“There are different kinds of different.” Rosie chewed on the side of her thumbnail.
“Fiddlecock,” said her mother.
* * *
It wasn’t Claude who most worried them that summer anyway—which was, in some ways, his last—but Ben, who had always been quiet but was quieter than usual, who had always been bookish but spent that summer he was eleven reading Shakespeare while his brothers swam. They’d decided he didn’t need sixth grade and should skip right to seventh, where he’d be a year younger but only a year or two ahead of everyone else as opposed, in sixth grade, to being so far ahead there was no point in his being there at all. Penn thought the fewer years in the hellscape that was middle school the better. Rosie thought being in class with Roo would make up for any of the social stuff he might miss. They’d broken it to the two oldest boys gently, worried Roo would feel his world cramped and horned in on, worried Ben might rather be smarter than everyone around him by four or five times rather than just two or three. Roo had been delighted and immediately started scheming for them to secretly switch places so Ben could take his tests for him, as if promoting Ben to seventh grade would also render them identical twins. But Ben had clammed up, worried about neither Rosie nor Penn knew what, worried in a way that the sun and the summer and even Shakespeare could not touch.
The Sunday afternoon before school started up again, there was a picnic at the pool: crockpot-boiled hot dogs, American cheese slices, limp pickles, watermelons hacked to pieces by someone who evidently had bad blood with the fruit going back generations. Because they’d spent all summer in the lake, it was their first—and last—foray of the season to the public pool. Orion wore orange flippers, a rainbow snorkel, and a fake fin. Ben wore khaki shorts and a button-down shirt, just to make sure no one thought there was any chance he was going swimming. Claude wore his bikini because Penn found he could not say to his son, “The suit you love is okay at home but not in public,” because Rosie would not say, “We’re proud of you in private but ashamed of you at the pool.”
They staked out chairs, a table, a corner of grass on which to pile towels and goggles and flip-flops. Every flat surface seemed sticky with melted ice cream. Late-summer bees, not easily deterred, nosed their bottles of sunscreen. The dark parts of the sidewalk were too hot to walk on barefoot for more than a few steps. The whole world smelled of chlorine and sugar. A few kids shaded their eyes to stare at Claude. A few pointed and laughed. A few—maybe more than a few—adults raised hands to their mouths and whispered behind them to one another as if, Penn thought as they stared at his family, this masked what they were talking about. A classmate of Rigel and Orion’s ran over to them.
“Cool fin,” he said to Orion.
“Thanks.”
“Why is your brother wearing a bikini?”
“I dunno,” said Rigel, for he did not, and what other answer was there really?
“Weird.”
“Yeah.”
“Bet I can do a bigger belly flop off the diving board than you two.”
“Cannot.”
“Can too.”
And they all ran off to prove it.
The adults were less easily diverted but didn’t have much more to add, and for the same reason: what was there to say really? Rosie’s bus-stop nemesis, Heather, galloped over without preamble to demand, “Where did Claude even get that suit? I mean, you guys only have boys.”
“He got it from his grandmother,” Rosie answered truthfully then added, also truthfully, “She’s a girl.”
Several fathers approached Penn with some variation of “Nice pink bikini,” as if he were wearing it himself, so Penn thanked them, and they seemed not to know what to say to that.
The lifeguard manager opened with “Wow, that’s quite the getup your son has there.”
“It’s true,” Penn agreed. “I told Orion fake fins were only funny in an ocean, but we’re in Wisconsin, so what are you going to do?”
Someone dumped a package of plastic cups and a mess of goldfish in the pool, and the kids dove in en masse, like a wave, to catch the ones with the other and take them home. It seemed like every child for twenty miles was in the pool swimming like goldfish, after goldfish. Even Claude, who had not yet learned to swim underwater, was in doggy-paddling pursuit of a fish. But Ben had tepee’d a lounger, bringing the head part and the feet part overhead like wings, and crawled inside his own private triangle of plastic straps. Penn crawled in beside him, best he could, curled up like a pill bug with giant hairy feet that had to stay outside.
