The Glass Castle_ A Memoir - Jeannette Walls [45]
Mom was also hard at work on her writing. She bought several typewriters—manuals and electrics—so she’d have backups should her favorite break down. She kept them in her studio. She never sold anything she wrote, but from time to time she received an encouraging rejection letter, and she thumbtacked those to the wall. When we kids came home from school, she’d usually be in her studio working. If it was quiet, she was painting or contemplating potential subjects. If the typewriter keys were clattering away, she was at work on one of her novels, poems, plays, short stories, or her illustrated collection of pithy sayings—one was. “Life is a bowl of cherries, with a few nuts thrown in”—which she’d titled. “R. M. Walls’s Philosophy of Life.”
Dad joined the local electricians’ union. Phoenix was booming, and he landed a job pretty quickly. He left the house in the morning wearing a yellow hard hat and big steel-toed boots, which I thought made him look extra handsome. Because of the union, he was making steadier money than we’d ever seen. On his first payday, he came home and called us all into the living room. We kids had left our toys out in the yard, he declared.
“No, sir, we didn’t,” I said.
“I think you did,” he said. “Go out and take a look.”
We ran to the front door. Outside in the yard, parked in a row, were three brand-new bicycles—a big red one and two smaller ones, a blue boy’s bike and a purple girl’s bike.
I thought at first that some other kids must have left them there. When Lori pointed out that Dad had obviously bought them for us, I didn’t believe her. We had never had bicycles—we had learned to ride on other kids’ bikes—and it had never occurred to me that one day I might actually own one myself. Especially a new one.
I turned around. Dad was standing in the doorway with his arms crossed and a sly grin on his face. “Those bikes aren’t for us, are they?” I asked.
“Well, they’re too damn small for your mother and me,” he said.
Lori and Brian had climbed on their bikes and were riding up and down the sidewalk. I stared at mine. It was shiny purple and had a white banana seat, wire baskets on the side, chrome handlebars that swept out like steer horns, and white plastic handles with purple-and-silver tassels. Dad knelt beside me. “Like it?” he asked.
I nodded.
“You know, Mountain Goat, I still feel bad about making you leave your rock collection back in Battle Mountain,” he said. “But we had to travel light.”
“I know,” I said. “It was more than one thing, anyway.”
“I’m not so sure,” Dad said. “Every damn thing in the universe can be broken down into smaller things, even atoms, even protons, so theoretically speaking, I guess you had a winning case. A collection of things should be considered one thing. Unfortunately, theory don’t always carry the day.”
We rode our bicycles everywhere. Sometimes we attached playing cards to the forks with clothespins, and they flapped against the spokes when the wheels turned. Now that Lori could see, she was the navigator. She got a city map from a gas station and plotted out our routes in advance. We pedaled past the Westward Ho Hotel, down Central Avenue where square-faced Indian women sold beaded necklaces and moccasins on rainbow-colored serapes they’d spread on the sidewalk. We pedaled to Woolworth’s, which was bigger than all the stores in Battle Mountain put together, and played tag in the aisles until the manager chased us out. We got Grandma Smith’s old wooden tennis