The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter Page 5

  Even now, decades later, it’s hard for me to shake that absurd image of a gerbil following in a hamster’s footsteps. Yet, I recognize the real truth underlying my father’s words: nobody can predict the future, but somewhere between ordering his first four pairs of gerbils and writing those lines, my dad bet our family’s entire future on the gerbil.

  home from working on his ship one night and gathered us in the den for a family meeting. He instructed Donald and me to sit on either side of the fireplace in our handcrafted pine thrones, while Gail colored at the giant cable spool that Dad had so cleverly turned into a coffee table.

  By the envelope that Dad held between his hands, we knew he’d gotten his orders. For military families like ours, this was like Oscars night, since you never knew what that envelope contained. We all tried to sit still and be quiet as Dad began his usual speech about his duty to this great country and ours, too.

  However, none of us was fully prepared for what the envelope contained. “When summer comes, this family is shipping off to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas,” Dad announced.

  “Kansas?” Mom repeated, like he’d said “Mars.” “What the hell is the Navy doing in Kansas?”

  “Teaching the Army about the Navy,” Dad said.

  Dad sounded matter-of-fact about this, but I could tell by the pinched look around his blue eyes and the way he crumpled up the envelope and tossed it into the fireplace that he wasn’t happy about this new tour of duty. Nonetheless, he explained that the Navy was asking him to teach Army officers what the Navy could do for them during wartime at the Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth. “Given the events in Vietnam, Army officers have to be prepared to fight in wide-ranging circumstances,” he told us, “from counterinsurgency attacks to full scale nuclear war. My job is to help teach them how.”

  So, in a peculiar sort of military Noah’s ark, Dad was chosen as one of just three Navy officers assigned to Fort Leavenworth in 1967, along with three Marines and three Air Force officers. He had already served in the Korean War and visited ports and cities in more than thirty countries around the world. Now Dad sold our house in Virginia Beach and drove us to Kansas.

  It was a miserable trip. By the time we left, it was July and so hot that our legs burned on the car seats even through the towels Mom gave us to sit on. Our white Ford Galaxy had no air-conditioning, so we were forced to ride with the windows down. We couldn’t hear much or even keep our eyes open because of the wind and exhaust on the highway. Our parents chain-smoked throughout the drive, which meant that the smoke streamed steadily into the backseat.

  At twelve years old, I suffered from such severe motion sickness that I was fed a steady diet of Dramamine. The drug turned me into a drooling narcoleptic. I woke up each time Donald pinched my leg, punched my arm, or ripped the book out of my hands, only to nod off again, my chin bouncing against my chest, until the blows accumulated and made me cry.

  Once Mom turned around to snap at me in the car. “What in the world are you crying about?” she asked. “I can’t understand why you’re always so emotional, Holly. There’s no need for this fuss. You know what it’s like to move. Crying only makes things worse for all of us.” She turned back around and said something I couldn’t hear to my father.

  It was true that I could remember what it was like to move. I had clear memories of all the places we’d lived, starting with our terraced gardens in Mexico City, where Dad was the naval attaché at the American embassy and did something mysterious with maps and Mom was a smash hit at parties in sparkling cocktail gowns that made her look like a mermaid. After that, there’d been a little red-shingled house and another, more solid brick house and several places in between. It didn’t matter where I was, because I was at home with my family.

  But I was older now, and it wasn’t the house that I’d miss but the people and animals that had been woven into the fabric of my life in Virginia Beach. Marcy had become a second sister to me, and I was leaving her behind. My grandparents were staying in their apartment in Newport News. I didn’t have my guinea pig, George, for comfort because my parents hadn’t let me bring him; George was now living in a cage next to Marcy’s rabbit. My parents had sold Tip and left Yankee, our newly adopted collie/shepherd, with our grandparents. The gerbils were all sold to pet stores or given away to schools, even Kinky, before Dad hosed out the garage and watered his little trees one last time. My whole world had been pulled out from beneath me like a scatter rug.

