The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (7 page)

I thought about Kinky, too, whose life I had saved when Dad discovered the crook in her tail and called her “a defect.” He wanted to “dispose of her” in the same mysterious way he did with other gerbils that didn’t suit his purposes, an activity he did at night after we were in bed. I assumed that he drowned them in the lake, but he never admitted to this. I had pleaded with him for Kinky’s life, though, and he let her live in a separate cage. I still took her out and brought her into the house to play with now and then. Could Kinky have somehow gotten rabies while she was out of the cage?

“Are you positive that gerbil doesn’t have rabies?” I asked Dad. The gerbil appeared to have recovered completely, and sat up now on its hind legs to stare at us as we stared at it.

“Absolutely,” he said. “This animal is simply subject to seizures, like an epileptic,” he explained.

I knew all about epilepsy because Laura Troisi, a new girl in my sixth-grade classroom, had it. Each time Laura had a seizure, the teacher held her down by the legs while the nurse pressed a tongue depressor between Laura’s foaming lips, shouting, “Don’t let the poor thing swallow her tongue!”

Once, I’d even been the one chosen by the teacher to hold Laura’s legs until the nurse arrived. I tried hard not to look at Laura’s underpants as she flopped around on the cold tile floor, but I could see that she wore day-of-the-week underpants like mine. As noble as I felt for being the one chosen to hold the afflicted in place, it bugged me that Laura had worn Wednesday underpants on a Thursday. The feel of Laura’s cool fishy skin made me shiver, too, and I had to be brave not to make a face at the nubby feel of the black leg hair stubble sprinkled on her skin like pepper.

“Maybe some gerbils can get epilepsy, but others can’t,” I suggested. “Like people.”

“You’re probably right, Holly,” Dad said. “Or maybe all gerbils can have seizures, but it has to be the right combination of environmental factors to set them off. I don’t really know.”

Even though the gerbil in question appeared completely normal again, Dad kept it in a cage by itself after that, just in case there was something wrong with it. From then on, he spent every free minute in the garage, doing everything in his power to induce seizures in gerbils. When I asked why, he muttered, “This could be my big scientific breakthrough.”

I liked the sound of that. What if my father wasn’t just a
Navy commander with a secret stash of gerbils but a genius scientist, like Einstein or Madame Curie? And, by extension, if Dad was a genius, maybe there was hope for me, even if the art teacher at school had just called me a retard for painting my self-portrait blue.

Some nights I sat on the stepladder in the garage and watched my father at work until Mom sent me to bed. Dad was so intent on the gerbils that he never acknowledged my presence while engaging in various seizure-inducing tactics: shining lights into a gerbil’s eyes, flicking the garage lights on and off, moving gerbils between cages, or holding them upside down by their tails before flipping them right side up again.

“About the only thing you haven’t done is yell ‘Boo!’ in their faces,” Mom observed one Saturday morning.

Afterward, we heard Dad shouting at the gerbils in the garage.

A
S DAD
conducted his gerbil experiments with increasing intensity, he also began writing to veterinarians and researchers around the country, searching for someone else who might have made the same observations of this bizarre rodent behavior. Eventually he got lucky. Dr. Sigmund T. Rich, director of the research animal facility at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote back to tell Dad that although he had never seen seizures among the gerbils in his lab, he’d sure like to.

“Film it for me,” Dr. Rich suggested. “I want to see what you’re talking about.”

So Dad promptly hung up a white sheet in his office as a
backdrop and filmed an 8 mm movie of gerbils having seizures. “This is the first and only such movie in the world,” he told us as he set off for the post office to mail the movie all the way to California.

“I’m sure it’s unique,” Mom said. “In a class all by itself.”

I was finally old enough to understand that if Mom said things a certain way, she was really saying the opposite of what she thought, so you’d better listen closely. But despite her doubts about Dad’s genius, Dr. Rich was so impressed by the movie that he encouraged Dad to write an article.

“But what would you say in an article?” I asked Dad, daring to stand in the doorway of his home office, a sanctuary so off-limits that you couldn’t even borrow a pair of scissors without having to clean out the car as a punishment for crossing the forbidden threshold.

