The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter (26 page)

By the time I started high school in Massachusetts, it was clear that you could not use the words
fun
and
lady
in the same sentence. I was therefore eager to discover what it was like not to be one. This was no simple matter, since so many of the lady rules had something to do with sex, and I couldn’t get a boyfriend to stick around long enough to really take that code book for a test drive. As one boy put it, “The only person in the world scarier than your father is your mother.”

My first boyfriend was Brian, the brother of Sheri the serial killer. I chose him out of self-preservation. Brian was a thug of a kid with a buzz cut, squinty blue eyes, and the square jaw of a superhero. He sat next to me in Spanish, the only college-bound
class on his schedule, and slept through every hour of
¡Hola! ¿Cómo te llamas?
lolling at his desk so that his legs sprawled into the aisle. Other people were so afraid of Brian that they chose other aisles if they needed to sharpen pencils at the back of the room rather than try to step over him. This was fine with me. Whenever his sister and the other girls tried to bully me, Brian bullied them harder.

In the beginning of this relationship, our kisses were chaste and inexperienced. Yet as Brian and I pressed our clothed bodies together, I understood why my mother had been so anxious to drill me on ladylike behavior and keep me out of the clutches of Dad’s student merchant Marines in New York: sex was fun!

Every spare minute that first winter I rode my bike down to the Boat Club to meet Brian, who drove across the frozen lake from his house to the Boat Club by snowmobile. The snowmobile was exhilarating and dangerous, the perfect aphrodisiac. I loved straddling the seat behind Brian and pressing my body against his as we fishtailed on the icy lake or plunged through the woods on narrow trails, the tree branches clawing at our helmets. We couldn’t talk over the engine noise or the cold rush of wind.

Once we reached our favorite spot, an overgrown Christmas tree farm where the tight rows of tall pines created a secret dell even on snow-bright days, we’d shut off the snowmobile. Deafened by the silence broken only by the steady
drip, drip
of ice melting off the tree boughs, we unzipped our jackets and reached wherever we could with our hands and mouths. Sometimes Brian and I were so absorbed in each other that other snowmobilers surprised us midgrope. We’d have to
press our bare torsos together as they roared by, cheering and whistling.

When the ice was gone, Brian could still fetch me from the town beach by boat, racing across the water in his father’s inboard to meet me. He always drove in that reckless, immortal way of teenage boys everywhere, the nose of the boat flung high in the air as he gunned the engine.

Mom and Grandmother caught us the day that I told them I was riding my bike to school for exercise and needed to leave an hour early to make it on time. I pedaled down to the Boat Club, where Brian had already tied his boat up at the dock. It was chilly and had rained the night before. Since everything was still damp in the boat, we huddled on the sunny steps of the Boat Club and began kissing.

In anticipation, I’d worn nothing under my jeans and T-shirt. No underpants, no bra. No lady was I!

Brian had just hiked my shirt up when I spotted Mom and Grandmother over his shoulder. They marched toward us in tandem, faces set in grim expressions beneath matching helmets of dark hair. It was like being set upon by zombies.

I stood up, knees trembling, brushed off my jeans, and went to them without a word, praying that they wouldn’t notice that I’d left home without my underpants.

“This kind of thing is never going to happen again,” Mom said. “This is not the way any daughter of mine is going to behave.”

“Or a granddaughter of mine,” Grandmother added. “We raised you to be a lady.”

“What was I doing that was so wrong?” I wailed. “We were just kissing!”

Mom shook her head. “You were muckled onto that boy like a barnacle on a boat,” she said.

I folded my arms against my braless chest, still afraid they’d discover my secret unladylike state. “I don’t see what’s so wrong with kissing,” I insisted.

“Kissing leads to other things,” Grandmother sniffed. “It’s just like marijuana and heroin. And why should a boy buy the cow when he can get the milk for free?”

We loaded my bike into the station wagon while Brian roared off in his boat across the lake behind us. Brian could bully his sister and her friends; he’d been in knife fights and gotten drunk enough to punch out a kid at a basketball game. He’d even thrown a chair at a kid across the cafeteria. But he was no match for Mom and Grandmother.

“How did you find me?” I asked sullenly as Mom pointed the car toward the high school.

Grandmother rolled her eyes. “We weren’t born yesterday, you know.”

A
FTER
Brian, I fell in love with a car and went out with the boy who owned it: a souped-up Mustang owned by a senior named Reggie. Reggie had a bowl haircut and was slightly shorter than my own five feet four inches even in his Frye boots, but I overlooked all of this because I loved racing in the Mustang. Reggie would put his car up against Clay Jenson’s Corvette along Snow Road and we’d break 110 mph, screaming around the curves and praying there wasn’t a hay wagon coming the other way. One night, Clay flipped his Corvette on a patch of black ice and landed upside down in a ditch, but the
roll bar kept him and his girlfriend from dying. Clay’s car was totaled, but we found other people to race and went on as before.

All of this was so thrilling that I let Reggie take me parking by the river and put my hand on his penis. To my surprise it felt hot and rubbery, not at all what I was expecting. I might have gone further than that, too, but I had a strict curfew and my father, towering over Reggie, had made sure that my new boyfriend knew what it was.

The relationship would have lasted longer if I’d never invited Reggie to dinner at our house. Once Mom met him, she didn’t let up, asking me every week when I was going to break up with him.

