This Is How It Always Is: Part III: The Color of Monday Summary & Analysis

There are Buddha statues everywhere in Thailand. There are seven just on Claude’s bike ride from the guesthouse to the clinic, and in town there are even more. One day, Rosie and Claude have to go into the city of Chiang Mai for supplies, but Chiang Mai is nothing like Bangkok. There are gardens and bike paths in Chiang Mai, and there are lots of temples, which means there are tons of Buddha statues. Claude notices that all the statues have long, shapely fingernails, and Buddha’s face and lips are always vaguely feminine. Buddha looks like a girl, Claude decides, even though he knows that Buddha is a boy.

Claude and Rosie’s guide, Nok, explains that Buddha statues are depicted as feminine because femininity is “peaceful, gentle, [and] nonaggressive.” He further explains that Buddha had many bodies before enlightenment. In Buddhism, nothing belongs to you, not even your own body. Claude instantly likes this idea. Buddha is a guy who was born male, shaved his head, “got enlightened, and then ended up looking like a girl.” Buddha understands that bodies don’t matter, and from that moment on, Claude is a Buddhist.

Claude also notices that everyone seems to be wearing yellow, and Nok explains that yellow is the “color of Monday.” Okay, Claude says, but it is Wednesday. Yes, Nok says, but the king was born on Monday, and yellow is his color. The guide asks Claude what day of the week he was born on, but Claude doesn’t know. He looks to Rosie, but she can’t remember either. Nok asks how Claude knows his color if he doesn’t know what day he was born. “Find out,” Nok says, “Is important.”

Later that night, Rosie tells Claude it makes sense that his color is yellow. Yellow is the color they painted the nursey in Madison when they didn’t know if Claude would be a boy or a girl. Yellow is the “middle way,” Rosie says, but Claude says there isn’t a middle way, and if there is, he doesn’t get it. For Claude, there are only two choices. Rosie says that seems true, but the middle way is hard to find for the same reasons that it is right. The middle way is “invisible,” she says. “Like in a fairy tale?” Claude asks. Rosie initially says no, but she changes her mind. Yes, she says. The trick is coming to a fork in the road and making your own path.

Rosie tells Claude that she misses Poppy. Not because Poppy is a girl, and Claude is a boy, she says, but because Poppy is happy, and Claude is sad and lost. Poppy and Claude are both a boy and a girl, Rosie says, but Poppy is the way to the “middle way,” which is why being Poppy is so hard. Claude says being Poppy isn’t hard, it is being Claude that is hard, but Rosie asks to rephrase. It is hard to stay Poppy, she says, but lucky for Claude, Poppy “is strong as seas.”