The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter

by Holly Robinson

  “Welcome home, dear,” Mom said as Dad threw open the door and heaved his duffel bag full of the week’s laundry off his shoulder and onto the floor.

  Dad’s smile was like Mom’s: half grimace. He nodded at me and said, “Go get your brother and clean out my car. Now.”

  “Yes, sir.” I ran down the basement stairs and found Donald in the workshop with Grandfather, gluing the spindles back into an old chair that Grandfather had found by the side of the road. “Dad’s home,” I said.

  “O Captain! my Captain!” Grandfather said.

  “We have to clean out the car,” I said. “Right now, or he’ll be mad. You know how he is.”

  “Why do we have to do it every Friday? It’s his mess,” Donald grumbled, but he followed me out to the driveway.

  By the time we came back inside, Dad had changed out of his Navy uniform and was squinting at the new blue-and-white kitchen wallpaper that Mom and Grandfather had put up that week, a tumbler of scotch in one hand. “Looks about an eighth of an inch off to me,” he pronounced. “That’s a shame, considering what wallpaper costs a roll. I hope you got it on sale.”

  Grandmother came downstairs to join us in the kitchen, a flowered apron tied around her tweed skirt. “I baked you an apple pie, Robbie,” she said.

  “Thank you, Mother, but there was really no need. We eat too many sweets,” Dad said, still eyeing the wallpaper. “How much electricity do you suppose that old oven of yours uses?”

  “Come look, Dad,” I said, leading him over to the kitchen window overlooking the back garden and the pastures beyond. “Donald and I cleared a lot of rocks out of the pasture. We filled in some of the woodchuck holes, too.”

  “Your grandfather mowed the grass again, I see,” Dad said. “I never did care too much for manicured lawns. Mowers use an awful lot of gas, you know.”

  Grandfather had come up from the basement by now and was standing with his arms folded across his chest. The last of the sunset glinted against his glasses so that I couldn’t read his expression. “Might as well let the grass grow up around you, then, and live in a jungle,” he said. “You’d save a hell of a lot of pennies that way.” He turned on his heel and went upstairs.

  “Well, I’ll leave you all to enjoy your dinner,” Grandmother said. She set her pie down on the counter before following Grandfather up to their apartment.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” Mom said.

  “What? What did I do?” Dad asked. “Can’t a man express an honest opinion around here without everyone taking it so personally? After all, I’ve bent over backward to give your parents a place to live. I should have some say in things.”

  “Hitler would have more tact,” Mom said.

  Dad may have given my grandparents a home, but they worked hard to earn it. The very next day, for instance, my father returned from taking the trash to the dump and called Grandfather outside to see what he’d brought home. Donald and I followed Grandfather out to the driveway, where the back of Dad’s red Ford station wagon was crammed with dirty flat sticks he’d collected at the dump.

  “What is that stuff?” I asked Dad. “Kindling?”

  He shook his head. “If you just wire these together, Dad,” he told Grandfather, “I bet we can make a snow fence all along the road.”

  “Damn fool,” Grandfather muttered behind me. “Spindly little things will fall down in the first storm.”

  Somehow, though, Grandfather managed to build a fence from those discarded slats of wood, and it never did fall down.

  SHORTLY after we moved to Massachusetts, Dad gave us a lecture on keeping the lights off and the heat down. “Now that the military’s not paying our utility bills, it’s important to remember that frugal is our middle name,” he said as he showed us how to make Christmas ornaments out of scraps of old wallpaper that we’d peeled off the kitchen and hallway walls.

  As the cold set in, Dad made a habit of feeling the pipes when he got home on Fridays to make sure that nobody had turned up the heat; luckily, Mom knew enough to turn the heat down on Friday mornings so that the pipes would cool in time.

  That first Christmas, Dad said there was no money for a Christmas tree, so Donald and I hiked out to the woods behind the house, cut down a tree, and dragged it home, a practice we would repeat every year after that. Grandfather nailed together bits of scrap wood and painted them to make Christmas trees for either side of our front door. He also fashioned a candelabra out of old spools of thread and spray-painted it black so that we could use it as a centerpiece during Christmas dinner.

