The Best American Essays 2016 Part 11

Eyes that have never lifted to any face, still less locked with another's gaze.

All literature-all art-springs from the hope of communicating with others. And yet there are others for whom the effort of communication is not possible, or desirable.

Seems like she doesn't know we're here.

What do you think she is thinking?

Perhaps this is the unanswerable question: Does the brain think?

If the brain is sufficiently injured, or undeveloped: Can the brain think?

In itself, perhaps the brain does not think; it is the human agent within the brain, which some have called the soul, that thinks. And yet-can a soul, or a mind, be differentiated from its brain? We speak of "our" brain as if we owned it, in a way; as we might speak of "our" ankle, "our" eyes. But such common usage is misguided, perhaps. We are nothing apart from our brains, thus it is our brains that think. Or fail to think.

Obviously, our brains generate consciousness-but this is an unconscious process. We are habituated to believe, at least in our Western tradition, that "we" are located somewhere inside our brains, behind our eyes; for it is our eyes "we" see through. When we look into the eyes of others, as we speak to them, we are looking "into" the brain, that is, the core of personality-or so we think. (It is unnerving to think that just as our personalities reside in an organic, perishable brain, in some infinitely vast network of neurons beyond all efforts of tracking, the personalities of others reside in a similar place.) Except, of course, in some individuals, there is no eye contact-the brain refuses to function in accord with our expectations.

In April 2014, fourteen years after our father's death, in response to a query, my brother brings me up-to-date on our sister's condition, which seems unchanged: Lynn is totally nonverbal and does not talk at all. She has frequent seizures and wears a helmet at all times to protect her when she falls... She does not recognize me nor do I think she recognizes anyone at all. She is shy, and does not like it when her routine is changed.

It would have startled and displeased my parents, if I'd suggested going to visit Lynn in her facility; it would have seemed intrusive to them, for they would have surmised that if I visited my sister, it might be for the purpose of writing about her; and they would not have wanted me to write about her, not then, not ever. And so I had not ever inquired about visiting her-though I had many times fantasized about visiting the now-adult woman who very likely closely resembles me as I would have been if at birth some neurological catastrophe had occurred to render my brain impaired. And after sixty years, as I contemplate visiting Lynn at last, with my brother Fred, I feel faint with dread, and guilt.

For the fact is, the visit would not benefit Lynn, only me. The visit would be intrusive and upsetting to her, who is upset by any break in her routine. Only my brother has visited Lynn, in the years since my parents' deaths. But Lynn does not recognize him, has no awareness of him, and for him too such visits are futile; except as Fred Oates Jr. is Lynn's guardian, he has no role in her life. Yet my brother has (heroically, I think) acquitted himself fully as her guardian, and has borne the responsibility he'd accepted at my father's request.

"Help us name your baby sister, Joyce."

It was a festive time. It was, in fact, my birthday: my eighteenth birthday. I had not been forgotten after all.

My parents smiled with happiness. It was their hope, if I helped to name my sister, that I would love her too.

This was long ago. Yes, it was a happy time.

For so much lay ahead, unantic.i.p.ated. No reason to antic.i.p.ate the wholly unexpected of years to come.

After days of deliberation I presented my parents with the name that seemed to me the ideal name-Lynn Ann Oates.

A very nice name, they said. "Thank you, Joyce."

MARSHA POMERANTZ.

Right/Left: A Triptych.

FROM Raritan.

1. Share/Split.

My friend boa slithered up the stairs beside me to my room, keeping a lower profile than such well-known confidants as, say, Christopher Robin's bear. Boa was a bootlace strung with red, yellow, blue, and green wooden beads, and as I led him by the knotted nose, I told him how things were in the world. He was always pleased to give my findings independent confirmation.

The facts:.

1. Mothers don't eat. It had come to my attention that mothers were fueled by something other than food: possibly telephone talk and worry. I wondered how old you had to be to turn into a mother and not have to eat anymore.

