The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter Read online

  We’d also had a pair of horned toads with devil heads. The horned toads were speckled black and white, and you could hardly see them on the aquarium gravel. They weren’t very friendly, either; they’d flatten themselves against the bottom of the aquarium if you tried to pick them up, opening their mouths like they wanted to swallow you whole even though they were only four inches long. The horned toads eventually starved to death because we didn’t ever manage to feed them the right mealworms and they wouldn’t eat anything else.

  There was a lesson in this, Mom pointed out. “It doesn’t pay to be picky if you live in a cage,” she warned as she swept the horned toads with their gravel into the kitchen trash.

  Now she told Dad that she had washed her hands of reptiles forever, and stood up to gather dishes. “Holly, come help me in the kitchen. Donald, if you give that dog one more green bean under the table, I’m going to feed you under the table with him. Get back into your chair.”

  I followed Mom out to the kitchen. “Do you really think Dad’s right?” I asked, as I helped her rinse plates. “Is his gerbil book going to be a big hit?”

  “Well, it’s not like the Beatles,” she said. “Nobody’s going to faint at the sight of it.”

  MY FATHER’S book probably never did make anyone faint, but it did have a long shelf life. Dad wasn’t surprised. “It really is the definitive book on gerbils,” he said with satisfaction.

  It’s true that the pages of How to Raise and Train Pet Gerbils were packed with pithy how-to advice on selecting, feeding, training, and even breeding pet gerbils. But what probably made the book a best seller was a combination of lucky timing, as Dad took care to remind us; his full-color photographs of gerbils at their most beguiling (my favorite showed a gerbil standing on its hind legs next to a miniature stuffed red kangaroo); and his writing, which was nothing like our father’s conversational style.

  At home, we were used to Dad’s barked commands (“Sit up straight!” “Don’t jump on the couch!” “Put your napkin on your lap!” “Be quiet so I can think!”) and ongoing safety seminars (“Never drink out of your glass and walk at the same time;” “Never take a shower or talk on the telephone during a lightning storm”). In my father’s world, accidents didn’t just happen. They were caused by human error. His job was to make us conscientious and cautious, and thus prepared for life’s big curveballs.

  However, in How to Raise and Train Pet Gerbils, my father was generous and funny, acutely observant and understanding of the flaws of others. He also liked to spice up his writing with similes and exclamation marks. In the section about gerbil “locomotion,” for instance, he wrote, “Young gerbils can use their hind legs for jumping by the time they’re weaned. When a cage full of youngsters is suddenly startled, they look like a box of jumping beans scattering in various directions! The owner has owned some which seemed to enjoy doing back-flips!” During a jump, Dad added, the tail “may act like a rudder to help guide the animal through the air.”

  To my shock, Dad also seemed to know that I’d been handling the gerbils. Under “Selecting Pet Gerbils,” he wrote, “Al though the author’s 10-year-old daughter has tamed ‘middle-aged’ gerbils in a few days, it is more desirable to begin training with a younger animal.”

  My father had never spoken to me about his suspicions, so I’d assumed he hadn’t noticed that I was playing with the gerbils. After all, he didn’t know how old I was—I was nearly twelve years old, not ten—and he didn’t even know what class I was in at school, as we discovered when Dad drove to school to pick me up for a doctor’s appointment and came back home again without me, furious because he thought I’d skipped school, since nobody had been able to locate me in the fourth grade. (I was in fifth.)

  After reading that passage in Dad’s book, I waited for him to confront me about playing with the gerbils. He never did. Still, I wondered if he’d written a particular passage under a section labeled “Escapes” just for me. Here, Dad described how to catch a renegade gerbil with a bucket:

  Place a bucket in the room where your gerbil escaped. Make a series of “steps” from the floor up to the bucket lip, using wood blocks or bricks. Put some seeds and bedding on the steps and in the bucket; you can also put the escaped animal’s mate inside the bucket (ensure that the bucket is high enough that the animals can’t jump out). By the next morning your escaped gerbil should be safely in the bucket and ready for return to his cage.

