The Glass Castle (27 page)

Dinitia Hewitt was there, too. That summer morning I'd spent swimming with Dinitia at the public pool was the happiest time I'd had in Welch, but she never invited me back, and even though it was a public pool, I didn't feel I could go to the free swim unless I had an invitation from her. I saw her again only when school started, and neither of us ever mentioned that day at the pool. I guess we both knew that, given the way people in Welch thought about mixing, it would be too weird for us to try to be close friends. During lunch, Dinitia hung out with the other black kids, but we had a study hall together and passed notes to each other there.

By the time she got to Welch High, Dinitia had changed. The spark had gone out of her. She started drinking malt ale during school. She'd fill a soda can with Mad Dog 20/20 and carry it right into class. I tried to find out what was wrong, but all I could pry from her was that her mother's new boyfriend had moved in with them, and the fit was a little tight.

One day just before Christmas, Dinitia passed me a note in study hall asking for girls' names that began with D. I wrote down as many as I could think ofDiane, Donna, Dora, Dreama, Diandraand then wrote,
Why?
She passed a note back saying,
I think I'm pregnant.

After Christmas, Dinitia did not return to school. When a month had gone by, I walked around the mountain to her house and knocked on the door. A man opened it and stared at me. He had skin like an iron skillet and nicotine-yellow eyes. He left the storm door shut, so I had to speak through the screen.

"Is Dinitia home?" I asked.

"Why you want to know?"

"I want to see her."

"She don't want to see you," he said and shut the door.

I saw Dinitia around town once or twice after that, and we waved but never spoke again. Later, we all learned she'd been arrested for stabbing her mother's boyfriend to death.

* * *

The other girls talked endlessly among themselves about who still had their cherry and how far they would let their boyfriend go. The world seemed divided into girls with boyfriends and girls without them. It was the distinction that mattered the most, practically the only one that did matter. But I knew that boys were dangerous. They'd say they loved you, but they were always after something.

Even though I didn't trust boys, I sure did wish one would show some interest in me. Kenny Hall, the old guy down the street who was still pining away for me, didn't count. If any boy was interested in me, I wondered if I'd have the wherewithal to tell him, when he tried to go too far, that I was not that kind of girl. But the truth was, I didn't need to worry much about fending off advances, seeing howas Ernie Goad told me on every available occasionI was pork-chop ugly. And by that he meant so ugly that if I wanted a dog to play with me, I'd have to tie a pork chop around my neck.

I had what Mom called distinctive looks. That was one way of putting it. I was nearly six feet tall, pale as a frog's underbelly, and had bright red hair. My elbows were like flying wedges and my knees like tea saucers. But my most prominent featuremy worstwas my teeth. They weren't rotten or crooked. In fact, they were big, healthy things. But they stuck straight out. The top row thrust forward so enthusiastically that I had trouble closing my mouth completely, and I was always stretching my upper lip to try to cover them. When I laughed, I put my hand over my mouth.

Lori told me I had an exaggerated view of how bad my teeth looked. "They're just a little bucked," she'd say. "They have a certain Pippi Long-stockingish charm." Mom told me my overbite gave my face character. Brian said they'd come in handy if I ever needed to eat an apple through the knothole in a fence.

What I needed, I knew, was braces. Every time I looked in the mirror, I longed for what the other kids called a barbed-wire mouth. Mom and Dad had no money for braces, of coursenone of us kids had ever even been to the dentistbut since I'd been babysitting and doing other kids' homework for cash, I resolved to save up until I could afford braces myself. I had no idea how much they cost, so I approached the only girl in my class who wore braces and, after complimenting her orthodontia, casually asked how much it had set her folks back. When she said twelve hundred dollars, I almost fell over. I was getting a dollar an hour to babysit. I usually worked five or six hours a week, which meant that if I saved every penny I earned, it would take about four years to raise the money.

I decided to make my own braces.

