The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter Read online

  Dad pointed at my plate. “What are you eating, Holly?”

  “Lasagna,” I said, confused by the sudden shift in topic.

  “And what’s in lasagna sauce?”

  “I don’t know. Tomatoes? Onions? Hamburger?”

  “And where does hamburger come from?” Dad took another mouthful.

  “But that’s different,” I protested weakly, sick to my stomach. “We don’t actually raise our own cows and kill them.”

  “No. Though perhaps that would be more ethical than letting somebody else do our dirty work,” Dad countered. “You don’t know how these cows were treated before they died.”

  “It would be cool to kill our own,” Donald said.

  “Shut up,” I said. “Anyway, I’ve been thinking about being a vegetarian,” I lied. Cheeseburgers were a staple in my diet.

  “You’ll get anemia,” Mom said, waving a hand at this nonsense. “A girl your age needs plenty of iron.”

  “Because you get periods” Donald said.

  Mom gave him a look. “I get periods,” she said.

  Donald was silenced. The rest of us were, too. Nobody wanted to think about Mom’s periods.

  “Look,” Dad said after a moment. “I don’t like killing the gerbils, either, but it’s painless. They just go to sleep. It’s very humane.”

  “Like a Nazi gas chamber,” Donald said. “The Jews went to sleep, too.”

  “Jesus Christ, Donald,” Dad said.

  Mom glared. “I won’t have that language at my table.”

  Donald ignored her. “Sometimes the gerbils don’t die right away, you know,” he told Dad.

  “What?” Dad grabbed a piece of garlic bread and frantically bit into it.

  “I’ve seen it,” Donald went on. “Sometimes, if you don’t gas them for long enough, the gerbils wake up in the Dumpster and try to escape. They’re probably living in our pasture right now.”

  “They’d never make it through the winter,” Mom pointed out.

  “Look,” Dad said, exasperated. “There’s no perfect way to get rid of surplus stock. I sell what I can to pet distributors, but the reality is that production and customer orders are both unpredictable. Plus, researchers often want males instead of females, because they don’t want hormones interfering with their studies.”

  “You mean you kill off mostly girl gerbils?” I was nearly hysterical. I’d been reading Sylvia Plath’s poetry; now I stood up and recited a line from my favorite poem, “Daddy”:

  Every woman adores a Fascist,

  The boot in the face, the brute

  Brute heart of a brute like you.

  There was a small silence. Then Mom said, “Good Lord. I certainly hope that’s not what they’re teaching you at the high school.” She stood up and began clearing the table. “Help me get these plates into the dishwasher.”

  I began clearing the table, but paused in the doorway between the dining room and kitchen. “How can you raise gerbils just to be tortured?” I asked tearfully.

  Dad sighed. “They’re not tortured,” he said. “Scientists are very humane. And this is the only way to make progress in medicine. Without animal research, we might never prevent or cure many potentially fatal diseases. Did you ever stop and think about that?”

  We looked at each other for a long moment, but neither of us dared to say Gail’s name.

  AS COLLEGE loomed, Dad earnestly advised me about academic majors. He encouraged me to join ranks with him in the booming gerbil industry. “You’re the only one in this family besides me who even likes gerbils,” he pointed out. “If you don’t take over my business, I don’t know who will.”

  “I don’t think so, Dad,” I said. “I want to be an artist or a doctor. Or maybe a lawyer.” Anything but a gerbil farmer, I thought, but couldn’t bring myself to say it.

  My father shook his head. “You can’t be a lawyer. Every time you got your period, you’d cry in front of the judge.”

  “Chauvinist,” I said, but I was afraid that he might be right. I’d always been the soft-hearted one in the family, weeping with the abandon of a menopausal widow whenever there was an injured bird in the yard or a tearjerker TV show. When I was younger, I used to crawl into a prone position beneath the coffee table so that nobody would see me cry.

  Inevitably, though, Dad would notice. “Holly’s leaving us now,” he’d announce. “Good-bye, Holly!”

  “Good-bye, Holly!” Mom would echo, calling to me as if she were standing across a crowded train platform.

