The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (27 page)

One night, we camped out in the wooden bunkhouse that JoJo had built deep in the woods “in case the tax man ever comes.” The bunkhouse was a roughhewn building that required careful maneuvering to avoid catching the wide bell bottoms of our hip-hugger jeans on the nail points sticking out of the clapboards.

“We’ve made booby traps for ourselves, haven’t we?” Bea asked mournfully as I tried to untangle one of her long blond braids from a nail. “We might just as well nail ourselves up on crosses for the tax man to find.”

O
NE
summer day between freshman and sophomore year of high school, Bea and I saddled up our horses early and met in the center of town. We rode up one of the farm lanes and played tag in the cornfields, ducking low against the horses’ necks to protect our faces from the cornstalks as we raced along the furrows. Afterward, we rode over to the drive-in restaurant on Route 9 and sat astride our sweaty horses between the parked cars, eating ice cream cones and licking the drips off our bare arms.

On the way back, we veered off down the road toward the town beach. It was still early and the beach was nearly empty. We stripped off our saddles and bridles and used the horses’ manes to pull ourselves onto their backs. Then we urged the animals into the cool green water with shouts and hard thumps of our heels against their sides until the horses finally charged into the lake, scattering the few swimmers around us.

We rode them deeper into the water until the horses were swimming, too. Ladybug churned the water with her hooves and I floated just above her, legs out straight behind me, clinging to her mane and laughing.

Eventually, one of the swimmers phoned the chief of police to alert him to the beasts in the water. The chief arrived with the siren shrieking atop his cruiser and got out to stand on the beach.

“You girls should know better than to swim those horses here,” he shouted. He kept one hammy hand on his gun, but looked overheated and wistful just the same.

We said we were sorry and rode the horses back out onto the beach, feeling the great power of them as the police chief backed away from us. We tacked the horses up again and returned to town, where we let the horses drink at the fountain in the center of the common and thought about what else to do with our Saturday.

The fountain had a sculpture of two seated women in flowing gowns that reached their toes. The statue was pristine white, with just a bit of green mold like lace edging along the edges of the cement dresses. A town vandal with a sense of humor had painted the women’s toenails pink.

As the horses slurped and snorted, Bea and I heard music
coming from beyond the stand of tall maples lining the common. It was a man singing, accompanied by a guitar. We trotted the horses over and saw a lanky freckled redhead sitting with his back against one of the trees, an acoustic guitar in his lap. He gazed up at us on our horses, grinned, and started singing “Lady Godiva”:

“What other songs do you play?” I asked once he was finished.

“What don’t I?” he asked.

“It’s true,” Bea said, for she’d known this man, Michael, since she was in first grade and he was in sixth with her older brother. He’d been drafted and sent to Vietnam the previous year at age nineteen. Now he was back and living in the caretaker’s cottage of the biggest lake house.

We slid down off the horses and drop-tied them next to the tree, where their heads drooped and they swished their tails. The three of us sang protest songs about Vietnam and laughed over all of the words we didn’t know. After we tired of this, we followed Michael across the common, leading the patient horses behind us, and went to the Lallys’ barn. This was a place I’d heard about but never been invited into. It was a red-shingled pole barn with a sway-backed roof. The Lallys were a family of four brothers and a single mother; the father had died two years earlier of cancer. Two of the Lally boys
worked for my father. One of them was in jail now for reasons Dad said I didn’t need to know.

The Lally boys had hung music posters and flags on every wall and beam of the barn, along with Indian bedspreads, Christmas lights, and a collection of license plates. There were guitars in the barn, a drum set, and a piano. Teenagers could be found there day or night, sleeping, drinking, getting high, having sex, or just being there because everyone else was.

On this particular morning, half a dozen kids were sleeping on couches that looked as old as the barn, with cotton stuffing spilling out of the cushions. Bea and Michael passed a joint around with the youngest Lally boy, but I refused to smoke. It was too much like what my parents did, and I expected it to make me cough.

Eventually, Bea said she had to go home. She grabbed hold of the pommel of her saddle, hauled herself onto her horse, and dreamily trotted down the middle of Route 9, her yellow braids bouncing against her back, oblivious of the cars honking their horns behind her.

Afterward, Michael took my hand and led me out to the cornfield behind the barn. We found a shady spot at one edge of it beneath an old willow tree. Michael pulled off his T-shirt and spread it on the ground. Without any words at all, I lay down on that T-shirt like it was a magic flying carpet and waited for him to take me somewhere.

