The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (29 page)

Even with all of these precautions, occasionally something went awry. Once, for instance, a group of rowdy young gerbils confined to the hold of a Japanese Airlines jet chewed their way out of a shipping box and made a mad dash for freedom. Dad had to consult with the Japanese for several hours, shouting instructions to Japanese technicians over our kitchen phone as he talked them through various strategies for capturing renegade rodents. The Japanese jet had to be grounded for forty-eight hours during this gerbil round-up, for fear that any loose gerbils might chew through the electrical wires while the jet was airborne.

O
NE
night, I lay in bed and contemplated my latest artwork, an aggressive sunset in burnt oranges, murky purples, and
hysterical reds that I’d painted over the pale blue Colonial floral wallpaper Mom had so painstakingly hung in my room the month before, causing her to yell at me in a way she usually reserved for Donald. I didn’t care, though. I thought my room looked just like an album cover.

Donald poked his head through the doorway and interrupted my reverie. He was taller than I was, now that I was sixteen and he was thirteen, and he’d grown his hair long. His wavy hair was the color of dirt and so thick and tangled that it looked like a preschool art project. Beneath that mop, his eyes were the feverish bright blue of a religious charismatic’s.

“What’s up?” I asked.

Donald cast a quick look over his shoulder, then poked his head further in. “I saw Dad do it today,” he whispered.

“Stay out of my room,” I said automatically “Do what?”

“Kill the extras.” Donald’s voice was hushed.

“What are you talking about?”

“The extra gerbils! Dad kills them himself, you know. He gasses them. Just like the Nazis with the Jews.”

“He does not either! Get out of my room,” I said, but without conviction. I had never before allowed myself to wonder what Dad did with surplus gerbils. The reason was simple: on some level pricking below my conscious mind, I knew.

“Dad’s got his own personal gas chamber,” Donald went on, excited to have my full attention. “It’s this big plastic thing that looks like a hatbox. He puts a hose in it and pumps in carbon monoxide from a tank.”

“Go
away!”
I threw a book at him. “You’re
disgusting!”

Donald grinned, satisfied. “Mom says quit pretending that
you can’t hear her and go downstairs to set the table. Dinner’s almost ready.”

I laid silverware around the table like a robot. We were having lasagna, one of my favorites, but I couldn’t eat. Finally halfway through dinner, I said, “Dad, tell me the truth. Are you committing gerbil genocide?”

Dad’s bald scalp immediately flushed scarlet inside his monk’s fringe of gray hair. “Goddamn it, Donald, I told you not to say anything to your sister,” he said, and lifted a huge wedge of lasagna to his mouth.

I recognized this tactic: we weren’t allowed to speak with our mouths full, so Dad was silencing himself by chewing.

“Holly and I are employees, Dad,” Donald reminded him solemnly. “We attend company meetings. We deserve to be in the know.”

Dad sighed and continued chewing, but we waited him out. Finally, he put down his fork. “Look, it’s like any business. If you have extra inventory, you have to unload it.”

“Unload it!” I cried. “These are lives we’re talking about!”

“These are gerbils,” Dad said patiently “Rodents. They wouldn’t even exist if I weren’t breeding them. Their sole purpose is to serve the cause of medical research. If I didn’t kill the extra animals, if I had to feed every gerbil that was defective or unsold, I’d go broke. It’s a simple matter of doing the math.”

“But you’re killing innocent animals!” I pushed my plate away. “You’re a
murderer
!”

My mother stifled a snigger at the end of the table, and little Philip looked worriedly around at all of us. “Who is Dad killing?” he asked.

“No one,” Dad said. “Eat your dinner.”

“Anyone need seconds?” Mom said. “It’s good lasagna tonight. Going once? Twice? Any takers? No?”

Dad pointed at my plate. “What are you eating, Holly?”

“Lasagna,” I said, confused by the sudden shift in topic.

“And what’s in lasagna sauce?”

“I don’t know. Tomatoes? Onions? Hamburger?”

“And where does hamburger come from?” Dad took another mouthful.

“But that’s different,” I protested weakly, sick to my stomach. “We don’t actually raise our own cows and kill them.”

“No. Though perhaps that would be more ethical than letting somebody else do our dirty work,” Dad countered. “You don’t know how these cows were treated before they died.”

“It would be cool to kill our own,” Donald said.

“Shut up,” I said. “Anyway, I’ve been thinking about being a vegetarian,” I lied. Cheeseburgers were a staple in my diet.

“You’ll get anemia,” Mom said, waving a hand at this nonsense. “A girl your age needs plenty of iron.”

“Because you
get periods”
Donald said.

Mom gave him a look. “I get periods,” she said.

Donald was silenced. The rest of us were, too. Nobody wanted to think about Mom’s periods.

“Look,” Dad said after a moment. “I don’t like killing the gerbils, either, but it’s painless. They just go to sleep. It’s very humane.”

“Like a Nazi gas chamber,” Donald said. “The Jews went to sleep, too.”

“Jesus Christ, Donald,” Dad said.

