The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (17 page)

Now that we were in Massachusetts, Dad brought us a few steps closer to the cliff edge of deepest anonymity. He’d chosen to buy the poor farm in West Brookfield not just because it was affordable and within a day’s drive of an airport but also because it was on the way to nowhere. After his retirement from the Navy in two years, there would be no military brass to rip the bars off his uniform if his secret passion for the pocket kangaroo was unveiled. In the meantime, he wanted to ensure that his fellow officers at the Merchant Marine Academy remained in the dark about how the heck he spent his free time.

Dad was also worried about the long-term repercussions of raising gerbils on a large scale. Leftist politics were seeping into everything from women in the workplace to U.S. involvement abroad. That included increasingly vocal animal rights activists. Dad planned to raise gerbils not as pets, but to sell to researchers engaged in scientific studies; the more under the radar he could keep us, the better.

To this end, my father now devised an ingenious cover-up to disguise his intent: he made the gerbil farm look like a horse farm. In historical papers held at the town library describing the history of our property, the “almshouse” was “sold to William Shaw, later sold to Mark V. Crockett. Mr. Crockett sold the fields and wooded land to the Wildlife Preserve of Mass. And the remainder to Tumblebrook Farm, a riding stable operated by D. G. Robinson.”

Of course, establishing a convincing front meant bringing the horses from Kansas to Massachusetts and building a barn for them, a plan that Mom and I immediately took to heart. None of us knew a thing about barn raising, but luckily we had reinforcements. My mother’s parents, Maybelle and Everett Keach, came to live with us shortly after New Year’s, dragging a rickety trailer full of their belongings all the way from Virginia. The trailer came unhitched from the car on its last gasp up Long Hill Road and rolled backward into a stone wall, but we managed to retrieve most of their belongings—a few bits of antique pine furniture, pots and pans, Grandfather’s gardening tools—and installed our grandparents in the small in-law apartment upstairs.

My grandparents were no strangers to hard work. Maybelle had been born in England and arrived in Boston by ship with her father, recruited by the New England mills as an expert wool sorter, and her mother, a girl with a streak of wildness that led her to abandon her family at age thirty-five for an eighteen-year-old lover. Grandmother was fifteen years old at the time of her mother’s defection. The oldest of five children, she was luckier than her siblings: her own grandmother, who had also divorced her first husband, had remarried a British
sergeant major named Peter Pickles, so she was in a good position to take young Maybelle in hand.

While my grandmother’s two younger sisters toiled away at menial jobs and her two younger brothers labored in factories from an early age, Grandmother was able to finish high school, take piano lessons, learn to pour a proper tea, and wear gloves and a hat to the Methodist church. She turned into a steely sort of woman determined to be nothing like her own wandering mother, but known far and wide for her impeccable housekeeping, charitable acts, good manners, and tidy children.

Her only weakness was Grandfather, whom she met at age sixteen and fell for like a sack of sugar knocked off a table by a baseball bat. As a young man, my grandfather, Everett, was a natty dresser who talked Grandmother into taking off the woolen bloomers she wore under her dress and stashing them under the bushes before joining him on the back of his motorcycle for furiously fast rides. She married him at age seventeen and had three children by the time she was twenty-one years old.

It was difficult for me to imagine the ardor of this court ship. By the time Grandfather moved in with us, he was a balding, terse, bespectacled man in a flannel shirt who was never without a pipe and a Dixie cup of liquid courage at his elbow. He wore broad-brimmed hats, told raunchy jokes, read three mystery novels a week, and rode low in the seat of his old car at speeds that made you wonder why he didn’t just walk. He had his own inexplicable passion for Native Americans, which meant that he was always ferreting around for arrowheads and had a collection of Indian headdresses hanging
in the basement that scared the bejesus out of you whenever you rounded the corner into his basement workshop.

But Grandfather was handy with a toolbox, no matter how many bottles of homemade wine or cheap whiskey he kept stashed around the basement. When my father discovered an abandoned dairy barn on the 350 acres of land across the street that had originally belonged to the poor farm and was now conservation land, he petitioned the state for permission to disassemble the building. Dad and Grandfather constructed a wooden cart and attached it to a wheezing red tractor purchased from a neighboring farm. We used this clanking Dr. Seuss contraption to haul enormous, knotholed planks of ancient lumber and anything else we could salvage from the original pole barn to our property: hinges, nails and screws, and even a few dented buckets.

With the recycled lumber, we had enough to build a stable behind the house with stalls for a dozen horses; Dad did this with the idea that we would take in boarders. “If you and your mother are going to keep horses, we might as well let other people pay for the grain,” he said.

In addition to the wood, the original dairy barn also had milking stanchions and all sorts of other peculiar, torturous-looking metal odds and ends, which Grandfather cut and welded to make hay bins, bars for the stalls, and gates for the pastures.

The horses arrived that spring, when lush beds of wild daffodils sprang out of the ground and the magnolia tree outside our kitchen window bloomed with flowers as pink and delicate as Grandmother’s English teacups. As I unloaded Lady bug from the horse trailer and threw my arms around
her neck, it suddenly seemed possible to me that I might survive on the farm after all.

