It didn’t seem like the person in Rosie and Penn’s life to whom they would be most grateful would be a six-year-old, but that’s what happened anyway. Every day, they gave silent, ecstatic thanks for Aggie Granderson. For starters, she made everyone crazy. There are few children more treasured than ill-behaved ones who belong to someone else. They had five, but Aggie was louder. They all woke up one morning before dawn to Aggie, inside and next door, banging cymbals and scream-singing, “Yankee Doodle went to town riding on a donkey/Stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaronkey” at the top of her six-year-old lungs. Penn smiled sleepily at his wife.
“What are you so happy about?” Rosie groaned.
“Two words,” said Penn. “Not. Ours.”
They had five, but Aggie was wilder. Somehow when she was over, bowls of popcorn defenestrated, whole boxes of cereal were accidentally fed to, then extruded by, the dog, potted plants sprouted lamp cords, crudités, and, once, the business end of a rectal thermometer.
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.
And better than all those wonders, she lived next door. Poppy and Aggie were in and out of each other’s houses all weekend long. Penn came to greet the sight of Aggie at his dinner table as no more or less surprising than any of his other kids. Rosie started to habitually buy six of anything she was only planning to buy five of. Any given load of laundry was likely to have as many of Aggie’s clothes in it as Poppy’s. And because Aggie lived not just nearby, but very nearby, it was eleven months before Poppy proposed an overnight her parents couldn’t wriggle out of.
“Can we have a sleepover?” the girls would chorus, and Penn would answer, “You can’t bring all your stuffies to Aggie’s, and if you pick and choose, some will have their feelings hurt. Wouldn’t it be better just to sleep at home tonight and keep peace in the Stuffie Kingdom?”
Or Rosie would say, “The extra sheets are in the wash. How about Aggie just comes back first thing in the morning?”
Or Marginny would show up in slippers after dark with a sleepy-looking Poppy, explaining, “We just thought the girls would have more fun hiking tomorrow if they both got a good night’s sleep in their own beds tonight.”
But a sleepover—and with her new friends Natalie and Kim too, not just Aggie—was the only thing Poppy wanted for her seventh birthday. She wanted a sleepover plus baked brie, pimento cheese sandwiches, spicy tuna rolls, Doritos, ginger ale, and, of course, cake and ice cream, plus a pass on all fruits and vegetables for a thirty-six-hour period to include the whole of her birthday plus half the next day as well. Rosie and Penn found they could not reasonably object to any of that. A girl has only one seventh birthday, after all.
They didn’t want to scare her, but they wanted her to be prepared. They didn’t want to make her feel unsafe, but they wanted to protect her. They didn’t want to suggest to her that her body needed hiding. But unfortunately it did.
“Where will you change into PJs?” Rosie asked, lightly, while hanging streamers, as if this question were no more or less significant than what kind of frosting Poppy wanted on her cake.
“I dunno,” said Poppy. “Can we do a craft too?”
“Sure,” said Rosie. “How about the bathroom?”
“For the craft?”
“How about you change in the bathroom?”
“A bathroom craft would be awesome. Like those crayons you use in the tub. Or toilet decorating.”
“I just think … you know girls at sleepovers often … I think Kim and Natalie and Aggie might want to change out of their clothes and into their PJs right in your turret, so I’m just a little worried that…” What? What was she just a little worried that? Probably the girls would pull nightgowns or pajamas on over their underwear, right? They might even fall asleep in their clothes if she was lucky. Still, she’d seen what came from not having a plan, and she wanted to be prepared. “You could just say you’re shy.”
“I’m not shy.”
“But I mean to explain why you have to change alone in the bathroom.”
Poppy looked up from her crepe-paper bows for the first time. “I have to be alone?”
“Well, because your friends don’t know … you know … quite who you are.”
“Who I am?”
“I mean they know you, of course, but they don’t know. You know?”
Poppy looked confused. “Are you being silly, Mama?” She concluded her mother was just teasing her and broke into a huge almost-seven-year-old smile. “Don’t worry. This is going to be the best sleepover ever.”
But Rosie worried anyway. “What are we going to do?” She was whipping green cream-cheese frosting, as instructed.
“See how it plays out?” Penn guessed.
She pointed a whisk at him. “You’re the one who wants to keep this thing a secret.”
“I don’t want to keep this thing a secret. We have all, prudently, agreed to this approach for this moment. For good reasons.”
“But it’s like she didn’t even know what I was talking about. It’s like she’s forgotten she’s really a boy.”
“She’s not really a boy.”
“Yes, right, I know, I know. But you know what I mean. It’s like she’s forgotten she has a penis.”
“When you own a penis”—Penn glanced down at his authoritatively—“you never forget.”
“She’s forgotten that a penis isn’t what she’s supposed to have,” Rosie persisted. Maybe she couldn’t quite articulate it, but she knew the point was valid. “She’s forgotten her friends have—and are expecting—something else.”