  BY THE time I started sixth grade, we had more than 250 gerbils in our Virginia garage. Dad had added extra shelves for them, and we could no longer park our car indoors. Mom simply waved a hand at nosy neighbors who asked why we always left the cars in the driveway. “Oh, I’ve never been much good at backing out,” she’d say. “And it’s so much easier to bring groceries in through the front door, don’t you think?”

  Dad went back to sea for four months. Donald was hardly around, either; he and his friends had built a fort out of forgotten cement pipes, creating a lid for it out of scrap wood. Lately they’d been busy designing homemade bombs; occasionally, riding my bike around the neighborhood, I’d hear an explosion and know Donald was at work.

  Mom was busy, too. She still trolled the flea markets and had developed a new passion: clocks. We had more than our share of them, all ticking and chiming and bonging and cuckooing as they struggled to keep time. Mom was also such a devotee of the psychic healer Edgar Cayce that she made several trips to Cayce’s house in Virginia Beach and schooled herself in extrasensory perception. We practiced ESP with her, guessing what was for lunch or where she’d hidden her hairbrush, and “seeing” the numbers she pictured in her mind. Mom even arranged for Edgar Cayce’s son Hugh to lecture at one of her champagne brunches for the Navy wives.

  My mother’s ESP fortunately did not extend to the garage, where Marcy and I were personally testing Dad’s new marketing tool for schools and pet shops: a mimeographed handout called “20 Simple, Humane Experiments with Gerbils for Schools or Individuals.” Throughout that fall, we did all twenty gerbil experiments and recorded the results in black laboratory notebooks that Marcy’s mother bought for us at the Navy commissary when we said we needed them for school.

  One of our favorite experiments was #2, “The Senses.” This involved mixing artificial sunflower seeds with real seeds. As my dad instructed in the purple ink of his mimeographed instructions, we meticulously recorded “the degree of success in selection of real food under conditions of normal light and in darkness.”

  Along with being an expert furniture maker, Dad had been carving fake sunflower seeds in his spare time. Marcy and I discovered the wooden seeds, perfect in every detail, cached in a matchbox on his workbench. We fed these decoys to the garaged gerbils, alternately flicking the lights on and off to see what they’d do. Most of the animals seemed happy enough to gnaw on them without actually swallowing; they trimmed those decoy seeds as sharp as pencil points.

  We also tried experiment #3, “Locomotion.” For this laboratory exercise, Dad advised amateur animal scientists to “measure approximate maximum speed of locomotion with an unconfined gerbil in an escape-proof room.”

  Marcy and I eagerly tried doing this with two gerbils, but we failed to measure the speed since the garage proved not to be escape-proof after all. While Marcy stood at the far end of the garage with a stopwatch at the finish line we’d marked in tape, I released our rodent sprinters near Dad’s workshop table. To our dismay, the animals dashed right by Marcy flattened themselves to envelope size, and easily passed beneath the garage door. By the time we raised the door to follow, the gerbils were tumbling like dried brown leaves across the paved road to a neighbor’s neatly edged lawn. We never recovered our subjects.

  After that, Marcy and I retreated to safer experiments, such as #12: “Gnawing Ability.” This required nothing more challenging than giving various groups of gerbils pieces of wood to chew on, recording their gnawing rates, and describing the shapes they made. This was a fun experiment to record, beca
use while most gerbils would chew up just about anything you gave them, a few seemed to understand that this was their chance to shine. One gerbil, in particular, had the soul of an artist, chewing a little and then sitting back on her hind legs to examine her work before going at it again. We went through an entire box of my sister’s ABC building blocks before Mom found out.

  Afterward, we did as my father suggested and made a display out of each “unique wood sculpture” by gluing them into shoeboxes that we’d painted, creating dioramas of gerbil art. Gail was as pleased as we were with the results, but Mom made me babysit around the neighborhood until I’d earned enough money to replace my sister’s set of blocks.

