The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (16 page)

Donald went over and slapped his hand on the bottom step. The poodle started barking again as the lump under the rug moved faster.

“Rats! My God!” Mom moaned. She fled back to the kitchen and scooped up Philip while Dad, Donald, and I tried to catch the rat in a saucepan. This was unsuccessful. The animal eluded us by moving under the stair runner all the way downstairs, where it disappeared into a hole in the wall.

As Mom mopped up after the poodle, we heard Samantha meowing. Siamese cats have peculiar cries; if you didn’t know what it was, you might think someone was strangling a baby while playing a Jew’s harp. We traced this noise to the wall where the rat had disappeared. Somehow, Samantha had maneuvered her way into the tiny hole in the horsehair plaster to chase after the rat. Now she was stuck.

“We’ll have to break down the wall,” Dad said.

“Over my dead body,” Mom said. “That cat managed to get in there. She’ll just have to get out on her own. At least with the cat in there, the rat won’t come back out.” She turned a cold shoulder on the cat’s pitiful noises. “We’ll buy rat poison in the morning,” she added. Mom put Philip to bed upstairs, then said she was going to take a nap on the couch.

“You kids go help your mother while I unpack the kitchen,” Dad commanded.

“How can we help her?” Donald asked. “She’s sleeping.”

“I don’t care,” Dad said. “Just find something useful to do.”

Dad started unpacking the kitchen. Donald fed cardboard boxes into the fireplace, where Dad had built a fire to take the chill out of the downstairs rooms. The upstairs was even colder, I realized, as I felt my way along the hallway, trying light switches that didn’t work. When I discovered that the tiny box designated to be my bedroom had no heat other than the pale warmth rising from the kitchen through a metal grate in the floor, I began calculating how long it would take me to hitchhike back to Kansas.

I noticed a transom over the door, a small, multipaned window. Was I supposed to open it to let in more heat? I squinted up at the odd little window, puzzling over something dark hanging from its sill. At last, still mystified, I reached up and poked at the black shape. It swooped toward me and flew into my bedroom, where it darted into every corner before finding the doorway and zooming out again.

I screamed and ran downstairs. “Dad, Dad! There’s a bat flying around upstairs!”

He picked up the kitchen broom and buckled on one of my mother’s riding helmets, then galloped upstairs like Don Quixote.

When this drama had subsided, I went back to unpacking my bedroom, fantasizing about hitchhiking to San Francisco. After a while, my fingers were numb from the cold. I went back downstairs to see if there was anything to eat besides canned goods.

Dad was back at his post in the kitchen, marooned in a sea
of opened boxes. “There’s no ice cream!” I accused him, flinging the freezer open twice to be sure.

“Of course there’s no ice cream,” Dad said. “We just got here. Nobody’s been to the commissary yet. Open a can of beef stew if you’re still hungry.”

“I don’t want beef stew!” I wailed. “And there probably isn’t any commissary! We’ll probably have to drive five thousand miles for a
Coke!”

Donald showed up just then. He looked as nervous as the poodle, but at least he wasn’t dribbling pee on the floor. “I think there’s a problem with the fire,” he said.

Dad paused in his unpacking. “What kind of problem?”

“I think it’s too big,” Donald said.

In the living room, smoke was pouring out of the fireplace. Mom was awake now, sitting up and coughing on the couch. “Guess I’d better go upstairs and get the baby,” she said, and took the stairs two at a time.

“What the hell did you do now, Donald?” Dad yelled. “I was helping! I was breaking down boxes!” Donald yelled back. “It was just really hard to get the refrigerator box to fit in the fireplace!”

“Jesus Christ,” Dad said, stunned by the sheer size of the problem crackling in front of us. The smoke was starting to curl through the house. Meanwhile, it was ten degrees outside and still snowing. “Goddamn it,” he said. “I think the chimney’s on fire. Let’s hope we don’t lose the roof. You kids get out of here while I call the fire department.”

We couldn’t find the cat. Mom, my brothers, and I sat in the car with the whimpering poodle while firemen scrambled
around on our icy roof to put out the fire. Embers were shooting out of the chimney into the night sky like fireworks.

Other cars started arriving. Vehicles filled with families pulled into our yard or parked on the frozen field across the street. People climbed out of them and stood about in small groups, faces lit by the flames.

“I bet this is what Woodstock was like,” I told Mom, who sat in the front seat with Philip on her lap. She kept the engine running to keep us warm despite Dad’s strict orders not to waste gas.

“Except that these people are wearing jackets instead of dancing around naked,” she said. “Thank God.”

