The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter Read online

  The door opened a crack. “What is it?” Dad asked. “I’m busy.”

  Behind him, lights were set up on stands and shining against a white screen as a backdrop. I knew he’d bought three pairs of gerbils in a Kansas City pet shop shortly after our arrival; he kept them in our basement storage room, a dark and musty space, under lock and key. For the past week, Dad had been coming home after a full day of teaching and, as soon as the sun went down, he’d retreat to the basement and sneak back upstairs with gerbils stashed in his pocket or a cage tucked under his jacket.

  “I want to know what you’re doing in there, Dad,” I said.

  “What do you mean, what am I doing?” He didn’t open the door any wider. With the bright lights behind him, my father’s thin face was cast in shadow, his blue eyes dark pools. “I’m working,” he said. “What did you think I’d be doing? I’m always working.”

  “I want to know why you have to sneak the gerbils up and down the stairs,” I said. “Can’t you just photograph them on the lawn like you did in Virginia?”

  Dad looked at me like he was the one in his right mind. “Are you kidding me?” he asked. “Look, you can’t tell anyone, not anyone, about the gerbils in the basement,” he said. “Not even the other two Navy families at Fort Leavenworth. I could be discharged if the higher-ups found out what I’m doing. Now go on. I have to finish something here.” He closed the door.

  I didn’t have to ask who the higher-ups were because I knew: the mysterious military brass, the generals and admirals housed in the Pentagon, a building that Dad told us was so vast, you had to wear roller skates to make it to appointments on time.

  In the kitchen, my mother and sister were still coloring. “Mom,” I said, “did you know that Dad’s bringing his gerbils into your bedroom?”

  “Yes, I know, honey.”

  “Don’t you even care?” I demanded. “It’s so strange! Can’t you stop him?”

  “Why should I?” Mom asked. She stood up and went to the counter, which she began wiping again, though it was already clean. “That’s your father’s thing. I don’t have to know every last detail of what my husband does with his spare time. You won’t, either, if you’re smart.”

  She wrung out the dish rag, folded it in half, and laid it carefully over the kitchen faucet before finally turning around to look at me. “Look, I know it’s bizarre, Holly, but that’s your father.”

  WHAT was my father doing with a crop of gerbils in that dark, musty basement storage room?

  He was breeding them again. The gerbils multiplied as easily in the basement as they had in our Virginia garage. We had a ten-by-twelve-foot space divided from the rest of the basement by thin walls—every apartment had a storage area like this—and Dad set up shelves for his gerbils just as he had in Virginia. Soon he had to move suitcases and odd boxes upstairs to make room for more shelves and gerbil cages. He continued to observe the gerbils and photograph them, so absorbed in his work that he made notes on a yellow pad of paper during dinner or held his head in his hands and gazed into space, his blue eyes unfocused. He might as well have been in a coma. Our family carried on dinner, conversations, arguments, and homework around him, as if Dad were a statue of himself.

  While Dad trained Army officers at the Staff College to lead troops into Vietnam, he wrote a paper about gerbil seizures and the potential use of gerbils in research. The paper was accepted and published on January 6, 1968, in the prestigious journal Science News under the title “Animals Suited to Epileptic Research.”

  The first we heard about Dad publishing the results of his scientific studies was when he passed the magazine around the dinner table. He made sure to hold the magazine pages open with his own hands because he didn’t want sticky pages, he said. In the article, he detailed his observations about gerbil seizures.

  “After being handled,” he’d written,

  a susceptible animal may lie passively with limbs extended and body trembling, then resume normal activity within minutes …. Muscular rigidity sometimes molds the gerbil’s body in specific postures or allows the animal to be held in positions it would not normally tolerate.

  More recently, moderate to severe seizures have been observed in some gerbils. This behavior is characterized by a staring appearance of the eye, falling down on the table, running movements of the legs, and a recovery period during which the gerbil appears dazed. Recovery is rapid and apparently complete; no deaths or aftereffects have been reported.