At breakfast my mother would hover ominously as I moped over my oatmeal. At lunch she would often be cleaning, exuding busyness and wearing a kerchief that swept her hair up from the nape and tied in a knot above her forehead-like Alice's headgear in The Honeymooners, only the Russian-immigrant version, a flower print with strong, blotchy pinks. At dinner, as Lowell Thomas brought the news from North, from South, from East, from West, my mother brought the lamb chops, mashed potatoes, and thoroughly boiled vegetables from the stove to the table. Rarely did she sit down with us and eat them. If she sat, she would jump up to get an extra knife, then to answer the phone, then to put the pots in the sink and fill them with water so they wouldn't dry out and exhaust both her and the metal-scented Brillo pad that already oozed rust.

As I ate I distributed dinner to the four corners of my personal geography, imagining an ingested olive-drab green bean traveling through my middle to my left big toe, a forkful of mashed potatoes dispatched to the right elbow, and so on. I tried to make sure that all parts of me received sufficient supplies.

Despite my best efforts to keep all my regions intact under a centralized administration, I learned that 2. Halvsies is all. This finding was made not at the kitchen table but in the car on the way to my grandmother's in the Bronx. It was a Sunday; my father was driving the two-tone '51 Buick, my mother sat next to him, and I was in the backseat. Maybe the Yiddish hour was on WEVD, and maybe my mother was singing along, off-key, to "Rozhinkes mit mandlen" ("Raisins and Almonds," which she may or may not have eaten). "So if you're our little girl," my father said, the glance over his shoulder falling short of my eyes, "which half is your mother's and which half is your father's?" They seemed to be waiting for an answer. After due deliberation, I awarded my right side, which I favored, to my mother, whom I loved more that year, the antagonism over oatmeal notwithstanding. Years later I was still a.s.suaging my guilt with the thought that the left side contained my heart, location of loving and thudding, so my father didn't get such a bad deal.

It has been suggested to me that this early split was the forerunner of other geographical divisions in my life, such as the attempt to inhabit both Israel and the United States, journalism and poetry, one man and another. My behavior in a swimming pool is symptomatic. Some people, when lowering themselves into an occupied lane, say, "Do you mind if we share this?" I say, "Do you mind if we split this?" The distinction is obvious only in the American half of my life. In an Israeli swimming lane the word for share is the reflexive form of split, so I say, if I bother to ask, what amounts to, "Can we split ourselves on this?" Which goes a long way toward explaining Middle East politics.

The principle of halvsies also came into play with the youngest of my three older brothers, the only one close enough in age to share a split with. When our neighbors gave us a chocolate bunny and egg at Easter, the gifts were usually stored on a shelf in the bas.e.m.e.nt, where their existence could be denied until the end of Pa.s.sover. Finally they were brought upstairs to be divided, and then of course the question was who would get the bigger half. Fairly early I learned the moral advantage of saying I preferred the smaller. It felt less like losing. And it was practice for turning into a mother. At Easter I learned another fact, related to the principle that contiguity implies causality: I learned that 3. Rabbits lay eggs. They were everywhere together: plush bunnies and dyed eggs nestled in shredded green cellophane approximating spring. Clearly it was a matter of kins.h.i.+p.

There was an alternative, vegetable theory for the origin of eggs, however: the first book I ever took out of the school library, when I was seven, was called The Egg Tree, and it was full of pictures of pastel-painted Easter eggs blooming on bare branches. My mother lifted her head from the gossip columns of the Daily News to take a look. "Jewish girls don't read books like that," she said. Although I didn't return this book to the library immediately, I no longer had the heart to pursue my research into rabbit-and-egg relations. My heart, in any case, was in occupied territory.

My father the occupier had yet another theory about eggs, which I discovered inadvertently on the rare occasions when I'd come home from school and find him there. He'd be in the hall near the back door, under a light that I noticed only years later was a bare bulb, checking messages tucked behind the warping plastic switch plate. The ritual went like this: "Where's Mom?"

"In my back pocket." I'd duly glance into the one where his wallet wasn't. "Not there," I'd say. "What's new?"

