“Sounds nice.” Claude wiped his eyes.
“It does.” Penn tried to keep his voice steady as his own eyes filled because this was important. “And it makes for great stories. But it’s not real. It’s not possible. I think it’s not even desirable.”
“I desire it.”
“I don’t.” Penn shook his head. “I don’t want to erase your past. You were a perfect baby. You were the smartest three-year-old I ever knew. I don’t want to erase your transformation either. You’re so special, and you’re so brave. You proclaiming who you are and being who you want to be in a world that makes that hard is awe inspiring. I’m so proud of you, Poppy. I don’t want to pretend you’re ordinary. I want to climb your turret and shout your extraordinary to the entire city.”
Claude pictured his father clinging like Godzilla to the turret roof, roaring Poppy’s slow but inspiring transformation to the sky. He was glad he was in Thailand.
* * *
The next day at school, Claude started back in with the fairy tale. But not his father’s fairy tale. Having introduced all these other characters, it seemed a shame to him not to use them.
“Princess Stephanie had tons of friends. They all knew she was a princess, but none of them knew she was also a night fairy, and she didn’t want them to find out.”
“Why?” Claude’s students could not imagine being something as cool as a night fairy and not wanting anyone to know.
“She was embarrassed,” Claude explained.
“Why?”
“Because none of her friends were night fairies. She was the only one.”
“Why that does not make her feel special?”
“Because it was weird,” said Claude. “And disgusting. Her friends would be grossed out if they knew she was really a night fairy, so she hid it from them. But one day they were all hanging around after school, and suddenly, without warning, her wings popped out, right before their eyes. Princess Stephanie was so upset she ran away crying. But her friends ran after her. They totally understood.”
“It’s no big deal, Steph,” Cinderella assured her. “The same thing happens to me all the time. If I’m running late, my shoes, my clothes, my car—POOF—suddenly it’s like they’re someone else’s. I don’t even recognize myself.”
“Me too,” said Ariel. “I swear to you I used to be a fish.”
“You did?” Stephanie was so grateful to her friends she started crying again.
“Well, half.”
“And you should have seen me before I got eaten by a wolf,” said Little Red Riding Hood. “You would have hated me. I was such a weak little thing I got in trouble picking flowers. Lame.”
“What happened?” Stephanie sniffed.
“I got eaten, that’s what happened. I grew up. I figured out I needed to be smart and strong, and I took control.”
“How?”
“I worked out.” Little Red smiled and flexed her biceps. Claude demonstrated. The class giggled. “I got a personal trainer. I’ll give you her number.”
Claude’s students nodded along, pleased so far.
“So all of Princess Stephanie’s friends finally knew who she really was, and they all loved her anyway, all except one. Her rival neighbor princess was angry.”
“But not her fault,” Claude’s students objected en masse.
“It wasn’t her fault she turned into a night fairy,” Claude acknowledged, “but it was her fault she lied about it.”
“She have to keep secret,” the students insisted.
Claude shook his head. “The rival neighbor princess told Stephanie everything, so she didn’t think they had any secrets.”
“Every princess and person have secret,” Dao said.
“That’s true.” Claude tried to think if he’d ever seen a teacher cry in front of the class. “But some secrets are secrets, whereas some secrets are lies.”
“Every person have another person inside,” Mya insisted. As in: the rival neighbor princess shouldn’t have needed to be told. As in: it doesn’t count because Stephanie’s secret was actually the human condition.
“Princess Stephanie couldn’t convince her not to be mad,” Claude continued. “She tried to explain and she tried to say sorry, but the neighbor princess didn’t care. So Stephanie had to use magic on her.”
“Turn her into frog?” one little boy guessed.
“Turn her into big giant big gross monster who stink?” guessed another.
“Turn her into night fairy also?” said Zeya.
“No, no, no,” though Claude thought these were not half-bad ideas. “Stephanie waved her magic wand and turned the angry neighbor princess into an understanding neighbor princess, one who didn’t mind and wasn’t mad and still loved Stephanie and always would.”
