The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter Page 16

  Every spare minute that first winter I rode my bike down to the Boat Club to meet Brian, who drove across the frozen lake from his house to the Boat Club by snowmobile. The snowmobile was exhilarating and dangerous, the perfect aphrodisiac. I loved straddling the seat behind Brian and pressing my body against his as we fishtailed on the icy lake or plunged through the woods on narrow trails, the tree branches clawing at our helmets. We couldn’t talk over the engine noise or the cold rush of wind.

  Once we reached our favorite spot, an overgrown Christmas tree farm where the tight rows of tall pines created a secret dell even on snow-bright days, we’d shut off the snowmobile. Deafened by the silence broken only by the steady drip, drip of ice melting off the tree boughs, we unzipped our jackets and reached wherever we could with our hands and mouths. Sometimes Brian and I were so absorbed in each other that other snowmobilers surprised us midgrope. We’d have to press our bare torsos together as they roared by, cheering and whistling.

  When the ice was gone, Brian could still fetch me from the town beach by boat, racing across the water in his father’s inboard to meet me. He always drove in that reckless, immortal way of teenage boys everywhere, the nose of the boat flung high in the air as he gunned the engine.

  Mom and Grandmother caught us the day that I told them I was riding my bike to school for exercise and needed to leave an hour early to make it on time. I pedaled down to the Boat Club, where Brian had already tied his boat up at the dock. It was chilly and had rained the night before. Since everything was still damp in the boat, we huddled on the sunny steps of the Boat Club and began kissing.

  In anticipation, I’d worn nothing under my jeans and T-shirt. No underpants, no bra. No lady was I!

  Brian had just hiked my shirt up when I spotted Mom and Grandmother over his shoulder. They marched toward us in tandem, faces set in grim expressions beneath matching helmets of dark hair. It was like being set upon by zombies.

  I stood up, knees trembling, brushed off my jeans, and went to them without a word, praying that they wouldn’t notice that I’d left home without my underpants.

  “This kind of thing is never going to happen again,” Mom said. “This is not the way any daughter of mine is going to behave.”

  “Or a granddaughter of mine,” Grandmother added. “We raised you to be a lady.”

  “What was I doing that was so wrong?” I wailed. “We were just kissing!”

  Mom shook her head. “You were muckled onto that boy like a barnacle on a boat,” she said.

  I folded my arms against my braless chest, still afraid they’d discover my secret unladylike state. “I don’t see what’s so wrong with kissing,” I insisted.

  “Kissing leads to other things,” Grandmother sniffed. “It’s just like marijuana and heroin. And why should a boy buy the cow when he can get the milk for free?”

  We loaded my bike into the station wagon while Brian roared off in his boat across the lake behind us. Brian could bully his sister and her friends; he’d been in knife fights and gotten drunk enough to punch out a kid at a basketball game. He’d even thrown a chair at a kid across the cafeteria. But he was no match for Mom and Grandmother.

  “How did you find me?” I asked sullenly as Mom pointed the car toward the high school.

  Grandmother rolled her eyes. “We weren’t born yesterday, you know.”

  AFTER Brian, I fell in love with a car and went out with the boy who owned it: a souped-up Mustang owned by a senior named Reggie. Reggie had a bowl haircut and was slightly shorter than my own five feet four inches even in his Frye boots, but I overlooked all of this because I loved racing in the Mustang. Reggie would put his car up against Clay Jenson’s Corvette along Snow Road and we’d break 110 mph, screaming around the curves and praying there wasn’t a hay wagon coming the other way. One night, Clay flipped his Corvette on a patch of black ice and landed upside down in a ditch, but the roll bar kept him and his girlfriend from dying. Clay’s car was totaled, but we found other people to race and went on as before.

  All of this was so thrilling that I let Reggie take me parking by the river and put my hand on his penis. To my surprise it felt hot and rubbery, not at all what I was expecting. I might have gone further than that, too, but I had a strict curfew and my father, towering over Reggie, had made sure that my new boyfriend knew what it was.