"Ah katz iz geloifen oifn dach und geleikt ahn ei." Yiddish for "A cat ran up on the roof and laid an egg."

I thought maybe he was right about a cat being on the roof, but he couldn't be right about a cat laying an egg. Even Hallmark greeting cards reinforced the theory that eggs came from bunnies. Then again, I did know that startling things occurred up there on the s.h.i.+ngle slopes. For instance, 4. People roll s...o...b..a.l.l.s off the roof in the middle of the night. I had very firm proof of this, having woken up in the dark one winter to the sound of small creaks and large plunks from above. By this time I was about ten, and more scientifically inclined. My confidant Boa, under the bed among the dust bunnies and the mite eggs, heard these sounds with his very own ears. If someone was rolling things off the roof, I thought, I would see the evidence on the ground. I looked out the window. Sure enough, indentations in the snow below the edge of the eaves. I ran and woke my mother.

"Someone's rolling s...o...b..a.l.l.s off the roof."

"Don't be silly."

I coaxed her out of bed and into my room to see the evidence from my window.

"Icicles dropping off," she said. "Go back to sleep."

"I can't."

"You're not trying hard enough."

I swore I'd never say that to my kids. Better yet, I'd never turn into a mother at all.

Fortunately, I found more tolerance for truth in other quarters. One night a few weeks later, when, being the youngest, I'd had to go to bed while family and guests reveled downstairs, there was a knock at my door. My cousin Miriam came in and sat on the bed.

"How ya doin', kid?" she inquired, with a little box to the elbow she didn't realize was the locus of potatoes mashed with chicken fat.

I was pleased to have her company and even more pleased by the revelation she was about to share, not split, with me and n.o.body else: she had been born an Eskimo, named Minigoochi, kidnapped as a child, forcibly imported to the gray geometry of Astoria, Queens. She gave me extensive details about life in the igloo and herring for breakfast; none of that oatmeal. I sensed a fellow displaced person, another being half elsewhere. Maybe the s...o...b..ll rollers had been her long-lost relatives and arrived on the wrong day, signaling high and low.

Years later, clearing out my parents' home after my mother died, I found in the heavily varnished credenza (my mother, when enunciating, said credenzer) a small clear-plastic box containing wooden beads colored red, yellow, blue, and green: Boa, deconstructed. I threw him out, or maybe threw him in as a bonus to the tag-sale customer who bought the busy flowered kerchief, or the radio containing Lowell Thomas, or the mattress of my insomnia on a snowy night.

Recently I had lunch with my cousin Miriam and thanked her for confiding in me about her Minigoochi life. She had no recollection of either the life or the story, but, patting my potato elbow, accepted my grat.i.tude with grace. It surprised me at this late date that even she had deserted the cause of truth. But then, only half of what I've written here is true. I won't say which half, and I won't say which half I love more.

2. Milk/Meat I learned to tell my right hand from my left by standing in the kitchen, facing the sink, and thinking about the dishes in the closets. At the time I was still too short to peer over the porcelain rim and learn that in the Northern Hemisphere water swirls down the drain counterclockwise.

Right, I knew, was the closet where the dairy (milchig) dishes were stored. They were accompanied by the usual array of implements, such as an eggbeater and a potato masher. We called this the milchika side, adding that final a for lubrication between consonants, like a pat of b.u.t.ter stirred into noodles to keep them unstuck. Left was the closet where the meat (fleis.h.i.+g) dishes, with their respective eggbeater and potato masher, bided their time. We called it the fleis.h.i.+ka side, the a in this case a.n.a.logous to a dollop of chicken fat averting the clumping of peas. "Right" was a.s.sociated with milk, crumbly white farmer cheese, and sour cream. "Left" was chicken soup, chopped liver, and hamburgers of a doneness in which what juice remained was as dark as the crust.

