The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter Page 11

  There was rampant swapping among the various couples on the lake, too. So many marriages went down in flames that on the sign on Route 9 that said “Welcome to West Brookfield,” someone scrawled out the town’s name that summer and substituted it with “Peyton Place.”

  AS BEFORE, Donald and I were operating under stern orders not to speak of the gerbils outside the family. This was a needless command. We were savvy enough to know that we weren’t going to break into any school cliques with gerbils as our calling cards.

  Donald and I started school midyear. He was in sixth grade at the local elementary school and had little trouble adjusting. Donald was savvier than his eleven-year-old peers, faster on his bicycle, and an ace shot with his BB gun. He’d seen enough Army drills in Kansas to understand the basic principles of attack and defend.

  My brother established his position high on the West Brookfield food chain early on thanks to a single incident: when one of the tough kids in town stole his bike, Donald said, “You’d better give that back or I’ll shoot you in the leg.” When the boy refused, Donald got his BB gun and shot that kid right in the leg.

  “That’ll teach them to mess with you,” Mom said.

  Things didn’t go as smoothly for me. I was in ninth grade at Quaboag Regional High School, which served the mill towns of Warren and West Warren in addition to West Brookfield. The school lived up to its nickname of “Little Poland”: the bus driver played polkas on the radio, Polish was spoken in the halls, and Polish food was served in the cafeteria.

  Compared to my high school at Fort Leavenworth, with its straight lines, quiet classrooms, and routine inspections, anarchy ruled at Quaboag in the early 1970s. The lockers, a complicated maze at one end of the cafeteria, were rich with the heady aromas of pot and booze, and there were daily brawls with creative weaponry, like the pointy ends of shop compasses. With my bookish tendencies and absurd accent—Tidewater Virginia overlaid with Kansas twang—I fit into this school like a gerbil among a pack of coyotes.

  Rumor had it at Quaboag that my parents were rich, which we were, in relative terms, living as we did in that big house on top of Long Hill Road. Even if the house was falling down around our ears, we had fifteen rooms all to ourselves. More than one kid came up to ask me how we’d gotten our money. “Oh, you know. My dad’s military,” I’d answer vaguely.

  Rumor had it that my mysterious father was either CIA or a tax-dodging millionaire, and my new clothes (despite being from Sears) and horses must mean that I was an heiress. Even if I had not been forbidden from telling the truth, I knew it would do nothing to help my reputation to admit that my father’s aspiration in life was to be a gerbil farmer.

  By the boys at Quaboag, I was warmly welcomed, flirted with, teased, and fought over. Chalk that up to novelty and to the breasts that had accompanied me all the way from Kansas. However, it is a given in high school that if the boys like you too much, the girls won’t like you at all.

  My first month at Quaboag, three of the girls made it clear that I was not welcome. The girls had lovely names, the hopeful romantic imaginings of mothers raised on a steady diet of TV soap operas: Clarissa, Donna, and Sheri. But they were not lovely girls. Clarissa had biceps the circumference of my waist. Donna wore men’s blue work trousers and work boots. Sheri had sharp hatchet features and the unblinking, mesmerizing green eyes of a serial killer.

  My harpies were assigned to the standard, twiddle-your-thumbs vocational classes, which served as a holding pen for teenagers too young to drop out and work at the local lace factory. This meant that I was safe while tucked inside my college-prep classes. Eventually, however, I’d have to join the bodies swimming upstream to the gym or the lockers and the girls would track me down.

  Shortly after I started freshman year at the high school that January, the girls began their torment with a whispering campaign. They’d hound me in the hallways and follow so close behind me that I could feel their hot cigarette breath on my neck as I race-walked down the hallways to avoid them.

  “Holly Robinson sucks,” they whispered.

  “Holly Robinson sucks donkey dick,” they whispered.

  “Holly Robinson could suck the bumper off a car,” they said.

