The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter Read online

  “We’ll have to break down the wall,” Dad said.

  “Over my dead body,” Mom said. “That cat managed to get in there. She’ll just have to get out on her own. At least with the cat in there, the rat won’t come back out.” She turned a cold shoulder on the cat’s pitiful noises. “We’ll buy rat poison in the morning,” she added. Mom put Philip to bed upstairs, then said she was going to take a nap on the couch.

  “You kids go help your mother while I unpack the kitchen,” Dad commanded.

  “How can we help her?” Donald asked. “She’s sleeping.”

  “I don’t care,” Dad said. “Just find something useful to do.”

  Dad started unpacking the kitchen. Donald fed cardboard boxes into the fireplace, where Dad had built a fire to take the chill out of the downstairs rooms. The upstairs was even colder, I realized, as I felt my way along the hallway, trying light switches that didn’t work. When I discovered that the tiny box designated to be my bedroom had no heat other than the pale warmth rising from the kitchen through a metal grate in the floor, I began calculating how long it would take me to hitchhike back to Kansas.

  I noticed a transom over the door, a small, multipaned window. Was I supposed to open it to let in more heat? I squinted up at the odd little window, puzzling over something dark hanging from its sill. At last, still mystified, I reached up and poked at the black shape. It swooped toward me and flew into my bedroom, where it darted into every corner before finding the doorway and zooming out again.

  I screamed and ran downstairs. “Dad, Dad! There’s a bat flying around upstairs!”

  He picked up the kitchen broom and buckled on one of my mother’s riding helmets, then galloped upstairs like Don Quixote.

  When this drama had subsided, I went back to unpacking my bedroom, fantasizing about hitchhiking to San Francisco. After a while, my fingers were numb from the cold. I went back downstairs to see if there was anything to eat besides canned goods.

  Dad was back at his post in the kitchen, marooned in a sea of opened boxes. “There’s no ice cream!” I accused him, flinging the freezer open twice to be sure.

  “Of course there’s no ice cream,” Dad said. “We just got here. Nobody’s been to the commissary yet. Open a can of beef stew if you’re still hungry.”

  “I don’t want beef stew!” I wailed. “And there probably isn’t any commissary! We’ll probably have to drive five thousand miles for a Coke!”

  Donald showed up just then. He looked as nervous as the poodle, but at least he wasn’t dribbling pee on the floor. “I think there’s a problem with the fire,” he said.

  Dad paused in his unpacking. “What kind of problem?”

  “I think it’s too big,” Donald said.

  In the living room, smoke was pouring out of the fireplace. Mom was awake now, sitting up and coughing on the couch. “Guess I’d better go upstairs and get the baby,” she said, and took the stairs two at a time.

  “What the hell did you do now, Donald?” Dad yelled. “I was helping! I was breaking down boxes!” Donald yelled back. “It was just really hard to get the refrigerator box to fit in the fireplace!”

  “Jesus Christ,” Dad said, stunned by the sheer size of the problem crackling in front of us. The smoke was starting to curl through the house. Meanwhile, it was ten degrees outside and still snowing. “Goddamn it,” he said. “I think the chimney’s on fire. Let’s hope we don’t lose the roof. You kids get out of here while I call the fire department.”

  We couldn’t find the cat. Mom, my brothers, and I sat in the car with the whimpering poodle while firemen scrambled around on our icy roof to put out the fire. Embers were shooting out of the chimney into the night sky like fireworks.

  Other cars started arriving. Vehicles filled with families pulled into our yard or parked on the frozen field across the street. People climbed out of them and stood about in small groups, faces lit by the flames.

  “I bet this is what Woodstock was like,” I told Mom, who sat in the front seat with Philip on her lap. She kept the engine running to keep us warm despite Dad’s strict orders not to waste gas.

  “Except that these people are wearing jackets instead of dancing around naked,” she said. “Thank God.”

  Dad stood around outside, too, talking and joking with the firemen as if he were hosting a party. We watched him gesture at the fire trucks and flames as if he’d meant for all of this to happen.