“You okay, sweetie?”
“Fine.”
“How come you’re not swimming?”
“Don’t feel like it.”
“Are you worried about school?”
Ben shrugged. Said nothing.
“Are you worried about going to middle school? Skipping a grade? Not knowing everyone? Being younger than everybody else? Going to class with Roo?”
Nothing.
“Am I warm?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, I’m warm?”
“Yes, that’s what I’m worried about.”
“Which one?”
“All of them. And everything else too.”
“Everything else too?”
“I’m worried about middle school, skipping a grade, not knowing everyone, being too young, and being so much smarter than Roo that the teachers won’t believe him when he says I’m his brother. I’m worried my friends will think I think I’m too smart for them, even though I don’t, even though I am. I’m worried about taking a shower with a whole bunch of other kids after gym. I’m worried about art class because art is required, and I suck at art. I’m worried about Claude because other kids are going to make fun of him and be mean to him and maybe try to hurt him, and he doesn’t even care. And you and Mom don’t even care.”
“We care,” Penn said softly.
“Why are you letting him wear that bathing suit?”
“He loves it.”
“He can love it at Carmy’s where it’s just us, but here … everybody’s whispering stuff about him. Everyone’s staring. It’s weird.”
“I don’t think he’s actually noticed.” Penn watched Claude on the other side of the pool singing to his rescued goldfish and rocking its cup in his crooked arms like a baby. “Isn’t not noticing even nicer—and better preparation for kindergarten—than not being whispered about in the first place?”
“I don’t know,” Ben said.
“Me neither,” his father admitted. And then, “Is that all?”
“All what?”
“All you’re worried about?”
“I’m worried about those fish.” Ben squinted against late-summer, late-day sun in the direction of the pool where goldfish swam like foxes from neighbor-kid hounds. “I don’t think goldfish are built to handle that much chlorine and stress.”
“You neither,” said Penn.
“Chlorine and stress?”
“Well, the former would come off in the shower, but I think you have too much of the latter maybe.”
“I can’t help it,” said Ben.
“Pick one.”
“One what?”
“One thing on your list to worry about. Put all your worry into that one thing. Worry about it as much as you like, as much as you need to. But only that one thing. Anytime any of the other things flits across your mind, take that concern and channel it into your one thing.”
“That’s the same amount of worry, just less spread out,” said Ben.
“Consolidation is good,” his father promised. “If you give all your worry to one thing, soon you’ll realize that’s way too much and worry about it less, and you’ll feel more in control of it for keeping it at the front of your mind, and that will help you worry less too. So what’s it going to be? That was a long list. What on it concerns you very most of all?” Penn expected the showers or Roo being weird at school or the whole smartest-youngest-smallest-kid thing.
> But Ben didn’t even hesitate. “Claude. By far. I am most worried about what’s going to happen to Claude when he goes to school this year.”
Penn was increasingly, creepingly worried too, but he took his own advice. The kids who stared at Claude, the parents who gossiped, the classmates who laughed, the neighbors who sniped, the acquaintances who made brazen comments about what wasn’t remotely their business, the strangers who scowled, the brother who fretted, Penn boiled all those worries into a fine reduction he could put in a jelly jar in the back of the refrigerator and forget about, at least for the moment. It was easy to believe, as summer waned and school began once more, that all things would be new again, that old worries would turn and dry and float away like autumn leaves. Easy to believe but not necessarily warranted.
The next morning Claude came downstairs for his first day of kindergarten. He was wearing his tea-length dress—clean, pressed, and, his mother could not deny, appropriate for such an auspicious occasion—and he was in tears, holding a plastic cup of water with a very still upside-down goldfish.
