As with so many things, this needed only a name to become real. A name and more hair. Mr. Tongo reported that lots of parents of kids like Claude went to court to change birth certificates and seal records, that lots of kids like Poppy switched schools so they could start over where no one knew who they really were so they could be, instead, who they really were. All that felt unnecessarily drastic to Rosie though because at this age, best she could tell, hair was all. Children with short hair were boys; children with long hair were girls. A penis-bearing child wanting to be a girl had only to name himself after his late aunt and grow his hair out for the transformation to be complete. She had, she figured, three, maybe four inches before Claude’s hair grew over his ears and she lost him, possibly forever. She would have, at last, the Poppy she’d always dreamed of. She just wasn’t ready yet.
They were stared at in restaurants though, at a table for seven, that had always been true. But she and Claude, running errands just the two of them, were stared at at the mall and the grocery store and the library too, and that was new. In those early days, with not-grown-out-yet hair, Claude still looked like a boy in a dress. Some fellow shoppers smiled at Rosie with admiration or maybe pity or maybe just empathy. (So they did not themselves have a little boy who wanted to be a girl; they were parents too, and it was always something.) But many frowned at her with undisguised disapproval. Some said to Poppy, “Don’t you look fancy?” or, “What a pretty dress,” or, heartfelt to Rosie, “What a beautiful child.” But others said loudly to each other as they passed, “Was that a boy or a girl?” or, “How do you let your kid do that?” or, “That mother should be shot.”
By April though, Claude was gone, and Poppy, hair finally grown past his ears into a short but inarguable pixie cut, had taken over. His self-portraits became solo affairs: only Poppy, not his whole family, Poppy in a golden ball gown, Poppy in a purple tiara with matching purple superhero cape, Poppy wearing flip-flops, yoga pants, and a sports bra, sitting in full lotus, grinning enlightenment off the page. He came down to breakfast every morning bubbling over, grinning before his feet hit the kitchen, laughing with his brothers, soaring really, and it was only then his parents realized just how sullen mornings had been when having to change out of the breakfast dress before school had been hanging over Claude’s oatmeal. He used the nurse’s bathroom. He made himself—and his brothers—sunflower-butter sandwiches, which was all it took to win the unflagging love of Miss Appleton.
Rosie and Penn were slower to adjust. They say it is what you never imagine can be lost that is hardest to live without. Rosie had always assumed this referred to postapocalyptic scenarios where what you had to live without was power or water or Wi-Fi, but in fact, it was deeper sown than that. It reminded Penn of the French toddlers whose family had rented the house next door the summer he was sixteen. It was très irritant how much better French they spoke than he did, and it was even beaucoup plus irritant that they remembered, without even trying, which nouns were masculine and which were feminine when he could not, even though he’d spent a thousand hours studying and they weren’t even potty trained yet. Now his whole life was like that. Sometimes he called Poppy “he” and sometimes “she.” Sometimes he called Roo and Ben and Rigel and Orion “he” and sometimes “she.” Sometimes he called Roo “Ben” (wrong kid) or “Rufus” (wrong name) or “Rude” (not a name at all though, increasingly, not necessarily untrue either). Sometimes he called Rosie “he.” Once he introduced her at a party as his husband. He called the mailman “she.” He called the guy who fixed the brakes on the van “she.” He called the newspaper “she.” Neither Claude nor Poppy seemed bothered one way or the other, but Penn felt something essential in his brain had been severed. Whatever link you got for free that picked the appropriate pronoun whenever one was called for was permanently decoupled, and suddenly Penn’s mother tongue was foreign.
They all went to Phoenix for spring break. Poppy went to the mall with his grandmother, shared cinnamon pretzels in the food court, and threw pennies into the fountain to make a wish. He wished everything would always stay exactly like this because suddenly, for the first time in either of his lives, all the kids wanted to be his friend. Shy, all-alone Claude was replaced by laughing, gregarious Poppy, who saved his allowance to buy a fairy calendar on which he recorded all the requests he got for playdates.
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?
“Gun-toting?” said Penn.
“Or something,” said Rosie.
“I think you’re worrying prematurely.”
“If you don’t worry about something until it’s already a problem,” said Rosie, “that’s not worry. That’s observation.”
The little girls who invited Poppy over had pink rooms and pink LEGOs and pink comforters over pink sheets on their pink beds. They had crates—actual crates!—of tutus and high heels and dress-up clothes, stuffed animals who themselves wore tutus and high heels and dress-up clothes, Barbies and clothes for the Barbies, jewelry, nail polish, fairies, and baby dolls. They liked to draw and trade stickers. They liked to put their stuffies in strollers and give them a bottle and push them around the block. They liked to have a lemonade stand. They liked to chase each other around the house but in tutus and high heels, and when they caught you at the end, they just hugged you and giggled and laughed together instead of making a big thing about who was a loser and sitting on your head and farting. Poppy could not understand why everyone in the whole world didn’t want to be a girl.
