“No, it’s the opposite.” Her daughter shook her head happily. “It’s like they know exactly.”
Poppy would have been asleep a minute later except there was a tap-tap-tapping behind her blinds. She opened them to see Aggie leaning out her own window to poke at Poppy’s with a yardstick duct taped to the end of an umbrella. Their hill was so steep that Aggie’s second-floor window looked out over the roof of most of Poppy’s house, but Poppy’s turret put them feet from each other.
“Hi.” Aggie grinned.
“Hi.” Poppy rubbed her eyes, maybe because she was sleepy or maybe because she couldn’t believe luck as magical as this.
“I’m so glad you moved here. We can be rival princesses in neighboring castles.” Aggie had been waiting a long time for someone sufficiently royal to move in next door. The previous occupants had been an elderly couple who used the turret for storage. “We can climb up and down each other’s hair.”
“We can pass notes and letters,” Poppy wonder-whispered, “and spells.”
“Or cupcakes,” said Aggie. “Like if you earn dessert and I don’t.”
“We can trade books and dolls and cool rocks we find and pictures we draw back and forth.”
“We can tell secrets,” said Aggie. “We can tell each other things we can’t tell anyone else in the whole world. Up here, no one will ever know.”
Poppy went to bed tingling with happiness, ecstatic with impatience. She wondered how long she would have to wait before she had something secret to tell.
Everyone Who?
Mr. Tongo’s point was a little more on the nose: “It doesn’t smell like anyone else’s business.”
Rosie had been sorry to leave her colleagues in the ER. She’d been sorry to leave her mentors and her residents, the nurses and the attendings, the place that had made her a doctor, and her home for so many years, but it was Mr. Tongo, with his peculiar wisdom and quirky comfort, to whom it was somehow hardest to say goodbye. Then, at her farewell party, he’d reminded her that he wasn’t officially her therapist or her social worker but in fact her friend, and this meant he could be in Seattle whenever she needed him.
“Teleportation?” Rosie put nothing past Mr. Tongo.
“Telephone.” He winked. “It’s only nineteenth-century technology, but it’s more effective because it’s not pretend.”
Three weeks later, not even fully unpacked yet, she’d called him. Their life felt unfolded, a cardboard box they’d broken down and flattened back to a plain square then refolded into something unrecognizable. Rosie needed a voice of reason, no matter how unreasonable. And that was what he said: “It doesn’t smell like anyone else’s business.”
“Smell like?”
“Well, it certainly doesn’t sound like anyone else’s business, does it? Don’t think of Poppy as Claude under wraps. Think of Poppy as a 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?”
“Not usually, no.”
“And it doesn’t feel like anyone else’s business either, right? That’s your point. That it feels odd and awkward to tell.”
“Right but—”
“So I’m sniffing around, and it doesn’t have that whiff of Things We Share either.” Mr. Tongo made snuffling noises on the other end of the line to show that he was on the scent. “We discuss a lot of intimate things with our friends, but our genitals, and those of our children, are private. Many of my patients and clients—kids as well as their parents, people dealing with a whole range of conditions, not just this one—find they don’t want to explain themselves every time they meet someone new. They don’t want to be responsible for educating everyone they meet. They don’t consider what’s in their pants to be any of anyone else’s business.”
“I guess not but—”
“You have lots of opportunities there you never had in Wisconsin. You could go a whole winter without shoveling your walk. You could drink a cup of coffee that would occasion tears of joy. If you shed them out of doors in February, they would not freeze on your cheeks. What fun! And Poppy doesn’t have to be Poppy Who Used to Be Claude. She can be Just Poppy.”
“But people need to know.”
“Who does?
“Everyone.”
“Oh yes, I see,” said Mr. Tongo. “Everyone who?”
“Her teachers. The school nurse. The parents of her playdates. Her soccer coach. Her ballet instructor. Our friends. Their kids. The boys’ friends. The parents of the boys’ friends—”
“Why?” Mr. Tongo wondered.
“Why?”
“Yes, why do all those people need to know? What’s likely to happen at school that Poppy’s penis would make a difference to her first-grade teacher or the school nurse? What kind of playdates is this six-year-old going on that her friends’ parents need her whole medical history? Do you get her friends’ medical histories when they come over to play?”
“No.”
“No. So why do they need hers?”