The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter Read online

  For my parents and brothers,

  who believe, as I do, that being normal is overrated.

  And for my husband and children,

  who have shown me that passion, friendship, and love

  need not be mutually exclusive.

  Contents

  Prologue

  One Mail-Order Gerbils

  Two The Gerbil Whisperer

  Three Even Girls Like Gerbils!

  Four A Navy Man in Kansas

  Five Doin’ Time in Leavenworth

  Six Trading My Bikini for a Horse

  Seven Dad Buys Himself a Gerbil Farm

  Eight Who’s Going to Marry Her Now?

  Nine My Sister the Time Traveler

  Ten Welcome to the Poor Farm

  Eleven Nobody’s Business but Ours

  Twelve Do It Yourself or Die Trying

  Thirteen The Man Without a Nose

  Fourteen My Mom Wears Jodhpurs

  Fifteen A Lady Always Wears Underpants

  Sixteen Saving the Blond Gerbil

  Seventeen Rebellions

  Eighteen What a Gerbil Farmer Does for Fun

  Nineteen The Gerbil Czar Retires

  Epilogue The American Gerbil Show

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  My son nods. “It looks like a twig,” he says.

  Aidan and I are in our favorite pet store, standing in front of a tank of catfish. We come here regularly as a reward after any arduous domestic chore—shoe shopping, food shopping, recycling. It’s not one of the new, supersized pet stores, those wannabe Wal-Marts with their broad aisles, gleaming white floors, health foods, and pet accessories that could double as prom jewelry. This store actually sells pets. There are metal bins of squealing guinea pigs that scatter shavings as they stampede into corners. Ferrets lounge like movie stars in hammocks above a cage of solemn lion-faced rabbits, and there’s an entire room of fish so dimly lit that it feels like we’re swimming underwater, too.

  Unlike those cruise ship pet stores, where the sales clerks all seem to be short-tempered men in jobs of last resort after alcohol binges or failed rock-and-roll careers, the clerks here are young and cheerful and tattooed. They have their own flocks of parrots or packs of dogs at home, and they clearly remember being just like Aidan is now: a nine-year-old kid with ant farms, butterfly nets, animal traps, fishing rods, and a zeal for dissecting owl pellets. Aidan even has a nifty bug vacuum that sucks insects out of tree bark. Because of him, we have two dogs, two cats, two tanks of fish, and two hamsters; it’s a lot like living with Noah without the ark.

  “This is a Farlowella catfish,” the skinny blond clerk murmurs as she nets one of the wriggling, whiskered twigs and drops it into a plastic bag filled with water. “It won’t give your tetras any trouble,” she promises Aidan. “They’re not nippy like other catfish.”

  Aidan is right at her elbow, nearly dancing in place with excitement. When he grows up, he wants to be either a cave explorer or an inventor; either way, he will live in the woods and trap his own animals as pets. He plans to build his house by hand, and his furniture, too. I believe him.

  As we make our way into the brightly lit main room of the pet store, Aidan takes my hand and tugs me toward the rodent room. “We have to see Screamer before we go,” he reminds me.

  The clerk laughs and leaves our new algae eater adrift in its own private plastic bubble next to the cash register. Then she leads us over to the cages of rats and mice and hamsters, where the white mice are on top of the exercise wheel instead of inside it, tumbling off and then climbing right back on again.

  Screamer is in the glass tank above the mice. He’s the most famous hamster we know, so famous that he’s not even for sale. This is because, although he is small and brown and short-haired like most hamsters, he screams every time someone picks him up and turns him onto his back. It’s an ungodly noise, hissing and shrill at the same time, like the cranky water pipes I once had in a San Francisco apartment.

  The clerk tips the hamster upside down, and Screamer’s cries drill through my skull. Then the girl flips the hamster over again and tucks him back into his nest. In the sudden silence, Aidan notices a new tank of animals next to Screamer’s.

  “What are those?” he asks, pushing his face close to the glass. “They’re not hamsters.”

