“I don’t know,” I said.
“Do you like biology?”
I sighed. “Not really.”
Dr. Cortina laughed and removed his glasses to wipe his eyes. “Then I think it’s safe to conclude that science probably isn’t your life’s work,” he said gently donning his glasses again. “But don’t despair. Better to find this out now than later. Too many people force themselves forward on a certain path because it’s what they think they should do. Life’s too short for that. Just keep asking yourself what makes you happy.”
AFTER more teacher conferences where it was clear that nobody at the local high school knew what to do with my brother Philip, Mom and Dad finally put my little brother in a private school in Worcester, “a place where at least the teachers are smarter than he is,” Mom said. Occasionally, when it was Mom’s turn to drive the car pool, she would stop by to take me to lunch.
Two months after I left my laboratory job and returned to Big Boy—a move I still hadn’t confessed to my parents—my mother called to say that she was coming to see me. I went to my morning classes and headed home to clean the apartment. I was living with vegetarian roommates; one of them, Vicki, was seated at the kitchen table when I came home, wearing a pair of enormous sunglasses and slicing up raw steak.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “Why are you wearing sunglasses indoors?”
“It’s the flesh,” she said, gesturing at the bloodied beef strips on the table. “I’m cooking for Harry tonight, and I wanted to surprise him by fixing his birthday dinner here. He said he wanted a real he-man, red-meat meal. But I can’t stand the sight of this poor wounded flesh.”
“Oh. Okay. Listen, my mom’s coming over. Do you think you could clean up some of that blood before she gets here?”
Vicki nodded and went back to her dramatic carving while I made my bed and stood in the hallway, wondering what to do about the clay. Leaving my job in Dr. Cortina’s lab had left me with free time during the day, since I mostly waitressed at night; I had signed up for pottery classes on a whim. The act of centering a lump of clay on a spinning wheel and transforming it between my hands, shaping a vase, pitcher, or bowl, absorbed me like nothing else I’d ever tried.
I’d prevailed upon Donald to come and help me build my own pottery wheel from a kit. He’d agreed because I paid him, and because it involved pouring a cement flywheel. I had put the wheel in an alcove in the hallway and lined the walls and floor with plastic, but I still managed to splatter raw clay everywhere.
My roommates didn’t mind traipsing through clay to get to their bedrooms, but now that I was faced with trying to clean, I realized it was like the Dr. Seuss book The Cat in the Hat: like the cat spreading the pink spot that he wants to remove, anything I used to clean up the clay just transferred the clay to the next surface I touched.
I tried to meet my mother downstairs when she arrived, but she was too quick for me. She came through the kitchen and stopped at the hallway threshold to stare at the clay, the pottery wheel, and the shelves of greenware I’d been drying before taking them over to Clark to fire in the kiln.
“What on earth is all this?” she asked.
“A pottery wheel,” I said.
She gave me a look. “Please don’t tell me that this is your mess.”
“Okay.”
Mom sighed. “I hope your landlord doesn’t pay you a surprise visit.”
We went out to lunch and then stopped at the grocery store, as always, where Mom tried to convince me to let her buy me more food than I needed. “My roommates are vegetarians,” I explained. “I really just need rice and beans.”
She dismissed this. “We’re not living in Mexico, you know.”
As we shopped for food, I finally told Mom about my decision to stop working in Dr. Cortina’s laboratory.
“Well, that’s too bad,” she said. “You know how your father worries about your lack of focus. But you’ll still get your degree in biology, won’t you? It seems too late to change majors at this point, with just one year to go.”
I nodded. “Yes. But I want to be an artist instead of a doctor.”
We were walking back to the car. Mom stopped and turned to glare at me. “You’ll end up living on cat food if you’re an artist,” she said. “Why don’t you go to nursing school?”
“I can’t work at a job I don’t love,” I said firmly.
“I knew it was a mistake to send you to such a liberal college,” Mom said. “Look, you can’t be a debutante all your life. There may come a day when you have to buy your own groceries.”
