Free The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter by Holly Robinson

acted asmidwives to pregnant spiny mice if the mice were caged together.
    The final paragraph of that paper is the only clue to Dad’s surprising defection from gerbils. There, Dad wrote, “The availability of sand rats and spiny mice suggests that they will be valuable for studying many interrelated factors involved in diabetes … researchers hope to be able to establish stable inbred strains of these species to increase their potential as experimental animals.”
    In Kansas, Dad wasn’t content to just sneak gerbils upstairs like James Bond with his latest secret weapon. He was toying with the idea that he might escape the military by retiring early and raising gerbils on a large scale while still keeping his options open by researching the potential of breeding other laboratory animals.
    As always, though, he kept his plans a secret. My father’s byline for the article on spiny mice and sand rats was again, simply, “D. G. Robinson Jr.” Clearly, very few people reading
Science News
knew that the author of these papers was a Navy commander who went to work every day with gold bars on his shoulders, his lectures on naval war tactics timed to the Army minute.
    And even fewer people at Fort Leavenworth knew what my dad was up to in the basement of our Army issue housing. Not even, most of the time, us.



before I turned thirteen, and that time in my life was notable for this stunning achievement: my breasts and my bikini got me a horse. “You’ve certainly started blossoming,” Dad observed one day, looking up from the kitchen table to find me standing there in the new, two-piece green-and-white polka-dot bathing suit that I insisted on wearing everywhere, even biking past the lines of sweating uniformed soldiers to buy chewing gum and a Coke at the PX.
    “Put something on, for God’s sake,” Mom said. When I refused and stomped out of the room, I heard her scolding my father. “We should never be living on an Army fort with a girl this age,” she said. “Holly was such a sweet little thing when we brought her here, but now she’s running wild.”
    She was right. Within two weeks of arriving in Kansas I’d found a crush, a blond, cleft-chinned colonel’s son with his own basement band. He played lead guitar, wooing me with Iron Butterfly’s “In-a-gadda-da-vita,” and wore bangs dangerously close to his eyes.
    When I wasn’t with him, I roamed the fort with my newbest friend, Katy, the younger sister of one of the lifeguards at the officers’ club pool. Our favorite pastime was to put on our bathing suits and follow the young soldiers around the base, teasing them with made-up marching songs of our own: “Left! Left! Left-right-left! I left my wife and forty-nine kids on the brink of starvation without any gingerbread!”
    We also liked to hang out at the Hunt Club, flirting with the prisoners on work parole. Leavenworth is known for its prisons—the U.S. Penitentiary is there, as are Lansing Correctional Facility and the U.S. Military Disciplinary Barracks; the population is so prison-heavy that the Leavenworth Tourism Bureau adopted “Doin’ Time in Leavenworth” as its marketing slogan one year. At the Hunt Club, the military prisoners mucked out stalls, mowed the hayfields, fed and watered the horses, worked out with weights in the tack room, and might as well have had
Danger!
tattooed on their chests, along with the usual assortment of skulls and eagles and women’s names.
    I was blossoming, but was I beautiful? I knew better. Yet I began wearing makeup and shaving what little hair I had on my legs. In an act of bravado that left me itching and thrashing about in my bed for weeks afterward, I even shaved off the hair on my back after Katy pointed it out.
    “Mom,” I asked in desperation one day, “do you think I’ll ever be pretty?”
    Her answer was less than encouraging. “We’re so glad you’re smart,” she said. “And you’ll be a wonderful mother.”
    In desperation, I took my