The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (4 page)

As it turned out, though, I didn’t wait that long. One May morning, Marcy and I decided to marry my guinea pig, George, to Marcy’s rabbit in my backyard. We had to struggle to get George into the bow tie I had made for him out of one of Mom’s red checked dish towels. Marcy’s rabbit was already white as a bride, so all we had to do was weave a dandelion crown and hang it over her ears. This would’ve been easier if her ears hadn’t already been pasted flat to her head, the result of our fox terrier, Tip, barking so hard at us from his chain that he was hopping up and down as if he were being stung by bees. Tip’s biggest goal in life was to swallow another animal whole.

Dad was outside with us. My father never sat still. Every night, after watching the news about Vietnam, he would burn up excess energy by conducting booming, fierce military marches he played on the hi-fi, using his Camel cigarette as a baton. He also made good use of his workshop. In addition to building a pair of miniature pine thrones for either side of the fireplace, he’d found a giant cable spool by the side of the road and somehow got it home, where he sanded it, varnished it,
and then rolled it into the house with a thundering sound on the wood floors that made Tip bark and Gail cry. We used the spool as a coffee table, even though Mom complained that it was like having a redwood growing in the den.

Since spring, Dad had spent his free time outdoors, first building a screened-in porch and then turning his attention to landscaping. Our backyard resembled a miniature forest because of the tiny trees Dad had planted everywhere, most of them willows and poplars. The white paint on those skinny trunks made it seem like we were growing a crop of canes for the blind. Now he was digging another hole.

Marcy whose father outranked mine and who had a teen age sister who sat out in the yard and smoked marijuana for all the world to see, wasn’t the least bit afraid of my father. Never mind that Dad, if he wasn’t actually issuing orders to us or informing us of something, was prone to such long silences that it was like he didn’t see you at all. Marcy stood up, leaving her rabbit in my lap with George, and walked right over to him.

“What in Sam Hill are you doing, Commander Robinson?” Marcy asked, standing with one hand on her hip like she was already a grown-up, even though the backside of her shorts was covered with grass stains and her white anklets had half disappeared into her sneakers.

My father, unaccustomed to being interrupted, did not pause in his digging to correct her language. However, because Marcy’s dad outranked him, he did answer her. “Whatever do you mean, Marcy?”

“Why are you planting all these trees?” she demanded.

Dad shrugged and continued to dig. “Somebody will
move into this house when we move out, right?” he asked her. “And don’t you think they’d enjoy a little more shade than we’ve got?”

“Yes
, sir.”

Dad nodded, but it was as if he were nodding to himself, because he still didn’t look at Marcy “I guess you might say I’m planting for the future, then,” he said. This phrase seemed to please him, because he lit another cigarette and then started digging harder, as if his white T-shirt weren’t already see-through with sweat.

Marcy traipsed back over to me, her short black hair so straight and stiff, the edges of it stroked her jaw on both sides like paintbrushes. “Your dad is crazy,” she said admiringly. “Just plain crazy.”

I took a deep breath, encouraged by my best friend’s daring. “He has a secret, too,” I whispered as Dad pushed the wheelbarrow with its lone occupant, a sapling the size of my arm, down toward the lakeshore. “Come on. I’ll show you, but you have to swear not to tell anyone.”

I led Marcy by the hand to the side door of the garage. She was carrying her rabbit and I held my guinea pig on his back like a baby in my arms, so getting the door open was tricky. I finally managed to push it open. We slipped into the cool garage and I closed the door immediately behind us. I stopped and blinked in the sudden dark, and we both stood perfectly still for several moments to keep from walking into things.

“What’s that scratching sound?” Marcy whispered.

“My dad’s new pets,” I whispered back. We edged around our turquoise Buick toward the back of the garage. My eyes
were getting used to the light, which mainly came from the two windows in the garage door, a pair of dusty slits.

