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 Shortly after their arrival, the gerbils were ensconced in a fabulous new home: an expensive, elaborate, multi-tiered HabiTrail, built of curved plastic tunnels which led in and out of various gerbil sitting rooms, parlors, bedrooms. The HabiTrail was the most mod, most expensive rodent home available; it was the Levittown project of gerbildom. But George and Martha weren't pleased with life on this street of dreams. They wanted to scurry in the world, to feel the linoleum on their paws, to breathe the free air of our partial daylight basement. They weren't allowed out, but I let them out anyway, whenever my mother left me unsupervised. Dr. Niblick had instructed that I stay out of school, that I refrain from exercise, that I -- I had never imagined such a beautiful prescription falling into my hands -- sit on the couch and watch as much television as I could stand. I was all too happy to comply. Day after happy day, as I sat watching Gilligan's Island, Dark Shadows, Batman, Underdog, Speed Racer, and, most importantly, I Love Lucy, George and Martha explored the dusty terrain of our unfinished basement. In the laundry room, they huddled behind the dryer, basking in the warmth of the permanent press cycle. They emerged from behind the storage freezer -- where bulk purchases of frozen chicken parts were kept -- coated with dust bunnies. But the place they loved the best was the deep luggage closet under the stairs. Here were kept, variously, my mother's college trunk, still bearing the return address of the tiny Adirondack town where she grew up; my grandfather's elegant, frayed leather suitcases, bearing tags with exotic destinations written in his spidery hand; a gaggle of ugly matched American Touristers; four picnic baskets; several coolers; eight orange life preservers and a ski belt. This was the closet, stacked according to some ancient Egyptian custom, where George and Martha loved to retire of a humid afternoon. This was the closet where they would meet their maker. It was a Thursday. It was just after 2 p.m.; Mr. Ed had gone off, and Petticoat Junction was about to come on. My mother flung open the basement door unannounced -- an unprecedented occurrence in itself -- and abruptly began to canter down the stairs. I threw a blanket over the empty HabiTrail. "What is it?" I asked. She barely glanced at me. "Carlotta Hyland," she muttered tersely, naming one of the neighborhood ladies she liked the least, a large imperious woman who thought very highly of herself. "Is she dead?" I asked, because it seemed the right thing to say. My mother did look at me, then. Askance. "No. Her mother has broken her hip." "Oh," I said. My mother threw open the door to the suitcase closet. Before I could say anything, she began to rummage inside. "I'm loaning her my yellow Weekender so she can visit," she explained crisply, "if I can find it." She found it all right, and before I could say a word, she pulled it out from the middle of the precariously balanced luggage pyramid. I heard the rumble of tumbling picnic baskets, the whoof of spanked leather, the thud of something hefty hitting the floor. My mother disappeared as quickly as she had arrived. It was quite a while before I could bring myself to begin the excavation. I briefly entertained the notion that, considering my condition, I had better not even make the attempt. But I knew the job must be done. I found them side by side, flattened but not burst, underneath a small, squarish, but rather heavy overnight bag. They looked peaceful, but not so peaceful that they didn't also look quite dead. I picked them up, using a pair of big rubber-tipped pliers from the workbench, and put them in a shoebox. I buried them in the side yard, under the rhododendrons. It was several days before I could tell anyone what had happened to them. Then they became a forbidden topic: the gerbils were never mentioned again. Except once, obliquely, about two years later. By that time we had a scurvy, anti-social cat with a perennial ear infection, a loathesome creature to which my mother had taken an inexplicable shine. My uncle and aunt came to visit one day shortly after this cat, whose name was Mrs. White, had just given birth to her second litter of the year. My uncle peered into the box where Mrs. White and her mewling, charmless offspring were encamped. One of the kittens made an unmistakably hostile gesture toward him -- an inept arch, accompanied by an awkward but thoroughly contemptuous hiss. "Well," he said blandly, rocking back on his heels. "Time to get the suitcase out, I guess." |