The Glass Castle_ A Memoir - Jeannette Walls [106]
“I spent days on that,” Lori shouted. “And you’ve ruined it!”
“I elevated it,” Dad said. He told Lori he would help her write a paper that would demonstrate that Shakespeare’s plays had multiple authors, like Rembrandt’s paintings. “By God, you’ll set the literary world on edge,” he said.
“I don’t want to set the world on edge!” Lori screamed. “I just want to win a stupid little scholarship!”
“Goddammit, you’re in a horse race, but you’re thinking like a sheep,” Dad said. “Sheep don’t win horse races.”
Lori didn’t have the spirit to rework the bust. The next day she smushed the clay into a big glob and left it on the drafting table. I told Lori that if she hadn’t been accepted into an art school by the time she graduated, she should go to New York anyway. She could support herself with the money we’d saved up until she found a job, and then she could apply to a school. That became our new plan.
Everyone was mad at Dad, which gave him a case of the sulks. He said he didn’t know why he even bothered to come home anymore, since he no longer got the slightest bit of appreciation for his ideas. He insisted he wasn’t trying to keep Lori from leaving for New York, but if she had the sense that God gave a goose, she would stay put. “New York is a sorry-ass sinkhole,” he said more than once. “filled with faggots and rapists.” She’d get mugged and find herself on the streets, he warned, forced into prostitution and winding up a drug addict like all those runaway teenagers. “I’m only telling you this because I love you,” he said. “And I don’t want to see you hurt.”
One evening in May, when we’d been saving our money for almost nine months, I came home with a couple of dollars I’d made babysitting and went into the bedroom to stash them in Oz. The pig was not on the old sewing machine. I began looking through all the junk in the bedroom and finally found Oz on the floor. Someone had slashed him apart with a knife and stolen all the money.
I knew it was Dad, but at the same time, I couldn’t believe he’d stoop this low. Lori obviously didn’t know yet. She was in the living room humming away as she worked on a poster. My first impulse was to hide Oz. I had this wild thought that I could somehow replace the money before Lori discovered it was missing. But I knew how ridiculous that was; three of us had spent the better part of a year accumulating the money. It would be impossible for me to replace it in the month before Lori graduated.
I went into the living room and stood beside her, trying to think of what to say. She was working on a poster that said TAMMY! in Day-Glo colors. After a moment, she looked up. “What?” she said.
Lori could tell by my face that something was wrong. She stood up so abruptly she knocked over a bottle of india ink, and ran into the bedroom. I braced myself, expecting to hear a scream, but there was only silence and then a small, broken whimpering.
Lori stayed up all night to confront Dad, but he didn’t come home. She skipped school the following day in case he returned, but Dad was AWOL for three days before we heard him climbing the rickety staircase to the porch.
“You bastard!” Lori shouted. “You stole our money!”
“What the goddamn hell are you talking about?” Dad asked. “And watch your language.” He leaned against the door and lit a cigarette.
Lori held up the slashed pig and threw it as hard as she could at Dad, but it was empty and nearly weightless. It struck his shoulder lightly, then bounced to the floor. He bent down carefully, as if the floor beneath him could shift at any moment, picked up our ravaged piggy bank, and turned it over in his hands. “Someone sure as hell gutted old Oz, didn’t they?” He turned to me. “Jeannette, do you know what happened?”
He was actually half grinning at me. After the whipping, Dad had jacked up the charm with me, and even though I was planning to leave, he could make me laugh when he tried, and he still considered me an ally. But now I wanted to knock him over the head. “You took