In Cold Blood

Photo by Stephanie Moody

I've never won a gamble. So how could I foresee the dangers of signing a permission slip for my son's 2nd grade class lottery? ...

By Susan Lewis

Listen to In Cold Blood By Susan Lewis

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My son has won the lottery.

No, not that lottery-not the one where I get to quit worrying about the cost of braces, college andkeeping four children in sneakers through their teenage years.

My child's winnings will not be wasted paying the mortgage on the house or saving for college. They will, he tells me, be displayed, protected in a glass case atop his toy cubby, next to his bed. Illuminated by a bright light, they will be watched, guarded and cherished, nourished with attention, love and a weekly diet of ... crickets.

My son has won Mrs. Adams' second-grade lottery, and as he bounces on the love-seat cushions in my office at home, he can hardly believe his luck.

My son has won a pair of chameleons.

"Mom, why are you so surprised?" asks my ten-year-old daughter. "You signed the permission slip."

"I know, but ... " My voice trails off, unwilling to betray the secret of the parent gamble: Sometimes you say yes to gain the credit but never expect to get the bill. I never win anything  - why should my child? With 25 kids in the class, really, what were the chances?

"Is this for Thanksgiving vacation?" I ask weakly, having forgotten to ask before.

"Nope. Forever," he says, bouncing.

The goldfish were bad enough, with their aquarium, filter, plants, antibiotic drops and propensity to die right after we'd bought all their equipment and medications. Then came the dog, definitely a more interactive, if costly,

pet, who keeps us forever safe from squirrels and piles of dry leaves. Our last addition was Hermie-the-hermit-crab, who, although the cheapest to maintain, is about as dull a companion as I can imagine, who has many times been pronounced dead due to lack of movement, only to revive when we're about to clean hls tank.

Now, chameleons. Cold-blooded, creepy lizards. "Fine," I finally say. "But they will be your responsibility. I'm not doing a thing."

"Okay, but my teacher gave me an article about them. Could you read it, because some of the words are a little hard for me," he says, batting his blue choirboy eyes.

Twenty-two hours later, I find myself in the same pet store where just the other day I bought 40 pounds of dog food and a bright-orange plastic football. It turns out the chameleons we are getting are nor really chameleons, which live in the wilds of Africa, but cheap impostor lizards called anoles (uh-NO- lees), which live in the homes of second-grade students all across America.

The good news is they come with food. The bad news is the food crawls. It turns out these lizards are pretty picky eaters and accept only moving insects, such as crickets or active houseflies. The rest of the bad news is that they came to us homeless, contained only in the temporary shelter of a pretzel jug. Hence, our emergency run to the pet store.

Our group includes my son, his ten-year-old sister, the two lizards and a bag crawling with crickets, who are perhaps the only ones less happy to be

here than I am. I spot a slender young man wearing the store's red shirt as he slithers out from behind a display of chew toys.

"Excuse me? My son won his classroom chameleons, and my neighbor gave us a small glass case, but my son says we need a screen for the top."

"Absolutely. They zip right up the walls, and if they get out, they are extremely difficult to catch," he says, eyes glittering.

We follow him away from the familiar aisles of dog toys and biscuits into a cold, alien part of the pet store, where pictures of snakes and lizards sprawl atop row upon row of boxes on the shelves. Standing amidst them is the salesman, holding up asmall, rectangular screen, his lips curled into a smile. "Do you have bedding?"

"Excuse me?"

"Bedding," he says again, leading me to a pile of bags labeled REPTILE BEDDING. "For the bottom of the tank."

I shoot a glare at Andrew. "We were just going to use dirt," I say politely.

"Dirt," he says, his voice flat.

"You know, what buggy things crawl in outside. Is there anything wrong with dirt?"

A long breath escapes his lips. "I guess you could try it. It's just that … well, we never use dirt.” He nods toward some lighted ten-gallon aquariums containing what looks like Astroturf under plastic trees. "I mean, you never know what's in dirt. You’ll have to cook it first. You don’t want thechameleons to get mites. Dirt – hmmm. If you can be sure it’s sterile ...”

