SQUIRRELS ARE MY FAVORITE

It had taken until I was sixteen for me to hear the other side of the story, the alteram partem, as Mother had put it. Until then it had been inappropriate for her to tell me everything I wanted to know because I was young and because she wanted to protect me from what all Mrs. Ushock knew. And I suspect she wished to believe that my love for her was pure and not provoked by a dreadful curse in the way the Twins’ love was toward their mother, and Peter Rumbaugh’s and Hermann Rumbaugh’s was toward their mothers, and who knows how far back in time the love curse went—maybe all the way back to some dark forest in Germany.

For my mother to tell me that my love for her was partially an artificial love, like a love generated by a genetic disease, or a hypnotic fraud, must have taken a lot of courage. And in realizing just how courageous she was to tell me the truth about her past and mine, I have come to love her all the more. It is not perfection that captures the heart but honesty.

 

But when I was seven I did not know any of this Rumbaugh history and curse, which I now know is my history and curse, too. In hindsight I can comment on those early years—from the moment I saw the stuffed mother until I turned sixteen. I can try to explain them to you in a deeper way than if I revealed them as I lived them, for then I was blinded by so many things that were overpowering me.

For instance, strange things began to happen to me immediately after I tried to mount my rag doll in the hotel bathroom. Right after Mrs. Kelly found it and caused my mother to worry about me, I woke up so odd to myself, so confused by my strange compulsive behavior that the only peace for me was to give in to impulses I could not control.

I was ready to hear Ab and Dolph’s side of the story about their stuffed mother, only it turned out that uncovering the whole story of the Twins’ other side was like journeying into a Black Forest fairy tale that grew more puzzling and disturbing the deeper I ventured into its murky shadows. After I had run up the stairs that Easter Sunday morning, screaming that I had seen Mrs. Rumbaugh and scaring the life out of the Twins, they surely wanted to do everything possible to go to the grave with their secrets. But after those few days away from them, I just as surely wanted their secrets before they went to the grave. I needed to know about their relationship with their mother and why and how they preserved her, and I wanted to know how it was that at seven years old I felt the same urge to preserve my own mother. I wanted them to answer that question, so after school, as I told my mother I would, I returned to the pharmacy.

“I’m back!” I announced, marching through the front door with a determined look on my face. The Twins were standing behind their tall rear counter while bottling pills.

For a frozen moment they stared down at me like two old parsnips, then wordlessly returned to their work.

“I want to go downstairs,” I said forcefully.

“Ab and I agreed that’s off-limits now,” Dolph replied, jerking his thumb toward the basement door, which was further protected with a new hasp and lock. “No more playing in the cottage area. We had a burst pipe that ruined it down there.”

“I don’t want to play in my cottage,” I said. “I want to play in your workshop where you stuff the animals.”

“Why?” Ab asked, quizzing me.

“I want to stuff animals for a hobby,” I replied. “And I want you to teach me everything you know.”

“You’re not old enough,” Ab insisted, crossing his arms over his chest.

“It’s too gruesome for a girl,” Dolph added. “Boys only.”

I pulled over the step stool so I could climb up and look them in the eye. Then I said something that was entirely unrehearsed. Although I didn’t know it, it was the same instinctive threat my mother had used so many years before. “If you don’t let me back down there and teach me what you know, I’ll tell the police what I saw,” I said evenly.

Ab abruptly turned his back on me and said to Dolph with concern in his voice, “Seems to me she favors her mother’s kin.”

“The same threat,” Dolph said, swallowing rapidly.

“Did your mother put you up to this?” Ab suddenly asked as he whirled around toward me like an inquisitor.

“Of course not,” I replied. “It’s my idea. She wouldn’t like it.”

A look of satisfaction settled onto Ab’s face as he turned to Dolph. “Maybe she is more like us,” he said.

“But she’s a girl,” Dolph replied suspiciously.

“It’s the blood,” Ab said wisely. “It’s more genes than gender.”

