The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (6 page)

“I’m telling you, Sally,” Dad said, waving his Camel cigarette over his dinner plate. “Everyone is climbing onto the gerbil bandwagon. By the time I write about collared lizards, there’s going to be a hot market for those, too.”

My parents argued the pros and cons of raising lizards through dinner. Mom was against the idea; she’d been disappointed by too many reptiles in the past. She reminded Dad of Mr. Green Jeans, an iguana we’d named after Donald’s favorite
character on the TV show
Captain Kangaroo
. Mr. Green Jeans was so tame that he would ride on your shoulder even while you pretended your bicycle was a horse. Then Mom turned the heat lamp off in his aquarium to save on electricity bills, figuring the lizard would be warm enough because it was summer. Sadly the air-conditioning froze Mr. Green Jeans to death right on his sleeping branch.

We’d also had a pair of horned toads with devil heads. The horned toads were speckled black and white, and you could hardly see them on the aquarium gravel. They weren’t very friendly, either; they’d flatten themselves against the bottom of the aquarium if you tried to pick them up, opening their mouths like they wanted to swallow you whole even though they were only four inches long. The horned toads eventually starved to death because we didn’t ever manage to feed them the right mealworms and they wouldn’t eat anything else.

There was a lesson in this, Mom pointed out. “It doesn’t pay to be picky if you live in a cage,” she warned as she swept the horned toads with their gravel into the kitchen trash.

Now she told Dad that she had washed her hands of reptiles forever, and stood up to gather dishes. “Holly, come help me in the kitchen. Donald, if you give that dog one more green bean under the table, I’m going to feed you under the table with him. Get back into your chair.”

I followed Mom out to the kitchen. “Do you really think Dad’s right?” I asked, as I helped her rinse plates. “Is his gerbil book going to be a big hit?”

“Well, it’s not like the Beatles,” she said. “Nobody’s going to faint at the sight of it.”

M
Y FATHER’S
book probably never did make anyone faint, but it did have a long shelf life. Dad wasn’t surprised. “It really is the definitive book on gerbils,” he said with satisfaction.

It’s true that the pages of
How to Raise and Train Pet Gerbils
were packed with pithy how-to advice on selecting, feeding, training, and even breeding pet gerbils. But what probably made the book a best seller was a combination of lucky timing, as Dad took care to remind us; his full-color photographs of gerbils at their most beguiling (my favorite showed a gerbil standing on its hind legs next to a miniature stuffed red kangaroo); and his writing, which was nothing like our father’s conversational style.

At home, we were used to Dad’s barked commands (“Sit up straight!” “Don’t jump on the couch!” “Put your napkin on your lap!” “Be quiet so I can think!”) and ongoing safety seminars (“Never drink out of your glass and walk at the same time;” “Never take a shower or talk on the telephone during a lightning storm”). In my father’s world, accidents didn’t just happen. They were caused by human error. His job was to make us conscientious and cautious, and thus prepared for life’s big curveballs.

However, in
How to Raise and Train Pet Gerbils
, my father was generous and funny, acutely observant and understanding of the flaws of others. He also liked to spice up his writing with similes and exclamation marks. In the section about gerbil “locomotion,” for instance, he wrote, “Young gerbils can use their hind legs for jumping by the time they’re weaned. When a cage full of youngsters is suddenly startled, they look
like a box of jumping beans scattering in various directions! The owner has owned some which seemed to enjoy doing back-flips!” During a jump, Dad added, the tail “may act like a rudder to help guide the animal through the air.”

To my shock, Dad also seemed to know that I’d been handling the gerbils. Under “Selecting Pet Gerbils,” he wrote, “Al though the author’s 10-year-old daughter has tamed ‘middle-aged’ gerbils in a few days, it is more desirable to begin training with a younger animal.”

My father had never spoken to me about his suspicions, so I’d assumed he hadn’t noticed that I was playing with the gerbils. After all, he didn’t know how old I was—I was nearly twelve years old, not ten—and he didn’t even know what class I was in at school, as we discovered when Dad drove to school to pick me up for a doctor’s appointment and came back home again without me, furious because he thought I’d skipped school, since nobody had been able to locate me in the fourth grade. (I was in fifth.)

After reading that passage in Dad’s book, I waited for him to confront me about playing with the gerbils. He never did. Still, I wondered if he’d written a particular passage under a section labeled “Escapes” just for me. Here, Dad described how to catch a renegade gerbil with a bucket:

B
Y THE
time I started sixth grade, we had more than 250 gerbils in our Virginia garage. Dad had added extra shelves for them, and we could no longer park our car indoors. Mom simply waved a hand at nosy neighbors who asked why we always left the cars in the driveway. “Oh, I’ve never been much good at backing out,” she’d say. “And it’s so much easier to bring groceries in through the front door, don’t you think?”

Dad went back to sea for four months. Donald was hardly around, either; he and his friends had built a fort out of forgotten cement pipes, creating a lid for it out of scrap wood. Lately they’d been busy designing homemade bombs; occasionally, riding my bike around the neighborhood, I’d hear an explosion and know Donald was at work.

