This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

  “Okay?” The painted-cheeks woman smiled at him. It was a question that seemed to encompass many things. Did he have everything he needed? Did he understand what he was supposed to do? Did he need water? Supplies of some kind? A snack? A lesson plan? An anything plan?

  “Okay” did not seem like the truthful response to any of these questions—like hungry, okay was something Claude didn’t think he’d ever be again—but it was what he answered anyway.

  “You fine.” The woman winked. “Begin read. You know what do next.”

  But Claude did not know what to do next.

  “Where your robe?” one of the little pigtailed girls demanded before Claude could even sort out the books on his lap. Her name was Mya, and Claude was relieved because apparently she spoke English already. Not that he knew what she was talking about.

  “My robe?”

  “You monk, right?”

  “A monk?”

  “Nen? You call, I think, ‘novice’?”

  “I’m not a monk. I’m a gi … kid.” He felt himself flush. If Marnie Alison and Jake Irving ruining his life weren’t reminder enough of who he was now, what had to happen to make Claude remember? The little girls seemed not to notice though.

  “But your head is”—Dao, whose pigtails were tied with red ribbons, searched for the right word—“naked,” and Claude wondered who had come before him, who had taught these girls some English and how and why “naked” was part of their vocabulary. He didn’t think it was probably from the picture books.

  “I used to have long, dark hair just like you.” He spoke slowly so they would understand him. “But I shaved it before I came here.”

  “To become monk?”

  “No…”

  “To be not hot?”

  “Not that either.”

  “You want hide?” said the third little girl, Zeya.

  And that was it exactly. “Yes. I wanted to hide.”

  “But why? You so pretty.”

  At home, you did not call boys pretty. Pretty meant girl. But probably it was a foreign-language problem because there was no way these little girls thought he was one. Was there?

  “I was … angry,” Claude half explained, but the girls’ faces lit with comprehension.

  “Oh angry,” they agreed all around with huge smiles and much clasping of Claude’s and one another’s hands. “Angry very good reason.”

  Interrogating him was probably a pretty good way to learn English, and Claude didn’t have a better idea, but he put a stop to it anyway. They couldn’t ask very many questions before they were ones Claude wouldn’t answer, answers they wouldn’t understand even if he were willing to give them, even if he knew the answers, which he did not. He didn’t want to think about those answers, or even those questions, anyway.

  Then he remembered the origami fortune-tellers PANK had been obsessed with in third grade. Aggie’s uncle had shown them how to make them one rainy Saturday afternoon, and soon every worksheet, homework assignment, and notice home got folded into a square that got smaller and smaller until each plane revealed a color or letter or secret symbol to choose from and each corner untucked a final question. With the paper folded into bird beaks over your first fingers and thumbs, you opened the bird’s mouth, closed, and spread, closed, opened, closed, and spread, as many times as the fortune-teller directed, and at the end, you had to answer the question thus revealed by the origami gods.

  Claude got a precious sheet of paper—the school seemed to have so little of anything to spare—and wrote four questions in the heart of the heart of it. He let Zeya be the first fortune-teller. He was going to do it, but they were all bouncing-while-trying-to-sit-still excited, and Claude remembered being an eight-year-old girl.

  The first question went to Mya: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “Next life?” said Mya.

  It took Claude a minute to understand what she was asking. “This life,” he assured her, then tried again: “What job do you want to have when you become an adult? If you could have any job in the world?”

  Mya looked like she had never considered this question before. “What my choice?”

  “Anything.” Claude opened his hands wide to hold all the options. “Whatever you want.”

  Mya trolled for ideas. “What you want when you grow up?”

  Poppy. This answer burst into Claude’s brain uninvited. He wanted to be Poppy when he grew up. He knew if Jake Irving heard this answer, baseball announcer would sound much more plausible by comparison. If Claude wouldn’t grow up to be Poppy, he couldn’t imagine growing up at all. This was another thing he and the pigtailed little girls had in common: none of them could imagine growing up.

  Since no one—not the pupils, not the teacher—could think of any answers, the second question went to Dao. “What is your favorite subject in school?” That had been the kind of question PANK had asked one another even though they all knew each other’s favorite subject in school as well as they knew their own.

