The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls Read Free Book Online Page A

the back of the car with bobbing, mewing bags.
    "It doesn't seem right," I told Mom. "We rescued them. Now we're going to kill them."
    "We gave them a little extra time on the planet," Mom said. "They should be grateful for that."
    * * *
    Dad finally got a job in the gypsum mine, digging out the white rocks that were ground into the powder used in drywall and plaster of paris. When he came home, he'd be covered with white gypsum powder, and sometimes we'd play ghost and he'd chase us. He also brought back sacks of gypsum, and Mom mixed it with water to make Venus de Milo sculptures from a rubber cast she ordered through the mail. It grieved Mom that the mine was destroying so much white rockshe said it was real marble and deserved a better fate and that, by making her sculptures, she was at least immortalizing some of it.
    Mom was pregnant. Everyone hoped it would be a boy so Brian would have someone to play with other than me. When it got time for Mom to give birth, Dad's plan was for us to move to Blythe, twenty miles south, which was such a big town it had two movie theaters and two state prisons.
    In the meantime, Mom devoted herself to her art. She spent all day working on oil paintings, watercolors, charcoal drawings, pen-and-ink sketches, clay and wire sculptures, silk screens, and wood blocks. She didn't have any particular style; some of her paintings were what she called primitive, some were impressionistic and abstract, some were realistic. "I don't want to be pigeonholed," she liked to say. Mom was also a writer and was always typing away on novels, short stories, plays, poetry, fables, and children's books, which she illustrated herself. Mom's writing was very creative. So was her spelling. She needed a proofreader, and when Lori was just seven years old, she would go over Mom's manuscripts, checking for errors.
    While we were in Midland, Mom painted dozens of variations and studies of the Joshua tree. We'd go with her and she'd give us art lessons. One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight.
    Mom frowned at me. "You'd be destroying what makes it special," she said. "It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty."

    I NEVER BELIEVED IN Santa Claus.
    None of us kids did. Mom and Dad refused to let us. They couldn't afford expensive presents, and they didn't want us to think we weren't as good as other kids who, on Christmas morning, found all sorts of fancy toys under the tree that were supposedly left by Santa Claus. So they told us all about how other kids were deceived by their parents, how the toys the grown-ups claimed were made by little elves wearing bell caps in their workshop at the North Pole actually had labels on them saying MADE IN JAPAN.
    "Try not to look down on those other children," Mom said. "It's not their fault that they've been brainwashed into believing silly myths."
    We celebrated Christmas, but usually about a week after December 25, when you could find perfectly good bows and wrapping paper that people had thrown away and Christmas trees discarded on the roadside that still had most of their needles and even some silver tinsel hanging on them. Mom and Dad would give us a bag of marbles or a doll or a slingshot that had been marked way down in an after-Christmas sale.
    Dad lost his job at the gypsum mine after getting in an argument with the foreman, and when Christmas came that year, we had no money at all. On Christmas Eve, Dad took each of us kids out into the desert night one by one. I had a blanket wrapped around me, and when it was my turn, I offered to share it with Dad, but he said no thanks. The cold never bothered him. I was five that year and I sat next to Dad and we looked up at the sky. Dad loved to talk about the stars. He explained to us how they rotated