The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter Read online

  Now Dad ordered me to keep the garage door shut good and tight, too. “The neighbors don’t need to know our business.”

  Later, when I asked Mom why the gerbils were so top-secret, she sighed. “Raising gerbils in your garage is very un-Navy behavior,” she explained. “Just do as your father says.”

  “But doesn’t it bother you when Dad goes out to the garage every night after dinner?” I asked.

  “Not really.” Mom shrugged. “Some men have golf. Mine has gerbils.”

  NO MATTER how closely I watched them, I could never be sure when the gerbils were having sex. One would jump on top of another and there would be a scramble, but that could as likely happen in a cage of young males vying for leadership as it could between a breeding pair in the mood for love. I just knew that the gerbils were making babies. Within a month, all but one of Dad’s original pairs had a litter; within two months, they’d bred again and Dad was setting up cages for new pairs out of the first litters.

  Telling the difference between male and female gerbils was easy, Dad said. One Saturday, while I was helping him fill water bottles, he held a pair of gerbils up by their tails to show me how the females had two touching buttons and the males had theirs separated with a bulge to either side. It didn’t seem to matter which one you picked as a mate for any particular gerbil, either; any couple would happily make a nest together.

  What would make a Navy officer sitting on a ship in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea consider raising gerbils in his garage? By late spring, when the shelves along the back wall of our garage were half filled with cages, it finally occurred to me to wonder.

  “Why do you want so many gerbils, Dad?” I asked one morning as I helped wash his car, taking care to scrub dirt off the wheel wells with a toothbrush just as he’d shown me. My father cared for his cars the way he cared for his ship: everything had to be spit-shined and tuned up and sparkling. Unfortunately for his family, we were his only crew.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said absently. “I might sell some as pets, or maybe write a book about them. You know, I can’t find a thing about gerbils in the library.”

  I reported this exciting news to my mother later. She was in the kitchen with her mother, Maybelle Keach, and she was not impressed. Mom was such an animal lover that we’d had pet mice, turtles, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, dogs, cats, and even lizards through the years. Yet she still couldn’t find room in her heart for gerbils.

  “It’s those damn rat tails,” she told me. “I just can’t overlook those tails.”

  My mother had graduated from the University of Maine with a degree in Romance languages and was offered jobs with the UN as an interpreter and at Pan Am as a flight attendant, but she’d chosen my father instead. She was determined to make a go of being a wife and mother and threw herself into every domestic task with an overabundance of energy and intelligence.

  At the start of our lives in Virginia, she had gone on an antiquing kick, painting our furniture Colonial blue and then streaking it black. On the morning that I spelled out Dad’s plans for writing a book about gerbils, hopping from one foot to the other in my excitement, Mom was engaged in a brand-new hobby: decoupage. Each day, another piece of furniture in our house was graced with a magazine picture shellacked to its surface.

  “Honest to God,” Mom said, and began to furiously slap a fresh coat of varnish onto an end table, where she’d glued a picture of pink roses in a white pitcher. “What will that man think of next? This is one little hobby that I wish he’d outgrow in a hurry.”

  Grandmother beckoned me over to the kitchen table and made me sit down. She was peeling potatoes for dinner, and it was high time I learned how, she said. “At your age, I was fixing dinner for my entire family.”

  Grandmother had sold her gift shop and moved from Maine to Virginia to be closer to us, and she was trying hard to help Mom raise us “the way we should be raised.” She was British and was always dressed for an outing, in case the opportunity arose. She was fond of reminding us that her father had once guarded Queen Victoria’s jewels. That day, she wore a cotton button-down green shirtdress with a white belt. Her hair, as always, was freshly curled and, as she’d told me once in a fit of pride, “Titian red.” Despite her careful appearance, though, she was always doing something useful, usually in the kitchen. Her potato skins came off in a single swirl of peel, like brown ribbons unraveling into the white ceramic bowl. My own were more like fingernail cuttings.

