The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter Read online

  “Those daredevils are always racing around like crazy on the trails and taking jumps they have no business taking,” she warned. “Don’t you dare go out with them, Holly.”

  Ah, but what’s a mother’s dare to a thirteen-year-old girl but a summons, a battle cry, a gauntlet thrown? Out I went, riding with the older kids every day after school and earning their tolerance, if not respect. I might not be beautiful, but I could keep up on the trails.

  And then, during one furiously fast ride, I decided to follow one of my new teenage friends over a high wooden gate on a trail that paralleled a paved road. Ladybug and I had taken higher jumps in the ring; I knew all it would take was a jab of my heels to make the horse go faster and rising in my saddle at the right moment while thrusting my hands forward to give Ladybug enough rein to sail clear of the fence.

  My friend took the jump first. Then I kicked my heels into Ladybug’s dappled gray sides and we were off. I pushed my hands forward and rose out of the saddle to meet the jump. I did everything exactly as my instructor, a retired general, had taught me during endless drills in the ring.

  But Ladybug did not. She didn’t like the sight of that jump or the feel of me leaving the saddle. She didn’t want to be there at all. The grain was probably being dumped into her feed bucket back at the stables right that minute. So my horse veered sharply away from the fence and bucked, dislodging me from the saddle like a catapult launching a pumpkin.

  I don’t remember much of what happened after that. I woke up alone on the paved road and discovered that my horse and friend were gone. A hot, salty liquid filled my mouth, running down my throat and choking me. I spat it out. There was more blood than I’d ever seen, and it was still pouring out of my mouth and nose. The metallic smell and taste of my own blood filled the air.

  I tried to stand up, but my legs were too weak. I sank down beside the road and passed out again.

  Max was the one who found me. He was one of the military prisoners who worked in the stables during his parole, a skinny, dark-haired guy whom all of the girls loved to flirt with. He’d been in the barn when Ladybug came cantering home and dashed into her stall wearing her tack, followed shortly by the terrified teenager who had been riding ahead of me. She told Max where to find me. Unlike our parents, we all trusted the prisoners completely, because they talked to us as if we weren’t children.

  Max had no access to a car, so he climbed onto the tractor he used to pull the hay wagon. He drove it as fast as he could to the jump, where he found me lying beside the road, barely conscious. Max picked me up and laid me gently down on top of the hay, then drove me back to the barn.

  I’D LOST seven teeth, I’d broken my nose, and my face was so swollen that I could feel my cheeks on my shirt collar without turning my head. I’d been wearing a riding helmet, luckily, so my skull was intact. But nobody would give me a mirror.

  Donald and my father drove to the jump and tried to find my teeth, but they were too smashed to be reset in my mouth. I came home from the hospital with nothing but stitches where the oral surgeon had removed the last tiny fragments of shattered teeth pressed into my gums by the fall. I lay on the couch, head pounding, sore and drowsy with pain medication.

  I turned onto my side and pressed my throbbing face against the pillows. “At least my snaggletooth is gone!” I yelled into the kitchen, but neither of my parents heard me. They were too busy arguing about Ladybug.

  “I knew that horse was a bad idea from the start,” Dad insisted. “We should shoot it. I should personally load up my old Navy pistol and go down there and goddamn shoot that goddamn horse.”

  “It’s not the horse’s fault,” Mom said. “I told Holly not to jump. She disobeyed. There’s nothing wrong with that horse. Nobody’s going to shoot it. It would break Holly’s heart, losing Ladybug. That horse is her only friend in the world.”

  “Jesus Christ, Sally!” Dad yelled. “Look at Holly. Just look at her! Who’s going to marry her now?”

  and you spend most of your life trying to rip them off. In ours, my father was stern, Mom was fun, I was smart, Donald was wild, and Gail was beautiful. Those labels defined our default modes, the roles we played over and over again, and made us think that we understood one another even when we were itching to escape our own skins.