  “Baby baby baby,” Donald sang in my ear, pinching me as hard as he could, leaving red welts on my bare legs as the Summer of Love brought three hundred thousand protestors against the Vietnam War to New York.

  Our family was in no mood for love-ins. Mom turned off the car radio and shook her head over the news of antiwar demonstrations not just in New York, where you’d expect that sort of thing, but all over the country, too. “Those dirty hippies,” she said. “What do they know about duty?”

  “They’ll never last,” Dad agreed.

  Our only stop before Kansas was my father’s childhood home in Ohio, where Donald and I slept in the stifling, slope-roofed attic room that had once belonged to Dad and his younger brother, Pete. The room was still full of fascinating relics: arrowheads and stamp collections, books on insects and BB guns, and the detritus of a boyhood spent dreaming of a world where every question has an answer.

  THE oldest of three children, my father was born to Donald and Rebecca Robinson on April 21, 1928, in Montgomery, Ohio, a place that Dad always said had more churches than stores “because there’s nothing to do there but plant your crops and pray.”

  According to my grandmother Robinson’s diary, which I read many years after she died, “little Don-Don too often cuts up high jinks.” By age two, my dad had reached the point where he “jabbers all day, says ‘no’ to everything,” and “is always asking ‘What’s that?’” He “pulled the butterfly table over on him” one day “burned his fingers on the oil stove” the next, and managed to pry the cover off an electrical outlet, earning an electric shock for his curiosity.

  While noting that “Don-Don has learned to spit—also lots of other things,” Grandmother Robinson revealed her survival strategy, which turned out to be the same one I use now with my youngest son Aidan: “I try to keep Don-Don outside as much as I can.”

  What sort of twisted path would lead such a child into gerbil farming instead of into other, possibly more logical career options, such as dynamiting bridges?

  Here’s where the nurture part of the nature-versus-nurture debate comes in: children absorb every experience that comes their way, but only some stick. You can’t tell until years later which childhood experiences will become permanent features of their interior landscapes as adults.

  In my dad’s case, he experienced early on that raising animals at home could be profitable. One of his childhood neighbors in Ohio, Frank Maxfield, was a chemist employed by Procter and Gamble who raised mice, rats, hamsters, rabbits, and guinea pigs in a blue barn behind his peak-roofed farmhouse. Maxfield sold the animals to research scientists at various institutions. My father played with Maxfield’s children and envied their extra spending money. He longed to live more like they did. Or, even better, like the Fleischmann family, whose palatial Yeast Estate was just down the road.

  Dad’s own family lived in a modest white box of a house next to the railroad tracks. Once a week, the steam engine ran behind the Robinson home from Montgomery to Blue Ash, making it a natural stop for ragmen and train tramps who begged for food at the kitchen door. Before World War II, Dad’s father ran a gas station, where he was once stabbed with an ice pick and another time kidnapped and taken out to a field, where the robbers poured whiskey down his throat and took his money.

  Once the war started, Grandfather Robinson worked on an assembly line at the Wright Aircraft Factory. As a boy, my dad used to lie in bed at night and listen to the steady zoom-zoom sound of aircraft engines being tested, a sound that steadily fed
his fantasies about joining the military.

  By the time Dad hit high school, he was earning his own way by delivering newspapers and working in the local drugstore. The pharmacist trained my father to compound prescriptions, and by age sixteen Dad could fill them on his own. He used down time between customers to mix up his own gunpowder, wrap it in aluminum foil, and lay these delicious little dynamite capsules under the streetcar tracks at regular intervals, so that it sounded like a machine gun firing when the trolley went by.

  Dad had his own pets—he was especially fond of white mice—but he longed to be a world-famous explorer like Martin Johnson and bring back new species “from darkest Africa.” Johnson, who left home at fourteen to work on a cattle boat, later became the first filmmaker to capture classic aerial scenes of giraffes and elephants stampeding across the African plains. My father watched Johnson’s movies by sneaking into the local drive-in movie theater on foot, but the closest he came to being Martin Johnson was a mail-order taxidermy course he took in high school that cost him $12 of his hard-earned drugstore money. Completing his taxidermy assignments required walking up and down the rural roads of Ohio to find dead birds and animals. Dad enthusiastically ordered the accessories he needed to complete his projects—squirrel skulls and birds’ eyes—through catalogs, just as he would order his first gerbils more than twenty years later.