“I’d just describe what I’ve seen our gerbils do in the garage, I guess,” Dad said. “There are lots of scientists who might be interested in that sort of behavior.” He explained that he’d combed through all of the scientific papers he could find about gerbils in the library. “I’ve discovered something that could potentially change the way people do medicine,” Dad said, lifting his chin a little. “No other laboratory animal has natural seizures. For mice and rats and other lab animals, seizures have to be induced through electric shock, sound waves, or vitamin deficiencies. Gerbils are unique.”

I wasn’t surprised. I’d discovered for myself that gerbils were unique. Kinky knew her name and would take sunflower seeds from my lips. She could find her way through a maze of blocks to whatever bit of lettuce or carrot I’d put there for her.
She’d curl up on my shoulder while I read a book, too, and nibble gently at the tips of my hair when she was ready to climb down.

“That’s great, Dad,” I said. “Maybe you can write a book about gerbil seizures instead of collared lizards.”

“I’ve already started another book,” Dad said, “and it’s got nothing to do with lizards.”

That year, Dad self-published a second book, called
Raise Gerbils as Pets, Laboratory Animals
. In it, he spelled out his dreams for the future:

Even now, decades later, it’s hard for me to shake that absurd image of a gerbil following in a hamster’s footsteps. Yet, I recognize the real truth underlying my father’s words: nobody can predict the future, but somewhere between ordering his first four pairs of gerbils and writing those lines, my dad bet our family’s entire future on the gerbil.

home from working on his ship one night and gathered us in the den for a family meeting. He instructed Donald and me to sit on either side of the fireplace in our handcrafted pine thrones, while Gail colored at the giant cable spool that Dad had so cleverly turned into a coffee table.

By the envelope that Dad held between his hands, we knew he’d gotten his orders. For military families like ours, this was like Oscars night, since you never knew what that envelope contained. We all tried to sit still and be quiet as Dad began his usual speech about his duty to this great country and ours, too.

However, none of us was fully prepared for what the envelope contained. “When summer comes, this family is shipping off to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas,” Dad announced.

“Kansas?” Mom repeated, like he’d said “Mars.” “What the hell is the Navy doing in Kansas?”

“Teaching the Army about the Navy,” Dad said.

Dad sounded matter-of-fact about this, but I could tell by
the pinched look around his blue eyes and the way he crumpled up the envelope and tossed it into the fireplace that he wasn’t happy about this new tour of duty. Nonetheless, he explained that the Navy was asking him to teach Army officers what the Navy could do for them during wartime at the Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth. “Given the events in Vietnam, Army officers have to be prepared to fight in wide-ranging circumstances,” he told us, “from counterinsurgency attacks to full scale nuclear war. My job is to help teach them how.”

So, in a peculiar sort of military Noah’s ark, Dad was chosen as one of just three Navy officers assigned to Fort Leavenworth in 1967, along with three Marines and three Air Force officers. He had already served in the Korean War and visited ports and cities in more than thirty countries around the world. Now Dad sold our house in Virginia Beach and drove us to Kansas.

It was a miserable trip. By the time we left, it was July and so hot that our legs burned on the car seats even through the towels Mom gave us to sit on. Our white Ford Galaxy had no air-conditioning, so we were forced to ride with the windows down. We couldn’t hear much or even keep our eyes open because of the wind and exhaust on the highway. Our parents chain-smoked throughout the drive, which meant that the smoke streamed steadily into the backseat.

At twelve years old, I suffered from such severe motion sickness that I was fed a steady diet of Dramamine. The drug turned me into a drooling narcoleptic. I woke up each time Donald pinched my leg, punched my arm, or ripped the book
out of my hands, only to nod off again, my chin bouncing against my chest, until the blows accumulated and made me cry.

Once Mom turned around to snap at me in the car. “What in the world are you crying about?” she asked. “I can’t understand why you’re always so emotional, Holly. There’s no need for this fuss. You know what it’s like to move. Crying only makes things worse for all of us.” She turned back around and said something I couldn’t hear to my father.

It was true that I could remember what it was like to move. I had clear memories of all the places we’d lived, starting with our terraced gardens in Mexico City, where Dad was the naval attaché at the American embassy and did something mysterious with maps and Mom was a smash hit at parties in sparkling cocktail gowns that made her look like a mermaid. After that, there’d been a little red-shingled house and another, more solid brick house and several places in between. It didn’t matter where I was, because I was at home with my family.