  Despite coexisting with my mother, who regularly trounced him verbally, showed more business savvy, didn’t flinch at blood, and tore down walls with crowbars, Dad continued to perceive men as strong leaders and women as vulnerable helpmates. His latest book laid these beliefs out on the page for the whole world to see.

  During the two years that Dad was holed up in his bachelor’s quarters at the Merchant Marine Academy, he hadn’t been content to just teach during the week and get his business started on weekends. He had also approached the Pet Library, the publishing division of Hartz Mountain pet supplies, to ask if they’d like a book about gerbils. They’d immediately given him a contract.

  For his new book, Know Your Gerbils (1972), Dad recycled some of the information about keeping pet gerbils from his first book and used a few of the same photographs. He also included more recent pictures, the result of various photography sessions at the farm. In these, Donald appeared as a genius scientist or medical professional. Clipboard in hand, my brother looked as if he were meticulously recording the weights of gerbil pups on a scale, charting a gerbil’s movements in the mysteriously labeled “open field” test, or sagely cataloging a gerbil’s performance on an elevated “Y-maze” track.

  I, meanwhile, was relegated in every picture to the role of secretary or nurse. In my only solo appearance, I was dangling a pair of gerbils by their tails, gerbilly asses pointed toward the camera.

  It was an unfortunate portrait: Dad caught me looking cross-eyed down my nose to determine, as his caption handily explained, the difference between male and female gerbils by assessing “the animal with the greatest and the one with the least distance between the anal and genital openings.”

  SHORTLY after the publication of Know Your Gerbils, Dad’s most loyal employee, Angeline, began bemoaning the fate of white gerbils. These were born occasionally as a result of recessive genes; since Dad couldn’t sell them with the others—he was still working on producing a pure agouti strain of inbreds prone to seizures—he disposed of them in his hatbox gas chamber.

  “Maybe we don’t have to let Dad see them,” I said.

  “How are you going to do that?” Angeline raised one penciled eyebrow under her blond bangs. “We can’t hide them forever.” She sighed. “I just wish I could take them home. I’d like to breed white gerbils.”

  “Why don’t you?” I asked. “You could save them!”

  So, whenever a white gerbil was born, Angeline would wait until it was old enough to wean and then take it home in a cage she kept on the backseat of her car.

  “You really don’t think I’m stealing?” she asked me anxiously one day, running a hand through her hair as she showed me another white gerbil in a litter of three brown brothers and sisters.

  “No. Dad’s just going to gas it anyway,” I reassured her.

  That very afternoon, as if to prove my point, Dad found a white gerbil that had escaped our notice. He carried the weanling by its tail over to Angeline. “Here’s another defect,” he said, and handed it to her.

  Angeline plucked the gerbil out of Dad’s fingers and cradled it between her palms. I didn’t dare meet her gaze. “Yes, sir,” she said, and carried the gerbil into the room with the gas chamber. I kept Dad talking so that he wouldn’t hear her disappear through the side door and out to her car.

  Every now and then, I’d find a favorite gerbil and save it, too. I couldn’t bring gerbils into our house, but I began hiding them from Dad. The most remarkabl
e of these was a male with a stunning shock of soft blond hair growing right between his ears.

  “Look!” I said, showing him to Angeline. “A blond gerbil! Can we save him?”

  She grinned and nodded. Angeline and I managed to move the blond gerbil from rack to rack, from room to room, between the gerbil buildings. It was a small, mutinous gesture that my father never noticed at all. But it was something.

  pany meeting and summarized the state of affairs at Tumblebrook Farm, reading from an agenda printed on blue paper.

  I recognized the paper as the recycled backside of a page from one of the latest issues of the Gerbil Digest. Dad’s office, along with our basement, attic, and family room floor, was stacked thigh-high with these papers, along with anything else that might come in handy: old Time magazines, empty mayonnaise jars of screws, bits of old crown molding, cardboard boxes filled with glass shards, heaps of rags, and emptied cans with the labels removed. Each time Dad used an item from this collection he would sigh with satisfaction and remind us of how we might have thrown it out if not for him.

