This Is How It Always Is Read online

  “I dunno. Probably.” Poppy smiled happily. “You’re such a good hair braider.” It was the best thing about cancer it turned out. Poppy’s wig hair was much longer and less tangled than her real hair. “Your daughter’s going to be so lucky.”

  At that very moment, Rosalind Walsh, aged twelve, decided two things: her daughter would have long hair, like really long, like long enough to sit on, and she would name her Poppy. Eventually, Rosie discovered Siam was now called Thailand, but it was several lifetimes later before she got there, and then it was not for vacation. This was the last time she was ever alone with her sister.

  All the way to the hospital, while Penn murmured, “Breathe, breathe,” and Roo sang, “I gotta crow,” and Ben and Rigel and Orion cawed back at the tops of their little boy voices, “Er-er-er-errrrr,” Rosie whispered, “Poppy. Poppy. Poppy. Poppy.”

  Twenty minutes after they pulled up at the front door, the baby was ready.

  “Push,” said the doctor.

  “Breathe,” said Penn.

  “Poppy,” said Rosie. “Poppy. Poppy. Poppy.”

  Was that why? Was she just trying endlessly to make a daughter to fulfill an ancient dream of her sister’s, a ten-year-old’s dream at that? Did she believe this daughter would grow up and be, at ten, the little girl she’d lost, Poppy herself, picking up where Poppy had left off, fulfilling all the promise of that stymied, hacked-off, stubbed-out little life? As long as she kept her womb full, might Poppy, some version of Poppy—some waiting, watchful, wandering Poppy demon—gather up all her errant atoms and come home again? Was it creepy to imagine your dead sister taking up residence in your uterus? Wasn’t it purported to be a sign of insanity to do the same thing over and over expecting different results?

  One card short of a deck. One waffle short of a stack. One horse short of a … group of horses.

  Or was it some long-bred, deep-sown conviction that the more children the better because you never knew when you might lose one? They had all been so broken when Poppy died, Rosie and her mom and dad. One was not enough. One was always out of balance. It was no longer two against two. There was no longer anyone to play with, to run to, to spare. Her mother, she knew, saw double, saw Poppy always at the edges, in Rosie’s shadow, at Rosie’s side during school plays and dances and graduation ceremonies, Poppy just behind Rosie and Penn at the wedding, Poppy panting quietly at Rosie’s side while her babies were all being born. Even when Rosie’s father left the world just before Roo came into it, her mother saw Poppy’s ghostly outline alongside Rosie’s swollen belly at graveside, quietly weeping for all that was lost, and it wasn’t just their father. At least then, it was one against one again. Balance restored.

  One is the loneliest number. Never put all your eggs in one basket.

  So maybe that was why. Or maybe Rosie and Penn just liked babies, their promise and chaos and mess, the way babies all started the same and almost instantly became entirely different. Rosie loved the high-pitched pandemonium of her big, sprawling family, muddled love filling up their farmhouse-clubhouse, a cacophony only she could make out, a whirling storm with her and Penn, grinning together, spinning together, at the center.

  “Push,” said the doctor.

  “Breathe,” said Penn.

  “Poppy,” said Rosie.

  And then, soon, “It’s a boy! A healthy, beautiful, perfect, impatient baby boy,” the doctor said. “Fast little guy. Good thing you didn’t hit traffic.”

  One fell swoop, Rosie thought. Once upon a time.

  Takes one to know one. A baby brother. At least the boys would know what to do.

  One Date

  Penn was an only child. On their first date when Rosie said, “So, do you have brothers or sisters?” and Penn said, “Nope. Only child,” Rosie had replied, “Oh, I’m so sorry,” as if he’d said he had only three months to live or had been raised above an artisan deli by vegans.

