The Glass Castle (13 page)

But I loved Grandma Smith. She was a tall, leathery, broad-shouldered woman with green eyes and a strong jaw. She told me I was her favorite grandchild and that I was going to grow up to be something special. I even liked all of her rules. I liked how she woke us up every morning at dawn, shouting, "Rise and shine, everybody!" and insisted we wash our hands and comb our hair before eating breakfast. She made us hot Cream of Wheat with real butter, then oversaw us while we cleared the table and washed the dishes. Afterward, she took us all to buy new clothes, and we'd go to a movie like
Mary Poppins
.

Now, on the way to Phoenix, I stood up in the back of the car and leaned over the front seat between Mom and Dad. "Are we going to go stay with Grandma?" I asked.

"No," Mom said. She looked out the window, but not at anything in particular. Then she said. "Grandma's dead."

"What?" I asked. I'd heard her, but I was so thrown I felt like I hadn't.

Mom repeated herself, still looking out the window. I glanced back at Lori and Brian, but they were sleeping. Dad was smoking, his eyes on the road. I couldn't believe I'd been sitting there thinking of Grandma Smith, looking forward to eating Cream of Wheat and having her comb my hair and cuss, and all along she'd been dead. I started hitting Mom on the shoulder, hard, and asking why she hadn't told us. Finally, Dad held down my fists with his free hand, the other holding both his cigarette and the steering wheel, and said. "That's enough, Mountain Goat."

Mom seemed surprised that I was so upset.

"Why didn't you tell us?" I asked.

"There didn't seem any point," she said.

"What happened?" Grandma had been only in her sixties, and most people in her family lived until they were about a hundred.

The doctors said she'd died from leukemia, but Mom thought it was radioactive poisoning. The government was always testing nuclear bombs in the desert near the ranch, Mom said. She and Jim used to go out with a Geiger counter and find rocks that ticked. They stored them in the basement and used some to make jewelry for Grandma.

"There's no reason to grieve," Mom said. "We've all got to go someday, and Grandma had a life that was longer and fuller than most." She paused. "And now we have a place to live."

Mom explained that Grandma Smith had owned two houses, the one she lived in with the green shutters and French doors, and an older house, made of adobe, in downtown Phoenix. Since Mom was the older of the two children, Grandma Smith had asked her which house she wanted to inherit. The house with the green shutters was more valuable, but Mom had chosen the adobe house. It was near Phoenix's business district, which made it a perfect place for Mom to start an art studio. She'd also inherited some money, so she could give up teaching and buy all the art supplies she wanted.

She'd been thinking we should move to Phoenix ever since Grandma died a few months back, but Dad had refused to leave Battle Mountain because he was so close to a breakthrough in his cyanide-leaching process.

"And I was," Dad said.

Mom gave a snort of a laugh. "So the trouble you kids got into with Billy Deel was actually a blessing in disguise," she said. "My art career is going to flourish in Phoenix. I can just feel it." She turned around to look at me. "We're off on another adventure, Jeannettie-kins. Isn't this wonderful?" Mom's eyes were bright. "I'm such an excitement addict!"

WHEN WE PULLED UP
in front of the house on North Third Street, I could not believe we were actually going to live there. It was a mansion, practically, so big that Grandma Smith had had two families living in it, both paying her rent. We had the entire place to ourselves. Mom said that it had been built almost a hundred years ago as a fort. The outside walls, covered with white stucco, were three feet thick. "These sure would stop any Indians' arrows," I said to Brian.

We kids ran through the house and counted fourteen rooms, including the kitchens and bathrooms. They were filled with the things Mom had inherited from Grandma Smith: a dark Spanish dining table with eight matching chairs, a hand-carved upright piano, sideboards with antique silver serving sets, and glass-fronted cabinets filled with Grandma's bone china, which Mom demonstrated was the finest quality by holding a plate up to the light and showing us the clear silhouette of her hand through it.

The front yard had a palm tree, and the backyard had orange trees that grew real oranges. We'd never lived in a house with trees. I particularly loved the palm tree, which made me think I had arrived at some kind of oasis. There were also hollyhocks and oleander bushes with pink and white flowers. Behind the yard was a shed as big as some of the houses we had lived in, and next to the shed was a parking space big enough for two cars. We were definitely moving up in the world.