  “At this point in time,” Dad announced, his blue eyes lingering on each of us in a sales technique he’d learned by reading a marketing textbook purchased at a yard sale, “Tumblebrook Farm has left its competition behind and continues to produce more gerbils than anyone else in the world. We’re charging fixed prices with absolutely no discounts, and I have set gerbil prices as high as the market will bear. Orders are ranging in size from 2 to 450 animals, with the average being between 25 and 100 animals per order. Customers continue to pay for boxes and shipping charges to keep our overhead as low as possible.”

  “That’s good, Dad, right?” I asked.

  He nodded and lowered the paper to the table. “I am also pleased to add that company morale is at an all-time high.”

  Mom lit a cigarette. “We’re going to miss 60 Minutes if we don’t wrap this up soon,” she reminded him.

  “This is important, Sally.” Dad picked up his agenda again and pointed at the last two bullet points. “We have reached a critical juncture at Tumblebrook Farm,” he went on.

  “A what, Dad?” Donald asked. He was bouncing a baseball under the table. Baseballs don’t bounce, but that didn’t stop him from trying.

  My father ignored him and continued reading over the noise. “I am pleased to report that we have a diverse customer list and reasonable expectations of steady growth as the species continues to gain broader acceptance as a test animal. However, we don’t want to limit our viability in the future.”

  “Our what, Dad?” Philip asked. He was using one of the cloth napkins to play tug-of-war with the dogs under the table.

  “He doesn’t want to put all of his eggs in one basket,” I translated.

  Dad nodded. “I have therefore decided that this is an appropriate time to add a new species to Tumblebrook Farm, and I’d like to put that to a company vote.”

  “Not lizards,” Mom said. “Please, for the love of God. Not lizards.”

  “I know. Snakes!” Donald yelped. “Let’s breed boa constrictors!”

  My father had remarkable powers of concentration. He continued as if nobody had spoken at all. “I was considering chinchillas,” he mused. “And I certainly haven’t ruled out the colonization of tree shrews and degus, as these animals seem to be gaining in popularity among researchers. However, given our current facilities and manpower, I have decided that African pygmy goats would be the best possible addition to Tumblebrook Farm in the short term.”

  “Oh, sure, great idea,” Mom said. She stood up to clear away the coffee cups. “That way, I get to take care of them at the barn. Am I right? Admit it. That’s what’s going through your devious little mind.”

  “Sally, please sit down. I’m not finished here,” Dad said.

  “Send me a memo,” Mom snapped. “60 Minutes has already started. Better yet, how about a show of hands, kids? Who votes for an early adjournment, with the discussion to be continued at some future date, after I have a private word with your father?”

  Dad was the only one who didn’t raise his hand.

  MY FATHER’S herd of African pygmy goats consisted of eight does and a buck. Not one of them stood higher than my kneecaps. The does were black and white, with sweet tufted beards and gentle dispositions. But the buck had a devil’s horns and protruding gold eyes with slit black pupils. He patrolled the yard with a drunk’s confident swagger and had a signature stink, like a roadkill muskrat three days old.

  Grandfather built a shed for the goats behind the horse stable. We penned them in at night to keep them safe from coyotes, but the pygmy goats were free to graze the farmyard during the day. The little does were easily spooked by our dogs; they’d bleat in distress and bolt into the pasture if the dogs started barking at them. We’d spend hours beating back the tall weeds in the pasture until we found the witless, stubby-legged creatures and led them back. Dad took no part in any of this. Whenever Mom complained about the goats, he’d remind her that the gerbils were “more than full-time, Sally, since I’m chief cook and bottle washer. Get the kids to help you.”

  About six months after the goats arrived, one of the does was bitten by the buck during a romantic tryst. This love bite caused an abscess in her neck that swelled to the size of a Georgia peach. I cradled the goat in my arms while Mom ex-pertly lanced the lump with a needle. We drained the pus into an empty coffee can until the wound ran clear, and kept the doe in a playpen in our kitchen for several days until she healed completely.