I pause.  I can leave. I know I can leave at any time. I am not cooking dirt.

Taking the screen, I grab the shoulders of my son and start for the door. "Okay, great. Come on,kids, let's go."

"Need a light?" comes the reed-thin voice behind me.

"Excuse me?" I stop and turn, then look down at Andrew. "He means a light over the case, Mom. Don’t worry, I’m going to use my desk light.”

The reptile man sighs, his eyes darting to me. "Well, fluorescents are better because they give them the UV and other rays they need. A desk light'll work," he says, grudgingly. "Do you have a night-light?"

"A night-light?"

He moves his head slowly from side to side. "Well, it's a special night-light, for the heat." Then, guardedly: "Your house doesn't drop below 70 at night, does it?"

I stare.

"If it does, you need to provide heat, and we have several alternatives. There are heated rocks, heating pads that go under the tank, ceramic heating fixtures. The desk light'll give off heat duringthe day. But you can't keep it on at night. It'll screw up their cycle-mix up their days and nights."

Right. I had a baby that did that once. I start the mental math: $7.50 for a purple reptile night-light vs.however much it costs-in dollars and sleeplessness-to keep the house hot at night for two small lizards who should be living in Africa.

"Fine, I'll take a night-light. Okay, we've got an aquarium, screen, night-light.

Last thing   - about the ... food." As I look at the bag of wriggling brown

crickets, a vague uneasiness rises in me, a feeling that we are about to embark on a path of treachery, that we will never again read Pinocchio in the same carefree way.

"This article my son brought home talks about feeding them wriggling crickets with forceps." I shudder. "Can't we just dump them all in?"

"You can do that," he says, grimacing. "But if the crickets are just in there, not eating, they'll losetheir nutritional content."

Their nutritional content?

"You really want to feed them."

Pause. "Feed the food?"

He nods. "Vegetables, things like that. They really like potatoes."

The more I learn, the less I understand why anyone would intentionally keep a lizard for a pet. I am beginning to suspect some sort of conspiracy between the pet-supply industry and second-grade teachers. Isn't November kind of early to be ditching the classroom pets? I want to know what's wrong with these lizards.

"They weren't exactly class pets," the teacher tells me later. "They were for our study of predator and prey relationships in the ecosystem. You see, the ladybugs and aphids kept escaping." Now she tells me.

Neither of them is what you'd call friendly. They sprawl, motionless, except for the scanning movement of their eyes, which move independently of each other. The one, named Skinny, spends most of its time clutching the walls at a top corner of the aquarium. The bigger one, Split, is downright disdainful of anyone and anything.

The article says that anoles, like chameleons, change their color according to their mood. Every time I go to look at them, Split - nearly always bright green when I enter the room-takes one look at me and turns brown. I don't think he realizes where his crickets are coming from, or that the crickets are beginning to look a lot cuter than he is.

It is Sunday afternoon - when normal people are reading the paper, taking walks, watching sports - and I am on the phone searching for crickets. It

is obvious there has been some sort of run on local crickets. Places nearby are completely sold out. I rip open the phone book [this being the late 90’s], scramble for the pet-supply listings, and start calling. Finally, I find ten crickets at a place about 30 minutes away.

"Can you hold them for me?"

"How soon can you get here?"

"A half hour."

"Well ... all right. But if you're late, I can't guarantee they'll be here."

It's kind of spooky, but it appears that there is a whole underground network of reptile owners ourthere-friends you thought you knew, strangers you'd never suspect, ordinary people you see everyday, all of whom have crickets on their shopping lists.

This, however, will be the limit of our reptile experience. There will, I tell my son, be no frogs, no chameleons after these guys have eaten their last cricket. The only positive aspect of this experience is that it has improved my relationship with the dog, who is looking almost

human to me. She cuddles on the rug; she is warm, not cold, and most important, she'll eat cooked food. No, this is my last cold-blooded pet.

"Mom, I figured out the sex of the chameleons," says Andrew, coming into my office.

"What?"

"One of them is a male."

"Okay. And the other?"

My eight-year-old smiles. Really, what were the chances?

Originally published in Philadelphia Magazine, November 1997