“You’re hiding the family photos.”
“We haven’t told anybody yet,” Rosie said. “We will. We just haven’t so far.”
“If we didn’t need someplace gay, we could have just stayed where we were—”
“It wasn’t safe there.”
“Where we were happy,” said Roo.
“We’ll be happy here,” said Rosie.
“Not like this we won’t.” Roo slunk back to his basement.
Rosie and Penn were still lost most of the time, never sure where was home or how to get there. Half their lives remained in boxes at that point. Plus Roo had been sulky and sullen all summer, gloomy since they announced the move, moody still now that they were here. And so she missed it, his warning, his fledgling teenage foresight that secrets are miserable things, that secrets, be they deliberate or accidental, will out, and then it won’t matter where you live, for no place anywhere can protect you from the power and the fallout of a secret once exploded.
Rosie rehung the wedding photo and one of each kid. For Poppy, she chose Claude’s preschool graduation. Capped and gowned, you couldn’t really tell.
Strategically Naked
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?”