There was a color code in the kitchen that prevented the mixing of milk and meat. The milchika dish drainer was red; the dish sponge was pink. The milchika towels had red stripes down the sides, so that red, and by extension, warm colors, meant dairy; you would not use these towels, during some stove emergency, to lift the lid off overly exuberant chicken soup. To do that you would use the towels with blue stripes down the sides. And by the way, how many times do I have to tell you that's what pot holders are for?

As long as I stayed at home, right and left were relatively uncomplicated. Asked to hold up my right hand, I merely did the preschool version of a thought experiment: planting myself so that the seam of the worn linoleum ran under the arches of my saddle shoes, I conjured up the porcelain of the sink, the glossy white-painted wooden cabinets with chromium pulls beneath it, the glossy white-painted closet doors at each side, and voil, in less than ten minutes the correct hand would shoot up. If b.u.t.terscotch pudding (milchig, in a dish from the right side) was being proffered as a prize for the right answer, the thought experiment could be accomplished in less than ten seconds.

It was at school, when contemplating a first-grade workbook, that I got my directional signals crossed. As I recall, there were two kinds of black-and-white line drawings, accompanied by two kinds of insidious fill-in-the-blanks. The first was something like: Look, look, Spot! d.i.c.k has a balloon in his _______ (right, left) hand.

This question, I began to understand, required a somewhat more sophisticated thought experiment than those of my early career. I had to put myself in d.i.c.k's place, i.e., pretend I was in the kitchen, but facing the stove, which was opposite the sink. Or maybe pretend I was the sink, with a right-hand closet and a left-hand closet, facing me. Or was I still me, stepping inside the page and turning around, carrying the kitchen closets with me, the cups swinging riskily on their hooks, the cow-shaped creamer lowing morosely at the disturbance, the carefully h.o.a.rded, yellowing, reusable plastic containers rolling with every degree of my rotation? Eventually, I figured out that d.i.c.k's left hand was opposite my right hand. This was what it meant to recognize another being; I was mastering the difficult arts of empathy and differentiation.

Then came the second challenge: Look, look! d.i.c.k is on the _______ (right, left). Jane is on the _______ (left, right). Spot is in the middle. There was d.i.c.k again, that person-in-reverse. But what degree of empathy was required this time? Whose right? Whose left? Were we still talking about d.i.c.k's hands, or were we back to right and left vis--vis me?

I lurched through first grade somehow, looking both ways and up and down before crossing streets, as the princ.i.p.al, at a.s.semblies, advised. I was pretty good at up and down. But this question of whose right, whose right of way, whose way, has continued to plague me. It was only intensified by my twenty years in Israel, where reading, not to say living, is done from right to left instead of from left to right, though numeration, usually but not always, is left to right.

On a visit to the United States sometime during those twenty years I drove my aging parents to a fish restaurant, got out, and checked the hours on the door before easing them out of the car and propping them up on their varifooted walking equipment. We ambled haltingly over to the restaurant, which, at three o'clock, as it turned out, was not yet open. The hours I'd read as eight to four were in fact four to eight. Some might attribute this confusion to my personal right/left handicap. Others, I hope, will blame the rabbis for determining that fish is pareve, considered neither dairy nor meat, and can be a.s.sociated with either the right-hand, red-towel closet or the left-hand, blue-towel closet, depending on which pot it is cooked in and what accompanies it on the plate. Only recently have I been puzzled by this neutral cla.s.sification of the finned breed. Hath not a fish eyes? If you p.r.i.c.k it, doth it not bleed? Then how could it be served with a dairy meal?

My parents were annoyed and disappointed by our ill-timed foray; so much for my good intentions. But maybe I hadn't really wanted to take them to this restaurant. Maybe I was just getting back at them for having had such unwieldy, old-fas.h.i.+oned, overloaded kitchen closets that made my thinking lumber so.

For an understanding of family vengeance-as well as empathy and fish-we of course look to Shakespeare: of what use a pound of flesh? "To bait fish withal." The Bard, incidentally, was kind enough to minimize his stage directions, so that we are spared the question of whether right and left pertain to the actors or the audience. If Christian Portia were to enter stage right and Jewish Jessica stage left, I, for one, wouldn't know where to put myself.

