The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (32 page)

“So you actually own all of these rods?” I asked, eyeing the towering pile of them. Those rods were longer than I was, and as shiny and black as giant licorice sticks.

“Of course.” Dad picked up a dozen thermal rods and balanced them across his shoulders. “But only temporarily.” He began walking, in his Speedo and sneakers, toward the riding
arena, hunched under the load of rods like an ox beneath a yoke. “I’m an agent for the company that manufactures them.”

I picked up some of the rods and laid them across my shoulders, as Dad had done, and followed him toward the arena. Dad paused by the garden and spun slowly around to look at me. The rods turned with him. “I can sell thermal rods to anybody who wants them,” he announced confidently. “I expect them to fly out of here. There’s an energy crisis, you know. People won’t be able to get enough of these.”

With that, Dad was on his way again, slowly maneuvering the rods on his shoulders along the narrow path between the garden and the riding ring, where two women on horseback stopped to gape at the sight of my father, naked but for his brown bikini, totter by with those long black plastic rods balanced across his shoulders.

B
Y THE
time I was accepted at Clark University in Worcester, Dad had managed to put up his third and last building. Tumblebrook Farm, Home of the Gerbil, now occupied 7,300 square feet of building space, and Dad was indisputably a gerbil czar, the world’s foremost expert on and largest supplier of Mongolian gerbils. He had an inventory of more than 8,700 gerbils, with 2,600 new gerbils being born on our farm every week.

Dad had outlasted and outsold his competitors. Thanks to the gerbils, he now had a swimming pool and a Lincoln Continental. He could even indulge in an antique coin collection.

The gerbils also paid most of my college tuition when I headed off to Worcester. To supplement the rest, I took a job
as a waitress in Abdow’s Big Boy Restaurant, a landmark in Worcester because of the chubby Big Boy statue out front. Big Boy was decked out in checked pants and an Elvis Presley hairdo, and he bore a giant hamburger aloft like the Olympic torch. I made good money there because Abdow’s was a home away from home for most of the city’s drunks; once, a man handed me a fifty-dollar tip for spraying extra whipped cream onto his strawberry pie.

The running joke, whenever I came home from college, was to ask if we were rich enough yet for me to quit waitressing. Dad always shook his head and told me that we were still waiting for our ship to come in.

One weekend, though, he had a different answer. I came into the kitchen and found Mom frying chicken for dinner and Dad seated at the claw-footed oak table with a tumbler of scotch at his elbow. At the sight of me, Max the parrot cocked his head and scoffed like a Russian villain in a James Bond movie.

“Ah ha!” Max cried. “Ah ha ha ha!”

“Hey, Max,” I said. “How are you?”

“Ah
ha
!” Max screeched even louder.

Dad rolled his eyes. “If we’re lucky, that bird will die a timely but painless death while we’re on vacation.”

“You’re going on vacation?” I was so surprised that I stopped in the middle of the kitchen and dropped my bags where I stood. It was a well-known fact that my parents never went anywhere.

“We all are,” Dad said. “We need to do something as a family.”

“But why? We never have before.”

“It’s a celebration.” Dad picked up his scotch and held it up to the light for a minute, turning the glass in his hand. “This year, I made as much money as the governor of Massachusetts. What do you think of that?”

I sat down. “Wow.” Max squawked and tried to bite my shoulder through the cage. I moved out of his reach. “That’s great, Dad.”

“Of course, the governor enjoys a few more perks than I do,” Dad added generously. “A mansion. A staff. A secretary. A car at his disposal, and so forth.”

“Still,” I said. “That’s quite an accomplishment. You must have sold a ton of gerbils.”

“And you do have a secretary,” Mom said, leaving the stove to come over to the table. “My mother’s right upstairs.” She sat down with us and reached for Dad’s cigarettes. He tried to slide the package back into his pocket, but she was too quick for him.

“You’ll have to take time off from your job,” Dad informed me.

“How much time?”

“Two weeks, starting the Fourth of July.”

I shook my head. “I can’t do that,” I said. “They count on me. And summer’s the busiest season for tips. I need the money.”

“You have to come with us,” Mom said. She thought for a minute, and then added, “Of course, depending on where your father decides to take us, I might stay home, too.”

“That’s not an option,” Dad said. “You both have to go on vacation. And that’s an order,” he added, smiling.

“But I’ll get fired!” I protested. “Waitresses don’t ever get
vacations. Besides, I just barely memorized the prices on the menu and learned how to carry six hot plates without a tray.”

“All useful skills, I’m sure,” Mom said.

“Quit your job,” Dad suggested. “That way they can’t fire you.”

I didn’t quit, but I lied. When I went back to work that Sunday, I told the manager, a scrawny woman whose white hair net hung like a cobweb over her ears, that my little brother Phil had a life-threatening blood disease and would probably be dead by summer’s end.

“My family needs me to spend time with them,” I said. “Two weeks.”

The manager sighed, unimpressed. “Call me if your brother doesn’t die,” she said. “I’ll put you back on the schedule.”

F
OR
our first and only family vacation, Dad couldn’t bring himself to pay for a motel despite his governor’s salary. Instead, he called us outside early on the day of our departure and said, “Surprise! We’re traveling in style!”

An RV was parked in our driveway, the sort of camper that’s one step up from a plumber’s truck, with a bed over the cab and built-in furniture designed for leprechauns.