Air Currents and Other Winds
While Rosie was puzzling how to talk him out of his dress, Claude accidentally, in his grief, spilled dead fish down his front. Through fonts of tears and snot and disappointment, he had to change out of the dress and settle for an old red patent-leather purse of Carmelo’s, which Rosie consented to as a compromise position in the hopes he could pass it off successfully as an ill-suited lunch box. She put his peanut butter and jelly, banana, pretzels, and, as a first-day treat, chocolate-chip cookies—plus a note—in the purse to give it lunch-box cachet. Claude’s kindergarten was full-day, six whole hours of sitting quietly and following rules and being away from home where someone—everyone—loved him best of all. Ben and Roo were off to their first day of middle school. Orion came down for breakfast wearing an eyeball sticker between his brows, and when she started to question him about it, he winked one of his other ones at her. So Claude’s lunch purse was only seventh or eighth on Rosie’s list of concerns that morning.
But when she arrived back at school at the end of the day, Claude was nowhere to be seen, and Orion and Rigel rushed out with the bell singing, “Claude got in trouble. Claude got in trouble.” Then the kindergarten door opened, spilling tiny children into their parents’ eager arms, all except Claude, who was being held to his new teacher’s side by what seemed a very firm hand on the top of his head.
“Mrs. Adams?” The kindergarten teacher’s name was Becky Appleton. At orientation, she’d told the parents to call her Becky, but Rosie just couldn’t. First of all, Becky was the name of a child, not a person in whose charge she put the care and education of her baby boy, and though the teacher did look to be about fourteen years old, Rosie still thought she should have the decency to go by Rebecca already. But mostly, kindergarten classrooms always made Rosie feel more like a child herself than the parent of five of them. She remembered her own first day of kindergarten with a clarity that really should have been foggy all these years later. She had been through this four times now, and it never got any less weird. The tiny desks and chairs, the bins of still-pointy crayons and pencils, the smell of new eraser, these made Rosie want to sit down and learn the alphabet rather than be on a first-name basis with the teacher. “You’re Mrs. Adams? Claude’s mother?”
“It’s Walsh, actually.” Rosie decided to let go, for the moment, the fact that it was Ms. not Mrs., and Dr. not Ms.
“Claude had a great first day, Mrs. Walsh.” Becky’s tone was belied by the look on Claude’s face. “But he had some trouble at lunch. The school does not allow peanut butter, so Claude had to sit and eat by himself at his desk in the classroom.”
“I read the kindergarten materials cover to cover,” said Rosie. “There’s nothing in there about not sending peanuts to school.”
“Oh, we just assume people know that. I guess we forget that not everyone is as aware as we are about skyrocketing peanut allergies among children today. No peanuts is implied.”
“Claude is my fifth child to go through this school. The one I made him today was perhaps the eight or nine hundredth peanut butter and jelly sandwich I’ve sent here. Is this a new rule?”
“We don’t check their sandwiches,” explained Miss Appleton. “It’s about good faith and respect. Doing unto others. The Golden Rule.”
“It’s a no-peanut honor system?”
“Exactly. We’d never have known Claude had a forbidden sandwich except he was bragging to his new friends about how ladies who lunch, lunch on finger sandwiches, cucumber usually, but in his case peanut butter because cucumbers make the bread soggy unless eaten right away.”
“That’s true.” Rosie wondered, vaguely at the time, more pointedly later on, whether the issue here was the peanut butter or the patent-leather purse it had come out of. Or the lesson about ladies who lunch. “Is anyone in Claude’s class allergic to peanuts?”
“It’s a precautionary rule.”
“Does his eating his sandwich in the classroom protect precautionary peanut-allergy sufferers better than in the cafeteria?”
“Well”—Miss Appleton pretended to hesitate to share the next part—“I skipped my own free period to supervise Claude in the classroom while he ate. I was able to make sure he didn’t touch anything.”
“Let’s go home, baby,” Rosie said to Claude.
“Bye-bye, Claude,” said Miss Appleton. “It was nice to meet you today. I am so excited for our year ahead.”
Claude did not raise his gaze from the ground.
“Oh, one more thing Mrs. AdamsImeanWalsh. We generally discourage accessories at school, especially at this age.”
“Accessories?”
“Jewelry, headgear, shiny shirts. Purses.”
“Shiny shirts?”
“Anything distracting. We like students to be able to concentrate during class.”
“Sure, but—”
“If they’re fiddling, it’s hard for them to learn.”