  Grandmother kept a close eye on my peeling progress while she addressed my mother. “You never can tell, Sally,” Grandmother said. “It’s possible that Robbie could make some pocket money with the gerbils.” She and my mother were the only ones who still called my dad “Robbie,” a nickname he’d earned for his last name, Robinson, during his Annapolis days.

  “I can’t imagine that gerbils will ever be much of a craze,” Mom said. “Look at them! And they’re eating us out of house and home.”

  “Has he sold any at all?” Grandmother asked.

  “Oh, a few here and there to pet stores. But you heard Holly. Now he’s talking about writing a book!” Mom shook her head. “A book! Who in his right mind would ever want to read a book about gerbils?”

  Grandmother said, “Well, just you be grateful that gerbils aren’t chickens. We had hundreds of chickens when you were growing up, Sally, remember? All of them flapping and clucking and crowing until I thought I’d go out of my mind.”

  “Of course you have to defend the gerbils,” Mom sniffed. “It’s all your fault that we have them. If you hadn’t shown Robbie that damn article about gerbils in Newsweek, I wouldn’t have a bunch of Mongolian pocket kangaroos living in my garage.”

  “The gerbils are quiet, though,” Grandmother reminded her. “You don’t even know they’re in the garage. Be glad of that, Sally.”

  IT WAS true that buying gerbils was really Grandmother Maybelle’s idea. She’d come across an article about gerbils in the December 27, 1965, issue of Newsweek magazine and showed it to Dad. “I thought the kids might like these,” she told him.

  Later, after our first pairs of gerbils were installed in the garage, I asked Dad if I could see the article. The brief feature, “Here Come the Gerbils,” began by asking, “Will Mongolian gerbils take over the world? The long-tailed bright-eyed rodents may weigh less than 3 ounces, but they are off to a good start. This Christmas the gerbils … are already challenging hamsters as the favored pet.”

  According to that article, Creative Playthings president Frank Caplan had initially offered gerbils for sale “as a jest” and was amazed by the response. Gerbils apparently started to fly off the shelves the minute he advertised them.

  “We had to tell the breeder to work overtime for Christmas,” Caplan is quoted as saying, despite the gerbil’s “slight resemblance to the mouse-rat family,” an unfortunate association that he admitted “may prejudice some mothers” against them, as it had mine.

  It would be inaccurate to say that my father read that article and saw an easy buck in gerbils. More to the point, he was fascinated by them, and knew this would be a self-sustaining hobby if he could breed the gerbils and sell them to pet stores.

  And breed they did. Our Virginia garage seemed to be the perfect gerbil hothouse, with new litters appearing every four weeks. Soon we had nearly two hundred gerbils.

  I’d never seen anything being born before, so I loved to watch the babies appear. Most gerbil mothers had four to six babies, but sometimes they’d surprise me and have only one or up to ten. The birthing mothers would race around the cage, seemingly frantic. Then they’d suddenly freeze in place, a look of absolute concentration on their faces as a baby emerged, pink and blind and squirming. It was like the most amazing magic trick in the world. Or like spring: one minute there was only dirt, and the next you’d see a purple crocus.

  Once in a while, a mother would help the birth along by reaching between her hind legs to pull out the pup with her paws or teeth. Then she�
��d eat the goo surrounding the baby, a process that made me nearly gag but fascinated me anyway.

  Certain gerbil moms delivered their pups in a tidy pile, while others dashed madly around the cage as if being chased, dropping babies all over creation. Then, when it was over, these mothers would resolutely dig their babies out of the shavings and drag them over to a nest, usually in a corner, where the babies would peep like newly hatched chicks. The disconsolate fathers watched this process from a distance and slept alone for a few days, but otherwise seemed unbothered by parenthood.

  As I watched the pups wiggle around in search of their mother’s milk, I couldn’t help but compare them to my sister, Gail. She had arrived in our lives just as red-faced and bald and squinty as a gerbil pup. My mother must have given birth to all of us, I reasoned, though I couldn’t imagine Mom pulling off that goo with her teeth. Now I wondered why she hadn’t nursed Gail.

  Finally I asked. “Mom, couldn’t you have fed Gail yourself, instead of giving her bottles?”