  Luckily, the roof was slate and the fire trucks had arrived in time to hose down the clapboards. A fireman tapped on Mom’s window after a little while. “Should be fine to go back inside soon,” he said.

  “Who are all these people?” Mom asked.

  The fireman shrugged and scratched his smudged nose beneath the big yellow hat. “Volunteers. They all heard the sirens.”

  “They aren’t all firemen,” Mom pointed out. “A lot of people are just standing around and watching.”

  “Oh, them others, you mean.” The fireman grinned. “Some people just like a good fire,” he said. “The Papas had one every year about this time up here at the farm with that old chimney. It’s a town tradition. You new people are just keeping it going.”

  “I’m so glad to oblige,” Mom said, and rolled up her window.

  “Who were the Papas?” I asked eagerly, thinking of the Mamas and the Papas.

  “I think he was saying Paupers,” Mom said. “That’s how they talk in Massachusetts.”

  “What are paupers?” Donald asked.

  “Poor people,” Mom said. “Poor people just like us.”

  WE WERE far from poor. Dad, always cautious, had crafted a thoroughly detailed scheme for starting his gerbil farm while finishing up his twenty years in the Navy. He commuted back and forth those first two years between Massachusetts and Long Island, where he lived in officers’ quarters at the Merchant Marine Academy. His plan was to retire with the rank of commander and a reasonable Navy pension while he grew enough gerbils to ensure our financial health. To do this, he’d found a fifteen-room farmhouse on ninety acres of land that we could afford on his salary simply because it was buried in the Brookfields, the forgotten agricultural heart of Massachusetts between Boston and the Berkshires.

  Nonetheless, technically we really had bought the poor farm. Our house, depending on whom you asked around West Brookfield, was known as “the old Blair Farm,” “the town farm,” or the “almshouse.” In the years before Social Security, paupers were sent to live in state-subsidized farms managed by wardens or poor masters. They worked the land, living off the food they grew and the cows they milked.

  “The transom over your window was probably put there so the warden could tell when a pauper died in his sleep,” Dad teased me.

  They probably died of cold, I thought, tossing and turning and shivering in my bed during those first drafty weeks in West Brookfield. Who, I wondered, had been desperate enough to live in this creaky old house before we did? Who had slept in my teeny box of a bat-friendly room, folding her few clothes into its odd built-in cupboards? And was she as miserable as I was?

  For I was miserable, more miserable than I’d ever been in my life. I missed my sister but couldn’t talk about her because it made Mom leave the room and Dad grind his teeth. I missed our horses, but Ladybug and Robin wouldn’t arrive until spring. And most of all, I hated this farm, with its stained carpeting, peeling layers of wallpaper, noisy radiators, dribbling shower, and fields full of nothing but snow, snow, snow. Why had Dad moved us here? Gerbils had proved to be perfectly happy in basements and garages! We could have kept our horses in a stable, where there were other people to ride with! At the very least, we could have moved to a town within forty miles of a movie theater!

  I spent that first chilly week on the poor farm giving my parents the silent treatment.

  “A vacation for our ears,” Dad pronounced, while Mom communicated her requests for help with household chores through notes taped onto the bathroom mirror.

  In my bedroom,
I tried on clothes and discarded them, or read books I’d already read. At one point, I was bored enough to iron my own hair, an idea I’d read about in Seventeen magazine. I managed to raise long, red, angry blisters across my forehead when I pressed the iron too close to my scalp in an attempt to flatten my wavy bangs, prompting Donald to dub me “Little Miss Frankenstein.”

  Mom yelled at me for branding my own forehead. I stormed outside and stomped across the thick icy crust over the snow. It was a dramatic escape toward the woods behind our house, like a settler fleeing the murderous savages. Unfortunately, the icy crust layered over the snow wasn’t thick enough to hold my weight, so my feet punched through the ice again and again until welts rose on my ankles to match the ones on my forehead.

  After a few dozen tortured steps, I threw myself down onto the snow, howling at the gray sky until I realized that Mom, Donald, and little Phil were all watching me from the kitchen window. Mom waved.

  A minute later, she opened the back door. “Why don’t you come inside?” she called. “It’s too cold to be lying around in that snow.”

