The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter Page 3

  ONE Saturday morning, Dad went off to the Sears, Roebuck in Virginia Beach to buy tools, an odyssey that could take all day. My mother was inside, coloring with Gail, and Donald had done his usual disappearing act after breakfast, probably off to torment the construction workers or hunt for turtles along the marshy lakeshore.

  I slipped into the garage and lifted one edge of the metal lid off the cage of female gerbils I’d been studying for the past week. I didn’t remove the lid completely, for fear the animals might escape. Instead, I slid my arm into the cage and lay my hand flat on the bottom of the cage, palm up. With my free hand, I reached into my pocket to extract the sunflower seeds I’d taken from my brother’s box of hamster food. I lined my palm with the seeds.

  This group of gerbils was nearly full-grown by now, and there was one in particular that I liked because she had a crooked tail like my grandmother’s Siamese cat. I’d named her Kinky, and now I called her to me. “Here, Kinky, Kinky, Kinky,” I whispered.

  Kinky and her sisters ran over to my hand, probably more in response to the alien sight and smell than to my voice, but I liked to imagine that Kinky knew her name right away. Tiny claws tickled my palm as the gerbils sat on my hand and went after the seeds. They didn’t store seeds in their cheeks the way Donald’s hamster did, but ate them on the spot. In no time, the seeds were gone, and before I could remove my hand, Kinky had climbed right up my arm. She was nearly out of the cage before I shook her off.

  The gerbil landed on her back but was unhurt. She immediately scrambled to her feet and sat up on her hind legs, watching me to see what would happen next. “Sorry,” I apologized, and repeated the whole process of sliding my hand into the cage and dropping a few seeds into my open palm.

  It took me two weeks to fully train Kinky. By the time I was finished, I could coax her to climb right up my arm and down my shoulder to search for seeds in my shirt pocket, and I could hold her in the palm of my hand and feed her sunflowers from my lips. She would ride comfortably in my pocket, too, just her little head sticking up to observe her passing surroundings. I’d ferry Kinky in this way from the garage to my bedroom, where I’d let her rampage through my stable of plastic horse statues and sit in my Barbie car.

  Eventually, I felt comfortable enough to ride my bike to Marcy’s house with Kinky in my pocket so that she could join our Star Trek games. We were deep in one such game—I was playing Mr. Spock and using the Vulcan technique of joining two minds to communicate with Kinky by pressing my forehead to hers—when we were interrupted.

  “Girls.” Marcy’s mother was a slim figure silhouetted in the relentless afternoon sunshine beyond the garage. “Holly has to go home right away. Her mother needs her.”

  Stunned, I pedaled home as fast as I could without spilling my gerbil. What could possibly be wrong that Mom would call me home in the middle of a perfectly good Saturday morning? On most Saturdays, Donald and I came home only if we were hungry or it was dark, and sometimes not even then.

  My mouth went dry and I leaned forward over the handlebars, though not so far that Kinky could leap out of my pocket. What if something had happened to someone in my family? I also had more selfish concerns: What if Dad had discovered that Kinky was missing, and knew I’d disobeyed his orders not to touch the gerbils? Or what if he saw Kinky in my pocket when I rode up the driveway?

  As it turned out, I had plenty of time to slip Kinky back into the cage with her sisters. The garage was empty, the big front doors securely shut as usual. I dropped Kinky back into her cage. Then I retraced my steps through the garage and entered the house by the front door.

  I found Mom in the backyard. She stood on the lawn next to the lake, where Dad was dragging Gail’s empty bright blue plastic wading pool across the lawn. “Oh, good, you’re here,” Mom said.

  She held me by the shoulders and looked me up and down, then sent me back inside for a clean blouse. “Wear the red striped one,” she called after me. “I ironed it and hung it up in your closet. Put on a clean pair of shorts and comb your hair, too.”

  This was getting more mysterious by the minute. By the time I returned to the yard Donald was there, too, in an equally stiff shirt, hair combed and slicked to one side, only his sly blue eyes a clue to his real nature.