What directional guidance we do get in The Merchant of Venice hardly tells us which end is up. The clown Launcelot Gobbo, Shylock's servant, walks down the street and meets his father, who is looking for him and, being blind, doesn't know he's found him. Young Gobbo, apparently settling some dish-closet accounts of his own, teases his father with these directions to Shylock's: Turn up on your right hand at the next turning, but at the next turning of all, on your left; marry, at the very next turning turn of no hand, but turn down indirectly to the Jew's house.

I happened to be puzzling over this scene while standing in line at a U.S. post office one day, holding some letters addressed in Hebrew and some addressed in English. I concluded my business, and, with empathy in my heart and stamps in my purse, walked toward the exit, where I reached for the wooden handle on the gla.s.s door. No thought experiments: I just took in the PULL sign and pulled. The door went nowhere. Suddenly I noticed d.i.c.k, Jane, and Spot all smirking at me from the sidewalk. Now in digital color, d.i.c.k sported fleis.h.i.+ka designer jeans with a milchika striped polo. "Oh," he said, "the places you'll go."

"Exeunt omnes," I replied.

3. Undo/Redo During my time in Israel there was a family emergency on Long Island. I got on a plane in Tel Aviv, flew for eleven hours, landed in New York, took a taxi to my parents' house, picked up the car keys, went out, slamming the door, realized I had locked myself out, remembered which bas.e.m.e.nt window might be unlatched, backed myself into it, landing feetfirst in a sink, got the house keys, dashed out the door, drove to the hospital, parked in a garage, entered the lobby, and stood by a potted ficus deciding whether to go first to my mother with heart failure on the seventh floor or my father half-paralyzed by a stroke on the fourth. A dry leaf from the detritus around the bas.e.m.e.nt window apparently still clung to the elbow of my sweater; a man pa.s.sing plucked it off, smiling, and handed it to me.

My mother, in a frail voice from her bed-I have the impression of pink, but nothing was pink there, only blanched skin and bleached sheets-my mother, whose warnings and interpretations I usually rejected, said, "Go see him but try not to be shocked." I walked slowly down the corridor, over beige linoleum squares, practicing unsurprise.

Where, in the middle of my father, was the dividing line, the hyphen in half-dead? I imagined a column of hyphens, like vertebrae, held in proximity by cartilage and air and the goodwill of some unintentioned Being. Or the same hyphens, each rotated 90 degrees, the way you pivot a gurney to get it through the door, hyphens turned vertical, forming a semi-permeable perforated line, allowing a little life to ooze through, osmotic, from left to right, and a little death from right to left. If you listened closely you could hear the backwash, like blood murmuring around a weakened heart valve.

All this so as not to look at his face, which asked me how much I was willing to know of who he now was. And what did I know before?

The German artist Hannah Hch made mischling photomontages in her series From an Ethnographic Museum, showing alien eyes, unpaired, in an unsuspecting face; exposing rough seams between cultures, raveled and frayed. One montage, Abducted (1925), shows an African sculpture of four bare people riding the long back of a beast, two women between two men, all facing left. But Hch replaced the head of the first woman with a Western profile facing right: pale skin, bobbed hair, lipstick on an appalled mouth open in protest against this inexorable motion. The hostage has as much chance of reversing her fate as someone sliding backward through a small, low window, trying to get unborn.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote about discreteness of categories as the essence of purity in many faiths and cultures. According to this theory, something is unkosher-unfit, unseemly-if it mixes attributes of two or more categories, as lobsters and shrimp do, for instance: mischlings living in the sea but having no fins or scales, not swimming but walking on the seafloor.

All this so as not to look at his face.

