The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter

by Holly Robinson

  We drove another three hours north the next day to Popham Beach, Maine. The beach was cornbread gold and soft, and Donald and I dashed in and out of the waves with little Phil. I was surprisingly at peace. We must have looked like any other family, with our parents sitting in their webbed lounge chairs with the cooler between them while we swam.

  However, all went sour the next night at our next campground, further north in Maine. There, ours was one of many RVs, and it was a tugboat amid cruise ships. Generators chugged and televisions blared all around us. You couldn’t go to the showers without falling over people sprawled in webbed chairs with flesh hanging in pink bunches wherever it escaped from bathing suits and shorts.

  “They’re in a different class of people, campers,” Mom said as we picked our way through the bodies.

  That night, Mom started picking fights with Dad. It was over small things at first—she wanted to sleep alone in the bed above the cab and let Phil sleep with Dad—and escalated from there. Listening to them bicker, I realized that this was the longest time our family had ever been together, sleeping and eating in gerbilly close quarters, with no sprawling farm fields, animals, or chores to buffer us from one another.

  Donald tried hard to entertain us that night with imitations of Uri Geller, the handsome Israeli who had laid claim to paranormal abilities such as telekinesis and telepathy. Geller had explained to the world that his special gifts were granted to him as a child when he was playing in a garden and struck by a strange light; he was best known for bending spoons with his mind.

  As Donald laid out a row of plastic spoons on the picnic table, we gathered around to watch. Donald stared hard at the utensils for several long, breathless moments, during which I nearly believed he could bend them. At last, though, he hit the spoons with his fist and sent them flying. “I can’t be expected to bend plastic!” he said. “Show me some metal!”

  Mom sighed. “You know, I’d really rather watch you shuck this corn with your mind than bend spoons.”

  “Yes. Plastic spoons aren’t cheap, you know,” Dad said, bending over to collect them from the pine needles around the rock so that he could wash them and stow the spoons in the camper again. “It’s not like plastic spoons grow on trees.”

  Donald and I had a fit over that one, giggling so hard that Dad sent us out for more firewood. Later, as we fed the wood into the fire, our parents had their final argument. This one was about lobsters.

  “All I want,” Mom told my father, “is for you to indulge me just this once. I want you to drive down the street and buy a couple of lobsters.” She set a giant pot of water over our puny campfire. “It’ll take me that long to boil the damn water anyway.”

  “Please be quiet, Sally. People will hear you.” Dad peered around at the other campers. There were so many campfires going that the whole forest looked ablaze.

  “Nobody can hear me,” Mom said. “Not over their goddamn generators,” she shouted, glaring at Dad. Mom was in full fighter stance now, head thrown back, both hands on her hips, her dark curls bouncing even while she stood still. “All I want is a lobster, and then I can die happy.”

  “We’ve got plenty to eat right here in the camper,” Dad protested. “And it’s too much work.”

  Mom snorted. “Like you’ve done any work around here.”

  “Sally please lower your voice,” Dad said. “Lobsters are too expensive.”

  “I bet they’re not too expensive for the governor of Massachusetts,” Mom said.

  “If you don’t want Dinty Moore’s beef stew, we’ve got canned hash and soup,” Dad said, sounding a little desperate. “And hot dogs! We’ve got plenty of hot dogs, Sally. Nobody even has to cook.”

  Mom shook her head at him, slipped on her big checkered oven mitts, picked up the pot of hot water, and doused the fire. “You’re right. Nobody has to cook because I quit. I’ve tried camping and now I want to go home. If you won’t take me, I’ll find a bus.”

  And so, three days into our two-week vacation, we drove home in silence except for Phil crying “Uno!” every time I let him win at his card game at the little folding table in the back of the camper.

  biology as my major and won Dad’s approval. Whenever anyone asked what I planned to do after graduation, I answered “med school” in the breezy manner of the wholly undecided.

