The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter Page 19

Dad looked at me. “I don’t suppose you’ve changed your mind?”

  “No, Dad. Sorry. It’ll have to be Phil,” I told him.

  Dad sighed. “I’ll be dead by then.”

  It was true that Phil was still little. But even at six years old, he was having a few rebellions of his own. He was especially frustrated in school, where he told us that the other children were stupid, “like three grades dumber than me.” Later, an IQ test proved that he was most likely right.

  One day, Mom went to pick Phil up early from the elementary school and discovered that the teacher had tucked my little brother into the basement therapy room with other “special” students after he’d corrected her once too often on her spelling. Phil was finally happy, sewing together leather wallets and comb cases, but Mom yanked him out of that school and sent him on to St. Mary’s Catholic School in nearby Ware, a mill town best known for its motto, “The town that can’t be licked.”

  “Let’s hope the nuns knock some sense into that kid,” she said. “If nothing else, he’ll learn how to pray.”

  The animals, meanwhile, were also raising Cain. In retaliation for the goats, Mom had gone against Dad’s wishes and brought home several pairs of exotic birds. The first to inhabit our stable yard were two pairs of peacocks. This was a mistake. The peacocks had brain-numbingly beautiful feathers but regularly issued cries as earsplitting as the air horns on semi trucks. Mom also bought Chinese golden pheasants and guinea hens; the pheasants were pleasing to have around, like plumes of sunlight beneath the hedges. But the chubby, black-speckled guinea hens terrorized the dogs and children around the barn by darting out at them from unexpected places. After each attack, the birds cackled and regrouped under the bushes again, huddling in wait for their next victim.

  Grandfather had always wanted geese, so he installed half a dozen gray and white geese on the small pond beside the driveway. Grandfather built a little A-frame house for them, complete with fancy gingerbread trim. It looked like a shrunken Swiss chalet. In summer, the goslings sometimes kept my little brother Phil company, leaving their weedy pond to paddle about with my brother in his wading pool.

  Occasionally, we lost a gosling to a snapping turtle. One minute, it would be happily trailing after its mother in the pond. The next, there was nothing but rings of water where the gosling had been dragged under.

  But most of the geese lived long, noisy lives, and they were a menace. Whenever someone parked in the driveway and tried to emerge from the car, the geese gave chase, running neck first, beaks open wide to hiss and show their red snake tongues. We kept a broom by the sundeck in case we needed to beat them off.

  Mom loved sheep, so these were our next acquisition. “Why not sell wool?” she asked Dad one night at dinner. “How hard could that be? All we’d have to do is let them eat what’s already here and shear them once a year.”

  For once, the entire family was in agreement, envisioning a field of fluffy white lambs cavorting in purple clover beside their even fluffier, money-making mothers. What none of us had anticipated was the overwhelming stupidity of sheep.

  We installed a flock of ewes with one ram, white with black ears, and were thrilled to see them grazing in the side yard next to the geese, where handy Grandfather promptly built a sheep shed and a fence. However, the sheep proved to be impossible to contain. They constantly tried to escape through the fence, and we spent hours untangling them from the barbed wire.

  The lambs were born in the spring, and this was fun, except for the bit where we had to wrap rubber bands around their tails to cut off the circulation and make the tails fall off. This tactic was meant to keep the wool around their hind ends cleaner, but not one of us had ever imagined the tedium of having to clean up lamb tail stubs that lay like fat cigarettes all around the sheep pen.

  One depressed ewe refused to care for her twin lambs at all. We brought the wobbly newborns into the kitchen and kept them in a cardboard box lined with towels next to the kitchen table. The lambs were cute, but the novelty of having to bottle-feed them every two hours finally pushed us over the edge. We sold the entire flock of sheep at an auction scarcely a year after buying them.

  “Nobody wears wool anymore, anyway,” Mom sniffed as we helped her lead the sheep out to the truck that came to collect them. “It’s all about polyester these days.”