  “Oh, thanks. It’s okay,” he’d said, and realized only a few beats later that that response was entirely wrong. He was having trouble concentrating. He was having trouble doing anything because blood was coursing through him twice as fast and hard as usual owing to the fact that he could not slow his heart, which had been in a state since several hours before he’d driven over to pick her up. Before he’d done so, he couldn’t imagine why. Rosie was a friend of a friend of a friend, an arrangement someone he’d not even known had hit upon at a party one night, drunk and silly. He was in grad school at the time, getting an MFA and waking each morning to wonder why he was getting an MFA. A woman from his medieval lit class (what this class had to do with writing a novel he could not even begin to guess) had dragged before him a woman he did not recognize, who had looked him over appraisingly for a bit before finally asking, “So. Want to date a doctor?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I know a single doctor who’s into poets.”

  “I’m not a poet.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t.”

  “She’s real cute. I think you might really hit it off.”

  “You don’t know my name.”

  “She’s not into names.”

  “That wasn’t my point.”

  “Still.”

  How could he argue with that logic? Still. There was nothing to say in response to still. He shrugged. He had a policy at the time never to say no to new and potentially peculiar experiences in case he needed things to write about later. Dating a doctor who liked poets because someone he’d never met before thought they’d hit it off seemed like it fell into this category.

  And that’s all it was. Writing fodder. Writing fodder and a change of pace and a new life philosophy that was not to say no. He wasn’t dreading it, but he wasn’t looking forward to it either. He felt entirely neutral toward the date, like a quick trip to the grocery store for milk. But then, about an hour before he was going to take a shower and get dressed, sitting in his studio apartment on his sofa reading Dante’s Inferno, his heart started racing. He felt his cheeks flush, and he felt his lips go dry and his palms go wet, and he felt this absurd need to try on a few shirts to see which one looked best, and he felt, all of a sudden, nervous, and for the life of him, he could not imagine why. He thought it might be the flu. He actually thought about calling her to cancel in case he was contagious, but the woman worked at a hospital so probably had a germ-avoidance strategy of some sort.

  He pulled up in front of her apartment and sat in his car trying to slow his breathing, waiting for his knees to stop shaking, but when it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, he gave up and rang her bell. When she opened the door and he saw her, Penn said, “Oh.”

  It wasn’t that Rosie was so beautiful, though she was, that is, he thought she was, that is, he felt she was. He had to rely on this vague sense of what she looked like because he couldn’t see her. It was as if she were backlit, bright sun behind her preventing his eyes from adjusting so he could see her properly. Or it was as if he were fainting, the black bits at the sides folding his vision into smaller and smaller origami boxes. But it was none of those things. It was like when your car spins out on an icy road, and your senses turn up so high that time seems to slow because you notice everything, and you just sit in your spinning car waiting, waiting, to see if you’re going to die. He couldn’t look at her because every sense and every fraction of a moment and every atom of his body was being in love with her. It was weird.

  Penn was getting an MFA, yes, but he was a fiction writer, not a poet, and he did not believe in love at first sight. He had also congratulated himself in the past for loving women for their minds and not their bodies. This woman had not yet spoken a word to him (though he assumed since she was a doctor that she was probably pretty smart), and he couldn’t get himself to concentrate on what she looked like, but he seemed to love her anyway. She was wearing—already—a hat, a scarf, and a four-inch-thick down parka that came all the way down to her boots. There was no way to fall in love w
ith a woman just for her body in Wisconsin in January. He reminded himself though, still standing dumb in her doorway, that it wasn’t love at first sight. It seemed to have happened quite a bit before that. He seemed to have fallen in love about an hour and a half earlier on his sofa in the middle of “Canto V” before ever laying eyes on Rosie. How his body had known this, foreknown this, he never did figure out, but it was right—it was quite right—and very quickly, he stopped caring.

  So at the restaurant, he was a little off his game. For one, he was distracted. For another, he knew. He had already decided. He was in—they could dispense with the small talk. So when Rosie, glowing, luminous, unpeeled from all her layers, lovely underneath, smiling shyly at him Rosie, said she was sorry he was an only child, that’s what he said first: it’s okay. Then a few seconds later, when his brain caught up, he added, “Wait. No. What? Why are you sorry I’m an only child?”