  The relationship would have lasted longer if I’d never invited Reggie to dinner at our house. Once Mom met him, she didn’t let up, asking me every week when I was going to break up with him.

  “What do you care?” I finally asked her furiously. “Reggie’s a nice guy. He takes me places. He pays for me at the movies.”

  “He’s too old for you,” she said. “Three years makes a lot of difference at your age. And that boy stinks of pig manure.”

  “He can’t help that!” I cried, offended mostly because I’d noticed the stink, too. “His dad’s a pig farmer. And anyway, I probably smell like gerbils!”

  “Gerbils have no odor,” Mom said automatically.

  This was a myth perpetuated by my father. It may even have been true for pet gerbils. But given the numbers we had, the gerbil stink could make you cry for mercy. How was it possible, I wondered, that Mom so confidently pegged pigs lower on the farm animal status scale than gerbils? Somehow she did, though, and coming from her it even sounded rational.

  I ignored Mom’s views on Reggie and invited him home again. Not to dinner, but afterward, when I thought everyone in my family would be safely mesmerized by the television. This time, Reggie brought his guitar and sat with me in the dining room with the swinging doors shut. He proceeded to play “Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones, gazing deeply into my eyes as he plucked the strings.

  “Wild, wild horses, couldn’t drag me away-ay!”

  I wanted to be awed. Or, at the very least, not horrified. Sadly, though, Reggie was a lamentable musician. He played most of the right chords but sang like someone who’d grown up underwater.

  I tried my best to keep a straight face as the ballad dribbled on. Soon it would be over and we could go for a drive in his Mustang.

  Then I noticed the swinging door twitching a little behind Reggie. I prayed that it was one of the cats. Or one of the dogs. Or even little Philip. Anyone, dear God, but my brother Donald.

  The door swung open a bit more and stayed open. Now I could see Donald lip-synching the words behind Reggie. My brother was clutching his heart and batting his eyelashes at me. Even worse, Mom, Grandmother, Grandfather, and Phil were all crowded in the doorway, too, making faces as my oblivious suitor serenaded me with all his heart.

  “Wild, wild horses, couldn’t drag me away-ay!” Reggie yodeled, and my mother rolled her eyes and then, I swear to God, pinched her nose shut with two fingers.

  After that night, I never saw Reggie again.

  MY BEST friend in West Brookfield was Bea Wilson, whom I met in freshman English class. The class was taught by Mr. Adams, a soulful Peace Corps dropout, the son of a minister who had us singing protest songs and writing short stories full of dark angst. We modeled our stories after his own impenetrable fiction, which Mr. Adams handed out on a regular basis as part of our classroom reading.

  Mr. Adams also directed a ninth-grade play about slavery, where I played a black man hoeing fields and singing “Oh, freedom, oh, freedom! Oh, freedom over me!” The intensity of opening night was marred for me only by a gym teacher sitting in the front row. At the sight of me in a black sweater and suspenders, he told his buddy beside him, “They sure didn’t build girls like that in my day, no sirree.”

  Bea’s farmhouse stood on a hill on the opposite side of West Brookfield. It was even older and colder than mine. But her house had delightfully sloped ceilings and tilted floors, and the wallpaper was a warm riot of flowers in every room.

  Bea’s father and mother were both from wealthy families. Her father, JoJo, had worked as an engineer for a large company before deciding to “defect from our money-grubbing im
perialist U.S. Government and escape those goddamn whining capitalists,” he confided in me one afternoon as he wrapped aluminum foil around their TV antenna to get better reception. In West Brookfield, he declared, “I can be one of the real people living off the land.”

  On his own 350 acres, JoJo tried pig farming but quit when the barn burned down. He then created a mobile home park and lived off the land that way. “My dad’s a good example of how not to work for anybody else,” Bea explained. “I guess he’s a lot like your dad that way.”

