The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (14 page)

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.

E
VERY
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.

“Okay okay,” I said. “But no wrecking my dolls.”

“You’re too old for dolls.” Gail giggled. “You wear a bra.”

“You’ll wear a bra someday too,” I said, and then bit my lip, because I didn’t believe my own lie, and I knew by her silence that Gail didn’t, either. After a minute of punishing quiet punctuated only by the thump of my hand on my sister’s body, I began, “The hero of my story is a little girl like you,” I said, “with blond hair and dark eyes. But she’s a magic girl.”

“And her name is Gail!” Gail guessed.

“That’s right,” I agreed. “But this little girl is always nice to her big sister.”

“She is not.”

“Yes
, she is. And you know what? This little Gail can fly, too, and she has so many magical powers that even dragons are afraid of her.”

After that first night, my mother began asking me to do Gail’s exercises more often. To help Gail pass the time, I read to her from my books, holding them in my free hand and reading loudly over the steady popping rhythm of my cupped palm. Our favorite was
A Wrinkle in Time
by Madeline L’Engle. L’Engle used mind-bending words that intrigued us both, such as
gamboled
, and Gail and I loved to imagine
tessering
, L’Engle’s word for traveling through time. The book introduced us to concepts and questions that kept our minds buzzing for hours.
We wondered if we could find a tesseract, too, and travel through a dark nothingness to a different place and time.

I especially identified with Meg Murry, the book’s main character, who had “mouse brown hair” like mine and felt like an outcast at school. Gail’s favorite character was Meg’s little brother, Charles Wallace, who was, like Gail, four years old and different from everyone else. Meg and Charles even had parents like ours.

“Meg looked up at her mother,” I read to Gail one night, “half in loving admiration, half in sullen resentment.” Meg’s mother, writes L’Engle, has “flaming red hair, creamy skin, and violet eyes with long dark lashes,” all of which “seemed even more spectacular in comparison with Meg’s outrageous plainness.” And Meg’s father was missing. Granted, Mr. Murry was actually physically trapped on another planet, but ours might as well have been.

T
HE
end, when it came, was swift. It was late August when Gail was admitted to the hospital with another bout of pneumonia. I was at a friend’s house when I was called home early.

I went into the living room and found my father and brother sitting on the couch. My mother, now enormously pregnant with whoever would join our family next, was curled up in the brown wing chair in the living room and looked, except for that big belly, like a little child. She was crying. I’d never seen my mother cry before.

My father sat with his hands dangling helplessly between his knees. He simply told Donald and me the facts.
Gail. Hospital
.
Didn’t make it this time
. “We’re sorry, kids,” he said. “Very, very sorry.”

He snapped his fingers to show us how mercilessly quick a life can end. For a while, that was the only sound in the room, a damp echo of my father’s thumb against his finger as his Navy ring flashed bright blue and gold.

My parents seldom spoke of Gail again, after donating her body to research and holding a small memorial service in Kansas. When I thought about Gail, I comforted myself by imagining that she’d left us behind by tessering through a wrinkle in time into another dimension. I longed to follow her through that dark nothingness to a far-flung planet where many-armed, furry beasts could warm us and heal us after such a long, hard journey.

home in Massachusetts sixteen months later, in December 1969. I was sandwiched between my brother Donald and little Philip in his elbow-cracking plastic car seat. The windows were closed because of the cold, and my parents smoked with such relentless abandon that I glanced up from my book at one point and thought we were driving through fog. When it was too dark to read, I stared over the front seat at the headlights rolling like white beads over the hilly landscape and increasing in number as we drew closer to the East Coast. Meanwhile, the red ends of my parents’ cigarettes danced like fireflies above the dashboard.