The Glass Castle (20 page)

About a week after Mom and Dad left, we kids were all sitting in Erma's living room watching TV. Stanley was sleeping in the foyer. Erma, who'd been drinking since before breakfast, told Brian that his britches needed mending. He started to take them off, but Erma said she didn't want him running around the house in his skivvies or with a towel wrapped around him looking like he was wearing a goddamn dress. It would be easier for her to mend the britches while he was still wearing them. She ordered him to follow her into Grandpa's bedroom, where she kept her sewing kit.

They'd been gone for a minute or two when I heard Brian weakly protesting. I went into Grandpa's bedroom and saw Erma kneeling on the floor in front of Brian, grabbing at the crotch of his pants, squeezing and kneading while mumbling to herself and telling Brian to hold still, goddammit. Brian, his cheeks wet with tears, was holding his hands protectively between his legs.

"Erma, you leave him alone!" I shouted.

Erma, still on her knees, twisted around and glared at me. "Why, you little bitch!" she said.

Lori heard the commotion and came running. I told Lori that Erma was touching Brian in a way she ought not to be. Erma said she was merely mending Brian's inseam and that she shouldn't have to defend herself against some lying little whore's accusations.

"I know what I saw," I said. "She's a pervert!"

Erma reached over to slap me, but Lori caught her hand. "Let's all calm down," Lori said in the same voice she used when Mom and Dad got carried away, arguing. "Everybody. Calm down."

Erma jerked her hand out of Lori's grasp and slapped her so hard that Lori's glasses went flying across the room. Lori, who had turned thirteen, slapped her back. Erma hit Lori again, and this time Lori struck Erma a blow in the jaw. Then they flew at each other, tussling and flailing and pulling hair, locked together, with Brian and me cheering on Lori until we woke up Uncle Stanley, who staggered into the room and pushed them apart.

Erma relegated us to the basement after that. A door in the basement led directly outside, so we never went upstairs. We weren't even allowed to use Erma's bathroom, which meant we either had to wait for school or go outside after dark. Uncle Stanley sometimes sneaked down beans he'd boiled for us, but he was afraid if he stayed talking, Erma would think he'd taken our side and get mad at him, too.

The following week, a storm hit. The temperature dropped, and a foot of snow fell on Welch. Erma wouldn't let us use any coalshe said we didn't know how to operate the stove and would burn the house downand it was so cold in the basement that Lori, Brian, Maureen, and I were glad we all shared one bed. As soon as we got home from school, we'd climb under the covers with our clothes on and do our homework there.

We were in bed the night Mom and Dad came back. We didn't hear the sound of the car pulling up. All we heard was the front door opening upstairs, then Mom and Dad's voices and Erma beginning the long narrative of her grievances against us. That was followed by the sound of Dad stomping down the stairs into the basement, furious at all of us, me for back-talking Erma and making wild accusations, and Lori even more for daring to strike her own grandmother, and Brian for being such a pussy and starting the whole thing. I thought Dad would come around to our side once he'd heard what had happened, and I tried to explain.

"I don't care what happened!" he yelled.

"But we were just protecting ourselves," I said.

"Brian's a man, he can take it," he said. "I don't want to hear another word of this. Do you hear me?" He was shaking his head, but wildly, almost as if he thought he could keep out the sound of my voice. He wouldn't even look at me.

After Dad had gone back upstairs to tie into Erma's hooch and we kids were all in bed, Brian bit my toe to try to make me laugh, but I kicked him away. We all lay there in the silent darkness.

"Dad was really weird," I said, because someone had to say it.

"You'd be weird, too, if Erma was your mom," Lori said.

"Do you think she ever did something to Dad like what she did to Brian?" I asked.

No one said a thing.

It was gross and creepy to think about, but it would explain a lot. Why Dad left home as soon as he could. Why he drank so much and why he got so angry. Why he never wanted to visit Welch when we were younger. Why he at first refused to come to West Virginia with us and only at the last possible moment overcame his reluctance and jumped into the car. Why he was shaking his head so hard, almost like he wanted to put his hands over his ears, when I tried to explain what Erma had been doing to Brian.

