The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (34 page)

At last Dad returned, looking triumphant. “It went well, I take it,” I said.

“You bet. We had over a hundred people. And that’s not all.” Dad leaned forward to whisper. “I finally met Henry Foster.”

I had no idea who this was. “Is that good?”

“Is that good?” Dad laughed. “Of course it is. Henry Foster is the president of Charles River Laboratories, the world’s largest supplier of mice and rats. He’s a legend in his own lifetime!”

My father sat down on one of the little metal folding chairs he’d brought with him—he had a stack of these rescued from the dump and stored in our basement for just such an occasion—and reclined with his hands behind his head. Dr. Henry Foster was a veterinarian, Dad explained, who’d been struck by the same vision as Victor Schwentker: to provide clean, healthy rodents to academic researchers and scientists at drug companies. Foster first began breeding animals in a warehouse west of Boston, where he developed “pathogen-free rats,” an essential step forward in laboratory animal science. The original company moved to a headquarters in Wilmington, Massachusetts, and had expanded to become Charles River Laboratories International, a conglomerate of over a hundred facilities and 8,400 employees in twenty different countries.

“You want to know the most amazing thing?” Dad asked.

“What’s that?”

“Henry Foster is one of the ten richest men in Boston. But when I introduced myself to him, Henry Foster said, ‘I know who you are.’ Henry Foster knew all about my gerbils.”

“That’s great, Dad.” I was honestly impressed.

My father nodded, smiling broadly, then quickly recovered
his frown. “Of course, it never pays to take things for granted. I can’t rest on my laurels.”

I
LASTED
at my research job with Dr. Cortina for three months. Each week it grew more difficult to go. I was having headaches, which I blamed on the lab chemicals. I was sleep-deprived from trying to keep up with organic chemistry, which required hours in the laboratory as well as lectures and outside assignments, and from getting up every morning at 5:00 A.M. to work out with the crew team, which had replaced horseback riding as my obsession in Worcester. Dr. Cortina was overly understanding anytime I called to say I couldn’t come in; he sweetly suggested that I “rest up” and come in when I could. “The work will still be here for you,” he said.

Finally, one spring morning when the magnolia trees on Clark’s campus were at their most delicate pink and the forsythia was so bright yellow that it made me blink, I went to work, sat at the lab bench in front of a rat turned belly-up on the dissecting tray, and realized I couldn’t cut the rat open.

I didn’t want to feel a rat’s cold skin bristling with hairs beneath my hand as I pressed the animal into place. Not just today, but not ever again. I didn’t want to be a doctor. I didn’t want to have anything to do with a career that would require me to dissect animals. Even opening up the horse shoe crabs in my physiology class had made me sick to my stomach, and surely medical school would require worse things.

I tried hard to talk myself into staying on that bench in Dr. Cortina’s lab. This was cancer, I reminded myself: public
enemy number one. This was the work of the noble scientist. I was paving the way toward a cure. For every second that went by without me cutting open this animal, cancer was getting a leg up on humankind.

Dad was so proud whenever he told people that I was going to become a doctor. My father had devoted his life to raising gerbils as laboratory animals because it was a cause that he believed could make the world a better place. He wanted his children to live their lives with the same degree of passion and commitment to humanity. If I gave up here, if I told my father that I no longer wanted to study medicine or do medical research, he would be crushed.

I even tried speaking to myself in my father’s voice, closing the door so that I could say the words aloud, like God lecturing Noah. “Focus, Holly,” I boomed. “Focus on what’s important. You are a servant of medicine.”

But, in the end, nothing I said in my tortured monologue could make me pick up that knife. I finally put my tools away, slid the rat into the lab refrigerator, and made my way to Dr. Cortina’s office, shoulders hunched, sneakers squeaking on the linoleum.

I found Dr. Cortina hunched between two towers of papers, scribbling something on a graph, concentrating so hard that the pink tip of his tongue was pinched between his teeth. He didn’t hear me knock the first time.

“I don’t think I can work for you anymore,” I said when Dr. Cortina finally noticed me. “I’m sorry. Maybe I’m just not a biologist at heart.”

“Really? But you do such good work in the lab.” Dr. Cortina looked up at me from his desk with a kind smile. “Ah,
well. So it goes.” He seemed not the least bit rattled that I was quitting; of course, there were probably dozens of pre-meds coveting my place at his lab bench.

“I don’t think that being careful in a laboratory is the same thing as being a scientist,” I said. “Or a doctor.”

“No, but it’s a start.” Dr. Cortina tapped his pen against one of the stacks of paper in front of him. “So what do you think you’ll do, then? Are you going to change majors?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Do you like biology?”

I sighed. “Not really.”

Dr. Cortina laughed and removed his glasses to wipe his eyes. “Then I think it’s safe to conclude that science probably isn’t your life’s work,” he said gently donning his glasses again. “But don’t despair. Better to find this out now than later. Too many people force themselves forward on a certain path because it’s what they think they should do. Life’s too short for that. Just keep asking yourself what makes you happy.”