* * *

The people living on North Third Street were mostly Mexicans and Indians who had moved into the neighborhood after the whites left for the suburbs and subdivided the big old houses into apartments. There seemed to be a couple of dozen people in each house, men drinking beers from paper bags, young mothers nursing babies, old ladies sunning themselves on the sagging, weathered porches, and hordes of kids.

All the kids around North Third Street went to the Catholic school at St. Mary's Church, about five blocks away. Mom, however, said nuns were killjoys who took the fun out of religion. She wanted us to go to a public school called Emerson. Although we lived outside the district, Mom begged and cajoled the principal until he allowed us to enroll.

We were not on the bus route, and it was a bit of a hike to school, but none of us minded the walk. Emerson was in a fancy neighborhood with streets canopied by eucalyptus trees, and the school building looked like a Spanish hacienda, with a red terra-cotta roof. It was surrounded by palm trees and banana trees, and, when the bananas ripened, the students all got free bananas at lunch. The playground at Emerson was covered with lush green grass watered by a sprinkler system, and it had more equipment than I'd ever seen: seesaws, swings, a merry-go-round, a jungle gym, tether balls, and a running track.

Miss Shaw, the teacher in the third-grade class I was assigned to, had steely gray hair and pointy-rimmed glasses and a stern mouth. When I told her I'd read all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, she raised her eyebrows skeptically, but after I read aloud from one of them, she moved me into a reading group for gifted children.

Lori's and Brian's teachers also put them in gifted reading groups. Brian hated it, because the other kids were older and he was the littlest guy in the class, but Lori and I were secretly thrilled to be called special. Instead of letting on that we felt that way, however, we made light of it. When we told Mom and Dad about our reading groups, we paused before the word. "gifted," clasping our hands beneath our chins, fluttering our eyelids, and pretending to look angelic.

"Don't make a mockery of it," Dad said. "'Course you're special. Haven't I always told you that?"

Brian gave Dad a sideways look. "If we're so special," he said slowly, "why don't you" His words petered out.

"What?" Dad asked. "What?"

Brian shook his head. "Nothing," he said.

* * *

Emerson had its very own nurse who gave the three of us ear and eye exams, our first ever. I aced the tests. "Eagle eyes and elephant ears," the nurse saidbut Lori struggled trying to read the eye chart. The nurse declared her severely shortsighted and sent Mom a note saying she needed glasses.

"Nosiree," Mom said. She didn't approve of glasses. If you had weak eyes, Mom believed, they needed exercise to get strong. The way she saw it, glasses were like crutches. They prevented people with feeble eyes from learning to see the world on their own. She said people had been trying to get her to wear glasses for years, and she had refused. But the nurse sent another note saying Lori couldn't attend Emerson unless she wore glasses, and the school would pay for them, so Mom gave in.

When the glasses were ready, we all went down to the optometrist. The lenses were so thick they made Lori's eyes look big and bugged out, like fish eyes. She kept swiveling her head around and up and down.

"What's the matter?" I asked. Instead of answering, Lori ran outside. I followed her. She was standing in the parking lot, gazing in awe at the trees, the houses, and the office buildings behind them.

"You see that tree over there?" she said, pointing at a sycamore about a hundred feet away. I nodded.

"I can not only see that tree, I can see the individual leaves on it." She looked at me triumphantly. "Can you see them?"

I nodded.

She didn't seem to believe me. "The individual leaves? I mean, not just the branches but each little leaf?"

I nodded. Lori looked at me and then burst into tears.

On the way home, she kept seeing for the first time all these things that most everyone else had stopped noticing because they'd seen them every day. She read street signs and billboards aloud. She pointed out starlings perched on the telephone wires. We went into a bank and she stared up at the vaulted ceiling and described the octagonal patterns.

At home, Lori insisted that I try on her glasses. They would blur my vision as much as they corrected hers, she said, so I'd be able to see things as she always had. I put on the glasses, and the world dissolved into fuzzy, blotchy shapes. I took a few steps and banged my shin on the coffee table, and then I realized why Lori didn't like to go exploring as much as Brian and I did. She couldn't see.

