Essay Experiment #18: Peacock Procreation

Just as the male peacock is about to have its way with the female, feathers spread in an alluring fan, exposing extra layers of tail pompadour, rattling and shaking and calling in a pre-hump display of color, texture and sound, my toddler runs up to it.

PEACOCK! He yells. PEEEEEEEEEEEACOCK!

You know, if someone ran up to you and yelled HUMAN HUMAAAAAAAAAAN! HUMANNNNNCOCK! just before you hit the roof with an orgasm, you might pull back too-- just saying.  And toddlers know these things intuitively, the way they know crackers and fruit are good and everything else is not. 

Understandably, the male honks away, annoyed, at best, blue-balled at worst, not gonna propagate at worst worst.  Its glorious fan of feathers collapses and drags on the asphalt behind it.  

We stand on the curb of a lawn in San Antonio suburbs, at the cul de sac on Dusquesne street, rolypoly bugs and mosquitoes prowling, and watch the marvel of domesticated peafowl trying to get it on. Animal behaviorists call this place a "lek", where males assemble and engage in competitive displays to attract females.  It's mid April, the dizzying season for baby-making.  

My husband reaches out and pinches my butt gently, so the children cannot see. 

The toddler startles a few males into retreat, moments before their sperm can begin its spasm-assisted journey up the cloaca into the uterus of the peahen.  He explores a parked car with a busted tire and dented fender with the same untempered interest, running his palms along its hub like my stepson ran his along my back during labor. "CAR!" Ro yells, ruining its chances of scoring with the lady cars; "CARRRRRRRRRRR." and "It's hurt?" He points to the dangling fender bit. It does look sad and hurt.  

He pat-pats the greasy deflated wheel, tries to wrench the fender back, because toddlers know that everything feels intensely, intuitively, the same way they know intuitively that laundry is for dumping on the floor.

When Ro senses in our shared bed that we want to "snuggle," he wields his complete sentences: "Daddy, don't hug Mommy! No, Mommy, go over there!" He doesn't know exactly why this is funny to us but he'll physically remove my husbands' hands from my body, because toddlers know intuitively that their parents' procreation would disrupt their social order, which is to say their ability to be the only one who gives orders and because: boobs are theirs. 

The male peacocks fan and flutter and ruffle and flutter and pitter patter.  And the females--peahens, much drabber in color and more self-possessed- peck with disinterest at the lawns, eating who knows what little critter.  It's fun to watch the males try so damn hard, and the females be so unflinchingly picky, hard to please.  It's actually inspiring.  

I remove my husband's hands and pretend to look at the bugs.  I haven't seen roly-poly bugs since my childhood, when they were common in our backyard, easily frightened into little balls. 

I cannot imagine the peacocks tritely agreeing-- in their unnerving mating cry to accept this human behavior-- toddlers will be toddlers! This too is one of the way life manifests itself: toddlers capsize sex and insert themselves like punctuation marks--and species fail to commiserate. 

Such Interruption is the story of our lives. 

And by "our" I mean my husband and mine.

And the rest of humanity who somehow got through the toddler stage with their hinges intact.

In this neighborhood, peacocks roam free, loose and ubiquitous, not an anomaly, not a majesty, in the conjoined front yards of Texas Suburbia and up and down their concrete driveways. Suburbia has a shocking, refreshing amount of green; it soothes my too-much-on-the-computer-too-much-urban-life eyes. 

Here, peacocks are neither pet nor pestilence; they are their own thing, glorious in juxtaposition with suburbia's main feature of being unremarkable.  They move through the property lines, honking, flapping, strutting, and pooping. 

We are roaming streets to find the peacocks being peacocks with the children, my husband pushing against the weight of nostalgia. These are the streets he grew up on, playing ball, the moss in the heavy trees, this one neighbor--can you see her?--who was so uptight she didn't want kids touching her lawn. If your ball happened to roll there, you had to be fast, but she was faster, waiting at the window for a transgression. 

Peacocks appear in paintings, in kingdoms. Their long feathers are strewn across the lawn, catching the light, defiled exotic.  Royalty would never visit here; they have sent their fowl ambassadors and because they were fed-- grains-- they stayed.

We are fed; we stay, too.

Texas in Spring is forgiving, while Texas in the summer makes outside unbearable.  The birds too seem to know they are in a period of pleasantness, and in their biology they prepare for the future by creating those who will populate it. 

It hasn't hit 80 degrees--yet-- as the mosquitoes hoped it would, sweat making every living thing more scrumptious.  It rained too much in the past two weeks, and so the grass is an excruciating green. 

Our minds still filed down from long days of plane travel, we pack into the rental car and drive through Hill Country to see my husband's old dear high school friend, who has had some hard times. 

Down the road from her dark house are two horses at pasture, white and brown.  A sturdy white fence marks the perimeter of the field.  The land is dusted in fuschia and yellow flowers, like a jigsaw puzzle that would make you crazy, especially once you realized your kids had lost the final pieces.