  “They’re gerbils,” I tell him. “They’re good pets because they don’t use much water, so their cages don’t smell as bad as your hamster cage. They don’t eat their babies, either, like hamsters do sometimes.”

  Aidan looks up at me and blinks in surprise. “How do you know so much about gerbils, Mom?”

  I bite my lip and consider dodging the question. Our five children know all about their grandfather’s career as a Navy officer. That always seemed like enough family lore to take to elementary school: a grandpa who left his boyhood home in Ohio to go to the U.S. Naval Academy and serve his country for twenty years, first in the Korean War, then as the captain of a ship that transported tanks and Marines, and finally as head of naval science at the Merchant Marine Academy on Long Island. We have my dad’s oil portrait to prove it. The painting, which always hung in my parents’ front hall, shows Dad in uniform, his eyes blue and far-gazing, his shoulders square, his features chiseled and handsome beneath the gold-braided cap. He looks like President Gerald Ford on steroids. There is no hint in that portrait of who my dad really is.

  Clearly, the way to approach this conversation with Aidan is nonchalantly, as if I were dispensing some routine edicts from the adult world, the way I answer his questions about sex or why voting matters. Nothing flashy. Just the facts.

  “Your grandfather used to raise gerbils,” I tell Aidan casually as we pay for the catfish and start walking toward the car. “I thought I told you that.”

  This tactic fails. Aidan looks stunned. As well he should: Aidan only knows my father as a quiet, bald retiree whose favorite activities are reading and Scrabble, so the idea of my father raising gerbils is outrageous to him. I might as well have confessed that my dad was a Broadway dancer.

  “No,” Aidan says.

  “Oh. Well, he did,” I assure him as I unlock the car and hand the catfish to Aidan in the backseat. “We had a lot of gerbils at one time.”

  “Like a whole cageful?” Aidan asks doubtfully.

  I put the key in the ignition and turn it. “More.”

  “How many more?”

  I don’t want to talk about this. I’ve never talked about my father’s other life. As my brother Donald always says, “Telling people about Dad just makes them ask more questions.” But Aidan, of all my children, deserves to know, because there is no child more like my father than this one. “We had thousands more,” I tell him as we head home. “Like, nine thousand gerbils.”

  When I glance at Aidan in the rearview mirror, he is frowning hard. It is the same expression he has when we talk about the tooth fairy: my youngest son wants to believe, because he likes finding dollar bills under his pillow. But he doesn’t want to be the only kid in school whose parents can trick him. “You’re kidding me, right, Mom?”

  “Nope.”

  “Where did Grandfather keep them?” Aidan challenges. “In the garage?”

  “At first,” I admit. “And then the gerbils were in our basement, and then he built buildings for them. Big buildings. We had a gerbil farm.”

  “Mom,” Aidan says excitedly, “was Grandfather in the Guinness Book of World Records?”

  I laugh. “No. But he could have been, I bet. He raised more gerbils than anyone else in the world.”

  “Wow,” Aidan says with a sigh. “But why, Mom?”

  By now, we are nearly home. And it’s a goo
d thing, too, because that’s one question that has no easy answer.

  I came home and found my family gathered in the garage. I’d been pedaling my bike around the neighborhood after school, pretending that the bike was a horse I was racing around the cul-de-sacs. I’d ridden so hard through the soupy Virginia heat that my short bangs were glued to my forehead and my knobby knees were shaking as I dismounted the bike and walked it up the driveway.

  My brother Donald raced outside when he saw me. Donald was eight years old, skinny and quick and so blond that he looked bald in most lights. It didn’t help his looks any that Mom buzzed his hair like a Marine’s, which only called attention to the fact that Donald’s head was so long and narrow that everyone, even our parents, called him Picklehead.

  “Dad got boxes from Air Express,” Donald said. “Now he’s opening them!”

  I dropped my books and lunchbox down on the cement floor of the garage and went to stand between Donald and my mother, who carried my little sister, Gail. We stood close together in the dim oily cave of the garage and watched in silence while my father—a methodical man who never went anywhere without a list, a map, and a pocketknife—unpacked the boxes with his usual precision.