When we reached the metal shelves that now ran along the back and both sides of the garage, I flicked on the light so that Marcy could see the towers of gerbil cages. I fervently hoped that Dad wouldn’t suddenly come around to the front of the house and realize the light was on. I was disobeying orders for sure.

Marcy’s dark eyes went wide. “What are they?” she asked.

“Shhh. Whisper,” I reminded her. “They’re gerbils from Mongolia. Gerbils are a kind of kangaroo rat that lives in the desert. Dad calls them pocket kangaroos because they can jump.”

We stood in silence as the animals went about their business. Every so often, a gerbil would bound around, knocking against the sides of its cage, or a baby would squeak. By now, Marcy was making little panting noises of excitement, like our fox terrier when he saw the gerbils.

I knew one more trick. “Watch this,” I said, and clapped my hands smartly together. The sound startled George the guinea pig—he squealed, and I almost dropped him. Marcy’s rabbit thumped her feet, so Marcy had to hang on to her by the scruff of her neck. But it was worth it: in the dim light, I could see that the gerbils had all frozen upright on their hind legs, heads turned toward us as if we were the movie and they were the audience.

O
NE
Saturday morning, Dad went off to the Sears, Roebuck in Virginia Beach to buy tools, an odyssey that could take all
day. My mother was inside, coloring with Gail, and Donald had done his usual disappearing act after breakfast, probably off to torment the construction workers or hunt for turtles along the marshy lakeshore.

I slipped into the garage and lifted one edge of the metal lid off the cage of female gerbils I’d been studying for the past week. I didn’t remove the lid completely, for fear the animals might escape. Instead, I slid my arm into the cage and lay my hand flat on the bottom of the cage, palm up. With my free hand, I reached into my pocket to extract the sunflower seeds I’d taken from my brother’s box of hamster food. I lined my palm with the seeds.

This group of gerbils was nearly full-grown by now, and there was one in particular that I liked because she had a crooked tail like my grandmother’s Siamese cat. I’d named her Kinky, and now I called her to me. “Here, Kinky, Kinky, Kinky,” I whispered.

Kinky and her sisters ran over to my hand, probably more in response to the alien sight and smell than to my voice, but I liked to imagine that Kinky knew her name right away. Tiny claws tickled my palm as the gerbils sat on my hand and went after the seeds. They didn’t store seeds in their cheeks the way Donald’s hamster did, but ate them on the spot. In no time, the seeds were gone, and before I could remove my hand, Kinky had climbed right up my arm. She was nearly out of the cage before I shook her off.

The gerbil landed on her back but was unhurt. She immediately scrambled to her feet and sat up on her hind legs, watching me to see what would happen next. “Sorry,” I apologized,
and repeated the whole process of sliding my hand into the cage and dropping a few seeds into my open palm.

It took me two weeks to fully train Kinky. By the time I was finished, I could coax her to climb right up my arm and down my shoulder to search for seeds in my shirt pocket, and I could hold her in the palm of my hand and feed her sunflowers from my lips. She would ride comfortably in my pocket, too, just her little head sticking up to observe her passing surroundings. I’d ferry Kinky in this way from the garage to my bedroom, where I’d let her rampage through my stable of plastic horse statues and sit in my Barbie car.

Eventually, I felt comfortable enough to ride my bike to Marcy’s house with Kinky in my pocket so that she could join our
Star Trek
games. We were deep in one such game—I was playing Mr. Spock and using the Vulcan technique of joining two minds to communicate with Kinky by pressing my forehead to hers—when we were interrupted.

“Girls.” Marcy’s mother was a slim figure silhouetted in the relentless afternoon sunshine beyond the garage. “Holly has to go home right away. Her mother needs her.”

Stunned, I pedaled home as fast as I could without spilling my gerbil. What could possibly be wrong that Mom would call me home in the middle of a perfectly good Saturday morning? On most Saturdays, Donald and I came home only if we were hungry or it was dark, and sometimes not even then.