  In truth, I had little interest or talent in biology. The courses seemed like they should be interesting—biology was the very stuff of life, was it not?—but the lectures dragged on. My classmates were hell bent on getting into medical school. They took their class notes everywhere, even to the beach, and wouldn’t attend a party until their lab reports were done. Even the textbooks bored me—an amazing thing, considering that I was such a voracious reader that I found delight in reading cereal boxes. My cell biology textbooks were filled with words as long as my arm, each one meaning something like “the kind of cell that has little hairs all over it.”

  I did reasonably well in my cell biology class at Clark junior year only because my best friend—a broad-shouldered smoker, an ex-alcoholic at the age of twenty-one who sauntered about campus in red sneakers—really was determined to make it into medical school. Louisa asked me to help her study with flash cards, so I learned the material by default.

  My organic chemistry class was even worse than cell biology. The big-bellied, frog-eyed professor was often struck completely dumb by the presence, in the front row of this class, of a coed from New York who wore short skirts and deliberately lined up her colored pens between her legs, squeezing her thighs to hold them in place. At some point in every lecture you could count on her uncrossing her legs, allowing the pens to spill in all directions like a porcupine losing its quills.

  I had never been so uninterested in school. Yet when my cell biology professor offered me a job in his laboratory, I jumped at the chance. It was time to move on from waitressing, I reasoned, and working as a lab assistant was one step closer to my ultimate goal of getting through medical school and saving the world in some as yet vague way. (In my fantasies, I lived in a thatch-roofed village, surrounded by children who narrowly escaped terminal illnesses because I had arrived with the right medicine in the nick of time; I had a great tan and dressed in those khaki vests that are mostly pockets.)

  Dr. Cortina, my cell biology professor, wore white lab coats that were as clean and crisp as restaurant tablecloths before the appetizers. He provided me with my own lab coat, a little long in the sleeves, and told me that I could do anything I liked in the lab: play music, eat lunch, take a nap. “The nice thing about being a research scientist,” he said, “is that you work your own hours. A lot of hours, but your own.”

  I stopped just short of telling him that I knew something about that, having lived with my father, and asked what kind of research I would be working on.

  “Cancer,” Dr. Cortina said. “We’re studying how tumors grow.”

  Cancer! This was even better than anything I’d dreamed up in my fantasy life. Here was a chance to save millions! I followed Dr. Cortina out of his office, a small room dedicated to bookshelves and stacks of papers with mile-long titles, and down the hall to his laboratory. Dr. Cortina sat me down at a gray-speckled lab bench and brought something over on a tray. He set the tray in front of me and I nearly vomited.

  It was a rat. I’d dissected animals in various classes, of course, but this rat wasn’t like the neatly pickled, plastic-looking frogs and pigs I’d taken apart before. This rat was freshly killed, its fur still sleek and white, its snout a bright pink.

  “As you can see, I’ve just split the belly open,” Dr. Cortina was saying, pointing at the incision with one well-manicured finger. “You don’t really need to make the incision this long, but it might make the work easier for you. And we’ll just be discarding the rest of the rat when you’re finished.”

  I nodded, biting my bottom lip. I could do this. Of course I could. This was what good scientists did, the basic research necessary to save the world
from plagues, viruses, limps, and blindness.

  “What do you want me to do after the rats are cut open?” I asked.

  Dr. Cortina showed me how to remove the rat’s ovaries—they looked like gray, evil-smelling grapes—and asked me to weigh them and record the weight in a particular column on a chart. He was testing a certain tumor-inhibiting chemical, he said, and the point was to see if it had worked. The rats we were dissecting all had ovarian tumors he’d induced to grow in them; by weighing the ovaries, he could calculate how and why the cancer had progressed or halted after the tumor-inhibiting medication.

  And so that was my job, and I did it for three hours a day between classes. I played music to distract myself from thinking about what the rats had actually gone through, and I even developed enough of a stomach for the job that I could eat lunch at the same bench where I was about to split a rat open and remove her ovaries. I also became convinced that at some point in the afterlife someone was going to remove my ovaries and weigh them, because I believed in karma as much as I believed in anything.