  Whatever my father couldn’t capture in words about gerbil seizures, his photographs did it for him. Stark in black and white, one of the pictures showed a gerbil in full seizure. It looked like a monster in a low-budget Japanese horror movie. The gerbil’s body was stretched out and stiff, and its tail stuck straight out. Its teeth were bared in a terrified grimace.

  Proud as he was about having his first article appear in such an esteemed publication as Science News, my father never told anyone else at Fort Leavenworth about it. Nor did he indicate anywhere in the pages of the magazine that he was a Navy commander. In fact, he didn’t even use his full name in the byline, only “D. G. Robinson Jr.”

  This magazine article brought correspondence from all over the world. I saw envelopes with university and laboratory names on the return addresses from as far away as Sweden and Japan. Apparently Dad wasn’t the only man in the world with a thing for gerbils.

  Encouraged by this brush with fame, he wrote a second piece for Science News. This one was published in the February 15, 1969, issue, and focused, surprisingly, not on gerbils but on sand rats and spiny mice.

  Why would my father suddenly detour away from writing about the gerbil, the one thing that had succeeded in stirring up his passions to the point of forgetting all other outside pursuits?

  Reading the article closely, I saw that the piece focused on diabetes and how the disease didn’t occur naturally in sand rats, as it did in some mutant mice and certain strains of Chinese hamsters. To induce diabetes in sand rats, Dad reported, you had to feed them standard laboratory pellets. And in writing about spiny mice—also known as “porcupine mice”—in this piece, Dad listed research studies that revealed how spiny mouse females that had already given birth often acted as midwives to pregnant spiny mice if the mice were caged together.

  The final paragraph of that paper is the only clue to Dad’s surprising defection from gerbils. There, Dad wrote, “The availability of sand rats and spiny mice suggests that they will be valuable for studying many interrelated factors involved in diabetes … researchers hope to be able to establish stable inbred strains of these species to increase their potential as experimental animals.”

  In Kansas, Dad wasn’t content to just sneak gerbils upstairs like James Bond with his latest secret weapon. He was toying with the idea that he might escape the military by retiring early and raising gerbils on a large scale while still keeping his options open by researching the potential of breeding other laboratory animals.

  As always, though, he kept his plans a secret. My father’s byline for the article on spiny mice and sand rats was again, simply, “D. G. Robinson Jr.” Clearly, very few people reading Science News knew that the author of these papers was a Navy commander who went to work every day with gold bars on his shoulders, his lectures on naval war tactics timed to the Army minute.

  And even fewer people at Fort Leavenworth knew what my dad was up to in the basement of our Army issue housing. Not even, most of the time, us.

  before I turned thirteen, and that time in my life was notable for this stunning achievement: my breasts and my bikini got me a horse. “You’ve certainly started blossoming,” Dad observed one day, looking up from the kitchen table to find me standing there in the new, two-piece green-and-white polka-dot bathing suit that I insisted on wearing everywhere, even biking past the lines of sweating uniformed soldiers to buy chewing gum and a Coke at the PX.

  “Put something on, for God’s sake,” Mom said. When I refused and stomped out of the room
, I heard her scolding my father. “We should never be living on an Army fort with a girl this age,” she said. “Holly was such a sweet little thing when we brought her here, but now she’s running wild.”

  She was right. Within two weeks of arriving in Kansas I’d found a crush, a blond, cleft-chinned colonel’s son with his own basement band. He played lead guitar, wooing me with Iron Butterfly’s “In-a-gadda-da-vita,” and wore bangs dangerously close to his eyes.

  When I wasn’t with him, I roamed the fort with my new best friend, Katy, the younger sister of one of the lifeguards at the officers’ club pool. Our favorite pastime was to put on our bathing suits and follow the young soldiers around the base, teasing them with made-up marching songs of our own: “Left! Left! Left-right-left! I left my wife and forty-nine kids on the brink of starvation without any gingerbread!”

  We also liked to hang out at the Hunt Club, flirting with the prisoners on work parole. Leavenworth is known for its prisons—the U.S. Penitentiary is there, as are Lansing Correctional Facility and the U.S. Military Disciplinary Barracks; the population is so prison-heavy that the Leavenworth Tourism Bureau adopted “Doin’ Time in Leavenworth” as its marketing slogan one year. At the Hunt Club, the military prisoners mucked out stalls, mowed the hayfields, fed and watered the horses, worked out with weights in the tack room, and might as well have had Danger! tattooed on their chests, along with the usual assortment of skulls and eagles and women’s names.