  She blushed. He would have too, but his blood flow must already have been at capacity. “Sorry,” she said. “I always think … My sister, um … Weren’t you lonely?”

  “Not really.”

  “Because you were really close with your parents?”

  “Not really that either.”

  “Because you’re a writer? You like to be alone in the dark brooding by yourself deeply?”

  “No!” He laughed. “Well, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t think I was brooding alone in the dark. But I don’t think I was lonely either. How about you? I take it you had brothers and sisters?”

  Rosie’s glow clouded over, and Penn was immediately sorry all the way down to his toes. “I had one sister. She died when I was twelve and she was ten.”

  “Oh Rosie, I’m sorry.” Penn knew he’d said the right thing that time.

  She nodded at her roll. “Cancer. It sucks.”

  He tried to think what to add, came up with nothing, reached for her hand instead. She grasped him like someone falling off something high. He gasped at the sudden sharp pain of it, but when she tried to ease off, embarrassed, he squeezed back harder. “What was her name?” he asked gently.

  “Poppy.” Then she laughed, a little bit embarrassed. “Rosie. Poppy. Get it? My parents were into gardening. She’s lucky they didn’t name her Gladiola. Gladiola was totally on the table.”

  “Is that why you think only-childhood is so sad?” He was glad to see her laughing again, but no one he’d ever met had treated the fact that he lacked siblings as a tragedy. “Because it was for you?”

  “I guess.” She shrugged. “Maybe that’s why I like you already. We’re both only children.”

  He tried to stay with her, but all he heard was she liked him already.

  Later, much later, she said the same, that it was love pre first sight, that she’d walked around that whole morning and afternoon somehow knowing that this would be the last first date of her life. Whereas this had made him nervous as hell, it had made her calm. Whereas he’d felt impatient with the small talk, she knew they had all the time in the world. To the extent that time was guaranteed in the world. Which it was not.

  Later, less later, Penn lay in his own bed, grinning at the ceiling in the dark. He tried to stop himself, he did, and he made fun of himself for doing it, but he couldn’t help it. He could not keep down, keep away, keep at bay what felt like a tiny seed of secret, certain knowledge, stable as a noble gas, glowing as gold: Poppy. My daughter will be named Poppy. Not a decision. A realization. Something that had long been true—since Rosie was twelve, half his lifetime ago—except he hadn’t known it yet.

  Residency

  Penn could never remember the name of the friend of the friend who knew a doctor who was interested in dating a poet. Maybe he never knew it. He could never remember the friend either, though he clearly owed her. Rosie was only just barely a doctor, as it turned out. She was in year one of an emergency medicine residency. She did not have the time to have a boyfriend. She did not have the brain space to have a boyfriend. Penn had not been aware that having a boyfriend took up brain space, but he could see how there were a great many facts, terms, drugs, treatments, protocols, and patient scenarios to memorize, none of them remotely familiar, all of them life-and-death important, and it was clear that this would be stressful.

  “Then why did you want to date a poet?” he asked her when she explained that it wasn’t personal, she just didn’t have time for any boyfriend. If she were going to have a boyfriend, it would be him. But she wasn’t.

  “I didn’t say I wanted to date a poet. I said one should date a poet. A theoretical one. A theoretical poet. Everyone in my program is hooking up with everyone else in my program, and then you’re dating some overcaffeinated, overextended, exhausted egomaniac who finally gets a day off and uses it to study. My point was date someone who sleeps instead, someone who thinks slowly and deeply and talks in words that don’t need to be memorized from flash cards. A poet. But I didn’t mean it. I don’t have the energy or the time. That’s why residents are always sleeping with each other. They’re the only ones who fit into each other’s schedules.”

  “Then why did you say yes?” Penn asked.

  “You sounded nice when you called.” Rosie shrugged. “And I was bored of doing patient charts.”