  This much was true. Most of my friends had fathers who drove sedans or station wagons. These dads came to the high school basketball games and took their families out for Sunday drives. Other than that, they disappeared in the morning and came home at night. None of my friends seemed to know, or care, what their fathers did, whereas Bea and I were privy to every move our fathers made. There was a still a difference between us, however. Bea had little involvement in her father’s life, but my brothers and I were enlisted troops serving Dad and his secret mission: raising gerbils to the nth degree. My father, like Bea’s dad, worked for himself. But unlike Bea’s dad, who seemed to have plenty of free time on his hands, Dad traipsed up to the gerbil building early every morning and didn’t return to the kitchen until just before dinner, when he’d pour himself a tall scotch and settle his briefcase on the dining room table. He made his business our business.

  In the end, though, none of these comparisons between our fathers was as interesting to me as the fact that Jojo was a nudist. Nobody in that family wore underpants. Bea’s jeans had holes that left pink dime-sized circles of skin showing on her butt and thighs. And when Jojo headed out to the frog-choked pond in front of their house to shimmy out of his ragged blue jeans and fling himself onto the grass, his lack of underpants clearly answered any lingering questions I had about what made men different from women.

  I had touched Brian’s penis, but here was a penis for me to examine in the clear light of day. It was neither alluring nor intimidating. Jojo’s penis was simply a wrinkled pink part of him, like the nose on his face.

  Besides our rundown houses and our isolationist fathers, the other thing that drew Bea and me together was our shared passion for horses. Her grey gelding even looked like a larger version of Ladybug I often trotted Ladybug down Long Hill Road, across the town common, and up the hill to Bea’s house on weekends, about six miles in all. We’d spend the day riding and the night singing folk songs while Bea played her guitar.

  One night, we camped out in the wooden bunkhouse that JoJo had built deep in the woods “in case the tax man ever comes.” The bunkhouse was a roughhewn building that required careful maneuvering to avoid catching the wide bell bottoms of our hip-hugger jeans on the nail points sticking out of the clapboards.

  “We’ve made booby traps for ourselves, haven’t we?” Bea asked mournfully as I tried to untangle one of her long blond braids from a nail. “We might just as well nail ourselves up on crosses for the tax man to find.”

  ONE summer day between freshman and sophomore year of high school, Bea and I saddled up our horses early and met in the center of town. We rode up one of the farm lanes and played tag in the cornfields, ducking low against the horses’ necks to protect our faces from the cornstalks as we raced along the furrows. Afterward, we rode over to the drive-in restaurant on Route 9 and sat astride our sweaty horses between the parked cars, eating ice cream cones and licking the drips off our bare arms.

  On the way back, we veered off down the road toward the town beach. It was still early and the beach was nearly empty. We stripped off our saddles and bridles and used the horses’ manes to pull ourselves onto their backs. Then we urged the animals into the cool green water with shouts and hard thumps of our heels against their sides until the horses finally charged into the lake, scattering the few swimmers around us.

  We rode them deeper into the water until the horses were swimming, too. Ladybug churned the water with her hooves and I floated just above her, legs out straight behind me, clinging to her mane and laughing.

  Eventually, one of the swimmers phoned the chief of police to alert him to the beasts in the water. The chief arrived with the siren shrieking atop his cruiser and got out to stand on the beach.

  “You girls should know better than to swim those horses here,” he shouted. He kept one hammy hand on his gun, but looked overheated and wistful just the same.

  We said we were sorry and rode the horses back out onto the beach, feeling the great power of them as the police chief backed away from us. We tacked the horses up again and returned to town, where we let the horses drink at the fountain in the center of the common and thought about what else to do with our Saturday.

  The fountain had a sculpture of two seated women in flowing gowns that reached their toes. The statue was pristine white, with just a bit of green mold like lace edging along the edges of the cement dresses. A town vandal with a sense of humor had painted the women’s toenails pink.

  As the horses slurped and snorted, Bea and I heard music coming from beyond the stand of tall maples lining the common. It was a man singing, accompanied by a guitar. We trotted the horses over and saw a lanky freckled redhead sitting with his back against one of the trees, an acoustic guitar in his lap. He gazed up at us on our horses, grinned, and started singing “Lady Godiva”:

  Seventeen, a beauty queen

  She made a ride that raised a scene

  In the town …

  “What other songs do you play?” I asked once he was finished.