Rosie was starting to have the same question. She was used to picking children up from playdates with bruised elbows and scraped shins, torn pants and reports of broken things and borderline behavior. She wasn’t used to her youngest having playdates at all, never mind coming home from them all smiles, suffused with quiet, almost private, joy. The moms would beam at Rosie. “She’s such a good girl.”
“Who?” Rosie asked the first time.
“She’s welcome anytime. She’s so well behaved.”
Or they would lay a hand on her arm and say, “You’re so brave,” or “You’re such a good mother. You’re doing so well with all this.” Rosie appreciated the support but wasn’t sure parenting ever really qualified as brave—or maybe it always did—because it’s not like you had a choice. But what she would have chosen, she got too. Poppy’s hair was still short, but not short enough to prevent Rosie from plaiting two little braids every morning, one on each side, which Poppy tucked happily behind his ears.
Some playdates went less well. Rosie and Penn kept a no-fly list of kids with whom Poppy could not play again. One playdate ended when Poppy and the other little girl were playing princesses, and the dad made a dirty joke about drag queens. That family went on the list. One mom peppered Rosie with questions every time they ran into each other on the playground after school as to the process of physically turning Claude into Poppy, which Penn wanted to excuse on the grounds that she was showing interest but which Rosie saw for what it was: impudent nosiness. Another family went on the list when Penn went to pick Poppy up and the mom and dad tag-teamed him to explain, politely, that God did not make mistakes, and since God had given Poppy a penis, he and Rosie were interfering with God’s plan. “And that’s … bad?” Penn guessed. He also guessed that if that family kept their own list, his name had just gone on it.
Rosie tried not to let any of it get to her. She had too much to do without worrying about her kid’s friends’ parents’ ignorance. Her job wasn’t to educate them. Her job was just to raise her kid, all her kids. And work to feed them all. As she and Penn kept telling Poppy, you don’t have to like everyone. Find who’s fun and smart and safe, and stick with them.
Which approach worked just fine until Nicky Calcutti. Nicky was Claude’s one friend from before, and Nicky seemed a little perplexed, a little put off, by the change. He was a quiet kid, which was probably what Claude had liked about him. He was unassuming. He didn’t wrestle or chase. He didn’t always have to have his way loudly. Mostly, the boys played next to each other, like toddlers, and that was fine with both of them. He’d been over once, since, to play with Poppy and had murmured to Rigel, “I never had a playdate with a girl before,” to which Rigel had replied, “Oh it’s great. Their rooms smell way better.” But Nicky did not seem mollified.
“Maybe he’s taking this personally,” Penn guessed.
“Like Claude becoming Poppy is a failure of Nicky’s manhood?” said Rosie.
“Something like that.”
“He’s five.”
Five he may have been, but five turned out not to be too young to be offended or freaked out. Five turned out not to be too young for any number of sins. Rosie and Penn knew Nicky’s mom. After Claude’s announcement, she’d emailed Rosie to say she hoped the boys would still be friends. She asked if she could do anything to help. She promised peppermint ice cream—Claude’s favorite and Poppy’s as well—if Poppy would come over to play. Rosie dropped him off, stood in the door and chatted idly for a few minutes with Cindy Calcutti, and was in the art store buying supplies for a project Orion was doing about bats when her phone rang. Poppy was crying too hard to tell her what was wrong. Rosie was in her car and halfway to Nicky’s already before he even managed a wobbly, “Mom? Would you come get me?”
Cindy Calcutti and Nick Calcutti Sr. were separated. Rosie gathered this was a no-way-in-hell-are-we-getting-back-together separation rather than the let’s-take-some-space-and-work-it-out kind but, having a much better grasp than other people on what was and wasn’t her business, declined to pry. She knew that Cindy was jockeying for full custody by sharing irreproachably during this trial period. If it was Nick’s day with his son, Cindy did not say Nicky has a playdate. Cindy went and got a manicure and let her erstwhile husband supervise.
Rosie was close, but Penn was closer, so she called him from the car and sent him over. He was home with the boys, and though Roo and Ben were probably old enough, at twelve and thirteen, to babysit other people’s brothers, babysitting their own raised an entirely different set of issues. Penn piled them all into the van and pulled up at the Calcuttis’ mere moments before Rosie did. She had not, apparently, been obeying posted speed limits. Or stoplights.
Poppy opened the door before they made it up the walk and ran, sobbing and full-tilt, toward them all. He’d disappeared within a circle of brothers before Nick Sr. made it to the front door. He was much larger than Penn, whose only regret was that he could not therefore meet the man quite eye to eye.
“What on earth happened?” Rosie asked Nick, his son nowhere in evidence, hers having absorbed completely the other child who could answer that question.
“Your kid’s a faggot, that’s what happened,” said Nick Calcutti Sr.
