The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (5 page)

Dad lifted a gerbil out of the cage by its tail and dropped it into the wading pool. The animal fell with a plop and froze for a moment, stunned. Then the gerbil began darting through the toys, climbing blocks, digging under stuffed animals, and sitting up on its hind legs to examine one of the plastic horses.

“Okay, kids. Gather around the pool and look interested,” Dad commanded.

He moved us closer together. When we were positioned shoulder to shoulder, kneeling beside the wading pool, he lifted a camera out of the black bag beside him.

“Try to smile, kids,” Mom encouraged, lighting another
cigarette from her perch on the shady back stoop. She’d poured herself a glass of iced tea, too, so that she could fully enjoy the show.

For the next few hours, we modeled with gerbils. Every now and then Dad would return the gerbil in the wading pool to its cage and pluck a fresh animal out to drop in its place. I wondered if, to the gerbils, it was like being beamed up on
Star Trek
. Meanwhile, my brother, sister, and I stared into the pool as if mesmerized by the animals’ antics, which in fact we soon were, given the hot sun beating down on our backs, the fox terrier’s constant yapping, and the fact that our legs and feet soon fell asleep from kneeling.

“Stop squinting and don’t scratch yourselves,” Dad reminded us now and then as he shot roll after roll of film and moved the props and us around the pool.

After a while, Dad released us from our penitents’ positions and had us pose individually. He photographed each of us with gerbils on our laps, climbing up our arms, sitting in our pockets, crawling across our shoulders, and staring at us nose to nose. I was so pleased to win Dad’s praise for my ease in handling the gerbils that I nearly told him my secret right then. I wanted to introduce him to Kinky, safely in her cage in the garage. She would be a great gerbil model—and then we wouldn’t have to sell her. But Dad was in such a fugue state of fevered concentration that conversation was impossible. Besides, he would have disapproved of me disobeying his orders.

Occasionally that afternoon, a gerbil would fall asleep on duty and we’d have to prod it with a finger or a stalk of grass to get it moving again in the wading pool. Toward the end of the session, a gerbil bit Donald’s finger so hard that he began
shaking his hand frantically to dislodge its little teeth, which of course only made the animal hang on to the finger with all of its mighty rodent power.

At this, I laughed until my sides hurt. Dad went pale and ordered my mother to “do something.” Mom, who had grown up on a farm and knew how to bridle a horse, shear a sheep, and throttle a chicken, came to the rescue by pinching the gerbil’s jaws open. There wasn’t nearly as much blood as I’d hoped.

At last, as the sun was setting and streaks of pink were floating like forgotten scarves along the brackish water behind us, we were released. We ran to the pitcher of lemonade that Mom had put out on the screened porch. Our skin was slick with sweat and our legs were crisscrossed by grass tracks and dotted red from the chiggers. But that didn’t matter, because Dad was pleased.

“You did a great job today, kids,” he told us, and handed Donald and me a dollar apiece.

Donald and I were so busy plotting ways to spend our sudden good fortune that we forgot to ask Dad why he wanted so many pictures of us with gerbils.

I
N THE
middle of August, Dad shipped off to sea for another four months. We went to see him off at the pier. Mom looked Barbie-doll gorgeous in her white flowered sundress with its full skirt; she even had a red handbag to match her red high heels. Every man in uniform smiled at her, the beautiful dark-haired wife of their ship’s commanding officer, as the sailors in
their white uniforms poured like milk up the clanging gray metal ramp.

It was a typical Virginia summer day, the heat so strong that it cast puddle mirages on the docks. As we waited for the sailors and Marines to board the ship, Donald, Gail, and I pelted rocks at the jellyfish that flowered blue and purple in the water below the pier. The water was a deep frothy green, like liquid spinach, and we took turns pretending to push each other into the ocean.

Truthfully, the idea of falling into the water terrified me, for Dad’s ship rose out of it like a monolith, and it was easy to imagine being sliced in half by its giant nose. The USS
Grant County
looked like an enormous car ferry, only instead of sedans and station wagons it carried tanks and giant trucks and Marines. From Dad’s lectures at dinner, I knew that it was 446 feet long, was powered by six diesel engines, had a troop capacity of 706, traveled at speeds of seventeen knots, and had three gun mounts.

“It’s one heck of a boat,” Dad always said, “and I’m proud to be at her helm.”

Donald and I occasionally played onboard the USS
Grant County
that summer, trying out the hideaway beds and metal bathroom sinks scarcely bigger than cereal bowls, and banging our shins on the high oval doorways when we played tag. We sneaked into the forbidden areas, too, like the cargo hold, where we’d hide behind vehicles as big and impossible-looking as dinosaurs, their treads still harboring flattened bamboo stalks from lands I couldn’t imagine.

