Parent time is like fairy time but real. It is magic without pixie dust and spells. It defies physics without bending the laws of time and space. It is that truism everyone offers but no one believes until after they have children: that time will actually speed, fleet enough to leave you jet-lagged and whiplashed and racing all at once. Your tiny, perfect baby nestles in your arms his first afternoon home, and then ten months later, he’s off to his senior year of high school. You give birth to twins so small and alike, they lie mirrored, each with a head in the palm of one hand while their toes reach only to the crooks of your elbows, but it’s only a year before they start looking at colleges. It is so impossible yet so universally experienced that magic is the only explanation. Except then there are also the excruciating rainy Sundays when the kids are whiny, bored, and beastly, and it takes a hundred hours to get from breakfast to bedtime, the long weekends when you wonder whose demonic idea it was to trap you in your home with your bevy of abominable children for a decade without school.
They were all of them, even Poppy, still little boys in Rosie’s eyes, never mind four-fifths of them were now eight-plus inches taller than she was with voices deep as wells. That was something she would explain to people about Poppy if she ever actually decided to explain to people about Poppy instead of keeping her a secret: your babies are always your babies. Roo and Ben were nearly six feet tall with limbs like giraffe legs and wingspans that augured flight. Fourteen-year-old Rigel appeared no more like baby Rigel, fourteen-year-old Orion like toddler Orion, than Poppy did like little Claude. But those tiny boys, those tiny bundles of baby, were right there before her every morning over breakfast and every evening over dinner and every time they woke up sick in the middle of the night or came home with some school miracle accomplished or ranged into moments of stumbling maturity. Poppy’s transformation, she would have told people, if she told people, was no more miraculous or astonishing or, frankly, absurd, than any of the others, nor any more apparent to her rainbow mama eyes. Parent time is magic: downtempo and supersonic all at once, witch’s time, sorcerer hours. Suddenly, while you aren’t paying attention, everything’s changed.
Poppy was about to start fourth grade, the twins ninth, Roo and Ben their junior years of high school. On the way to work, Rosie considered that she had only two more years with her whole tribe, and then she’d be down to three. She had only two more years—after a dozen of them—with a child in elementary school. Only two more Halloween parades. Only two more turkeys shaped like hands. She could scarcely imagine a holiday season without “Up on the Rooftop” stuck in her head, but she looked forward to trying it out. The weather was all turquoise sky, sunshine spread wide and warm like butter on new rolls, dappling shadows that somehow made clear it was the end of summer not the beginning, back to school not semester’s end.
They had a pediatrician of course. And a dentist. Jupiter had a vet, especially as her muzzle grayed and her hearing went and it took a full minute to get up from her bed for a walk. The twins had an orthodontist. Ben had an optometrist and an allergist. Roo had an orthopedist from the time he broke his wrist skiing the first winter after they moved, overconfident that his Wisconsin snow experience trumped his classmates’ rain, forgetting their Washington mountain experience trumped his Midwestern flat. Poppy, in the years to come, would have a whole host of ists and ologists. But Rosie and Penn stuck with Mr. Tongo.
They met with him online, rather than over the phone, so he could see their faces and they his and anything else he wanted to show them: to no one’s surprise, Mr. Tongo was a fan of the visual aid. He still favored his giant exercise balls over actual office chairs, and it gave Rosie and Penn the impression he was talking to them from a train, bouncing lightly up and down, rolling occasionally side to side. Then suddenly he would break off and rush about the room, in and out of the shot, on and off the screen, pulling books off shelves or models out of drawers or standing on the desk to make a point, even though that meant they could only see his shoes and the bottoms of his trousers.
This day, Rosie and Penn at first thought they’d clicked the wrong contact, for when they connected, the window opened onto what seemed to be a preschool classroom, pastel wooden alphabet blocks stacked into high-rises and skyscrapers, a city of wobbly block towers.
“Mr. Tongo?” Penn ventured.
No answer.
“Mr. Tongo,” Rosie called. All these years later, they still did not call him by his first name.
Still no answer.
“Is the Wi-Fi wonky?” Penn wondered. “Or maybe it’s a glitch on his end?”
“Disconnect and try again,” said Rosie.
Suddenly, they heard a roar. Godzilla lumbered into view. He lurched into one precarious building and another, turning all to ruin, before mounting one of the rubbled piles and facing the camera triumphantly. Around his neck hung a sign in Mr. Tongo’s neat block handwriting. It read: PUBERTY.
Godzilla was menacing enough until Mr. Tongo’s face loomed three times larger at his side looking ready to accept his Oscar nomination.
“Hi, Mr. Tongo,” Penn and Rosie chorused from somewhere between bemused and wary.
