The Best American Essays 2016 (39 page)

At the meeting required to enter the lottery, we were told that on two unspecified dates—one in early May and one in early November—social workers from the organization’s various offices throughout the state would gather together, number the applications, put the numbers in a hat, and blindly draw a particular quantity determined by their leader. After we mailed in our application, I wondered often about this event. I imagined tiny slips of paper—the one with my number on it, for instance—blowing off a table when someone exited or entered the room before it made its way into the hat, leaving me with no chance at all of being picked. Was there a lottery witness? Did a senior citizen stand against the wall, hands joined together solemnly as on so many states’ televised daily lotto picks, to ensure that everything went fairly and squarely? And if, as the social worker informed us, we would be allowed to reconsider the items we marked on the application again at a later date—whether we could parent a child with microcephalus or one born from a schizophrenic, for instance—why was it even on the lottery application in the first place? Was this really some kind of weeding-out process? I imagined the social workers—all women, most likely mothers themselves—laughing wildly at those whose applications indicated a desire for the perfect child, ripping them up, and trashing them immediately. If this truly was a lottery, why not just have us write our name and number on the back of a raffle ticket and, if our ticket was drawn, consider the hard questions later?

Some psychologists believe gambling mirrors sexual excitement, with its repeated buildup, climax, and release of tension. Maybe this is why the idea of the adoption lottery excited my husband and me so much, why we chose this agency over others where we could have signed a contract and jumped right into the adoption process. It felt natural to begin parenthood this way: to cast our lot, and then wait a month or two to see what happened.

Mid-April rolled around. I still had not seen a single salamander. One weekend the forecast was warm and rainy, but I was busy entertaining a friend who had flown in to visit. On Saturday she slept in, and I grabbed an umbrella to walk the dog and check out an overflow area near our lake, finding two deep open holes: turtle hatchlings must have overwintered in the nest and emerged in the last few days. It was a sign of something—but as of yet, I saw no amphibians.

We stayed indoors all weekend. On Sunday morning we missed a call from my husband’s little brother. On Sunday night it was still raining. He called again, and my husband disappeared to talk to him. He returned to announce that his brother’s wife was pregnant—twelve weeks pregnant, with identical twins.

I left my husband and guest to hunt for salamanders. Many factors were at work in my decision to go out that night, and I don’t deny any of them. The major mistake in psychology may be the belief that awareness changes behavior. It doesn’t: we like our social pressure, our sorrow, our envy. I knew I should be overjoyed by the prospect of two new nieces or nephews—and I was—but I admit I was also irritated, as if there were some kind of cosmological math occurring that didn’t add up: two babies for them, and zero for us.

I drove the streets past every pond I knew, looking for slick salamander bodies in my headlights, wondering how many I was running over in my desperate quest. But it began to snow. In the morning five inches would cover the ground. I became dizzy from the windy country roads, staring into the oncoming flakes with my brights on. The seasons ran through my mind, lapping one another. They tangled in my brain and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d missed something, even though I knew it was still early. It felt too late.

A week or so later I bought a pair of boots—no matter that I should be saving money—at the local Fleet Farm, the kind kids wear to jump in puddles (or obstetricians, I recently found out from a friend, whose son’s birth proved messy and more difficult than the norm). I couldn’t believe I’d been traipsing around the shores of ponds all these years without them. I also couldn’t believe I was still traipsing around the shores of ponds at my age, a kitchen strainer in hand. I knew I should be shuttling kids to soccer practice, piano lessons, laundering the clothes of
kids
who do this. Was there something wrong with me? Because I didn’t have children I couldn’t stop being one? I felt like a ten-year-old boy, not a thirty-eight-year-old woman. In an old army ammunition plant near Madison, Wisconsin, a reservoir contains a population of tiger salamanders that, in adapting to their enclosed environment, have become neotenic, retaining for life their juvenile characteristics—feathery gills, keeled tails. They still reproduce, but along with their young, never leave the water to live on land as do most adult tiger salamanders. Officials want to drain the reservoir, seen as a safety hazard, but locals are working hard to preserve it and its salamander population.