A
FTER
more teacher conferences where it was clear that nobody at the local high school knew what to do with my brother Philip, Mom and Dad finally put my little brother in a private school in Worcester, “a place where at least the teachers are smarter than he is,” Mom said. Occasionally, when it was Mom’s turn to drive the car pool, she would stop by to take me to lunch.

Two months after I left my laboratory job and returned to Big Boy—a move I still hadn’t confessed to my parents—my mother called to say that she was coming to see me. I went to
my morning classes and headed home to clean the apartment. I was living with vegetarian roommates; one of them, Vicki, was seated at the kitchen table when I came home, wearing a pair of enormous sunglasses and slicing up raw steak.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “Why are you wearing sunglasses indoors?”

“It’s the flesh,” she said, gesturing at the bloodied beef strips on the table. “I’m cooking for Harry tonight, and I wanted to surprise him by fixing his birthday dinner here. He said he wanted a real he-man, red-meat meal. But I can’t stand the sight of this poor wounded flesh.”

“Oh. Okay. Listen, my mom’s coming over. Do you think you could clean up some of that blood before she gets here?”

Vicki nodded and went back to her dramatic carving while I made my bed and stood in the hallway, wondering what to do about the clay. Leaving my job in Dr. Cortina’s lab had left me with free time during the day, since I mostly waitressed at night; I had signed up for pottery classes on a whim. The act of centering a lump of clay on a spinning wheel and transforming it between my hands, shaping a vase, pitcher, or bowl, absorbed me like nothing else I’d ever tried.

I’d prevailed upon Donald to come and help me build my own pottery wheel from a kit. He’d agreed because I paid him, and because it involved pouring a cement flywheel. I had put the wheel in an alcove in the hallway and lined the walls and floor with plastic, but I still managed to splatter raw clay everywhere.

My roommates didn’t mind traipsing through clay to get to their bedrooms, but now that I was faced with trying to clean, I realized it was like the Dr. Seuss book
The Cat in the Hat:
like the cat spreading the pink spot that he wants to remove,
anything I used to clean up the clay just transferred the clay to the next surface I touched.

I tried to meet my mother downstairs when she arrived, but she was too quick for me. She came through the kitchen and stopped at the hallway threshold to stare at the clay, the pottery wheel, and the shelves of greenware I’d been drying before taking them over to Clark to fire in the kiln.

“What on earth is all this?” she asked.

“A pottery wheel,” I said.

She gave me a look. “Please don’t tell me that this is your mess.”

“Okay.”

Mom sighed. “I hope your landlord doesn’t pay you a surprise visit.”

We went out to lunch and then stopped at the grocery store, as always, where Mom tried to convince me to let her buy me more food than I needed. “My roommates are vegetarians,” I explained. “I really just need rice and beans.”

She dismissed this. “We’re not living in Mexico, you know.”

As we shopped for food, I finally told Mom about my decision to stop working in Dr. Cortina’s laboratory.

“Well, that’s too bad,” she said. “You know how your father worries about your lack of focus. But you’ll still get your degree in biology, won’t you? It seems too late to change majors at this point, with just one year to go.”

I nodded. “Yes. But I want to be an artist instead of a doctor.”

We were walking back to the car. Mom stopped and turned to glare at me. “You’ll end up living on cat food if you’re an artist,” she said. “Why don’t you go to nursing school?”

“I can’t work at a job I don’t love,” I said firmly.

“I knew it was a mistake to send you to such a liberal college,” Mom said. “Look, you can’t be a debutante all your life. There may come a day when you have to buy your own groceries.”

We rode home in silence, my throat thick with anger. What had my mother done with her life but mooch off Dad? Immediately, though, I knew this was unfair: my mother had followed her own bliss, working hard to run a riding stable that barely made ends meet and devoting her life to caring for us. So I said nothing.

Mom parked the station wagon on the street below my apartment building and we began hauling the bags of groceries up the open back staircase. I lived on the second floor; as I fumbled with keys to unlock the door, we both happened to glance down at the car from the back porch. A tall, skinny man with a blue shirt that hung on him like a flag on a pole was sauntering up to the open tailgate of Mom’s station wagon. He glanced around and then began gathering up the remaining bags of groceries as if they belonged to him.

“He can’t do that!” Mom cried indignantly. “I paid good money for that food!”

“He just did, though,” I said, laughing a little as the thief began sauntering up the street. He might as well have been whistling. “Look, if he’s that hungry, he probably deserves the food more than I do.”

“The hell with that,” Mom said.

Before I could stop her, Mom ran down the two flights of stairs. I watched in astonishment from the back porch as my
nimble mother, looking very small from my vantage point, trotted up behind the man and started whaling away at him with her purse. Before I could make it down the stairs, the man had dropped the bags and run.

I helped Mom collect the scattered groceries. “I’m not sure if that was brave or stupid,” I said. “But it was amazing.”

Mom balanced a bag of groceries on one hip. “We work too hard for our money to let anyone steal from us,” she said with a sniff.