The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter Read online

  Each time we visited, Louisa showed us her handmade items, sliding her creations out of clear plastic bags as tenderly as if they were babies being unwrapped from layettes.

  “You like?” she asked every time, hopeful of a sale.

  Finally, I felt so sorry for her that I bought a sweater with my babysitting money, a brown and green and orange cardigan.

  “You’ll never wear that thing,” Mom said as we drove away. “It doesn’t pay to feel sorry for people.”

  “You don’t know,” I argued. “I might wear it on a really, really cold day.”

  “Let me know in advance,” Mom said. “I’ll want to take your picture.”

  But cold weather came and went, and I never did put on that sweater. Louisa’s creation remained in its plastic sack under my bed until I went to college, its brown bulk as shiny as a bear, startling me each time I looked under the bed for something else and reminding me of Canada and the men who danced together there, trying to stay warm.

  IT TURNED out that Jack Baptiste was a lucky find. As Dad’s gerbils increased in number and he began looking for other animal caretakers, he discovered that it was nearly impossible to attract and keep responsible employees. If you looked in the local weekly paper, there were always three ads sure to be found under the jobs column: dishwashers at the local inn, line workers at the wire factory, and animal handlers at Tumblebrook Farm. This never changed in the twenty-five years that my father raised gerbils.

  Dad did everything he could to beat good people out of the bushes. He tried offering more than minimum wage. He even paid for employee health benefits over Mom’s protests.

  “That’s crazy. You won’t even let me buy curtains for the family room,” Mom said. “How can we afford to pay other people’s doctor bills?”

  “Some of these people have families,” he told her. “What are they supposed to do if their kids get sick?”

  To sweeten the deal, Dad offered his workers an added incentive: a quarter more per hour if they stopped smoking, despite the fact that he continued to run through a couple of packs of Camels a day.

  Still, despite these perks, our employees were not always the top-quality individuals that Dad might have hoped for. Picture the people you see every day working the counters of your favorite fast-food places or sweeping floors at the mall. Now double or halve their ages, give each one a drug or alcohol habit, dress them in Salvation Army finds, add a twitch here and a blind eye or a limp there, and that would pretty much describe most of the employees at Tumblebrook Farm.

  We hired thieves and wife beaters, the wives who got beaten, junkies and alcoholics, hitchhikers passing through, and teenagers whose cars roared like lions and were held together by duct tape. Dad’s employees typically were, as Mom so succinctly put it, “beneath the bottom of the barrel.”

  Most employees gladly accepted the quarter-an-hour quit-smoking raise and then stood around smoking under the ceiling fans in the gerbil buildings to avoid detection whenever they lit up. Among the men, one was an ex-junkie who added a dozen spoonfuls of sugar to each cup of coffee and was perfectly happy carrying on conversations alone. Another was a Civil War buff who occasionally showed up to clean cages dressed as Johnny Reb, while a third fellow was a self-described “unemployed environmentalist” who wrapped himself naked around a tree in order to keep a local farmer from cutting it down.

  Among the women, one called herself Daisy Mae and dressed for work in cutoff shorts that showed two half moons of her ass no matter what the weather; she made the rounds among the male employees and managed to get them to do most of her work while she napped in the sun out on the picnic table that Dad had put outside the gerbil building to boost company morale through impromptu employee picnics. Another woman had to leave without notice anytime her enraged husband figured out that she was back working for us and came charging up the road in his souped-up Chevy truck, a rifle aimed out the window.

  Still, despite their flaws, Dad always expected the best of his workers, especially the women. He claimed that female employees did better work than the men, and given a choice—a rare day—he would always hire a female applicant over a man.

  “Why?” I asked him one afternoon as he and Mom and I gathered to watch General Hospital. One of the few perks of working for ourselves was that we never had to miss our favorite TV shows, even in an era before TiVo and VCRs.

  “Women don’t get bored doing repetitive tasks,” Dad explained. “Plus, their maternal instincts really kick in around the gerbils.”

  Mom shook her head, not taking her eyes off the television. “What about me?” she asked. “I get bored easily and I hate gerbils.”

  “You’ve always been different,” Dad said.

  ONE day after school, I walked up to the gerbil building to clean cages with Angeline, a stout bottle blonde in her fifties. Angeline’s gum-snapping, no-nonsense approach to work meant that she and I could complete our list of required tasks—posted each day by my father on the bulletin board by the door—in the shortest time possible. Then we could lounge around and chat.

  I liked working with Angeline. She talked to me as if I were thirty, not fifteen, and asked my advice on everything from boyfriends to buying a secondhand car. In this way, I was like everyone else in my family: willing to give advice to anybody, even if I had to ad-lib.

  That afternoon, Angeline and I spent four hours doing the usual: cleaning six racks of cages with twenty-four cages per rack. We put the gerbils in cages filled with fresh shavings by other employees the night before, then pushed the dirty cages on wheeled carts down to the washroom. There we scraped the contents into trash barrels and washed the cages at waist-high industrial sinks, soaking them in disinfectant and rinsing them until they gleamed. When the cages were finally clean enough to suit Dad’s daily inspection, we wheeled them over to the drying racks, where we left the cages for someone else to fill with clean shavings the next day.

