The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [141]
She thought back to the first time she had genuinely realized that she herself would someday die. It seemed incomprehensible in retrospect. She had known since childhood that everyone died sooner or later, but until not too many years ago this knowledge had held no personal meaning for her. Death was always something that happened to other people. Occasional family deaths—her grandparents, an uncle, a friend of her father’s—had left her untouched. And then one spring morning a donkey walked across her grave, and the shivers stayed with her for a full week.
She had been married then. Married to Alan, and although she could not recall the year she knew it must have been late in their brief marriage because they would not otherwise have bought the gerbils. Neither of them had quite voiced the thought, but they had bought the little rodents to hold their marriage together. It was starting to come unglued, starting to reveal itself as having been a gross error from the beginning, but had not yet reached the point where they could face the fact that there was nothing there worth saving. It had seemed a little extreme to have a child to save the marriage. Gerbils, allegedly silent and odorless and able to thrive on an occasional handful of sunflower seeds, seemed a more moderate and equally feasible solution.
They had purchased a male and female gerbil, and the gerbils had done what she and Alan had virtually ceased to do, and had done so without benefit of birth control. The female gerbil grew fatter than seemed possible ultimately producing a litter of five hairless and blind little creatures. The thrill of the birth had quite overwhelmed Linda, and for the next few days it seemed to her that she and Alan truly loved each other.
Then one day the mother gerbil died. They never learned how or why. The babies were about a week old; two had their eyes open already. They were a week old, and their mother was dead, and Alan ran around to veterinarians trying to get a formula for a gerbil milk substitute, then tried pet shops in the hope that a gerbil mother who had lost her young might be enlisted to wet-nurse the little things. In the end they warmed Similac to body temperature and tried to feed it to the babies with a tiny eyedropper from a child’s nurse kit. One by one the baby gerbils went cold and stiff. The first one died six hours after they found the mother dead. The fifth and last died around dawn the next day.
She and Alan had an apartment. There was no yard, so she took the little corpses to Central Park and buried them, digging tiny graves with a soup spoon. She wept over their graves as she had never wept in her life.
The next day Alan wanted to buy another female gerbil. “Oh, no,” she cried. “Never.”
“But Eddie will be lonely now,” Alan had said. They’d named the gerbils Eddie and Wallie, for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. “The poor old guy can’t just sit alone for the rest of his life.”
And then it hit her—the realization that everything died, that everyone died, that she would die. It was a realization that had to come to everyone sooner or later, and that everyone got over, as she in time got over it herself. But from that moment on her marriage was finished. It would have been finished anyway, would have ended even if they had been up to their necks in thriving hopping odorless gerbils, but that was the point where she herself knew that she had to leave him. She did not do so at once. She waited for quite awhile, but waited with no hope whatsoever.
Eddie remained with Alan when she left. She wondered what had become of him. He had almost certainly died by now, she thought. Gerbils didn’t live very long.
She went out for a sandwich and a cup of coffee, picked up a magazine, and was back at the desk by seven. A few minutes before eight a voice spoke her name. She looked up from her magazine at Karen Markarian.
“I hope I’m not bugging you,” Karen said. “I was in town with nothing to do and I thought maybe