Dad stood around outside, too, talking and joking with the firemen as if he were hosting a party. We watched him gesture at the fire trucks and flames as if he’d meant for all of this to happen.

Luckily, the roof was slate and the fire trucks had arrived in time to hose down the clapboards. A fireman tapped on Mom’s window after a little while. “Should be fine to go back inside soon,” he said.

“Who are all these people?” Mom asked.

The fireman shrugged and scratched his smudged nose beneath the big yellow hat. “Volunteers. They all heard the sirens.”

“They aren’t all firemen,” Mom pointed out. “A lot of people are just standing around and watching.”

“Oh, them others, you mean.” The fireman grinned. “Some people just like a good fire,” he said. “The Papas had one every year about this time up here at the farm with that
old chimney. It’s a town tradition. You new people are just keeping it going.”

“I’m so glad to oblige,” Mom said, and rolled up her window.

“Who were the Papas?” I asked eagerly, thinking of the Mamas and the Papas.

“I think he was saying
Paupers,”
Mom said. “That’s how they talk in Massachusetts.”

“What are paupers?” Donald asked.

“Poor people,” Mom said. “Poor people just like us.”

W
E WERE
far from poor. Dad, always cautious, had crafted a thoroughly detailed scheme for starting his gerbil farm while finishing up his twenty years in the Navy. He commuted back and forth those first two years between Massachusetts and Long Island, where he lived in officers’ quarters at the Merchant Marine Academy. His plan was to retire with the rank of commander and a reasonable Navy pension while he grew enough gerbils to ensure our financial health. To do this, he’d found a fifteen-room farmhouse on ninety acres of land that we could afford on his salary simply because it was buried in the Brookfields, the forgotten agricultural heart of Massachusetts between Boston and the Berkshires.

Nonetheless, technically we really had bought the poor farm. Our house, depending on whom you asked around West Brookfield, was known as “the old Blair Farm,” “the town farm,” or the “almshouse.” In the years before Social Security, paupers were sent to live in state-subsidized farms
managed by wardens or poor masters. They worked the land, living off the food they grew and the cows they milked.

“The transom over your window was probably put there so the warden could tell when a pauper died in his sleep,” Dad teased me.

They probably died of cold, I thought, tossing and turning and shivering in my bed during those first drafty weeks in West Brookfield. Who, I wondered, had been desperate enough to live in this creaky old house before we did? Who had slept in my teeny box of a bat-friendly room, folding her few clothes into its odd built-in cupboards? And was she as miserable as I was?

For I was miserable, more miserable than I’d ever been in my life. I missed my sister but couldn’t talk about her because it made Mom leave the room and Dad grind his teeth. I missed our horses, but Ladybug and Robin wouldn’t arrive until spring. And most of all, I hated this farm, with its stained carpeting, peeling layers of wallpaper, noisy radiators, dribbling shower, and fields full of nothing but snow, snow, snow. Why had Dad moved us here? Gerbils had proved to be perfectly happy in basements and garages! We could have kept our horses in a stable, where there were other people to ride with! At the very least, we could have moved to a town within forty miles of a movie theater!

I spent that first chilly week on the poor farm giving my parents the silent treatment.

“A vacation for our ears,” Dad pronounced, while Mom communicated her requests for help with household chores through notes taped onto the bathroom mirror.

In my bedroom, I tried on clothes and discarded them, or
read books I’d already read. At one point, I was bored enough to iron my own hair, an idea I’d read about in
Seventeen
magazine. I managed to raise long, red, angry blisters across my forehead when I pressed the iron too close to my scalp in an attempt to flatten my wavy bangs, prompting Donald to dub me “Little Miss Frankenstein.”

Mom yelled at me for branding my own forehead. I stormed outside and stomped across the thick icy crust over the snow. It was a dramatic escape toward the woods behind our house, like a settler fleeing the murderous savages. Unfortunately, the icy crust layered over the snow wasn’t thick enough to hold my weight, so my feet punched through the ice again and again until welts rose on my ankles to match the ones on my forehead.

After a few dozen tortured steps, I threw myself down onto the snow, howling at the gray sky until I realized that Mom, Donald, and little Phil were all watching me from the kitchen window. Mom waved.

A minute later, she opened the back door. “Why don’t you come inside?” she called. “It’s too cold to be lying around in that snow.”

“How could you let Dad bring us here?” I screamed at her. “What am I supposed to
do?”

Mom gestured at the cup in her hand. “The only thing you need to do today is come inside and have some hot chocolate,” she said.

Mom and Dad lived according to this solid-gold credo: “What we do is nobody’s business.”