  “Doesn’t it seem weird to you,” I asked Angeline, “that Dad keeps breeding the same gerbils to each other? I mean, isn’t it like incest or something? Shouldn’t the babies all be retarded? I thought that’s what happened when brothers and sisters got married.”

  “The idea is to standardize the line,” Angeline explained. “If you keep the genetics the same from one generation to the next, you start weeding out variables that can show up in experiments and give some poor little researcher a heart attack. That’s why scientists have been inbreeding different mice for decades.” She cracked her gum, considering. “Your dad must have over a dozen generations of gerbils by now,” she calculated with an excitement I couldn’t fathom. “All descended from the same ancestors he bought from Victor Schwentker.”

  “Do you ever feel bad about working here?” I asked. At fifteen, I had reached the “wallowing age,” as Mom called it.

  Angeline shook her head. “Not at all. Your dad takes good care of his animals, and I know there are scientists out there doing stroke research with the gerbils. My dad died of a stroke.”

  I thought about this as I picked up the next gerbil. How many gerbil deaths would I accept if I knew those deaths would bring a cure for someone with cystic fibrosis, like my sister? What was an animal’s life worth compared to a human’s? I didn’t know the answer. I only knew that talking about gerbils and medical research was a lot different from holding a gerbil in my hand and feeling it, so warm and yet nearly weightless, an animal with a heartbeat of its own.

  “He’s coming!” one of the other workers shrieked suddenly from the other end of the building, where she’d been doling out green pellets from the food cart. “The commander is on his way. I can see him from the end door!”

  Unlike in his military days, when Dad had hidden the fact that he was raising gerbils, here in his gerbil kingdom he relied upon his Navy title to convey an extra mantle of authority Every one of his employees called him “the commander.”

  The window in the door offered the only view of the dirt road leading up
to the gerbil building. Someone in the building was always posted there as a lookout to alert other employees when my father was approaching. That way, they had plenty of time to turn the thermostat back down in winter, if one of the employees had brazenly cranked up the heat. They could also scramble out from under the fan if they’d been smoking cigarettes, or climb off the picnic table outside if they’d gotten high and needed a nap. We always had plenty of time to appear busy because Dad took forever to actually reach the building.

  I wandered over to the door and peered out. Dad was walking as he always did, with his head down and his hands in his pockets, so deep in thought that he hunched his shoulders and moved as slowly as if he were dragging a bag of gerbil pellets up the road behind him. I wondered what he was thinking about, and realized I didn’t have a clue.

  marrying my father, but this didn’t faze her a bit. “It’s time I went back to work,” she announced one night at dinner. “I’m going to give riding lessons.”

  “You can’t do that. You don’t know a single thing about teaching,” Dad said.

  She shrugged. “I’ve been getting on and off horses all my life, haven’t I? All I have to do is show other people how.”

  Dad succeeded in business because he left nothing to chance and followed every rule in the book. Mom succeeded because she thought every chance was worth taking. If she didn’t like the rules, she made up her own. For instance, when she failed her driver’s test in Virginia, she immediately drove to a different city and took it again. When we moved to Massachusetts, Mom signed up for ballet lessons. After being told that she was too old to dance en pointe, she practiced for hours on end until she was up on toe shoes for the first time at age thirty-nine.

  Mom derived her confidence in part from her beauty. At age sixteen, when she came into the kitchen to show her father and his friend her new prom dress, Grandfather’s friend had cocked an eyebrow and said, “Everett, that girl looks like something you can’t afford.”

  By the time we moved to Massachusetts, Mom was in her late thirties but had the trim, athletic build of a much younger woman and dark hair without a strand of silver. “Well, why shouldn’t I be a ballerina?” she asked me, tiptoeing around the living room in her new pink satin toe shoes. “I look good in a leotard. Better than some of those high school girls who can’t keep their hands out of the cookie jar.”

  Once Mom made up her mind to run a riding stable, we rarely saw her in anything but formfitting canary-yellow jodhpurs and knee-high black boots. She even wore her jodhpurs and boots to pick me up at school, to collect Grandmother’s prescriptions at the pharmacy, or to dash into the grocery store for milk and eggs.

  “I think of my jodhpurs as my calling card,” she told me when I asked why she didn’t change her clothes. “People see me in this outfit and ask where I ride, and I can tell them that I give riding lessons. They almost always call me.”

  With her exotic outfit, drop-dead figure, dark hair, and quick smile, it was no wonder they called. In her jodhpurs and boots, Mom made men forget their own names when she walked by. I once saw a woman whack her husband with a purse over my mother.

  The barn was finished, but if Mom was really going into business full-time, we needed a riding ring, too. We built it the same way we’d done everything else on the farm: with salvaged materials and our own labor. Donald dragged additional lumber over from the state land and we put up a circular rail fence in a matter of days.

  And then, every day after school for three weeks, Donald and I dug rocks out of the soil with shovels and our bare hands, the heat beating down on our necks and making us dizzy, the effort of removing the rocks gradually shaving our fingernails down to black slivers.