"Don't think about things like that," Lori told me. "It'll make you crazy."

And so I put it out of my mind.

MOM AND DAD TOLD
us how they'd made it to Phoenix only to find that Mom's laundry-on-the-clothesline ploy hadn't kept out intruders. Our house on North Third Street had been looted. Pretty much everything was gone, including, of course, our bikes. Mom and Dad had rented a trailer to carry back what little was leftMom said those foolish thieves had overlooked some good stuff, such as a pair of Grandma Smith's riding breeches from the thirties that were of the highest qualitybut the Oldsmobile's engine had seized up in Nashville, and they'd had to abandon it along with the trailer and Grandma Smith's riding breeches and take the bus the rest of the way to Welch.

I thought that once Mom and Dad returned, they'd be able to make peace with Erma. But she said she could never forgive us kids and didn't want us in her house any longer, even if we stayed in the basement and kept as quiet as church mice. We were banished. That was the word Dad used. "You did wrong," he said, "and now we've all been banished."

"This isn't exactly the Garden of Eden," Lori said.

I was more upset about the bike than I was about Erma banishing us. "Why don't we just move back to Phoenix?" I asked Mom.

"We've already been there," she said. "And there are all sorts of opportunities here that we don't even know about."

She and Dad set out to find us a new place to live. The cheapest rental in Welch was an apartment over a diner on McDowell Street that cost seventy-five dollars a month, which was out of our price range. Also, Mom and Dad wanted outdoor space we could call our own, so they decided to buy. Since we had no money for a down payment and no steady income, our options were pretty limited, but within a couple of days, Mom and Dad told us they had found a house we could afford. "It's not exactly palatial, so there's going to be a lot of togetherness," Mom said. "And it's on the rustic side."

"How rustic?" Lori asked.

Mom paused. I could see her debating how to phrase her answer. "It doesn't have indoor plumbing," she said.

* * *

Dad was still looking for a car to replace the Oldsour budget was in the high two figuresso that weekend we all hiked over for our first look at the new place. We walked down the valley through the center of town and around a mountainside, past the small, tidy brick houses put up after the mines were unionized. We crossed a creek that fed into the Tug River and started up a barely paved one-lane road called Little Hobart Street. It climbed through several switchbacks and, for a stretch, rose at an angle so steep you had to walk on your toes; if you tried walking flatfooted, you stretched your calves till they hurt.

The houses up here were shabbier than the brick houses lower down in the valley. They were made of wood, with lopsided porches, sagging roofs, rusted-out gutters, and balding tar paper or asphalt shingles slowly but surely parting from the underwall. In almost every yard, a mutt or two was chained to a tree or to a clothesline post, and they barked furiously as we walked by. Like most houses in Welch, these were heated by coal. The more prosperous families had coal sheds; the poorer ones left their coal in a pile out front. The porches were every bit as furnished as the insides of most houses, with rust-stained refrigerators, folding card tables, hook rugs, couches or car seats for serious porch-sitting, and maybe a battered armoire with a hole cut in the side so the cat would have a cozy place to sleep.

We followed the road almost to the end, where Dad pointed up at our new house.

"Well, kids, welcome to Ninety-three Little Hobart Street!" Mom said. "Welcome to home sweet home."

We all stared. The house was a dinky thing perched high up off the road on a hillside so steep that only the back of the house rested on the ground. The front, including a drooping porch, jutted precariously into the air, supported by tall, spindly cinder-block pillars. It had been painted white a long time ago, but the paint, where it hadn't peeled off altogether, had turned a dismal gray.

"It's good we raised you young 'uns to be tough," Dad said. "Because this is not a house for the faint of heart."

Dad led us up the lower steps, which were made of rocks slapped together with cement. Because of settling and erosion and downright slipshod construction, they tilted dangerously toward the street. Where the stone steps ended, a rickety set of stairs made from two-by-foursmore like a ladder than a staircasetook you up to the front porch.