  Grandmother did her part, too. She hand-quilted garlands of candy canes, angels, and soldiers to wrap around the front staircase, and crocheted red and green holiday covers for the extra rolls of toilet paper sitting on top of the toilet tank. The next fall, she started making apple-head dolls to sell at church fairs, using empty Clorox bottles for the bodies and pinching the dried-up apples into eerie little grimacing gremlin faces. I felt sorry for any kid whose mother came home with one of those, despite the hours Grandmother spent stitching dresses and aprons and hats for her apple-headed horrors.

  Where I was concerned, Dad was a stop-spending vigilante. I had already cost him more money than any of my siblings because of my teeth. Those first few weeks after my riding accident in Kansas, I’d had to keep my lips pressed shut to hide my toothless gums while they healed. An Army dentist had then crafted a temporary bridge attached to a plastic roof plate. This contraption was held in place by a few strategic wires that fit into the cracks between my remaining front teeth.

  The only good thing about the accident, other than losing my snaggletooth, was that I now had a surefire way to unnerve my father. He had a much softer stomach than Mom, who could pluck ticks the size of grapes off the dogs with her bare hands and inject medicine into a horse with a needle the size of a milk shake straw. Anytime Dad lectured or scolded, I’d use my tongue to flip the bridge down, revealing the gap where my front teeth had been. At the sight of my bright pink gums, he’d blanch and turn away.

  “Jesus Christ, Holly,” he’d mutter. “Don’t do that to me.”

  That first year in Massachusetts, I was outfitted with a permanent bridge—a nifty, wire-free cosmetic design not covered by military health insurance. I could no longer flip my front teeth at Dad because they were permanently anchored into place by crowns on teeth that hadn’t been knocked out. This meant that I had a straight-toothed smile and no longer had to worry about losing my teeth at inopportune moments, as I had in Kansas, where I routinely had to dive to the bottom of the pool to retrieve them.

  The down side of having such an expensive mouth was that Dad would materialize from nowhere to issue warnings anytime I ventured outside. “Your teeth, Holly!” he’d cry, trotting after me as I set off on horseback. “Watch out for your teeth! Those cost money we don’t have, you know!”

  He was also extremely watchful of my toilet paper consumption. Whenever I used our only bathroom upstairs, I had to turn the toilet paper roll as stealthily as possible, because if he heard me using it, Dad would come pounding up the stairs to knock on the bathroom door.

  “You don’t need more than three squares, Holly!” he’d yell. “Remember, more than three squares is wasted!”

  Eventually, I solved this problem by buying toilet paper with my own babysitting money a separate stash that I kept in my bedroom and carried back and forth to silently unwrap, counting out five squares just because I could.

  IN THE steady dauntless way of pioneers, we slowly began to make the farm feel like home. Grandfather planted a huge garden behind the house, one-half of which was devoted to tall, brightly colored flowers—Grandmother adored gladioli, so we had more of those than anything else—while from the other half we reaped peas and beans, tomatoes and cucumbers, lettuce and squash.

  After dinner each night, Grandfather patrolled his garden for weeds and evidence of rabbits or woodchucks, a pipe in his mouth. Sylvester, a Siamese cat he and my grandmother dot
ed on like a favored son, tagged along at Grandfather’s heels and rubbed up against an occasional cabbage, so cross-eyed that the rabbits could hop about anywhere they liked, unhindered by the cat’s presence.

  Grandfather’s vegetables were so extraordinary in size and color, so unlike anything we’d ever brought home from the commissary, that they looked like the irradiated food I’d read about in science fiction novels.

  “How do you get the squash to grow this big?” I asked one day as we collected gourds with the size and heft of artificial limbs.

  “Oh, that’s an old family secret.” Grandfather filled his pipe and lit it, then leaned forward to whisper, “It’s all about having enough horseshit to go around. And there’s no shortage of that in this family.”