Mom was busy, too. She still trolled the flea markets and had developed a new passion: clocks. We had more than our share of them, all ticking and chiming and bonging and cuckooing as they struggled to keep time. Mom was also such a devotee of the psychic healer Edgar Cayce that she made several trips to Cayce’s house in Virginia Beach and schooled herself in extrasensory perception. We practiced ESP with her, guessing what was for lunch or where she’d hidden her hairbrush, and “seeing” the numbers she pictured in her mind. Mom even arranged for Edgar Cayce’s son Hugh to lecture at one of her champagne brunches for the Navy wives.

My mother’s ESP fortunately did not extend to the
garage, where Marcy and I were personally testing Dad’s new marketing tool for schools and pet shops: a mimeographed handout called “20 Simple, Humane Experiments with Gerbils for Schools or Individuals.” Throughout that fall, we did all twenty gerbil experiments and recorded the results in black laboratory notebooks that Marcy’s mother bought for us at the Navy commissary when we said we needed them for school.

One of our favorite experiments was #2, “The Senses.” This involved mixing artificial sunflower seeds with real seeds. As my dad instructed in the purple ink of his mimeographed instructions, we meticulously recorded “the degree of success in selection of real food under conditions of normal light and in darkness.”

Along with being an expert furniture maker, Dad had been carving fake sunflower seeds in his spare time. Marcy and I discovered the wooden seeds, perfect in every detail, cached in a matchbox on his workbench. We fed these decoys to the garaged gerbils, alternately flicking the lights on and off to see what they’d do. Most of the animals seemed happy enough to gnaw on them without actually swallowing; they trimmed those decoy seeds as sharp as pencil points.

We also tried experiment #3, “Locomotion.” For this laboratory exercise, Dad advised amateur animal scientists to “measure approximate maximum speed of locomotion with an unconfined gerbil in an escape-proof room.”

Marcy and I eagerly tried doing this with two gerbils, but we failed to measure the speed since the garage proved not to be escape-proof after all. While Marcy stood at the far end of the garage with a stopwatch at the finish line we’d marked in
tape, I released our rodent sprinters near Dad’s workshop table. To our dismay, the animals dashed right by Marcy flattened themselves to envelope size, and easily passed beneath the garage door. By the time we raised the door to follow, the gerbils were tumbling like dried brown leaves across the paved road to a neighbor’s neatly edged lawn. We never recovered our subjects.

After that, Marcy and I retreated to safer experiments, such as #12: “Gnawing Ability.” This required nothing more challenging than giving various groups of gerbils pieces of wood to chew on, recording their gnawing rates, and describing the shapes they made. This was a fun experiment to record, because while most gerbils would chew up just about anything you gave them, a few seemed to understand that this was their chance to shine. One gerbil, in particular, had the soul of an artist, chewing a little and then sitting back on her hind legs to examine her work before going at it again. We went through an entire box of my sister’s ABC building blocks before Mom found out.

Afterward, we did as my father suggested and made a display out of each “unique wood sculpture” by gluing them into shoeboxes that we’d painted, creating dioramas of gerbil art. Gail was as pleased as we were with the results, but Mom made me babysit around the neighborhood until I’d earned enough money to replace my sister’s set of blocks.

S
HORTLY
after Dad returned from sea duty, Donald and I were watching
The Jetsons
on TV in the den. We were debating whether it would be cooler to have an ejecting bed that
could pop you out like a toaster or a vacuum tube that could shoot you off to school when Dad burst into the house from the side door to the garage, flailing his arms as if he were being chased by hornets. His hairless head gleamed as pink and shiny as a dog’s nose.

“One of the gerbils is having a seizure!” he yelled.

Mom, who was sitting on the couch with Gail, pulled my little sister closer, as if to prevent her from catching whatever lunatic fever had infected our father. “What do you mean, a seizure?” she asked.

“Damn it, I don’t know!” Dad called over his shoulder as he jogged down the hallway toward his study. “The animal just started shivering and trembling and twitching its whiskers, and then it froze right up stiff!”

“Maybe it’s dying,” Mom suggested, just this side of hopeful.

“I don’t think so,” Dad said.

He returned a minute later, carrying his camera and hurrying back to the garage, still talking fast. “I picked the gerbil up by its tail, and it flopped around and seemed like it was filled with jelly. But then, a minute later, it started running around like nothing had happened.”

We all raced into the garage after him to witness the miraculous seizing gerbil, which he’d confined to an empty plastic cage. Dad was right: the animal looked normal. But when he picked it up out of its cage and dropped it gently into another empty cage beside it, the gerbil flattened out and bared its teeth, trembling so violently that I tried to stroke its back to calm it.

Mom snatched me away by the wrist. “Don’t you dare touch that animal,” she said. “It looks rabid.”

“It can’t have rabies,” Dad scoffed. “What rabid animal could get into the garage in the middle of the night and bite a gerbil?”

“A muskrat,” she suggested. “A raccoon. A cat.”

Dad shook his head. “And bite a gerbil through a plastic cage without eating it for a midnight snack? I doubt it. And it’s not like any of the gerbils could get out of the garage on their own.”

“Just the same, I’m going inside,” Mom said. “You and the kids should, too. We should get rid of that gerbil before it infects somebody else.”

She left the garage with Donald and Gail and closed the door firmly behind her, but I stayed behind with Dad. Guiltily, I thought of the gerbils that had escaped while Marcy and I were playing with them. Dad had never noticed them missing because he was at sea.