  Penn was going to be irritated by this except that he recalled he only went out with her for writing material. Besides, this meant she was going to need wooing after all. He was delighted. Penn was a student of narrative and knew that lovers should be wooed, relationships fought for, that anything too easily won was soon lost or else not worth winning. He suspected she was worth winning. He was up for the challenge. It would—he’d been right all along—make for good writing fodder. She may have been studying the human heart. But so was he.

  It seemed like getting a degree in creative writing would mostly involve writing, but it didn’t. It mostly involved reading and not reading what he wanted to read and not reading what he wanted to write. It was mostly literary theory—incomprehensible, jargon-filled, irrelevant to his own projects. It wasn’t as hard as chemistry and anatomy and human physiology, but it was a bigger waste of time. And it took a lot of it. Fortunately, it could be done anywhere. Where Penn did his was in Rosie’s ER waiting room.

  The summer after his sophomore year of high school, when everyone else he knew had a summer job or an internship or was attending some kind of enrichment program disguised as camp, Penn had gotten up every morning to take the commuter train out to Newark International Airport. This was back in the days when anyone could go through the metal detectors and hang out at the gates, and you didn’t need a boarding pass, and the fact that you were there every day by yourself with no luggage and no ticket and no intention of going anywhere, dressed in a black hoodie and scribbling ceaselessly in a notebook, bothered no one. He’d pick a departure gate and sit watching and listening for a while and make up stories about the passengers, the businessmen with their briefcases and paunches and nose bridges that needed constant squeezing, the old people with their hideous shoes and piles of presents, and especially the people traveling alone, always, in his stories, headed off to some kind of illicit, romantic rendezvous. When he got tired of departures, he’d head off to baggage claim and watch tearful reunions, the hugging that looked like people trying to stuff themselves inside each other. Or he sat on a bench just inside the front doors and watched the other kind of crying, the departures and letting-gos, the loved ones torn from each other only to find themselves sniffling in a long line to get their boarding passes, check their bags. The transition seemed profound to fifteen-year-old Penn, that someone could be weeping in her boyfriend’s arms one moment, desperate to squeeze out every last second with him, and the next could be waiting on line, impatiently checking her watch, and shifting from foot to foot, scowling at the elderly couple at the front who was holding up everyone else.

  Studies in Airports was Penn’s first manuscript. He’d taken the stories to the copy place on a disk and had them printed then bound with a
black, plastic spiral, but his guidance counselor refused to consider hanging around an airport making stuff up a real internship anyway. Still, he’d learned a lot more than he did proofing ad copy for the Rockaway Gazette, which is what he’d done the following summer. And he’d gotten a lot more writing done.

  So reading and writing in Rosie’s hospital waiting room was something he was long practiced for: lots of crying people, lots of pathos, the heights of tragedy, the heights of relief, which looked a lot like the heights of tragedy, and lots of that odd paradox he’d observed at Newark International that lay at the heart of waiting—that even when what people were waiting for was the worst news of their life or the best, even when the waiting was heavy with implication and consequence, waiting people still transformed into cranky toddlers, impatient and frowning and red-faced infuriated with vending machines that dispensed the wrong thing, and kids who did not use their inside voice. You’d think people in a hospital waiting room would be kindred spirits, compatriots, like soldiers who’d served together, fellow citizens of a hollowed, harrowed world, but no, mostly they avoided one another’s eyes and heaved great passive-aggressive sighs in one another’s direction whenever someone had the audacity to get attention from the nurses first.

  Penn wooed and studied, watched and listened and made notes for stories. He read. He wrote. Rosie would emerge every few hours, sometimes blood-spattered, sometimes vomit-splashed, always frazzled, always exhausted and red-eyed. Always rosy. And always glad to see him in spite of her protestations. And these were many: Aren’t you uncomfortable out here? The chairs are gross, and the food is awful. Do you know how many germs are in hospital waiting rooms? Do you know how weird a place this is to read literary theory? Didn’t I tell you I don’t have time for a boyfriend? Wouldn’t you like to go home and get some sleep? One of us should. Wouldn’t your living room be preferable? The risk there is so low of someone coming in with a gunshot wound.