As I have detailed in the past, after my father's Golden Retriever, Katie Dog, died at the ripe old age of 17 (I was 4), my mom would not allow me to have a new pet. All the pets that I had between Katie Dog and Rosie Dog were the result of some ingenuity and maneuvering on my part. The last pet I ever had before Rosie was, in face, the result of an outright deception.
Her name was Marty Mouse, and I named her Marty because (A) it is alliterative and (B) I thought she was boy. Basically, I assumed that, being a mouse, (s)he would have really tiny mouse testicles—so tiny that maybe I couldn't even see them properly. A couple of weeks after I got her, I saw someone else's clearly male mouse, and realized my mistake, but kept the name and continued to insist to outsiders that she was actually a he. I was ten years old at the time, and all my stuffed animals were boys. I had no female friends until I was seventeen years old. Fishy and Snaily were both relatively asexual (well, Fishy's gender was impossible to determine, and Snaily was actually a hermaphrodite), so they were both de jure boys. Marty was a mammal, though, and her sex was a lot harder to deny, but I did my best anyway.
Anyway, Marty was a little brown and white mouse that I conned my mom into letting me have. We needed to do an experiment for our 6th Grade science class, and I just told my mom that it needed to be with a mouse, and we needed to take care of the mouse at home. She asked some questions of me, but I skillfully avoided mentioning that the experiment could be with anything, animal or otherwise, and that I had to have a partner, who could also theoretically take care of the pet mouse. My mom finally decided it was okay, as long as I never took Marty out of her cage in the apartment. That was a rule I promptly broke the moment I got her home.
I bought Marty at a Petland Discounts, and I also got her a small terrarium with a mesh top, some bedding, some food, a water dish, and a little hideaway. Of course, I didn't realize that mice are nocturnal, and when Marty started spending all of the daytime asleep in her hideaway, I started shaking her out of his hideaway to get her to play around with me. The poor little thing actually started to get bags under her eyes, eventually. Nonetheless, I loved her with all my heart, and I did my best to take care of her, changing her bedding and cleaning and refilling her water dish. Almost a decade later, I would use that water dish as an ashtray.
The experiment my partner and I did was to see if Marty would run a maze any faster depending on what kind of music was playing at the other end. The music was provided by me, from my extremely limited CD collection, so it consisted of:
- The soundtrack to The Lion King
- The original cast recording of A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum
- Miles Davis — Kind of Blue
- Live — Throwing Copper
- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky — Swan Lake
And that is it. Also, our control was to have her run the maze with no music. This was a terribly designed experiment. I believe we got an A.
After a few months had gone by, my mom suddenly realized that the experiment must have been over by then. She called my science teacher and got him to agree to release Marty upstate, where he had a house. I was upset. I knew that my time with Marty was short—it was pretty lucky that I had gotten to have her at all, let along that long. Still, I knew I would miss her terribly, and I was worried for her safety out there in the wild. In retrospect, at least she was probably able to sleep during the day and express her femininity in ways that I was probably denying her.
Marty was my last pet until Rosie, except for that time I caught a fly in an empty tennis ball can and kept it alive for a day and half. That is how desperate I was for animal companionship. I think, like most animal-obsessed children, humanity (or, at least, the examples of humanity I could find around me) felt alien to me, and I looked for a world in which I could fit. Animals are not judgmental in that way (except for most cats, the bastards), and I so exquisitely felt the need for it that I was willing to lie to get a mouse, just for a few months. A few, glorious months.
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