  When I called home to tell my parents that I’d given up my waitressing job at Big Boy, Dad was ecstatic about my new position as lab assistant. “Now you’re really learning the scientific method,” he enthused. “There are some things you can’t learn in a textbook, and being meticulous in a laboratory is one of them.”

  “I don’t know, Dad,” I sighed. “This doesn’t really feel right to me. Maybe I’m not cut out for med school.”

  “Of course you are!” he said. “I used to think I wanted you to take over the gerbil business. But you’ll want a husband and a family one day, and becoming a doctor is a more viable career option.” He sighed. “I make good money, but at what cost? If you’re a do-it-yourself kind of person like me, there are obvious disadvantages. At least doctors can take vacations.”

  TO MY father’s delight, his article “Gerbil or Jird: Seeking a Common Language for Biomedical Research” earned the most prominent headline on the cover of the September/October issue of Lab Animal magazine in 1975. The appearance of the article led him to ask if I could help out at the annual meeting of the American Association for Laboratory Animal Sciences. The conference was going to be held in Boston, he pointed out, at the Hynes Convention Center, so I wouldn’t have to travel far from my apartment near Clark.

  “This will be a watershed conference for me,” Dad said. “I’m leading a panel seminar. You can work the booth while I’m in the seminar, maybe make a few career contacts,” he urged. “You never know who’s going to turn up at these meetings.”

  I made my way into Boston in my old white Galaxy Ford, got a badge at the door, and showed up at my father’s booth. The Hynes Convention Center was an enormous, echoing space downtown. It was packed with animal breeders, researchers, clinicians, and vendors selling their cutting-edge laboratory animal equipment, like shields that would allow scientists to deliver germ-free rodents by cesarean section and pass them through to a foster nursing mother. None of the animals were present, but their pictures were everywhere, like pin-up posters: exotics such as nude mice and lemurs, and commonplace rats, rabbits, mice, and hamsters.

  I found Dad at one of the cheap outer booths—you paid according to the size and location—and he looked dapper in a shirt and tie ordered from the Sears catalog for this very day. He’d dressed up his booth in Navy colors, blue and gold and white, and he had poster displays of gerbils. He was damp-palmed over the whole ordeal and pumped my hand as if I were a colleague.

  “Your job is to man the booth while I give my talk,” Dad said, eyeing my jeans and T-shirt. “I’m leading a panel seminar, ‘The Gerbil in Research,’ for three hours, starting at one o’clock.”

  “That’s fine, Dad,” I reassured him. “All I have to do is hand out these pamphlets about Tumblebrook Farm, right? And maybe some issues of the Gerbil Digest?”

  He held up a hand in warning. “Not too many. It’s expensive to print things these days. I wouldn’t want to waste money on casual curiosity seekers.”

  “I don’t see many of those here, Dad,” I said. “I don’t think you have to worry.”

  But telling my father not to worry was like telling him not to breathe. He had a “prestigious lady researcher from NIH” coming to talk about the brain research she was doing on gerbils, Dad informed me. “It should be a pretty good-sized crowd,” he said nervously.

  For his sake, I hoped so. I patted him on one broad shoulder and sent him on his way. “Go get ’em, Dad.”

  While he was gone, I defended myself against various salesmen interested in selling me equipment and immersed myself in a novel, occasionally handing out pamphlets to people who asked for them. In the booth next to ours, a film repeated over and over, announcing the benefits of a certain genetic strain of mice.

  At last Dad returned, looking triumphant. “It went well, I take it,” I said.

  “You bet. We had over a hundred people. And that’s not all.” Dad leaned forward to whisper. “I finally met Henry Foster.”

  I had no idea who this was. “Is that good?”

  “Is that good?” Dad laughed. “Of course it is. Henry Foster is the president of Charles River Laboratories, the world’s largest supplier of mice and rats. He’s a legend in his own lifetime!”