LeAnn leans against the fence, her hair in a tight blond bun, fiddling with her fingers and looking out at nothing much. She tells me not too quietly that my husband's ex was always jealous of her, just because she and John were longtime friends. I'm incredulous but she can't say much more about it, because my stepsons are right there, scaling the fence, doing parkour in the grass-filled ditch on the side of the road. 

The toddler tries to copy them, then begs to go through the slats of the fence and see the HORSIES. Toddlers don't understand fences. Horses have a better sense of them.

The peacocks have no fences, but they seem to contain themselves within certain areas of the neighborhood, only occasionally and idiotically getting run over by a car.  My mother-in-law's second husband, R, tells me that one peacock was hit by a doctor, speeding through to get to his shift at the hospital.  The doctor was remorseless, the huge bird lying with a track mark through its fat breast in the road.  Residents yelled from their homes, and the doctor said something to the effect of, stupid birds, I have to get to work to take care of all you assholes.  

Mmmm, the ethos of healing. 

LeAnn's house, like its owner, is too depressed, and after everyone has had nutella and peanut butter and sugar and sugar and sugar sandwiches, we set out again, down to a lakefront where you can swim if you want to be slimed and cold. The geese on the shoreline honk in their pissed off way, waiting for whatever visitor will give them more fresh-ripped pieces of stale whitebread. I can feel them feeling our dietary idiocy and loving it.  Their sex is undainty. 

The trees look like something Dr Seuss would draw, but on a morning he woke up slightly and inexplicable aesthetically inclined to be a realist. The grass is as long as my son's hair.  Everything feels jacked up and totally alive, photoshopped into a perfection just by looking, past made vestigial by the flip of sky reflected in the incandescent water.  We are sandwiched here between earth and heaven, and that is the whole thing. 

My son narrates his own movements and everylittlething he sees, and attempts hazardly to climb a playground set.

He has me chasing him through plastic tunnels, bright red and blue, that the light of the sun shines through. He make intermittent, predictable announcements about his own whereabouts, like a conductor announcing train stops, just in case you weren't paying attention: I am in here, I am back, mama don't come in with roro, I am in the plane! 

Hands and knees, crawling after him, waiting, listening to him.

Listening.

He imitates the peacock's cry, calling.  I keep expecting a peacock, from miles away, to yank up her picky head, turn her eyes to him, melt. 

We are, essentially, killing time at the playground, waiting to end this visit and drive to another, conversation slimming down to nothing, down to just sitting and standing around together and that being enough because: the past. Because: the present. All day in a kind of neither pleasant or unpleasant stasis, I keep thinking, this is it, this is all there is. 

This is it this is all there is this is it and yet we keep going.

A moment of stillness from a silent meditation retreat of a decade earlier slides back into my bones like an egg resting in the bottom of a freshly dug nesting hole.

It is like getting the realization without the cost of the meditation retreat. Or you could say that your whole life is the cost of the realization.

When we are back in San Antonio, we walk again.  This time, it's apparent mating has already begun in earnest, and with results. The Peacocks have dug holes and laid their fat eggs in the lawns. The exotic meets the cliche. The eggs are not well hidden and many nests stay unprotected, hardly sat on. You would think it would take more work and discretion to make something as complicated, spectacular and bizarre as a peacock.

By contrast, our human mothers volunteer their very lives to be sure we come to developmental fruition--you want her, you will have to take me, our gestation method announces, even if the mother privately feels anything but. We protect you wee things with our whole existence.

But my toddler runs after his abler big brothers, then climbs a bank of dirt and ivies and plunges his hand into the nest full of eggs. His Grammie assures us this one has been abandoned, but I am not as confident why. He holds the egg up high enough to break it if he drops it, which he is wont to do just to check if, you know, gravity is still a thing and what his special powers are. 

I feel worried for the incipient peafowl, though my husband can tell by holding a light to the egg that nothing is growing there, there is no vasculation, no ghostly yolk becoming a discernible embryonic particular. 

Put it down, I say with too much worry in my voice. Already giving the toddler too much power. He flashes me the creepy grin of knowing he can do something he should not.  He's already stepped on hundreds of innocent rolypoly bugs, stomp stomp killing for no reason-- Gentle, I say. This is like the egg Fossey came from. 

Fossey is our hand-reared baby parrot. I met Fossey right after birth when we heard a peeppeep and a grisly creature with no neck control wobbling in the nesting scraps. Sooner after birth than I met my own son.  My husband and I peering into the nest box and starting to cry simultaneously, which is something that just happens to people-- even assholes, as one doctor told us-- when they witness the beginning of life. 

The peacocks honk and wail-- but for sex, not protection. Begging for it, some might say.  Like Fossey, I remind my toddler again, thinking the personal connection will be enough to stay his throwing arm. He wouldn't hurt that, would he? He grins again, but I can tell the analogy didn't hit home with the moral harness I'd intended. Egg! He says, and holds it up even higher on his tippy toes, peacocks fornicating on the cul-de-sac all around him. The power of man, I think. To hold on to someone's fate at every moment, to unthinkingly let go.