  “What is subject?”

  “You know, like math or reading or art or whatever.”

  They all looked at him blankly, so he tried a different way. “What is your favorite part about school?”

  Dao brightened. “Oh, we love school.” She seemed to speak for all of them. “First time.”

  “This is your first time in school?” They were eight. How could that be?

  “My father sick so we come long way to clinic. Then he die and I am sad. But then I live here, go school, am happy.” She had taken the fortune-teller from Mya and was tapping her fingers together within its tiny walls.

  Claude thought he felt wind on the damp back of his neck, but the air was still as stone. He had always heard adults say something took your breath away because it was beautiful or surprising in a good way or precious like a baby. But this really did take his breath away, and it was the opposite. This was loss that ruined your life leading straight to gain that saved it. It wasn’t silver lining; it was a whole silver sky. Claude was totally over fifth grade, but even he could see that school was a miracle for Dao except she couldn’t have it without first becoming an orphan. It was the least fair thing he had ever heard in his life, which, considering the state of his life, was saying something. But Dao, Mya, and Zeya were all nodding and smiling as if Dao’s were as good an answer to “What’s your favorite subject in school?” as science or social studies would have been.

  When he origamied that first paper fortune-teller that long ago rainy afternoon, Aggie’s uncle had wiggled his fingers over it and sung a bunch of nonsense words which, he promised, turned it actually magic so that now it would tell real fortunes, reveal real secrets. Poppy’s hands were shaking so hard on her first turn she could barely operate the bird beaks. She was terrified she’d count out her number and color and letter and symbol and untuck a panel that read: SECRET PENIS!! Of course, Aggie’s uncle was just teasing, and of course, even at eight, she had been pretty sure that was the case all along. But as awful as that would have been, it was still less upsetting than the answers untucked here.

  * * *

  Claude had nowhere else to go, so he stayed late at the school. The woman with the painted cheeks put him to work cleaning brooms, which seemed like a waste of time to him though he supposed you couldn’t get clean floors with dirty brooms. When he finally got back to their room at the guesthouse, it was empty. It felt late—it felt like tomorrow—but his mother was nowhere. As soon as he opened the computer though, it rang. Claude hoped his father wouldn’t be too disappointed to find yet another son instead of his wife.

  From fifteen time zones away, Penn held his breath as electrons danced across oceans and connected and a window opened in Thailand to reveal his daughter. Her stubbled bare head, her baggy clothes, her swollen red eyes burned through his computer screen and made her look like a small, sad, tired version of his little girl, but his little girl nonetheless. She could go halfway around the world and transform herself utte
rly, but she was still right there before him. He remembered back when she first became Poppy, how his brain could not use pronouns anymore, and this felt the same. This strange new boy who called himself Claude was only pretend. Penn could still see Poppy right there, unmissable as Christmas.

  “How was your first day at the clinic?” Penn could hear the inanity of this as if he were asking how was school or had she done all her homework. But he didn’t want to scare her or, worse, plant as yet seedless ideas, so he refrained from asking what he really wanted to know.

  “Stupid,” Claude sulked.

  Penn kept his voice upbeat. “What did you do?”

  “They made me teach.”

  His father’s face lit up. “Teach what?”

  “English. To little kids.”

  “How wonderful!” Penn launched brain waves of ecstatic thanks toward Southeast Asia. “Pop … Claude, what a gift to you and to these children. What a fine teacher you must be.”

  “They think I’m a monk,” Claude said.

  “They do? Why?”

  “Because I’m bald.” Claude ran a miserable hand over his miserable hair. His miserable nonhair.

  “They’re little,” said his father. “They’re just confused.”

  “Can girls be monks?” Claude did not raise his eyes from the keyboard. “Or does that mean they can tell I’m a boy?”

  “I don’t know,” Penn admitted. “I don’t know much about Buddhist monks.”

  “I thought maybe…” Claude trailed off.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. It’s stupid.”

  “I bet it’s not.”

  “I thought maybe it would be like when you do an experiment in science and you make it so the results are fair.”

  Penn’s eyebrows reached for each other. “Blind?”

