This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

  But what drew Claude to the Buddha first was not his eyes nor his ears but his fingers. Actually, his fingernails. They were long and shapely. They were elegantly filed. Often, they were painted gold. His hands lay quietly in his lap, easy and neat and turned gently open, like he was asking, and genuinely caring, how you were, like he was getting ready to offer to make you a snack or some tea. Like a girl. The Buddhas wore jewelry and snailed their hair. They had full lips and secret smiles and shy eyes, high cheekbones and delicate noses, eyebrows that swept like swallows. Some had soft little bellies. Some had two squiggles that formed a triangle between their legs, and maybe that was the bottom of his jacket, but maybe it was something better. Sometimes the Buddhas lay on their sides, heads propped on hands, looking like if they could speak they would say, “So! Tell me everything!” just like Poppy’s friends did during sleepovers. One was wearing a floor-length beaded gold gown, the sparkling diamond weave of which snugged the Buddha’s gentle curves, and a black updo framing eyes that gazed modestly down at the dress and said, “Damn, I look good.” The Buddha had long, rounded thighs, smooth shoulders, flared hips, and a narrow waist. He had delicate feet, hands poised at his sides like patient birds. Sometimes up top, he was flat as the stone he was carved from. Sometimes robes or dresses or sashes seemed to hide something more up there because no matter the material, posture, expression, or outfit, the Buddha looked like a girl.

  Claude wasn’t sure it was polite to ask why—the Buddha may not have been a god, but in all the stories, he definitely was a he—but he did anyway. It was unlike him, but he had to know.

  Nok said, “Buddha peaceful, gentle, nonaggressive. So look female.”

  He said, “Buddha many lives and bodies before enlightenment.”

  He said, “Nothing belong to you. Not even the body of you.”

  None of which really answered the question. What was clear, however, was that the Buddha was born male, then cut off all his hair one day and got enlightened, then ended up looking like a girl. And as if that weren’t enough, the Buddha also seemed to feel that even things as unalterable as bodies were temporary, and what mattered was if you were good and honest, and forgiveness solved everything. That was how, whatever else they were, Claude and Poppy became Buddhists for life.

  * * *

  Their last day in Chiang Mai was the king’s birthday, and the whole city, the whole country, was having a party. People were giving out free food in the markets, shoving oranges into Claude’s hands and fish balls on a stick and a bowl of sweet, creamy pumpkin soup. And everywhere he looked, everyone was wearing yellow: yellow shirts and dresses, yellow hats and shawls, yellow shoes and yellow scarves.

  “Why is everyone wearing yellow?” Claude had to yell so Nok could hear him over the chanting.

  Nok smiled that smile that meant he must have made a mistake with his poor English comprehension skills because no one could possibly be as ignorant as Claude was. “It is color of Monday.”

  “What?”

  “Yellow.”

  “What’s yellow?”

  “The color of Monday.”

  “Monday has a color?”

  “Every day have a color.”

  “It does?”

  “Of course.”

  “But it’s Wednesday.”

  “Today is Wednesday, but king is born on Monday, so his color yellow. What day you born?”

  “June seventh.”

  “What day of week?”

  “Oh,” said Claude. “I have no idea.”

  This news was greeted with incredulity. “Then how you know your color?”

  Claude did not know his color.

  “What day he born?” Nok asked Rosie.

  “June seventh.”

  “What day of week?” Nok repeated patiently.

  “No idea.”

  “Find out,” Nok advised. “Is important. Your day tell what your color and also what your Buddha position.”

  “Buddha position?” Claude and his mother said together.

  “King’s Buddha position—Monday—is Dispelling Fear. Standing with one hands up or two hands up.” Claude had been thinking of these as talk-to-the-hand Buddhas. He looked like he was about to do one of those moves where you do three snaps in a Z and add, “Whatever it is, girl, I do not want to hear about it.” But apparently (and not, Claude reflected, surprisingly) it was more loving and generous than that. He was dispelling fear. Sometimes the position was meant to suggest holding back storms or an angry sea. Sometimes it was calling for peace, keeping fighting and fear at bay, reminding people to choose calm, choose love. Let be.

  * * *

  That night after dinner, they went back to the fish spa. Armed with a cell-phone connection, Claude discovered that, like the king of Thailand, he had been born on a Monday as well.

  “Makes sense.” His mother wiggled her toes to give the fish a ride.

  “What does?”

  “Your color being yellow.”

  “Why?”

  “Yellow’s what you paint the nursery if you don’t know whether the baby will be a boy or a girl.” Claude did not look up from the fish, so Rosie couldn’t tell whether this was helping or hurting, but she pressed on anyway. It was as good an opening as she was likely to get. “You were in the yellow baby room longer than anyone.”

  “The yellow baby room?”

  “The nursery in Madison. You were so little you probably don’t remember it. We kept that room yellow, just in case you were a girl.”

  “When?” Claude wondered but his mother seemed not to hear.