  Unlike me, Donald had no interest in reading. In fact, he hated any sort of calm. As my mother put it, “Poor little Donald needs more action than he gets.” We lived on a lake, and my brother loved to mix himself a tall glass of chocolate milk for breakfast at 5:00 A.M. before sneaking outside to catch frogs and snakes beneath the dock. He was a petty thief who would try every back door until he could get into a neighbor’s kitchen and help himself to food better than ours. He lifted restaurant tips so fast that waitresses went home shortchanged while Donald always had enough money for Cokes. He even swiped coins from the collection plate at the Lutheran church where Mom sent him alone to Sunday school; we weren’t Lutherans, but Mom sent him anyway hoping that “somebody over there will save that kid’s soul.”

  Donald had a genius for escaping mischief unscathed, which left me as his fall guy. Arguing with Donald was like arguing with a prophet: he always knew he was right. During the short time we’d lived in Virginia, he had already convinced me to lick a frozen pipe and race a newspaper boy on a bicycle, which led to me being run over by the bicycle and breaking my nose. Most recently, Donald had convinced me to climb to the top of a telephone pole, using the same metal rungs the telephone repairmen used, and shimmy down it again in shorts; Mom had to spend an entire evening plucking splinters out of my legs.

  My mother came up to me as I stood there waging war with Donald. She whipped a comb out of her apron pocket and dragged it through my short hair with a heavy, hopeless sigh. My hair was as dry and brown as toast; Mom had to spit on the comb to make the strands lie down. Then she ordered me to stand next to Donald until our father was ready.

  “Ready for what?” I asked, but Mom ignored this and went to sit in the shade with two-year-old Gail, who was dressed in a ruffled blouse. With that outfit and her wild blond curls tamed into ringlets, Gail looked like somebody’s princess doll.

  Donald sidled closer to me as we watched Dad drag the wading pool to first one location, then another, with Tip the fox terrier barking madly at the scraping sound. “You’re stupid,” Donald said, and hammered his fist into my thigh.

  “Not as stupid as you,” I said automatically, punching him back. It was our standard greeting.

  Donald grabbed my arm and pinched it hard. Before I could pinch him back, Dad ordered us to collect toys from our bedrooms and bring them outside. “Anything small,” he added. He was dressed in a white T-shirt and baggy khaki shorts, his pale legs sticking out like straws. A cigarette hung from one corner of his mouth. “Make it quick, before the light changes.”

  Donald, Gail, and I ran through the house as if we were on a treasure hunt. I gathered dolls, plastic horse statues, and stuffed animals. When I brought out my armload of belongings to the yard, Dad commanded me to dump everything on the grass near the wading pool. Donald and Gail did the same.

  Dad selected a few items and began arranging them in the swimming pool, standing back every now and then to squint at his handiwork like an artist with a canvas. Once satisfied, he went into the garage. He returned with one of the gerbil cages and a black leather case.

  Dad lifted a gerbil out of the cage by its tail and dropped it into the wading pool. The animal fell with a plop and froze for a moment, stunned. Then the gerbil began darting through the toys, climbing blocks, digging under stuffed animals, and sitting up on its hind legs to examine one of the plastic horses.

  “Okay, kids. Gather around the pool and look interested,” Dad commanded.

  He moved us closer together. When we were positioned shoulder to shoulder, kneeling beside the wading pool, he lifted a camera out of the black bag beside him.

  “Try to smile, kids,” Mom encouraged, lighting another cigarette from her perch on the shad
y back stoop. She’d poured herself a glass of iced tea, too, so that she could fully enjoy the show.

  For the next few hours, we modeled with gerbils. Every now and then Dad would return the gerbil in the wading pool to its cage and pluck a fresh animal out to drop in its place. I wondered if, to the gerbils, it was like being beamed up on Star Trek. Meanwhile, my brother, sister, and I stared into the pool as if mesmerized by the animals’ antics, which in fact we soon were, given the hot sun beating down on our backs, the fox terrier’s constant yapping, and the fact that our legs and feet soon fell asleep from kneeling.

  “Stop squinting and don’t scratch yourselves,” Dad reminded us now and then as he shot roll after roll of film and moved the props and us around the pool.

