While Rosie was puzzling how to talk him out of his dress, Claude accidentally, in his grief, spilled dead fish down his front. Through fonts of tears and snot and disappointment, he had to change out of the dress and settle for an old red patent-leather purse of Carmelo’s, which Rosie consented to as a compromise position in the hopes he could pass it off successfully as an ill-suited lunch box. She put his peanut butter and jelly, banana, pretzels, and, as a first-day treat, chocolate-chip cookies—plus a note—in the purse to give it lunch-box cachet. Claude’s kindergarten was full-day, six whole hours of sitting quietly and following rules and being away from home where someone—everyone—loved him best of all. Ben and Roo were off to their first day of middle school. Orion came down for breakfast wearing an eyeball sticker between his brows, and when she started to question him about it, he winked one of his other ones at her. So Claude’s lunch purse was only seventh or eighth on Rosie’s list of concerns that morning.
But when she arrived back at school at the end of the day, Claude was nowhere to be seen, and Orion and Rigel rushed out with the bell singing, “Claude got in trouble. Claude got in trouble.” Then the kindergarten door opened, spilling tiny children into their parents’ eager arms, all except Claude, who was being held to his new teacher’s side by what seemed a very firm hand on the top of his head.
“Mrs. Adams?” The kindergarten teacher’s name was Becky Appleton. At orientation, she’d told the parents to call her Becky, but Rosie just couldn’t. First of all, Becky was the name of a child, not a person in whose charge she put the care and education of her baby boy, and though the teacher did look to be about fourteen years old, Rosie still thought she should have the decency to go by Rebecca already. But mostly, kindergarten classrooms always made Rosie feel more like a child herself than the parent of five of them. She remembered her own first day of kindergarten with a clarity that really should have been foggy all these years later. She had been through this four times now, and it never got any less weird. The tiny desks and chairs, the bins of still-pointy crayons and pencils, the smell of new eraser, these made Rosie want to sit down and learn the alphabet rather than be on a first-name basis with the teacher. “You’re Mrs. Adams? Claude’s mother?”
“It’s Walsh, actually.” Rosie decided to let go, for the moment, the fact that it was Ms. not Mrs., and Dr. not Ms.
“Claude had a great first day, Mrs. Walsh.” Becky’s tone was belied by the look on Claude’s face. “But he had some trouble at lunch. The school does not allow peanut butter, so Claude had to sit and eat by himself at his desk in the classroom.”
“I read the kindergarten materials cover to cover,” said Rosie. “There’s nothing in there about not sending peanuts to school.”
“Oh, we just assume people know that. I guess we forget that not everyone is as aware as we are about skyrocketing peanut allergies among children today. No peanuts is implied.”
“Claude is my fifth child to go through this school. The one I made him today was perhaps the eight or nine hundredth peanut butter and jelly sandwich I’ve sent here. Is this a new rule?”
“We don’t check their sandwiches,” explained Miss Appleton. “It’s about good faith and respect. Doing unto others. The Golden Rule.”
“It’s a no-peanut honor system?”
“Exactly. We’d never have known Claude had a forbidden sandwich except he was bragging to his new friends about how ladies who lunch, lunch on finger sandwiches, cucumber usually, but in his case peanut butter because cucumbers make the bread soggy unless eaten right away.”
“That’s true.” Rosie wondered, vaguely at the time, more pointedly later on, whether the issue here was the peanut butter or the patent-leather purse it had come out of. Or the lesson about ladies who lunch. “Is anyone in Claude’s class allergic to peanuts?”
“It’s a precautionary rule.”
“Does his eating his sandwich in the classroom protect precautionary peanut-allergy sufferers better than in the cafeteria?”
“Well”—Miss Appleton pretended to hesitate to share the next part—“I skipped my own free period to supervise Claude in the classroom while he ate. I was able to make sure he didn’t touch anything.”
“Let’s go home, baby,” Rosie said to Claude.
“Bye-bye, Claude,” said Miss Appleton. “It was nice to meet you today. I am so excited for our year ahead.”
Claude did not raise his gaze from the ground.
“Oh, one more thing Mrs. AdamsImeanWalsh. We generally discourage accessories at school, especially at this age.”
“Accessories?”
“Jewelry, headgear, shiny shirts. Purses.”
“Shiny shirts?”
“Anything distracting. We like students to be able to concentrate during class.”
“Sure, but—”
“If they’re fiddling, it’s hard for them to learn.”
“Was Claude fiddling?”
“No. He was not. But other children found his purse distracting.”
“Was he doing anything distracting with it?”
“Just the presence of the purse was distracting.”
“Like the peanuts?”
“How do you mean?”
“You are prophylactically ruling out purses and peanuts,” said Rosie.
Miss Appleton blushed from head to toe. “Prophylactically? Like,” she whispered the next word, “condoms?”
“Prophylactically like preventatively and defensively. Anticipatorially, if you will.”
“Um, sure.”
“It means you are banning peanuts and purses just in case they might cause problems even though they’ve caused none yet and despite the fact that doing so may infringe on the rights and well-being of your student citizens.”