  My sister, Gail, like my mother, was born beautiful and had an air of expectation about her, an attitude that the world was there for her pleasure. I was too good a child to ever say that I hated her, but I seethed at times, staring in the mirror at my plain face topped by its boyish haircut. It was hardly fair that nature should grant Gail all of the goods.

  I longed to have my sister’s heart-shaped face, those dimples, the blond ringlets, those bottomless dark eyes with their long black princess eyelashes. She was so beautiful, “such a cunning child, just like my little Sally,” as Grandmother Keach said, that even Donald didn’t tease her. In families with three children, there is usually an odd man out, and that was me. Donald and Gail teamed up to play together in ways that I could never be with either of them.

  Despite her princess-doll looks and forest-fairy grin, Gail was fearless, dogging Donald’s heels in Virginia whenever he went down to the lake to muck around for minnows and painted turtles and frogs. In that way, too, Gail was like my mother. Mom was so brave that she’d run away from home on the family pony, bareback and without a bridle, when she was just four years old. My mother made it two miles down the road before a neighbor spotted her trotting away and took her back home. Who knows how Mom mounted the pony? She probably charmed him the way Gail hypnotized our dogs, who always slept alongside Gail when she colored on the floor and let her do terrible things to their ears and tails. Even our old fox terrier, Tip the Terrible, never bit her.

  For all of her childish beauty, energy, and mischief, though, Gail suffered infections frequently as a toddler and was often short of breath. She huffed and puffed when she ran down the hallway after us. She had to stop and gasp for air if she tried to keep up with Donald or the dogs, who always waited patiently for her to catch up.

  Dad accepted this. “You know Gail’s just doing that to get attention,” he’d say whenever Mom worried aloud that something might be wrong. “The youngest kid always has to work hardest to get noticed.”

  But my mother persisted. In Virginia, she began taking Gail to every military doctor who agreed to see her. Most shook their heads and called my sister’s mysterious condition “a failure to thrive.” Finally, Mom defied them all, and my father, too, by paying to see an outside doctor, a specialist who finally gave her an answer. It wasn’t one she wanted. The last year we lived in Virginia, Gail was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. She was three years old.

  The body of someone with cystic fibrosis produces too much mucus. Children with the disease suffer chronic infections because the mucus in their lungs is so thick that it clogs the respiratory system and allows bacteria to grow. The extra sticky mucus also clogs the pancreas, undermining digestion.

  In this country, cystic fibrosis is the most common fatal hereditary disease among Caucasian children; one out of every twenty Caucasians carries the recessive gene for it. Probability dictates that one out of every four children born to carrier parents will have the disease. Medical treatments have come a long way since my sister was diagnosed; today, people with cystic fibrosis can live into their thirties, or even their forties.

  We were stunned. None of us had ever heard of cystic fibrosis, and there had never been a case of it on either side of the family. There followed several brief but hostile volleys between my parents, each furiously accusing the other of having a bum gene in the family tree. Then Dad went to sea again, leaving Mom to cope alone with finding Gail whatever treatments were available.

  Gail was a stoic, though, and Donald and I often forgot that she was sick at all. In Virginia, and even during our first year in Kansas, she was able to cheerfully run after us and chattered incessantly whenever she could catch her breath.

 
; “Can you eat chocolate, Grandmother?” Gail asked Grandmother Keach one day.

  “Yes,” said Grandmother. “I love chocolate.”

  Gail beamed. “Me too!” She wrinkled her nose. “Do you wheeze and cough sometimes, too, Grandmother?”

  Grandmother nodded. “I have asthma,” she said. “It’s not always easy for me to breathe.”

  “You know what? I can’t breathe sometimes, either! Look what happens!” Gail crowed, and ran up and down the hallway to make herself cough and wheeze, skidding in her socks just the way Donald and I had taught her.

  BY THE time we moved to Fort Leavenworth, Gail was almost four years old. Despite having occasional bouts of pneumonia and even being hospitalized for it, she was a terror. She poked straw into my horse’s nostril to see what Ladybug would do, tore up Donald’s homework when he wouldn’t play with her, and got into my Barbies, cutting their hair with nail scissors and tearing apart their clothes. I was almost too old to play with Barbies, but I resented the fact that Gail could do anything she liked and still be praised for her beauty by everyone who saw her.

