The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter Read online

  The noise caused my father to run up to the barn from the house, shouting something to my mother about lawsuits and lessons not being worth the risk. My mother was not dissuaded. It took us several minutes, but we eventually had all of the horses settled along the rail again. One by one, my mother taught the women how to mount their horses, and soon they were plodding around the ring, all of them looking pleased with themselves for not giving up.

  Every woman there wanted to be my mother.

  AMONG the boarders, the woman I rode with most often was Savage Jones, a former film agent married to a pediatrician. Savage was fiftysomething, but with her tight red curls, stocky build, and pink Keds sneakers, she looked like an eight-year-old girl on coffee, bouncing along on her toes beside her giant bay horse, Bongo. Savage always carried a mayonnaise jar filled with a clear liquid that she sipped throughout our trail rides.

  “It’s only vitamin water,” she assured me. “You can never get enough water to flush out the poisons from your system.”

  Bongo had been gelded too late and was so wild that Savage appeared to fly around beside him like a trapeze artist dangling from the lead line. Yet she wouldn’t ride him in the ring.

  “Too many eyes watching,” she confided. So I ended up leading Savage on trail rides through the woods, keeping Ladybug solidly in front of Bongo so that he couldn’t take off.

  One summer morning, Savage showed up at the stables wearing a flea collar. “There’s no reason this wouldn’t work on a human,” Savage said, pulling the plastic collar a little tighter as we set off down the trail through the state land across the street.

  Usually we followed the main logging road over tiny streams, beneath towering pines, and through an ancient orchard of gnarled, graying apple trees. One part of the trail was like a fairy-tale forest, with pine trees so tall and thick that nothing but moss grew in the damp blackness beneath them.

  As we rode, Savage talked about her former life in New York. Her chatter was as constant as the deerflies that needled our faces and shoulders, forcing us to tuck branches into the horses’ bridles and into our riding helmets for protection. Between Savage’s constant monologue, the rocking horses, the buzzing flies, and the swishing branches, I’d be lulled nearly to sleep. So I was startled when one day Savage yanked Bongo to a halt in the middle of the path and cried, “I know. Let’s have an adventure today!”

  “What kind of adventure?” I asked uneasily. I trusted Savage about as much as I trusted her horse.

  “How about taking this trail for a change?” Savage pointed at some flattened grass next to the logging road.

  “That’s just a deer path,” I warned, but Savage had already turned Bongo away from Ladybug to nose through the thick brush.

  Against my better judgment, I followed her; Mom had drilled it into me that my job was to safeguard the boarders. And so I was right behind Savage when her horse stumbled into a nest of digger wasps.

  The wasps buzzed around Bongo and Savage in an angry mob. The horse reared and took off with Savage bouncing in the saddle like a rag doll. I spurred Ladybug after the bigger horse; half Arabian, Ladybug was fast, surefooted, and very determined. She caught up with the bigger gelding easily and I leaned over to grab the other horse’s reins, which Savage had dropped while she was making sounds like a fleet of fire trucks.

  Once we’d halted, Savage righted herself in the saddle, adjusted her flea collar, and gave me a shaky smile. She hadn’t dropped the mayonnaise jar. Now she lifted it to her lips. “You know, maybe Bongo is too much horse for me,” she said. “He’s just like my husband.”

  BEFORE long, Mom had accrued so many riding students that she had to hire an assistant teacher. She spent some of her earnings on an indoor riding arena—a metal building that was like a huge, empty gerbil building—and, between boarders and school horses, stabled over forty horses at a time.

  Yet Mom was still restless. “I think I’ll breed Arabians,” she declared. “I’ve always loved their pointy little ears and muzzles, and the way they run with their tails in the air like fountains.”

  “You can’t do that. You don’t know one thing about breeding horses,” Dad argued.

  She shrugged. “I’m sure the horses know what to do,” she said.

  Mom bought a chestnut Arabian stallion named Nahill and had me help her train him. As long as there were no mares within smelling distance, Nahill was personable enough. His nastiest habit was nipping our pockets in search of treats and pinching our skin by mistake; I cured him of this by biting him on the ear. Before long, he was so tame that Nahill would trot by my side on a lead line as we hopped over rails on the ground together.