  SEIZED by the pioneering spirit, I decided to build a house of my own. I went to the West Brookfield Library and checked out a book called something like How Even the Dumbest People Can Build Houses. I drew up house plans that depended on using salvaged wood from the dairy barns across the street—there seemed to be an endless supply—and the old windows from the three-sided greenhouse that had once been attached to our farmhouse and now lay in random piles behind the duck pond near the road.

  On horseback, I’d found the perfect spot for my endeavor: a small hollow overlooking a shallow green pond noisy with frogs and songbirds. “Can you help me build this?” I asked Donald one night, speaking directly to his knees and calves, since the rest of my brother’s lanky body was hidden beneath the body of a rusted, ancient Triumph he’d convinced Mom to buy from Whitey.

  Donald slid out from beneath the car on the little wheeled cart he’d built himself for just such a purpose and examined my plans. “A house, huh?” he asked.

  For once, I’d gotten Donald’s attention, a rare thing for anyone, since he generally thought most people were too stupid to live. “Just a cabin,” I corrected. “A place to think.”

  “A place to screw your boyfriends, you mean,” Donald said, but he agreed to help.

  He drove me across the street in the rattling jeep, so rusted in spots now that it looked like a camouflaged Army vehicle, and we collected scraps of wood from the barn. Next, we piled on the old glass windows from the greenhouse; I planned to use these as walls so that I could see the pond from any angle, despite Donald’s assertion that I’d “sizzle like a steak.”

  With the jeep loaded and ready, we careened down the logging trail in back of the house, spooking the horses and dropping occasional panes of glass and pieces of rotted lumber as we bounced over the rutted road. Donald drove fast enough so that low overhanging branches snapped against the hood of the jeep and broke right off.

  “Might as well clear the trail while we’re at it,” he said when I urged him to slow down.

  At the pond, we unloaded what was left of the lumber and glass, and then Donald took off, leaving me alone in the woods with the deerflies, gnats, and mosquitoes feeding on my neck and arms, and only a hammer and a box of salvaged rusty nails for tools. I’d chosen the biggest nails I could find, nails longer and fatter than pencils. In my mind, the bigger the nails, the sturdier the walls.

  I devoted myself to building my house every day after school for three days, bruising my thumb with the hammer, embedding splinters in my hands, and developing a case of poison ivy that left my face swollen like a doughnut.

  I quit when I had a floor and one wall. I’d succeeded in building my own window onto the pond, and every now and then I’d ride one of the horses up that rutted trail to sit there and stare through the glass at the weeds and water, swatting bugs off my neck.

  DURING our first year in Massachusetts, Dad and Donald made about fifteen trips to Brant Lake to gather gerbils and gerbil-growing supplies. My father didn’t want to waste pennies on a motel, so he did the ten-hour round trip to Brant Lake in a single day, leaving home early on Saturday and arriving in time for Mildred Schwentker to feed them sandwiches.

  On the way home, if Donald begged hard enough, they’d stop at a McDonald’s, sideswiping curbs with the U-Haul trailer full of rattling metal gerbil cages and shelves as Dad wheeled in and out of the parking lots. They never once ate inside a restaurant, because Dad always believed that sitting in a fast-food place defeated the true purpose of its existence. Besides, time was money.

  By the time we’d accumulated a few hundred breeding pairs in our basement, Dad was ready to build his first gerbil building. He presented his design on paper one Saturday night over plates of spaghetti.

  “Just how do you propose paying for this little empire of yours?” Mom challenged. We were all quiet, seeing who could suck down the longest noodle without chewing, little Phil occasionally choking as he tried to outdo Donald.

  “The same way I buy socks, refrigerators, and anything else we need,” Dad said. “With my Sears card.”

  “How much?”

  “Probably about ten thousand,” Dad said, pulling a second piece of paper out of his briefcase and showing the numbers to her.

  “My God,” Mom said. Her face went pale. “We’ll be in debt the rest of our lives.”

  Dad scoffed at this. “I have a business plan,” he said.

  Mom pushed her plate aside. It was still piled high with spaghetti; she’d been eating less and was thinner than I’d ever seen her. I pulled her plate over to my side of the table and dug my fork in. I was growing taller, and I was even thinner than my mother; I was so hungry all of the time that Mom accused me of having a tapeworm.