We rode home in silence, my throat thick with anger. What had my mother done with her life but mooch off Dad? Immediately, though, I knew this was unfair: my mother had followed her own bliss, working hard to run a riding stable that barely made ends meet and devoting her life to caring for us. So I said nothing.
Mom parked the station wagon on the street below my apartment building and we began hauling the bags of groceries up the open back staircase. I lived on the second floor; as I fumbled with keys to unlock the door, we both happened to glance down at the car from the back porch. A tall, skinny man with a blue shirt that hung on him like a flag on a pole was sauntering up to the open tailgate of Mom’s station wagon. He glanced around and then began gathering up the remaining bags of groceries as if they belonged to him.
“He can’t do that!” Mom cried indignantly. “I paid good money for that food!”
“He just did, though,” I said, laughing a little as the thief began sauntering up the street. He might as well have been whistling. “Look, if he’s that hungry, he probably deserves the food more than I do.”
“The hell with that,” Mom said.
Before I could stop her, Mom ran down the two flights of stairs. I watched in astonishment from the back porch as my nimble mother, looking very small from my vantage point, trotted up behind the man and started whaling away at him with her purse. Before I could make it down the stairs, the man had dropped the bags and run.
I helped Mom collect the scattered groceries. “I’m not sure if that was brave or stupid,” I said. “But it was amazing.”
Mom balanced a bag of groceries on one hip. “We work too hard for our money to let anyone steal from us,” she said with a sniff.
LATE one Friday night, I drove home from Clark for a weekend of spring trail riding. I spent the night in my old bedroom and looked out the window as soon as I woke up the next morning, excited to see the horses grazing in the pastures.
The horses were there. But there was something else, too, something that hadn’t been there before: there was an ark in our yard.
I wandered down to the kitchen, where Mom was having her second cup of coffee after mucking out stalls, and pointed out the window. “What is that thing?”
“Oh, that’s just your father’s boat,” she said. “It arrived early this morning.”
I slipped into a pair of boots and went outside to walk around Dad’s newest passion. The boat was a 1928 cabin cruiser, thirty-eight feet long and all wood and brass. The vessel was up on a stand, bringing it halfway up to the second-floor windows of our house.
Dad poked his head over the boat’s bow railing and grinned down at me. “You know, this was once a real pleasure cruiser,” he told me. “This boat had her heyday on the Great Lakes.”
“It looks like it would sink like a rock,” I said.
Dad looked hurt. “Well, we are going to fix it up, you know.”
And they did. My father and Donald worked on that boat all summer, hammering on new boards and caulking holes and seams, adding bits of brass scavenged from flea markets, and making the ark seaworthy.
For the boat’s maiden voyage, Dad paid someone to trailer it two hours to the coast. He and Donald put the boat in the water in Scituate, Massachusetts, where Dad had found a prospective buyer. It took six bilge pumps to empty the boat of water once it was floating, since the shrinkage in the boards during the months the boat was on land had
caused gaps between them.
Afterward, Donald called home to tell us about their journey. “Dad wanted to drive the boat,” he said, laughing, “and we had to come into this pier with these big metal rings on the posts. I was up front with the ropes when Dad crashed the boat into the metal rings. Man, you crash fourteen tons of boat into metal, and the metal bends like a pretzel.”
I winced. “Was anybody watching?”
“Oh, yeah,” Donald said. “We came roaring in, and there was a whole crowd there. You should’ve heard them yelling when we cracked the dock.”
I came home again a few weekends later and wandered out toward the stable after breakfast on Saturday morning. Dad was standing outside in the empty space on the lawn where his ark had been. He wasn’t doing anything. He wasn’t even smoking a cigarette.
“What are you doing out here, Dad?” I asked.
“Oh, just thinking.”
“About what?”
My father glanced over his shoulder toward the gerbil buildings, barely visible behind the thick green foliage of the trees in full leaf. “Retirement.”
“Really?” I folded my arms and studied my father more closely. He looked the same, dressed as always in stained khaki work pants—the bottom half of one of his old Navy uniforms—and an equally tired white T-shirt. He wore a blue duck-billed cap to keep the sun off his head, which was already peeling. Dad was still fit and square-shouldered and handsome, with a posture that suggested he was standing at attention. Pencils protruded from his pants pocket, along with the little spiral notebook full of lists he always carried.