* * *

I went to the library and asked for a book on orthodontia. The librarian looked at me kind of funny and said she didn't have one, so I realized I'd have to figure things out as I went along. The process involved some experimentation and several false starts. At first I simply used a rubber band. Before going to bed, I would stretch it all the way around the entire set of my upper teeth. The rubber band was small but thick and had a good, tight fit. But it pressed down uncomfortably on my tongue, and sometimes it would pop off during the night and I'd wake up choking on it. Usually, however, it stayed on all night, and in the morning my gums would be sore from the pressure on my teeth.

That seemed like a promising sign, but I began to worry that instead of pushing my front teeth in, the rubber band might be pulling my back teeth forward. So I got some larger rubber bands and wore them around my whole head, pressing against my front teeth. The problem with this technique was that the rubber bands were tightthey had to be, to workso I'd wake up with headaches and deep red marks where the rubber bands had dug into the sides of my face.

I needed more advanced technology. I bent a metal coat hanger into a horseshoe shape to fit the back of my head. Then I curled the two ends outward, so when the coat hanger was around my head, the ends angled away from my face and formed hooks to hold the rubber band in place. When I tried it on, the coat hanger dug into the back of my skull, so I used a Kotex sanitary napkin for padding.

The contraption worked perfectly, except that I had to sleep flat on my back, which I always had trouble doing, especially when it was cold: I liked to snuggle down into the blankets. Also, the rubber bands still popped off in the middle of the night. Another drawback was that the device took a lot of time to put on properly. I'd wait until it was dark so no one else would see it.

One night I was lying in my bunk wearing my elaborate coat-hanger braces when the bedroom door opened. I could make out a dim figure in the darkness. "Who's there?" I called out, but because I had my braces on, it came out sounding like. "Phoof der?"

"It's your old man," Dad answered. "What's with the mumbling?" He came over to my bunk, held up his Zippo, and flicked it. A flame shot up. "What the Sam Hill's that on your head?"

"My brafef," I said.

"Your what?"

I took off the contraption and explained to Dad that, because my front teeth stuck out so badly, I needed braces, but they cost twelve hundred dollars, so I had made my own.

"Put them back on," Dad said. He studied my handiwork intently, then nodded. "Those braces are a goddamn feat of engineering genius," he said. "You take after your old man."

He took my chin and pulled my mouth open. "And I think they're by God working."

THAT YEAR I STARTED
working for the school newspaper,
The Maroon Wave
. I wanted to join some club or group or organization where I could feel I belonged, where people wouldn't move away if I sat down next to them. I was a good runner, and I thought of going out for the track team, but you had to pay for your uniform, and Mom said we couldn't afford it. You didn't have to buy a uniform or a musical instrument or pay any dues to work on the
Wave
.

Miss Jeanette Bivens, one of the high school English teachers, was the
Wave
's faculty adviser. She was a quiet, precise woman who had been at Welch High School so long that she had also been Dad's English teacher. She was the first person in his life, he once told me, who'd showed any faith in him. She thought he was a talented writer and had encouraged him to submit a twenty-four-line poem called. "Summer Storm" to a statewide poetry competition. When it won first prize, one of Dad's other teachers wondered aloud if the son of two lowlife alcoholics like Ted and Erma Walls could have written it himself. Dad was so insulted that he walked out of school. It was Miss Bivens who convinced him to return and earn his diploma, telling him he had what it took to be somebody. Dad had named me after her; Mom suggested adding the second N to make it more elegant and French.

Miss Bivens told me that as far as she could remember, I was the only seventh-grader who'd ever worked for the
Wave
. I started out as a proofreader. On winter evenings, instead of huddling around the stove at 93 Little Hobart Street, I'd go down to the warm, dry offices of
The Welch Daily News,
where
The Maroon Wave
was typeset, laid out, and printed. I loved the newsroom's purposeful atmosphere. Teletype machines clattered against the wall as spools of paper carrying news from around the world piled up on the floor. Banks of fluorescent lights hung down eighteen inches above the slanted, glass-topped desks where men wearing green eyeshades conferred over stacks of copy and photographs.

