The mother stormed off with her progeny. “All right,” Donna said to her retreating back. Donna herself could drop in on the weekend to feed the animals. The boy’s mother would probably decide to suffer them on Monday night.
But she didn’t. She didn’t come in on Monday or Tuesday. Then one of the volunteers got word that the whole family, pregnant sister included, had left for Mississippi. Who knew where in Mississippi? And who knew where in the Boston area they had lived? It was the Ladle’s policy not to ask questions. Who knew what third grade in which school was grieving for its lost gerbils?
At the staff meeting Mimi suggested that the gerbils be declared official mascots. Donna proposed finding them a berth elsewhere. She pointed out that deprived women first go weepy over animals and then identify with them; the Ladle would soon drown in self-pity.
This reasoning met silence. That singing grandmother would have agreed with Donna — she’d no doubt sent many a stray cat packing. Donna mentioned the wretched guest who, by carefully leaving wrapped food for the alley rats, had brought the wrath of the church upon their heads.
Mimi leaned forward. “The gerbils are entertaining,” she said calmly, “and maybe we’ll find some off-label use for them,” she added, looking first at Donna and then at Pam, who said, “Let’s give it a try,” and the management of the Ladle passed from Donna to Pam at that moment, as it was supposed to do, as Donna had meant it to do, as she had dreaded its doing since the day she noticed that her period was late.
Donna, swallowing, reminded herself of Pam’s fidelity to the Ladle’s values of nonintervention, uninquisitiveness, and tolerance.
At first the two gerbils seemed indifferent to their good fortune. They just sniffed their toys, rode their wheel, gobbled their pellets of food, chewed on cardboard toilet-paper rolls. Then one weekend Mimi built a platform for the cage, and on Monday she placed it in the middle of the dining room. “Now they are integrated into our community,” O-Kay said. To Donna they looked above the community, little high priests. Sometimes they stood up with their claws on the bars and silently orated, bits of cardboard clinging to their mouths like cigars.
“They speak in tongues,” Miss Valentine claimed. “Français,” she clarified.
The gerbils’ new position in the center of the room tempted guests to feed them. Pam warned that the gerbils would soon refuse their usual food. “They’ll become tyrants.” But some women couldn’t resist spoiling the animals, and on certain days the gerbils’ confused friskiness followed by torpor indicated that they had been treated to booze as well as salad. After a few overfed weeks they grew bored with their wheel. Instead of chewing the cardboard rolls they crawled inside them. “They’re shooting up,” O-Kay said.
By December, a very wet month, almost everybody was sharing lunch with the gerbils. Pam stopped urging restraint, since the animals now turned up their snouts at anything except fresh vegetables. Also, constant rain was making the whole crowd more irritable than ever; best not to notice minor infractions. In front of the church the street ran like a river. The newspapers used the word deluge every day. “The Almighty wants to get rid of talk radio,” Rabbi Steve explained.
The church’s subcommittee on social action, dripping, made a surprise inspection of the facility. The chairwoman, speaking for the committee, suggested that the presence of rodents so near food was unhygienic. Mimi treated the speaker to her level gaze; the chairwoman looked alarmed, as if she sensed that her own coven could be dispatched by a wink of that sapphire eye. Then Mimi lowered her lids and stood like a penitent with the rest of the staff, their hands in hastily donned surgical gloves crossed on their breasts or clasped at their waists, except for Donna’s, whose were splayed on her belly.
One of the volunteers interrupted the tense silence by suggesting coffee. Miss Valentine, talking to herself, appeared with a tray of unopened dinner packets that had just been delivered by a Sabena airline steward on his way home. The site visit turned into a party.
The rains continued. Mushrooms appeared overnight on lawns. O-Kay fed some of them to the gerbils. “Enjoy your sweet life while you can,” she told them. “Because someday soon…”
“Shut your hole,” Miss Valentine said, and she hit O-Kay on the side of the head with her pocketbook. Miss Valentine was immediately barred for twenty-four hours by the staff. A volunteer put her arm around O-Kay. O-Kay ducked under the arm, embraced Pam, and began to shake uncontrollably. Pam suggested that O-Kay lie down. The volunteer burst into tears. Donna suggested that she lie down. The gerbils passed out, but they woke up half an hour later with no apparent ill effects.
Still the rains came. Storefronts gleamed coldly in the brief intervals of pale sunlight. The alley behind the church bubbled with mud, and a black lake formed in front of the stairs leading to the Ladle’s door.
Donna too would soon be awash. Her sac of amniotic fluid was just holding. On the Wednesday of the second week in December she felt a mild wrench. She had a doctor’s appointment that afternoon. Leaving, she recklessly told a little clutch of women that the baby, male, would be theirs to name.
“Oh, Jesus, Donna,” groaned Pam, but her voice was drowned out by suggestions: Achille, Nelson, Steve…
The obstetrician looked pleased during the examination. “Any day,” she said.
Donna returned to the Ladle. The Cuisinart had broken again; maybe she could fix it before the baby came. And O-Kay’s car had sprung some new leaks. She’d speak to O-Kay about spending a night or two in a shelter.
In the alley Donna paused dreamily before the big puddle. The rain had stopped, probably only briefly, just to tease them. The sky was a deepening mauve. The puddle was the color of garnets. Beyond this jeweled lake the three stone steps descended damply to the Ladle’s door, which was slightly ajar, as if by inadvertence. But that heavy door couldn’t have been left ajar accidentally. Donna squinted. A brick made of Legos had been inserted between the door and its jamb. She walked around the puddle to the nearest ground-level window and lowered herself into its well, her sneakered feet sinking into decaying leaves. She peered into the dining room.
O-Kay and Miss Valentine and Mimi sat side by side at one of the long tables. On the back of each chair was draped a coat — O-Kay’s schoolgirl parka; Miss Valentine’s black sateen trench coat, plucked from donations one lucky day; Mimi’s suede garment, the fur hat resting on its shoulder. The cage of gerbils had been removed from the platform and now occupied most of the center of the table.
For a while all three gazed at the cage. Then Mimi lifted its gate. The gerbils ran out. Mimi lowered the gate.
From the window well Donna moaned aloud. The creatures would head right for the pantry. They’d get into the rice or the cornmeal. She’d have to call the exterminator again, and throw out half the dry produce.
But the animals surprised her. They raced not for the kitchen but for the hall leading to the back door. She lost sight of them. She stood up in the well in time to see them leaping over the Lego brick. Pell-mell, with all the willfulness of the crazed, they ran up the cement stairs and into the lake. There they drowned.