Donald and I explored the trails and logging roads behind the house all spring, with me on horseback and Donald zipping around on an old dirt bike he’d found abandoned somewhere on Long Hill Road and coaxed back to life. I’d trot Ladybug along the trails through the dappled light of the huge trees bowed over the cart roads, while in the pasture next to me Donald flew over dirt moguls and sometimes was separated from his bike in midair. Neither of us would admit it, but Donald and I were glad for each other’s company.

By May, Donald and Dad were making monthly pilgrimages to Victor Schwentker’s house in Brant Lake, renting a twenty-four-foot U-Haul truck to ferry back everything necessary for a gerbil colony: cages and metal shelves, water bottles and feeding hoppers, filing cabinets and desks, and crates of gerbils. We wheeled the crates into the basement through the door beneath the sundeck and stacked the new gerbils on shelves next to the glass jars that Grandmother used for preserving fruit and vegetables.

With our horses grazing in the field beside the house, probably no one passing by would ever suspect—well, really, who would?—that in the basement of the old poor farm we were seeding a new crop of gerbils.

M
Y PARENTS
chose the Lake Wickaboag Boat Club as their point of entry into West Brookfield social life. Boats, water, and cocktail parties: the Boat Club was the one place where they felt they might fit in.

If you saw West Brookfield from an airplane, Lake Wickaboag would sit at its center like a green eye with marshy lashes. Some townspeople belonged to the Boat Club—the families with any money that is—but most members were summer families from Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania who came to West Brookfield every summer to vacation in lakeside camps that had been in their families for generations.

The Lake Wickaboag Boat Club was, despite its grand name, a mushroom of a place, a tiny pseudo log cabin on a weedy beach. Naturally, Dad revealed nothing about the true nature of his farm to the Boat Club members; they were under the impression that he was a military bigwig who had chosen to have a hobby farm. The members of the Boat Club were so besotted with the idea of having a real live Navy commander in their midst that they invited Dad to don his Navy uniform and ride in the lead boat that summer during the Memorial Day parade. Dad enjoyed every minute of it, perfecting what Mom called “your Royal Navy wave to the landlubbers” from the bow of the boat. Despite this overwhelming welcome, my parents didn’t stay members for long.

“Those people are all so boring,” Mom said with a sniff. “All very provincial. And your father never was much of a dancer.”

The kids in town used to spy on the adult parties at the Boat Club, and they didn’t look boring to us. One Saturday night, the skinny woman I babysat for, the mother of three boys under the age of four, climbed onto the bar and shimmied along the tops of the exposed beams in the ceiling like a miniskirted serpent. Another man perfected a trick of his own,
removing the bras of various women by pulling them out of the armholes of their sleeveless dresses like a Hindu snake charmer urging cobras out of baskets.

There was rampant swapping among the various couples on the lake, too. So many marriages went down in flames that on the sign on Route 9 that said “Welcome to West Brookfield,” someone scrawled out the town’s name that summer and substituted it with “Peyton Place.”

A
S BEFORE
, Donald and I were operating under stern orders not to speak of the gerbils outside the family. This was a needless command. We were savvy enough to know that we weren’t going to break into any school cliques with gerbils as our calling cards.

Donald and I started school midyear. He was in sixth grade at the local elementary school and had little trouble adjusting. Donald was savvier than his eleven-year-old peers, faster on his bicycle, and an ace shot with his BB gun. He’d seen enough Army drills in Kansas to understand the basic principles of attack and defend.

My brother established his position high on the West Brookfield food chain early on thanks to a single incident: when one of the tough kids in town stole his bike, Donald said, “You’d better give that back or I’ll shoot you in the leg.” When the boy refused, Donald got his BB gun and shot that kid right in the leg.

“That’ll teach them to mess with you,” Mom said.

Things didn’t go as smoothly for me. I was in ninth grade at Quaboag Regional High School, which served the mill
towns of Warren and West Warren in addition to West Brookfield. The school lived up to its nickname of “Little Poland”: the bus driver played polkas on the radio, Polish was spoken in the halls, and Polish food was served in the cafeteria.

Compared to my high school at Fort Leavenworth, with its straight lines, quiet classrooms, and routine inspections, anarchy ruled at Quaboag in the early 1970s. The lockers, a complicated maze at one end of the cafeteria, were rich with the heady aromas of pot and booze, and there were daily brawls with creative weaponry, like the pointy ends of shop compasses. With my bookish tendencies and absurd accent—Tidewater Virginia overlaid with Kansas twang—I fit into this school like a gerbil among a pack of coyotes.

Rumor had it at Quaboag that my parents were rich, which we were, in relative terms, living as we did in that big house on top of Long Hill Road. Even if the house was falling down around our ears, we had fifteen rooms all to ourselves. More than one kid came up to ask me how we’d gotten our money. “Oh, you know. My dad’s military,” I’d answer vaguely.

Rumor had it that my mysterious father was either CIA or a tax-dodging millionaire, and my new clothes (despite being from Sears) and horses must mean that I was an heiress. Even if I had not been forbidden from telling the truth, I knew it would do nothing to help my reputation to admit that my father’s aspiration in life was to be a gerbil farmer.

By the boys at Quaboag, I was warmly welcomed, flirted with, teased, and fought over. Chalk that up to novelty and to the breasts that had accompanied me all the way from Kansas. However, it is a given in high school that if the boys like you too much, the girls won’t like you at all.