  Now Mom sighed and said, “You know, I never minded it that you wanted to keep a few gerbils. You get such a kick out of them, and I thought they’d keep you busy when you got out of the Navy. But I wasn’t really thinking of gerbils as a second career.”

  “You never were much of a planner,” Dad said. “What did you think I was going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Mom admitted, raising her hands in surrender. “I guess it was all sort of nebulous until now. Now it’s happening.”

  “Darn right,” Dad said.

  Mom sighed. “Just promise to put your building where I can’t see it from the house. I don’t even want to think about gerbils.”

  PARTLY to appease my mother, but mainly to hide what he was doing, Dad chose the far southwest corner of our property for his first gerbil building, a spot hidden from the world by a thick stand of maples and oaks. An excavator came and created a long dirt road, and we all hiked the length of it to marvel at the barrel of the concrete truck spinning around and around to spill an endless waterfall of liquid cement into the frame Dad had built on the ground.

  Later that month, a Sears truck delivered stacks of iron beams, sheet-metal siding, and fifty-pound bags of bolts. Dad hired a mason to put bolts in the beams at prescribed intervals. He also hired a plumber and an electrician. But he put up the bulk of the building himself, working alongside Donald and Grandfather every weekend to turn the piles, boxes, and bags of metal into a long, low structure about the size of our old ranch house in Virginia. He worked even through the start of deer hunting season, when hunters were stomping about in the state land around our property in their orange vests, firing bullets into the trees. The hunters seemed to have trouble distinguishing between deer and horses, or even between deer and chickens, because bullets were fired at our animals more times than we cared to count. Mom made us all stay inside the cleared areas of our stable and garden.

  Once, a bullet came zinging out of the woods and ricocheted next to Dad as he straddled the very top of the new gerbil building, screwing on the metal roof. Mom happened to be standing below him because she’d brought his lunch.

  “Will you please get down!” she yelled at Dad. “You’re like a sitting duck up there! At least wait until Sunday when the hunters aren’t out!”

  “You never know how long good weather will hold,” Dad argued back, and kept putting in screws.

  It took nearly two months to complete the building. “Gosh, that wasn’t too bad,” Dad said as we all stood aro
und to admire it. My father pulled a Navy handkerchief out of his back pocket and swabbed the sweat off his bald, sunburned head. “Good thing I played with so many Erector sets as a kid.”

  A year after our arrival in Massachusetts, the gerbils finally had a home of their own.

  Raise Gerbils as Pets, Laboratory Animals, my dad’s post-Navy business plan sounded simple: “Starting with two pairs of gerbils and two cages … you are ‘in business’ if the gerbils breed and you can sell them.”

  Thanks to his deal with Victor Schwentker, we had everything necessary to start peddling gerbils on a large scale within a year of moving to Massachusetts, including cages, racks, food, filing cabinets, watering carts, and, of course, gerbils—well over a thousand of them within that first year. But the single most essential item Dad acquired from Victor wasn’t something he ferried home in a U-Haul from Brant Lake, though, but a single piece of paper. On it was a list of Victor’s clients. These included the Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health, Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, and several pharmaceutical companies.

  One day, as I was filling water bottles and feeders in the gerbil building, my father reminded me that no matter how many lucky breaks you get in business, you can’t ever take things for granted. “Your luck can run dry any minute,” Dad said. “For instance, a lot of people would expect an animal-raising venture to be a self-sustaining business. You might think that breeding animals is like having a factory, and that a profitable product would appear in a steady stream with very little effort.”

  This was seldom the case, though, Dad warned, “even if gerbils may seem to approach this ideal. As in any other business, you really have to know your market and stay ahead of the curve.”

  By the time our gerbil colony was established, scientists had already been using rodents as disease models for decades. In Dad’s eyes, any laboratory researcher who already relied on mice, rats, or hamsters as research subjects was a potential convert to gerbils. Gerbils might even prove to be valuable for certain studies that scientists couldn’t conduct with other rodents. This could translate into sizeable profits.