“Hmm,” Dolph concluded, and nodded his head in agreement. “After all, she came back, and that would be the sign of her affliction.”

“The curse,” Ab said, proudly looking up at the photograph of his mother. “She comes by it honestly.”

Apparently, after I had seen their mother that Easter morning, they had debated whether I would return. The curse had always shown up in the men, and although they knew I was part Rumbaugh, they were not sure how much I would follow their family path, or my mother’s. But I surprised them with just how much Rumbaugh blood had infected me.

“I need to know how to preserve things,” I said.

“We’ll help with animals but nothing beyond that,” Dolph replied, turning toward me.

“And you’ll need a specimen,” Ab added.

“I brought one.” I had a brown grocery bag and pulled out my misshapen rag doll, which I’d saved from the trash.

“That’s a toy,” Ab said, carefully taking it from me and flipping it all about as if examining a newborn. “You need a real specimen.”

“Can you get me one?” I asked.

“That can be arranged,” Ab said. Then he stuck out his hand to shake, as did Dolph.

“It’s a deal,” I agreed, and placed my small hand between theirs as if it were a key that perfectly fit between the teeth of a lock.

It was from that moment on the Twins were convinced that the hereditary Rumbaugh curse was in my blood and that preserving my mother was not some perverse child’s game or an idea thrust upon me from a horror film. They began to groom me to stay forever true to the Rumbaugh legacy, and my apprenticeship as a junior taxidermist began.

Each day after school they gave me a lesson. We started mall.

Squirrels were easy to manage. I learned to slice the fur from the flesh without nicking their delicate features. The Twins showed me where to make the key incisions along the underside of the body, from the tail up to the chin, and how to branch off from this central divide and slice down the arms and legs. They trained me how to slowly tug the skin with one hand while simultaneously slicing away the underlying adhesive membrane with the other, as if removing the peel from a grape. After the skin was slowly detached, they taught me how to bathe and preserve it in a solution of alum and salt. The flesh and eyes were removed with a variety of sharp, curved knives while the bones, tendons, and claws were kept for strength and shape. Once that step was complete and after the skeleton had fully dried, they instructed me how to gently return the pliable skin back over the skull and then partially sew up the body with neat, small glove stitches. As the body took shape, they showed me how to use a forceps to stuff the squirrel with nonshrinking sculptor’s clay and cotton batting in order to give it shape, and because the clay didn’t dry right away after I had fully stuffed and sutured the squirrel back up, I could pat and pinch and squeeze the skin in order to position the clay and cotton so that all the muscles were in the correct proportions. The eyes were ordered from a taxidermy supply house, as were extra teeth, and they were all glued in.

Each day I worked on my squirrel bodies. When I finished one, Ab or Dolph would go over it with me and point out what I did right or wrong and how I could remedy the problems. And if I messed up too badly, then one of the Twins would take the .22 squirrel rifle out to the edge of town and I’d have a fresh specimen the next day.

When Mother arrived from work on the bus I’d show her my projects, and she would awkwardly smile down on me, and Ab and Dolph would proudly tell her that I was a natural at the art. They’d make a big fuss over me, and they were smart enough to make a fuss over her, too. They’d get her a black marble mortar bowl of ice cream and a cold bottle of Coke and give her all the makeup samples they had received and anything else she wanted—all for free. They wanted to keep me firmly under their control, but at the same time they didn’t want Mother to feel left out. They even gave her driving lessons and encouraged her to use their Mercedes. Of course, the more she used the car, the more time I spent with the Twins.

Within six months I had progressed so well that I wanted to mount my squirrels. At first I did the typical poses. Squirrel on a stump with a prized acorn in hand. Spooked squirrel on the side of a tree limb with its head cocked toward some danger. Squirrel in a tree hole with its cute little head sticking out. But after a while I lost interest. Preserving them was all about technique and making them look authentic. If I wanted to see a squirrel, I could just step outside and see them in the trees, so there was no imagination involved.

