The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (21 page)

Thanks to his deal with Victor Schwentker, we had everything necessary to start peddling gerbils on a large scale within a year of moving to Massachusetts, including cages, racks, food, filing cabinets, watering carts, and, of course, gerbils—well over a thousand of them within that first year. But the single most essential item Dad acquired from Victor wasn’t something he ferried home in a U-Haul from Brant Lake, though, but a single piece of paper. On it was a list of Victor’s clients. These included the Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health, Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, and several pharmaceutical companies.

One day, as I was filling water bottles and feeders in the gerbil building, my father reminded me that no matter how many lucky breaks you get in business, you can’t ever take things for granted. “Your luck can run dry any minute,” Dad said. “For instance, a lot of people would expect an animal-raising venture
to be a self-sustaining business. You might think that breeding animals is like having a factory, and that a profitable product would appear in a steady stream with very little effort.”

This was seldom the case, though, Dad warned, “even if gerbils may seem to approach this ideal. As in any other business, you really have to know your market and stay ahead of the curve.”

By the time our gerbil colony was established, scientists had already been using rodents as disease models for decades. In Dad’s eyes, any laboratory researcher who already relied on mice, rats, or hamsters as research subjects was a potential convert to gerbils. Gerbils might even prove to be valuable for certain studies that scientists couldn’t conduct with other rodents. This could translate into sizeable profits.

“Did you know,” Dad enthused over his briefcase of papers at the dinner table one night, “that of the sixty-six thousand laboratory animals used in this country daily, over ninety-five percent are rodents?”

“I had no idea,” Mom said. “It’s amazing how many things I don’t know.”

As usual, Dad either missed or ignored her sarcasm; I could never be sure which it was with him. He kept talking as if nobody had said a word. “All we have to do to succeed is find a niche market for gerbils,” Dad assured us. “Give me a niche to fill, and I’ll do it.”

Thanks to my father’s steady marketing efforts, which included advertisements in laboratory magazines and direct mailings, gerbils began inching their way into research studies on epilepsy, stroke, nutrition, human behavior, and infectious diseases those first two years on the farm. In a fit of optimism,
Dad even created his own letterhead. The letterhead read “Tumblebrook Farm, Home of the Gerbil” in English and, in tiny letters below a simple line drawing of a house, the same thing in Mandarin Chinese.

“Why Chinese?” I asked Dad, squinting at the letters.

“For the gerbils,” he said, sounding surprised. “It’s the language of their homeland.”

D
ONALD
and I both worked for Dad after school and on weekends. Some days, it seemed like it took us years to trudge up to the silver building that sat like a windowless ranch house out on the back ten acres, especially in cold weather or when we were trying to outrun the mosquitoes. While our friends played sports or watched TV, we went to work and came back with wood shavings in our hair and stinking of gerbil pee. The stinging smell of rodent urine was so bad that Donald, assigned the unlucky job of loading the jeep full of used gerbil shavings for Grandfather to drive to the dump, rechristened that vehicle the “Honey Wagon.”

Our chores in the gerbil building were mundane enough to produce the sort of altered state that I imagined my musician idols, Morrison and Hendrix, achieved with drugs. As Dad’s radio hummed easy-listening music in the background, we wheeled our carts up and down the cement aisles, rhythmically doling out green food pellets, filling water bottles, and cleaning out cages.

We also tagged new litters of squirming, pink, blind gerbil pups as we moved through the tall walls of cages. Dad used a special system to track new litters. This involved attaching
color-coded plastic rings to the cages of breeding pairs to mark the ages of the babies and recording births on index cards. The colored rings—red, green, blue, or yellow—each represented a certain age in weeks.

We weaned the pups at five weeks, and the colored rings made it easy to identify which gerbils were ready to leave their mothers. We separated the new weanlings by sex into larger metal cages that held fifty or so at a time. I hated the assembly-line nature of the work, and tried to think of these gangs of young, single-sex gerbils as teenagers in school dormitories, waiting to grow up and get married. Dad had a more pragmatic view.

“It’s pretty much like propagating seeds,” he observed. “You just put the gerbils in a box and watch them grow. When they’re old enough to breed, you set them out in new boxes of their own.”

Though the work was often mind-numbing, my dad’s gerbil hothouse provided me with a welcome sanctuary after fending for myself at the high school, especially if it was an afternoon where I was lucky enough to work alone. Often I’d linger there after my chores were done, soothed by the steady scratching noises of the animals in their shavings. I’d change the radio station from Dad’s elevator music to rock and roll—forbidden by my father, who was afraid that hippie music would upset the animals.

Occasionally I even brought homework and did it at Dad’s metal desk in the corner. Dad’s desk was “strictly off-limits to all employees,” that is, Donald and me. But I loved sitting there and, if I finished my homework, flipping through the science journals that collected in dusty knee-high stacks all
around the floor. In this way, I discovered that there were pygmy gerbils, bushy-tailed gerbils, fat-tailed gerbils, Egyptian gerbils, Indian hairy-footed gerbils, and naked-soled gerbils. I wanted to see and hold them all.