  I began inventing new ways to get from one class to the other, sliding through the darkened theater to cut between hallways or making excuses to stop by the main office until, seconds before the bell rang, I could make a dash for safety. Once I made the mistake of trying to hide in one of the bathrooms. Clarissa, Donna, and Sheri were seated on the gray horseshoe-shaped sink, having lunch and smoking a joint, when I came bursting through the door.

  Clarissa slipped between me and the bathroom door before I could get out. “Do you know how bad you suck?” she asked, hooking her thumbs into the waistband of her hip-hugger jeans. This had the unfortunate effect of distending her belly even more over the jeans, and it suddenly dawned on me that she was pregnant. My immediate thought was that at least I couldn’t have more than eight more months of this torture.

  “Why do you hate me so much?” I asked. “I haven’t done anything.”

  “We don’t hate you,” Sheri said, stepping up alongside Clarissa, a carton of milk from the lunchroom in her hand. “We just hate the way you look. It offends us.” She tipped the carton of milk upside down over my head and spilled the contents into my hair. “There. Now that’s a big fucking improvement.”

  The three of them howled as I fled the bathroom, wiping the milk from my face.

  That afternoon, as I was pulling books out of my locker as fast as I could to make the bus, Clarissa sneaked up to pin me against the locker. “Hit me, bitch!” she screamed. “Hit me so that I can nail you good in self-defense!”

  Her blue eyes were narrowed by pot and she stank of beer. She was waving a shop compass in one hand, the metal point gleaming like a switchblade. A crowd gathered around us and started the usual chanting.

  “Fight, fight, fight!”

  I took a deep breath. “I can’t do that,” I said. “I’m a pacifist.”

  “Figures you’d suck pacifiers, too,” howled Donna, who stood behind Clarissa with her work boots planted wide as the sky.

  “No,” I said. “I’m a pacifist. That means that I’m morally opposed to violence. If you hit me, I still can’t hit you back.” Maybe they would knock me out, I thought. Then I could just go to sleep and not wake up.

  “God, you are such a fucking weirdo loser,” Clarissa said, and turned away to repeat my manifesto to her friends. The three of them doubled over and laughed like hyenas, giving me the chance to slip away.

  DAD needn’t have worried about anyone making a fuss about the gerbils. In West Brookfield there were three types of people: those who worked locally and had always lived in West Brookfield, occupying the modest capes and ranch houses on the newer streets in town; the few newcomers who worked in Worcester or Springfield and were starting to buy up the huge antique Colonials around the common; and the families of children like Donna, Clarissa and Sheri, who rented the sagging bungalows and apartments in the two-story buildings along the railroad tracks bordering the outskirts of West Brookfield like a tattered hem.

  Beyond those railroad tracks, Long Hill Road was the lawless frontier. In fact, among our Long Hill neighbors, we stood out as one of the more normal families.

  Just down the street in a small shack lived a family with so many members of different sizes that we couldn’t keep track of how they were related. The one thing they all had in common besides missing teeth was their white-blond hair and pink-rimmed eyes, leading Mom to dub them “the Albinos.”

  The Albinos wrapped their house in plastic. Not just their windows but their entire house was annually shrink-wrapped to keep out the cold. The plastic usually started to rip in places within a month of being tacked onto the house, so it sounded like applause whenever a good breeze came up.

  In the winter, the Albino children wore plastic bread bags wrapped around their feet instead of boots, s
o you could always hear them coming and going. Their cars were wrapped, too: plastic on the windows, and duct tape on the rusted bumpers and wheel wells so that they’d pass inspection. You always knew that the Albinos were driving by when you heard the whistle and whip of those streamers trailing behind their cars.

  At the bottom of Long Hill Road, next to the railroad tracks, lived Whitey a gold-toothed motorcyclist who built his own race cars in his yard and gave Donald essential tips on beating the cops at their own game. With Whitey as his mentor, Donald knew every speed trap by the age of fourteen and even managed to hoist the police chief’s canoe off the town beach and bring it up to the house. Later, when Donald got his driver’s license, Whitey taught him how to cut a hole in the floor of your car so that you could just push the empty beer cans through it if the cops happened to give chase on an unlucky Saturday night.