  “How could you let Dad bring us here?” I screamed at her. “What am I supposed to do?”

  Mom gestured at the cup in her hand. “The only thing you need to do today is come inside and have some hot chocolate,” she said.

  Mom and Dad lived according to this solid-gold credo: “What we do is nobody’s business.”

  Now that we were in Massachusetts, Dad brought us a few steps closer to the cliff edge of deepest anonymity. He’d chosen to buy the poor farm in West Brookfield not just because it was affordable and within a day’s drive of an airport but also because it was on the way to nowhere. After his retirement from the Navy in two years, there would be no military brass to rip the bars off his uniform if his secret passion for the pocket kangaroo was unveiled. In the meantime, he wanted to ensure that his fellow officers at the Merchant Marine Academy remained in the dark about how the heck he spent his free time.

  Dad was also worried about the long-term repercussions of raising gerbils on a large scale. Leftist politics were seeping into everything from women in the workplace to U.S. involvement abroad. That included increasingly vocal animal rights activists. Dad planned to raise gerbils not as pets, but to sell to researchers engaged in scientific studies; the more under the radar he could keep us, the better.

  To this end, my father now devised an ingenious cover-up to disguise his intent: he made the gerbil farm look like a horse farm. In historical papers held at the town library describing the history of our property, the “almshouse” was “sold to William Shaw, later sold to Mark V. Crockett. Mr. Crockett sold the fields and wooded land to the Wildlife Preserve of Mass. And the remainder to Tumblebrook Farm, a riding stable operated by D. G. Robinson.”

  Of course, establishing a convincing front meant bringing the horses from Kansas to Massachusetts and building a barn for them, a plan that Mom and I immediately took to heart. None of us knew a thing about barn raising, but luckily we had reinforcements. My mother’s parents, Maybelle and Everett Keach, came to live with us shortly after New Year’s, dragging a rickety trailer full of their belongings all the way from Virginia. The trailer came unhitched from the car on its last gasp up Long Hill Road and rolled backward into a stone wall, but we managed to retrieve most of their belongings—a few bits of antique pine furniture, pots and pans, Grandfather’s gardening tools—and installed our grandparents in the small in-law apartment upstairs.

  My grandparents were no strangers to hard work. Maybelle had been born in England and arrived in Boston by ship with her father, recruited by the New England mills as an expert wool sorter, and her mother, a girl with a streak of wildness that led her to abandon her family at age thirty-five for an eighteen-year-old lover. Grandmother was fifteen years old at the time of her mother’s defection. The oldest of five children, she was luckier than her siblings: her own grandmother, who had also divorced her first husband, had remarried a British sergeant major named Peter Pickles, so she was in a good position to take young Maybelle in hand.

  While my grandmother’s two younger sisters toiled away at menial jobs and her two younger brothers labored in factories from an early age, Grandmother was able to finish high school, take piano lessons, learn to pour a proper tea, and wear gloves and a hat to the Methodist church. She turned into a steely sort of woman determined to be nothing like her own wandering mother, but known far and wide for her impeccable housekeeping, charitable acts, good manners, and tidy children.

  Her only weakness was Grandfather, whom she met at age sixteen and fell for like a sack of sugar knocked off a table by a baseball bat. As a young man, my grandfather, Everett, was a natty dresser who talked Grandmother into taking off the woolen bloomers she wore under her dress and stashing them under the bushes before joining him on the back of his motorcycle for furiously fast rides. She married him at age seventeen and had three children by the time she was twenty-one years old.

  It was difficult for me to imagine the ardor of this court ship. By the time Grandfather moved in with us, he was a balding, terse, bespectacled man in a flannel shirt who was never without a pipe and a Dixie cup of liquid courage at his elbow. He wore broad-brimmed hats, told raunchy jokes, read three mystery novels a week, and rode low in the seat of his old car at speeds that made you wonder why he didn’t just walk. He had his own inexplicable passion for Native Americans, which meant that he was always ferreting around for arrowheads and had a collection of Indian headdresses hanging in the basement that scared the bejesus out of you whenever you rounded the corner into his basement workshop.

