The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter Read online

  Michael mumbled something about just passing the time with a little music, if that was all right.

  “It most certainly is not all right,” Dad said. “My daughter is fifteen years old, for God’s sake, and you’re a middle-aged man. I’m asking you to leave the grounds immediately. Do not come back. Do not make me get my Navy pistol.”

  The pistol, I knew, was a cobwebbed relic hanging above our fireplace. But Michael scrambled to his feet, ran to his Volvo, and tossed the guitar into the backseat through the window.

  “You’ve ruined my life!” I shouted at my father, who was still glaring after Michael’s car long after it was out of sight. “He’ll never come back now!”

  Dad shook his head. “My job is to protect you,” he said. “A man that age has no business being here. A man that age is thinking about only one thing with a girl like you.”

  “You don’t know that.” Stung, I wheeled around and slammed open the screen door against the house. “And anyway, I was thinking about it more than he was,” I muttered.

  “I hope not. We expect you to act like a lady,” Dad said. “Be glad I got here in time to save you from yourself.”

  “college-bound” by my high school guidance counselor at Quaboag, who steered me away from typing, wood shop, home economics, art, or any other classes where you actually did something. It wasn’t until junior year that I finally defied him and signed up for art.

  The art teacher was known as “Lamb Chops” for the size and shape of her buttocks and thighs, always encased in skintight jeans beneath bright cotton tops. She was so nonchalant about attendance and behavior that students never missed her class. In fact, there were always extra students hanging around with Lamb Chops; if you wanted to draw, paint, or make pots, you were welcome.

  I began to draw with an intensity previously reserved for reading. I had been doodling all my life, drawing animals, mostly, thousands upon thousands of horses and dogs, all of them with noble profiles and muscular necks. Now, Lamb Chops taught me to draw not my imagined ideals but what was really in front of me.

  As I studied lines, angles, colors, shadows, and perspectives, I remembered how my own mother used to bring her sketchpad everywhere, or set up her easel and paints in our various family rooms and backyards. I had a distinct memory of hugging Mom and breathing in her special perfume, which I realized only now must have been turpentine.

  “Why don’t you paint anymore?” I asked Mom one morning as we mucked out stalls. “You used to love it.”

  “I don’t need to paint anymore,” she told me. “I just did it because I liked it. Then I got bored and moved on to other things. That’s the way I am.” She stopped working for a minute and straightened up to lean on the pitchfork. “It’s not like you can make a living as an artist, anyway.”

  “That’s not the point of art, to make a living,” I said. “It’s something you do for your soul.”

  “Your soul?” Mom laughed. “God. You really are a hopeless romantic.” The way Mom said it, “hopeless romantic” was a dire prognosis, like leprosy or leukemia. “You certainly didn’t get that from me.” She dug her pitchfork into the manure and started shoveling again.

  “Well, it can’t be from Dad,” I said.

  “Oh, you’d be surprised,” Mom said. “The two of you are more alike than you think.”

  I pondered this troubling comment the next day as I pedaled my bike downtown to my new job at the Top Hat Diner, a job that mostly involved serving coffee and grilled muffins to old men in duck-billed caps. That I would turn out like my father, whom I saw as methodical and overly focused, stern and unyielding, instead of like Mom, whose charisma attracted people to her like deer to a salt lick, was appalling to me. I didn’t want to grow up to be a penny-pinching worrier who thought I would be electrocuted every time I took a shower during a thunderstorm. How could my mother possibly call Dad a romantic?

  Though defining what my father was posed a problem now that Dad was no longer in the Navy. He wasn’t a businessman, store clerk, farmer, or police officer like any of the other fathers I knew. He didn’t watch sports on television or drink beer or go fishing. He didn’t take my mother out to dinner, other than on her birthday, and he never went to plays or movies. He never read novels. He never had fun.

  In fact, I couldn’t think of a single thing my father did that wasn’t productive. My dad never went anywhere and seemed to have no friends. He scarcely even talked to his own family back in Ohio. The one time his sister and her husband had visited, they’d slept in their camper parked in our yard.

