The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (19 page)

As Dennis walked me to the door, he clapped a hand on my shoulder. “You just tell your dad not to worry about the neighbors, okay? We’re cool. You are, too. You just don’t know it yet.”

were chores to do than hours in a day. As Mom put it, “This house has been really abused. There are lots of loose things about it.” Like the settlers who had made similarly arduous journeys to stake a claim, we used hard work as a salve for grief and loss.

While Dad spent weekdays in New York, teaching at the Merchant Marine Academy, the rest of us peeled off old wallpaper, patched and painted walls, yanked up stained carpeting, and scraped layers of yellow enamel off the stair railings. We brightened the dark kitchen paneling with white paint and hung wallpaper in places where the house would have fallen apart without that extra gluey layer holding it together.

One Friday, I came home from school and interrupted Mom in the middle of taking down an entire wall with a crowbar. “I’ve always wanted to do this,” she declared, wiping plaster dust off her cheek. “There’s nothing like a little demolition to relieve stress.”

“What are you so worried about, Mom?” I asked.

She glanced at the clock. “Your father’s due back from
New York any minute, and you know he’ll find something to criticize.”

Mom put down the crowbar, went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water. She took two Alka-Seltzer tablets out of her jeans pocket and dropped them into the glass. “Plop plop, fizz fizz,” she said with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes, and gulped down the contents of the glass just as we heard Dad’s car pull into the driveway.

“Holly! Donald! Where are you?” Dad shouted as he came up the basement stairs, running as usual.

“Welcome home, dear,” Mom said as Dad threw open the door and heaved his duffel bag full of the week’s laundry off his shoulder and onto the floor.

Dad’s smile was like Mom’s: half grimace. He nodded at me and said, “Go get your brother and clean out my car. Now.”

“Yes
, sir.” I ran down the basement stairs and found Donald in the workshop with Grandfather, gluing the spindles back into an old chair that Grandfather had found by the side of the road. “Dad’s home,” I said.

“O Captain! my Captain!” Grandfather said.

“We have to clean out the car,” I said. “Right now, or he’ll be mad. You know how he is.”

“Why do
we
have to do it every Friday? It’s
his
mess,” Donald grumbled, but he followed me out to the driveway.

By the time we came back inside, Dad had changed out of his Navy uniform and was squinting at the new blue-and-white kitchen wallpaper that Mom and Grandfather had put up that week, a tumbler of scotch in one hand. “Looks about an eighth of an inch off to me,” he pronounced. “That’s a
shame, considering what wallpaper costs a roll. I hope you got it on sale.”

Grandmother came downstairs to join us in the kitchen, a flowered apron tied around her tweed skirt. “I baked you an apple pie, Robbie,” she said.

“Thank you, Mother, but there was really no need. We eat too many sweets,” Dad said, still eyeing the wallpaper. “How much electricity do you suppose that old oven of yours uses?”

“Come look, Dad,” I said, leading him over to the kitchen window overlooking the back garden and the pastures beyond. “Donald and I cleared a lot of rocks out of the pasture. We filled in some of the woodchuck holes, too.”

“Your grandfather mowed the grass again, I see,” Dad said. “I never did care too much for manicured lawns. Mowers use an awful lot of gas, you know.”

Grandfather had come up from the basement by now and was standing with his arms folded across his chest. The last of the sunset glinted against his glasses so that I couldn’t read his expression. “Might as well let the grass grow up around you, then, and live in a jungle,” he said. “You’d save a hell of a lot of pennies that way.” He turned on his heel and went upstairs.

“Well, I’ll leave you all to enjoy your dinner,” Grandmother said. She set her pie down on the counter before following Grandfather up to their apartment.

“Now look what you’ve done,” Mom said.

“What? What did I do?” Dad asked. “Can’t a man express an honest opinion around here without everyone taking it so personally? After all, I’ve bent over backward to give your parents a place to live. I should have some say in things.”

“Hitler would have more tact,” Mom said.

Dad may have given my grandparents a home, but they worked hard to earn it. The very next day, for instance, my father returned from taking the trash to the dump and called Grandfather outside to see what he’d brought home. Donald and I followed Grandfather out to the driveway, where the back of Dad’s red Ford station wagon was crammed with dirty flat sticks he’d collected at the dump.