Every day for a couple of weeks I exercised my father's dead half, moving the leg out slightly from under the sheet, bending, straightening, bending, straightening skin, bone, and string of muscle. Someone in charge had told me this would help circulation, maybe muscle tone; there was hope of restoring use. I explained to my father what I was doing, but I never knew what he absorbed. Words would come out of him from time to time, but I couldn't tell if those were words he intended. Gradually it became clear that nothing in his leg would change, and one day I gave up. Later I pictured the scene as something from a grade-B cowboy movie: lying on a craggy ledge, I had slowly disengaged my fingers, numbed by his dangling weight, and let him slide over the edge. I wondered if he had felt himself slip. His left hand clutched my right arm against the bed rail.

In the next stage of betrayal I moved him on a gurney through the underground pa.s.sage from the hospital to the geriatric inst.i.tute, from the live side to the dead side. He and my mother had been volunteers in "geriatrics," and he had often wheeled patients back and forth through that tunnel for X-rays and tests. I had witnessed his usefulness, his hand on the shoulder of a man in a wheelchair, his nearly nonchalant pressing of the elevator b.u.t.ton, his unmindful placing of one foot in front of the other. Did he know now that he was going in the final direction to the last place?

One day I shaved him carefully, crying, and went back to Israel. Years later I saw a 1934 marble sculpture of Giacometti's: half head, half skull, with open mouth and closed jaw. I recognized the cheekbones.

I picture time flowing from left to right, like prevailing winds on a flat map. On my computer screen is a little arrow labeled UNDO, curving back toward the left. REDO curves toward the right. Through the open window above my desk I hear a baby crying. I click UNDO: silence. Unnerved, I click REDO. The baby cries again. I can huff, I can puff, I can blow the winds back.

At the nurses' station on my mother's floor in an old-age home, four years after my father's death, there were signs to help people get their bearings: THE WEATHER IS (CLOUDY, RAINY, SUNNY). Once a sign said TODAY IS TUESDAY on Wednesday. It would be right in another six days, but who had another six days?

On the day that turned out to be my mother's last, bad weather took over her body. She tossed from one side of the bed to the other, her head missing the pillow and thumping against the bars. "Wow," she said, and then: "What's happening?" I was trying not to be shocked and so was she, but I could tell she wasn't trying hard enough. Months later I found a photo of a gargoyle in the newspaper travel section, with the same startled eyes.

When one of my brothers and I were called back later that night, whoever she was had already been abducted. Her jaw was tied up with a towel, in the old-fas.h.i.+oned toothache style, apparently to stop her from asking "What's happening?" wherever she was going, or from saying mean things. When I was a kid she used to say, "Do that again and I'll knock your block off." And one night just a few months earlier, when I was visiting her at home and had tucked her in and put the water gla.s.s in its place and the Tylenol in its place so she could find them in the night of her "legal" blindness, she turned toward me and said, "Who's going to do this for you?"

I had cut out the picture of the gargoyle, thinking maybe I'd make a photomontage. I'm still wondering what could share that page.

JILL SISSON QUINN.

Big Night.

FROM New England Review.

The U.S. contains more species of salamander than any other country, but in an entire lifetime you may never encounter one. Salamanders-secretive, fossorial, nocturnal-exit underground harbors only in darkness. Even those that gather in great ma.s.ses to breed do so without a sound, moving monklike through the yammering of wood frogs and spring peepers to ephemeral ponds.

In the country's eastern half, many folks would be surprised to find they share their neighborhoods with Ambystoma maculatum, the spotted salamander, a creature that looks like it belongs in the Amazon. Two uneven rows of big bright-yellow dots extend from head to tail on its dark, glossy body, a body I have always thought looks purple, though most field guides describe it as steel-gray or black. Spotteds are stout and medium-sized; at four to seven inches long, they look like they'd make a good meal for something. But they're not easy to find. Scientists tracking them with radio telemetry, through tiny transmitters surgically implanted into the salamanders' midsections, discovered one spotted salamander living four feet underground. To find one of these brightly colored animals beneath a rock or within a log feels like hitting the jackpot.