  My father’s sole identity seemed to be a workaholic whose singular passion in life was to produce more gerbils than anyone else in the world. In the process of applying to colleges, I struggled to come up with a satisfactory answer to scribble into that blank line that cropped up on every application and financial aid form: Father’s occupation.

  On the blank lines, I tried out “retired Navy officer,” “scientist,” “author,” and, in a daring creative stroke, “livestock breeder.” I had grown up hiding what my father did. I wasn’t about to change now.

  At the same time, it seemed wrong not to mention gerbils. No matter how I felt about them, or about what Dad did with them, gerbils were going to put me through college. They deserved some credit, I thought.

  Finally, I settled on this benign phrase: “gentleman farmer.” And for my academic major, I wrote, “very undecided.”

  THE upside of Dad being such a single-minded workaholic was that his business grew steadily every year. Each month brought more gerbil orders than the last, thanks to ads in laboratory animal magazines, Dad’s personal appearances at laboratory animal conferences, and his recent and most successful marketing tool by far: a quarterly newsletter he dubbed the Gerbil Digest.

  As with his letterhead, the Digest logo was a small house on the cover with “Home of the Gerbil” written in Chinese characters below the roof. The Digest also featured one of Dad’s photographs, a black-and-white portrait of a gerbil nibbling on a seed.

  The point of this newsletter was to ratchet up the cycle of gerbil supply and demand. For each issue, Dad spent hours, even days, at the University of Massachusetts library in Amherst, where he was now taking graduate courses in zoology, to read the most recent scholarly articles about ongoing gerbil research—most of it done with his own animals.

  He summarized the research into a newsletter format, made dozens of copies, and paid Donald, Philip, and me to collate and staple the pages, a job I loathed because it required walking around the dining room table until I was dizzy and avoiding staple gun fights with Donald. Dad’s careful market research and our stapling efforts paid off, though: the Gerbil Digest was soon recognized as such a valuable biomedical research tool that it was indexed in Biological Abstracts.

  In this fashion, Dad made gerbils increasingly indispensable to the world. By my junior year of high school we were housing over six thousand gerbils. Our second building was filled to capacity. We had an emergency generator to maintain power in the gerbil buildings because they had to be climate-controlled, and Dad listed over a dozen employees on the payroll in addition to family members. He was now contemplating the construction of a third building over Mom’s protests.

  With all of this action in our back pastures, people in town couldn’t help but finally notice that something was up. That winter, the trees all seemed to shed their leaves during the same week when Massachusetts was walloped with the first snowstorm of the season. As a result, our twin gerbil buildings were suddenly revealed like a pair of gleaming metal cruise ships grounded on an iceberg.

  This arresting sight caused a pair of townie kids to circle my locker at school the next morning. The boys had greasy hair down to their shoulders, pot breath, and clunky Frye boots that ripped the muddy hems of their bell-bottoms.

  “Hey, Holly,” one of them drawled, imitating my Virginia accent, “how y’all doin’ up there yonder at the rat farm?”

  “Yeah,�
�� his friend snorted. “What’s Commander Mouse up to these days?”

  The two of them followed me down the hall, cackling like hyenas. “What are you doing after school, rat farmer’s daughter? Want to get high?”

  After school, I stormed straight off the bus and out to the stable, where Mom was tacking up horses for lessons. “The kids at school are calling Dad a rat farmer. I hate it that people think we’re nuts!” I complained.

  Mom didn’t even bother to turn around. “What do you care what those stupid kids say?” she asked. “You know that we’re better than they are. Let them think what they want. They will, anyway. Just ignore them.”

  That was the thing about Mom. No matter what happened, she knew that she was better than anyone else. Meanwhile, I was constantly on alert, hiding whatever freakish tendencies I had toward reading, science, and horses to avoid ridicule.

