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.