  “I also like the idea of dispelling fear.” Rosie swished fish and tried to pass this off as idle musing. In all the wonder and whirling of the day, the golden wats and teeming Buddhas, the joyous celebrants, the ravenous fish she was feeding with her own flesh, this was what stilled for her, smooth and clear as glass. Dispelling fear. Taming what was scary not by hiding it, not by blocking it or burying it, not by keeping it secret, but by reminding themselves, and everyone else, to choose love, choose openness, to think and be calm. That there were more ways than just two, wider possibilities than hidden or betrayed, stalled or brokenhearted, male or female, right or wrong. Middle ways. Ways beyond.

  They had, she could finally see, been choosing out of fear. Penn’s rushing fevered drive for magical transformation was fear, but so was Rosie’s insistence that they wait and see and make their child choose. They needed their fear dispelled, she and Penn and Claude and Poppy, because they could not live in fear anymore. But everyone else needed their fear dispelled too because that’s where all the trouble was. Nasty fifth-graders and violent college students and ignorant playdates and people who gave you rude looks in the grocery store and missing-the-point school administrators and proponents of the hedge enemy and a wide world of not-yet-enlightened people were nothing more or less than scared. They needed their fear dispelled, their seas calmed, their storms allayed. And the person to dispel the fear was Rosie. She couldn’t cower anymore; she couldn’t wait; she had to leap. Ten-year-olds were not so scary, after all, and this one before her was coming clear and clearer. It didn’t do to make lost children find their own way out of the woods. This child, this tender child, was young yet and new in the world. The way was hard, and help was called for. Penn could not choose the route and pave the way. But neither could Rosie sit back and wait for what would come. There were other ways. They were not easy to see, and they were not easy to execute, but easy had been taken off the wish list long ago.

  “It’s the middle way, my love,” she said.

  “I don’t get the middle way.” Claude made his legs make figure eights through the warm water and tried to match his mother’s certain tone.

  “How come?”

  “Because there is no middle way.” It came out between a groan and a whimper. “There are only two choices, and they aren’t even choices, at least not ones you get to choose. If you only tell some of the truth, that’s a lie. If only one tiny
stupid part of you is a boy, you can never be a girl.”

  “All of that seems true. It does.” His mother reached across the water and took his hands. “But it’s not. I think the middle way is hard for the same reason the middle way is right.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s invisible.”

  “Like in a fairy tale?”

  “No,” his mother said to the fish, then looked up at him. “Actually, yes, sort of like a fairy tale. There’s a fork in the road. It seems like there are only two choices. It seems like the task is to figure out which way to go, left or right, forward or back, deeper or safer, but in fact any of those choices is easy compared to the real trick. The real trick is you have to forge your way straight ahead through the trees where there is no path.”

  “Why doesn’t that sound peaceful?” Claude, the budding Buddhist.

  Rosie didn’t know. “Maybe it is in the long run? Maybe it takes time. Maybe peaceful and easy turn out to be opposites.” She thought of the whole lifetime it takes to grow up and become an entire person. She thought of the day she and Penn—a family of two at the time—painted the nursery yellow, the color of either way, of dispelling fear, of not-knowing. The color of Monday. “Can I tell you a secret?”

  Claude looked up from the fish.

  “I miss Poppy.” Rosie smiled.

  Claude didn’t say anything. Then he said, “But didn’t you miss Claude when you had Poppy?”

  “That’s not quite what I mean,” Rosie said carefully. “You know, I’ve called you Claude here because you asked me to. But it doesn’t really matter to me what your name is or what your hair looks like or if you’re my daughter or my son because no matter what, I only, I always, see you. You are always the same child to me, my brilliant beautiful shining child, my baby. You became Poppy, but you never stopped being Claude. You became Claude again, but you never stopped being Poppy. Boy or girl, Poppy or Claude, they seem so different to you, to the world. Not to me. Used to be, I couldn’t even tell them apart.”

  “Used to be?”

  “Now I see how different Poppy and Claude are, but not how you think. I miss Poppy not because I miss my happy, strong, laughing little girl but because I miss my happy, strong, laughing child. Claude is a lost, sad child out of joint. That’s what I’ve realized since we’ve been here. It’s not that Poppy’s the girl and Claude’s the boy. There’s boy and girl in both of them. They both have what they parade and what they hide. It’s that Poppy’s the happy child, and Claude is the sad one. Poppy’s the one who fits and feels comfortable, and Claude is the one who chafes in ill-shaped holes. And that makes it so much easier to choose between them.”

  “But you said it’s hard, and you have to plow through the trees anyway. You said invisible middle way.”

  “Because Poppy is the happy child, but Poppy is also the way through the trees I think. You have to be—you get to be—Poppy, even though it’s hard. What was wrong at home wasn’t being Poppy. What was wrong was trying to make it easy to be Poppy. Being Poppy isn’t easy. What we have to do is help you be Poppy even though it’s hard.”

  “I never said being Poppy was too hard.” Claude crossed his arms over his chest, whether defiant or hugging himself his mother could not say. “I’m not afraid of that.”

  “Maybe it’s not being Poppy that’s hard,” Rosie acknowledged. “Maybe it’s staying Poppy. Staying Poppy is going to get complicated for a while here. You have some tough decisions to make, but we’ll help. You have some tough reentry to go back to, but it won’t be as bad as you think. Being Poppy will never be featherweight, but I think it’s lighter than being Claude. And fortunately, Poppy is strong as seas.”

