Chances Are . . .

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death by suicide, suicidal ideation, mental illness, and sexual abuse.

“On December 1, 1969, the evening of the nation’s first draft lottery, Lincoln convinced the house mother to let the hashers serve dinner half an hour early so they could all crowd around a tiny black-and-white TV in the back room where they ate their meals. Given that their fates hung in the balance, the mood was strangely buoyant, at least at the beginning. Of the eight hashers’ birthdays, Mickey’s came up first, 9th out of 366 possibilities, causing the others to break into a chorus of ‘O, Canada,’ which might’ve gone over better if they’d known more than the first two words of the song.”

This scene establishes how random chance alters the friends’ life trajectories through the draft lottery. The juxtaposition of the “strangely buoyant” mood and the dire, life-altering consequences creates a distinct air of dramatic tension, and Mickey’s low number raises the specter of an untimely death and ultimately foreshadows his eventual flight to Canada. As the men huddle around the “tiny black-and-white TV,” their collective vulnerability represents their powerlessness against larger historical forces, and the fact that they must learn their fate here rather than watching the sorority sisters’ larger television mutely highlights the class differences to which they are subjected.

“[Trudy] hoped Lincoln would one day come to [share her fond sentiments] about the Chilmark house, and to that end she’d already made the necessary arrangements for him, not his father, to inherit it. She just wanted him to promise that he wouldn’t sell the property except out of some grave necessity, and promise, too, that if he did have to sell it, he wouldn’t share the proceeds with his father, who would hand over the money to his church. It was one thing, she said, for her to give up her sole true faith, but she had no intention of allowing Dub-Yay to permanently endow a bunch of damn snake handlers, not with her money.”

The Chilmark house functions as a multilayered symbol representing Lincoln’s mother’s independence, her childhood freedom, and the ongoing tension in her mismatched marriage. Through this inheritance arrangement, Russo reveals her determination to preserve at least a fragment of autonomy within her otherwise constrained existence. In laying aside her submissive posture to deliver the facts to her son, she also reveals the depths of her contempt for her husband, and her references to his congregation as “a bunch of damn snake handlers” also stresses her constant awareness of the differences between the affluent life that she gave up and the narrow-minded nature of the town in which her marriage to Dub-Yay now imprisons her.