Claude decided it was too cold to go outside at recess anyway and spent it alone in the library instead. Claude was content to eat lunch on his lap in the bathroom. But after a few times, the nurse told him her bathroom was only for going to the bathroom in, not for eating lunch in. So Claude went back to the little boys’ room.
Miss Appleton kept him in from recess one day to ask, “Where are you going to the bathroom?”
“I’m not going to the bathroom,” said Claude. “I’m going to the library.”
She took a deep breath. “When you go to the bathroom, where do you go to the bathroom?”
“Where I always go to the bathroom.”
“In the boys’ bathroom?”
Claude nodded. He knew he’d done something wrong; he just didn’t know what it was.
“Why are you using the boys’ bathroom?”
“Because I’m a boy?”
She took another deep breath. “Then why are you wearing a dress?”
Claude was confused. They’d been through this. “I like to wear a dress.”
“Little boys do not wear dresses.” Miss Appleton tried to channel her usual patience. “Little girls wear dresses. If you are a little boy, you can’t wear a dress. If you are a little girl, you have to use the nurse’s bathroom.”
“But little girls use the girls’ bathroom,” said Claude.
“But you’re not a little girl,” Miss Appleton said through her teeth.
At the end of the day, Victoria Revels called. “We are happy to treat your child like a girl if that is what he believes himself to be,” she began.
“Not happy,” Penn corrected. “Legally obligated.”
“Both,” said Ms. Revels. “But it cannot be just on a whim.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning if he thinks he is a girl, he has gender dysphoria, and we will accommodate that. If he just wants to wear a dress, he is being disruptive and must wear normal clothes.”
“I’m not sure either Claude or I or even you understand the distinctions you’re making up as you go along here,” said Penn.
“It’s confusing,” the district representative acknowledged, “for Miss Appleton and for the children and clearly also for Claude. No one knows how to treat this child. Do we say he or she? Does Claude line up with the boys or the girls? Why is his hair still short? Why hasn’t he changed his name?”
“Aren’t there girls in the class with short hair?” said Penn. “Aren’t there girls in the class who wear pants?”
“The point,” said Ms. Revels, “is that we can treat your child as a boy. Or we can treat your child as a girl. But we cannot treat him as … well, I don’t even know what else there is.”
“That might be the problem.” Penn had been online. He’d read and researched. He was starting to be an expert here. “He might be both. He might be neither. He might be a boy in a dress or a girl with a penis. He might be one for a while and then another. He might be gender variant. He might be genderqueer—”
“Not in kindergarten he is not,” she interrupted. “He cannot be all of the above in kindergarten, and he cannot be none of the above in kindergarten. In kindergarten, a child can only be a he or a she, a boy or a girl. Kindergartens are not set up for ambiguity.”
“Maybe they should be,” said Penn. “The world is an ambiguous place.”
“Not for a five-year-old. For a five-year-old, the world is very black and white. It’s fair or it’s unfair. It’s fun or it’s torture. There are not disgusting cookies. There are not delicious vegetables.”
“But there are,” said Penn, “even for five-year-olds. Claude hates cookies with coconut. He loves broccoli. He does have a penis, and he does need to wear a dress. It would be simpler perhaps if these things weren’t true, but they are. For all your kids. Surely some of the little girls in his class play soccer after school, and surely some of the boys play hopscotch. This is a good thing, not a bad thing.”
“It may be a good thing,” said Ms. Revels, “but good or bad, we can’t accommodate it. He needs to decide one way or the other. He needs to … pardon me, but he needs to move his bowels or get off the pot.”
“In the nurse’s office,” added Penn.
“In the nurse’s office,” said Victoria Revels.
* * *
Penn wanted to call Dwight Harmon and raise hell. They had a responsibility to make sure his child wasn’t bullied or picked on. And they weren’t going to pressure Claude into declaring a gender-or-anything-else identity just because it made it easier for the district to refer to him in the third person. Rosie wanted to model for Claude an attitude of brushing off insults like dog hair and laughing with wry but wise amusement at hapless administrators. Rosie, like most parents, had learned this approach when she had a second child. When Roo fell down at the playground, she’d swoop in cooing, “Are you okay? Show Mommy where it hurts. Oh my poor baby boy.” And he’d cry like the brokenhearted. By Ben, she’d learned to keep her seat and call, “You’re all right.” And so he was.
“If we don’t act like it’s a big deal, he won’t feel like it’s a big deal,” said Rosie.
“But it is a big deal,” said Penn.
As usual though, while they were trying to map the appropriate course, Claude charted his own. At dinner, he announced he was changing his name to the cocoa channel.
“The cocoa channel?” said Ben.
“Like a TV station with nothing but chocolate,” said Claude.
“You mean Coco Chanel.”
“What’s Chanel?”
“Her last name. She invented perfume.”
“Chocolate perfume?” said Claude.
“Maybe.” Ben shrugged. He didn’t know much about perfume. He did know his little brother couldn’t go around calling himself the cocoa channel. Or Coco Chanel.
“You can just be Claude,” said Penn. “Is Miss Appleton giving you a hard time?”
“No.”
“They can’t make you change your name. You can keep your own name and still wear whatever you want.”