  But Grandfather was handy with a toolbox, no matter how many bottles of homemade wine or cheap whiskey he kept stashed around the basement. When my father discovered an abandoned dairy barn on the 350 acres of land across the street that had originally belonged to the poor farm and was now conservation land, he petitioned the state for permission to disassemble the building. Dad and Grandfather constructed a wooden cart and attached it to a wheezing red tractor purchased from a neighboring farm. We used this clanking Dr. Seuss contraption to haul enormous, knotholed planks of ancient lumber and anything else we could salvage from the original pole barn to our property: hinges, nails and screws, and even a few dented buckets.

  With the recycled lumber, we had enough to build a stable behind the house with stalls for a dozen horses; Dad did this with the idea that we would take in boarders. “If you and your mother are going to keep horses, we might as well let other people pay for the grain,” he said.

  In addition to the wood, the original dairy barn also had milking stanchions and all sorts of other peculiar, torturous-looking metal odds and ends, which Grandfather cut and welded to make hay bins, bars for the stalls, and gates for the pastures.

  The horses arrived that spring, when lush beds of wild daffodils sprang out of the ground and the magnolia tree outside our kitchen window bloomed with flowers as pink and delicate as Grandmother’s English teacups. As I unloaded Lady bug from the horse trailer and threw my arms around her neck, it suddenly seemed possible to me that I might survive on the farm after all.

  Donald and I explored the trails and logging roads behind the house all spring, with me on horseback and Donald zipping around on an old dirt bike he’d found abandoned somewhere on Long Hill Road and coaxed back to life. I’d trot Ladybug along the trails through the dappled light of the huge trees bowed over the cart roads, while in the pasture next to me Donald flew over dirt moguls and sometimes was separated from his bike in midair. Neither of us would admit it, but Donald and I were glad for each other’s company.

  By May, Donald and Dad were making monthly pilgrimages to Victor Schwentker’s house in Brant Lake, renting a twenty-four-foot U-Haul truck to ferry back everything necessary for a gerbil colony: cages and metal shelves, water bottles and feeding hoppers, filing cabinets and desks, and crates of gerbils. We wheeled the crates into the basement through the door beneath the sundeck and
stacked the new gerbils on shelves next to the glass jars that Grandmother used for preserving fruit and vegetables.

  With our horses grazing in the field beside the house, probably no one passing by would ever suspect—well, really, who would?—that in the basement of the old poor farm we were seeding a new crop of gerbils.

  MY PARENTS chose the Lake Wickaboag Boat Club as their point of entry into West Brookfield social life. Boats, water, and cocktail parties: the Boat Club was the one place where they felt they might fit in.

  If you saw West Brookfield from an airplane, Lake Wickaboag would sit at its center like a green eye with marshy lashes. Some townspeople belonged to the Boat Club—the families with any money that is—but most members were summer families from Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania who came to West Brookfield every summer to vacation in lakeside camps that had been in their families for generations.

  The Lake Wickaboag Boat Club was, despite its grand name, a mushroom of a place, a tiny pseudo log cabin on a weedy beach. Naturally, Dad revealed nothing about the true nature of his farm to the Boat Club members; they were under the impression that he was a military bigwig who had chosen to have a hobby farm. The members of the Boat Club were so besotted with the idea of having a real live Navy commander in their midst that they invited Dad to don his Navy uniform and ride in the lead boat that summer during the Memorial Day parade. Dad enjoyed every minute of it, perfecting what Mom called “your Royal Navy wave to the landlubbers” from the bow of the boat. Despite this overwhelming welcome, my parents didn’t stay members for long.

  “Those people are all so boring,” Mom said with a sniff. “All very provincial. And your father never was much of a dancer.”

  The kids in town used to spy on the adult parties at the Boat Club, and they didn’t look boring to us. One Saturday night, the skinny woman I babysat for, the mother of three boys under the age of four, climbed onto the bar and shimmied along the tops of the exposed beams in the ceiling like a miniskirted serpent. Another man perfected a trick of his own, removing the bras of various women by pulling them out of the armholes of their sleeveless dresses like a Hindu snake charmer urging cobras out of baskets.