The Best American Essays 2016

by Jonathan Franzen

  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

  In 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.

  I haven’t thought about Uncle Craig in I don’t know how long, had forgotten ever having known someone who was lynched, and this lapse is what troubles me when I throw back the sheets. I ask my mother for details, and she calls from work, and yeah it had to be about ’96 because that was the year after Daddy died and left her with two sons and the year my sister was born, and she wants to send me pictures of Craig’s daughter’s daughter, who is beautiful and in one picture is holding my baby niece, and our girls are always beautiful, but yeah, Momma doesn’t think they ever found who did it, doesn’t think they were really looking, no use in me being mad about it now, she’s gotta go visit Craig’s wife Aunt Deborah in Columbia and see the new granddaughter, and she’s gonna send me all these pictures of the beautiful girls.

  2. We Live on Elm Street

  Wes Craven died. Brain cancer. Violent, but relatively goreless, considering. Features and images went up online to commemorate what Craven had given us. I wonder if maybe lately I don’t have much grief left on reserve for famous white men, or if I have trouble mourning in general, but in a predictable mix of homage and nostalgia, that evening I decided to watch A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Craven’s classic franchise-starter in which razor-fingered Freddy Krueger stalks the dreams of four archetypal suburban kids.

  I rarely think of Craven, but I can easily visualize many of the kill scenes that made him famous and his killers infamous. I keep a mental library of the kills. I often call on them while writing poems as though for a diction of fantasized violence, a showcase of its pronunciations. This is what Craven and his counterparts have given me.

  A few minutes into the film I began to dread the rest of it. Each scene seemed to climb toward the least red death in the film—that of Rod, the first victim’s dark, “rough-edged,” pretty-faced boyfriend, the prime suspect in her death; Rod, whom Freddy—existing somewhere between nightmare and poltergeist—hangs by a bedsheet in what will appear to the always-ain’t-seen-nothin’ cops to be an otherwise empty jail cell.

  It’s a bloodless kill. It looks to the adults like a simple guilt-fueled suicide. Meanwhile, I barely register it as the scene of a film. My ears fumble the dialogue. My eyes take in the images from the laptop screen, but my mind is digressing, recycling props kaleidoscopically, replacing Rod with Sandra Bland. That I can color in the glue-and-scissors details around Bland’s death with a scene as outrageous and inventive as this one irritates me. The story from the Waller County jail has as many holes, cuts, edits, and special effects as Craven’s slasher. Black ghosts dangle in all the corners of my horror flicks lately, even when I am not looking.

  Upon discovering Rod’s body, the heroine, Nancy, shrieks the beginning of her long frustration. She knows what’s killing her friends, what’s coming after her. Knowing makes her crazy. Disrupting everyone else’s resistance to knowing makes her the problem.

  3. Everybody Knows Your Name

  When I enter the bar, its walls are talking loudly among themselves, the way a dead woods might always be filled with falling trees regardless of whether an eavesdropping ear would hear. One wall has its mouth full of Josephine Baker and all her feathers. Another holds Miles Davis in the dark throat of its holler, his trumpet paused mid-rapture. There are others, bound in frames, jazzing up the space. All the patrons are white. Their beer voices slap up the Black talent and bounce back. I come like a gap in a white caravan and grit my teeth against the din of it. Down an aisle of stools and minimalist tables, a vintage-looking man plays a vintage-looking piano, grinning at the skinny woman thinly singing another jazz standard, her hair in a vintage-looking bun. A young New Yorker sits across from me and gets bored with my pointing out how white spaces have “this thing” for making ornament of nonwhite strife and achievement—which are often difficult to tell apart. I’m also bored. I’m trying to understand this nearly ubiquitous need for the Negro edge. Bodies dangling like festive decorations, tricking the light. Somehow I’ve become a conduit for haunting—a needle pushed across the black cut, which spins even when I don’t want to lower my nose to it because maybe tonight my spine needs respite from the violent signals of memory and literacy. How hopeful. Not this night. What happens when I’m not here? What am I assumed to cosign when I am here? These are two different questions with similar answers. Sometimes when I say I’m bored, I mean bored into. White nostalgia in the age of the hipster bar is a dense sulfuric stink. For one reason or another, I keep inhaling. I order a pizza and neat whiskeys.

