The Glass Castle_ A Memoir - Jeannette Walls [74]
And then there were the Halls. All six of the Hall children had been born mentally retarded, and although they were now middle-aged, they all still lived at home with their mom and dad. When I was friendly to the oldest, Kenny Hall, who was forty-two, he developed a powerful crush on me. The other kids in the neighborhood teased Kenny by telling him that if he gave them a dollar or stripped down to his skivvies and showed them his wanker, they’d arrange for me to go on a date with him. On a Saturday night, if he’d been set up like that, he’d come stand on the street in front of our house, sobbing and hollering about me not keeping our date, and I’d have to go down and explain to him that the other kids had played a trick on him and that, although he did have many admirable qualities, I had a policy against dating older men.
The family who had it the toughest on Little Hobart Street, I would have to say, was the Pastors. The mother, Ginnie Sue Pastor, was the town whore. Ginnie Sue Pastor was thirty-three years old and had eight daughters and one son. Their names all ended with Y. Her husband, Clarence Pastor, had black lung and sat on the front porch of their huge sagging house all day long, but he never smiled or waved at passersby. Just sat there like he was frozen. Everyone in town said he’d been impotent for years and none of the Pastor kids was his.
Ginnie Sue Pastor pretty much kept to herself. At first I wondered if she lay around in a lacy negligee all day, smoking cigarettes and waiting for gentlemen callers. Back in Battle Mountain, the women lounging on the front porch of the Green Lantern—I’d long since figured out what they really did—wore white lipstick and black mascara and partially unbuttoned blouses that showed the tops of their brassieres. But Ginnie Sue Pastor didn’t look like a whore. She was a blowsy woman with dyed yellow hair, and from time to time we saw her out in the front yard, chopping wood or filling a scuttle from the coal pile. She usually wore the same kinds of aprons and canvas farm coats worn by the rest of the women on Little Hobart Street. She looked like any other mom.
I also wondered how she did her whoring with all those kids to look after. One night I saw a car pull up in front of the Pastor house and blink its headlights twice. After a minute, Ginnie Sue came running out the door and climbed into the front seat. Then the car drove off.
Kathy was Ginnie Sue Pastor’s oldest daughter. The other kids treated her like a total pariah, crowing that her mother was a. “hoor” and calling her. “lice girl.” Truth was, she did have a pretty advanced case of head lice. She kept trying to befriend me. One afternoon on the way home from school, when I told her we’d lived for a while in California, she lit up. She said her mama had always wanted to go there. She asked if maybe I’d come over to her place and tell her mama all about life in California.
Of course I went. I’d never gotten inside the Green Lantern, but now I’d get an up-close look at a genuine prostitute. There were lots of things I wanted to know: Was whoring easy money? Was it ever any fun, or was it just gross? Did Kathy and her sisters and her father all know Ginnie Sue Pastor was a whore? What did they think of it? I didn’t plan on flat out asking these questions, but I did think that by getting inside the Pastors’ house and meeting Ginnie Sue, I’d come away with some idea