My mouth went dry and I leaned forward over the handlebars, though not so far that Kinky could leap out of my pocket. What if something had happened to someone in my family? I also had more selfish concerns: What if Dad had discovered
that Kinky was missing, and knew I’d disobeyed his orders not to touch the gerbils? Or what if he saw Kinky in my pocket when I rode up the driveway?

As it turned out, I had plenty of time to slip Kinky back into the cage with her sisters. The garage was empty, the big front doors securely shut as usual. I dropped Kinky back into her cage. Then I retraced my steps through the garage and entered the house by the front door.

I found Mom in the backyard. She stood on the lawn next to the lake, where Dad was dragging Gail’s empty bright blue plastic wading pool across the lawn. “Oh, good, you’re here,” Mom said.

She held me by the shoulders and looked me up and down, then sent me back inside for a clean blouse. “Wear the red striped one,” she called after me. “I ironed it and hung it up in your closet. Put on a clean pair of shorts and comb your hair, too.”

This was getting more mysterious by the minute. By the time I returned to the yard Donald was there, too, in an equally stiff shirt, hair combed and slicked to one side, only his sly blue eyes a clue to his real nature.

Unlike me, Donald had no interest in reading. In fact, he hated any sort of calm. As my mother put it, “Poor little Donald needs more action than he gets.” We lived on a lake, and my brother loved to mix himself a tall glass of chocolate milk for breakfast at 5:00 A.M. before sneaking outside to catch frogs and snakes beneath the dock. He was a petty thief who would try every back door until he could get into a neighbor’s kitchen and help himself to food better than ours. He lifted restaurant tips so fast that waitresses went home shortchanged while
Donald always had enough money for Cokes. He even swiped coins from the collection plate at the Lutheran church where Mom sent him alone to Sunday school; we weren’t Lutherans, but Mom sent him anyway hoping that “somebody over there will save that kid’s soul.”

Donald had a genius for escaping mischief unscathed, which left me as his fall guy. Arguing with Donald was like arguing with a prophet: he always knew he was right. During the short time we’d lived in Virginia, he had already convinced me to lick a frozen pipe and race a newspaper boy on a bicycle, which led to me being run over by the bicycle and breaking my nose. Most recently, Donald had convinced me to climb to the top of a telephone pole, using the same metal rungs the telephone repairmen used, and shimmy down it again in shorts; Mom had to spend an entire evening plucking splinters out of my legs.

My mother came up to me as I stood there waging war with Donald. She whipped a comb out of her apron pocket and dragged it through my short hair with a heavy, hopeless sigh. My hair was as dry and brown as toast; Mom had to spit on the comb to make the strands lie down. Then she ordered me to stand next to Donald until our father was ready.

“Ready for what?” I asked, but Mom ignored this and went to sit in the shade with two-year-old Gail, who was dressed in a ruffled blouse. With that outfit and her wild blond curls tamed into ringlets, Gail looked like somebody’s princess doll.

Donald sidled closer to me as we watched Dad drag the wading pool to first one location, then another, with Tip the fox terrier barking madly at the scraping sound. “You’re stupid,” Donald said, and hammered his fist into my thigh.

“Not as stupid as you,” I said automatically, punching him back. It was our standard greeting.

Donald grabbed my arm and pinched it hard. Before I could pinch him back, Dad ordered us to collect toys from our bedrooms and bring them outside. “Anything small,” he added. He was dressed in a white T-shirt and baggy khaki shorts, his pale legs sticking out like straws. A cigarette hung from one corner of his mouth. “Make it quick, before the light changes.”

Donald, Gail, and I ran through the house as if we were on a treasure hunt. I gathered dolls, plastic horse statues, and stuffed animals. When I brought out my armload of belongings to the yard, Dad commanded me to dump everything on the grass near the wading pool. Donald and Gail did the same.

Dad selected a few items and began arranging them in the swimming pool, standing back every now and then to squint at his handiwork like an artist with a canvas. Once satisfied, he went into the garage. He returned with one of the gerbil cages and a black leather case.