  “Now I know where the settlers got all those rocks for their stone walls,” Donald groaned at one point.

  “And their foundations,” I said, heaving a small boulder into the back of the tractor cart. “Don’t forget all of those stone foundations.”

  The effort was worth it, though: when we were finished, the riding ring was impressive, with its white rail fence and smooth dirt surface. The ring doubled as a paddock for turning out the horses or exercising them on lunge lines for people who boarded their horses with us.

  Gradually, as Mom built up her business, I began spending more of my working hours in the stable than in the gerbil buildings. This suited me fine. The gerbils were kept in nearly windowless, climate-controlled, claustrophobic metal ranch houses. Two hours spent tending gerbils left me with my eyes burning from the ammonia and my skin itching from the sawdust. But the barn was a lovely place that smelled of hay and molasses, horses and saddle soap.

  The gerbils ran from my touch when I lifted the lids of their cages. When I appeared in the stables, the horses came to the doors of their stalls and nodded in welcome, snorting and pushing their velvety muzzles in my direction for a treat from my pocket. I talked to the horses the same way I talked to the gerbils, but I could count on certain horses answering back, whinnying or stomping their hooves.

  There were a lot of cats in the barn, too. People dropped them off in the middle of the night sometimes. There were cats of all sizes and colors, and they did their own talking as they followed me up and down the aisles, arching their backs or rubbing against my boots as they waited for me to fill their food dishes in the tack room.

  In the gerbil building, I was subjected to my father’s critical eye and constant scoldings about waste, money, and the terror of fleas. But in the stable, I felt welcomed and useful as I fed the horses before school and turned them out into the pastures with a thundering of hooves. I loved to watch the horses run with heads and tails held high, looking as if they might, at any moment, take wing.

  WHAT is it about girls and horses? People love to equate the passion that young girls have for horses with burgeoning sexuality, but girls who ride know that true horse lust is all about power.

  Within a year of opening her riding school, Mom had collected a group of enthusiastic barn rats, girls whose zealous affection for horses was equal to my own. The girls never minded helping us shovel out stalls, fill water buckets, or comb burrs out of tails.

  To these girls, I was a TV idol. I gradually learned to en joy living up to their high expectations by fearlessly climbing onto even the most headstrong horses to help train them. One particular resident horse—a sorrel half-Thoroughbred colt appropriately named Derringer—was completely psychotic. Anytime someone mounted him, Derringer would take off like a bullet, head low to the ground, body flattened so that your only chance for survival was to press your body against his neck. Finally, I broke him of this by pulling his nose toward my knee and nearly flipping us both onto the ground.

  The stable was the one place in my life where I felt in control. It was also a place where age meant nothing. Women and girls who love horses have a natural common ground, and I found myself in demand as a riding partner on the trails. I didn’t have many friends at school, but there was always someone to talk to at the barn, so I was much less lonely than before. School became something I had to get through before riding.

  Joanne and Mystique were among my mother’s first riding students. They lived together in an apartment overlooking the Catholic church in town with a fuzzball of a gray dog that was perpetually panting, no matter what the weather. Mystique was a philosophy professor at Radcliffe College, and Joanne had a little leather shop in Brookfield, where she made belts and sandals and handbags for the tourists who came apple picking or leaf peeping through central Massachusetts.

  It took us a while to catch on to the fact that Joanne and Mystique were a couple, despite the fact that both of them sheared their hair shorter than my brother Donald’s and dressed in identical blue jeans and T-shirts. Once we did, though, we accepted them as they were. Mom shared her coffee every morning with Joanne as they watched the horses in the back pasture, and Dad liked to linger at the kitchen table whenever the women rode in the ring, since neither wore a bra.

  Joanne was
a sumo wrestler of a woman with serious dark eyes and sleek black hair. She was one of the first eight adults to sign up for riding lessons when Mom started offering beginner classes for adults. For that lesson, I helped Mom tack up the gentle school horses we’d picked up at auctions and loop their reins over the top rail of the ring. Mom instructed the nervous women to stand at their horses’ heads while I demonstrated how to mount a horse in the center of the ring.

  “Hold the reins in your left hand and the pommel of the saddle in your right,” Mom lectured. “Then lift your left leg—that’s your left leg, Sandra, otherwise you’ll end up sitting backward—and put your left foot in the stirrup.”

  The women all dutifully took hold of their reins and saddles. Unfortunately, the lesson was cut short when one of the barn cats, a black and white tom we called Rocky, flung himself kamikaze style off the top rail of the ring and onto the neck of one of the horses. Panic ensued. The horse that Rocky had speared with his claws reared back, tugging at the top rail and startling the other horses so that they pulled back, too.

  The reins were only looped around the top rail, but they held fast. The collective strength of the horses was enough to pull the top board right off its fence posts, though; the horses set off with it and dragged the fence rail halfway across the ring before we managed to stop them.

  The women screamed, terrifying the horses even more. In seconds, there were horses and reins and broken boards and cats and dust flying every which way, unsettling even my unflappable mother, who yelled, “Calm down! Please, all of you, if you calm down, the horses will, too!”