Inside were three rooms, each about ten feet by ten feet, facing onto the front porch. The house had no bathroom, but underneath it, behind one of the cinder-block pillars, was a closet-sized room with a toilet on a cement floor. The toilet wasn't hooked up to any sewer or septic system. It just sat atop a hole about six feet deep. There was no running water indoors. A water spigot rose a few inches above the ground near the toilet, so you could get a bucket and tote water upstairs. While the house was wired for electricity, Dad confessed that we could not at the moment afford to have it turned on.

On the upside, Dad said, the house had cost only a thousand dollars, and the owner had waived the down payment. We were supposed to pay him fifty dollars a month. If we could make the payments on time, we'd own the place outright in under two years.

"Hard to believe that one day this will all be ours," said Lori. She was developing what Mom called a bit of a sarcastic streak.

"Count your blessings," Mom said. "There are people in Ethiopia who would kill for a place like this." She pointed out that the house did have some attractive features. For example, in the living room was a cast-iron potbellied coal stove for heating and cooking. It was big and handsome, with heavy bear-claw feet, and she was certain it was valuable, if you took it to a place where people appreciated antiques. But since the house had no chimney, the stovepipe vented out a back window. Someone had replaced the glass in the upper part of the window with plywood, and wrapped tinfoil around the opening to keep the coal smoke from leaking into the room. The tinfoil had not done its job too well, and the ceiling was black with soot. Someoneprobably the same someonehad also made the mistake of trying to clean the ceiling in a few spots, but had ended up only smudging and smearing the soot, creating whitish patches that made you realize how black the rest of the ceiling was.

"The house itself isn't much," Dad apologized. "but we won't be living in it long." The important thing, the reason he and Mom had decided to acquire this particular piece of property, was that it came with plenty of land to build our new house. He planned to get to work on it right away. He intended to follow the blueprints for the Glass Castle, but he had to do some serious reconfiguring and increase the size of the solar cells to take into account that since we were on the north face of the mountain, and enclosed by hills on both sides, we'd hardly ever get any sun.

* * *

We moved in that afternoon. Not that there was much to move. Dad borrowed a pickup from the appliance store where Uncle Stanley worked, and brought back a sofa bed that a friend of Grandpa's was throwing out. Dad also scavenged a couple of tables and chairs, and he built some makeshift closetswhich were actually kind of niftyby hanging lengths of pipe from the ceiling with wires.

Mom and Dad took over the room with the stove, and it became a combined living room, master bedroom, art studio, and writer's study. We put the sofa bed there, though once we opened it, it never went back to being a sofa. Dad built shelves all along the upper walls to store Mom's art supplies. She set up her easel under the stovepipe, right next to the back window, because she said it got natural sunlightwhich it did, relatively speaking. She put her typewriters under another window, with shelves for her manuscripts and works in progress, and she immediately started thumbtacking index cards with story ideas to the walls.

We kids all slept in the middle room. At first we shared one big bed that had been left by the previous owner, but Dad decided we were getting a tad old for that. We were also too big to sleep in cardboard boxes, and there wasn't enough room on the floor for them, anyway, so we helped Dad build two sets of bunk beds. We made the frames with two-by-fours; then we drilled holes in the sides and threaded ropes through. For mattresses, we laid cardboard over the ropes. When we finished, our bunk beds looked sort of plain, so we spray-painted the sides with ornate red and black curlicues. Dad came home with a discarded four-drawer dresser, one drawer for each of us. He also built each of us a wooden box with sliding doors for personal stuff. We nailed them on the wall above our beds, and that was where I kept my geode.

The third room at 93 Little Hobart Street, the kitchen, was in a category all its own. It had an electric stove, but the wiring was not exactly up to code, with faulty connectors, exposed lines, and buzzing switches. "Helen Keller must have wired this damn house," Dad declared. He decided it was too convoluted to bother fixing.

We called the kitchen the loose-juice room, because on the rare occasions that we had paid the electricity bill and had power, we'd get a wicked electric shock if we touched any damp or metallic surface in the room. The first time I got zapped, it knocked my breath out and left me twitching on the floor. We quickly learned that whenever we ventured into the kitchen, we needed to wrap our hands in the driest socks or rags we could find. If we got a shock, we'd announce it to everyone else, sort of like giving a weather report. "Big jolt from touching the stove today," we'd say. "Wear extra rags."