“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.