Rosie turned on her heels and started back down the walk. She simply did not need to have this conversation with this man. He had managed, in one short sentence, to tell her everything she needed to know. But when she got back to Poppy and took him in her arms, he whispered, “He has a gun,” and then she could not in good conscience leave Nicky there.
“Everyone in the car,” she said, and turned to face down Nick Calcutti Sr. with her husband.
Nicky peeked out from behind his father’s legs. “Daddy says I’m not allowed to play with faggots, Mrs. Walsh. And I don’t want to anyway.”
Nick spit between his teeth. “What you do with your kid is your own damn business, but it’s disgusting, and you better keep it far away from my son. Seems to me what you’re doing is child abuse, and you should go to jail, but what do I know? Don’t make no difference to me as long as you keep far away from Nicky. See, this is what I keep telling Cindy. She needs a man around the house to prevent bullshit like this from going down.”
“Why does Poppy think you have a gun?” said Penn.
“’Cause I do.”
“How does he know that?”
“’Cause I don’t keep it hidden. Two things a man should have: this”— here, he cupped his crotch in his hand and shoved it in Rosie’s general direction—“and this”—at which he pulled back his flannel shirt to reveal a gun in a holster behind his right hip.
“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.”
Penn felt his brain flood with one desire only: to beat the shit out of this guy. That Penn was a lover not a fighter, a writer not a wrestler, seemed not to matter. Nor that he’d never been in a fistfight in his life. Nor that it was probably a bad idea to punch in the face a man whose face he couldn’t quite reach, its being several inches over his head, a face surrounded by forty extra pounds that Penn had not, a face backed up—as he’d been pointedly shown—by an actual gun. He tried to replace the vision of Nick’s bloody face with his own, Rosie looking down at it. He made himself imagine what Rosie would look like looking at him bleeding from a stomach wound in front of this asshole’s house.
In contrast, Rosie had seen men with guns before. She’d cleaned up their messes in the ER. She’d treated them around the handcuffs with which they were locked to their gurneys. She’d saved their lives so they could be transferred from hospital to jail, patient to prisoner. She was afraid of men with guns. But she was not cowed by them.
She dropped to a knee and peeked behind Nick Calcutti to his son. “Nicky, sweetie, are you okay?”
“Yeah?”
“When’s your mom getting home?”
“She said eleven thirty, but she doesn’t like to drive when her nails are wet.”
“Jesus Christ.” Nick Sr. was on to other complaints now. Forget his son’s transgender playmate, his wife’s manicure habit could not be more annoying. Then he came back to Penn, who remained an uncomfortably small number of inches from his chest. “I’ll thank you to get the hell off my property.”
Penn opened his mouth to reply, but Rosie beat him to it. “We’d like nothing more. But we’ll stay with Nicky until Cindy gets home.”
“You think I can’t take care of my own son?” Nick cut the few inches between his chest and Penn’s in half. “Coming from you, I take that as a compliment.”
“As you wish,” said Rosie.
“If you don’t get the fuck off my lawn,” Nick replied, “I’m calling the cops.”
“Please,” said Penn. “Please call the cops.”
Nick reached out with both hands and shoved Penn hard enough to knock him down. Maybe not hard enough. Maybe Penn was just surprised. Maybe Penn was just incredulous to find himself in a low-budget action film all of a sudden. Nick closed the gap he’d made between them by stepping up between Penn’s legs and standing over him. Rosie had taken out her phone and dialed the nine and the one in which tiny, tiny blink of time, Cindy pulled up, got out of her car, and came to understand what had transpired in an instant. It was not, unfortunately, her first time.
“Cindy, he has a gun,” said Rosie.
“I know.” Cindy’s eyes were on her husband, something more than rueful but nowhere close to fear. That’s when Rosie became angry. Cindy knew her husband had a gun, but she’d left Rosie’s child with him anyway. Cindy knew her husband was a sexist, bigoted asshole, and yet she’d gone to get her nails done. Cindy’s desire to play nicely in order to convince a judge to give her more time with her own child had put Rosie’s in significant danger. Rosie briefly wondered which was stronger: Nick Sr.’s loyalty to the mother of his son or Nick Sr.’s anger toward the mother of his son and how he might feel about Rosie borrowing his gun and shooting off one of Cindy’s newly lavender toes.
Penn stood and brushed himself off. Rosie could think of not a single thing more to say. She turned, taking Penn’s hand as she did so, and headed back toward the van. She’d have to come back later for her car, but she could not imagine getting into it alone right now nor operating it, hard as she was shaking, nor watching her family head home without her. Cindy ushered her own family into her house.
“Why do you let our son play with faggots and assholes?” Rosie heard Nick say just before the door closed.
In the van, her phone buzzed almost instantly with an email from Cindy. The subject line said “Sorry:(”
Rosie deleted it without reading.