“It was me all along!” Mr. Tongo wiggled his plastic Godzilla as if they might need proof. “A monstrous welcome to us all.”
They smiled at him weakly. “How are you, Mr. Tongo?”
“Me? I’m wonderful. Delighted to be with you. Thrilled to see you both. So! Back to school. Such an exciting time. Quelles felicitations! Mazel tov!”
Penn found it remarkable that a dozen or so years of school was sufficient to keep everyone on an academic calendar for life so that even people like Mr. Tongo, who had no children, wished him a happy new year every September. It was as if those school years bred a nostalgia so deep into the cells that the body woke to it each fall as naturally as the squirrels in the park began their frenzied harvest, never mind the weather was still fine, the sun still gracing them all. “It’s very exciting,” he acknowledged, then added awkwardly, “thank you.”
“Most welcome, most welcome. So my friends, in honor of the new year, today I think it’s time we do a little after-school special: ‘Puberty Versus Blockers. A Love Story.’”
Rosie watched her eyebrows rise in the miniature window in the corner of her screen. “Oh, Mr. Tongo. Poppy’s only nine.” Had he lost count? “We’re years away yet. Years away.”
“Time flies like a banana, my dear.” His eyes actually twinkled. “When was the last time you two talked seriously about hormone blockers?”
Rosie recalled the Dueling Dinner with Marginny and Frank. They’d had squash soup to start, which meant it had been fall which meant it had been a year already. “It’s been a while,” Rosie admitted.
“Well, let’s do it!” Mr. Tongo clapped his hands together. “This is going to be fun!” Over the years, Penn’s brain had come to play, under Mr. Tongo’s promise of fun, the theme music from Jaws.
Rosie shook her head. “Puberty is later for natal males than natal females. It’s not time yet. It’s too early to be thinking about hormone blockers.”
“It’s too early to be taking them,” Mr. Tongo corrected gently. He was methodically bricking Puberty Godzilla into a prison of hormone blocks. “It’s exactly the right time to be thinking about them. You all have some tough decisions just ahead. Blockers, and for how long? Cross-sex hormones, and when? Surgeries, and which ones? All/some/none of the above? Hard stuff. Is Poppy worried about all this, do you think?”
“Not at all,” Rosie assured him.
But Mr. Tongo was not assured. “That’s what worries me. 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.”
Penn closed his eyes. He did know.
“Now, it’s so much better in so many ways. Claude was lucky. He came to you and said he wanted to wear a dress and said he wanted to be a girl, and you said okay, and you said you’d help, and you said it didn’t matter to you because you’d love him no matter what. So you grew out his hair and bought him a dress and moved across the country to a city on a sound: add water, instant girl. And that’s so wonderful for all of you. Except puberty is going to blindside Poppy. She doesn’t think of herself as a boy. You don’t think of her as a boy. Because she didn’t grow up hating it, because it’s never stood in the way of her being who she felt and you accepted she was, she’s totally normalized her penis. It doesn’t connote maleness for her. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just how she pees. But that’s about to change. And soon, long hair and a dress aren’t going to be enough to keep her a girl. You have to prepare her for that.”
“You’re saying we’ve done too good a job?” Rosie laughed, half joking.
But Mr. Tongo nodded. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. Rude, I know. It’s irritating when people tell you that you’re such good parents you’re failing your kid.”
Penn and Rosie looked at themselves looking overwhelmed and guilty, but Godzilla broke into a little dance.
“Cheer up, you two! Poppy’s not going to turn into a man overnight. Just start planting the seeds. Think about how you’ll talk to her about the changes—the beautiful, miraculous, to-be-celebrated changes—that come for all boys and girls as they get just a little older than she is now. You’d have to help your little girl turn into a woman under any circumstances. These are just a little more fun!”
* * *
At nine, fourteen, fourteen, sixteen, and seventeen, Penn’s brood wasn’t finished growing up, but they were finished with childhood—finishing anyway. They were getting ready to go off into the world, but it wasn’t therefore true that they didn’t listen to stories before bed anymore. They did. Some nights. Especially if they were camping or on vacation. Especially in the summer, when they were all likely to be out in the backyard around the fire pit after dark. But Poppy’s bedtime was earlier than the boys’, who had their own stories to tell to which their parents and their sister were not privy. So Penn and Poppy were often on their own for storytime.
Grumwald didn’t have a lot of friends anymore. He’d had to leave the ones he grew up with behind when he went Away, and he hadn’t made new ones. Princess Stephanie, on the other hand, had lots of girlfriends, but only Grumwald knew her secrets. For instance, her girlfriends didn’t know she became a fairy every night. They didn’t know she could fly and light stars. They thought her hair was neon green only because she was just that cool. She felt bad about lying to them, but she didn’t want to risk losing them by telling the truth. And it was easy. If she wore a T-shirt when they went swimming, if she always changed in the bathroom, they never saw her without a top on so her wings were hidden. If they went out for brunch instead of dinner and had book club during the day, no one thought it was strange she could never do anything in the evenings.