  Just before leaving Virginia for Kansas, Gail had started sleeping in an oxygen tent, a pale blue sheet of plastic draped over her bed and attached to a humming metal tank. The tent collected droplets of moisture inside it, and Gail crawled out of her mist tent each morning with her fine hair in tight curls about her scalp, making her look more like a pale, ethereal fairy than ever. Sometimes I fantasized that I could sleep in her tent and wake up looking like that. Most of the time, though, I ignored my sister, glad that my legs and lungs could carry me out of our apartment and off to the stables.

  Mom was becoming increasingly consumed with Gail’s care. She gave Gail physical therapy exercises and medication, and tried to protect my sister from the infectious diseases that other children in the neighborhood might bring into the house; Donald and I were seldom allowed to bring friends to the apartment. The most I saw of my mother during that time was at the stables, for she continued to ride despite being pregnant again. Our last rides together were in late spring, when the violets were starting to bloom along our favorite bridle trail, a narrow, tree-canopied path so lush with giant ferns that it was easy to imagine dinosaurs roaming there at night. Not surprisingly, my mother seemed depressed, overwhelmed by both her unexpected pregnancy and taking care of Gail.

  Once, Mom grew so exasperated with my nitwit chatter that she scolded me as we headed out on one of our favorite trails. “You’re going to kill yourself on that horse one of these days, because you never pay attention when you’re riding,” she said as I swiveled in my saddle to start talking to her.

  “I am not!” I protested, still facing backward. Just then, Ladybug darted beneath a steel guy wire that ran from a telephone pole to the ground, knocking me clear out of the saddle. My mother laughed, so the fall was worth it.

  What I didn’t know was that Mom was deliberately, defiantly riding her horse during this pregnancy over the protests of my father, her friends, and even her own doctor. She wanted to lose the baby.

  “I just wanted a delicate little miscarriage,” she confessed to me years later. “I didn’t think I could face another child being sick like Gail. I didn’t believe I was strong enough to go through that again.”

  Dad, for his part, left Gail’s nursing to Mom and retreated deeper and deeper into his mysterious basement world, or brought the gerbils upstairs to photograph them. In 1969, he published two articles in the magazine Highlights for Children, this time using the byline “D. G. Robinson Jr., Member, American Association of Laboratory Animals.” The first, published in January, introduced gerbils as “friendly desert jumpers” and offered a fetching portrait of a gerbil sitting comfortably in one of my dad’s slippers.

  The second piece appeared in October of that year and was a child’s guide to gerbil care; it included, in abbreviated form, the mimeographed experiments that Marcy and I had tried doing in our Virginia garage. To illustrate one experiment about comparing a gerbil’s heart rate to your own, there was a photograph in Highlights for Children of Donald and me that Dad had taken in the living room of our Fort Leavenworth apartment. My mother had dressed both of us in neatly ironed button-down shirts for that photo, and Donald is valiantly positioning an enormous stethoscope on the jittery rodent I’m clutching in my hand.

  When Dad showed us the magazine, I remembered the rapid flutter of the terrified animal’s heartbeat beneath my fingers, and how amazing it was to feel tangible proof that a fragile little thing like a heart was powerful enough to keep any animal alive.

  Donald and I often talked about death, a subject our parents would leave the room to avoid, but my brother and I never discussed the possibility of Gail dying. In the way of children, we talked about what scared us most by playing a game that involved asking each other what death we’d choose. The one who could think of the most dramatic death ever—being set on fire while being tossed out of an airplane into a sea of sharks, for instance—won.