  GRADUALLY we added more pets to our household. We still had Beau, the black poodle we’d brought from Kansas, and Yankee, our collie/shepherd mix, who my grandparents had kept in Virginia and brought with them to Massachusetts. We rapidly added more dogs until we had a motley pack. Mom picked up Chrissy, a grinning shepherd mix, from a nearby dairy farm, and Donald brought home Sassy, a miniature Yorkshire terrier puppy small enough to tuck into the pocket of his jacket.

  However, Mom still wasn’t satisfied. One day she went out on a long drive by herself with no explanation. She came home with a dog from the pound, a shaggy-haired Russian wolfhound. The dog was cream-colored and pointy-nosed; from some angles it looked noble. From others, it looked like a collie that had been run over by a truck. Mom named him Yuri.

  Yuri had a temper. Twice, the wolfhound bit visitors to our farm, and he would have happily tasted more if Mom hadn’t kept him chained to a post by the back door, from which he lunged at anyone who passed and snapped his long, skinny jaws like a crocodile.

  At about the same time, Mom also developed a passion for parrots. We didn’t have the money to buy one, so she got a yellow-headed Amazon in the same way we acquired most of our animals: for free, from someone who’d gotten tired of taking care of it. Mom named the parrot Max and kept him in a cage next to the kitchen table, where she fed him bits of bacon and egg every morning from her own plate.

  Max and Yuri had twin dispositions. You could only handle Max wearing a thick work glove, and passing Max’s cage required a quick dip of the shoulder to avoid being bitten.

  All in all, between the guinea hens, the geese, the wolf hound, and the parrot, entering our house became a real challenge. Some people might have thought we didn’t want visitors at all.

  blebrook Farm, Dad spent an entire month painting our square house on the hill a deep dirt brown. With so many outbuildings crowded around it, our poor farm now looked like a dark lord’s castle surrounded by a feudal village.

  To this scene my parents added a swimming pool the summer before my senior year of high school. Gerbils paid for that shimmering blue rectangle, which Dad centered smack in the middle of our property between his metal buildings gleaming in the distance and Mom’s stable. My parents spent their summer days tending to their respective animals. Then they retired poolside each evening for cocktails, cigarettes, and summit meetings on neutral turf.

  Other than these evening powwows, Dad rarely approached the pool. He did buy himself a new bathing suit, though, a brown bikini Speedo that matched the house paint and emphasized his heron’s legs and farmer’s tan. I saw him swim maybe twice during my entire adolescence, but he wore that bikini whenever weather permitted. Dad mounted the tractor to mow the lawn in that bathing suit. He washed the car in it. He sawed wood in his Speedo, setting up his table and chain saw close enough to the pool so that flying chips of wood dotted the water’s surface like dead beetles. Dad even put his Speedo on to heave gerbil boxes into the back of the station wagon.

  “I wish to God you’d put some clothes on,” Mom scolded Dad at one point. “You look like a French Canadian tourist in that thing.”

  “Really it’s the most comfortable article of clothing I own,” Dad said. “I’d wear this everywhere if I could.”

  One hot July day, Dad donned his new Speedo and asked me to help him carry his thermal rods. Thermal rods were my father’s newest obsession and business brainstorm; these were six-foot-long black plastic pipes, six inches in diameter and filled with salt crystals.

  “You can install these rods anywhere inside the wall of a building,” Dad told me that afternoon as I helped him ferry a stack of rods from the enorm
ous truckload dumped next to the driveway over to a pile by the riding arena.

  “How do they work?” I asked.

  “When the sun hits the wall, the salt substance absorbs heat and turns liquid, dispersing the heat into tubes,” Dad said. “At night, when the sun goes down, the heat is exchanged into the room as the salt inside the rods solidifies.”

  “So you actually own all of these rods?” I asked, eyeing the towering pile of them. Those rods were longer than I was, and as shiny and black as giant licorice sticks.

  “Of course.” Dad picked up a dozen thermal rods and balanced them across his shoulders. “But only temporarily.” He began walking, in his Speedo and sneakers, toward the riding arena, hunched under the load of rods like an ox beneath a yoke. “I’m an agent for the company that manufactures them.”