“The business is almost ripe for selling,” he explained. “We’ll always have a conventional colony of gerbils. I don’t have the ability, or the interest, to make the animals completely germ-free, and that’s certainly what researchers are starting to want these days.” He sighed. “I think I’ll sell the business to Henry Foster. Charles River can certainly afford to buy me out.”
“When?”
As always, when it came to talking about money, Dad was cagey. “We’re just in the talking stages right now. It might take a few years. But I know they’ll want to make a deal eventually. If Charles River can get their hands on my line of inbred gerbils, nobody else in the world will ever be able to compete with them.” He turned his attention back to the lawn in front of us and fell silent again. The grass was slightly brown, still, where the boat had stood for so long.
“Are you really ready to retire, though?” I asked. “You’re not that old.”
“No,” Dad said. “I’m not old yet.” He offered me the ghost of a smile. “But I’m not young, either. I guess I’ll have to find something else to do, now that the boat is gone and the gerbil business is pretty much running itself these days.”
“Why did you get that boat, anyway?” I asked.
Dad looked at me for a long time, his blue eyes steady. “I don’t know,” he said. “What is it about having a boat? It’s all about going after a dream, I guess.”
I nodded and stood there with my father for a while longer, staring at the empty space where the boat had been, picturing the polished wood and gleaming brass, and all of the places a boat like that could take you.
Epilogue
The American Gerbil Show
sixth annual American Gerbil Society gerbil show in Bedford, Massachusetts. The show is being held at the Bedford Plaza, a modest three-story brick hotel with a swimming pool, a restaurant, and free pitchers of iced tea and lemonade in the lobby. There is no outward sign that the hotel has been overrun by gerbil enthusiasts from as far away as Missouri and Oregon, Canada and Argentina, other than the nervous desk clerks who eye people’s pockets as if expecting rodents to pop right out of them.
I’ve brought my son, Aidan, and two of his friends with me. The boys charge up the three flights of stairs to the conference room, which is packed with more than a hundred people. A spillover crowd mills around outside the doors. Rows of tables line the room, with more tables in the center. The tables are piled with cages brought in by breeders who are showing off not only gerbils but other exotic pocket pets as well: dwarf hamsters and South African pygmy hedgehogs, ferrets and degus, chinchillas, and pygmy mice no bigger than my fingernail.
As I mingle with members of the American Gerbil Society, I recall one of my mother’s favorite sayings: “There’s a lid for every pot.” The breeders are all earnest and friendly. They are the sorts of people who wear their many passions emblazoned on their T-shirts: American Gerbil Society, Greyhound Festival, Christmas Revels, Audubon Society. If they weren’t here, these people would be out walking for good causes.
“Pygmy mice babies are so small that you have to be careful not to dump the little ones out when you change the shavings,” one breeder tells Aidan as my son watches her mini-mice nibble and hop.
“I probably shouldn’t admit this here, but I’ve always liked hamsters better than gerbils,” confides the solitary hamster breeder at the show, a redhead with a pierced tongue and a herd of plush black teddy bear hamsters. “It’s a strictly aesthetic thing. I don’t like rodents with tails.”
One of the gerbil breeders proudly shows me her foundation sire, a marvelously muscular black-and-white pied gerbil alone in a cage. “I had him paired with a lovely Siamese girl, but I’m retiring him now,” she explains when I ask where the gerbil’s mate is. “He’s going to live out the rest of his days with one of his grandsons.”
A few side tables in the conference room display gerbil paraphernalia for sale: gerbil bags and gerbil hats, gerbil blankets and crazy-looking wooden gerbil houses, books about gerbils and statues of gerbils, too. One item for sale is a book about a gerbil who sculpts; the author, Judith Block, is a New York artist who has kept a tank of gerbils in her kitchen since 1972. She is petite with springy red curls and oversized glasses, and clearly in her element as she helps judge one of the pet classes. She once bought gerbils from my father, Judith tells me when I introduce myself.