  There was a furniture factory on Long Hill Road, too, run by Seventh Day Adventists who wore black polyester trousers no matter how hot it was, with button-down shirts and shiny black shoes. On quiet days, you could almost dance to the popping rhythm of the staple guns and the hum of buzz saws as the Adventists produced conveyor belts of plywood-backed bookcases and bureaus in the name of God.

  Among our most immediate neighbors, probably the most integrated into society was the owner of the hearse parked in our driveway that first night. His name was Dennis Clark, and he was an artist and a musician who taught at another area high school. The hearse had been in our driveway because it had broken down there while he helped the former occupants move out. Dennis sold it shortly afterward because, as handy as that car might be for moving musical instruments, the cops always stopped him in it. “I just don’t understand why,” he told us. “It’s almost like they want to run me out of town.”

  Dennis lived with his wife and two children in a squat white cape made decorous by hex signs. In addition to painting hex signs and hearses in his spare time, he had crafted a special coffin-shaped cart for his own father. As the weather warmed up, he would set his aged pops in the coffin cart and pull it out to the sunny corner of the yard overlooking the road. The frail old man looked as though he might topple into the path of your oncoming car as he lifted a scrawny arm to wave at you passing by.

  “At least if the old man gets run over, they can roll him right on over to the cemetery in that thing,” Mom said.

  The first time I visited the Clarks was to sell magazines, a fund-raiser for the high school. I walked down the street one Saturday, waved at the old man on the lawn, and knocked on the door. It opened almost immediately. Facing me in the doorway wasn’t Dennis Clark or his wife, though, but a tall brown-and-white goat with the long silky ears of a basset hound. For an instant I thought the goat must have turned the knob. Then Dennis popped his head around the corner, a skinny, amiable man with big glasses and a beard like a paintbrush.

  “Come in, come in!” he insisted. “I was just practicing my mandolin.” He strummed a chord to demonstrate, which made the goat trot back outside through the double doors leading out to the yard, leaving a trail of raisin-sized dung pellets along the dining room floor.

  As I stared, Dennis laughed. “Don’t worry about the goats. Those are Nubians. They’re from Africa and they’re very sweet pets. It’s like having big poodles around, only more useful. They’ll clear out your yard, even the poison ivy. So, to what do I owe the pleasure of your esteemed company?”

  “I’m selling magazines to raise money for the high school,” I said.

  “Always a good cause, always,” Dennis murmured, but made no move to extract his checkbook. He just stood there grinning, as if waiting for me to sing a birthday telegram.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” I said after a moment, and started to turn away.

  “Wait, wait!” he protested. “We’re neighbors! We should take this opportunity to get to know each other!” He went to the kitchen and returned with a glass of apple cider. “Have a cooling refreshment, at least. Now tell me. How are you settling in?”

  “Fine.”

  “Are you enjoying school here?” He narrowed his eyes, as if he could see right through my skin to my bruised heart.

  “It’s okay. It’s school,” I said.

  This seemed to please him. “That’s the spirit,” he said. “You’ll find your kin, don’t worry. It just takes time. It’s not easy being new.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  “So what are your parents going to do with that big farm?” he asked.

  I nearly choked on the cider. Nobody had ever asked me so directly before. “We have horses,” I hedged.

  “Oh! Horses, yes, they’re always fun,” Dennis said dismissively “But isn’t your father going to do something, well, a little more interesting?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.

  Dennis grinned. “That house has always had interesting people in it, you know. In fact, this whole street.” He waved his hand, including all of Long Hill Road in that single sweeping gesture. “For instance, there was a multiracial family in my house before I bought it.” Dennis lowered his voice as if the Klan might be lurking around the corner. “They were members of those Catholic Communists, the Dorothy Day movement. The commune’s right down the road in Brookfield. Everyone on this road was supporting Abbie Hoffman, in fact. I’m sure you’ve heard of him.”