  As Dad slid out the contents of that first box with the help of a metal ruler, I saw that it was a plastic cage with a wire top. The wire top had two dips in it, one for a water bottle and the other for food. Dad held the cage high up like a holy chalice to admire its contents. Through the opaque bottom of the cage, I could make out two dark, round shadows that skittered this way and that. My mouth went dry with excitement.

  “What do you think of them, Sally?” Dad asked.

  Mom wrinkled her nose. My mother was thirty-two years old that summer, but she often dressed in shorts that showed off her figure and tied bright scarves over her short brown curls. She was girlish and lovely, like Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet, but without the scary violet eyes. “They look like rats to me,” she said. “Look at those awful tails.”

  “What are they, Dad?” Donald asked.

  “Gerbils.”

  There were four cages in all, in four separate Air Express boxes. The process of meticulously unpacking the boxes and examining their contents took Dad so long that by the time he’d lined the cages up on the metal shelves installed along the back wall of the garage, Donald and I were giving each other Indian burns and Mom was on her third cigarette.

  At last, though, the gerbil cages were on the shelves and I was able to stand on tiptoe to peer into them. Each plastic bin held a pair of palm-sized animals with long tails. The tails had tiny black tufts at the ends, like miniature lion tails. The gerbils were a warm sand color with creamy underbellies and shiny black eyes; their eyes looked just like the buttons our grandmother Keach sewed onto sock monkeys for her gift shop in Maine. I wanted to put a gerbil on my bed and kiss it.

  “Where did you get them?” I asked.

  Dad handed me a catalog from inside one of the boxes. It was Creative Playthings, a toy catalog that Donald and I routinely fought over until we reduced it to confetti, even though we knew that Dad would never buy us anything from a catalog except school clothes from Sears. The gerbils were advertised in the “Discovering Nature” section for $5.50 a pair, a fortune.

  Donald yanked the catalog out of my hands and asked Dad why he hadn’t gotten the Tom Thumb greenhouse or the egg incubator, too. I pushed my face close to the plastic side of one cage. The gerbils inside it surprised me by bounding around on their hind legs like tiny, caffeinated kangaroos.

  “Can I hold one?” I asked, tugging on the pocket of Dad’s khaki uniform pants. He had taken off his brass-buttoned Navy shirt with the bars and stripes, but the pants were still cinched tight around his white undershirt with a shiny black belt that matched his shiny black shoes. You could see your face in those shoes.

  “Not yet,” he said. “Let them get used to us.”

  We left the gerbils and went inside to have supper and watch TV, all of us oblivious to the fact that Dad, with one whimsical purchase from a toy catalog, had charted a new course for our family’s future.

  WINTER must come to Virginia, but in my memory Virginia was always hot. It wasn’t the sort of sunny hot that you’d want to bask in, either, but the sticky sort of hot that makes your skin feel like it’s melting off your bones. If there was ever a breeze, it stank of dead crab and rotting marsh grasses, and the lawns were hopping with chiggers and ticks and fleas.

  A few months before the gerbils arrived, we had moved to Virginia Beach from Annapolis, Maryland, where my father was teaching at the Naval Academy before becoming captain of the USS Grant County, LST 1174. We lived in a housing development of uninspired brick ranch houses with minimalist landscaping, shiny avocado appliances, sunken living rooms, and long hallways perfect for sliding races in your socks. Southern Point jutted into Wolfsnare Lake like the thumb of a mitten; I suppose the mucky smells must have been the result of living not on a real lake but beside a glorified swamp created by damming up a piece of the Chesapeake Bay. All around us, new houses were going up so fast that we were surrounded by wooden skeletons.

  Still, as bad as it was outside, it was better than being in school. There were more than thirty kids in my fifth-grade class and most were Navy, with fathers stationed at Naval Station Norfolk or Naval Air Station Oceana. Like me, they’d lived in different countries and different states, and had moved every year or two with their families. School, for us, was always a place where we had to reinvent ourselves, a parade ground where you had a chance to show your colors.