Michael was the most beautiful boy in the world, with his red hair and freckles, and skin like peeled new potatoes, white and cool and slick to the touch. His guitarist’s fingers did things that made me stop breathing, and then he lay back on
his crossed arms beside me in the shade, staring up at the leaves on the old apple tree above us.

When nothing more happened, I sat up and pulled off my shirt. I’d stopped wearing a bra because Bea never wore one, so I thought for sure something unladylike might happen if I was shirtless, too. But Michael shook his head and laughed.

“Get dressed, Lady Godiva,” he said.

“Why?” I asked, so mortified that I crossed my arms in front of my chest. “Don’t you like me?”

“Of course I do. But you’re not old enough to be with me. Don’t take things too fast, okay?” He pulled me close for one more kiss. “Promise me that. You’re good the way you are. It’s the world that’s a rotten place.”

I didn’t understand any of this, but I put my shirt back on and then napped with my head on his shoulder.

As I rode home, trotting Ladybug up Long Hill Road, Michael chunked along behind me in his ancient black Volvo. He helped me put away the horse and tack, and then we sat on the front steps of my house, where Michael played the same melancholy folk songs that he’d strummed on the common. Suddenly Dad appeared, shooting up the driveway in his red Ford station wagon.

Dad must have seen us from the car. He came around the corner of the house at a trot, shouting at Michael to stand up, “and that’s an order!”

Michael obeyed instantly, the guitar dangling from one pale hand, and pushed his long hair out of his eyes. He was six feet tall, but next to my father he looked like a chastened twelve-year-old boy, skinny and vulnerable, his Adam’s apple bobbing as Dad shouted at him the way I imagined he had
done with all of those sailors and soldiers on board his ship or in his classrooms.

“Who are you?” Dad demanded. “And what the hell are you doing here with my daughter?”

Michael mumbled something about just passing the time with a little music, if that was all right.

“It most certainly is not all right,” Dad said. “My daughter is fifteen years old, for God’s sake, and you’re a middle-aged man. I’m asking you to leave the grounds immediately. Do not come back. Do not make me get my Navy pistol.”

The pistol, I knew, was a cobwebbed relic hanging above our fireplace. But Michael scrambled to his feet, ran to his Volvo, and tossed the guitar into the backseat through the window.

“You’ve ruined my life!” I shouted at my father, who was still glaring after Michael’s car long after it was out of sight. “He’ll never come back now!”

Dad shook his head. “My job is to protect you,” he said. “A man that age has no business being here. A man that age is thinking about only one thing with a girl like you.”

“You don’t
know
that.” Stung, I wheeled around and slammed open the screen door against the house. “And anyway, I was thinking about it more than he was,” I muttered.

“I hope not. We expect you to act like a lady,” Dad said. “Be glad I got here in time to save you from yourself.”

“college-bound” by my high school guidance counselor at Quaboag, who steered me away from typing, wood shop, home economics, art, or any other classes where you actually
did
something. It wasn’t until junior year that I finally defied him and signed up for art.

The art teacher was known as “Lamb Chops” for the size and shape of her buttocks and thighs, always encased in skintight jeans beneath bright cotton tops. She was so nonchalant about attendance and behavior that students never missed her class. In fact, there were always extra students hanging around with Lamb Chops; if you wanted to draw, paint, or make pots, you were welcome.

I began to draw with an intensity previously reserved for reading. I had been doodling all my life, drawing animals, mostly, thousands upon thousands of horses and dogs, all of them with noble profiles and muscular necks. Now, Lamb Chops taught me to draw not my imagined ideals but what was really in front of me.

As I studied lines, angles, colors, shadows, and perspectives, I remembered how my own mother used to bring her
sketchpad everywhere, or set up her easel and paints in our various family rooms and backyards. I had a distinct memory of hugging Mom and breathing in her special perfume, which I realized only now must have been turpentine.

“Why don’t you paint anymore?” I asked Mom one morning as we mucked out stalls. “You used to love it.”

“I don’t need to paint anymore,” she told me. “I just did it because I liked it. Then I got bored and moved on to other things. That’s the way I am.” She stopped working for a minute and straightened up to lean on the pitchfork. “It’s not like you can make a living as an artist, anyway.”