  My father’s thorough understanding of animal physiology and anatomy would come in handy like when he was making his own mini-documentaries of gerbils suffering seizures in our Virginia garage. First, though, Dad had to escape the confines of Montgomery, Ohio.

  Love led him to join the Navy. Dad’s high school sweetheart was a fair-skinned, blue-eyed beauty named Ann Lloyd, whom he called “Angel Eyes.” Ann and her family represented everything my dad longed to achieve. Ann’s father, John T. Lloyd, owned Lloyd Pharmaceutical Company, which had made it big with Chigger-Ease. Her grandfather, John Uri Lloyd, was not only a research chemist but also a best-selling novelist. The family owned a vacation home with an in-ground pool—a rarity in Ohio back then—and a horse stable.

  Before their high school graduation, a friend suggested that my father go to West Point. Dad took this idea to heart: West Point offered horsemanship classes, and Dad was bent on convincing Ann that he was worthy of her. He knew horses were the way to her heart. At the time, however, West Point had no vacancies, so my father’s congressman nominated him to the Naval Academy instead.

  Dad was admitted to Annapolis despite the fact that he couldn’t swim and had never even seen the ocean. The Navy wasn’t in my father’s plans, but it was his ticket to adventure. He eagerly left Ohio and set forth to serve his country.

  In return for his service, the Navy led him straight back to love. My mother’s older brother, Donald Keach, joined the Navy and met my father during the Korean War, when both were young officers on the USS John R. Pierce. When my uncle Don was injured by gunfire on the Pierce, it was my father who was sent to accompany him home to Maine, where Dad met my mother.

  “It was love at first sight,” Dad still says, “just because of the way your mother looked up at me and laughed with those brown eyes.”

  At the time, Mom was a senior at the University of Maine and dating several different men. “Those were the days when every girl had just one goal, and that was to get married,” she explained to me once. “Marriage was our very reason for being.”

  Men in the military had a certain aura, she said, and Dad had seen enough of the world to seem confident and decisive. He also had a movie star’s height and lean physique, a strong jaw, blue eyes, and tight curls of sandy hair. To add to his appeal, after their first date, Dad went back to sea and wrote my mother “a drawerful of beautiful letters.” She had graduated from the university by then and was working for a Maine newspaper while deciding between job possibilities at the UN, Pan Am, and the BBC in London.

  “If you want to see the world, I’ll show you the world,” Dad promised during his next shore duty—officially, their third date—and confessed that he’d been thinking of asking her to marry him.

  “Well, are you going to ask or aren’t you?” my mother wanted to know.

  Dad, forever the prepared Boy Scout, immediately pulled a little blue velvet bag out of his pocket and showed her the diamond inside it. “How do you want it set?” he asked.

  “When I told him I wanted platinum, he gasped a little, but that’s what I got,” Mom told me. “Don’t ever be afraid to ask for what you want in life.”

  flat, dry, tornado- and witch-plagued land I knew from The Wizard of Oz. This Kansas was green and hilly and much prettier than the swampy Tidewater region of Virginia that was rapidly dimming in my memory as we drove mile after mile away from it. We’d been in the car forever, and so we were excited to arrive, especially when Dad explained that there were Indians living nearby. Donald imagined being scalped while I daydreamed about owning a silver horse like the Lone Ranger and having a best Indian friend of my own, one who rode a pinto pony bareback and warned me of dangers on the road ahead.

  Mom, though, was not happy. She wasn’t accustomed to spending so much uninterrupted time with Dad. Whenever they fought about something—usually his driving—she’d threaten to get on the next Greyhound bus traveling in the opposite direction. Being from Maine, she also viewed the Midwest as provincial and said she couldn’t imagine living here, especially stuck on a fort surrounded by Army families.

