This Is How It Always Is(108)

*

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.