  I was blossoming, but was I beautiful? I knew better. Yet I began wearing makeup and shaving what little hair I had on my legs. In an act of bravado that left me itching and thrashing about in my bed for weeks afterward, I even shaved off the hair on my back after Katy pointed it out.

  “Mom,” I asked in desperation one day, “do you think I’ll ever be pretty?”

  Her answer was less than encouraging. “We’re so glad you’re smart,” she said. “And you’ll be a wonderful mother.”

  In desperation, I took my looks for a test run. “Tell your brother I have a crush on him,” I told Katy.

  We had been lying next to each other at the pool, turning every ten minutes for an even tan, though my face was doomed to be pale because I always held a book up and read while sunbathing. Now I put the book down and watched as Katy, a big-boned blonde whose bathing suit never quite covered her fleshy behind, sauntered over to her equally big-boned blond brother and told him of my true and undying feelings.

  Her brother squinted down at me from his lifeguard stand like Zeus observing the silly games of humans from Mount Olympus. Then he said something to his sister and turned away to blow his whistle at a boy jumping off the side of the pool. Katy trotted back, grinning, and flopped down on the towel beside me.

  “He says you’re not much in the face,” she dutifully reported. “But you’ve got a great body. He said that he’d meet you after school if you want to learn how to French-kiss.”

  Later on, my face still burning from this assessment, I climbed onto a chair in the middle of my bedroom and started hissing cuss words. “Shit, bitch, fuck, crap, cunt!” I whispered viciously at the ceiling. “Damn, puke, crap, bastard!”

  I ignored Donald, who sniggered just outside the door, until Mom came and pushed the door wide open.

  “There,” she said. “This way we can all hear you better. You must have something pretty important to say if you’re standing up on a chair.”

  MY ONLY passion, other than my new bikini, was horses. I’d wanted one ever since I was a child, when I’d seen my mother climb onto the back of her Thoroughbred in Maine and ride off with a queen’s distracted wave. For years I’d been reading every horse book I could find and living a rich fantasy life filled with mounts of every description. I had pretended that my pink and white bicycle was the Black Stallion as I raced the streets of Virginia, and I paced our hallways in Kansas as if I were leading my headstrong mustang pony causing my parents to threaten to send me to charm school if I couldn’t learn to “glide, not bounce,” as Mom implored.

  The Fort Leavenworth Hunt Club was paradise. The tack room to me was like the opium den to Sherlock Holmes. There were saddles and bridles and saddle blankets exuding those intoxicating odors of horse sweat and saddle soap. The wooden boxes were filled with brushes and crops and curry combs and hoof picks. Men and women strode about purposefully in canary-yellow jodhpurs and black knee-high leather boots. And, of course, there were the horses, snorting and whinnying and running in the paddocks or munching hay in their stalls, their heads bobbing over stall doors, ears pricking as I whispered secrets to them or fed them carrots and apple slices out of my pockets.

  I became a barn rat, helping other riders turn their horses out in the paddocks, where they rolled about in the dust, or volunteering to groom. I especially liked currying the horses’ coats in slow circles, making the animals arch their necks in pleasure like big dogs being scratched behind the ears. I loved using the shedding blade, too: this was a long silver blade with sharp teeth and leather handles at either end that you pulled along the horses’ bellies and flanks to make the loose hair rise in feathery wisps on the breeze.

  If I didn’t have a horse to work with, I’d just follow the older girls around, watching them closely as they flirted with the prisoners on work parole. The girls stood with one hand on a jodhpur-clad hip or tucked their hair beneath their velvet hunt caps as they smiled up at the angry, rebellious, muscle-bound men who did the cleaning and carpentry around the stables. I saw the power in these girls, power that came from their horses and the confident way they tamed these huge beasts with a cluck of the tongue and a bit of leather and leg.