Claude took a deep breath. That seemed like a good place to stop, so he did. But his students looked unconvinced.
“Not magic,” complained Zeya. As in: spells are for enchanted transmutation, not changing someone’s mind.
“Not enough,” complained Dao. As in: bitchy neighbor princesses deserve some kind of actual punishment.
“Not possible,” complained the boy who’d suggested turning her into a frog. As in: homo-amphibian metamorphosis might not be real, but it’s still more credible than Aggie getting over Poppy’s secret.
But Claude felt better. He realized this was what his father had been up to all these years, not entertaining his children but perfecting his world. If you wrote your own characters, they didn’t disappoint you like real people did. If you told your own story, you got to pick your ending. Just being yourself never worked, but if you made yourself up, you got to be exactly who you knew yourself to be.
Under Pants
At the ends of their long days, Rosie and K retired together to the cafeteria and a quiet plastic table and chairs—backyard furniture purchased by college students at a grocery store in another world—and ate and talked. Rosie was always anxious to get to a cell-phone signal or a computer and try Penn. She was anxious to get back to the child she had brought to the jungle with her, a child who was, by all accounts, working wonders in the classroom, wonders about which she longed for details like raindrops long for the sea. K had daughters as well as sons as well as a husband to get home to too, not to mention that the food at home was probably better than in the clinic cafeteria, which had to feed five hundred patients and their families every day, but Rosie and K sat together quietly every evening anyway, sometimes talking, sometimes breathing pungent steam off of hot tea and saying nothing at all.
Rosie told K all about Seattle and her own hill tribe, about private-practice family medicine, then about Wisconsin and the ER at UW, the farmhouse, the burgeoning family, the love affair, the storytelling, her sister, working her way backward through everything that mattered. K told Rosie her story backward as well. Medic at the border clinic, rewarding work in hard conditions over long days, two boys and two girls at home too young yet to leave for so many hours, a Burmese husband-soldier who’d lost too much in the war to heal, a three-week trek through the jungle to a whispered-about clinic which might be able to help, which turned out in fact to be able to help, not to cure the husband but to employ and empower the wife, and that was something, all the way back through the months of war in Burma that preceded his injuries that preceded their flight, all the way back to her childhood in northern Thailand before she crossed the border with an uncle for unspecified reasons, a childhood that sounded poor and lacking to Rosie but which K described as full of color and soil and possibility.
At the beginning, as they got to know each other, it was all surface details, rough sketching rather than precise portraiture, autobiography instead of memoir. They had not had long enough together to become close friends yet—though in fact, after Rosie left, they kept in touch for the rest of their lives—but they were both mothers, so they shared that instantaneous connection Rosie knew so well from years of being exactly that. You could sit down with another mom, e
ven one halfway around the world whose life was very different from your own, and find easy conversation, shared spirit, someone who understood why you might bring your ten-year-old into a malarial jungle rather than leave him behind, someone who understood what unspeakable things sometimes befell children and to what lengths you might go to fend them off, someone who saw the horrors and the threats and the carving up and the carving out and also how hard they were to schedule around and how little they cared about your job and how much they wanted just to be touching you all the time and what they looked like when they first woke up in the morning and how they learned to talk and walk and read and how quickly they outgrew their clothes and how it was to live every moment of every day in that world—even the moments when someone else’s kid was shitting thousands of tiny larva into a bucket, even the moments when someone else’s kid was shaking with a fever whose cause you could not discern, even the moments when someone else’s kid had her own baby stuck against her pelvis, draining her life in its efforts to be born.
So Rosie’s question, though it seemed both rude and random, was neither out of line nor a subject change. “Can I ask about your kids?” She slurped unadorned noodles from a plain broth which somehow, via who knew what crossed wires, tasted like her mother’s matzo ball soup.
K’s tired face lit up.
“How?” asked Rosie.
“How?” K grinned. “You mean, how I get them?”
Rosie blushed and nodded, concentrated on her noodles, reconsidered those sedimentary layers she’d realized K harbored all those weeks ago.
“Because you have noticed … I am like Claude.”