  One boy managed to set fire to a trash can every day. The ceiling was covered with so many sticky paper spit cones that it was like sitting in a cave thick with stalactites. One of the girls frequently climbed outside and stood on the second-floor window ledge until the teacher next door noticed her face at the window and came running over, her dress damp with sweat beneath her armpits.

  I was not a bad kid, nor an especially good one. I chose to remain invisible. I spent most of my school days reading horse stories inside my textbooks and pretending I was breaking mustangs in Wyoming or running with the wild ponies of Chincoteague, while at the same time wishing for a friend. So far, the only person who spoke to me with any regularity was the school bus driver, a skinny old man whose breath smelled of coffee and bacon, and who tucked my school picture into his bus visor as part of his collection of carefully combed children.

  Since I had no friends, the gerbils provided a welcome distraction. After school I’d go right into the garage and sit on a stepladder in the relative cool, breathing in the heady scents of motor oil, pine shavings, and the slightly musky odor of desert animals. Gerbils were far more entertaining to watch than my brother’s ill-tempered hamster, which remained curled in a tight fist of fur all day and reared up to bite if you tried to stroke it with a finger. Gerbils didn’t sleep during daylight hours, but scurried and bounded and sniffed with great purpose. They thumped their long back feet when frightened or sat up on their hind legs to stare at me with their black button eyes. (I suppose I served the same purpose for them as they did for me.) The gerbils were frantic diggers, too, constantly clawing at the corners of their cages as if certain that an entire maze of freedom tunnels lay just out of paw’s reach.

  The gerbils seemed to cheer my father up. Dad went to his ship every day the way TV dads went to their offices, and the stress of his new post as the commanding officer of a ship had made him humorless and stern, like the despot of a small, unimportant country. Now, instead of sitting at the dinner table with his cigarette and sighing with his head in his hands, as he’d done nearly every night since our arrival in Virginia, he put on old clothes and went straight out to the garage to tend his new livestock. The gerbils ate little and drank even less, so there wasn’t much to do, but Dad kept a gerbil journal and jotted down his observations.

  On Saturdays, my father let me fill the water bottles for the gerbils and drop handfuls of green pellets on
to their cage lids. But no matter how many times I asked if I could hold a gerbil, he said no. “These aren’t your pets,” he said. “Not like Donald’s hamster or your guinea pig. These are my pets, and I just want to watch them.”

  “Can’t I at least show them to my friends?” I asked. I didn’t have any friends yet, but I was certain that showing off our gerbils could get me some. A gerbil was much better than those miniature dogs and monkeys advertised in comic books, always photographed in silly teacups. And there was just no comparison between a gerbil and a sea monkey. Sea monkey ads showed grinning creatures costumed in tiny dresses and suits, but anybody who’d ever been tricked into buying them knew that sea monkeys were only ant-sized brine shrimp that arrived as dried eggs in tiny envelopes.

  But my father would not relent. “Don’t you dare touch my gerbils,” he said. “And don’t you let anyone near the garage, either. Those are strict orders.”

  “Yes, sir, Daddy, sir,” I said.

  When my father looked straight at you with his blue eyes, you had to say that. You also had to square your shoulders and lift your chin, the same way the sailors and Marines looked at Dad when they were saluting.

  My father was six feet tall, thin and muscular and handsome. The year we moved to Virginia, he was only thirty-five years old but already nearly bald, a fact that he claimed was due to us kids making such a racket that he couldn’t even hear himself think, so how could we expect his poor hair to grow?

  At home, Dad liked to be our captain just as he was captain on his ship. To prove his point, he sometimes made us eat “square meals” like he ate when he was at the Naval Academy. “It’s good discipline for plebes,” he’d tell us as we lifted our forks straight up and moved them at right angles to our mouths, dropping food along the way, especially Jell-O with Cool Whip, Mom’s favorite new easy family dessert.

  Also, before we left the dinner table, we were expected to say, “May we please be excused from the table, Daddy, sir?” and wait for him to say, “Permission granted, plebes.”