  Mom was frying hamburger patties, which she’d serve with mashed potatoes and a nice thick gravy of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup. She rolled her eyes at me from her post by the stove.

  “You’ve been reading too many books about Africa,” she said. “You can try that with your own babies if you want, but I prefer to think of myself as civilized.”

  as Mom saw it, was to raise independent children. She was a strong proponent of the idea that children should amuse themselves, so unless we were stuffed into the back of the car for family trips, where we rattled about like loose change, we were blissfully free of parental supervision even when we might have preferred their company. Just before our move to Virginia, for instance, Dad had kept a cabin cruiser on Chesapeake Bay. At cocktail hour, our parents would strap Donald and me into life jackets, hitch us onto ropes, and drop us into the water. They made sure to hoist up the ladder as we paddled and bobbed like bright orange ducklings around the boat. I was happy enough, but scrawny Donald was miserably blue-lipped with cold in minutes. He’d mewl at Mom to let down the ladder, but she’d lean over the boat railing to gaze down at him with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, shaking her head.

  “Just a few more minutes, kids,” she’d say. “Your father and I need some time to ourselves.”

  One day, when I complained about being friendless in our new Virginia neighborhood, Mom told me to stop moping. “Moping never helped anything. You know it’ll all be better before you’re married. Find something to do. Go watch TV or read a book.”

  I’d lost interest in television. Dad hadn’t wanted to pay for a color set like our neighbor’s, so he’d bought a $2 strip of tri-colored plastic. The colors on the plastic sheet ran in strips, with green on the bottom, pink in the middle, and blue along the top.

  “There,” he’d announced. “Color TV without the cost.”

  Mom wasn’t convinced. “I don’t know. Everyone has pink eyes,” she pointed out. “They look like albinos.”

  Trying to follow the action of the Lone Ranger through the blurred edges of the color strips made me seasick, so I stopped watching television completely and read more than ever. Every home movie of me in Virginia starts with me reading in a corner until a big pair of adult hands grabs the book away and I’m forced to look up at the camera, blinking and tipping my head like a startled chicken.

  As spring edged toward summer, however, I finally found a friend of my own. Marcy Cahill and I met when we were both forced into Girl Scouts. My mother was an overzealous troop leader who led us on sweaty hikes through the Norfolk Botanical Garden and invited a “hygiene lady” to our meeting to explain why it was essential for girls “to wipe from front to back, always front to back, following urination,” until Marcy and I about peed right in the kitchen from laughing.

  Marcy and I fit together like bookends. Both of us were readers and animal lovers and Star Trek fans, to the point where we dressed in identical blue jeans and red turtlenecks to look like crew members of the starship Enterprise. This behavior did little to enhance our popularity at school, but we went ahead and built our own starship Enterprise out of cardboard boxes in Marcy’s garage.

  Because Marcy was my best friend, I knew I had to show her the gerbils. After all, Marcy and I had cut our fingers and rubbed our blood together to be sisters after a Girl Scout sleepover, the morning after discovering that the other girls had dipped our underpants in water and frozen them in the camp freezer. I just had to wait until the right moment, when Dad was at sea and wouldn’t know I’d disobeyed orders.

  As it turned out, though, I didn’t wait that long. One May morning, Marcy and I decided to marry my guinea pig, George, to Marcy’s rabbit in my backyard. We had to struggle to get George into the bow tie I had made for him out of one of Mom’s red checked dish towels. Marcy’s rabbit was already white as a bride, so all we had to do was weave a dandelion crown and hang it over her ears. This would’ve been easier if her ears hadn’t already been pasted flat to her head, the result of our fox terrier, Tip, barking so hard at us from his chain that he was hopping up and down as if he were being stung by bees. Tip’s biggest goal in life was to swallow another animal whole.

  Dad was outside with us. My father never sat still. Every night, after watching the news about Vietnam, he would burn up excess energy by conducting booming, fierce military marches he played on the hi-fi, using his Camel cigarette as a baton. He also made good use of his workshop. In addition to building a pair of miniature pine thrones for either side of the fireplace, he’d found a giant cable spool by the side of the road and somehow got it home, where he sanded it, varnished it, and then rolled it into the house with a thundering sound on the wood floors that made Tip bark and Gail cry. We used the spool as a coffee table, even though Mom complained that it was like having a redwood growing in the den.