  I said nothing as rumors spread through school about rats and mice on Tumblebrook Farm. This grew more difficult as accusations flew: My father was an evil scientist who boiled rats for supper. He sold mice for fur. He had deals to send his mice into space. (This part was nearly true: Dad had been in discussion with NASA about sending his gerbils into space, but mice won out because of better genetic mapping.)

  I bit my tongue through it all. Dad never did anything to correct the impression that people in town had of us as rat farmers, either. In fact, whenever I complained at home about these rumors, he actually looked pleased. Dad’s theory was that animal activists were far less likely to bother camping out on our fields if they thought we were only raising rats.

  “Most people think mice and rats are ‘ew,’” he explained. “They really don’t care much about what happens to them. Gerbils are a different kettle of fish. It’s the pet thing.” He wagged a finger at me. “Remember, Holly. Nobody needs to know our business but us.”

  NO MATTER how many hours a week I worked for my father or how much I resented the weirdness of his business, I never got tired of the gerbil pups. Scarcely an inch long, the newborn gerbils were deaf and toothless, as blind as kittens, and as naked as lizards. Within a week, though, they blinked at the world around them, sprouted brown mossy fuzz, and cheeped like chicks. At three weeks, they hopped about in their cages, big-eyed miniatures of the adults.

  Cleaning cages meant having to destroy their nests. After seeing how frantic the families became, I defied my father’s orders to empty every bit of soiled litter. Instead, I saved small handfuls of the original nesting material to add to the clean cages before dropping the gerbil families into their new homes. I justified this secret rebellion by reasoning that having something familiar to smell and sleep in would lower gerbil stress and make for happier, healthier gerbil families.

  I felt loyal to the gerbils partly because I was so impressed by gerbil family life. If separated from their mates, gerbils are so loyal that they often refuse to take another one. Another big plus is that they hardly ever gobble down their young.

  Gerbils are also great communicators. They make good use of their long back feet, thumping them to warn of danger or wow potential mates. If a gerbil rolls onto its back in front of another gerbil, it wants a grooming session. If one gerbil becomes annoyed with another, it simply butts the pest away without doing serious harm.

  All in all, gerbils did a better job of getting along than most people, I thought, watching my own parents spar. Mom was more verbal and usually won their arguments, which almost always focused on money. She routinely stormed off during their “conversations,” usually after tossing a grenade of a one-liner. Afterward, Dad would stare into space through a haze of cigarette smoke or, more dramatically, sigh with his head in his hands.

  And, like gerbils, Mom would butt Dad away physically, using her shoulder or hip whenever he tried to wrap his arms around her waist at the kitchen sink or put his arm around her on the couch.

  “How come you never kiss Dad?” I dared to ask Mom once.

  She shrugged. “It’s hardly necessary when you’re married,” she said. “Being married is just like being in business together, only you don’t ever get to take a vacation.”

  I thought about my feverish kisses with Brian, Michael, and the other boys I’d dated—all of them briefly. Thanks to my family, I probably wouldn’t ever meet someone who stuck around long enough for me to marry. But that was okay, I decided. Judging by my parents, marriage seemed like a pesky but nonfatal condition, like a chronic cold or a bad back. Some days were better than others, but mostly you just had to survive marriage one day at a time.

  DURING many of our family dinners, Dad casually reported on the journeys of our gerbils as if they were cousins or friends taking vacations. “I sent three dozen breeding pairs to Ann Arbor, Michigan, today,” he might begin, or “Dr. Wong called to say that our fifty weanlings arrived in Miami on time despite that thunderstorm.” But we never talked about what actually happened to the gerbils once they arrived at their final destinations, despite the fact that Donald and I helped Dad ship his gerbils around the world.

  The animals usually traveled by jet in cardboard boxes lined with wire mesh. These boxes came in flats that Donald and I helped Dad assemble as needed. We also metered out food pellets and carrot stubs, which provided a water supply for gerbils on the go. We rationed these green and orange tokens according to how many gerbils were in a box and how far they had to travel.

