The delivery man rang the bell on my sixth birthday. The doorbell’s song was “Happy Trails,” as if you were leaving. This was 1967 and deliveries were only for flowers and sides of beef. In the box was a rat, with a birthday wish on a small card from my uncle who lived three hours away in Seattle. My mother was delighted, and I could tell she’d known already it was coming. She loved all animals, and her brother more than anyone except me. It was so glamorous to have an animal delivered! At six I couldn’t quite put together how it was done. I imagined the rat rode from Seattle in the brown delivery truck, the driver stopping to eye-drop it water occasionally.
We let all the tan wrapping fall to the floor and my mother held the cube cage by its hook on top. Four sides and the top were open-grid dull silver metal, twirling from the hook, and the bottom was a sheet of aluminum that slid out for cleaning. The excited rat ran from side to side, rocking the cage. There was a small door on the side. My mother set the cage on the vinyl placemat in the middle of the dining room table, a room we used twice a year for two holidays when I had to entertain the cousins from Montana I didn’t like. The bottom of the cage was carpeted in shavings. One side had a water bottle clamped to it, nozzled down, and angled in for Norman to drink. I named him Norman right away, because of a rat named Norman in a book I loved. This was before I had developed any creative thoughts of my own.
My father would be home for dinner as usual. He would go bananas over having a rodent in the house. There was nothing he hated more than rodents. All kinds. He’d made that clear over my small amount of years. We already had a cat, which was pushing his limits. He’d grown up with dogs.
And now I owned a rat. I had to admit I wasn’t fond of the rat’s tail, even though I liked the rest of it. But my dad. He was going to walk in and blow his stack, which was an expression I’d heard him use about his boss. And my dad seldom got angry. Only at the mower, or my mother when she drank. Mostly he played Monopoly with me, where I was still learning the skills to be the banker. On Sunday nights we watched My Favorite Martian. He had just quit smoking, “cold turkey” he called it, but I never saw him eat any meat to compensate.
He had allowed me the cat, which was all black. My mother had arranged for me to get it on Halloween at the neighbor’s house. She named it before I could, Blackat, “Black-cat said fast,” she told us. Black-it. I liked the name and wished I was that creative. My mother had trained Blackat to jump up on her shoulder when she stood very still. She wanted me to let Blackat do it too, but I was afraid. Blackat always wanted to ride in the car, not a thing cats normally like, and he sat up on the deep back shelf of the Chevy posing like the fake cats you could put there, with eyes that lit up red when you braked. My father did not like cats, and Blackat did not like him or his heavy footfall, so it worked out.
Now it was Norman, the rat.
And now I owned a rat. I had to admit I wasn’t fond of the rat’s tail, even though I liked the rest of it.
My father did have a conniption fit when he walked in and saw the cage on the dining room table. I had learned this phrase from my grandma, who used it when she spoke of her other daughter-in-law. My father knew this scheme was a concoction between my mother and her brother, just like her driving a VW Beetle when my father said she needed a station wagon. He was planning on more children, but they slept in twin beds.
Over dinner, he announced, “You can keep him as long as I never see him out of the cage.” Such relief. I could keep him! I saw the pained look on his face.
I loved Norman and my mother let me have him out of the cage while my father was at work. I petted him and chased him around the kitchen. Blackat had to be outside when this went on, although he wasn’t interested in the cage or what was in it anyway, even though he was supposed to chase and eat rodents.
One morning my father walked into the kitchen and Norman was out on the counter. I heard the screaming and yelling as I was getting dressed for school. My mother had ruined it!
Sure enough, I was ordered to get rid of him. “Bargains are bargains, young lady,” he said. Tearfully, I gave Norman to my playground boyfriend, Johnny. We had kissed once, in his front yard, and his mom had been watching and told my mother. It was barely, but they acted like the event should go on the nightly news. We said we were going to get married, but wait a long time, till we were twenty-two.
He took the rat. His parents liked Norman, but Johnny renamed it Stuart, because of the book Stuart Little, which yes, I loved, but this name change didn’t seem to improve the creativity of the name, so why do it? I was allowed to visit Stuart on Saturdays.
We got a dog after that, from my dad’s friend Tom, who picked up strays and made an effort to find the owners. This one’s owner couldn’t be found. It was a beagle named Betsy, her tag said, not my dumb name. She was blind in one eye. I loved Betsy. She watched TV with me, and posed like a big doorstop in front of the set. I loved her until she got run over by a moving van. That was the only time I saw my mom cry. And that just left the cat.
Martha Clarkson’s writing can be found in The Seattle Times, Clackamas Literary Review, Seattle Review, Portland Review, The Sun magazine, Mothering magazine, Feminine Rising, Quarter Past Eight, and Nimrod. She is the winner of the Anderbo Fiction Prize for the story “Her Voices, Her Room,” which has been produced as a podcast by PenDust Radio. She has two notable short stories in Best American Short Stories. Martha was a former poetry editor for Word Riot. Find her at: www.marthaclarkson.com
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