“I’m bored stiff,” I said to Ab.

“What do you have in mind?” he replied.

“I’m not quite sure,” I said, “but I’ll give it some thought.”

“You better hurry,” he advised. “We have a taxidermy show and contest over in York next month, and I think it’s time you enter the junior category.”

That night over dinner I asked Mom what I should do.

“They used to take me to those contests,” she recalled hesitantly.

“So, what did you see?” I asked eagerly.

“Well, the examples I remember best always seem to tell a story,” she said. “A fish that just looks like a fish is pretty dull. That’s why the good taxidermists show a fish struggling to be caught—you can imagine the moment. Or they show a bird feeding its young. Or butterflies swirling around an orchid. In other words, they breathe a little life into the scene. And in a way you end up caring about it and kind of get away from being creeped out that you are staring at something that was once alive.”

Tell a story. Breathe some life into it. That gave me some ideas.

The next day I began to work out a plan. I had a squirrel Cinderella scrubbing the floor with her very own tears under the caption CINDERELLA WEEPS FOR HER MOTHER. In a few days I had fixed the position of the squirrel, but I needed the Twins to help me with the other details.

In a month we were ready. Cinderella was kneeling on the floor wearing an old gray smock, dirty apron, and gingham mobcap. They had helped me sew the clothes. She had a scrub brush in one hand that we made out of the painted head of a child’s toothbrush. Dried Super Glue tears were dripping from her eyes, and a puddle gathered below. I could really feel her broken heart as she missed her mother. We constructed a little wooden bucket out of split twigs, and I painted the backdrop with a fireplace, because she got her name from cleaning up fireplace cinders. I wanted to be accurate.

Ab and Dolph helped me set it into a glass case, and they painted the title in gold script just as they did for their other displays.

For their entry they had produced the classic twin scene of Narcissus falling in love with his reflection. They used a black snake coiled up and entranced with himself as he stared down into a watery blue mirror.

I had kept the Cinderella project a secret from my mother until just before the contest. When I unveiled my display she praised it, but when the Twins left the room she took me aside.

“I don’t want to discourage you,” she said carefully, and smoothed my hair with her hand as if soothing me. “But I don’t want you to get carried away with all this morbid taxidermy.”

“Are you worried that I did a lost mother scene?” I asked.

“Yes,” she frankly replied. “I’m just thinking of how upset you got at school not so long ago.”

“Please don’t worry,” I said. “Ever since I’ve started this I’ve felt so much better. I’m really happy.”

“Okay,” she said.

But she wasn’t okay.

Looking back on this time, I can see how hard it must have been for her. On the one hand, if I stayed away from the Twins I just got myself worked up at school and had terrible anxiety thinking that something horrid was going to happen to her. On the other hand, when I was with the Twins she began to see that my interest in taxidermy and my devotional love for her were somehow tied to the Rumbaugh curse. She wanted me to remain happy, so she let me work with them, but she continuously kept a watchful eye on me. She knew she was walking a fine line; still, she felt confident that while I was young her influence over me was greater than theirs. I’m not trying to second-guess her, because I would have done the same if I were in her shoes.

At the York taxidermy show, the Twins and I received honorable mentions in the general competition and runner-up red ribbons in the Animal Animation category. When we returned to the pharmacy, they displayed my Cinderella diorama on the top of one of the shelves. And anytime a customer came in, they’d quickly point it out and make a big fuss over me. “She’s the best of the bunch of us” was what they would say.

I was so proud, and my success encouraged me.

All of my following subjects had something to do with a missing mother. I did a medley, from a kitten Snow White under glass with an acid green crab apple in her mouth to a Little Mermaid scene where Ariel searches for her dead mother, to Bambi’s mother being shot by the hunter. I didn’t always have the right animals—for instance, I didn’t have a real mermaid, so I lacquered a sea horse, glued on the hair, and painted the face and tail. It looked a little odd but the idea was good. I used a rabbit for Bambi’s mom and just trimmed the ears back with scissors so she appeared more like a deer.