  I nodded.

  Again Dennis beamed. “Well, the people in this neighborhood were all Catholic radicals. They took a vow of poverty but didn’t believe in birth control, so you can imagine the disaster that was.”

  I thought of the Albinos and nodded again.

  Dennis went on to talk about the history of the Native Americans on Long Hill Road and the artifacts taken from the hill to a Springfield museum. On our land, he said, there was a maize grinding stone the size of a small room. The original schoolhouse in West Brookfield had once been on poor-farm land, too, until it was rolled down the hill by oxen on logs in 1917.

  “During the 1920s, the government raised bison on poor-farm land,” he added. “That was part of the movement to re-populate the buffalo herds in America.” He cocked his head at me. “Your father’s not going to raise buffalo, by any chance?”

  I laughed. Not because it was such a strange suggestion, but because it would have been such a relief to tell people that we were doing something as normal as raising a few hundred head of bison.

  Dennis nodded. “I’m just yanking your chain, man. I know what your dad’s up to.”

  I was more shocked by this than by the goat in the dining room. “You do?”

  “Oh, sure. Your dad told me all about his new venture. And I don’t mind it a bit. I doubt anybody up here on Long Hill Road would protest a gerbil farm. You don’t have to worry. You know what I did before moving out here?”

  I shook my head.

  “I was a laboratory animal caretaker!” Dennis said, slapping one blue-jeaned thigh. “Man, now what kind of cosmic joke is that?” He took my empty glass, walked it over to the kitchen, and rinsed it out in the sink as he told me how laboratory animals had put him through art school.

  “I was an animal caretaker at Brown University when I was at Rhode Island School of Design,” Dennis said. “I took care of all sorts of exotic animals: bush babies, lemurs, cobras, rattlesnakes, spiders.”

  “You did?” I was rooted to the spot, fascinated, and feeling something I hadn’t felt in a long time: accepted.

  Dennis nodded. “The oddest animal was a spinny mouse. They do backflips to scare their enemies. I’d hear them spinning in their cages all day long, ba-doop, ba-doop, ba-doop.”

  His favorite lab animals, though, were the lemurs. “They have the most human-like skin,” Dennis explained. “Almost human ears. They’re from Madagascar. I used to take live mice in to feed them. I’d toss the mice into the cages, and the lemurs caught them with their hands like baseball players catching fly balls. Then they’d pop them right into their mouths and chew those mice up like popc
orn!”

  As Dennis walked me to the door, he clapped a hand on my shoulder. “You just tell your dad not to worry about the neighbors, okay? We’re cool. You are, too. You just don’t know it yet.”

  were chores to do than hours in a day. As Mom put it, “This house has been really abused. There are lots of loose things about it.” Like the settlers who had made similarly arduous journeys to stake a claim, we used hard work as a salve for grief and loss.

  While Dad spent weekdays in New York, teaching at the Merchant Marine Academy, the rest of us peeled off old wallpaper, patched and painted walls, yanked up stained carpeting, and scraped layers of yellow enamel off the stair railings. We brightened the dark kitchen paneling with white paint and hung wallpaper in places where the house would have fallen apart without that extra gluey layer holding it together.

  One Friday, I came home from school and interrupted Mom in the middle of taking down an entire wall with a crowbar. “I’ve always wanted to do this,” she declared, wiping plaster dust off her cheek. “There’s nothing like a little demolition to relieve stress.”

  “What are you so worried about, Mom?” I asked.

  She glanced at the clock. “Your father’s due back from New York any minute, and you know he’ll find something to criticize.”

  Mom put down the crowbar, went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water. She took two Alka-Seltzer tablets out of her jeans pocket and dropped them into the glass. “Plop plop, fizz fizz,” she said with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes, and gulped down the contents of the glass just as we heard Dad’s car pull into the driveway.

  “Holly! Donald! Where are you?” Dad shouted as he came up the basement stairs, running as usual.