  I picked up some of the rods and laid them across my shoulders, as Dad had done, and followed him toward the arena. Dad paused by the garden and spun slowly around to look at me. The rods turned with him. “I can sell thermal rods to anybody who wants them,” he announced confidently. “I expect them to fly out of here. There’s an energy crisis, you know. People won’t be able to get enough of these.”

  With that, Dad was on his way again, slowly maneuvering the rods on his shoulders along the narrow path between the garden and the riding ring, where two women on horseback stopped to gape at the sight of my father, naked but for his brown bikini, totter by with those long black plastic rods balanced across his shoulders.

  BY THE time I was accepted at Clark University in Worcester, Dad had managed to put up his third and last building. Tumblebrook Farm, Home of the Gerbil, now occupied 7,300 square feet of building space, and Dad was indisputably a gerbil czar, the world’s foremost expert on and largest supplier of Mongolian gerbils. He had an inventory of more than 8,700 gerbils, with 2,600 new gerbils being born on our farm every week.

  Dad had outlasted and outsold his competitors. Thanks to the gerbils, he now had a swimming pool and a Lincoln Continental. He could even indulge in an antique coin collection.

  The gerbils also paid most of my college tuition when I headed off to Worcester. To supplement the rest, I took a job as a waitress in Abdow’s Big Boy Restaurant, a landmark in Worcester because of the chubby Big Boy statue out front. Big Boy was decked out in checked pants and an Elvis Presley hairdo, and he bore a giant hamburger aloft like the Olympic torch. I made good money there because Abdow’s was a home away from home for most of the city’s drunks; once, a man handed me a fifty-dollar tip for spraying extra whipped cream onto his strawberry pie.

  The running joke, whenever I came home from college, was to ask if we were rich enough yet for me to quit waitressing. Dad always shook his head and told me that we were still waiting for our ship to come in.

  One weekend, though, he had a different answer. I came into the kitchen and found Mom frying chicken for dinner and Dad seated at the claw-footed oak table with a tumbler of scotch at his elbow. At the sight of me, Max the parrot cocked his head and scoffed like a Russian villain in a James Bond movie.

  “Ah ha!” Max cried. “Ah ha ha ha!”

  “Hey, Max,” I said. “How are you?”

  “Ah ha!” Max screeched even louder.

  Dad rolled his eyes. “If we’re lucky, that bird will die a timely but painless death while we’re on vacation.”

  “You’re going on vacation?” I was so surprised that I stopped in the middle of the kitchen and dropped my bags where I stood. It was a well-known fact that my parents never went anywhere.

  “We all are,” Dad said. “We need to do something as a family.”

  “But why? We never have before.”

  “It’s a celebration.” Dad picked up his scotch and held it up to the light for a minute, turning the glass in his hand. “This year, I made as much money as the governor of Massachusetts. What do you think of that?”

  I sat down. “Wow.” Max squawked and tried to bite my shoulder through the cage. I moved out of his reach. “That’s great, Dad.”

  “Of course, the governor enjoys a few more perks than I do,” Dad added generously. “A mansion. A staff. A secretary. A car at his disposal, and so forth.”

  “Still,” I said. “That’s quite an accomplishment. You must have sold a ton of gerbils.”

  “And you do have a secretary,” Mom said, leaving the stove to come over to the table. “My mother’s right upstairs.” She sat down with us and reached for Dad’s cigarettes. He tried to slide the package back into his pocket, but she was too quick for him.

  “You’ll have to take time off from your job,” Dad informed me.

  “How much time?”

  “Two weeks, starting the Fourth of July.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t do that,” I said. “They count on me. And summer’s the busiest season for tips. I need the money.”

  “You have to come with us,” Mom said. She thought for a minute, and then added, “Of course, depending on where your father decides to take us, I might stay home, too.”

  “That’s not an option,” Dad said. “You both have to go on vacation. And that’s an order,” he added, smiling.

  “But I’ll get fired!” I protested. “Waitresses don’t ever get vacations. Besides, I just barely memorized the prices on the menu and learned how to carry six hot plates without a tray.”

  “All useful skills, I’m sure,” Mom said.