  “I thought since they were little kids and they never met me before if they could tell I was a boy I must be a boy, but if they thought I was a girl, then maybe…”

  Claude trailed off again. Halfway around the world, his father chose his words very carefully. “You know, for you, this has been a big question all your life. Boy or girl. But not just for you—in this country, it’s one of the first things we notice about everybody. When someone has a baby, that’s our first question. When we meet new people, we like to be able to tell right away. Here, even people who’ve never asked the question about themselves still think about gender all the time. There, your little students probably see other things first.”

  “What things?”

  “Well, it’s probably unusual for them to meet a white person. You might be the first American they’ve ever met. You probably have a lot more money than most of the people they know, a lot of privileges they never dreamed of. They must have so many questions about who you are; boy or girl just isn’t what’s most pressing to them.” Penn imagined Claude’s identities reordering themselves like a split-flap display announcing train departures and arrivals. It made sense that these students saw foreign, white, American, healthy, rich, and whole before they ever saw male or female. Penn watched the flaps spin over and over themselves until they displayed forlorn, lonesome, and lost. “What do you see, sweetheart?” This was one of the things Penn really wanted to know but was worried to ask.

  Claude thought about his day of children without futures or at least with futures unforetold. “I see nothing,” he told his father. “I am unforeseeable.”

  Bonesetters

  Things unforeseen were plaguing Rosie as well. Everyone reported that Claude was great for the school, patient and gentle, an extra set of much-needed hands for the understaffed staff, for the understaffed students who had never imagined anything as exotic and far-flung as her baby. But Rosie was working when Claude was at school, so this poise and grace went unseen. She knew that the clinic’s students must be teaching Claude as much as he was teaching them, for the protected world of even a transgender ten-year-old is awfully small compared to what these kids had seen, foreseen. But Claude was usually asleep by the time she got home from the clinic, so how he was learning or growing or becoming went unwitnessed as well. Instead she got tears over breakfast or, worse, worry that precluded talking about it, that drew his eyebrows together and his mouth toward his shoulders.

  She expected heartache and sadness of course. She expected shock: culture shock from being a stranger in a very strange land and gender shock from being a boy again for the first time in five years and general shock from finding oneself, suddenly, a bald English tutor in Thailand. But she had also expected all that would have started to fade, at least a little, now that they’d been here a few weeks. It was so beautiful in Thailand. There was so much wonder. But if Claude was still miserable, maybe it was time to leave already. Maybe bringing him had been a mistake. “Do you hate it here, my love?”

  “Here and everywhere,” Claude said without looking up. For some reason, he felt worse with his mom than he did in his classroom. He knew she was just trying to help him, but maybe he had more in common with his little students. He knew she loved him more than anything for seven thousand miles in any direction, but somehow that just made him cry harder.

  She softened her tone. “Should we go home?”

  He looked up at her at once, the worry turned sharply to panic. “No. Mom, no. We can’t go home.” Like their ancestral land was set upon by marauding hordes. Like their intergalactic space pod had crashed on landing.

  This was unforeseen.

  But accounting for the unforeseen was one of Rosie’s particular talents. At home this manifested as never having to go to the grocery store. She would look at a pantry that contained only the dregs of boxes of four different kinds of pasta, half a bag of brown rice, four cans of kidney beans, three of tuna fish, and a bag of expired sun-dried tomatoes and concoct dinner. She would be missing two-thirds of the ingredients in a recipe, and by subbing skim milk for cream and olive oil for butter and lentils for beef and frozen broccoli for fresh spinach and red pepper flakes for mushrooms and nothing for fresh sage leaves (because really, what dish actually hinged on fresh sage leaves?), she could achieve lasagna béchamel without leaving the house.

  And it turned out it was this skill—not her years of ER experience, not her advanced training, not the decade and a half she’d spent in a teaching hospital—that made her so valuable at the clinic. What the recipe called for, they did not have on hand. What a Google search, not to mention said years of experience and her not-inconsiderable medical intuition, suggested as a viable substitution was not available either. But what Rosie could do was look at a yawning supply closet with its paltry stock, at moldy equipment and unreliable drug supplies, and figure out something that would work.

