story, help people see truth. He say be kind and forgive, honest and share. He say everything change so okay. He say middle way. He enlighten. That is the story. Learn mistake and fix and tell. Not-knowing to knowing. Even the Buddha You see?”
What was clear, however, was that the Buddha was born male, then cut off all his hair one day and got enlightened, then ended up looking like a girl. And as if that weren’t enough, the Buddha also seemed to feel that even things as unalterable as bodies were temporary, and what mattered was if you were good and honest, and forgiveness solved everything. That was how, whatever else they were, Claude and Poppy became Buddhists for life.
“Betwixt?” Grumwald was skeptical. “Isn't betwixt just a witchy way of saying in between?”
“Betwixt is more complex, more twisted threads, more layers than in between.” She smiled at him through rheumy eyes. “Betwixt a Prince and a night fairy is neither-nor as much as both-and. You see? Something new. Something more. Something better.”
“You have to tell. It can’t be a secret. Secrets make everyone alone. Secrets lead to panic like that night at the restaurant. When you keep it a secret, you get hysterical. You get to thinking you’re the only one there is who’s like you, who’s both and neither and betwixt, who forges a path every day between selves, but that's not so. When you're alone keeping secrets, you get fear. When you tell, you get magic. Twice.”
“Twice?”
“You find out you're not alone. And so does everyone else. That’s how everything gets better. You share your secret, and I'll do the rest. You share your secret, and you change the world.”