  “Quit your job,” Dad suggested. “That way they can’t fire you.”

  I didn’t quit, but I lied. When I went back to work that Sunday, I told the manager, a scrawny woman whose white hair net hung like a cobweb over her ears, that my little brother Phil had a life-threatening blood disease and would probably be dead by summer’s end.

  “My family needs me to spend time with them,” I said. “Two weeks.”

  The manager sighed, unimpressed. “Call me if your brother doesn’t die,” she said. “I’ll put you back on the schedule.”

  FOR our first and only family vacation, Dad couldn’t bring himself to pay for a motel despite his governor’s salary. Instead, he called us outside early on the day of our departure and said, “Surprise! We’re traveling in style!”

  An RV was parked in our driveway, the sort of camper that’s one step up from a plumber’s truck, with a bed over the cab and built-in furniture designed for leprechauns.

  “It’ll make Phil happy,” Dad said as Mom, Donald, and I squinted in disbelief at the refrigerator on wheels that he assured us would sleep eight to ten people. “You know how crazy he is about campers. I told Phil that this is his birthday present. And there’s room enough for each of you to bring a friend.”

  “Maybe if we tie our friends to the roof,” Donald said.

  Phil popped out of the RV door just then, banging metal against metal. “There’s a bed over the steering wheel!” he yelled. “Can you believe it?” He was turning eight years old that August and was easily entertained.

  “I am not going anywhere in that tin can,” Mom announced.

  “Oh, come on, Sally,” Dad said. “Where’s your sense of adventure? This camper has a fully equipped kitchen!”

  “Exactly my point.” Mom sniffed. “Camping is all about chores. And we know who does the chores around here.” She turned around and started walking back toward the house. “You go,” she called over one shoulder. “Take the kids with you. Now, that’s what I’d call a vacation.”

  Mom hid in the house while we helped Dad load up the camper with canned goods, linens, clothes, more canned goods, a TV, and a grill. We had enough Dinty Moore canned beef stew to feed a ship full of Navy men.

  Eventually, Dad went inside “to have a little talk with your mother.” Phil climbed back into the camper to line up his stuffed animals on the bed above the cab while Donald and I lolled around on the grass, waiting for whatever would happen next.

  Donald was easier to get along with since his near-death experience earlier that spring on a snake-hunting expedition t
o Belize. He’d driven to Central America in a caravan of high school students led by a guide with a guitar instead of a sense of direction. The guide had crashed their van into a truck full of rocks. While Donald’s travel companions suffered from lacerations and broken bones, my brother was clever and agile enough to dive under the dashboard just before the accident; his only injuries were bruises in the shape of the radio knobs.

  “Why do you think Dad’s trying to make us all go on vacation?” I asked him now. “It’s kind of weird, isn’t it? Maybe he’s having a midlife crisis.”

  “Nah. That was the Lincoln Continental,” Donald said.

  “Do you think he’s feeling nostalgic because you’re about to go to college?”

  “The family is the pillar of society,” Donald pronounced. “Ours might be a shaky pillar, but it’s still standing. I think Dad’s trying to save his marriage by taking a week off from the gerbils.”

  “He might as well have bought Mom another vacuum cleaner for her birthday, like last year,” I said. “I can’t believe he’s going to try to put her in a camper.”

  “It’s the Navy thing,” Donald said confidently “Dad just loves being shut up in a metal container. He can’t understand why nobody else wants to be in there with him.”

  Eventually, Dad prevailed. Mom marched back outside, fiercely smoking a cigarette, her purse dangling over one arm. Dad followed. His face was paler than usual. Donald and I took one look at our parents and scrambled into the camper.

  Our destination was Prince Edward Island, Canada, a road trip that would take us through New Hampshire, Maine, and New Brunswick. Our first stop was early that evening at a lake in New Hampshire, where Mom stood at the water’s edge and refused to swim.

  “See that?” she asked me, gesturing with her chin at the line of tubby women in sensible bathing suits standing waist deep in the water while their kids splashed around them like golden retrievers. “You know those women and kids are all peeing in the water. You might as well swim in a public toilet.”