“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.