My interest in salamanders renewed with surprising force the same spring my husband and I began the process of adopting a child. I had recently moved away from an area of high salamander density (from New Jersey, which has sixteen species, to Wisconsin, which has only seven) and ceased teaching environmental education; instead I was teaching English and spending my workdays indoors. Nevertheless, I aimed to be present for the annual nocturnal ma.s.s breeding of the spotted. There was a chance I would see them and a chance I wouldn't, these creatures that seemed scarce but were relatively numerous, that lived singly all year long but on a single evening gathered in mult.i.tudes. It was just this odd combination of uncertainty and possibility that I would need to embrace in my journey to becoming a parent.

What's more, the adoption process seemed at times (excuse the pun) rather cold-blooded. Mechanical. Deliberate. Too conscious. Take, for example, the initial paperwork, a long list of characteristics we had to decide whether we would accept in a child. We had checked "yes" for premature birth and low birth weight, and "maybe" for developmental delays and failure to thrive; "yes" for heart murmur, but "no" for heart defect; "yes" for cleft lip and club foot but "maybe" for epilepsy and microcephalus; "yes" for diabetes but "no" for hemophilia. Under both hearing and vision we'd checked "yes" for partial loss and "no" for total loss. Somewhat contradictorily, we'd checked only "maybe" for tobacco, alcohol, and drug use during pregnancy but "yes" for no prenatal care. We'd checked "yes" for criminal history in background, "yes" for mental illness, and "yes" for all the ethnic groups listed. We'd folded the paper into thirds, slid it into an envelope, and mailed it to the adoption agency we had selected, to enter it in the May lottery.

This was in March. As we waited to hear if we'd won, I needed something else to antic.i.p.ate that, like a child, had as yet eluded me. I needed something to actively look for, something I couldn't be sure I would find.

Many have attributed the "child wish," as it is called rather poetically in the scientific literature, to biology-a yearning innate and necessary for survival. "This gazing at my child," essayist Lia Purpura has written, "is a kind of eating, it is that elementally nouris.h.i.+ng." It seems reasonable to a.s.sume a species would die out if it did not have an inborn drive to create offspring. But natural selection would hardly hinge a species' survival to a desire for such a delayed effect. And for most of our evolution we didn't even know what act created children. If the biological child wish were true, we would be in peril-ingrained with a strong yearning for a particular end yet lacking any knowledge of how to achieve it; this would have caused extinction. By now the truth should be obvious: what we have an innate biological drive for is the creating, not the offspring. It's s.e.x we want, not children.

It appears, though, as if the human desire for children is innate simply because it is so common; most people want to and do have children. According to the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, in 2008 the number of women who had given birth ranged from 6 percent of teenagers aged fifteen to nineteen to 82 percent of women aged forty to forty-four. So by the end of their childbearing years, most women have borne children-more than three-fourths, a solid majority. Of the 6 percent of married women, per the Centers for Disease Control, who have complete infertility, many seek alternative methods of fulfilling the child wish. More than 1 percent of infants born in 2012 were the result of a.s.sisted reproductive technology (ART), a number that does not include the likely high and rarely publicized number of failed ART attempts. In addition, 1 percent of all women aged eighteen to forty-four, about half of whom already have a child through birth, have adopted.

These last two groups clearly want children. They've gone well beyond the mechanisms nature has provided to acquire them: the first may have induced ovulation with drugs and undergone multiple cycles of in vitro fertilization, accepted eggs into their bodies they did not create and sperm from men they've never met; the second has perhaps made uncomfortable decisions about the sort of child they want-its age, ability, race, and, for a little more dough, gender-and spent so much time preparing and signing paperwork that the process may begin to feel more akin to divorce than adoption. Both cases require significant amounts of money and entertainment of the child wish for much, much longer than the year it takes most people to have a child naturally. So when we go to such extremes to have a child, is it really the child wish we're fulfilling, or has the wish taken on some other nature? In other words, what exactly is it we desire when we desire children?