  But breeding horses wasn’t as easy as breeding gerbils. You couldn’t just let a stallion run loose with a mare, Mom explained, or the mare might get hurt because the stallion was too forceful.

  Our first attempt at breeding Nahill was with Justice, an Arabian mare that a woman from Springfield boarded at our stable; Justice’s owner wanted a foal to train for her son. We waited for Justice to show the edgy signs of being in heat, and then Mom asked me to cross-tie the mare in the riding arena.

  When Mom led Nahill out of the barn and into the echoing metal arena, I was startled to see our playful stallion transformed into a head-tossing, rearing beast, snorting and pawing the ground because he’d scented the mare. With a roar, he launched himself at the mare’s rump, breaking free of Mom’s hold on his lead line. The stallion reared and mounted the mare.

  Justice’s eyes rolled until the whites showed. She tried to spin around to escape the stallion, but the ropes held. Nahill’s penis dropped from its shaft, as long as my arm and bright pink. I was nearly as terrified as the mare.

  “Mom!” I cried. “He’s going to hurt her!” I made a move to release the cross ties, but Mom grabbed me just in time.

  “Stay back,” she ordered. “This is how it’s got to be done. Don’t worry. It’ll be over in seconds.”

  It was. The stallion gripped the mare’s quivering sides with his front hooves for a moment more. Then Nahill groaned and collapsed on top of her, nearly toppling the smaller horse beneath him.

  Mom shoved at Nahill’s sweat-foamed shoulder to get him off the mare and led the staggering stallion back to his stall. I untied Justice as quickly as my shaking hands would allow. The mare was suddenly, oddly calm, almost sleepy. I fed her a carrot in the flat of my hand.

  The pregnancy took. And, amazingly, we were all there to watch Justice give birth. This, too, was much different from what I’d seen in the gerbil building.

  It was a Saturday afternoon, and Joanne and Mystique were at the barn. So were Savage and her pediatrician husband, Whitney. Mom stood next to the stall door with them while Joanne, Mystique, and I climbed into the hayloft for a better view.

  Nothing happened for a long time. The mare lay on her side, then stood up, then threw herself back down on the stall floor. Justice whinnied now and then and lifted her head. Finally her sides began to heave at regular intervals. I started to feel frightened; the horse looked as if she were in pain but trying to sleep through it. Her enormous dark eyes were glazed and unblinking.

  When the foal began to crown, Mom went into the stall and kneeled beside Justice’s head, stroking the horse’s neck, which by now had foamed with sweat. Eventually the foal emerged. As it did, Justice lifted her head and whinnied again.

  To my astonishment, the foal, though still halfway in its mother’s body, nickered back. Spurred on by the murmur of sound, Justice pushed once more and the foal slid free. I started to cry, for no reason I could explain, and Joanne and Mystique both put their arms around me, wiping tears away as well.

  In less than half an hour, the mare and foal were both on their feet, and the foal was nuzzling its mother for milk. The foal was black with one white sock and a white blaze down the length of its nose.

  “Must be a boy, if he’s on his feet already,” Whitney crowed. “Look at him. So strong! What a boy!”


  Next to me in the loft, Joanne wiped her eyes and made a scissoring motion with her fingers, then pointed to Whitney. “Some men would be better off as geldings,” she whispered.

  THROUGH the years, only one man ever boarded his horse with us. This was Francis, the nineteen-year-old son of a dentist and the owner of an elegant Appaloosa quarterhorse gelding. Francis quickly won my mother’s admiration and tried hard to win mine.

  Francis had only one aspiration in life, and that was to be a cowboy. While we all used lightweight, flat English saddles, he rode in a heavy, hand-tooled Western saddle over a Navajo blanket. Francis kept a rope hanging from the saddle’s tall pommel and could lasso a running dog (though where he learned that in Massachusetts, I hadn’t a clue). He never went anywhere, even the movies, without wearing his broken-in brown cowboy boots, and he carried a bandanna in his pocket instead of a handkerchief.