“Was Claude fiddling?”
“No. He was not. But other children found his purse distracting.”
“Was he doing anything distracting with it?”
“Just the presence of the purse was distracting.”
“Like the peanuts?”
“How do you mean?”
“You are prophylactically ruling out purses and peanuts,” said Rosie.
Miss Appleton blushed from head to toe. “Prophylactically? Like,” she whispered the next word, “condoms?”
“Prophylactically like preventatively and defensively. Anticipatorially, if you will.”
“Um, sure.”
“It means you are banning peanuts and purses just in case they might cause problems even though they’ve caused none yet and despite the fact that doing so may infringe on the rights and well-being of your student citizens.”
“We-ell, I guess we hope you’ll just make something else for lunch? And we don’t really think boys, uh, children, um, need purses. For school.”
“It’s not a purse,” Claude interrupted. Rosie was relieved to hear his voice. “It’s a lunch tote.”
“Come on, sweetie,” Rosie said. “It’s been a long day. Let’s go home.”
Rigel and Orion were waiting for them on the playground, Orion hanging upside down from the little-kid monkey bars so that his hair brushed the ground and his face looked like a (three-eyed) strawberry, Rigel climbing up the sliding board then sliding down the stairs on his butt. They headed toward the car and home to see whether Roo and Ben had fared any better at middle school. Orion put his ten-year-old arm around his baby brother. “Kindergarten’s tough, kid. But we still love you.”
“Yeah, we love you,” Rigel echoed, “and your purse.”
“It’s a lunch tote.”
“And your lunch tote.”
* * *
The next day Rosie made cheese sandwiches all around. As Penn was packing them into a variety of lunch bags, boxes, and the pat
ent-leather tote, Claude came downstairs and slid into his breakfast seat without a word. His already short hair was clipped back anyway with four rainbow barrettes, and he was wearing a dress made by pulling his own T-shirt—light-blue with a silk-screened unicorn eating a hot dog on a bicycle—over a longer shirt of Penn’s so that it flared into a skirt just below his waist.
“Nice dress, dude.” Roo’s mouth was full of Cheerios, so it was hard to guess his tone.
“Thanks.” Claude gave a small smile to his own cereal bowl.
Rigel looked up from the webbed foot he was knitting. “You’re not wearing that to school, are you?” and Rosie held her breath, waiting for the answer.
“Some of it,” said Claude.
“You’ll get your butt kicked,” said Rigel.
“Butt, butt, butt.” Orion giggled, wiggling his toes into the done-already other webbed foot.
“It’s not that it’s not a nice outfit,” Ben tried gently. “It’s just not very manly, is it?”
“He’s not a man,” said Penn. “He’s five. He’s a little boy.”
“He may not even be that,” said Roo.
“Roo!” Rosie’s voice sounded like warning, but was what he said unfair? Untrue? Unkind? She had no idea. Of course Claude was a little boy because if he wasn’t a little boy, what was he? This seemed like such a simple question, but it was one she’d never encountered before as a parent, and that was saying something. It seemed like such a simple question, but somehow it was terrifying. What you were if you weren’t a little boy ranked as maybe Rosie’s fourth concern of the morning. She tabled it. “No one’s kicking Claude’s anything. If anyone tries to kick Claude’s anything, I’ll kick their anything.”
Penn knew in his heart that Claude should be who he was. But he also knew that Claude would be happier if neither his clothes nor his sandwich nor the bag it came out of attracted anyone’s attention because another thing his heart knew was this: it was more complicated than that. Five years of Orion wearing all manner of weird stuff to school had occasioned not so much as a raised third eyebrow from anyone. “What an imaginative boy Orion is,” his teachers said. “His spirit brightens everyone’s day.” If an eyeball sticker was creative self-expression, surely Claude should wear what he wanted to school. How could you say yes to webbed feet but no to a dress, yes to being who you were but no to dressing like him? How did you teach your small human that it’s what’s inside that counts when the truth was everyone was pretty preoccupied with what you put on over the outside too?
This Is How It Always Is Page 6