Rosie’s glasses were fogged from the steaming soup when her head shot up, so she couldn’t see K clearly. “No. I mean yes. I mean yes I noticed you are … like Claude. But I didn’t notice you’d noticed Claude was … like Claude. How did you know?”
“I cannot know how I know,” K smiled smugly. “He seem not comfortable in body. He seem more than what he seem.”
“He is,” Rosie said. “She is.”
“What is name at home?”
“Poppy.”
“Poppy,” K echoed. “Pretty name.”
“And yours?” Rosie prompted.
“We adopt them. We did not mean to. Choochai and I marry but not official marry, you know? We think we will be childless, and this is okay. There is fighting. There is war we are not part of and not apart of. We are very poor, country very broken. So we okay just to be two. Then in first month here, man bring in wife in labor three days, lost so much blood. The mama die. The father leave. The baby live and come home with me and Choochai. Every of our babies was a baby here who need home. But we cannot home all the babies here who need.”
Rosie put down her spoon to breathe, to count the ways this was barely imaginable, never mind sitting right across from her. “You are a wonder.”
“I am?”
“You are.”
“Why you say?”
“You left your home, your family. You work here, in these conditions, year in and out, without sufficient training or equipment or supplies. You’ve taken in these children who needed a family and made them your own. All while suffering the stigma of being…” She trailed off.
“Kathoey.” K supplied the word. It sounded like cat toy. “One of the thing K stand for. Translate as ladyboy. What you say?”
“Transgender.” Rosie sounded defeated to her own ears and wondered why.
“But not really suffer stigma,” K added.
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean—” Rosie began, but K went right on.
“Not like for Poppyclaude I think. In Thailand, lots kathoey. Not so big deal. We all Buddhist. Is karma. Is life. Is just another way to be.”
“Really?” It was the most astonishing thing Rosie had encountered in her travels thus far, including the woman who had arrived in labor and literally gotten down off an elephant.
“Buddhist way.” K shrugged. “Last life one thing, this one another, next another. Whatever happen last life to make me like this not my fault. Everyone know that. Me, my soul, will be lot of bodies before done, some male, some female, some both. So okay. No one care what is under my pants.”
“What is…” Rosie-the-clinician battled Rosie-the-courteous and won because so much was on its head here. “What is under your pants, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Like Sorry Ralph, I have all original parts.” K smiled. Rosie was impressed with a language facility that extended to puns. “Lot of clinics in Bangkok do surgery but mostly for foreigner. Many kathoey here let be. Which parts not what matter. Is soul, how move, how dress, how love, how be. Just like Poppy, I am female soul so do not matter to me or Choochai or sons or daughters or anyone what is under pants. Makes sense?”
Rosie nodded, speechless. It was hard to talk about these things in one’s own language, never mind someone else’s. “So you just…” Just what? She wasn’t sure herself what she was asking.
But K nodded. “I grow up north Chiang Mai. Not really even town. Rural. Farm. But my cousin kathoey so I know it is okay. Then at school, older students kathoey. Show me how. Hair. Clothes. Hormone easy to get if you want but lots do not. Just me is enough. Is not same for Poppy I do not think?”
“No.” Rosie shook her head and told herself sternly that it would be inappropriate to cry in front of this woman with whom she had spent the afternoon removing shrapnel from the side of a six-year-old. “It’s not the same. Everyone cares what’s under Claude’s pants. Poppy’s pants. And many of them mind. First everyone knew, and it wasn’t safe. Then no one knew, and then they found out, and that was worse.”
“Why you keep secret?”
“Because I didn’t learn. I saw. I saw what horrors come from keeping it a secret. I saw what storms unleash when it’s uncovered. But somehow, somehow, I made the same mistake.”
“Mistake good because you learn, you fix.”
“I don’t know how,” said Rosie.
“Middle way.”
“At home, there is no middle way. You’re male or you’re female. There’s no in between. You conform or you hide. You conform or you’re wrong. If you dress like a girl, then you have to be a girl, all girl, and if any part of you’s not, that’s not okay.”