  4. Who Kills Casey Becker

  We are introduced to a blonde, and the plot seems likely to center on her. She is stalked and attacked, but her blondness and surplus lines of dialogue are supposed to save her. She dies around twelve minutes in, murdered in the most violent way. The violent murder of a blonde who spoke frequently suggests that no one is safe. Craven’s Scream, credited with revitalizing the slasher subgenre in 1996, follows a formula previously deployed in A Nightmare on Elm Street. I can trace the tradition back to Hitchcock’s Psycho.

  Some nights, when I want to slip inside the guilty space between guaranteed discomfort and the foreknowledge of it, I turn on the movie just to watch this paradigm-shifting first scene. The killing of Casey Becker in Scream was momentous. It marked the end of Craven’s hiatus from big-box-office horror. It marked Drew Barrymore’s return to prominence. It established the Ghostface Killer—that easily laughable horror symbol—as a significant addition to the lineage of masked murderers. It brought the Michael Myers tradition back to the unsuspecting suburbs, where high school girls are often home alone and anyone, especially their boyfriends, could be the home-invading butcher. It’s as if in the imagination of Smalltown, USA, few other perils exist.

  The killing of Casey Becker was historic. It’s difficult to see the scene—her body disemboweled, dragged, and hanged from a large tree with the rope of a swing—as existing outside of American history, as created anywhere but in the continuum of a societal id that can’t forget what it’s seen its own hands do, that merely shuffles the moving parts of memory.

  There being no Black characters in Scream and so few in its contemporaries illustrates a dissonance, the rasp of an unintended truth. These films imagine the extremities of white cultural depravity and brutality but do so in an America where only whiteness factors (and is in fact not “white” but some agreed-upon glare of homogeneity convinced of its comfort). This arrangement falls back quickly on psychosis-as-motive, in which the mysteries of mental disorder and individual deviance are alibis for the whites-only fantasy. The artifice of chance is the drama. In the case of Scream, the logic seems presented like so: “These two white teens are psychological anomalies and their killing spree of other white teens is an isolated incident although all of their parents are always circumstantially absent and there will be a sequel in which another white man terrorizes the very same white people . . .”

  5. My Other Education

  I was a queer and skinny child whose dominant emotion was fear. While other boys practiced succeedin
g at masculinity, thrashing and breaking their bodies in hours of commune, I hung back and cultivated a knowledge of exits, of how to get out alive, how to avoid entry. I was probably sitting on the floor, legs in a bow, safe from my cousins’ game of tackle football in the front yard, when my aunt and uncle put a rented copy of Scream in the VCR.

  When I was a fifth- or sixth-grader in after-school care, Momma had an HBO subscription and I had a habit of unwrapping the aluminum foil from the school’s afternoon snacks, folding and shaping it into a hook circa Ben Willis of I Know What You Did Last Summer, and smuggling the flimsy prop out of the cafeteria and onto the playground, where I stalked my classmates throughout the plastic fort. I daydreamed of drafting a horror novel but only got as far as the cover image. I filled sketchbooks with color-penciled movie posters for teen slashers that existed and some that I hoped soon would. My drawings were decent. My illustration of the new playground had graced the school yearbook cover. One of my tornado scenes, inspired by Jan de Bont’s 1996 special-effects montage Twister, had aired on the morning news. In third grade, my post-Titanic sketches of nude women had stirred some quiet controversy among the faculty, but in the end the principal was lenient, even impressed, having found the renderings “tasteful.” I managed to keep the slasher sketches to myself until middle school, when all the low-boiling parts of me wanted to be acted out. My crosshatched knives stabbed no bodies but hovered in white space, dripping potential.