“What is that stuff?” I asked Dad. “Kindling?”

He shook his head. “If you just wire these together, Dad,” he told Grandfather, “I bet we can make a snow fence all along the road.”

“Damn fool,” Grandfather muttered behind me. “Spindly little things will fall down in the first storm.”

Somehow, though, Grandfather managed to build a fence from those discarded slats of wood, and it never did fall down.

S
HORTLY
after we moved to Massachusetts, Dad gave us a lecture on keeping the lights off and the heat down. “Now that the military’s not paying our utility bills, it’s important to remember that frugal is our middle name,” he said as he showed us how to make Christmas ornaments out of scraps of old wallpaper that we’d peeled off the kitchen and hallway walls.

As the cold set in, Dad made a habit of feeling the pipes when he got home on Fridays to make sure that nobody had turned up the heat; luckily, Mom knew enough to turn the heat down on Friday mornings so that the pipes would cool in time.

That first Christmas, Dad said there was no money for a Christmas tree, so Donald and I hiked out to the woods behind the house, cut down a tree, and dragged it home, a practice we would repeat every year after that. Grandfather nailed together bits of scrap wood and painted them to make Christmas trees for either side of our front door. He also fashioned a candelabra out of old spools of thread and spray-painted it black so that we could use it as a centerpiece during Christmas dinner.

Grandmother did her part, too. She hand-quilted garlands of candy canes, angels, and soldiers to wrap around the front staircase, and crocheted red and green holiday covers for the extra rolls of toilet paper sitting on top of the toilet tank. The next fall, she started making apple-head dolls to sell at church fairs, using empty Clorox bottles for the bodies and pinching the dried-up apples into eerie little grimacing gremlin faces. I felt sorry for any kid whose mother came home with one of
those
, despite the hours Grandmother spent stitching dresses and aprons and hats for her apple-headed horrors.

Where I was concerned, Dad was a stop-spending vigilante. I had already cost him more money than any of my siblings because of my teeth. Those first few weeks after my riding accident in Kansas, I’d had to keep my lips pressed shut to hide my toothless gums while they healed. An Army dentist had then crafted a temporary bridge attached to a plastic roof plate. This contraption was held in place by a few strategic wires that fit into the cracks between my remaining front teeth.

The only good thing about the accident, other than losing my snaggletooth, was that I now had a surefire way to unnerve my father. He had a much softer stomach than Mom,
who could pluck ticks the size of grapes off the dogs with her bare hands and inject medicine into a horse with a needle the size of a milk shake straw. Anytime Dad lectured or scolded, I’d use my tongue to flip the bridge down, revealing the gap where my front teeth had been. At the sight of my bright pink gums, he’d blanch and turn away.

“Jesus Christ, Holly,” he’d mutter. “Don’t do that to me.”

That first year in Massachusetts, I was outfitted with a permanent bridge—a nifty, wire-free cosmetic design not covered by military health insurance. I could no longer flip my front teeth at Dad because they were permanently anchored into place by crowns on teeth that hadn’t been knocked out. This meant that I had a straight-toothed smile and no longer had to worry about losing my teeth at inopportune moments, as I had in Kansas, where I routinely had to dive to the bottom of the pool to retrieve them.

The down side of having such an expensive mouth was that Dad would materialize from nowhere to issue warnings anytime I ventured outside. “Your teeth, Holly!” he’d cry, trotting after me as I set off on horseback. “Watch out for your teeth! Those cost money we don’t have, you know!”

He was also extremely watchful of my toilet paper consumption. Whenever I used our only bathroom upstairs, I had to turn the toilet paper roll as stealthily as possible, because if he heard me using it, Dad would come pounding up the stairs to knock on the bathroom door.

“You don’t need more than three squares, Holly!” he’d yell. “Remember, more than three squares is wasted!”

Eventually, I solved this problem by buying toilet paper
with my own babysitting money a separate stash that I kept in my bedroom and carried back and forth to silently unwrap, counting out five squares just because I could.