The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (23 page)

Among the women, one called herself Daisy Mae and dressed for work in cutoff shorts that showed two half moons of her ass no matter what the weather; she made the rounds among the male employees and managed to get them to do most of her work while she napped in the sun out on the picnic table that Dad had put outside the gerbil building to boost company morale through impromptu employee picnics. Another woman had to leave without notice anytime her enraged husband figured out that she was back working for us and came charging up the road in his souped-up Chevy truck, a rifle aimed out the window.

Still, despite their flaws, Dad always expected the best of his workers, especially the women. He claimed that female employees did better work than the men, and given a choice—a rare day—he would always hire a female applicant over a man.

“Why?” I asked him one afternoon as he and Mom and I gathered to watch
General Hospital
. One of the few perks of working for ourselves was that we never had to miss our favorite TV shows, even in an era before TiVo and VCRs.

“Women don’t get bored doing repetitive tasks,” Dad
explained. “Plus, their maternal instincts really kick in around the gerbils.”

Mom shook her head, not taking her eyes off the television. “What about me?” she asked. “I get bored easily and I hate gerbils.”

“You’ve always been different,” Dad said.

O
NE
day after school, I walked up to the gerbil building to clean cages with Angeline, a stout bottle blonde in her fifties. Angeline’s gum-snapping, no-nonsense approach to work meant that she and I could complete our list of required tasks—posted each day by my father on the bulletin board by the door—in the shortest time possible. Then we could lounge around and chat.

I liked working with Angeline. She talked to me as if I were thirty, not fifteen, and asked my advice on everything from boyfriends to buying a secondhand car. In this way, I was like everyone else in my family: willing to give advice to anybody, even if I had to ad-lib.

That afternoon, Angeline and I spent four hours doing the usual: cleaning six racks of cages with twenty-four cages per rack. We put the gerbils in cages filled with fresh shavings by other employees the night before, then pushed the dirty cages on wheeled carts down to the washroom. There we scraped the contents into trash barrels and washed the cages at waist-high industrial sinks, soaking them in disinfectant and rinsing them until they gleamed. When the cages were finally clean enough to suit Dad’s daily inspection, we wheeled them over
to the drying racks, where we left the cages for someone else to fill with clean shavings the next day.

“Doesn’t it seem weird to you,” I asked Angeline, “that Dad keeps breeding the same gerbils to each other? I mean, isn’t it like incest or something? Shouldn’t the babies all be retarded? I thought that’s what happened when brothers and sisters got married.”

“The idea is to standardize the line,” Angeline explained. “If you keep the genetics the same from one generation to the next, you start weeding out variables that can show up in experiments and give some poor little researcher a heart attack. That’s why scientists have been inbreeding different mice for decades.” She cracked her gum, considering. “Your dad must have over a dozen generations of gerbils by now,” she calculated with an excitement I couldn’t fathom. “All descended from the same ancestors he bought from Victor Schwentker.”

“Do you ever feel bad about working here?” I asked. At fifteen, I had reached the “wallowing age,” as Mom called it.

Angeline shook her head. “Not at all. Your dad takes good care of his animals, and I know there are scientists out there doing stroke research with the gerbils. My dad died of a stroke.”

I thought about this as I picked up the next gerbil. How many gerbil deaths would I accept if I knew those deaths would bring a cure for someone with cystic fibrosis, like my sister? What was an animal’s life worth compared to a human’s? I didn’t know the answer. I only knew that talking about gerbils and medical research was a lot different from holding a gerbil in my hand and feeling it, so warm and yet nearly weightless, an animal with a heartbeat of its own.

“He’s coming!” one of the other workers shrieked suddenly from the other end of the building, where she’d been doling out green pellets from the food cart. “The commander is on his way. I can see him from the end door!”

Unlike in his military days, when Dad had hidden the fact that he was raising gerbils, here in his gerbil kingdom he relied upon his Navy title to convey an extra mantle of authority Every one of his employees called him “the commander.”

The window in the door offered the only view of the dirt road leading up to the gerbil building. Someone in the building was always posted there as a lookout to alert other employees when my father was approaching. That way, they had plenty of time to turn the thermostat back down in winter, if one of the employees had brazenly cranked up the heat. They could also scramble out from under the fan if they’d been smoking cigarettes, or climb off the picnic table outside if they’d gotten high and needed a nap. We always had plenty of time to appear busy because Dad took forever to actually reach the building.

