The Glass Castle_ A Memoir - Jeannette Walls [29]
We couldn’t afford pet food, so the animals had to eat our leftovers, and there usually wasn’t much. “If they don’t like it, they can leave,” said Mom. “Just because they live here doesn’t mean I’m going to wait on them hand and foot.” Mom told us that we were actually doing the animals a favor by not allowing them to become dependent on us. That way, if we ever had to leave, they’d be able to get by on their own. Mom liked to encourage self-sufficiency in all living creatures.
Mom also believed in letting nature take its course. She refused to kill the flies that always filled the house; she said they were nature’s food for the birds and lizards. And the birds and lizards were food for the cats. “Kill the flies and you starve the cats,” she said. Letting the flies live, in her view, was the same as buying cat food, only cheaper.
One day I was visiting my friend Carla when I noticed that her house didn’t have any flies. I asked her mother why.
She pointed toward a shiny gold contraption dangling from the ceiling, which she proudly identified as a Shell No-Pest Strip. She said it could be bought at the filling station and that her family had one in every room. The No-Pest Strips, she explained, released a poison that killed all the flies.
“What do your lizards eat?” I asked.
“We don’t have any lizards, either,” she said.
I went home and told Mom we needed to get a No-Pest Strip like Carla’s family, but she refused. “If it kills the flies,” she said, “it can’t be very good for us.”
Dad bought a souped-up old Ford Fairlane that winter, and one weekend when the weather got cold, he announced that we were going swimming at the Hot Pot. The Hot Pot was a natural sulfur spring in the desert north of town, surrounded by craggy rocks and quicksand. The water was warm to the touch and smelled like rotten eggs. It was so full of minerals that rough, chalky encrustations had built up along the edges, like a coral reef. Dad was always saying we should buy the Hot Pot and develop it as a spa.
The deeper you went into the water, the hotter it got. It was very deep in the middle. Some people around Battle Mountain said the Hot Pot had no bottom at all, that it went clean through to the center of the earth. A couple of drunks and wild teenagers had drowned there, and people at the Owl Club said when their bodies floated back to the surface, they’d been literally boiled.
Both Brian and Lori knew how to swim, but I had never learned. Large bodies of water scared me. They seemed unnatural—oddities in the desert towns where we’d lived. We had once stayed at a motel with a swimming pool, and I worked up enough nerve to make my way around the entire length of the pool, clinging to the side. But the Hot Pot didn’t have any neat edges like that swimming pool. There was nothing to cling to.
I waded in up to my shoulders. The water around my chest was warm, and the rocks I was standing on felt so hot I wanted to keep moving. I looked back at Dad, who watched me, unsmiling. I tried to push out into deeper water, but something held me back. Dad dived in and splashed his way toward me. “You’re going to learn to swim today,” he said.
He put an arm around me, and we started across the water. Dad was dragging me. I felt terrified and clutched his neck so tightly that his skin turned white. “There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Dad asked when we got to the other side.
We started back, and this time, when we got to the middle, Dad pried my fingers from around his neck and pushed me away. My arms flailed around, and I sank into the hot, smelly water. I instinctively breathed in. Water surged into my nose and mouth and down my throat. My lungs burned. My eyes were open, the sulfur stinging them, but the water was dark and my hair was wrapped around my face and I couldn’t see anything. A pair of