The Twins also enjoyed taking twin scenes from literature. They did THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER, which they illustrated with baby pigs, and DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, using a fox cub for the gentleman doctor and a raging wild boar for his alter ego. They did a great Tweedledum and Tweedledee out of penguins, which they had shipped up in dry ice from southern Chile, and a creepy scene out of raccoons where Louis XIV visits his twin brother in the Bastille from The Man in the Iron Mask. I thought they were brilliant, and they won gold ribbons wherever they were displayed.

As I improved I won medals as well. I did Nancy Drew and Little Orphan Annie and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. It seemed there was no end to finding kids with dead mothers or missing mothers in literature. And the more I realized that so many young girls were without their mothers, the more I clung to mine.

And she clung to me. Each night, as soon as she arrived at the pharmacy, I put down my taxidermy project and thought of nothing else but her. We’d leave the Twins behind and go over to the Kelly Hotel and enter our own world, where she had set our own family rules.

“Rule number one,” she had insisted. “No taxidermy talk and no dead mother talk. That kind of talk is just double trouble. I want a normal life here. Girl talk. Mother-daughter talk. This is the fun side of the street. And that,” she said, pointing directly out our window at the pharmacy, “is the funky side of the street.”

It never mattered what she said, I always agreed with her entirely, and so we had fun. We went to movies. We bowled. We had manicures. We went shopping. We went to the park and played. We went out for cheap dinners. It was just us, and when we were alone her influence over me was magnetic and I stayed by her side and all was right with the world.

I didn’t mind not talking about taxidermy, and my worries over her death subsided because we were so alive then, cooking and getting dressed up and taking photographs of each other and talking and playing music and singing into a tape recorder and dancing and squealing like girls and in bed we would lie side by side and I would read a chapter that she would tape and the next night she would read a chapter and I would tape it. Of course, in some way, I knew I was taping her voice for a special reason, but the fun of doing so concealed the stealthy motive for doing it.

And she made sure I did a lot of things any normal kid would do—I went to dozens of birthday parties, had plenty of sleepovers, participated in just about every church event, from bazaars and charity banquets to community service and Bible camp. I started and quit piano lessons, violin lessons, flute lessons, gymnastics, and tap and ballet. We didn’t bother with sports, and because of my taxidermy interest we avoided getting a dog or cat or fish or even a hermit crab for a pet. My mother was pretty sure it would just end up as a specimen.

As I grew older I did not rebel against her. Instead, I rebelled against my own nature. I resented growing up. After a while I couldn’t jump into her arms or sleep curled up like a little moon-faced cameo around her belly, or stand on her feet and clutch her legs as we danced across the kitchen. My shoes got longer. Clothes would fit, and then before I knew it they would bind up around my shoulders and hips until I was no longer loose inside them. I was a long-limbed snake constantly molting from one outfit to another, and I didn’t like it. I wanted to remain her little girl, her sparkling pinkie ring, her shiny plastic toy.

Without knowing how or why, I felt my Rumbaugh curse was going to be the death of my mother despite my desire to keep her alive. When I asked myself why I felt this way, or thought this way, I didn’t have a sensible answer. I just did. It was a mark upon me.

So the question is, was my fear of her death caused by nature or nurture? Was it in my Rumbaugh genes, as Mom told me later, or was it only as I thought at the time—that I was a young girl who loved her mother and feared her death? No girl wants her mother to die, so fearing her loss doesn’t seem excessive. Plus, my sadness from indulging in thoughts of her death while I worked on the taxidermy was gloriously contrasted by how overjoyed I was when she came home from work and I threw myself into her arms. It was as though, each day, she was resurrected to save just me, and this was very pleasurable.

But lurking behind this ticking clock of fear and joy was the unspoken dread that someday she was not going to come home and I would have to do what the Twins did. I couldn’t predict the future. All I could predict was that the future would arrive and I would have to be prepared.