  Since spring, Dad had spent his free time outdoors, first building a screened-in porch and then turning his attention to landscaping. Our backyard resembled a miniature forest because of the tiny trees Dad had planted everywhere, most of them willows and poplars. The white paint on those skinny trunks made it seem like we were growing a crop of canes for the blind. Now he was digging another hole.

  Marcy whose father outranked mine and who had a teen age sister who sat out in the yard and smoked marijuana for all the world to see, wasn’t the least bit afraid of my father. Never mind that Dad, if he wasn’t actually issuing orders to us or informing us of something, was prone to such long silences that it was like he didn’t see you at all. Marcy stood up, leaving her rabbit in my lap with George, and walked right over to him.

  “What in Sam Hill are you doing, Commander Robinson?” Marcy asked, standing with one hand on her hip like she was already a grown-up, even though the backside of her shorts was covered with grass stains and her white anklets had half disappeared into her sneakers.

  My father, unaccustomed to being interrupted, did not pause in his digging to correct her language. However, because Marcy’s dad outranked him, he did answer her. “Whatever do you mean, Marcy?”

  “Why are you planting all these trees?” she demanded.

  Dad shrugged and continued to dig. “Somebody will move into this house when we move out, right?” he asked her. “And don’t you think they’d enjoy a little more shade than we’ve got?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Dad nodded, but it was as if he were nodding to himself, because he still didn’t look at Marcy “I guess you might say I’m planting for the future, then,” he said. This phrase seemed to please him, because he lit another cigarette and then started digging harder, as if his white T-shirt weren’t already see-through with sweat.

  Marcy traipsed back over to me, her short black hair so straight and stiff, the edges of it stroked her jaw on both sides like paintbrushes. “Your dad is crazy,” she said admiringly. “Just plain crazy.”

  I took a deep breath, encouraged by my best friend’s daring. “He has a secret, too,” I
whispered as Dad pushed the wheelbarrow with its lone occupant, a sapling the size of my arm, down toward the lakeshore. “Come on. I’ll show you, but you have to swear not to tell anyone.”

  I led Marcy by the hand to the side door of the garage. She was carrying her rabbit and I held my guinea pig on his back like a baby in my arms, so getting the door open was tricky. I finally managed to push it open. We slipped into the cool garage and I closed the door immediately behind us. I stopped and blinked in the sudden dark, and we both stood perfectly still for several moments to keep from walking into things.

  “What’s that scratching sound?” Marcy whispered.

  “My dad’s new pets,” I whispered back. We edged around our turquoise Buick toward the back of the garage. My eyes were getting used to the light, which mainly came from the two windows in the garage door, a pair of dusty slits.

  When we reached the metal shelves that now ran along the back and both sides of the garage, I flicked on the light so that Marcy could see the towers of gerbil cages. I fervently hoped that Dad wouldn’t suddenly come around to the front of the house and realize the light was on. I was disobeying orders for sure.

  Marcy’s dark eyes went wide. “What are they?” she asked.

  “Shhh. Whisper,” I reminded her. “They’re gerbils from Mongolia. Gerbils are a kind of kangaroo rat that lives in the desert. Dad calls them pocket kangaroos because they can jump.”

  We stood in silence as the animals went about their business. Every so often, a gerbil would bound around, knocking against the sides of its cage, or a baby would squeak. By now, Marcy was making little panting noises of excitement, like our fox terrier when he saw the gerbils.

  I knew one more trick. “Watch this,” I said, and clapped my hands smartly together. The sound startled George the guinea pig—he squealed, and I almost dropped him. Marcy’s rabbit thumped her feet, so Marcy had to hang on to her by the scruff of her neck. But it was worth it: in the dim light, I could see that the gerbils had all frozen upright on their hind legs, heads turned toward us as if we were the movie and they were the audience.