The day before Easter I hiked to a pond a couple miles into the forest. It was dry and warm, so I still didn’t find any salamanders. For this reason, I was reluctant to put on my boots, which I had been carrying in a backpack. Finally, since I didn’t want to have carried them in vain, I slipped them on and waded into the water. That is when I saw them.

All over the substrate, on submerged sticks and grasses, like a thousand tiny glass slippers, lay the spermatophores of now-vanished male spotted salamanders. I picked up a stick where a salamander had laid three in a row to examine them more closely. They were translucent, the size of half your pinkie fingertip. You might think they were some kind of tree mold, or something a snail left behind. They littered the bottom of the pond like confetti, evidence of the start of the salamander new year. Upon further inspection, I found floating beneath last year’s submerged cattail leaves loose constellations of eggs coalescing into infant galaxies.

I wanted to pick them up, but two feet was as far as I could go. I began to sink a little, and water threatened to deluge my boots. I was in the muck.

Despite knowing that the day-to-day tasks of raising an infant (changing diapers, doing laundry, cleaning up vomit) and raising a teenager (worrying, feeling hated) are unlikely to increase my happiness, and that social pressures to have children and labels of selfishness for the child-free are diminishing, I have not lost my child wish. Perhaps my (and others’) child wish is so strong because the paradox of parenthood was nonexistent in the ancestral evolutionary environment. When we lived in small clans and tribes, children weren’t such a drain on just two people. The “village” helped to care for the howling, nocturnal infant and adolescence wasn’t so trying on parents because children began their own families at puberty.

So say Sonja Lyubomirsky and Julia K. Boehm of the University of California, Riverside, in their 2010 article “Human Motives, Happiness, and the Puzzle of Parenthood” (
Perspectives on Psychological Science
). Furthermore, they point out that studies indicating a correlation between parenthood and decreased well-being have a severe limitation: it may not be possible to measure the kind of joy we receive from hanging out with our kids.

Consider this: When my nephew was a baby (he is eighteen now) I carried him along on a hike with my mother and his two sisters. We jumped over puddles in ATV trails where, annually, American toads laid their jellied egg-strings, and descended to the creek where my father had often taken my sisters and me as children. A soft wind blew aspen leaves from the trees. I took in the whole scene. But then my attention was caught by something I will never forget: my nephew’s long moment of focus on a single leaf falling to the creek, from sky to water’s surface. It was the first time he had seen the likes of this. He had no room in his head for the big picture, for cycles and seasons and laws of physics. His life thus far was a patchwork of private astonishments. Maybe this is what children give us.

The night of Easter was warm and humid. When I walked the dog, the spring peepers were deafening, like some kind of unoiled mechanism inside my ears. Despite my previous day’s discovery of the eggs and spermatophores, I reasoned that maybe a bout of latecomer-breeding would happen again that night.

Back home, sweating, I sat in a chair facing my husband, who was on the couch typing up his doctoral thesis.

“I feel like tonight is the night.” I said. “It’s foggy. It’s still sixty degrees. And it’s very humid.”

I was surprised when he put his laptop to the side and grabbed his camera to accompany me. We made the brief drive to the pool. Right away, when we exited the car, I saw something dark and glossy in the middle of the road. A salamander. Not the spotted but the blue spotted: slightly smaller and more slender, deep indigo on top, cloud-colored on the bottom, with sky-blue speckles. Blue spotteds also migrate to vernal pools in great masses, though their mating dance is more private as they pair off in the water, spread out, and lay their eggs mostly singly, attached to underwater vegetation.

When we entered the woods, we were in new territory. My husband and I have spent plenty of time outside in daylight hours, and certainly done our share of camping, but this was the first time we’d been out and about together in a dark wood. And it was unexpectedly pleasant. Something rustled, a sound that, we were surprised to find when we shined our lights at the ground, came from leaves lifting over worms pushing out of the soil. For a while we saw nothing, but when we got closer to the water they started appearing, every five feet or so a blue-spotted salamander, same as the one we saw on the road.