  Francis had an acne-scarred face, but his blue eyes made me wobbly in the knees until I let him kiss me. That kiss left my lips so bruised and raw that I avoided repeating the experience.

  “I keep telling Francis that he has to love you less in order for you to love him at all,” Mom said, apropos of nothing, over breakfast one morning. “But he just won’t listen.”

  “You talk to Francis about me?” I was horrified in the way only a teenage girl can be by her mother.

  She waved her cigarette at me. “Well, what was I supposed to do? He’s so desperate,” she said, pouring herself a second cup of coffee. “That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You always want to be with a man who loves you more than you love him.”

  Men, in my mother’s view, were useful rather than necessary. She relied on Francis for his trailer, to help her take the horses to shows and perform animal rescues. Whenever they heard about animals being neglected or abused, they’d contact the animal control officer and show up with Francis’s trailer if the animals had to be removed. Mom would nurse the horses back to health and use them in her riding lessons, or she’d give them to girls whose families would pay the board.

  In this way we acquired Sniffles, a Shetland pony that flew into rages if you tried to boss him around. Since Sniffles was so small—his back reached no higher than my waist—Mom decided that the shaggy bay pony would be the ideal candidate to introduce my brother Philip, now five years old, to the joys of horseback riding.

  “After all,” Mom mused, “he needs something to do, poor kid.”

  This was a true statement. Philip was just as wild as Donald had been, though he expressed himself intellectually rather than physically. He had started reading as a four-year-old and, with Grandmother to spur him along, was already devouring my father’s Time magazines every week. Whereas Donald at that age was scaling walls and stealing tips from waitresses, Philip was mouthy and big-headed, correcting his teachers rudely whenever they misspelled something or made a mistake. He had elicited a phone call from the school after taking a hundred-dollar bill from Dad’s dresser and presenting it for show-and-tell. During story hour, he had opened his desk lid and slammed it shut to protest the teacher’s decision to repeat a certain picture book rather than choose a new one.

  My mother’s responses to the teacher’s complaints were casual. “If she continues to bore Philip in school, then I can’t be responsible for the consequences,” she sniffed. “You’d think elementary school teachers would wise up and do something different for boys than they do with girls.”

  So, one bright autumn afternoon, I eagerly saddled up Sniffles. Francis picked Philip up and sat him on the pony’s back.

  Sniffles ran away immediately, taking the bit in his teeth and snatching the reins out of my little brother’s hands. We chased Sniffles all around the riding ring, the pony’s eyes rolling as his little hooves churned dirt, until Sniffles found the gate and made a dash for it.

  Philip raised his arms and let himself be scraped off the pony’s back as Sniffles plunged under the gate and headed straight for the grain room. Philip never rode another horse.

  Sniffles proved to be just as feisty when Mom tried to harness him to pull a driving cart a week later. “This pony’s eyes turn red whenever I try to get him to do something useful,” Mom said in frustration. “I can’t control him at all.”

  “Let me try,” Francis suggested.

  Mom handed him the driving harness. As he approached Sniffles with the leather straps dangling over one arm, Sniffles reared like the Black Stallion, pawing at the air with his hooves, eyes gleaming. Sure enough, those eyes looked red to me.

  Mom and I ducked behind the mounting block in case the pony decided to charge us. But Francis dropped the harness and grabbed both of the pony’s front legs. He pushed Sniffles up higher on his back legs, nearly toppling him over backward, and held him that way until the pony’s eyes rolled white and the sheer terror of being so unbalanced made his neck foam with sweat.

  Gently, Francis let him down. He buckled the harness onto Sniffles’s back without further incident and gave the pony a smart smack on his shaggy brown rump. “There now, old boy,” Francis murmured. “I wager you won’t give these ladies any more trouble, will you? Because you know I’m watching you.”

  Watching Francis as he danced with that pony and let him down so gently, and surrounded by the sweet autumn scents of hay and oats mixed with molasses, I wished, with all my being, that there could be some way to make yourself fall in love with the man who worked hardest to win your heart.

  entered our lives, my grandparents owned a gift shop in Bangor, Maine. Mom drove us north from Virginia to stay with them whenever Dad was at sea. The gift shop was a barn where my grandparents sold antiques and pottery, oil paintings small enough to hold in your palm, and china cats curled up on miniature rugs that Grandmother crocheted herself.