“She was in a book club?” said Poppy.
“Everyone’s in a book club.”
“Like with wine?” Poppy was intrigued.
“It’s not a book club if there isn’t wine.”
But then a scary thing started happening. Princess Stephanie started transforming into a night fairy without warning. She was at the mall shopping for shorts when one of her wings popped out suddenly, right in the middle of the day. She was in the dressing room at the time, luckily, but it made her nervous. Then, just when she’d convinced herself it was a weird one-time thing, she was at the coffee shop getting breakfast one morning when she realized the barista was staring at her in amazement, and no wonder—she was levitating. Not only had her wings unfolded at not yet eight thirty in the morning, she hadn’t even noticed. She spilled her latte, found her footing, and ran home crying. She was so scared she went to see the witch.
“Which witch?” Poppy giggled. “The one who was making Grumwald capture the night fairies?”
“The very same, which is why Grumwald was wary of her, but Princess Stephanie could tell that the witch wasn’t always friendly maybe (she was a witch after all) but she was smart. Stephanie could see that the witch had a lot to be cranky about—she was very old and had trouble getting around and most of her teeth were rotten, which must have made it hard to eat—but that didn’t mean she was unkind. Stephanie knew people didn’t usually ask witches for help, but she couldn’t think who better to turn to.”
“But the witch hated the night fairies,” said Poppy. “That’s why she was making Grumwald capture them.”
“Who better then,” Penn wondered, “to help her corral the night fairy within?”
And indeed, when she went to her, the witch was unfazed. “It happens to everyone,” she assured Princess Stephanie.
“It does?” Stephanie doubted it.
“Sure. Everyone’s someone else sometimes. Everyone transforms. Maybe not in quite the same way as you, but that’s sort of the point, the curse if you will. It happens to everyone but not to any two people in the same way, and no one likes it, no matter who’s waiting inside. The good news is I have beans.”
“I don’t cook,” said Stephanie.
“Not soup beans.” The witch thought damsels in distress should be quicker on the uptake. “Magic beans. I’ve got beans that will keep you from turning into a night fairy ever again.”
“Who will light the stars?”
“Who cares?” The witch shrugged. “Someone else’s problem.”
“What will I be at night then?”
“Just Princess Stephanie.” The witch grinned her awful brown witch teeth.
“But if I’m not a night fairy, who am I the princess of?”
“‘Of whom am I the princess?’” The witch was a bitch about grammar, but then she considered. “Huh. I guess if you’re not a night fairy, you can’t be a princess either. You’ll be Just Stephanie.”
Stephanie thought about this. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be Just Stephanie. On the one hand, it would certainly be simpler. On the other, what would the stars do without her? And besides, it was nice to be a princess. “Do you have beans that will control my wings just in the daytime? I’ll still be a night fairy and do the stars as long as I can keep my secret from my friends during the day.”
The witch sighed and rolled her eyes. Princesses were so demanding. But yes, she had those beans. And she felt for Princess Stephanie—it was different for her—so she handed them over. Stephanie went home, soaked them overnight, then turned them into hummus and ate it with carrot sticks for lunch the next day.
“Did it work?” said Poppy.
“It worked like a charm,” said Penn.
* * *
As soon as her parents’ lights went off, Aggie deployed her yardstick umbrella. Despite great advances in technology over the course of their childhoods, it would remain their communication device of choice. “Your brother’s in love with my sister.” She was talking before Poppy even had her window all the way open. “It’s gross.”
“Which one?”
“Do I have another sister? Cayenne. Duh.”
“Which brother?”
“Who knows? One of them. All of them. Her phone pings every five seconds, and she’s in there laughing her head off. Which one of your brothers is still up?”
“All of them probably. No one showed up for storytime but me.”
“What happened tonight?” Aggie followed the adventures of Grumwald and Princess Stephanie like a soap opera.
“Steph’s wings were popping out all over, but she didn’t want anyone to know, so she went to the witch and got some magic beans. She made hummus, ate it, and felt better.”
“Weird,” said Aggie. “What do you think it means?”
“I dunno.” Poppy shrugged. “Something. There’s always some kind of secret message.”
Aggie considered the matter. “I think your dad wants us to know it’s okay to do drugs. And not tell anyone about it.” Improbable though it seemed, Agatha Granderson grew up and eventually became a professor of literary studies at the University of California at Berkeley. She had a gift for textual metaphor. “Fourth grade is going to be so great!”