  SHORTLY after Dad returned from sea duty, Donald and I were watching The Jetsons on TV in the den. We were debating whether it would be cooler to have an ejecting bed that could pop you out like a toaster or a vacuum tube that could shoot you off to school when Dad burst into the house from the side door to the garage, flailing his arms as if he were being chased by hornets. His hairless head gleamed as pink and shiny as a dog’s nose.

  “One of the gerbils is having a seizure!” he yelled.

  Mom, who was sitting on the couch with Gail, pulled my little sister closer, as if to prevent her from catching whatever lunatic fever had infected our father. “What do you mean, a seizure?” she asked.

  “Damn it, I don’t know!” Dad called over his shoulder as he jogged down the hallway toward his study. “The animal just started shivering and trembling and twitching its whiskers, and then it froze right up stiff!”

  “Maybe it’s dying,” Mom suggested, just this side of hopeful.

  “I don’t think so,” Dad said.

  He returned a minute later, carrying his camera and hurrying back to the garage, still talking fast. “I picked the gerbil up by its tail, and it flopped around and seemed like it was filled with jelly. But then, a minute later, it started running around like nothing had happened.”

  We all raced into the garage after him to witness the miraculous seizing gerbil, which he’d confined to an empty plastic cage. Dad was right: the animal looked normal. But when he picked it up out of its cage and dropped it gently into another empty cage beside it, the gerbil flattened out and bared its teeth, trembling so violently that I tried to stroke its back to calm it.

  Mom snatched me away by the wrist. “Don’t you dare touch that animal,” she said. “It looks rabid.”

  “It can’t have rabies,” Dad scoffed. “What rabid animal could get into the garage in the middle of the night and bite a gerbil?”

  “A muskrat,” she suggested. “A raccoon. A cat.”

  Dad shook his head. “And bite a gerbil through a plastic cage without eating it for a midnight snack? I doubt it. And it’s not like any of the gerbils could get out of the garage on their own.”

  “Just the same, I’m going inside,” Mom said. “You and the kids should, too. We should get rid of that gerbil before it infects somebody else.”

  She left the garage with Donald and Gail and closed the door firmly behind her, but I stayed behind with Dad. Guiltily, I thought of the gerbils that had escaped while Marcy and I were playing with them. Dad had never noticed them missing because he was at sea.

  I thought about Kinky, too, whose life I had saved when Dad discovered the crook in her tail and called her “a defect.” He wanted to “dispose of her” in the same mysterious way he did with other gerbils that didn’t suit his purposes, an activity he did at night after we were in bed. I assumed that he drowned them in the lake, but he never admitted to this. I had pleaded with him for Kinky’s life, though, and he let her live in a separate cage. I still took her out and brought her into the house to play with now and then. Could Kinky have somehow gotten rabies while she was out of the cage?

  “Are you positive that gerbil doesn’t have rabies?” I asked Dad. The gerbil appeared to have recovered completely, and sat up now on its hind legs to stare at us as we stared at it.

  “Absolutely,” he said. “This animal is simply subject to seizures, like an epileptic,” he explained.

  I knew all about epilepsy because Laura Troisi, a new girl in my sixth-grade classroom, had it. Each time Laura had a seizure, the teacher held her down by the legs while the nurse pressed a tongue depressor between Laura’s foaming lips, shouting, “Don’t let the poor thing swallow her tongue!”

  Once, I’d even been the one chosen by the teacher to hold Laura’s legs until the nurse arrived. I tried hard not to look at Laura’s underpants as she flopped around on the cold tile floor, but I could see that she wore day-of-the-week underpants like mine. As noble as I felt for being the one chosen to hold the afflicted in place, it bugged me that Laura had worn Wednesday underpants on a Thursday. The feel of Laura’s cool fishy skin made me shiver, too, and I had to be brave not to make a face at the nubby feel of the black leg hair stubble sprinkled on her skin like pepper.

  “Maybe some gerbils can get epilepsy, but others can’t,” I suggested. “Like people.”

