The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (12 page)

announced at the dinner table that he wanted to read us some fan letters he’d gotten in response to his latest
Science News
article just as Mom was serving dessert, a new chocolate cake recipe from the
I Hate to Cook
cookbook.

“The beauty of this cake was that it was made in one bowl,” Mom said, ignoring Dad when he snapped the first letter free from its envelope with an eye-catching shake. “You just make three wells in the center of the dry ingredients for the oil, the eggs, and the milk,” she continued. “There’s really no mess at all.”

Making recipes from
I Hate to Cook
was almost as easy as cooking with Campbell’s soup, her other favorite no-fuss mealtime helper, Mom added. “I think this will become my kitchen bible.”

Dad cleared his throat and waved the letter in front of us. “This letter came to me from Delbert D. Thiessen, Ph.D., assistant chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas in Austin,” he announced. He repeated the
man’s name and title to be sure that we were as impressed as he was.

“You know,” Mom told him, “I worked hard on this dinner. You haven’t said a thing about it.”

Dad looked bewildered. “But I love everything you cook. You know that.”

“Still.” My mother lit a cigarette and pushed her own cake aside, untouched. The gauntlet was thrown. “You might at least acknowledge what I do around here. I’m your wife, not your slave. I don’t care how many gerbils you’ve got in that goddamn basement. I don’t want to hear about them
anymore.”
With that, she rose from the table and disappeared into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

Donald, Gail, and I took this as a cue that we could eat our cake in the den in front of the TV. We stood up and gathered our plates, but Dad stopped us. “Wait,” he said. “Sit down. You haven’t been excused yet.”

Gail ran off, as defiant as ever. But Donald and I sat down again and made faces at each other across the table while Dad, oblivious to our antics, shared the letter from Dr. Thiessen in Austin, Texas.

Dad put the letter down and looked at Donald and me. “There, kids, what do you think of that? Gerbils on NBC!”

“That’s great, Dad,” I said. I had to say something.

“May we please be excused, Daddy, sir?” Donald asked.

We raced each other to the television when Dad granted us permission, leaving our father alone at the table with his letter and cigarette and one-bowl chocolate cake.

I
WAS
plain-looking, with a nose that would have been ordinary, except for the slight bump that remained after the newspaper delivery boy ran me over with his bicycle in Virginia. Not ugly, just unexceptional: I had an average sort of mouth, brown hair, and brown eyes with no hints of green or gold in them like the characters in the books I read. As if these utterly average looks weren’t enough to bear, I also had a snaggle tooth. One of my incisors had grown in crooked and ridged because my mother had contracted German measles during her pregnancy with me.

Kids teased me about the tooth in elementary school enough so that I knew to smile with my lips closed. Nonetheless, there were those who noticed and remarked upon it in junior high at Fort Leavenworth, making junior high even more of a hell than it already was. In many ways, it was a hell devised by teenagers caught between rebelling and serving their parents, the way their parents served the country. The dances
were the sort where the girls wore party dresses and stood on one side of the gym, miserably waiting for some brazen male to cross the great divide and ask them to dance; at my first such dance, I wore a pale blue gauzy dress with a bow in the back and, of course, a snow-white Peter Pan collar; I looked like a minister’s wife. I came home ecstatic because I’d been asked to dance exactly once, by a boy whose collar was whiter than mine.

Meanwhile, various factions of the kids I went to school with were rebelling against Vietnam, so our teachers at General George S. Patton Jr. Junior High School did their best to maintain order in true Army fashion. Each morning, they lined us up in the cafeteria for inspection. Our skirts were to be no more than two inches above the knee; our bangs couldn’t touch our eyebrows; and girls were not allowed to wear makeup, heels, or dangling earrings. Naturally, these rules only provoked certain girls to roll up their skirts in the bathrooms, apply lipstick, and shake off their barrettes and hairbands the minute inspection was over.

Among my Army brat classmates, I was already an outcast for having a father who was in the Navy. And, of course, Dad had that secret stash of gerbils keeping him basement-bound for reasons I could never reveal. I reacted to both the kids and the Army by becoming a pacifist and carrying a photograph of my horse, Ladybug, in a locket around my neck. There was no point in trying to fit in, so I might as well do what I wanted.