I wandered over to the door and peered out. Dad was walking as he always did, with his head down and his hands in his pockets, so deep in thought that he hunched his shoulders and moved as slowly as if he were dragging a bag of gerbil pellets up the road behind him. I wondered what he was thinking about, and realized I didn’t have a clue.

marrying my father, but this didn’t faze her a bit. “It’s time I went back to work,” she announced one night at dinner. “I’m going to give riding lessons.”

“You can’t do that. You don’t know a single thing about teaching,” Dad said.

She shrugged. “I’ve been getting on and off horses all my life, haven’t I? All I have to do is show other people how.”

Dad succeeded in business because he left nothing to chance and followed every rule in the book. Mom succeeded because she thought every chance was worth taking. If she didn’t like the rules, she made up her own. For instance, when she failed her driver’s test in Virginia, she immediately drove to a different city and took it again. When we moved to Massachusetts, Mom signed up for ballet lessons. After being told that she was too old to dance en pointe, she practiced for hours on end until she was up on toe shoes for the first time at age thirty-nine.

Mom derived her confidence in part from her beauty. At age sixteen, when she came into the kitchen to show her father and his friend her new prom dress, Grandfather’s friend had
cocked an eyebrow and said, “Everett, that girl looks like something you can’t afford.”

By the time we moved to Massachusetts, Mom was in her late thirties but had the trim, athletic build of a much younger woman and dark hair without a strand of silver. “Well, why shouldn’t I be a ballerina?” she asked me, tiptoeing around the living room in her new pink satin toe shoes. “I look good in a leotard. Better than some of those high school girls who can’t keep their hands out of the cookie jar.”

Once Mom made up her mind to run a riding stable, we rarely saw her in anything but formfitting canary-yellow jodhpurs and knee-high black boots. She even wore her jodhpurs and boots to pick me up at school, to collect Grandmother’s prescriptions at the pharmacy, or to dash into the grocery store for milk and eggs.

“I think of my jodhpurs as my calling card,” she told me when I asked why she didn’t change her clothes. “People see me in this outfit and ask where I ride, and I can tell them that I give riding lessons. They almost always call me.”

With her exotic outfit, drop-dead figure, dark hair, and quick smile, it was no wonder they called. In her jodhpurs and boots, Mom made men forget their own names when she walked by. I once saw a woman whack her husband with a purse over my mother.

The barn was finished, but if Mom was really going into business full-time, we needed a riding ring, too. We built it the same way we’d done everything else on the farm: with salvaged materials and our own labor. Donald dragged additional lumber over from the state land and we put up a circular rail fence in a matter of days.

And then, every day after school for three weeks, Donald and I dug rocks out of the soil with shovels and our bare hands, the heat beating down on our necks and making us dizzy, the effort of removing the rocks gradually shaving our fingernails down to black slivers.

“Now I know where the settlers got all those rocks for their stone walls,” Donald groaned at one point.

“And their foundations,” I said, heaving a small boulder into the back of the tractor cart. “Don’t forget all of those stone foundations.”

The effort was worth it, though: when we were finished, the riding ring was impressive, with its white rail fence and smooth dirt surface. The ring doubled as a paddock for turning out the horses or exercising them on lunge lines for people who boarded their horses with us.

Gradually, as Mom built up her business, I began spending more of my working hours in the stable than in the gerbil buildings. This suited me fine. The gerbils were kept in nearly windowless, climate-controlled, claustrophobic metal ranch houses. Two hours spent tending gerbils left me with my eyes burning from the ammonia and my skin itching from the sawdust. But the barn was a lovely place that smelled of hay and molasses, horses and saddle soap.

The gerbils ran from my touch when I lifted the lids of their cages. When I appeared in the stables, the horses came to the doors of their stalls and nodded in welcome, snorting and pushing their velvety muzzles in my direction for a treat from my pocket. I talked to the horses the same way I talked to the gerbils, but I could count on certain horses answering back, whinnying or stomping their hooves.

There were a lot of cats in the barn, too. People dropped them off in the middle of the night sometimes. There were cats of all sizes and colors, and they did their own talking as they followed me up and down the aisles, arching their backs or rubbing against my boots as they waited for me to fill their food dishes in the tack room.