The Glass Castle

by Jeannette Walls

Mom always said people worried too much about their children. Suffering when you’re young is good for you, she said. It immunized your body and your soul, and that was why she ignored us kids when we cried. Fussing over children who cry only encourages them, she told us. That’s positive reinforcement for negative behavior.

‘It was the only thing to eat in the whole house,’ I said. Raising my voice, I added, ‘I was hungry.’ Mom gave me a startled look. I’d broken one of our unspoken rules: We were always supposed to pretend our life was one long and incredibly fun adventure.

‘Have I ever let you down?’ he asked Brian and me and then turned and walked away. In a voice so low that Dad didn’t hear him, Brian said, ‘Yes.’

We all started laughing, but it seemed funny only for a second or two, and then we stood there looking at one another in silence. I realized my hand was shaking so bad I could hardly hold the gun.

Despite our wondrous appliances, life in Phoenix wasn’t total luxury. We had about a gazillion cockroaches, big, strong things with shiny wings. We had just a few at first, but since Mom was not exactly a compulsive cleaner, they multiplied.

He and Brian and I went out on a serious Pervert Hunt. Our blood up, we searched the streets for hours, but we never did find the guy. I asked Mom and Dad if we should close the doors and windows when we went to sleep. They wouldn’t consider it. We needed the fresh air, they said, and it was essential that we refuse to surrender to fear.

Dad missed the wilderness. He needed to be roaming free in open country and living among untamed animals. He felt it was good for your soul to have buzzards and coyotes and snakes around. That was the way man was meant to live, he’d say, in harmony with the wild, like the Indians, not this lords-of-the-earth crap, trying to rule the entire goddamn planet, cutting down all the forests and killing every creature you couldn’t bring to heel.

I could hear people around us whispering about the crazy drunk man and his dirty little urchin children, but who cared what they thought? None of them had ever had their hand licked by a cheetah.

‘You don’t have to explain,’ Dad said. His voice was barely a whisper. He stood up and walked into the yard and sat down under the orange trees. I followed and sat down next to him. I was going to take his hand, but before I could reach for it, he said, ‘If you don’t mind, honey, I think I’d like to sit here by myself for a while.’

‘I wonder what life will be like now,’ I said to Lori. ‘The same,’ she said. ‘He tried stopping before, but it never lasted.’ ‘This time it will.’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘It’s his present to me.’

‘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.

Every night for the first few weeks, lying on my cardboard mattress and listening to the sound of rainwater dripping in the kitchen, I dreamed of the desert and the sun and the big house in Phoenix with the palm tree in the front and the orange trees and oleanders in the back. We had owned that house outright. Still owned it, I kept thinking. It was ours, the one true home we’d ever had.

Francie Nolan’s father sure reminded me of Dad. If Francie saw the good in her father, even though most people considered him a shiftless drunk, maybe I wasn’t a complete fool for believing in mine. Or trying to believe in him. It was getting harder.

‘I hate winter,’ I told Mom. ‘All seasons have something to offer,’ she said. ‘Cold weather is good for you. It kills the germs.’ That seemed to be true, because none of us kids ever got sick. But even if I’d woken up one morning with a raging fever, I never would have admitted it to Mom. Being sick might have meant staying home in our freezing house instead of spending the day in a toasty classroom.

‘You kids. You make me ashamed. Do you hear me? Ashamed!’ He turned down the street to Junior’s bar. We all watched him go. ‘You’re ashamed of us?’ Lori called after him. Dad just kept walking.

When my work was done, I read the stories on the wire services. Because we never subscribed to newspapers or magazines, I’d never known what was going on in the world, except for the skewed version of events we got from Mom and Dad - one in which every politician was a crook, every cop was a thug, and every criminal had been framed. I began to feel like I was getting the whole story for the first time, that I was being handed the missing pieces to the puzzle, and the world was making a little more sense.

‘Have I ever let you down?’ Dad asked. I’d heard that question at least two hundred times, and I’d always answered it the way I knew he wanted me to, because I thought it was my faith in Dad that had kept him going all those years. I was about to tell him the truth for the first time, about to let him know that he’d let us all down plenty, but then I stopped. I couldn’t do it.

Dad, meanwhile, was saying he was not asking me for the money; he was telling me to give it to him. He needed it. Did I think he was a liar when he said he’d get it back to me? I gave him the twenty dollars.

‘If you want to be treated like a mother,’ I said, ‘you should act like one.’ Mom rarely got angry. She was usually either singing or crying, but now her face twisted up with fury. We both knew I had crossed a line, but I didn’t care. I’d also changed over the summer. ‘How dare you?’ she shouted. ‘You’re in trouble now - big trouble. I’m telling your dad. Just you wait until he comes home.’

All through the long walk, the pain had kept me thinking, and by the time I reached the tree trunk, I had made two decisions.

The first was that I’d had my last whipping. No one was ever going to do that to me again. The second was that, like Lori, I was going to get out of Welch. The sooner, the better. Before I finished high school, if I could. I had no idea where I would go, but I did know I was going. I also knew it would not be easy. People got stuck in Welch.

If I came along and helped look after her two toddlers, she said she’d pay me two hundred dollars at the end of the summer and buy me a bus ticket back to Welch. I thought about her offer. ‘Take Lori instead of me,’ I said. ‘And at the end of the summer, buy her a bus ticket to New York City.’ Mrs Sanders agreed.

I no longer had to root through the bathroom wastebaskets for food, and I hardly ever went hungry again.

‘Don’t be sad, Mom. I’ll write.’ ‘I’m not upset because I’ll miss you,’ Mom said. ‘I’m upset because you get to go to New York and I’m stuck here. It’s not fair.’

‘Dad,’ I said, ‘as soon as I finish classes, I’m getting on the next bus out of here. If the buses stop running, I’ll hitchhike. I’ll walk if I have to. Go ahead and build the Glass Castle, but don’t do it for me.’

‘If things don’t work out, you can always come home,’ he said. ‘I’ll be here for you. You know that, don’t you?’ ‘I know.’ I knew that in his way, he would be. I also knew I’d never be coming back.

After talking to Mom, I looked around my room. It was the maid’s room off the kitchen, and it was tiny, with one narrow window and a bathroom that doubled as a closet. But it was mine. I had a room now, and I had a life, too, and there was no place in either one for Mom and Dad.

So, when I enrolled for my final year at Barnard, I paid what I owed on my tuition with Dad’s wadded, crumpled bills.

‘I got a lot to regret about my life,’ he said. ‘But I’m goddamn proud of you, Mountain Goat, the way you turned out. Whenever I think of you, I figure I must have done something right.’ ‘’Course you did.’ ‘Well, all right then.’ We talked about the old days some and, finally, it was time to go. I kissed them both, and at the door, I turned to look at Dad one more time. ‘Hey,’ he said. He winked and pointed his finger at me. ‘Have I ever let you down?’ He started chuckling because he knew there was only one way I could ever answer that question. I just smiled. And then I closed the door.