  “You’re probably right, Holly,” Dad said. “Or maybe all gerbils can have seizures, but it has to be the right combination of environmental factors to set them off. I don’t really know.”

  Even though the gerbil in question appeared completely normal again, Dad kept it in a cage by itself after that, just in case there was something wrong with it. From then on, he spent every free minute in the garage, doing everything in his power to induce seizures in gerbils. When I asked why, he muttered, “This could be my big scientific breakthrough.”

  I liked the sound of that. What if my father wasn’t just a Navy commander with a secret stash of gerbils but a genius scientist, like Einstein or Madame Curie? And, by extension, if Dad was a genius, maybe there was hope for me, even if the art teacher at school had just called me a retard for painting my self-portrait blue.

  Some nights I sat on the stepladder in the garage and watched my father at work until Mom sent me to bed. Dad was so intent on the gerbils that he never acknowledged my presence while engaging in various seizure-inducing tactics: shining lights into a gerbil’s eyes, flicking the garage lights on and off, moving gerbils between cages, or holding them upside down by their tails before flipping them right side up again.

  “About the only thing you haven’t done is yell ‘Boo!’ in their faces,” Mom observed one Saturday morning.

  Afterward, we heard Dad shouting at the gerbils in the garage.

  AS DAD conducted his gerbil experiments with increasing intensity, he also began writing to veterinarians and researchers around the country, searching for someone else who might have made the same observations of this bizarre rodent behavior. Eventually he got lucky. Dr. Sigmund T. Rich, director of the research animal facility at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote back to tell Dad that although he had never seen seizures among the gerbils in his lab, he’d sure like to.

  “Film it for me,” Dr. Rich suggested. “I want to see what you’re talking about.”

  So Dad promptly hung up a white sheet in his office as a backdrop and filmed an 8 mm movie of gerbils having seizures. “This is the first and only such movie in the world,” he told us as he set off for the post office to mail the movie all the way to California.

  “I’m sure it’s unique,” Mom said. “In a class all by itself.”

  I was finally old enough to understand that if Mom said things a certain way, she was really saying the opposite of what she thought, so you’d better listen closely. But despite her doubts about Dad’s genius, Dr. Rich was so impressed by the movie that he encouraged Dad to write an article.

  “But what would you say in an article?” I asked Dad, daring to stand in the doorway of his home office, a sanctuary so off-limits that you couldn’t even borrow a pair of scissors without having to clean out the car as a punishment for crossing the forbidden threshold.

  “I’d just describe what I’ve seen our gerbils do in the garage, I guess,” Dad said. “There are lots of scientist
s who might be interested in that sort of behavior.” He explained that he’d combed through all of the scientific papers he could find about gerbils in the library. “I’ve discovered something that could potentially change the way people do medicine,” Dad said, lifting his chin a little. “No other laboratory animal has natural seizures. For mice and rats and other lab animals, seizures have to be induced through electric shock, sound waves, or vitamin deficiencies. Gerbils are unique.”

  I wasn’t surprised. I’d discovered for myself that gerbils were unique. Kinky knew her name and would take sunflower seeds from my lips. She could find her way through a maze of blocks to whatever bit of lettuce or carrot I’d put there for her. She’d curl up on my shoulder while I read a book, too, and nibble gently at the tips of my hair when she was ready to climb down.

  “That’s great, Dad,” I said. “Maybe you can write a book about gerbil seizures instead of collared lizards.”

  “I’ve already started another book,” Dad said, “and it’s got nothing to do with lizards.”

  That year, Dad self-published a second book, called Raise Gerbils as Pets, Laboratory Animals. In it, he spelled out his dreams for the future:

  A part-time business is, and no doubt always will be, a part of the great “American Dream,” especially if this part-time business can be started at home …. Obviously, no one can predict the future with any degree of accuracy, but it is a fact that gerbils are the newest pets and experimental animals with any amount of popularity or promise since the hamster made his mark in this country about a generation ago. The present and past performances of the gerbil in this regard seem to indicate that he is following in the hamster’s footsteps.