“It’ll make Phil happy,” Dad said as Mom, Donald, and I squinted in disbelief at the refrigerator on wheels that he assured us would sleep eight to ten people. “You know how crazy he is about campers. I told Phil that this is his birthday present. And there’s room enough for each of you to bring a friend.”

“Maybe if we tie our friends to the roof,” Donald said.

Phil popped out of the RV door just then, banging metal against metal. “There’s a bed over the steering wheel!” he yelled. “Can you believe it?” He was turning eight years old that August and was easily entertained.

“I am not going anywhere in that tin can,” Mom announced.

“Oh, come on, Sally,” Dad said. “Where’s your sense of adventure? This camper has a fully equipped kitchen!”

“Exactly my point.” Mom sniffed. “Camping is all about chores. And we know who does the chores around here.” She turned around and started walking back toward the house. “You go,” she called over one shoulder. “Take the kids with you. Now, that’s what I’d call a vacation.”

Mom hid in the house while we helped Dad load up the camper with canned goods, linens, clothes, more canned goods, a TV, and a grill. We had enough Dinty Moore canned beef stew to feed a ship full of Navy men.

Eventually, Dad went inside “to have a little talk with your mother.” Phil climbed back into the camper to line up his stuffed animals on the bed above the cab while Donald and I lolled around on the grass, waiting for whatever would happen next.

Donald was easier to get along with since his near-death experience earlier that spring on a snake-hunting expedition to Belize. He’d driven to Central America in a caravan of high school students led by a guide with a guitar instead of a sense of direction. The guide had crashed their van into a truck full of rocks. While Donald’s travel companions suffered from lacerations and broken bones, my brother was clever and agile enough to dive under the dashboard just before the accident; his only injuries were bruises in the shape of the radio knobs.

“Why do you think Dad’s trying to make us all go on vacation?” I asked him now. “It’s kind of weird, isn’t it? Maybe he’s having a midlife crisis.”

“Nah. That was the Lincoln Continental,” Donald said.

“Do you think he’s feeling nostalgic because you’re about to go to college?”

“The family is the pillar of society,” Donald pronounced. “Ours might be a shaky pillar, but it’s still standing. I think Dad’s trying to save his marriage by taking a week off from the gerbils.”

“He might as well have bought Mom another vacuum cleaner for her birthday, like last year,” I said. “I can’t believe he’s going to try to put her in a camper.”

“It’s the Navy thing,” Donald said confidently “Dad just loves being shut up in a metal container. He can’t understand why nobody else wants to be in there with him.”

Eventually, Dad prevailed. Mom marched back outside, fiercely smoking a cigarette, her purse dangling over one arm. Dad followed. His face was paler than usual. Donald and I took one look at our parents and scrambled into the camper.

Our destination was Prince Edward Island, Canada, a road trip that would take us through New Hampshire, Maine, and New Brunswick. Our first stop was early that evening at a lake in New Hampshire, where Mom stood at the water’s edge and refused to swim.

“See that?” she asked me, gesturing with her chin at the line of tubby women in sensible bathing suits standing waist deep in the water while their kids splashed around them like golden retrievers. “You know those women and kids are all peeing in the water. You might as well swim in a public toilet.”

We drove another three hours north the next day to Popham Beach, Maine. The beach was cornbread gold and soft, and Donald and I dashed in and out of the waves with little Phil. I was surprisingly at peace. We must have looked like any other family, with our parents sitting in their webbed lounge chairs with the cooler between them while we swam.

However, all went sour the next night at our next campground, further north in Maine. There, ours was one of many RVs, and it was a tugboat amid cruise ships. Generators chugged and televisions blared all around us. You couldn’t go to the showers without falling over people sprawled in webbed chairs with flesh hanging in pink bunches wherever it escaped from bathing suits and shorts.

“They’re in a different class of people, campers,” Mom said as we picked our way through the bodies.

That night, Mom started picking fights with Dad. It was over small things at first—she wanted to sleep alone in the bed above the cab and let Phil sleep with Dad—and escalated from there. Listening to them bicker, I realized that this was the longest time our family had ever been together, sleeping and eating in gerbilly close quarters, with no sprawling farm fields, animals, or chores to buffer us from one another.

Donald tried hard to entertain us that night with imitations of Uri Geller, the handsome Israeli who had laid claim to paranormal abilities such as telekinesis and telepathy. Geller had explained to the world that his special gifts were granted to him as a child when he was playing in a garden and struck by a strange light; he was best known for bending spoons with his mind.

As Donald laid out a row of plastic spoons on the picnic
table, we gathered around to watch. Donald stared hard at the utensils for several long, breathless moments, during which I nearly believed he could bend them. At last, though, he hit the spoons with his fist and sent them flying. “I can’t be expected to bend plastic!” he said. “Show me some metal!”

Mom sighed. “You know, I’d really rather watch you shuck this corn with your mind than bend spoons.”

“Yes. Plastic spoons aren’t cheap, you know,” Dad said, bending over to collect them from the pine needles around the rock so that he could wash them and stow the spoons in the camper again. “It’s not like plastic spoons grow on trees.”

Donald and I had a fit over that one, giggling so hard that Dad sent us out for more firewood. Later, as we fed the wood into the fire, our parents had their final argument. This one was about lobsters.

“All I want,” Mom told my father, “is for you to indulge me just this once. I want you to drive down the street and buy a couple of lobsters.” She set a giant pot of water over our puny campfire. “It’ll take me that long to boil the damn water anyway.”