The Glass Castle_ A Memoir - Jeannette Walls [21]
“Girl!” Mom said.
Mom handed me the baby. I was going to turn six in a few months, and Mom said I was mature enough to hold her the entire way home. The baby was pink and wrinkly but absolutely beautiful, with big blue eyes, soft wisps of blond hair, and the tiniest fingernails I had ever seen. She moved in confused, jerky motions, as if she couldn’t understand why Mom’s belly wasn’t still around her. I promised her I’d always take care of her.
The baby went without a name for weeks. Mom said she wanted to study it first, the way she would the subject of a painting. We had a lot of arguments over what the name should be. I wanted to call her Rosita, after the prettiest girl in my class, but Mom said that name was too Mexican.
“I thought we weren’t supposed to be prejudiced,” I said.
“It’s not being prejudiced,” Mom said. “It’s a matter of accuracy in labeling.”
She told us that both our grandmothers were angry because neither Lori nor I had been named after them, so she decided to call the baby Lilly Ruth Maureen. Lilly was Mom’s mother’s name, and Erma Ruth was Dad’s mother’s name. But we’d call the baby Maureen, a name Mom liked because it was a diminutive of Mary, so she’d also be naming the baby after herself but pretty much no one would know it. That, Dad told us, would make everyone happy except his mom, who hated the name Ruth and wanted the baby called Erma, and Mom’s mom, who would hate sharing her namesake with Dad’s mom.
A FEW MONTHS AFTER Maureen was born, a squad car tried to pull us over because the brake lights on the Green Caboose weren’t working. Dad took off. He said that if the cops stopped us, they’d find out that we had no registration or insurance and that the license plate had been taken off another car, and they’d arrest us all. After barreling down the highway, he made a screeching U-turn, with us kids feeling like the car was going to tumble over on its side, but the squad car made one, too. Dad peeled through Blythe at a hundred miles an hour, ran a red light, cut the wrong way up a one-way street, the other cars honking and pulling over. He made a few more turns, then headed down an alley and found an empty garage to hide in.
We heard the sound of the siren a couple of blocks away and then it faded. Dad said that since the gestapo would have their eyes out for the Green Caboose, we’d have to leave it in the garage and walk home.
The next day he announced that Blythe had become a little too hot and we were hitting the road again. This time he knew where we were going. Dad had been doing some research and settled on a town in northern Nevada called Battle Mountain. There was gold in Battle Mountain, Dad said, and he intended to go after it with the Prospector. Finally, we were going to strike it rich.
Mom and Dad rented a great big U-Haul truck. Mom explained that since only she and Dad could fit in the front of the U-Haul, Lori, Brian, Maureen, and I were in for a treat: We got to ride in the back. It would be fun, she said, a real adventure, but there wouldn’t be any light, so we would have to use all our resources to entertain one another. Plus we were not allowed to talk. Since it was illegal to ride in the back, anyone who heard us might call the cops. Mom told us the trip would be about fourteen hours if we took the highway, but we should tack on another couple of hours because we might make some scenic detours.
We packed up what furniture we had. There wasn’t much, mostly parts for the Prospector and a couple of chairs and Mom’s oil paintings and art supplies. When we were ready to leave, Mom wrapped Maureen in a lavender blanket and passed her to me, and we kids all climbed into the back of the U-Haul. Dad closed the doors. It was pitch black and the air smelled stale and dusty. We were sitting on the ribbed wooden floor, on frayed, stained blankets used to wrap furniture, feeling for one another with our hands.
“Here goes the adventure!” I whispered.
“Shhhh!” Lori said.
The U-Haul started up and lurched forward. Maureen let loose with a loud, high-pitched wail.