The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter Read Online Free PDF

dolls, plastic horse statues, and stuffed animals. When I brought out my armload of belongings to the yard, Dad commanded me to dump everything on the grass near the wading pool. Donald and Gail did the same.
    Dad selected a few items and began arranging them in the swimming pool, standing back every now and then to squint at his handiwork like an artist with a canvas. Once satisfied, he went into the garage. He returned with one of the gerbil cages and a black leather case.
    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 anothercigarette 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 beganshaking 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