Rosie had taken to trying to walk around naked more, but it was hard. For one thing, there was the mob of teenage boys in her house. For another, there were the neighbors. The problem was the kids saw each other naked all the time, changing in and out of swimsuits and sports gear and school clothes and pajamas, and Poppy therefore had the impression that she was totally normal. Everyone had toes. Everyone had elbows. Everyone had a penis. Maybe it lacked subtlety, but Rosie thought “show don’t tell” was the best way to disabuse Poppy of this last point. She sat in the bath until her fingers wrinkled into origami so that she could be getting out of it just when Poppy wandered in looking for glue sticks. She threw her workout clothes in the wash with the towels then changed for yoga right when Poppy was gathering supplies for the beach. It was weird—not to mention chilly—but how better, in a houseful of penises, to show Poppy that while there was nothing wrong with her body, for a girl it was pretty unusual? But it seemed not to make an impression. Very nearly seven-year-old Poppy’s body looked no more like adult Penn’s than adult Rosie’s when you got right down to it. She was grateful, really, that Poppy didn’t understand. But she was also panicked, really, that Poppy didn’t understand.
It was a torturous evening. It was worse, in fact, than the one it commemorated, Poppy’s first sleepover, its anguished waiting escalating in intensity the longer it went on, proving altogether more painful than Rosie’s quick final labor. The girls started with the baked brie and the Doritos, ignoring Penn’s neat baguette slices and scooping up fancy French cheese with neon orange triangles instead. Rosie, anxious to get on with things already, tried to serve the (such that it was) main course then, but Penn pointed out it was only four thirty, and Poppy whined, “Mom, we have so much to do.” They all four whirled up to her turret while Rosie cursed the stairs: she couldn’t hear what they were doing up there by pressing her ear to the door at the bottom of them. Lots of giggling. Lots of high-pitched joy. They came down and watched The Sound of Music. They wanted to make clothes out of the curtains, but Penn steered them toward marshmallow monsters—Poppy’s chosen craft—instead. More marshmallows turned into snacks than into monsters. Then Poppy opened presents, and then she consented to dinner: the sandwiches and sushi. Rigel and Orion did a magic show with a set they’d gotten several birthdays ago, supplemented by an actual hacksaw and a chocolate rabbit they did indeed saw in half and manage to reattach by licking the edges until they were sufficiently sticky. The girls giggled. Roo and Ben stayed in their basement and pretended none of the rest of them existed. Penn blew up a bunch of balloons for a lawless, anarchic game of balloon tag. And Rosie fretted.
They called the older boys up for singing, cake, and ice cream. It was her first all-girls birthday, and Rosie was pleasantly surprised to see them actually sit and eat, quietly if not neatly, which would have been nice except she still had her own brood to contend with. Rigel balanced a piece of cake on the top hat Orion was wearing, which slid off onto Roo’s plate, which splattered ice cream onto Rigel’s present: orange knit party hats that looked to Rosie like yarmulkes. The twins held each other’s necks in the crooks of their elbows and rolled around on the kitchen floor for a bit, spreading dropped cake and ice cream into every corner and whipping Jupiter into a frenzy of barking and alarm. Rosie envied the dog, for whom it was socially acceptable to walk around whining ceaselessly when she was feeling anxious.
When the girls started yawning, Penn lightly suggested it might be time to start thinking about getting ready for bed. Rosie wasn’t ready yet. She felt like she was breathing very quickly all of a sudden. She tried to look nonchalant while the girls trundled upstairs. Then she raced for the turret steps like an about-to-be-sawed-in-half chocolate rabbit. She climbed the stairs as quietly as she could, stopping halfway up, like Christopher Robin, trying not to pant and give herself away. She heard bags unzipping, kicked-off shoes whacking into the molding, clothes being shed, soft exclamation over Kim’s Seattle Storm pajamas and Natalie’s slippers shaped like bear feet. She strained but could not hear whether or not underwear was being removed. Why couldn’t underpants be louder? She heard Poppy’s dresser drawers open and shut, open and shut again. Suddenly, Poppy was walking back toward the stairs.
Rosie cursed and ran full-tilt into her room where she flung herself onto the bed. Penn was already there, legs crossed at the ankle, one arm behind his head, the other holding the book he was reading. He looked quite pleased with himself.
“One thousand in unmarked bills and you wear that worn-through Brewers T-shirt to bed for a week, and your secret’s safe with me,” he told Rosie out of the side of his mouth as Poppy walked into the room.
“I can’t find any of my nightgowns,” Poppy said.
“I think they’re all in the dryer, sweetie.” Penn smiled the smile of the innocent.
Poppy wandered off to the laundry room and came back two minutes later in her flamingo nightgown. “Thanks, Daddy.”
“Sure, baby. What’d you do with your clothes?”
“Left them in a pile on the floor,” she admitted, then brightened, “but it’s my birthday.”