  Their house was even better. A creaky old white Colonial with broad pine floors and rocking chairs in the kitchen, the house had a view of the river and a generous sun porch. In winter, the snow drifted above the first-floor windows, and in summer wild blueberries grew in the fields around the house. To Donald and my cousins and me, Maine was paradise.

  Maine was also where Mom and Grandmother first tried to impress upon me that a lady always wears underpants.

  This happened during the summer my cousin Candy was visiting. She was my age and had red hair the color and texture of a rusty scrub pad. One day, after Candy and I had run through the tangle of blueberry bushes below the house, we returned with our legs scratched and bleeding. Our palms and tongues were black from eating as many blueberries as we’d picked. Grandmother sent us straight upstairs to bathe.

  We spent a long time in the bubbles. Then we emerged from the bathroom with our towels draped around us like elegant floor-length gowns and paraded around the attic bedroom we shared with Donald, daring my little brother to show us his if we showed him ours.

  Grandmother caught us at this game. “You girls put on your underpants this minute!” she cried, wringing her hands. “Ladies always wear underpants!”

  The very next night, Candy and I took another bubble bath after dinner—Lord, how we loved that old claw-footed tub—and came downstairs in our nightgowns with an exciting plan: to show her parents, my parents, our grandparents, and even dumb Donald how we could stand on our heads at the same time, elbow to elbow, a trick we’d been practicing for a week.

  We summoned our audience into the living room and directed them to sit while we assumed our pyramid positions, with our heads on the braided wool rug in front of the fireplace and our bony knees propped on our elbows. And then, wobbling but regaining our balance, we slowly raised our legs in the air and pointed our toes like ballerinas. Our nightgowns fell like soft cotton curtains over our heads, and there we stood, upside down and blinded by flannel, the blood rushing to our cheeks as we imagined our toes touching the ceiling.

  “Girls, girls, girls!” Grandmother clapped her hands so sharply that we both toppled right over. “You forgot your underpants! Never, ever forget your underpan
ts! A lady always wears underpants!”

  A lady must wear underpants: that was the first rule in an entire code book that Mom and Grandmother heroically tried to convey to me throughout my adolescence. Other rules included:

  A lady always sits with her legs crossed at the ankles.

  You don’t want to show the world your business.

  A lady doesn’t flounce. She glides.

  A lady wouldn’t roll her eyes at that.

  A lady never calls a boy first.

  Ladies do not laugh like hyenas.

  A real lady minds her manners at the dinner table.

  Ladies always modulate their voices.

  A lady would never, ever use that tone of voice with

  her parents.

  A lady knows when to say no.

  By the time I started high school in Massachusetts, it was clear that you could not use the words fun and lady in the same sentence. I was therefore eager to discover what it was like not to be one. This was no simple matter, since so many of the lady rules had something to do with sex, and I couldn’t get a boyfriend to stick around long enough to really take that code book for a test drive. As one boy put it, “The only person in the world scarier than your father is your mother.”

  My first boyfriend was Brian, the brother of Sheri the serial killer. I chose him out of self-preservation. Brian was a thug of a kid with a buzz cut, squinty blue eyes, and the square jaw of a superhero. He sat next to me in Spanish, the only college-bound class on his schedule, and slept through every hour of ¡Hola! ¿Cómo te llamas? lolling at his desk so that his legs sprawled into the aisle. Other people were so afraid of Brian that they chose other aisles if they needed to sharpen pencils at the back of the room rather than try to step over him. This was fine with me. Whenever his sister and the other girls tried to bully me, Brian bullied them harder.

  In the beginning of this relationship, our kisses were chaste and inexperienced. Yet as Brian and I pressed our clothed bodies together, I understood why my mother had been so anxious to drill me on ladylike behavior and keep me out of the clutches of Dad’s student merchant Marines in New York: sex was fun!