  After a while, Dad released us from our penitents’ positions and had us pose individually. He photographed each of us with gerbils on our laps, climbing up our arms, sitting in our pockets, crawling across our shoulders, and staring at us nose to nose. I was so pleased to win Dad’s praise for my ease in handling the gerbils that I nearly told him my secret right then. I wanted to introduce him to Kinky, safely in her cage in the garage. She would be a great gerbil model—and then we wouldn’t have to sell her. But Dad was in such a fugue state of fevered concentration that conversation was impossible. Besides, he would have disapproved of me disobeying his orders.

  Occasionally that afternoon, a gerbil would fall asleep on duty and we’d have to prod it with a finger or a stalk of grass to get it moving again in the wading pool. Toward the end of the session, a gerbil bit Donald’s finger so hard that he began shaking his hand frantically to dislodge its little teeth, which of course only made the animal hang on to the finger with all of its mighty rodent power.

  At this, I laughed until my sides hurt. Dad went pale and ordered my mother to “do something.” Mom, who had grown up on a farm and knew how to bridle a horse, shear a sheep, and throttle a chicken, came to the rescue by pinching the gerbil’s jaws open. There wasn’t nearly as much blood as I’d hoped.

  At last, as the sun was setting and streaks of pink were floating like forgotten scarves along the brackish water behind us, we were released. We ran to the pitcher of lemonade that Mom had put out on the screened porch. Our skin was slick with sweat and our legs were crisscrossed by grass tracks and dotted red from the chiggers. But that didn’t matter, because Dad was pleased.

  “You did a great job today, kids,” he told us, and handed Donald and me a dollar apiece.

  Donald and I were so busy plotting ways to spend our sudden good fortune that we forgot to ask Dad why he wanted so many pictures of us with gerbils.

  IN THE middle of August, Dad shipped off to sea for another four months. We went to see him off at the pier. Mom looked Barbie-doll gorgeous in her white flowered sundress with its full skirt; she even had a red handbag to match her red high heels. Every man in uniform smiled at her, the beautiful dark-haired wife of their ship’s commanding officer, as the sailors in their white uniforms poured like milk up the clanging gray metal ramp.

  It was a typical Virginia summer day, the heat so strong that it cast puddle mirages on the docks. As we waited for the sailors and Marines to board the ship, Donald, Gail, and I pelted rocks at the jellyfish that flowered blue and purple in the water below the pier. The water was a deep frothy green, like liquid spinach, and we took turns pretending to push each other into the ocean.

  Truthfully, the idea of falling into the water terrified me, for Dad’s ship rose out of it like a monolith, and it was easy to imagine being sliced in half by its giant nose. The USS Grant County looked like an enormous car ferry, only instead of sedans and station wagons it carried tanks and giant trucks and Marines. From Dad’s lectures at dinner, I knew that it was 446 feet long, was powered by six diesel engines, had a troop capacity of 706, traveled at speeds of seventeen knots, and had three gun mounts.

  “It’s one heck of a boat,” Dad always said, “and I’m proud to be at her helm.”

  Donald and I occasionally played onboard the USS Grant County that summer, trying out the hideaway beds and metal bathroom sinks scarcely bigger than cereal bowls, and banging our shins on the high oval doorways when we played tag. We sneaked into the forbidden areas, too, like the cargo hold, where we’d hide behind vehicles as big and impossible-looking as dinosaurs, their treads still harboring flattened bamboo stalks from lands I couldn’t imagine.

  On this day, though, Mom wouldn’t let us board the ship. She told us the men were busy getting ready to go to the Mediterranean, “in case there’s a little brush fire somewhere that needs putting out. Those Communists could be hiding anywhere, you know.” The way she said it made me imagine Communists as careless campers who might be thoughtless enough to toss a lighted match into dry brush.

  Dad kissed us all good-bye. As he leaned down in my direction, the brim of his hat hit my nose and we both laughed. Dad kissed my cheek then, and gave my arm a squeeze. “I know you’ll be good for your mother,” he said. “You always are. But I want you to do something for me, too.”

  I nodded, solemn and responsible despite Donald making faces at me from the edge of the dock. “I’ll do what I can, Dad.”

  “Help your mom take care of the gerbils,” he said. “She still doesn’t like them much.”

  “No, Dad. But I do.”

  “That’s my girl.” He kissed me one more time, then turned to my mother and hugged her briefly before making his way up the gangplank without us, his uniform whiter than anyone’s.

  with gerbils that first year in Virginia. The true purpose of my father’s photography sessions was not revealed to us, however, until a box of books arrived one day while we were at school. Dad handed one of the books around the dinner table that night as Mom ladled creamed tuna with peas over the saltine crackers on our plates.