On this day, though, Mom wouldn’t let us board the ship.
She told us the men were busy getting ready to go to the Mediterranean, “in case there’s a little brush fire somewhere that needs putting out. Those Communists could be hiding anywhere, you know.” The way she said it made me imagine Communists as careless campers who might be thoughtless enough to toss a lighted match into dry brush.

Dad kissed us all good-bye. As he leaned down in my direction, the brim of his hat hit my nose and we both laughed. Dad kissed my cheek then, and gave my arm a squeeze. “I know you’ll be good for your mother,” he said. “You always are. But I want you to do something for me, too.”

I nodded, solemn and responsible despite Donald making faces at me from the edge of the dock. “I’ll do what I can, Dad.”

“Help your mom take care of the gerbils,” he said. “She still doesn’t like them much.”

“No, Dad. But I do.”

“That’s my girl.” He kissed me one more time, then turned to my mother and hugged her briefly before making his way up the gangplank without us, his uniform whiter than anyone’s.

with gerbils that first year in Virginia. The true purpose of my father’s photography sessions was not revealed to us, however, until a box of books arrived one day while we were at school. Dad handed one of the books around the dinner table that night as Mom ladled creamed tuna with peas over the saltine crackers on our plates.

The book was called
How to Raise and Train Pet Gerbils
and had my dad’s name on the cover. To my horror, Donald’s picture was on the cover, too. The photograph showed my brother balancing a pair of gerbils in the crook of his arm. He was dressed in a bright blue shirt that set off his blond hair, and the camera added so many pounds that my pickleheaded brother looked nearly handsome.

The same portrait of Donald lovingly cradling those two gerbils appeared again inside the book, with this noble caption: “The author’s son handles gerbils without fear by either party.”

On the opposite page, I made my own solo debut in my red-striped blouse, with a gerbil on one shoulder and this humiliating proclamation beneath my picture: “Even girls like gerbils!”

“They paid me three hundred dollars for this book,” Dad told us proudly.

“Good thing the models and props were free,” Mom said.

Dad ignored this. He was busy explaining how his book was part of a popular series published by T.F.H. (Tropical Fish Hobbyist) Publications in New Jersey, a company owned by Herbert R. Axelrod. “That man is one of the world’s last true eccentrics,” Dad added.

“Not like anybody we know,” Mom said.

“What does Mr. Axelrod do, Dad?” I asked.

“When he’s not publishing books, Herb travels to the Amazon to catch new species of fish and names them all after himself,” Dad said. “And when he’s not doing that, he lives on Long Island in a huge mansion with a bomb shelter.”

“I wouldn’t mind a little mansion,” Mom said, tapping the ashes of her cigarette onto her dinner plate. “Maybe you should write another book for him.”

Dad had already thought of that. “Herb and I think I should write my next book about collared lizards,” he announced, in a way that made Mom light another cigarette before she’d finished the first one. Meanwhile, Dad informed us that his gerbil book was already “selling like hotcakes,” and we kids should always remember that in business, “the secret of success is timing, just like catching a wave at Virginia Beach.”

When Mom snorted at this, Dad produced evidence. “The world was ready for my book,” he insisted. “I hit it right with this one, Sally. Look at these.” He produced a file of newspaper and magazine clippings from his briefcase. Dad often brought his briefcase to the dinner table with him, “just like an Amway salesman,” Mom observed.

One of the articles, from the April 15, 1966, issue of
Time
, was called “Happiness Is a Pocket Kangaroo,” and compared gerbils favorably to hamsters.

“Pets that are fun to play with, easy to care for and that thrive in captivity are hard to come by,” I read aloud to Donald and Gail while my parents argued. “For the past decade, the furry favorite has been the hamster, but it tends to be neurotic, eat its young and bite the hand that feeds it. Now another member of the rodent family has arrived on the scene, warming children’s hands and parents’ hearts wherever its fuzzy face appears. It is the Mongolian gerbil (pronounced jurbill), a ball of fluff only four inches long (plus three inches of tufted tail) that looks and leaps like a vest-pocket kangaroo.”

The article noted that gerbils were so popular by now that they had even appeared on the NBC children’s program
Birthday House
and that singer Barbra Streisand had raved about her pair of gerbils on her CBS special.

In prowling through libraries, Dad had also unearthed a photo spread from the October 13, 1966, issue of the New York
Sunday News
called “New Look in Pets;” one picture in that series demonstrated a woman holding a gerbil “comfortably” in a wineglass.