“I want to change it. I don’t like Claude.”
“Me too. I want to change my name. Orion is the name of a star, not a boy.”
“Orion is the name of a constellation, not a star,” Ben corrected.
“Easy for you,” said Roo. “You got the normal name.”
“Roo’s a normal name,” said Ben.
“Yeah, for a kangaroo,” said Rigel.
“Let’s get a kangaroo!” said Orion.
“We’re not getting a kangaroo,” said Rosie.
“I’m changing my name to Kangaroo,” said Orion. “That’s what I want to be called from now on. Kangaroo Walsh-Adams.”
“At least you got a constellation,” said Rigel. “I got a foot.”
“My foot,” Orion said proudly.
“Your foot,” Rigel agreed morosely.
“No one is changing his name,” said Rosie. “Names aren’t something you give yourself. Names are something you get from your parents. Claude, if you want a girl’s name, you can be Claudia. Everyone else keeps the name I gave him.”
“Why?” Roo was using his tongue to remove the last bits of turkey from a carving knife.
“Because children are bad decision makers,” said Penn.
“You’re letting Claude decide to be a girl,” said Roo, “which is way worse than letting Orion name himself Kangaroo.”
“Roo!” said Rosie and Penn together.
“I don’t want to be Claudia. Claudia’s too much like Claude.”
“You could be Not Claude,” said Ben. “The Absence of Claude. The square root of negative Claude. A Claude Hole.”
“Claude Hole, Claude Hole, Claude Hole,” said Orion.
“Everyone out,” said Rosie. It was easier to do all the dishes herself for the next hour and a half, which is what it would take, than to listen to her family for one more minute. She realized she was teaching them that if they were enough of a pain in her as
s, she’d take over all their chores. She’d live to regret it, but at that moment, nothing she could think of sounded more luxurious than doing seven people’s dinner dishes all by herself.
Penn stayed and helped and didn’t say a word. She was grateful for his help. She was more grateful for his silence. Rosie was up to her elbows in soapsuds, the entire front of her soaked with dishwater, when Roo came downstairs to sulk at the now cleared dining-room table.
“He wants his name to be Coco Chanel,” he said sullenly. “Doesn’t that worry you?”
Rosie turned the water up higher, but Penn left his towel and sat down with his eldest. “He liked the idea of a chocolate television station. It’s no big deal.”
“It is a big deal,” said Roo. “You keep pretending it isn’t, but it is. What about his … you know.”
“Penis?”
“Yeah.”
“We aren’t worried about that yet. Maybe this is a just a phase. Maybe it’ll pass.”
“But if it’s going to pass, why are you encouraging it?”
“How are we encouraging it?”
“You’re letting him wear girl clothes and play with girl things and grow out his hair.”
“Right, we’re letting him, not encouraging him.”
“Say no.”
“You’ll perhaps have noticed,” said Penn, “that that’s not how it works in our household. When we can, we say yes. To all of you. When we say no, you better believe it’s a serious no. We say no when you want to do something that might hurt you. Otherwise, we mostly say yes.”
“This might hurt him.”
“It might. But it seems, at the moment, to beat the alternative. At the moment, it seems to be what he thinks he needs.”
“But you said kids are bad decision makers.”
“When did I say that?”
“At dinner. You said kids can’t rename themselves because they’re bad decision makers. But if kids are such bad decision makers, why are you letting Claude decide to be something he’s not?”
“Because what if he is?” said Penn.
* * *
That night, after teeth and stories and lights out, after the boys were asleep and the dishes washed, dried, and put away and the homework checked and the backpacks packed and the lunches assembled, after Rosie and Penn were in bed with their own lights out, their bedroom door cracked and a voice whispered into the darkness, “I picked my new name.”
Rosie opened the blankets and scooted over toward Penn so that Claude could crawl in beside her. He put his head against her shoulder and seemed to fall right back to sleep.
“Claude?”
“Mmm?”
“Your new name?”
“Yeah.”
“What is it?”
“Poppy,” he said. “I want my new name to be Poppy.”
“Poppy?” Rosie whispered.
“Carmy says Jews name their babies after dead people they love. I never met Poppy, but I love her anyway.”
“You do?” Rosie was full of wonder.
“Yeah. Because she liked dolls. And because she was your favorite. I like dolls. And I want to be your favorite.”
“You are my favorite.” She nuzzled into his neck.
“Do you think Poppy is a good name?”
“I think Poppy is a perfect name.”
Push
As with so many things, this needed only a name to become real. A name and more hair. Mr. Tongo reported that lots of parents of kids like Claude went to court to change birth certificates and seal records, that lots of kids like Poppy switched schools so they could start over where no one knew who they really were so they could be, instead, who they really were. All that felt unnecessarily drastic to Rosie though because at this age, best she could tell, hair was all. Children with short hair were boys; children with long hair were girls. A penis-bearing child wanting to be a girl had only to name himself after his late aunt and grow his hair out for the transformation to be complete. She had, she figured, three, maybe four inches before Claude’s hair grew over his ears and she lost him, possibly forever. She would have, at last, the Poppy she’d always dreamed of. She just wasn’t ready yet.