  The book was called How to Raise and Train Pet Gerbils and had my dad’s name on the cover. To my horror, Donald’s picture was on the cover, too. The photograph showed my brother balancing a pair of gerbils in the crook of his arm. He was dressed in a bright blue shirt that set off his blond hair, and the camera added so many pounds that my pickleheaded brother looked nearly handsome.

  The same portrait of Donald lovingly cradling those two gerbils appeared again inside the book, with this noble caption: “The author’s son handles gerbils without fear by either party.”

  On the opposite page, I made my own solo debut in my red-striped blouse, with a gerbil on one shoulder and this humiliating proclamation beneath my picture: “Even girls like gerbils!”

  “They paid me three hundred dollars for this book,” Dad told us proudly.

  “Good thing the models and props were free,” Mom said.

  Dad ignored this. He was busy explaining how his book was part of a popular series published by T.F.H. (Tropical Fish Hobbyist) Publications in New Jersey, a company owned by Herbert R. Axelrod. “That man is one of the world’s last true eccentrics,” Dad added.

  “Not like anybody we know,” Mom said.

  “What does Mr. Axelrod do, Dad?” I asked.

  “When he’s not publishing books, Herb travels to the Amazon to catch new species of fish and names them all after himself,” Dad said. “And when he’s not doing that, he lives on Long Island in a huge mansion with a bomb shelter.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a little mansion,” Mom said, tapping the ashes of her cigarette onto her dinner plate. “Maybe you should write another book for him.”

  Dad had already thought of that. “Herb and I think I should write my next book about collared lizards,” he announced, in a way that made Mom light another cigarette before she’d finished the first one. Meanwhile, Dad informed us that his gerbil book was already “selling like hotcakes,” and we kids should always remember that in business, “the secret of success is timing, just like catching a wave at Virginia Beach.”

  When Mom snorted at this, Dad produced evidence. “The world was ready for my book,” he insisted. “I hit it rig
ht with this one, Sally. Look at these.” He produced a file of newspaper and magazine clippings from his briefcase. Dad often brought his briefcase to the dinner table with him, “just like an Amway salesman,” Mom observed.

  One of the articles, from the April 15, 1966, issue of Time, was called “Happiness Is a Pocket Kangaroo,” and compared gerbils favorably to hamsters.

  “Pets that are fun to play with, easy to care for and that thrive in captivity are hard to come by,” I read aloud to Donald and Gail while my parents argued. “For the past decade, the furry favorite has been the hamster, but it tends to be neurotic, eat its young and bite the hand that feeds it. Now another member of the rodent family has arrived on the scene, warming children’s hands and parents’ hearts wherever its fuzzy face appears. It is the Mongolian gerbil (pronounced jurbill), a ball of fluff only four inches long (plus three inches of tufted tail) that looks and leaps like a vest-pocket kangaroo.”

  The article noted that gerbils were so popular by now that they had even appeared on the NBC children’s program Birthday House and that singer Barbra Streisand had raved about her pair of gerbils on her CBS special.

  In prowling through libraries, Dad had also unearthed a photo spread from the October 13, 1966, issue of the New York Sunday News called “New Look in Pets;” one picture in that series demonstrated a woman holding a gerbil “comfortably” in a wineglass.

  “I’m telling you, Sally,” Dad said, waving his Camel cigarette over his dinner plate. “Everyone is climbing onto the gerbil bandwagon. By the time I write about collared lizards, there’s going to be a hot market for those, too.”

  My parents argued the pros and cons of raising lizards through dinner. Mom was against the idea; she’d been disappointed by too many reptiles in the past. She reminded Dad of Mr. Green Jeans, an iguana we’d named after Donald’s favorite character on the TV show Captain Kangaroo. Mr. Green Jeans was so tame that he would ride on your shoulder even while you pretended your bicycle was a horse. Then Mom turned the heat lamp off in his aquarium to save on electricity bills, figuring the lizard would be warm enough because it was summer. Sadly the air-conditioning froze Mr. Green Jeans to death right on his sleeping branch.