Mom glared. “I won’t have that language at my table.”

Donald ignored her. “Sometimes the gerbils don’t die right away, you know,” he told Dad.

“What?” Dad grabbed a piece of garlic bread and frantically bit into it.

“I’ve seen it,” Donald went on. “Sometimes, if you don’t gas them for long enough, the gerbils wake up in the Dumpster and try to escape. They’re probably living in our pasture right now.”

“They’d never make it through the winter,” Mom pointed out.

“Look,” Dad said, exasperated. “There’s no perfect way to get rid of surplus stock. I sell what I can to pet distributors, but the reality is that production and customer orders are both unpredictable. Plus, researchers often want males instead of females, because they don’t want hormones interfering with their studies.”

“You mean you kill off mostly
girl gerbils?”
I was nearly hysterical. I’d been reading Sylvia Plath’s poetry; now I stood up and recited a line from my favorite poem, “Daddy”:

There was a small silence. Then Mom said, “Good Lord. I certainly hope that’s not what they’re teaching you at the high school.” She stood up and began clearing the table. “Help me get these plates into the dishwasher.”

I began clearing the table, but paused in the doorway between
the dining room and kitchen. “How can you raise gerbils just to be tortured?” I asked tearfully.

Dad sighed. “They’re not tortured,” he said. “Scientists are very humane. And this is the only way to make progress in medicine. Without animal research, we might never prevent or cure many potentially fatal diseases. Did you ever stop and think about that?”

We looked at each other for a long moment, but neither of us dared to say Gail’s name.

A
S COLLEGE
loomed, Dad earnestly advised me about academic majors. He encouraged me to join ranks with him in the booming gerbil industry. “You’re the only one in this family besides me who even likes gerbils,” he pointed out. “If you don’t take over my business, I don’t know who will.”

“I don’t think so, Dad,” I said. “I want to be an artist or a doctor. Or maybe a lawyer.”
Anything but a gerbil farmer
, I thought, but couldn’t bring myself to say it.

My father shook his head. “You can’t be a lawyer. Every time you got your period, you’d cry in front of the judge.”

“Chauvinist,” I said, but I was afraid that he might be right. I’d always been the soft-hearted one in the family, weeping with the abandon of a menopausal widow whenever there was an injured bird in the yard or a tearjerker TV show. When I was younger, I used to crawl into a prone position beneath the coffee table so that nobody would see me cry.

Inevitably, though, Dad would notice. “Holly’s leaving us now,” he’d announce. “Good-bye, Holly!”

“Good-bye, Holly!” Mom would echo, calling to me as if she were standing across a crowded train platform.

Despite coexisting with my mother, who regularly trounced him verbally, showed more business savvy, didn’t flinch at blood, and tore down walls with crowbars, Dad continued to perceive men as strong leaders and women as vulnerable helpmates. His latest book laid these beliefs out on the page for the whole world to see.

During the two years that Dad was holed up in his bachelor’s quarters at the Merchant Marine Academy, he hadn’t been content to just teach during the week and get his business started on weekends. He had also approached the Pet Library, the publishing division of Hartz Mountain pet supplies, to ask if they’d like a book about gerbils. They’d immediately given him a contract.

For his new book,
Know Your Gerbils
(1972), Dad recycled some of the information about keeping pet gerbils from his first book and used a few of the same photographs. He also included more recent pictures, the result of various photography sessions at the farm. In these, Donald appeared as a genius scientist or medical professional. Clipboard in hand, my brother looked as if he were meticulously recording the weights of gerbil pups on a scale, charting a gerbil’s movements in the mysteriously labeled “open field” test, or sagely cataloging a gerbil’s performance on an elevated “Y-maze” track.

I, meanwhile, was relegated in every picture to the role of secretary or nurse. In my only solo appearance, I was dangling a pair of gerbils by their tails, gerbilly asses pointed toward the camera.

It was an unfortunate portrait: Dad caught me looking cross-eyed down my nose to determine, as his caption handily explained, the difference between male and female gerbils by assessing “the animal with the greatest and the one with the least distance between the anal and genital openings.”

S
HORTLY
after the publication of
Know Your Gerbils
, Dad’s most loyal employee, Angeline, began bemoaning the fate of white gerbils. These were born occasionally as a result of recessive genes; since Dad couldn’t sell them with the others—he was still working on producing a pure agouti strain of inbreds prone to seizures—he disposed of them in his hatbox gas chamber.

“Maybe we don’t have to let Dad see them,” I said.

“How are you going to do that?” Angeline raised one penciled eyebrow under her blond bangs. “We can’t hide them forever.” She sighed. “I just wish I could take them home. I’d like to breed white gerbils.”

“Why don’t you?” I asked. “You could save them!”

So, whenever a white gerbil was born, Angeline would wait until it was old enough to wean and then take it home in a cage she kept on the backseat of her car.

“You really don’t think I’m stealing?” she asked me anxiously one day, running a hand through her hair as she showed me another white gerbil in a litter of three brown brothers and sisters.