I've always been fascinated by salamanders. Early on, I saw them retreating now and then beneath a ring of pioneer-laid stones around a favorite spring in the woods where I grew up. Later, walking off some adolescent woe, I leaned into a steep hill, brushed away leaves, and found the soil beneath so moist and rich with salamanders I could hardly believe it. (Long before, there would have been unbelievably more: the nonnative earthworm, brought to America in European s.h.i.+p ballast, gobbles up the forest's leaf litter, leaving less to support our native invertebrates and thus fewer invertebrates to feed our woodland salamanders, then, finally, fewer salamanders.) In my job as an environmental educator in New Jersey I taught elementary- and middle-school students. Salamanders, if you knew where and when to look, were often the easiest thing to conjure up for a hundred city kids who had just two and a half days to spend in the woods. Salamanders are more numerous than turtles. They are easier to catch than frogs. You kneel at a forest seep, fingers numb, lifting and replacing rocks wrapped in moss, one after another. Most reveal nothing. But then something happens in the mud beneath an upturned stone: what looks like just the current of the stream escaping becomes a salamander.

In general, salamanders don't bite, though, surprisingly, most do have tiny, flexible, cone-shaped teeth used for grasping prey. They don't pee on you like toads, or musk you like stinkpots or mink frogs. They don't scare the h.e.l.l out of you at first like snakes do. As long as you don't grab them by the tail (which would be cruel-many detach their tails in self-defense and leave them behind, wriggling wildly for the confused predator while they escape, then burn precious calories in tail regeneration), they are easy to handle. They seem relatively untroubled by capture, staring at you with dare-to-amuse-me eyes. If you want to commune with some animal, salamanders can be an exquisite choice.

Many species, despite overall general population declines, are still shockingly numerous. "If you took all the salamanders in the forest and put them in a sack," I would say to my herpetology students at the environmental education center, "and then put all the small mammals in that same forest in a second sack, the sack of salamanders would be larger." Another comparison: salamanders make up more than 2.6 times the bioma.s.s of birds during the peak breeding season. Once or twice a year, my students didn't need these thought-experiments; on a warm day after rain, there would be ma.s.s migrations of red efts, the toxic-looking-and, to a blue jay, toxic-tasting-juvenile, terrestrial stage of the eastern spotted newt. You couldn't walk without fear of crus.h.i.+ng one. Those days were a great unplanned lesson on fulfillment and desire. With kids transporting efts by hand across roads and paths, adopting particularly cute ones as temporary pets, we never got where we were going. Where we were going became where we were. What we unearthed became what we had set out for.

Salamander courts.h.i.+p and breeding offer quite a few zoological surprises. Up to a third of red-backed salamanders are monogamous, a rarity for amphibians-though their monogamy, it turns out, is more social than reproductive. Many terrestrial salamanders guard their eggs, curling body or tail around their clutch in the kind of circ.u.mferential hug one might more reasonably expect of a canine or rodent. But perhaps nothing tops the reproductive behavior of the spotted, which once a year holds a baccha.n.a.lian nuptial dance that lasts into the wee hours of the morning.

No one is sure what drives the various species of ambystoma, the mole salamanders, out of the networks of small mammal burrows they occupy singly for up to fifty-one weeks of the year, to mate in spring. Because they all appear at the same time, migrating to safe, fishless waters, herpetologists have come to call this event "Big Night." To ambystoma, the essential factors for Big Night must be quite precise. But to us, with our calendars and thermometers and sling psychrometers, it's just another numbers game.

They emerge in the first warm rain after winter. But how warm and how rainy is anybody's guess; different studies conclude different temperatures, and sometimes just fog or sudden snowmelt is enough. The most accurate predictor may have been right under our noses-or our feet-all along: in a ten-year study of mole salamanders in St. Louis County, Missouri, ma.s.s migrations started when soil temperatures a foot deep reached at least 40.1 degrees Fahrenheit and the thermal profile reversed-meaning it was finally warmer at the surface than underneath.

On that aforementioned first warm, rainy night after winter, spotteds return to the place of their birth, likely aided by the smell of the water and plants of each particular pool. In experiments, blindfolded-yes, blindfolded-salamanders have easily been able to find their pools; intercepted adults preferred home pond odors to those of foreign ponds.