“This is a good pool,” my husband declared, and I felt a small surge of affirmation. “I wonder if there are any in the frog pond by my work.”

“The frog pond?” I asked, curious.

“The overflow area by the lake,” he replied.

We went to check out this pond, along with another one nearby. The night was perfect. We labored for hours, covering ground we’d never walked in daylight. Even though we saw no nuptial dancing, it was clearly a Big Night for blue-spotted salamanders. I’d never seen so many. We didn’t get home till after midnight, and fell into bed, exhausted.

We did not win the lottery. The news was delivered in the mail along with another child characteristics checklist—blank, to be pondered all over again—and an invitation to enter the next lottery, which would occur in November. Earlier that week we had also received a large manila envelope enclosing a poster-sized drawing of “Quinn County.” My niece, for a school assignment on mapping, had named a district after us. I wondered what part of that child’s mind, who lives 800 miles distant and whom I hadn’t seen for a few months, I occupy. What word ignited her memory of me, brought me into existence in a place I no longer inhabit, to be gifted with a whole province?

We must never balk at unfamiliar territory. The worlds we discover, like those unanticipated red eft migrations that so engrossed my students or the midnight parade of blue-spotted salamanders my husband and I encountered, are often more astounding than what we set out for. For the truth is this: no one is desperate for a child until they can’t have one. The child wish is an art. We may entertain it any way we want as long as we know it is not about fulfillment. We must recognize that the laws mothers everywhere lay across the land—the grass is always greener; life is a gamble—were writ by the universe long ago and to live fully we must embrace them.

Finished with lotteries, I picked up the phone and called another adoption agency that had openings. I would, I decided, burrow beneath the bills and contracts, let them occupy a level I was not fully conscious of, as do those fossorial creatures I so admire, surfacing and resurfacing for the false starts. I would invite the ambivalence, the uncertainty that accompanied my original wish for a child, which is what, finally, defines it. Right then all I felt was calm. It was a calm that allowed me to imagine what it would look like if I ever found those spotted salamanders on Big Night in the beam of my flashlight: the yellow spots on their backs a hundred gold coins tossed into a fountain—the child wish, in whatever way it would, unraveling.

JUSTIN PHILLIP REED

Killing Like They Do in the Movies

FROM
Catapult

1. Digging Beneath My Uncle’s Feet

I
N 1996
, I knew nothing of the word
lynch
, only that it was also the last name of a girl in my grade whom none of us talked to.

They found Uncle Craig hanging from a tree on McKeever Road. I remember that his skin was darker than most of the skin I had seen, remember thinking later that his body and the tree must have shared a darkness. Crooked silhouette of limbs and fingers and trunks, all that Carolina morning burning holes through it. I shouldn’t have been able to beautify that image. I want to take to task my mind’s archive of envisioned, consumable violence.

At seven, I knew only what it was: a hanging. Not who, not why, and not since when.

A chain of associations drags me out of sleep. I dreamed someone tattooed on my forearm a talismanic pentagram. I somehow surface recalling the gruesome kills of Michael Myers throughout the
Halloween
franchise. All the white teenage girls, strangled or bleeding out, and then Tyra Banks: gutted and hanging by the neck from a wire. I demand a metaphor for how these scenes are imagined—how dust and waste and forgotten things might collect in the bed of a huge river, how I could pick up a small stone formed from centuries of this and wonder about its weight in my palm, the color contrast, and never question the river, what cut across it, sank through it, floated on its surface.

It’s not that Michael Myers had never strung up a body before
Halloween: Resurrection
(2002). On the contrary, it was by then the killer’s hallmark to suspend his victims, cocking his head in odd curiosity or appraisal of his work. It’s that Banks’s Blackness, her Black woman body silent in the center of the room, reveals the grotesque as no curio but a well-known wound. I’ve been failing to write a poem that ends with the lines
this body didn’t teach you all / you know about gore, but damn / if it didn’t try
.