  “What don’t I?” he asked.

  “It’s true,” Bea said, for she’d known this man, Michael, since she was in first grade and he was in sixth with her older brother. He’d been drafted and sent to Vietnam the previous year at age nineteen. Now he was back and living in the caretaker’s cottage of the biggest lake house.

  We slid down off the horses and drop-tied them next to the tree, where their heads drooped and they swished their tails. The three of us sang protest songs about Vietnam and laughed over all of the words we didn’t know. After we tired of this, we followed Michael across the common, leading the patient horses behind us, and went to the Lallys’ barn. This was a place I’d heard about but never been invited into. It was a red-shingled pole barn with a sway-backed roof. The Lallys were a family of four brothers and a single mother; the father had died two years earlier of cancer. Two of the Lally boys worked for my father. One of them was in jail now for reasons Dad said I didn’t need to know.

  The Lally boys had hung music posters and flags on every wall and beam of the barn, along with Indian bedspreads, Christmas lights, and a collection of license plates. There were guitars in the barn, a drum set, and a piano. Teenagers could be found there day or night, sleeping, drinking, getting high, having sex, or just being there because everyone else was.

  On this particular morning, half a dozen kids were sleeping on couches that looked as old as the barn, with cotton stuffing spilling out of the cushions. Bea and Michael passed a joint around with the youngest Lally boy, but I refused to smoke. It was too much like what my parents did, and I expected it to make me cough.

  Eventually, Bea said she had to go home. She grabbed hold of the pommel of her saddle, hauled herself onto her horse, and dreamily trotted down the middle of Route 9, her yellow braids bouncing against her back, oblivious of the cars honking their horns behind her.

  Afterward, Michael took my hand and led me out to the cornfield behind the barn. We found a shady spot at one edge of it beneath an old willow tree. Michael pulled off his T-shirt and spread it on the ground. Without any words at all, I lay down on that T-shirt like it was a magic flying carpet and waited for him to take me somewhere.

  Michael was the most beautiful boy in the world, with his red hair and freckles, and skin like peeled new potatoes, white and cool and slick to the touch. His guitarist’s fingers did things that made me stop breathing, and then he lay back on his crossed arms beside me in the shade, sta
ring up at the leaves on the old apple tree above us.

  When nothing more happened, I sat up and pulled off my shirt. I’d stopped wearing a bra because Bea never wore one, so I thought for sure something unladylike might happen if I was shirtless, too. But Michael shook his head and laughed.

  “Get dressed, Lady Godiva,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked, so mortified that I crossed my arms in front of my chest. “Don’t you like me?”

  “Of course I do. But you’re not old enough to be with me. Don’t take things too fast, okay?” He pulled me close for one more kiss. “Promise me that. You’re good the way you are. It’s the world that’s a rotten place.”

  I didn’t understand any of this, but I put my shirt back on and then napped with my head on his shoulder.

  As I rode home, trotting Ladybug up Long Hill Road, Michael chunked along behind me in his ancient black Volvo. He helped me put away the horse and tack, and then we sat on the front steps of my house, where Michael played the same melancholy folk songs that he’d strummed on the common. Suddenly Dad appeared, shooting up the driveway in his red Ford station wagon.

  Dad must have seen us from the car. He came around the corner of the house at a trot, shouting at Michael to stand up, “and that’s an order!”

  Michael obeyed instantly, the guitar dangling from one pale hand, and pushed his long hair out of his eyes. He was six feet tall, but next to my father he looked like a chastened twelve-year-old boy, skinny and vulnerable, his Adam’s apple bobbing as Dad shouted at him the way I imagined he had done with all of those sailors and soldiers on board his ship or in his classrooms.

  “Who are you?” Dad demanded. “And what the hell are you doing here with my daughter?”