“We-ell, I guess we hope you’ll just make something else for lunch? And we don’t really think boys, uh, children, um, need purses. For school.”
“It’s not a purse,” Claude interrupted. Rosie was relieved to hear his voice. “It’s a lunch tote.”
“Come on, sweetie,” Rosie said. “It’s been a long day. Let’s go home.”
Rigel and Orion were waiting for them on the playground, Orion hanging upside down from the little-kid monkey bars so that his hair brushed the ground and his face looked like a (three-eyed) strawberry, Rigel climbing up the sliding board then sliding down the stairs on his butt. They headed toward the car and home to see whether Roo and Ben had fared any better at middle school. Orion put his ten-year-old arm around his baby brother. “Kindergarten’s tough, kid. But we still love you.”
“Yeah, we love you,” Rigel echoed, “and your purse.”
“It’s a lunch tote.”
“And your lunch tote.”
* * *
The next day Rosie made cheese sandwiches all around. As Penn was packing them into a variety of lunch bags, boxes, and the patent-leather tote, Claude came downstairs and slid into his breakfast seat without a word. His already short hair was clipped back anyway with four rainbow barrettes, and he was wearing a dress made by pulling his own T-shirt—light-blue with a silk-screened unicorn eating a hot dog on a bicycle—over a longer shirt of Penn’s so that it flared into a skirt just below his waist.
“Nice dress, dude.” Roo’s mouth was full of Cheerios, so it was hard to guess his tone.
“Thanks.” Claude gave a small smile to his own cereal bowl.
Rigel looked up from the webbed foot he was knitting. “You’re not wearing that to school, are you?” and Rosie held her breath, waiting for the answer.
“Some of it,” said Claude.
“You’ll get your butt kicked,” said Rigel.
“Butt, butt, butt.” Orion giggled, wiggling his toes into the done-already other webbed foot.
“It’s not that it’s not a nice outfit,” Ben tried gently. “It’s just not very manly, is it?”
“He’s not a man,” said Penn. “He’s five. He’s a little boy.”
“He may not even be that,” said Roo.
“Roo!” Rosie’s voice sounded like warning, but was what he said unfair? Untrue? Unkind? She had no idea. Of course Claude was a little boy because if he wasn’t a little boy, what was he? This seemed like such a simple question, but it was one she’d never encountered before as a parent, and that was saying something. It seemed like such a simple question, but somehow it was terrifying. What you were if you weren’t a little boy ranked as maybe Rosie’s fourth concern of the morning. She tabled it. “No one’s kicking Claude’s anything. If anyone tries to kick Claude’s anything, I’ll kick their anything.”
Penn knew in his heart that Claude should be who he was. But he also knew that Claude would be happier if neither his clothes nor his sandwich nor the bag it came out of attracted anyone’s attention because another thing his heart knew was this: it was more complicated than that. Five years of Orion wearing all manner of weird stuff to school had occasioned not so much as a raised third eyebrow from anyone. “What an imaginative boy Orion is,” his teachers said. “His spirit brightens everyone’s day.” If an eyeball sticker was creative self-expression, surely Claude should wear what he wanted to school. How could you say yes to webbed feet but no to a dress, yes to being who you were but no to dressing like him? How did you teach your small human that it’s what’s inside that counts when the truth was everyone was pretty preoccupied with what you put on over the outside too?
These were Penn’s second through twenty-ninth concerns. He felt bees buzzing behind his rib cage. But before Penn could settle on a parenting path, Claude slipped out of his chair, padded upstairs, and emerged again wordlessly, defrocked and de-barretted, Penn’s skirt-shirt gone, only his own remaining over a pair of navy shorts. Claude shouldered his peanut-free purse, and everyone went off to school. When he got home at the end of a much smoother day, he went straight to his room and pulled Penn’s shirt back on under his own, stuck the barrettes back in his hair, added a pair of Carmelo’s clip-on earrings, and sat down at the dining-room table to homework with everyone else. Penn bit his bottom lip. The outfit itself didn’t much worry him—it ranked in the high thirties, maybe—but its persistence was starting to creep into the top ten. Instead, he turned to homeworking.
Penn was in charge of homework, and he had rules. Homeworking never commenced—even complaining about homeworking never commenced—until after snack. And it had to be a good snack. Penn recognized peanut butter on a celery stick for the bullshit it was. Blueberry pancakes. Chocolate banana pops. Zucchini mini pizzas. These were snacks. Then the dining-room table was cleared, wiped down, and requisitioned for work. All boys—Penn included—sat down and got to it, homeworking quietly, asking questions or for additional help as necessary, calming so that others could concentrate. Homeworking en masse made it more fun. Penn recalled hours in his room as a child, slogging through math problems or write-ups of science experiments or memorizing the words for things in French. Downstairs, his parents would be watching TV or laughing together about their day while upstairs he suffered the isolating boredom and nagging insecurity of passé composé. At his dining-room table with his cadre of boys, however, he could approach homework, aptly, like dinner—everything shared, the trials and triumphs, each according to his abilities, everyone pitching in to help. Roo might say, “Can anyone think of another way to say ‘society’?” or Ben might say, “Is there even a word for ‘soufflé’ in Spanish?” or Rigel and Orion might be building a rocket together while their father hoped it was for a science project and not just for the sake of blowing stuff up.