“Then you get a pass.” He kissed her good night. “Have fun up there. Don’t stay up too late, or you’ll be too tired for Mickey Mouse pancakes in the morning.”
Poppy raced upstairs to start year number seven.
“Thank you,” Rosie breathed. She closed her eyes. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“No problem,” said Penn. “You get a pass too.”
And she thought: just that simple. And she thought: problem solved. But the problem was just beginning.
* * *
Rosie imagined she’d have a year—until Poppy turned eight—to recover, but Poppy and Aggie had discovered sleepovers to be even better than their chapter books purported. Having broken the parental seal, they could no longer be deterred. Rosie’s reprieve lasted all of a week, and this time was worse because this time was at Aggie’s house. At Aggie’s house, Penn couldn’t spirit all Poppy’s sleepwear into the laundry, not that that was likely to work again at home either. At Aggie’s house, Rosie couldn’t barge in if necessary with some absurd but (alas) believable motherly bullshit like “At our house, we change in private.”
Rosie wondered if it was too late to invoke a rule that Friday was the Sabbath and they should all go to shul rather than attend sleepovers. Penn thought it probably was. In fact, Penn had a whole different point, which was that Rigel and Orion were going to the movies with Larry and Harry, Ben was playing miniature golf with the rest of the debate team, and Roo was highly unlikely to emerge from the basement under any circumstances. If Poppy were sleeping next door, they’d essentially have the house to themselves for the night, and since Rosie was walking around strategically naked all the time, he had some thoughts as to what they might do with it.
While Penn made this case and Rosie panicked, Poppy packed. The fact that she was going just next door didn’t mean packing wasn’t part of the ritual. Poppy packed Alice and Miss Marple. She packed two games, a bottle of green glitter toenail polish, and a bag of Orion’s costumes in case they wanted to play dress-up. To this modest assemblage, Rosie added a pair of underwear, a skirt, a T-shirt, a nightgown, and a toothbrush with the weepy foreboding of a mother sending a soldier off to war.
She sat Poppy down on her bed then kneeled at her feet. This time, she was a little better prepared. “When you change into your nightgown tonight, baby, you need to do it somewhere private. You know?”
“Yeah?” Poppy didn’t sound sure.
“Sweetheart, Aggie doesn’t know you have a penis, and she would probably be really confused to see it, so you either have to tell her or just excuse yourself and go into the bathroom and change.”
“Okay,” said Poppy.
“Which?”
“Which what?”
“Which do you prefer? Should we tell Aggie? She’s such a good friend, baby. You could tell her, and then she’d know, and everything would be fine. You could decide to tell other friends too, or if you told Aggie not to tell anyone else, you know she wouldn’t.”
“What about Nicky?” Barely a whisper.
“Nicky?”
“Remember how Nicky used to be my best friend and then he found out about me, and he was so grossed out he tried to shoot Daddy?”
Rosie rocked back on her heels and waited for the breath to return to her lungs. How had Poppy’s memory twisted that story into this? And when? How long had she been carrying this version around? “Oh, sweetheart, no. Nicky was your friend. He was little, but he loved you in his way. It was his father who didn’t understand. Nicky didn’t try to shoot Daddy. Nicky’s daddy didn’t even try to shoot Daddy.”
“But after he found out, he didn’t want to be my friend anymore.”
Rosie nodded and said nothing. This wasn’t entirely untrue. And what was true was probably even harder to understand.
“What if Aggie doesn’t want to be my friend when she finds out I’m really a boy?”
“Are you really a boy?” Rosie asked gently.
“No.” The first sure thing out of Poppy’s mouth so far. “I’m not, Mama.”
“No, you’re not. So Aggie won’t think that. We can explain it to her anytime. We can go over right now and tell Aggie together what a wonderful, brave, amazing little girl you are.”
“I don’t want her to think there’s anything weird about me.”
“Why?” said Rosie. “There’s plenty that’s weird about her.”
“Exactly,” said Poppy. “She’s the weird one. I’m the normal one. That’s the way we like it.”
Late that night, after a movie and a skit and toenail painting and LEGO building and thirty-six rounds of Hangman, Aggie took off every stitch of clothing she had on, wandered around naked looking for something she might wear to bed, and eventually donned, commando, a four-sizes-too-big swimsuit cover-up of Cayenne’s. Poppy took her nightgown out of her bag, balled it up in her arms, and headed toward the bathroom.
“You can just change in here,” Aggie assured her. “I’m not embarrassed.”
“Oh,” said Poppy. “Thanks.”
“Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Embarrassed?”
“No. But … Roverella’s watching me.” Roverella was Aggie’s family’s six-pound Chihuahua. Penn called it a hamster. It followed Aggie everywhere.
Aggie giggled. “Roverella is a watchdog. She watches everything. She loves to see people in their nudies, so I guess you better change in the bathroom.”
Poppy went off, relieved and pleased with herself. It was years before it struck Aggie as strange that someone would be embarrassed to change in front of a dog.