  It was around that time that I suddenly began wishing for a religion, any religion. But Dad maintained that he was a “confirmed agnostic” and wouldn’t take us to church, and my mother said she was too busy to spend her Sundays praying somewhere else when she could pray right at home. So I went with friends to the Catholic church, and horrified my parents by wearing a silver cross and asking to be confirmed a Catholic. I had no idea what that meant. I only knew that I wanted to believe in a heaven that would have sunlit, lily-covered ponds with white winged horses grazing nearby, and angels with more gauzy gowns than Barbie.

  EVERY now and then, our family spent a day together in Kansas, usually on a Sunday, when Dad would take us on rides through the rolling Kansas hills in his new car. This was a Buick that my brother called the “Station Wagon of Death” because of the way Dad liked to gun the engine up hills, shouting “Here we go, kids!” just before we went airborne at the crest of each one.

  Otherwise, I hardly saw my brother. Donald showed little interest in horses after our new gelding, Reveille, reared and toppled over on him, pinning him like a deer beneath Godzilla. While I spent time at the stables, he was devoted to his new chemistry set, which had arrived in the mail with its own alcohol lamp. I always knew when Donald was home by the smoke and bad smells oozing out from beneath the closed door of his bedroom. Whenever he did leave the house, Donald ran with a small gang of like-minded boys to shoot guns, ride bikes, and play around the foxholes near the soldiers doing drills with grenades.

  “That kid is always somewhere he shouldn’t be,” Mom would sigh.

  One night, Dad retreated to his basement gerbilry after dinner, as usual, and Donald ran outside to see a friend’s new bike. It was autumn but still hot, the thick air barely stirring beneath the ceiling fans. Mom was doing dishes when suddenly she shook her hands dry and, leaving the pans in the sink, retreated to the couch and curled up with one of her science fiction novels and a cigarette. She didn’t light the cigarette, though; she just held it between her fingers and stared at it, as if wondering what it was, resting her elbow on her pregnant belly to see the cigarette in front of her. It was an unnerving moment; my mother never sat still.

  “Want me to help you finish in the kitchen, Mom?” I asked.

  “I want you to do your sister’s exercises,” Mom said. “I’m not up to it tonight.”

  Gail’s exercises involved laying my skinny little sister across the big gold corduroy pillow on Mom’s bed in ten different positions, all of them uncomfortable. Many required Gail to dangle upside down like a broken doll. You had to pound the mucus out of her lungs by smacking one cupped hand across the brittle bones of her rib cage. As primitive as this treatment seemed, it was effective in getting the mucus to drain.

  In Virginia, Gail had been relatively compliant about her medicine, the mist tent, and the never-ending thumping exercises. Now that she was four years old, however, Gail recognized that Donald and I never underwent such torture. She had begun to
resist and complain.

  “She won’t let me,” I said automatically, not because I thought this was true, but because I was so taken aback that my mother would ask me to do this. Despite the difference in our ages, I continued to resent Gail while worrying about her at the same time and feeling guilty for loving her any less than unconditionally. I couldn’t help it, though. Gail could do whatever she wanted and get away with it because she could play her mortality card.

  “You have to make her let you do them,” Mom said. “I need you to.”

  I sighed and went to find my sister.

  Gail was standing in my room, feet wide apart, a Barbie doll in each hand, like King Kong ready for a helicopter attack. She grinned like the devil when she saw me.

  “Mom says I have to do your exercises,” I said.

  “No!” she shrieked. “No, no, no!”

  “I don’t want to do them, either. But if you let me put you over the pillow and do them, I’ll let you keep holding my Barbies. And I’ll tell you a story, too,” I said.

  Gail agreed. I followed her down the hallway to my mother’s bedroom, where Gail managed to climb onto the bed while still clutching the Barbies. My sister flopped herself down over the gold pillow, head dangling.

  I’d watched my mother do the exercises often enough to know what to do. Still, I felt as ungainly and evil as an ogre, with my huge hand on Gail’s fragile body. I felt ashamed of how much I’d resented her when this was what she had to look forward to every day. Somehow the reality of hitting her hadn’t hit me until I had to take part.

  Just as I was working up to feeling out-and-out pity for my sister, Gail cracked the heads of my Barbies together. “A story!” she yelled.