  Sometimes.

  She made a wound sequestration area out of palm fronds and coconut husk. She made an inhaler out of a plastic soda bottle. She prescribed drugs in all sorts of ways the FDA never allowed themselves to imagine.

  It had been week two before someone came in with a broken bone, odd because fractures were so common, there and everywhere, and at first Rosie had been relieved. The woman was very pregnant and in a wheelbarrow, both she and her husband, who was pushing, flushed and out of breath, and Rosie had at first thought it would be something much worse. Whereas labor and delivery had tended, in her previous medical experience, to be the most triumphant rotation, here most people gave birth at home, and only came in when there was a complication, often only after it was too late or became too late during the journey. Rosie came to greet the sight of mounded belly with sinking dread. This patient grasped her domed front, shook her head, and assured K, who assured Rosie, “Baby stay. Ankle go.” It was then Rosie noticed her propped leg, purple and blue, her ankle swollen to the size of her thigh. “Fall off water buffalo,” K explained. “Hard to balance with such big…” The woman grinned then grimaced then grasped her belly again.

  Rosie checked her pupils and her pulses, listened to her heart and the baby’s, had the woman endeavor to wig
gle toes on both feet. “Let’s get you up to X-ray.” It was out of her mouth before she realized that at least the “up” was entirely erroneous. The X-ray too? Surely they had some kind of antiquated-but-better-than-nothing X-ray machine. How could they run the place without one? That said, she’d been there every day for two weeks and never seen one, heard one mentioned, located a building where one might have been. Maybe it had just never come up.

  “K? I’m afraid to ask but … X-ray?”

  K’s particular talents had proven to stretch further even than from auto repair to midwifery. K was her medic. That’s how the clinic director had introduced her on day two: “This is your medic, K,” as if Rosie had not already saved a truck, lost a patient, and delivered a baby with the woman. Rosie had not been aware she got or needed a medic or what a medic in a clinic like this one even was per se. It turned out the medic was everything except for what Rosie was. And sometimes she was what Rosie was too. K did injections. She did the vomit and the blood and the feces, which was saying something because there was a lot of all of the above. She did wound-care work and handholding work and being patient with patients work. She did the translating work of explaining prognoses and which drugs to take when and how to clean abrasions and stanch blood and how to rehydrate babies and when to let fevers run their course versus when to seek medical care. She translated English into Thai and Northern Thai and a variety of Thai dialects and Burmese and Karen, and she translated Rosie’s stern and complicated Doctor into kind and reassuring Nurse, instructions clear enough to follow precisely, gentle enough to inspire confidence and calm. Rosie assumed K had gone to nursing school at least, but K could not get into nursing school because K had never finished high school.

  K was also her physical therapist and her social worker and her security detail. When a child came into the clinic with her father but then her father died, K knew how to comfort the little girl and find her someplace to stay and something to wear and enroll her in school. When a teacher came in to complain that his leg fit incorrectly so that he could walk, yes, but he could not stand for long periods of time in front of his classroom, K worked with the prosthetics department to fashion him a leg that stood as well as perambulated and with the patient to think about exerting discipline on small children from a seated position. When the injuries one woman claimed came from falling off a water cistern proved instead to have come from a husband incensed to find her pregnant again, K had him removed and found beds for all seven of his children. But K had never been to physical-therapy school or social-work school. K had never even taken a martial-arts class. What K knew, and it was a stunning, encyclopedic amount, she had learned from the doctors who’d come before Rosie, from the doctors who came and stayed for weeks or months or years, from watching, from experience, and from necessity. Rosie found herself asking K’s advice more often than the other way around. Rosie had more formal training, but it wasn’t training for this environment. K knew quite a bit more about worms and snakebites and what, based on your symptoms, probably laid eggs in you than had been covered by the University of Wisconsin’s medical school program. And of course she maintained Sorry Ralph, never mind the fact that her functional, sensitive, callus-free hands were precious as palladium. It took a while, longer than it should have maybe, but Rosie gradually realized the many versions of K layered atop one another like sediment. And like that striated earth, what remained of K after the buffeting of wind and wear and time was solid as rock.