They were stared at in restaurants though, at a table for seven, that had always been true. But she and Claude, running errands just the two of them, were stared at at the mall and the grocery store and the library too, and that was new. In those early days, with not-grown-out-yet hair, Claude still looked like a boy in a dress. Some fellow shoppers smiled at Rosie with admiration or maybe pity or maybe just empathy. (So they did not themselves have a little boy who wanted to be a girl; they were parents too, and it was always something.) But many frowned at her with undisguised disapproval. Some said to Poppy, “Don’t you look fancy?” or, “What a pretty dress,” or, heartfelt to Rosie, “What a beautiful child.” But others said loudly to each other as they passed, “Was that a boy or a girl?” or, “How do you let your kid do that?” or, “That mother should be shot.”
By April though, Claude was gone, and Poppy, hair finally grown past his ears into a short but inarguable pixie cut, had taken over. His self-portraits became solo affairs: only Poppy, not his whole family, Poppy in a golden ball gown, Poppy in a purple tiara with matching purple superhero cape, Poppy wearing flip-flops, yoga pants, and a sports bra, sitting in full lotus, grinning enlightenment off the page. He came down to breakfast every morning bubbling over, grinning before his feet hit the kitchen, laughing with his brothers, soaring really, and it was only then his parents realized just how sullen mornings had been when having to change out of the breakfast dress before school had been hanging over Claude’s oatmeal. He used the nurse’s bathroom. He made himself—and his brothers—sunflower-butter sandwiches, which was all it took to win the unflagging love of Miss Appleton.
Rosie and Penn were slower to adjust. They say it is what you never imagine can be lost that is hardest to live without. Rosie had always assumed this referred to postapocalyptic scenarios where what you had to live without was power or water or Wi-Fi, but in fact, it was deeper sown than that. It reminded Penn of the French toddlers whose family had rented the house next door the summer he was sixteen. It was très irritant how much better French they spoke than he did, and it was even beaucoup plus irritant that they remembered, without even trying, which nouns were masculine and which were feminine when he could not, even though he’d spent a thousand hours studying and they weren’t even potty trained yet. Now his whole life was like that. Sometimes he called Poppy “he” and sometimes “she.” Sometimes he called Roo and Ben and Rigel and Orion “he” and sometimes “she.” Sometimes he called Roo “Ben” (wrong kid) or “Rufus” (wrong name) or “Rude” (not a name at all though, increasingly, not necessarily untrue either). Sometimes he called Rosie “he.” Once he introduced her at a party as his husband. He called the mailman “she.” He called the guy who fixed the brakes on the van “she.” He called the newspaper “she.” Neither Claude nor Poppy seemed bothered one way or the other, but Penn felt something essential in his brain had been severed. Whatever link you got for free that picked the appropriate pronoun whenever one was called for was permanently decoupled, and suddenly Penn’s mother tongue was foreign.
They all went to Phoenix for spring break. Poppy went to the mall with his grandmother, shared cinnamon pretzels in the food court, and threw pennies into the fountain to make a wish. He wished everything would always stay exactly like this because suddenly, for the first time in either of his lives, all the kids wanted to be his friend. Shy, all-alone Claude was replaced by laughing, gregarious Poppy, who saved his allowance to buy a fairy calendar on which he recorded all the requests he got for playdates.
Rosie hated that calendar. Penn adored it. To Penn, it represented a triumph, difficult things overcome and implemented. Maybe the transition from Claude had been daunting and fraught, but here was Poppy, loved, friended, present, no longer disappearing off the page. He considered the calendar a hard-won trophy. T
o Rosie, it bespoke people’s cloying, pandering, PC bullshit and a strange Poppy cachet. Having status, she warned Penn, was not the same as having friends. Maybe parents just wanted their kids to invite Poppy over so they could gossip to their own friends or make a big show of being open-minded and tolerant. Maybe the kids wanted to play with Poppy because they were curious about him rather than because they liked him. And what would they do about invitations to sleepovers? What would they do when these kids stopped being sweet little kindergarteners and started being hormone-crazed, mean-spirited, cruel-intentioned, peer-pressuring, pill-popping, gun-toting teenagers?
“Gun-toting?” said Penn.
“Or something,” said Rosie.
“I think you’re worrying prematurely.”
“If you don’t worry about something until it’s already a problem,” said Rosie, “that’s not worry. That’s observation.”
The little girls who invited Poppy over had pink rooms and pink LEGOs and pink comforters over pink sheets on their pink beds. They had crates—actual crates!—of tutus and high heels and dress-up clothes, stuffed animals who themselves wore tutus and high heels and dress-up clothes, Barbies and clothes for the Barbies, jewelry, nail polish, fairies, and baby dolls. They liked to draw and trade stickers. They liked to put their stuffies in strollers and give them a bottle and push them around the block. They liked to have a lemonade stand. They liked to chase each other around the house but in tutus and high heels, and when they caught you at the end, they just hugged you and giggled and laughed together instead of making a big thing about who was a loser and sitting on your head and farting. Poppy could not understand why everyone in the whole world didn’t want to be a girl.
This Is How It Always Is Page 11