  I wanted to be them. I wanted to be like my mother. And, like the girl detective Trixie Belden, one of my favorite fictional heroines because she survived rabid dogs and poisonous snakes while solving dark mysteries, I longed for a horse of my very own. At times I even went around quoting the opening dialogue from The Secret Mansion, with the appropriate dramatic gestures.

  “Oh, Moms,” I’d moan, running my fingers through my short, sandy curls. “I’ll just die if I don’t have a horse.”

  “Why are you calling me that?” Mom would respond. “Stop whining. If wishes were horses, you’d have stables full of them by now.”

  Finally, though, she gave in. As Mom reasoned with my father, sitting on a horse under the watchful eye of an Army instructor had to be safer for me than spending free hours in some teenager’s smoky basement or taking my new breasts for a strut around the pool. She convinced him to buy a small gray mare that I named Ladybug because Trixie Belden’s first mount was called Lady.

  People came and went from Fort Leavenworth every few months or years as Army orders dictated, and they rarely took their horses with them. The lieutenant colonel who sold us Ladybug just days before he was sent to Vietnam assured us that the mare was “child-safe.”

  Ladybug certainly looked docile enough, with her long-lashed doe’s eyes, sweet brown freckles, round belly, and snow-white mane and tail. However, my new mount had a nasty habit of holding her breath whenever she was saddled, so it was impossible to get the girth tight. Later, we’d learn the knack of fastening the girth and then giving the mare a sharp knee jab to the belly to get her to expel her breath while we cinched the saddle tighter. But that first day, Mom mounted Ladybug, urged her to trot around the ring, and immediately found herself hanging upside down and being dragged through the dust by one stirrup.

  “That horse is cute but tricky,” Mom pronounced when she managed to get herself untangled and dusted off.

  Dad eyed my new horse with suspicion. “That animal doesn’t seem child-safe to me,” he said. “What if Holly gets hurt?”

  “Oh, she’ll be fine,” Mom said breezily, trying not to limp as she led Ladybug over to the mounting block. “You have to get thrown at least thirty times before you’re a real rider.” My mother pulled herself back into the saddle, wincing just a little. This time the horse behaved, trotting and cantering smartly about
the ring, tossing her head just like all of my fantasy horses had tossed theirs.

  “Maybe we should try to get our money back,” Dad said when Mom finished riding and handed the reins to me.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m sure the owner’s already parachuted into some Vietnamese jungle,” Mom said.

  I took Ladybug’s reins and quickly led her out of earshot of my parents. “You’re the most beautiful horse in the whole world,” I whispered, stroking her velvety gray muzzle. “I’m going to wear a picture of you in my locket.”

  Ladybug was the sort of horse “who feels her oats,” as my instructor put it, bucking and spooking sideways whenever the wind whipped up mini-tornadoes in the dusty riding ring, or trying to rub me off on a tree the minute my seat was loose. Within six months, though, I was a competent enough rider to start entering equitation classes in the local horse shows, and Ladybug and I won ribbons and trophies together.

  My true love was trail riding, though, which brought a measure of peace not only to me but also to my mother, who would get babysitters for Gail and ride with me on a horse she’d bought for herself, an elegant bay Thoroughbred named Robin. When we were out on the bridle trails, alone on the narrow paths that wound through the fields and woods of Fort Leavenworth, it was as if she and I had assumed false identities and traveled to a foreign country.

  With nothing more to disturb us than birdsong and the soft snorting sounds of the horses, we were transported far away, and never fought the way we did at home. On the trails, on our horses, my mother and I were almost friends.

  our Virginia ranch house, they were accompanied by a thin pamphlet on the history and care of gerbils written by Victor Schwentker. Victor lived in Brant Lake, New York, a hamlet in the Adirondack Mountains just west of Lake Champlain, a place where only the hardiest tourists make their way to cool off in the summer or enjoy a few glorious days of kaleidoscopic leaf peeping in the fall. It’s an unlikely place for gerbils to make their first appearance in this country, but that’s where their U.S. story began. It was only natural that my father, in his pilgrimage to know the gerbil, eventually wanted to tap in to Schwentker’s expertise.