“Gerbils are all about love,” she says, handing a small plastic cage back to a pint-sized boy with freckles. “Gerbils are so intelligent and fun, and each one has a different personality.” She gazes down at the boy, her eyes magnified, hypnotizing, and asks him what his gerbil does best.
“Nibbles!” the boy says. “That’s his name, too.”
The pet class begins as Judith and I talk. A teenage boy with an elaborate sound system and a smooth disc-jockey voice proclaims, “Lilac and Blossom can run on their wheel in tandem!” as their young owner holds up their carry cage for everyone to see. For the first time in decades, I remember Kinky, my unappreciated gerbil, born decades ahead of her time, and imagine myself here as a child, showing off her tricks. Where is that wrinkle in time when you need it most?
Meanwhile, Judith tells me that her favorite pet of all time was Phoebe, a gerbil artist whose work was so phenomenal that Judith created not only the book on display here but also a website to showcase it: www.phoebe.agsgerbils.org. In the preface of her webpages, Judith calls the sculptures crafted by Phoebe the gerbil “reminiscent of certain species of cactus, or of archeological finds in the Bayanzag Valley of the Gobi Desert, where some of the world’s oldest dinosaur fossils have been discovered. Since Phoebe, born in NYC, has never left the Riverdale section of the Bronx, her works perhaps harken back to DNA memory, or possibly to some interspecies, Jungian collective unconscious.”
Phoebe’s sculptures appear on the website with titles such as Twilight on the Gobi, Antler Totem, or Desert Cloud. Judith has written a haiku for each of them, and the haiku appears in Spanish as well as English, thanks to an Argentine gerbil lover, Laura Pimás, whom Judith met through the American Gerbil Society. For instance, the haiku for Twilight on the Gobi reads:
The violet hour.
The long, hot day is over.
I love the cold night.
La hora purpura.
El ardiente, largo día ha terminado.
Amo la fría noche.
> “Phoebe was unique,” Judith concludes fondly. “All gerbils chew cardboard tubes and destroy them, but Phoebe was an artist in a gerbil’s body. She’d chew on a colored cardboard tube, then step away and look at what she’d done, and then go back and chew, just like an artist who never thinks her art is finished. If her sculptures were done by people and brought to a design class, we’d say they’re works of art.”
In the next room, judges in white coats prod and examine and play with various gerbils competing in their show classes, evaluating them for body build, color, and personality in much the same way judges examine dogs at the Westminster Dog Show. Males are supposed to be buff, females more streamlined, and all prize-winning gerbils have fur tails with admirable tufts. A gerbil’s biggest dream, or at least his owner’s, is to win Best in Show.
The gerbils at the American Gerbil Society show look nothing like my dad’s. Ours were plain brown, with black tufts on their tails and creamy bellies. Here, there are orange gerbils with white bellies and ruby eyes. There are deep gray gerbils, light gray purplish gerbils, and nutmeg gerbils—that’s a calico color. There are even Siamese gerbils that look just like Siamese cats, except that they’re gerbils.
I stand around and watch the judging for a bit. “Every gerbil at an AGS show is handled by a judge,” says American Gerbil Society president Donna Anastasi, one of the show judges and author of the top-selling gerbil book for pet lovers, Gerbils: The Complete Guide to Gerbil Care (Bowtie, 2005). “If they nip, they lose points on personality. At hamster shows, the judges don’t even handle the animals,” she adds with a sniff. “They have to pick the hamsters up with a scoop.”
Donna is a young, fit-looking mother of two, a soccer mom married to a college professor. She graduated from Smith College and now works as a human-factors engineer. “Go ahead and call me nerdy,” she laughs. “I definitely am.”
As we chat, there is an instant connection. Like me, Donna is the daughter of a military man; children who grow up with Air Force, Army, or Navy parents have a special radar for one another, perhaps because we’re always friendly but hold a part of ourselves in reserve. We know from experience that you can lose everything you hold dear in an instant.
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