  “But what’s the difference between the Army and the Navy?” I asked. “I mean, other than working on land instead of on a ship?”

  “Navy people are higher-class than Army,” Mom explained. “In the Army they just want bodies. You don’t have to be smart to join.”

  To make matters worse, our fort housing wasn’t vacant yet. We were relegated to living for a month in cramped enlisted men’s quarters with no air-conditioning, thin walls, and a mysterious metal vent between the apartments big enough to pass a baby through. That first still, sticky night in Kansas, the noises seeping through the vent made it clear that the Army wife next door was no happier than my mother was to be cast away at Fort Leavenworth.

  “You want out of here?” a man demanded.

  “You know I do!” his wife screamed.

  “Fine. I’ll be first in line to buy you a plane ticket!”

  Our parents fought that first night in Kansas, too, as Mom walked around the table serving mashed potatoes.

  “So tell me,” she said to my father. “What was the big goddamn rush to get here?” She dropped potatoes onto Gail’s plate first, slap.

  “Sally, watch your language,” Dad said, giving each of us the hairy eye so that we’d know not to follow Mom’s example.

  “You could have gone ahead of me just this once to set up house,” Mom said. She served the potatoes to Donald and me, slap slap. “The kids and I could have stayed with my mother.”

  “Your mother.” Dad rolled his eyes. “Your mother, the Queen Mary.”

  No sooner were these words out than Mom slapped the scoop of mashed potato smack onto my father’s bald head instead of onto his plate.

  “Jesus Christ, Sally!” Dad yelled, swiping at his head with a napkin.

  “Jesus Christ, Sally!” Gail crowed, spooning mashed potatoes from her plate onto her own head.

  Donald went to the vent leading to the apartment next door and put his mouth close to the grille. “Hey, guys!” he shouted to the neighbors. “Did you hear that through the vent?”

  THE Army finally housed us in a stately, high-ceilinged apartment on the first floor of a brick building dating back to the early 1900s, a prime spot on Fort Leavenworth’s parade ground, a vast expanse of rolling lawn that served as our front yard and the training ground for lines of soldiers marching and shouting in the shimmering heat as they readied themselves for Vietnam.

  That first year in Kansas, Donald frequented the rifle range, where he earned the rank of sharpshooter at age ten. He also enjoyed using the parade
ground as a launching pad for the Estes rockets he ordered from a catalog. The rocket kits came with ample warnings about careful parental supervision, but since our parents were always busy, Donald set them off on his own. It didn’t matter. With all of the practice gunfire around us, anyone who heard the blasts just assumed it was another military exercise. Meanwhile, I discovered that Fort Leavenworth was like a small city. I could go anywhere by foot or bicycle: stores, movies, the pool at the officers’ club, and, most wondrous of all, the Fort Leavenworth Hunt Club, where I watched my favorite horses and riders with the ferocious devotion of a fanatic fan stalking rock stars.

  One night, I’d just rigged up an ingenious basket on a pulley and ropes that my friend John and I could use to deliver messages back and forth from his bedroom window upstairs to mine down below when I heard Dad come in. I went to my bedroom door, intending to close it, and saw my father scurrying in a peculiarly hunched way toward his own bedroom, hiding something under his coat.

  I tugged on the rope, sent a message up to John saying I’d be back later, and ran down the hall. I found my mother in the kitchen, coloring with Gail. “Mom, he’s doing it again,” I hissed.

  “Who?” she said without looking up.

  “Dad! He’s sneaking gerbils into the house under his coat!”

  Mom took her time selecting a blue crayon and then lit a cigarette. She still wouldn’t look at me. “Don’t talk to me about it,” she said. “Talk to your father.”

  “I will,” I said. “I’ll talk to him right now.”

  I went down the hall to their bedroom and knocked hard on the door. Dad didn’t answer. I knocked again, harder.