  Claude—Poppy—shook garra rufa fish off dripping legs and went to find the restroom. Right there in the hallway, exactly where you’d expect the bathrooms to be, there were three of them. One sign had a blue person in pants. And one sign had a red person with a cute flip hairstyle in a skirt. And one sign was half of each, a person whose left, blue leg was in pants and whose right, red leg came out from under a skirt. Claude—and Poppy—stood for a long time looking at it, making sure it wasn’t a trick, making sure they understood. It seemed impossible, but here it was. For the first time in their whole, whole lives, there was a right door.

  Inside, there was a bathroom. Sinks, toilets, toilet paper even. Ordinary. Nothing special. A miracle.

  An Ending

  Rosie’s first day back at the clinic was a long one. She and Poppy—they were making an effort to reclaim the name, a statement of hope, a declaration of intent—had gotten back late the night before, and then Rosie had come in even earlier than usual. A woman pregnant with twins delivered the first baby quick and easy but the second baby slow and hard. It was after one in the morning when Rosie got on her bike and checked her phone. Fifteen missed calls from Penn. Fifteen. And seven texts, two words apiece, all exactly the same: CALL HOME. She did so instantly. Call failed. She raised her arm and waved her phone in all directions. No cell service. Though she doubted it could bear her weight, she tried standing on the bright-blue plastic table that passed for the clinic intake desk. It wobbled, held, but did not result in bars on her phone. Was it true or some kind of desperate urban legend that getting higher up led to cell service? She made it as far as the first branch of the (she thought acacia?) tree next to the Ambulatory Care Center before the threat of whatever might be living there and the insanity she was displaying outweighed the remote possibility of some kind of altitudinous arboreal connectivity.

  She thought: There’s Wi-Fi at the guesthouse.

  She thought: He’ll have called Claude—Poppy—and she’ll know what’s going on.

  But when she arrived at the guesthouse seven breathless minutes later, knees bloodied from falling when she jumped out of the tree, thighs screaming from pedaling twice as hard as her thighs were inclined to left to their own devices, the Wi-Fi was down and Poppy was sound asleep.

  At first she was relieved. If it were bad, Poppy would have waited up to tell her. If it were bad, Poppy wouldn’t be able to sleep. Then she became unrelieved because if it were not bad, but really bad, Penn wouldn’t call Poppy. Penn would wait to talk to Rosie.

  It was going to be a long night.

  Rosie’s first thought, after she cleaned up her knees, checked the Wi-Fi a few hundred more times, and finally, resignedly, climbed into bed, was of Carmelo, who, after sixty-some years with her pack a day habit, probably had it coming to her, but her daughter was still not ready. Please, she pled to the Buddha, to the darkness, to the jungle, to any powers that be’d, I am not ready. I cannot lose my mother. She is all the family I have left.

  Then she thought of all the family she had left. There was no reason to assume it wasn’t one of the boys. Youth did not protect from everything, not even in the United States of America. A menacing cough that came on so quickly and sounded so ominous it could only portend something ill starred. A pestilent lump uncovered somewhere hideous. A catastrophic allergy no one had foreseen, retribution for all those cavalier PB&Js she’d sent to school in Wisconsin. Or an accident—car, bike, skateboard, stair, fist—there were endless permutations, none of which strained the imagination. Or they were into something they shouldn’t have been. Her fault for being halfway around the world. Drugs, drink, guns, gambling. They were teenage boys and therefore morons. She knew this in her heart.

  Or the other boy in her life. She could not live without Penn. It was as simple and awful as that.

  She spent a sleepless night with her dead mother, her diseased/bleeding/foolhardy/allergic sons, the love of her life doomed to malignant monsters. She thought, she could not help but think, of Jane Doe, who was still a child when she died in her hands, bloodied, beaten, and broken, shot and shamed and snatched untimely. You could not avoid being who you were, could you? You could not avoid being who you were, and sometimes it destroyed you. She thought, she could not help but think, of Nick Calcutti and the fallible infallib
le fact that, no matter how fast and far and fleet you go, you cannot always outrun violence. Sometimes you got to turn away, but sometimes you did not. She tried to think of Nick as proof that often, usually, you trialed and triumphed, but he was a near miss, and in her up-all-night, petrified heart she knew it. She tried to think of Jane Doe as a relic of a time and place and fear long past, but Jane was there-but-for instead, and she knew that too. When the sun rose finally and she left sleeping Poppy, blissfully ignorant, and made K drive her to town and a working telephone, she could draw only thimblefuls of breath, shallow as dust, nothing as substantial as a whisper.

  * * *

  It was afternoon in Seattle. Penn, in the middle of his workday, trying to squeeze a few more paragraphs out before everyone got home from school, answered the phone quite a bit more languorous and distracted than Rosie felt the occasion required.

  “Penn!” Torn, broken, desperate.

  “Rosie!” Delighted to hear from her.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Wrong?”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine. Better than fine. I have news.”