Free A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father by Augusten Burroughs Page A

mother understood that another set of crabs just wouldn’t cut it. I needed something warm and fuzzy that I could name and snuggle with.
    The pet store had an entire wall of small, furry mammals: mice, rats, guinea pigs, hamsters, gerbils. While I liked hamsters, too, the Habitrail cage was expensive. Even I could see that the interconnecting boxes, tubes, and spheres could easily bankrupt a family and lead to addiction later in life. Because, how would you know when to stop? How  could  you stop? An entire city could be built with a Habitrail. My mother understood this at once because when I asked she replied, “No way.”
    But a guinea pig and an aquarium were modest, so she agreed.
    There were so many and they were all cute, and I realized this wouldn’t be just a matter of waltzing into the store and pointing to one. I would have to meet each of the pigs and choose one based on its personality, spirit, and innate good manners. Luckily, the clerk was patient and allowed me to cradle every pig I pointed to. I knew I didn’t want a long-haired model, those were for girls who liked to comb hair and add repulsive little bows. So I narrowed my search to the short-haired variety.
    Still, it was tough. The black ones were sleek and beautiful, but did they look a little like rats, all one color like that?
    I could get a white one, but then, why not just get a bunny? “Could I?” I asked my mother.
    “Absolutely not. You may select a guinea pig and that’s it.”
    I settled on a tricolor, a little of each. He was tan and white with just a smattering of black. When I pressed him to my chest and he wriggled up against my neck and nuzzled my ear, I named him, Ernest. Ernie for short.
    We set up Ernie in his aquarium in the kitchen. The aquarium had a stand, so the top of the tank was well over my head. I had to call my mother or my father to take him out when I wanted to pet him.
    Soon, Ernie possessed an impressive repertoire of tricks. He squealed every time the refrigerator was opened and would stop only if some lettuce was deposited on the cedar-shaving-covered floor of his cage. He emitted a different squeal when he wanted to run around on the floor. If I called, “Here, Ernie!” he would run to the side of his aquarium closest to the door, stand up on his little back feet, and wait to be picked up. “Look at you,” I said to him, “just a little animal, plucked from nature.”
    Ernie was so adorable, even my mother, who at first called him “a loaf of rat,” came to love him. “He is awfully sweet, isn’t he?” she admitted as Ernie crawled across her bosom to nibble on her blue Indian corn necklace.
    My mother took many photographs of me and Ernie together—Ernie in one of the costumes I created for him out of fabric scraps and glue, Ernie sitting in a chair just like a person. Though when I strung one of my mother’s gigantic bras across the back of two kitchen chairs and set Ernie into one of the cups, like a hammock, she didn’t take a picture as I expected but screamed, “Take that horrible thing out of my good bra!” I was insulted that she called Ernie a “horrible thing” and I back-talked her. “He’s cuter than what’s usually in that big old bra.”
    Only my brother was uninterested in Ernie. But my brother, I’d come to understand, wasn’t interested in living things. Not only would he refuse to make eye contact, my brother wouldn’t respond if you spoke to him. You had to walk up to him and scream at the side of his head to get his attention, or jab him really hard with something sharp. That worked.
    One morning, an expression of contempt settled on his face when I told him there was no more cereal because I’d fed the last of it to Ernie. He was now in active competition with the little guinea pig for food.
    That afternoon I said, “Mom? I’m afraid my brother is going to do something bad to Ernie.”
    She stopped typing and looked up at me. “What do you mean by bad?” she