MARCELLE CHAGNON: If she’d stop the damned things from breeding, the whole problem would be solved. At least it would not bother me anymore, which is important. The only way to get her to stop breeding them, without bringing the Corporation or the health board or the S.P.C.A. or any other outsiders into it, is to go in there and separate the males from the females ourselves, and when she comes back from town, say to her, okay, Flora, this is a compromise. Sometimes people don’t understand what a compromise is until you force it on them. It’s either that or we sit around waiting for this thing to explode, and then it’ll be too late to compromise, because the outsiders will be in charge.
MERLE RING: Let Flora continue to keep the animals warm, well-fed, clean and breeding. Naturally, as their numbers increase, their universe will expand. And as a result, all the people in the trailerpark, insofar as they observe this phenomenon, will find their universe expanding also. (It’s understood that Merle did not express himself this way, for he would have been expressing himself to people who would have been offended by language like that. Here’s how he put it: “It should be interesting to see what the woman does with her problem — if it ever actually becomes a problem. And if it never becomes a problem, that should be interesting too.”)
Flora’s life up to now ought to have prepared her for what eventually happened with the guinea pigs. It had been a hard life, beginning when Flora was barely a year old with the death of her mother. Her father was what often in these parts is called a rough carpenter, meaning that he could use a hammer and saw well enough to work as a helper for a bona fide carpenter during the summer months. Usually he was the one who nailed together the plywood forms for making cellar walls and then, when the cement had set, tore the forms apart again. During the fall and winter months, when it was too cold for cement to pour, the bona fide carpenters moved to interior work, which required a certain skill and a basic fluency with numbers, and Flora’s father was always among the first to be laid off, so that he would have to collect unemployment until spring.
There were three older children, older by one, two and three years, and after the mother died, the children more or less took care of themselves. They lived out beyond Shack-ford Corners in a dilapidated house that appeared to be falling into its own cellar hole, an unpainted, leaky, abandoned house heated in winter by a kerosene stove, with no running water and only rudimentary wiring. The father’s way of raising his children was to stay drunk when he was not working, to beat them if they cried or intruded on his particular misery, and when he was working, to leave them to their own devices, which were not especially healthful devices. When Flora’s older brother was six and she was three, while playing with blasting caps he had found near the lumber camp a half-mile behind the house in the woods, he blew one of his arms off and almost died. When Flora’s only sister was eleven, she was raped by an uncle visiting from Saskatchewan and after that could only gaze blankly around you when you tried to talk to her or get her to talk to you. Flora’s other brother, when he was fourteen and she thirteen, sickened and died of what was determined by the local health authorities to have been malnutrition, at which point the remaining three children were taken away from the father and placed into the care of the state, which meant, at that time, the New Hampshire State Hospital over in Concord, where they had a wing for juveniles who could not be placed in foster homes or who were drug addicts or had committed crimes of violence but were too young to be tried as adults. Four years later, Flora was allowed to leave the mental hospital (for that is what it was) on the condition that she join the United States Air Force, where she spent the next twenty years working in the main as a maid, or steward, in officers’ clubs and quarters at various bases around the country. She was not badly treated by the Air Force itself, but numerous individual servicemen, enlisted men as well as officers, treated her unspeakably.
Despite her life, Flora remained good-naturedly ambitious for her spirit. She believed in self-improvement, believed that it was possible, and that not to seek it, not to strive for it, was reprehensible, was in fact a sin. And sinners she viewed the way most people view the stupid or the poor — as if their stupidity or poverty were their own fault, the direct result of sheer laziness and a calculated desire to exploit the rest of humankind, who, of course, are intelligent or well-off as a direct result of their willingness to work and not ask for help from others. This might not seem a particularly enlightened way to view sinners, and it certainly was not a Christian way to view sinners, but it did preserve a kind of chastity for Flora. It also, of course, made it difficult for her to learn much, in moral terms, from the behavior of others. There was probably a wisdom in that, however, a trade-off that made it possible for her to survive into something like middle age without having fallen into madness and despair.
Within a week of having moved into the trailerpark, Flora had purchased her first pair of guinea pigs. She bought them for fifteen dollars at the pet counter of the five-and-dime in town. She had gone into the store looking for goldfish, but when she saw the pair of scrawny, matted animals in their tiny, filthy cages at the back of the store, she had forgotten the goldfish, which looked relatively healthy anyhow, despite the cloudiness of the water in their tank. She built her cages herself, mostly from castoff boards and chicken wire she found at the town dump and carried home. The skills required were not great, were, in fact, about the same as had been required of her father in the construction of cement forms. At the dump she also found the pieces of garden hose she needed to make her watering system and the old gutters she hooked up as grain troughs.
Day and night she worked for her guinea pigs, walking to town and hauling back fifty-pound bags of grain, dragging back from the dump more old boards, sheets of tin, gutters, and so on. As the guinea pigs multiplied and more cages became necessary, Flora soon found herself working long hours into the night alone in her trailer, feeding, watering and cleaning the animals, while out behind the trailer the pyramid of mixed straw, feces, urine and grain gradually rose to waist height, then to shoulder height, finally reaching to head height, when she had to start a second pyramid, and then, a few months later, a third. And as the space requirements of the guinea pigs increased, her own living space decreased, until finally she was sleeping on a cot in a corner of the back bedroom, eating standing up at the kitchen sink, stashing her clothing and personal belongings under her cot so that all the remaining space could be devoted to the care, housing and feeding of the guinea pigs.
By the start of her third summer at the trailerpark, she had begun to lose weight noticeably, and her usually pinkish skin had taken on a gray pallor. Never particularly fastidious anyhow, her personal hygiene now could be said not to exist at all, and the odor she bore with her was the same odor given off by the guinea pigs, so that, in time, to call Flora Pease the Guinea Pig Lady (as did the people in town, having learned at last of the secret — through several sources: it’s a small town, Catamount, and one sentence by one person can be placed alongside another sentence by another person, and before long you will have the entire story) was not to misrepresent her. Her eyes grew dull, as if the light behind them was slowly going out, and her hair was tangled and stiff with dirt, and her clothing seemed increasingly to be hidden behind stains, smears, spills, drips and dust.
“Here comes the Guinea Pig Lady!” You’d hear the call from outside where the loafers leaned against the glass front of Briggs’ News & Variety, and a tall, angular teen-ager with shoulder-length hair and acne, wearing torn jeans and a Mothers of Invention tee shirt, would stick his long head inside and call out your name, “C’mere, take a look at this, will ya!”