“What do you care?” I finally asked her furiously. “Reggie’s a nice guy. He takes me places. He pays for me at the movies.”

“He’s too old for you,” she said. “Three years makes a lot of difference at your age. And that boy stinks of pig manure.”

“He can’t help that!” I cried, offended mostly because I’d noticed the stink, too. “His dad’s a pig farmer. And anyway, I probably smell like gerbils!”

“Gerbils have no odor,” Mom said automatically.

This was a myth perpetuated by my father. It may even have been true for pet gerbils. But given the numbers we had, the gerbil stink could make you cry for mercy. How was it possible, I wondered, that Mom so confidently pegged pigs lower on the farm animal status scale than gerbils? Somehow she did, though, and coming from her it even sounded rational.

I ignored Mom’s views on Reggie and invited him home again. Not to dinner, but afterward, when I thought everyone in my family would be safely mesmerized by the television. This time, Reggie brought his guitar and sat with me in the dining room with the swinging doors shut. He proceeded to play “Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones, gazing deeply into my eyes as he plucked the strings.

“Wild, wild horses, couldn’t drag me away-ay!”

I wanted to be awed. Or, at the very least, not horrified. Sadly, though, Reggie was a lamentable musician. He played most of the right chords but sang like someone who’d grown up underwater.

I tried my best to keep a straight face as the ballad dribbled on. Soon it would be over and we could go for a drive in his Mustang.

Then I noticed the swinging door twitching a little behind Reggie. I prayed that it was one of the cats. Or one of the dogs. Or even little Philip. Anyone, dear God, but my brother Donald.

The door swung open a bit more and stayed open. Now I could see Donald lip-synching the words behind Reggie. My brother was clutching his heart and batting his eyelashes at me. Even worse, Mom, Grandmother, Grandfather, and Phil were all crowded in the doorway, too, making faces as my oblivious suitor serenaded me with all his heart.

“Wild, wild horses, couldn’t drag me away-ay!”
Reggie yodeled, and my mother rolled her eyes and then, I swear to God, pinched her nose shut with two fingers.

After that night, I never saw Reggie again.

M
Y BEST
friend in West Brookfield was Bea Wilson, whom I met in freshman English class. The class was taught by Mr. Adams, a soulful Peace Corps dropout, the son of a minister who had us singing protest songs and writing short stories full of dark angst. We modeled our stories after his own impenetrable fiction, which Mr. Adams handed out on a regular basis as part of our classroom reading.

Mr. Adams also directed a ninth-grade play about slavery, where I played a black man hoeing fields and singing “Oh, freedom, oh, freedom! Oh, freedom over me!” The intensity of opening night was marred for me only by a gym teacher sitting in the front row. At the sight of me in a black sweater and suspenders, he told his buddy beside him, “They sure didn’t build girls like that in my day, no sirree.”

Bea’s farmhouse stood on a hill on the opposite side of West Brookfield. It was even older and colder than mine. But her house had delightfully sloped ceilings and tilted floors, and the wallpaper was a warm riot of flowers in every room.

Bea’s father and mother were both from wealthy families. Her father, JoJo, had worked as an engineer for a large company before deciding to “defect from our money-grubbing imperialist U.S. Government and escape those goddamn whining capitalists,” he confided in me one afternoon as he wrapped aluminum foil around their TV antenna to get better reception. In West Brookfield, he declared, “I can be one of the real people living off the land.”

On his own 350 acres, JoJo tried pig farming but quit when the barn burned down. He then created a mobile home
park and lived off the land that way. “My dad’s a good example of how not to work for anybody else,” Bea explained. “I guess he’s a lot like your dad that way.”

This much was true. Most of my friends had fathers who drove sedans or station wagons. These dads came to the high school basketball games and took their families out for Sunday drives. Other than that, they disappeared in the morning and came home at night. None of my friends seemed to know, or care, what their fathers did, whereas Bea and I were privy to every move our fathers made. There was a still a difference between us, however. Bea had little involvement in her father’s life, but my brothers and I were enlisted troops serving Dad and his secret mission: raising gerbils to the nth degree. My father, like Bea’s dad, worked for himself. But unlike Bea’s dad, who seemed to have plenty of free time on his hands, Dad traipsed up to the gerbil building early every morning and didn’t return to the kitchen until just before dinner, when he’d pour himself a tall scotch and settle his briefcase on the dining room table. He made his business our business.

In the end, though, none of these comparisons between our fathers was as interesting to me as the fact that Jojo was a nudist. Nobody in that family wore underpants. Bea’s jeans had holes that left pink dime-sized circles of skin showing on her butt and thighs. And when Jojo headed out to the frog-choked pond in front of their house to shimmy out of his ragged blue jeans and fling himself onto the grass, his lack of underpants clearly answered any lingering questions I had about what made men different from women.

I had touched Brian’s penis, but here was a penis for me to examine in the clear light of day. It was neither alluring nor
intimidating. Jojo’s penis was simply a wrinkled pink part of him, like the nose on his face.

Besides our rundown houses and our isolationist fathers, the other thing that drew Bea and me together was our shared passion for horses. Her grey gelding even looked like a larger version of Ladybug I often trotted Ladybug down Long Hill Road, across the town common, and up the hill to Bea’s house on weekends, about six miles in all. We’d spend the day riding and the night singing folk songs while Bea played her guitar.