  Twice a week, Dad or one of his employees drove to Bradley International Airport with boxes of gerbils stacked in the back of the station wagon, or, if there were too many boxes to fit inside the car, in the rattling Honey Wagon. On the way to the airport there was an obligatory stopover at the local veterinarian’s office, where the gerbils were given the once-over and the vet signed a bill of good health, allowing the gerbils to travel.

  Even with all of these precautions, occasionally something went awry. Once, for instance, a group of rowdy young gerbils confined to the hold of a Japanese Airlines jet chewed their way out of a shipping box and made a mad dash for freedom. Dad had to consult with the Japanese for several hours, shouting instructions to Japanese technicians over our kitchen phone as he talked them through various strategies for capturing renegade rodents. The Japanese jet had to be grounded for forty-eight hours during this gerbil round-up, for fear that any loose gerbils might chew through the electrical wires while the jet was airborne.

  ONE night, I lay in bed and contemplated my latest artwork, an aggressive sunset in burnt oranges, murky purples, and hysterical reds that I’d painted over the pale blue Colonial floral wallpaper Mom had so painstakingly hung in my room the month before, causing her to yell at me in a way she usually reserved for Donald. I didn’t care, though. I thought my room looked just like an album cover.

  Donald poked his head through the doorway and interrupted my reverie. He was taller than I was, now that I was sixteen and he was thirteen, and he’d grown his hair long. His wavy hair was the color of dirt and so thick and tangled that it looked like a preschool art project. Beneath that mop, his eyes were the feverish bright blue of a religious charismatic’s.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  Donald cast a quick look over his shoulder, then poked his head further in. “I saw Dad do it today,” he whispered.

  “Stay out of my room,” I said automatically “Do what?”

  “Kill the extras.” Donald’s voice was hushed.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The extra gerbils! Dad kills them himself, you know. He gasses them. Just like the Nazis with the Jews.”

  “He does not either! Get out of my room,” I said, but without conviction. I had never before allowed myself to wonder what Dad did with surplus gerbils. The reason was simple: on some level pricking below my conscious mind, I knew.

  “Dad’s got his own personal gas chamber,” Donald went on, excited to have my full attention. “It’s this big plastic thing that looks like a hatbox. He puts a hose in it and pumps in carbon monoxide from a tank.”


  “Go away!” I threw a book at him. “You’re disgusting!”

  Donald grinned, satisfied. “Mom says quit pretending that you can’t hear her and go downstairs to set the table. Dinner’s almost ready.”

  I laid silverware around the table like a robot. We were having lasagna, one of my favorites, but I couldn’t eat. Finally halfway through dinner, I said, “Dad, tell me the truth. Are you committing gerbil genocide?”

  Dad’s bald scalp immediately flushed scarlet inside his monk’s fringe of gray hair. “Goddamn it, Donald, I told you not to say anything to your sister,” he said, and lifted a huge wedge of lasagna to his mouth.

  I recognized this tactic: we weren’t allowed to speak with our mouths full, so Dad was silencing himself by chewing.

  “Holly and I are employees, Dad,” Donald reminded him solemnly. “We attend company meetings. We deserve to be in the know.”

  Dad sighed and continued chewing, but we waited him out. Finally, he put down his fork. “Look, it’s like any business. If you have extra inventory, you have to unload it.”

  “Unload it!” I cried. “These are lives we’re talking about!”

  “These are gerbils,” Dad said patiently “Rodents. They wouldn’t even exist if I weren’t breeding them. Their sole purpose is to serve the cause of medical research. If I didn’t kill the extra animals, if I had to feed every gerbil that was defective or unsold, I’d go broke. It’s a simple matter of doing the math.”

  “But you’re killing innocent animals!” I pushed my plate away. “You’re a murderer!”

  My mother stifled a snigger at the end of the table, and little Philip looked worriedly around at all of us. “Who is Dad killing?” he asked.

  “No one,” Dad said. “Eat your dinner.”

  “Anyone need seconds?” Mom said. “It’s good lasagna tonight. Going once? Twice? Any takers? No?”