I'd take the
Wave
galleys and sit at one of the desks, my back firm, a pencil behind my ear, studying the pages for typos. The years I'd spent helping Mom check spelling on her students' homework had given me lots of practice for this line of work. I'd make corrections with a light blue felt marker that couldn't be picked up by the camera that photographed the pages for printing. The typesetters would retype the lines I'd corrected and print them out. I'd run the corrected lines through the hot-wax machine that made the back side sticky, then cut out the lines with an X-Acto knife and fit them over the original lines.

I tried to remain inconspicuous in the newsroom, but one of the typesetters, a crabbed, chain-smoking woman who always wore a hairnet, took a dislike to me. She thought I was dirty. When I walked by, she'd turn to the other typesetters and say loudly, "Y'all smell something funny?" Just like Lucy Jo Rose had done to Mom, she took to spraying disinfectant and air freshener in my general direction. Then she complained to the editor, Mr. Muckenfuss, that I might have head lice and could infect the entire staff. Mr. Muckenfuss conferred with Miss Bivens, and she told me that as long as I kept clean, she'd fight for me. That was when I started going back to Grandpa and Uncle Stanley's apartment for a weekly bath, though when I was there, I made sure to give Uncle Stanley a wide berth.

Whenever I was at the
Daily News,
I watched the editors and reporters at work in the newsroom. They kept a police scanner on all the time, and when an accident or fire or crime was called in, an editor would send a reporter to find out what had happened. He'd come back a couple of hours later and type up a story, and it would appear in the next day's paper. This appealed to me mightily. Until then, when I thought of writers, what first came to mind was Mom, hunched over her typewriter, clattering away on her novels and plays and philosophies of life and occasionally receiving a personalized rejection letter. But a newspaper reporter, instead of holing up in isolation, was in touch with the rest of the world. What the reporter wrote influenced what people thought about and talked about the next day; he knew what was really going on. I decided I wanted to be one of the people who knew what was really going on.

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 Dadone 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.

AT TIMES I FELT LIKE
I was failing Maureen, like I wasn't keeping my promise that I'd protect herthe promise I'd made to her when I held her on the way home from the hospital after she'd been born. I couldn't get her what she needed mosthot baths, a warm bed, steaming bowls of Cream of Wheat before school in the morningbut I tried to do little things. When she turned seven that year, I told Brian and Lori that she needed a special birthday celebration. We knew Mom and Dad wouldn't get her presents, so we saved for months, went to the Dollar General Store, and bought her a toy set of kitchen appliances that were pretty realistic: The agitator in the washing machine twisted around, and the refrigerator had metal shelves inside. We figured when she was playing, she could at least pretend to have clean clothes and regular meals.

"Tell me again about California," Maureen said after she opened the presents. Although she had been born there, she couldn't remember it. She always loved hearing our stories about life in the California desert, so we told them to her again, about how the sun shone all the time and it was so warm that we ran around barefoot even in the dead of winter, about how we ate lettuce in the farm fields and picked carloads of green grapes and slept on blankets under the stars. We told her that she was blond because she'd been born in a state where so much gold had been mined, and she had blue eyes the color of the ocean that washed onto California's beaches. "That's where I'm going to live when I grow up," Maureen said.

Although she longed for California, the magical place of light and warmth, she seemed happier than the rest of us kids in Welch. She was a storybook-beautiful girl, with long blond hair and startling blue eyes. She spent so much time with the families of her friends that she often didn't seem like a member of our family. A lot of her friends were Pentecostals whose parents held that Mom and Dad were disgracefully irresponsible and took it upon themselves to save Maureen's soul. They took her up like a surrogate daughter and brought her with them to revival meetings and to snake-handling services over in Jolo.