“Not just middle way between male and female. Middle way of being. Middle way of living with what is hard and who do not accept you.”
“How do you do that?”
“You keep remember: all is change.”
“All what?”
“All life. You are never finish, never done. Never become, always becoming. You know? Life is change so is always okay you are not there yet. Is like this for you and Poppy and everyone. The people who do not understand are change. The people who afraid are change. There is no before and no after because change is what is life. You live in change, in in between.”
“And how do you do that?”
“You learn over lifetimes. You keep try. You will find middle way to be. This life. Next. You find your way.”
Rosie did not know if she could wait that long.
K smiled. “You know story of the Buddha?”
Rosie shook her head.
“Just like you and Claude. Poppy. Just like everyone. Story of change, of not-knowing to knowing, ignorance to enlightenment. But enlightenment is long, take a long, hard time. If it does not, it does not result enlightenment. Buddha was many lives before last one. In last life, Buddha was prince. You know?”
Rosie did. Rosie knew all about stories about a prince.
“Very shelter life in palace so ignorant of poverty, sickness, old age, death. Then he go out into world and learn. Then he help. That is important part. Once he learn, he listen and tell, he help. He leave family, leave palace, leave being a prince.” Rosie nodded along. This part sounded familiar. “He learn about the world and the people. He meditate to learn to be. He give up all food and water and house, but then his body too loud to achieve peace so he learn again
: too little as bad as too much. He teach, tell his story, help people see truth. He say be kind and forgive, honest and share. He say everything will change so okay. He say middle way. He enlighten. That is the story. Learn mistake and fix and tell. Not-knowing to knowing. Even the Buddha. You see?”
“But I’m not knowing,” said Rosie.
“Not yet,” said K.
The Color of Monday
The Buddha was everywhere. Not Everywhere everywhere, though maybe that too for all Claude knew. His ubiquity was worrisome because you weren’t supposed to point your feet at him, but you could never tell where he might pop up—there was a Buddha statue in the cafeteria, two in the schoolroom, three in the intake center, one in the waiting area. Claude had counted five so far in the guesthouse. On the bike ride to the clinic, they passed seven of them. When they went into town for an afternoon, he counted fifteen. The Buddha hid round a bend or on the crest of a hill or among the trees. Claude’s little students had tried to explain all about the Buddha who was Lord but not God, a prince, a teacher, a reminder, and a path, but what Claude liked about him was he looked like a girl.
He didn’t realize this until their trip to Chiang Mai, where they went to get supplies for the clinic and then stayed a couple extra days because his mother decided they had earned some time off. K told them Chiang Mai was Thailand’s second city, so Claude steeled himself for Bangkok again, but Chiang Mai was nothing like Bangkok. There were gardens and parks and mountains in Chiang Mai. There was a quiet treetop restaurant and a hotel with the giant cushy beds the guesthouse so completely lacked and a market where you could buy supplies without live animals looking at you tragically from buckets or cages. There were flowers everywhere and fruit stands and bike paths. There was a fish spa, where you sat on benches over an aquarium, and hundreds of garra rufa fish came and nibbled at your calves and feet.
But mostly in Chiang Mai there were wats, which meant temples. There were more than three hundred wats in the city, and Claude was pretty sure they saw every single one of them. They were right in the middle of everything, plopped next to a restaurant or a bank or a grocery store, right where you were going anyway so that they served, their guide Nok explained, as a reminder. What the temples wanted to remind you about was the Buddha. Maybe he wasn’t God, but then why were there so many statues of him? Each temple had legions of Buddhas. Oodles of Buddhas. Buddhas galore. There were paintings and drawings and murals of Buddhas. Stories of the Buddha. Statues of Buddhas with flames blooming from their heads toward the sky. Buddhas walking or meditating or sitting on a snake or talking to animals. Buddhas who looked like they were taking a nap. Buddhas with their eyes all cast down (because it is important to see oneself before others, Nok explained) and their ears stretched long (to listen, to observe, and also because long ears mean long life; Claude fingered his own but could not judge their relative length).
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