By eighth grade I was a good enough rider to join the Pony Club, a group of riders who followed the more expert hunter-jumpers during Sunday morning fox hunts. The hunts
were thrilling; we’d gallop through dew-heavy fields and along winding wooded trails, ducking low tree branches as we followed on the hocks of more experienced riders who careened over stone walls, ditches, and wooden fences. People were always being tossed off when their horses refused the jumps and scrambling out of the way of the horses galloping and leaping behind them. Occasionally, a horse dumped its rider and cantered merrily back to the barn with reins dangling and stirrups flapping. All of this was accompanied by the frantic baying of beagles following the scented trail laid ahead of time by one of the Hunt Club members, and by the trumpeting of a brass horn blown by our hunt master, a flamingo of a man with a skeletal build and a scarlet coat.

The stable was my sanctuary, the one place where I felt comfortable in my own skin. But there was school to contend with, still, during all of those other hours. I was never asked to a sleepover or a party, and lately I had been longing to be not like Trixie Belden, girl detective, but like Lisa Agnew, the most beautiful girl at General George S. Patton Jr. Junior High School.

Lisa Agnew had blue eyes, a straight nose, and sleek blond hair parted in the middle that swung shut like a pair of curtains on either side of her oval face. Her teeth were straight and white, and she wore empire-waist, low-necked shirred dresses that emphasized her full breasts. Most impressive of all, she had a boyfriend in high school who took her on dates in his own car. I held my breath each time Lisa passed me in the hall, longing for her to notice me and terrified that she might.

And then, suddenly, Lisa was gone. She was absent from
school for so long that I was certain her father must have been transferred; like Virginia, our Fort Leavenworth classes were always gaining and losing students without warning. But Lisa returned after a time, transformed by an ugly red scar across her face.

“What happened to you?” I breathed when I came into the girls’ bathroom later that morning and discovered Lisa there, alone, leaning toward the mirror to cake more forbidden makeup onto her scar.

“My boyfriend crashed his car,” she said flatly.

I nearly wept for her. “But you’ll get better, won’t you?” I asked. “The scar will fade.”

Lisa eyed me in the mirror with pity. “Obviously, you’ve never known what it’s like to be beautiful.”

It would be many, many years before I’d be able to look into a mirror without seeing the ghost of Lisa’s face next to mine, measuring what she had lost and what I would never have.

G
RADUALLY
, I was spending less time at home and more time at the stables with the older teenagers who entered horse shows, that strange breed of competitive, no-nonsense child who spends hours working on perfect form during the posting trot. These were the kids Mom didn’t want me to ride with because she thought I wasn’t experienced enough.

“Those daredevils are always racing around like crazy on the trails and taking jumps they have no business taking,” she warned. “Don’t you dare go out with them, Holly.”

Ah, but what’s a mother’s dare to a thirteen-year-old girl
but a summons, a battle cry, a gauntlet thrown? Out I went, riding with the older kids every day after school and earning their tolerance, if not respect. I might not be beautiful, but I could keep up on the trails.

And then, during one furiously fast ride, I decided to follow one of my new teenage friends over a high wooden gate on a trail that paralleled a paved road. Ladybug and I had taken higher jumps in the ring; I knew all it would take was a jab of my heels to make the horse go faster and rising in my saddle at the right moment while thrusting my hands forward to give Ladybug enough rein to sail clear of the fence.

My friend took the jump first. Then I kicked my heels into Ladybug’s dappled gray sides and we were off. I pushed my hands forward and rose out of the saddle to meet the jump. I did everything exactly as my instructor, a retired general, had taught me during endless drills in the ring.

But Ladybug did not. She didn’t like the sight of that jump or the feel of me leaving the saddle. She didn’t want to be there at all. The grain was probably being dumped into her feed bucket back at the stables
right that minute
. So my horse veered sharply away from the fence and bucked, dislodging me from the saddle like a catapult launching a pumpkin.

I don’t remember much of what happened after that. I woke up alone on the paved road and discovered that my horse and friend were gone. A hot, salty liquid filled my mouth, running down my throat and choking me. I spat it out. There was more blood than I’d ever seen, and it was still pouring out of my mouth and nose. The metallic smell and taste of my own blood filled the air.