  My father sat down on one of the little metal folding chairs he’d brought with him—he had a stack of these rescued from the dump and stored in our basement for just such an occasion—and reclined with his hands behind his head. Dr. Henry Foster was a veterinarian, Dad explained, who’d been struck by the same vision as Victor Schwentker: to provide clean, healthy rodents to academic researchers and scientists at drug companies. Foster first began breeding animals in a warehouse west of Boston, where he developed “pathogen-free rats,” an essential step forward in laboratory animal science. The original company moved to a headquarters in Wilmington, Massachusetts, and had expanded to become Charles River Laboratories International, a conglomerate of over a hundred facilities and 8,400 employees in twenty different countries.

  “You want to know the most amazing thing?” Dad asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “Henry Foster is one of the ten richest men in Boston. But when I introduced myself to him, Henry Foster said, ‘I know who you are.’ Henry Foster knew all about my gerbils.”

  “That’s great, Dad.” I was honestly impressed.

  My father nodded, smiling broadly, then quickly recovered his frown. “Of course, it never pays to take things for granted. I can’t rest on my laurels.”

  I LASTED at my research job with Dr. Cortina for three months. Each week it grew more difficult to go. I was having headaches, which I blamed on the lab chemicals. I was sleep-deprived from trying to keep up with organic chemistry, which required hours in the laboratory as well as lectures and outside assignments, and from getting up every morning at 5:00 A.M. to work out with the crew team, which had replaced horseback riding as my obsession in Worcester. Dr. Cortina was overly understanding anytime I called to say I couldn’t come in; he sweetly suggested that I “rest up” and come in when I could. “The work will still be here for you,” he said.

  Finally, one spring morning when the magnolia trees on Clark’s campus were at their most delicate pink and the forsythia was so bright yellow that it made me blink, I went to work, sat at the lab bench in front of a rat turned belly-up on the dissecting tray, and realized I couldn’t cut the rat open.

  I didn’t want to feel a rat’s cold skin bristling with hairs beneath my hand as I pressed the animal into place. Not just today, but not ever again. I didn’t want to be a doctor. I didn’t want to have anything to do with a career that would require me to dissect animals. Even opening up the horse shoe crabs in my physiology class had made me sick to my stomach, and surely medical school would require worse things.

  I tried hard to talk myself into staying on that bench in Dr. Cortina’s lab. This was cancer, I reminded myself: public enemy number one. This was
the work of the noble scientist. I was paving the way toward a cure. For every second that went by without me cutting open this animal, cancer was getting a leg up on humankind.

  Dad was so proud whenever he told people that I was going to become a doctor. My father had devoted his life to raising gerbils as laboratory animals because it was a cause that he believed could make the world a better place. He wanted his children to live their lives with the same degree of passion and commitment to humanity. If I gave up here, if I told my father that I no longer wanted to study medicine or do medical research, he would be crushed.

  I even tried speaking to myself in my father’s voice, closing the door so that I could say the words aloud, like God lecturing Noah. “Focus, Holly,” I boomed. “Focus on what’s important. You are a servant of medicine.”

  But, in the end, nothing I said in my tortured monologue could make me pick up that knife. I finally put my tools away, slid the rat into the lab refrigerator, and made my way to Dr. Cortina’s office, shoulders hunched, sneakers squeaking on the linoleum.

  I found Dr. Cortina hunched between two towers of papers, scribbling something on a graph, concentrating so hard that the pink tip of his tongue was pinched between his teeth. He didn’t hear me knock the first time.

  “I don’t think I can work for you anymore,” I said when Dr. Cortina finally noticed me. “I’m sorry. Maybe I’m just not a biologist at heart.”

  “Really? But you do such good work in the lab.” Dr. Cortina looked up at me from his desk with a kind smile. “Ah, well. So it goes.” He seemed not the least bit rattled that I was quitting; of course, there were probably dozens of pre-meds coveting my place at his lab bench.

  “I don’t think that being careful in a laboratory is the same thing as being a scientist,” I said. “Or a doctor.”

  “No, but it’s a start.” Dr. Cortina tapped his pen against one of the stacks of paper in front of him. “So what do you think you’ll do, then? Are you going to change majors?”