I also found out that our own Mongolian gerbils weren’t technically gerbils at all but a type of jird. They were also called desert rats, antelope rats, yellow rats, or clawed jirds, and fell in the order of rodents (Rodentia) and in the same suborder as mice and rats (Myomorpha). Gerbils were in the same family as hamsters (Cricetidae), but despite my mother’s dislike of them, I thought gerbils were cuter. I loved the thick black tufts at the ends of their tails and their dun color. The color, which Dad called “agouti,” was the same lovely soft brown as the cotton-tailed rabbits I often startled on my long walk up the dirt road to the gerbilry from our house.

One day at breakfast, I asked Dad if I could have some gerbils to keep as pets in my bedroom. I’d loved training Kinky in Virginia, and I hated Dad’s view that all gerbils were the same, just “drones,” as he put it. I wanted to prove him wrong and show him that gerbils had souls.

But Dad refused. “Absolutely not!” he shouted, clearly panicked by the very idea. “You are barred from bringing any gerbils into the house, and that’s an order! Is that clear?”

“But why, Dad?” I asked, truly puzzled. I knew that he wouldn’t miss the ones I took. He certainly didn’t notice when Donald carried a shoebox of gerbils on his bike to sell to local kids for spare change, a practice he would continue through college, when he sometimes bartered gerbils for beer. “You know I’d take good care of them.”

“That’s not the issue,” he said. “You kids would bring them down to the house, and then you’d get tired of them. Next thing I know, your pets would be back at the gerbil building, contaminating the colony with fleas or disease, and we’d be ruined. Ruined! Do you hear me?”

“What disease could the gerbils catch if Holly brought them to the house?” Mom intervened from the stove, where she was scrambling eggs. “The children don’t have any diseases. I don’t, either.” She looked pointedly at my father.

Dad shook his head. “Sally, you don’t know that. A staph infection could spread like wildfire through the gerbils and wipe out the business. Or fleas! Did you ever think of fleas, and what that would do to the gerbils? I’d never sell another animal if I ever filled an order with flea-infested or sick animals. We may never be a germ-free colony, but I can at least keep the colony clean.”

Mom scoffed. “If you’re really so worried about our children infecting your gerbils, maybe you should put a shower inside the gerbil building so the kids can wash up before they go in there to do all of that work for you,” she said, turning back to the pan of eggs. “Hell,” she muttered into the stove hood, “why not make us all wear spacesuits? Life with you can’t get much weirder than it already is.”

T
WO
years after our arrival in Massachusetts, Dad retired from the Navy without fanfare after twenty years of service. He immediately incorporated Tumblebrook Farm as a business and named himself president and treasurer. Mom was listed as
company secretary. Donald and I were official company employees, “on the books,” Dad told us proudly, our work hours and pay meticulously recorded.

I didn’t mind being a tax write-off. But being an employee meant mandatory attendance at Tumblebrook Farm company meetings. These were held in the dining room every Sunday night without fail, in case the IRS ever dropped by to see Dad’s accounts, which he kept in oversized record books that looked like something out of a Charles Dickens novel. All he needed was a pair of fingerless gloves.

“I don’t get why we have to attend,” I grumbled as I helped Mom load the dishwasher before one company meeting. “It’s not like Dad ever asks us for an opinion.”

“Your father misses his Navy staff meetings,” Mom said. “Humor him.”

That night, Dad opened up the company meeting in the dining room with a cigarette and a cup of coffee at his elbow and his briefcase in front of him. He began with an official welcome, then said, “My intention tonight is to bring you up to speed on the current state of affairs and inform you of coming events.” He passed out a printed agenda.

We heard a detailed update on building maintenance and construction. Then came a report on sales, which had been brisk again that week. Finally Dad surprised us.

“I’m proud to announce that we can now promote Tumblebrook Farm as the world’s largest producer of gerbils,” he told us. “Our monthly sales now surpass those of any other gerbil breeder, including what Victor used to do.” He gazed at each of us in turn, as if waiting for us to dispute his numbers. When we didn’t, he argued back anyway.

“It’s an entirely truthful tag line, unlike some,” Dad said, casting a sidelong glance at a copy of
Lab Animal Magazine
lying next to his briefcase, a look that said,
You know who you are
. “Given our rapid rise to success, I have begun plans for phase two of the business, which involves the construction of a second building similar in size to the first.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Mom said. She gripped her coffee cup so hard that her knuckles went white. “We don’t have that kind of money.”

“We have no choice,” Dad said. “Despite the success of Tumblebrook Farm as a supplier of gerbils worldwide, there can be no resting on our laurels. We still have to grow while watching every penny.”

“Dad, shouldn’t Grandmother and Grandfather be downstairs to hear this, too?” I asked. “They do an awful lot of work around here.”

My father ignored me. “As I was saying,” he went on, “we can expect to have to tighten our belts during the next phase of the company’s expansion.”

This was a common refrain at our company meetings. Phrases like “we’ll have to tighten our belts,” “trim around the edges,” and “lower the heat” were so routine that Donald, Philip, and I immediately began fidgeting, kicking at each other beneath the dining room table and dropping bits of food to make the dogs start fighting. Meanwhile, Mom stubbed out a Benson and Hedges on top of Dad’s Camels in the ashtray and gave a longing glance at the paperback novel she’d left on the sideboard.

“Still, despite our need to proceed with the utmost caution as we venture into phase two of the business, I’ve deemed
it necessary to hire additional staff,” Dad announced. “You kids simply aren’t keeping up with the work.”

I looked at Donald. I knew who skimped on cleaning cages. He made a face and kicked me under the table again.