The Glass Castle_ A Memoir - Jeannette Walls [46]
Since Mom and Dad had all this money, we got our own telephone. We had never owned a telephone before, and whenever it rang, we kids all scrambled for it. Whoever got there first summoned up a super-snooty English accent:. “Walls residence, the butler speaking, may I help you?” while the rest of us cracked up.
We also had a big record player in a wooden cabinet that had been Grandma’s. You could put a stack of records on it, and when one was finished playing, the needle arm automatically swung out and the next record dropped down with a happy slap. Mom and Dad loved music, especially rousing stuff that made you want to get up and dance, or at least sway your head or tap your foot. Mom was always going to thrift stores and coming back with old albums of polka music, Negro spirituals, German marching bands, Italian operas, and cattle roundup songs. She also bought boxes of used high heels that she called her dancing shoes. She’d slip on a pair of dancing shoes, put a stack of records on the phonograph, and crank the volume way up. Dad danced with her if he was there; otherwise she’d dance alone, waltzing or jitterbugging or doing the Texas two-step from room to room, the house filled with the sounds of Mario Lanza, or oompahing tubas, or some mournful cowboy singing. “The Streets of Laredo.”
Mom and Dad also bought an electric washing machine that we kept out on the patio. It was a white enamel tub up on legs, and we filled it with water from the garden hose. A big agitator twisted back and forth, making the entire machine dance around on the cement patio. It had no cycles, so you waited until the water got dirty, then put the clothes through the wringer—two rubber rolling pins rigged above the tub that were turned by a motor. To rinse the clothes, you’d repeat the process without soap, then let the water drain into the yard to help the grass grow.
Despite our wondrous appliances, life in Phoenix wasn’t total luxury. We had about a gazillion cockroaches, big, strong things with shiny wings. We had just a few at first, but since Mom was not exactly a compulsive cleaner, they multiplied. After a while, entire armies were scuttling across the walls and the floors and the kitchen counters. In Battle Mountain, we’d had lizards to eat the flies and cats to eat the lizards. We couldn’t think of any animal that liked to eat roaches, so I suggested we buy roach spray, like all our neighbors did, but Mom was opposed to chemical warfare. It was like with those Shell No-Pest strips, she said; we’d end up poisoning ourselves, too.
Mom decided hand-to-hand combat was the best tactic. We conducted roach massacres in the kitchen at night, because that was when they came out in force. We armed ourselves with rolled-up magazines or shoes—even though I was only nine, I already wore size-ten shoes that Brian called. “roach killers”—and sneaked into the kitchen. Mom threw the light switch, and we kids all started the assault. You didn’t even have to aim. We had so many roaches that if you hit any flat surface, you were sure to take out at least a few.
The house also had termites. We discovered this a few months after we moved in, when Lori’s foot crashed through the spongy wood floor in the living room. After inspecting the house, Dad decided that the termite infestation was so severe nothing could be done about it. We’d have to coexist with the critters. So we walked around the hole in the living room floor.
But the wood was chewed through everywhere. We kept stepping on soft spots in the floorboards, crashing through, and creating new holes. “Damned if this floor isn’t starting to look like a piece of Swiss cheese,