Lori wanted Mom to try on the glasses, too. Mom slipped them on and, blinking, looked around the room. She studied one of her own paintings quietly, then handed the glasses back to Lori.

"Did you see better?" I asked.

"I wouldn't say better," Mom answered. "I'd say different."

"Maybe you should get a pair, Mom."

"I like the world just fine the way I see it," she said.

But Lori loved seeing the world clearly. She started compulsively drawing and painting all the wondrous things she was discovering, like the way each curved tile on Emerson's roof cast its own curved shadow on the tile below, and the way the setting sun painted the underbellies of the clouds pink but left the piled-up tops purple.

Not long after Lori got her glasses, she decided she wanted to be an artist, like Mom.

* * *

As soon as we'd settled into the house, Mom threw herself into her art career. She erected a big white sign in the front yard on which she had carefully painted, in black letters with gold outlines, R. M. WALLS ART STUDIO. She turned the two front rooms of the house into a studio and gallery, and she used two bedrooms in the back to warehouse her collected works. An art supplies store was three blocks away, on North First Street, and thanks to Mom's inheritance, we were able to make regular shopping expeditions to the store, bringing home rolls of canvas that Dad stretched and stapled onto wooden frames. We also brought back oil paints, watercolors, acrylics, gesso, a silk-screening frame, india ink, paintbrushes and pen nibs, charcoal pencils, pastels, fancy rag paper for pastel drawings, and even a wooden mannequin with movable joints whom we named Edward and who, Mom said, would pose for her when we kids were off at school.

Mom decided that before she could get down to any serious painting, she needed to compile a thorough art reference library. She bought dozens of big loose-leaf binders and lots of packs of lined paper. Every subject was given its own binder: dogs, cats, horses, farm animals, woodland animals, flowers, fruits and vegetables, rural landscapes, urban landscapes, men's faces, women's faces, men's bodies, women's bodies, and hands-feet-bottoms-and-other-miscellaneous body parts. We spent hours and hours going through old magazines, looking for interesting pictures, and when we spotted one we thought might be a worthy subject of a painting, we held it up to Mom for approval. She studied it for a second and okayed or nixed it. If the photo made the grade, we cut it out, glued it on a piece of lined paper, and reinforced the holes in the paper with adhesive Os so the page wouldn't tear out. Then we got out the appropriate three-ringed binder, added the new photograph, and snapped the rings shut. In exchange for our help on her reference library, Mom gave us all art lessons.

Mom was also hard at work on her writing. She bought several typewritersmanuals and electricsso she'd have backups should her favorite break down. She kept them in her studio. She never sold anything she wrote, but from time to time she received an encouraging rejection letter, and she thumbtacked those to the wall. When we kids came home from school, she'd usually be in her studio working. If it was quiet, she was painting or contemplating potential subjects. If the typewriter keys were clattering away, she was at work on one of her novels, poems, plays, short stories, or her illustrated collection of pithy sayingsone was. "Life is a bowl of cherries, with a few nuts thrown in"which she'd titled. "R. M. Walls's Philosophy of Life."

* * *

Dad joined the local electricians' union. Phoenix was booming, and he landed a job pretty quickly. He left the house in the morning wearing a yellow hard hat and big steel-toed boots, which I thought made him look extra handsome. Because of the union, he was making steadier money than we'd ever seen. On his first payday, he came home and called us all into the living room. We kids had left our toys out in the yard, he declared.

"No, sir, we didn't," I said.

"I think you did," he said. "Go out and take a look."

We ran to the front door. Outside in the yard, parked in a row, were three brand-new bicyclesa big red one and two smaller ones, a blue boy's bike and a purple girl's bike.

I thought at first that some other kids must have left them there. When Lori pointed out that Dad had obviously bought them for us, I didn't believe her. We had never had bicycleswe had learned to ride on other kids' bikesand it had never occurred to me that one day I might actually own one myself. Especially a new one.

I turned around. Dad was standing in the doorway with his arms crossed and a sly grin on his face. "Those bikes aren't for us, are they?" I asked.