The Glass Castle_ A Memoir - Jeannette Walls [105]
Mom grew to love Elvis, too. She hadn’t gone back to teaching and instead spent her time painting, and on the weekends we began to drive to craft fairs all throughout West Virginia: shows where bearded men in overalls played dulcimers and women in granny dresses sold corncob back scratchers and coal sculptures of black bears and miners. We filled Elvis’s trunk with Mom’s paintings and tried to sell them at the fairs. Mom also drew pastel portraits on the spot for anyone willing to pay eighteen dollars, and every now and then she got a commission.
We all slept in Elvis on those trips, because a lot of times we made only enough to pay for the gas, or not even that. Still, it felt good to be on the move again. Our trips in Elvis reminded me how easy it was to pick up and move on when the urge struck. Once you’d resolved to go, there was nothing to it at all.
A S SPRING APPROACHED and the day of Lori’s graduation drew closer, I lay awake at night, thinking about her life in New York City. “In exactly three months,” I said to her, “you’ll be living in New York.” The following week, I said. “In exactly two months and three weeks, you’ll be living in New York.”
“Would you please shut up,” she said.
“You’re not nervous, are you?” I asked.
“What do you think?”
Lori was terrified. She was not sure what she was supposed to do once she got to New York. That had always been the vaguest part of our escape plan. Back in the fall, I’d had no doubt that she could get a scholarship to one of the city’s universities. She’d been a finalist for a National Merit Scholarship, but she’d had to hitchhike into Bluefield to take the test, and she got rattled when the trucker who picked her up put the moves on her; she arrived nearly an hour late and botched the test.
Mom, who supported Lori’s New York plans and kept saying she wished she were going to the big city herself, suggested that Lori apply to the Cooper Union art school. Lori put together a portfolio of her drawings and paintings, but just before the submissions deadline, she spilled a pot of coffee on them, which made Mom wonder aloud if Lori had a fear of success.
Then Lori heard about a scholarship sponsored by a literary society for the student who created the best work of art inspired by one of the geniuses of the English language. She decided to make a clay bust of Shakespeare. She worked on it for a week, using a sharpened Popsicle stick to shape the slightly bulging eyes and the goatee and earring and longish hair. When it was finished, it looked exactly like Shakespeare.
That night we were all sitting at the drafting table watching Lori put the final touches on Shakespeare’s hair when Dad came home drunk. “That does indeed resemble old Billy,” Dad said. “Only thing is, as I been telling you, he was a goddamn fake.”
For years, every time Mom brought out Shakespeare’s plays, Dad would carry on about how they’d been written not by William Shakespeare of Avon but by a bunch of people, including someone named the Earl of Oxford, because no single person in Elizabethan England could have had Shakespeare’s thirty-thousand-word vocabulary. All this bunk about little Billy Shakespeare, Dad would say, the great genius despite his grammar-school education, his small Latin and less Greek, was a lot of sentimental mythology.
“You’re helping perpetuate this fraud,” he told Lori.
“Dad, it’s just a bust,” Lori said.
“That’s the problem,” Dad said.
He studied the sculpture, then suddenly reached over and smeared off Shakespeare’s mouth with his thumb.
“What the hell are you doing?” Lori cried out.
“It’s no longer just a