Guinea Pigs

As a child, my oldest sister kept a cage of guinea pigs in the garage, and she’d made a deal with the produce manager at the Lucky down the street—well not really a deal; he just gave her all the expired lettuce, which she fed to them.

On weekends, she took them out of their cage and let them run around on the lawn, enlisting me, my brother, and my sister to help pen them in and stop them from hopping away. We got to hold and pet them as a reward.

They made little weet-weet noises such that my other sister named one Weetress—she, it seemed, could tell them apart. Their cage was lined with old newspapers and smelled of it. That, and the smell of wilted Iceberg lettuce, always brings them to mind.

My dad had no part in any of it, as was his custom with all our doings. He would only mention them when some small part of their care and maintenance inconvenienced him: Those damn guinea pigs, he’d say as he lowered a bag of feed pellets into the shopping cart. Worthless beasts, he’d say, lifting the bag from the trunk of the car. He’d always been this way, it seemed, even before our mother died.

When she got older, my sister graduated from guinea pigs to horses, working as a groom at the county racetrack in exchange for the work experience. She went on to vet school, became a large-animal vet, and eventually owned a ranch house with a ten-acre field for the dozen or so horses she kept, plus a few dogs.

Our dad retired, but he’d planned for it poorly, and when he ran out of money, my sister let him move into her spare room, where he lived for a couple of decades until he died.

Whenever I’d visit, I’d join her on her rounds, watch her service her clients’ horses, take in that whole life so different from mine. Once, I watched her make a tricky diagnosis, and as she explained the problem to her client, it became clear to me how skilled she was at her work, and I felt an unfamiliar feeling—one that was never spoken of, and rarely felt, in my family: pride.

In the evening, when we’d return to her house, Dad would be on the couch, watching TV. As we hung up coats and kicked off shoes, he’d start in with his usual litany of complaints—about the heat, the Democrats, how few good TV shows there were.

“Doesn’t that drive you crazy?” I whispered to her once, nodding toward the living room, toward what had become of our father.

She stared at me. “Oh, that?” she said, suddenly understanding, “I don’t even hear it anymore.”

END