Over the years, kindergarten homework had gotten more … Rosie said “intense”; Penn said “asinine with an emphasis on the ass.” When Roo was in kindergarten, there was playing with blocks and in the sandbox. There was learning to sit quietly on the rug and listen to a story. Now Claude had kindergarten homework of his very own. On this second night of school, it was to draw a picture of himself and write a sentence about what he hoped to learn this year. Claude’s sentence was “I hope to learn about science including stars, what kind of frogs live in Wisconsin, why oceans are salty, air currents and other winds, and why peanut butter is not allowed at school.” Penn marveled at his youngest son. So many children seemed somehow to age the littler ones more quickly, like some kind of obscure Einsteinian law of physics. Claude’s picture was of the whole family, and Penn could not decide if it was wonderful or alarming that, assigned to draw himself, Claude drew them all. Penn and Rosie and Carmelo stood with lanky arms around one another’s lanky shoulders, heads grazing the clouds just above them, the blue of the sky creeping occasionally over the outline of their faces so that their cheeks were smeared with the firmament. In front of them, sitting crisscross-applesauce all in a row in the grass, were five brothers: Roo’s hair curling out wider than his body; Ben’s glasses owling huge, dark eyes straight off the page; Rigel and Orion with ears unfairly cocked at right angles from pointy, parallel heads. And small in the corner—because he’d run out of room? because he got lost in his overlarge family? because he felt insignificant in the face of the vastness of the universe?—Claude had drawn himself in his tea-length dress with ruby slippers and wavy brown hair down to the ground, held back off his face with a dozen barrettes that snaked colored ribbons in all directions, cascading over his brothers, over his parents, over the clouds and the trees and the grass and the sky, a small, windblown child in his own personal tempest, puzzling over air currents and other winds and his place in the world, which, it struck Penn, was right about there, right where he’d imagined it. Penn’s concern over the drawing subsided into the high teens.
The picture went without comment by Miss Appleton except for a hastily penned and not very convincing “Nice work!” plus a sticker of a grinning check mark (because, Penn wondered, actually making a check mark was too much effort?). So did the lunch purse as long as it didn’t contain peanut butter. And Claude, for his part, merely changed clothes four times a day: PJs to a dress when he woke, then into school clothes after breakfast, then back into a dress and heels and jewelry when he got home, then back into PJs before bed.
Saying good night one night, smoothing the hair back off Claude’s forehead, listening to him tell them sweetly, sleepily, about his day, Rosie squeezed Penn’s hand for support and took a deep breath. “Does it make you tired, all that changing of clothes?” she asked gently.
Claude’s forehead wrinkled. His tiny shoulders shrugged. “It’s okay.”
“You know,” Penn said carefully, so carefully, “you could wear a dress or a skirt to school if you wanted. It would be okay.”
“No it wouldn’t,” said Claude.
Rosie felt her eyes produce actual tears of relief that Claude didn’t leap at this chance immediately. But she persisted anyway. “Sure it would.”
“The other kids would make fun of me.” Claude’s eyes were full too.
“That’s true,” Penn admitted. “They would. But that would be okay. They wouldn’t mean it. They would make fun of you for a day or two then forget all about you and make fun of something else.”
“They would never forget. They would make fun of me every day forever.”
“We would help you,” said Rosie. “We could think of things to say back. We could think of ways to ignore them.”
“We could not.”
“We could talk to Miss Appleton.”
“Miss Appleton doesn’t like me.”
“Of course she does!”
“No, she thinks I’m weird. And if I wear a dress to school, she’ll think I’m really weird.”
“You wouldn’t be weird. You would be you in a dress. Smart, sweet, kind, funny you in a dress. It would be okay.”
“No,” said Claude, “this is okay. Real clothes at home, school clothes at school. I can just change.”
That “real” reverberated around in Penn’s brain until it was deafening. “Well that’s okay too, of course. But you should be able to be who you are, wear what you like. The other kids, your teacher, your friends, everyone would be fine. Everyone loves you for who you are.”
“No one but you,” said Claude. “No one but us. We are the only ones.”
We are the only ones. This was the part that haunted Rosie, hunted her. It supplanted quite a few other concerns to leapfrog up to number three or four. Rosie was gratified that Claude felt so supported at home. Rosie was horrified that Claude felt so precarious outside of it. But Rosie was also used to conflicting emotions, for she was a mother and knew every moment of every day that no one out in the world could ever love or value or nurture her children as well as she could and yet that it was necessary nonetheless to send them out into that world anyway.
Rosie’s number-one concern was: what would make Claude happy?
Penn’s number-one concern was: what would make Claude happy?
But happy is harder than it sounds.