  When she seemed frisky again, I carried the doe back to the barn to reunite her with her sisters. She never made it. Along the way, the dogs jumped up at the goat in my arms, barking furiously, and gave her a heart attack. The goat gasped and died, her head lolling back over my arm.

  The prancing little buck met an even worse end. Mom and I went up to the barn one morning to feed the horses and discovered that he had hung himself in a bucket. He’d tried to take a drink by putting his head through the bucket handle and broke his own neck while twisting to get free.

  “I’m sure it was intentional,” Mom said, surveying the death scene with a sigh. “In any case, that’s it for me. I’m done with goats. You can tell your father that for me at the next company meeting.”

  “Can I have the buck’s body Mom?” Donald asked.

  Mom waved a distracted hand. “Just get it out of here,” she said. “It’s stinking up the stable.”

  Donald carried the buck out of the barn, and I watched him hike across the street to the old dry well and drop the goat into it.

  A few months later, Donald attached a hook to a rope and lowered it down the well to fish out the goat’s skeleton. He sawed the skull off and brought it back to his bedroom, where he put it on his bureau with a couple of Ping-Pong balls painted bright green and glued into the eye sockets.

  REBELLIONS became increasingly commonplace on our farm after that, beginning with my own brothers. Now fifteen, Donald had gotten himself a girlfriend, a bona fide hippie with waist-length blond hair, a wispy voice, Indian-print skirts, un-shaved legs, and a passion for creating her own costumes. Her best effort was a gauzy yellow skirt and top that she’d accessorized by punching holes into pennies and sewing them onto the fabric. She shimmied around our yard in that getup at one of my brother’s parties, clinking and clanking, belly button winking, until Mom made her come inside and have a cup of coffee. Donald began sneaking out of the house every night to pay her a visit, stealing my parents’ car to drive the five miles despite the fact that he was a year short of a driver’s license.

  Occasionally, Donald rebelled against farm chores, too. Once, as he was lying beneath one of the old Triumph roadsters he was always fixing up, Dad asked him to empty the manure cart out at the stables.

  Donald told him to go empty the cart himself. “Or have Holly do it,” he suggested. “She’s the horse nut.”

  “That’s no job for a lady,” Dad reminded him.

  “Well, those
horses weren’t my idea,” Donald said. “I wasn’t born to shovel shit.”

  “I don’t care. I asked you to do something. Now stop whatever dumb thing you’re doing and give me some help,” Dad demanded.

  Donald hammered at a pipe beneath his car without bothering to answer.

  “And that’s an order!” Dad growled.

  The more Dad tried to order him around, the more Donald ignored him, goading my father until he finally threatened to punish him. “I’ll take the belt to you,” Dad said. “See if I don’t.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Donald slid out from under the car and stood up, nearly as tall as my father. “You can’t punish me if you can’t catch me, old man. And we both know you can’t catch me anymore.”

  With that, the race was on. Dad chased Donald around and around the house. Mom heard the commotion and brought out a pitcher of lemonade and some glasses. She and I parked ourselves on the shady patio to watch my father and brother do laps around the farmhouse. Each time he came around to our side of the house, Donald grinned and waved, then disappeared again just as Dad rounded the corner.

  After a few minutes of this, Dad was gasping for breath and nearly limping. “I need a cigarette,” he complained.

  “Here. Have one of mine. Why don’t you sit down?” Mom said, and coaxed him onto the patio for a calming smoke and a cold glass of lemonade.

  Donald went back to his car. But after a few minutes, he joined us on the patio, too. “All that running made me sweat,” he complained. “Now I’m thirsty.”

  Dad shook his head. “Maybe you should join the Navy,” he suggested, while Mom poured out another glass of lemonade. “The Navy will show you how to sweat for real. You should go to Annapolis and have some respect drummed into you.”

  Donald scoffed at this idea. “Why would I want to get up at five in the morning and do push-ups?”

  “Well, then you’ll have to take over the gerbils.”

  “God, no,” Donald said. “I’d rather join the Navy.”