Parenting:
GERBIL DEATH
by Joyce Maynard
It was two days before Charlie's project for Black History Month was due, and that morning, at breakfast, I had promised him we'd work on his puppet of a famous American of African descent. Audrey was trying out for a role in the Lions Club play that night, and my daughter being a lover of the stage, and this year's show being Annie, tension was running high. Willy was busy making lists of names for his new gerbil, who had moved in with us the day before. There was sawdust and gerbil food all over the living room floor, from an afternoon spent setting up the cage. The pet store where I'd purchased it had neglected to include the cage-top in my bag, so I had to root around our basement for old storm window screens to prop up over the top, to keep Coco/Tulip/Fluffy from getting out, and Daisy, our tenant's cat, from getting in. It was, in other words, a fairly typical morning at our house. A Monday.
Monday is also the day my son Willy takes his harmonica lesson. It was Willy's idea to learn harmonica, but since a person can't exactly look up harmonica teachers in the yellow pages, I had been at a loss as to how to foster this ambition of his, until one day, at the coffee store, I met a fellow named Frank, eighty years old and still going strong, and as we got to talking I discovered that Frank was a blues harmonica player. Frank lost an arm in a factory accident, more than forty years ago, but that doesn't appear to slow him down much. In addition to working at the Red Cross in our town and singing and performing on the harmonica, he also does the best W.C. Fields imitation I've run across, and he's working up a tap dancing routine. Monday afternoons, Frank comes over to our house with his case of harmonicas, and he and Willy work on tunes while I bake him the apple pie that is is weekly fee, with a hunk of cheddar cheese thrown in for good measure. You might wonder whether age six is a little young to be singing "my mama up and left me" but Frank says a fella's never too young to know about the blues. "It's just life," he says. "The good and the bad. You live long enough, you see it all."
So I sent the children off to school knowing we had a busy day ahead of us. I spent the next six hours cleaning our house, top to bottom. Doing laundry, vacuuming under beds. By three o'clock, when the troops showed up, our house was looking spiffier than it had in a couple of months.
Audrey was the first one home. She fixed herself a snack and headed off for a babysitting job, singing "It's a Hard Knock Life." Next came Frank, who always sits a while in my kitchen, telling me stories and playing the occasional harmonica tune before the lesson begins. I was just starting to peel the apples -- and he was singing a blues number he'd made up, about his wife, who died six years ago -- when we heard a blood curdling scream from upstairs, in Willy's room, followed, a moment later, by the appearance of my six year old son, staggering in, head in his hands.
Willy was crying so hard we couldn't make out his story, so Charlie filled us in. The window screens were off the gerbil cage. Gerbil and cat nowhere to be seen. The gerbil appeared to be a goner. Charlie said he guessed this meant we wouldn't be stringing Jimi's love beads just now after all.
I set down my pastry blender, and Frank played a mournful note on the harmonica. I put my arms around Willy, but he was inconsolable. Charlie ran off to look for gruesome evidence. He came back a moment later with a bounce in his step. "Good news, Willy," he said. "I just spotted your gerbil running out from under my bed."
Now all we had to do was shut the cat up in the bathroom and catch the gerbil. That and -- Charlie reminded me -- work on Jimi Hendrix. And finish the pie. I told Willy to set some gerbil food out on the floor upstairs, and wait for the gerbil to come nibbling. Knowing his gerbil's love of food, I didn't figure we'd have long to wait.
But after Willy left, Charlie had a confession to make. "I made up that part about seeing Willy's gerbil," he said. "I just wanted to cheer him up."
At this point, Frank had been reminiscing about a hen his daughter had as a child, that got killed by a weasel back in around '48. Now he looked solemn. "I don't think this is a good day for a harmonica lesson," he said. "A fella's got to be in the mood." He launched into a a little blues number that had suddenly come to him, about a gerbil that died. I put the finishing touches on his pie and headed upstairs to break the sad news to Willy, that it wasn't looking good for his gerbil after all.
But when I got to the top of the stairs, a different kind of grisly scene from the one I'd been picturing greeted me. Instead of laying out a few neat piles of gerbil food, my son had broadcast seed throughout the entire second floor I'd just finished vacuuming, much the way a farmer might seed a field. Now I was the one wailing. And that's when Audrey came back from babysitting. "Disgusting," she said. "There could be pieces of dead gerbil under my bed at this very moment."
After I quieted down a little, Charlie reopened the puppet making question. I told him this was not a good moment.
We said goodbye to Frank. Charlie ran to get the dustbuster (not the appliance I might have chosen, to tackle the job of vacuuming up an entire bagful of gerbil seed, scattered over virtually every square inch of a four-room area). Willy sat on his bed, reminiscing about the gerbil. The cute way she used to make a nest in the sawdust. How soft her tail had been.
And slowly, things around our house quieted down again. I helped Charlie stitch a vest for his puppet, out of one of my old mini skirts. We had a somber dinner. A friend picked Audrey up, to take her to the Annie tryout. By the time I tucked the boys in, Willy had come round to the idea of getting a new gerbil, once we got a secure top for his gerbil cage.
At ten o'clock, my tenant Deane got home from work, and of course I told her the news. A minute later, she came back downstairs, cradling Coco/Tulip/Fluffy in her hands. She'd found Willy's gerbil curled up asleep on her bed -- alive and well, next to her cat, Daisy.
Audrey got home a few minutes later. She got a part in the show. It was midnight by the time I crawled into my bed -- which felt a little crunchy, on account of gerbil seed between my sheets. It's just life, I reminded myself. The good and the bad. Live long enough, you see it all.
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