The Glass Castle_ A Memoir - Jeannette Walls [75]
Clarence Pastor, sitting on the porch, ignored Kathy and me as we walked by. Inside, there were all these tiny rooms connected together like boxcars. Because of the way the house was settling on the eroding hillside, the floors and ceilings and windows tilted at different angles. There were no paintings on the walls, but the Pastors had taped up pictures of smartly dressed women torn from Sears Roebuck catalogs.
Kathy’s little sisters scampered around noisily, half dressed. None of them looked alike; one was redheaded, one a blonde, one had black hair, and there were all different shades of brown. Sweet Man, the youngest, crawled along the living room floor, sucking on a fat dill pickle. Ginnie Sue Pastor sat at the table in the kitchen. At her elbow was the carcass of a big expensive roaster, the kind we could hardly ever afford. She had a tired, lined face, but her smile was cheerful and open. “Pleased to meet you,” she said to me, wiping her hands on her shirttail. “We ain’t used to getting visitors.”
Ginnie Sue offered us seats at the table. She had heavy breasts that swayed when she moved, and her blond hair was dark at the roots. “You-all help me with this bird, and I’ll fix you a couple of Ginnie Sue’s special chicken rolls.” She turned to me. “You know how to pick a chicken clean?”
“I sure do,” I said. I hadn’t had anything to eat all day.
“Well, show me, then,” Ginnie Sue said.
I went for a wing first, pulling apart the spindly double bones and getting all the meat trapped there. Then I set to work on the leg and thigh bones, snapping them at the joints and peeling off the tendons and digging out the marrow. Kathy and Ginnie Sue were also working on the bird, but soon they stopped to watch me. From the tail, I pulled that nice piece of meat that everybody misses. I turned the carcass upside down and scraped off the jellied fat and meat flecks with my fingernails. I stuck my arm elbow-deep into the bird to excavate any meat clinging to the rib cage.
“Girl,” Ginnie Sue said. “in all my days, I have never seen no one pick a chicken clean like you.”
I held up the spear-shaped cartilage in the breast bone, which most people don’t eat, and bit down with a satisfying crunch.
Ginnie Sue scraped the meat into a bowl, mixed it with mayonnaise and Cheez Whiz, then crushed a handful of potato chips and added them. She spread the mixture onto two slices of Wonder bread, then rolled each slice into a cylinder and passed them to us. “Birds in a blanket,” she said. They tasted great.
“Mama, Jeannette lived in California,” Kathy said.
“That so?” Ginnie Sue said. “Live in California and be a stewardess, that was my dream.” She sighed. “Never got beyond Bluefield.”
I told her and Kathy about life in California. It quickly became clear they had no interest in desert mining towns, so I told them about San Francisco and then about Las Vegas, which wasn’t exactly in California, but they didn’t seem to care. I made the days we had spent there seem like years, and the showgirls I’d seen from a distance seem like close friends and neighbors. I described the glittering casinos and the glamorous high rollers, the palm trees and the swimming pools, the hotels with ice-cold air-conditioning and the restaurants where hostesses with long white gloves lit flaming desserts.
“It don’t get no better than that!” Ginnie Sue said.
“No, ma’am, it sure don’t,” I told her.
Sweet Man came in crying, and Ginnie Sue picked him up and let him suck some mayonnaise off her finger. “You did good on that bird,” Ginnie Sue told me. “You strike me as the kind of girl who’s one day going to be eating roast chicken and those on-fire desserts just as much as you want.” She winked.
It was only on the way home that I realized I hadn’t gotten answers to any of my questions. While I was sitting there talking to Ginnie Sue, I’d even forgotten she was a whore. One thing about whoring: It put a chicken on the table.
W E FOUGHT A LOT in Welch. Not just to fend off our enemies but to fit in. Maybe it was because there was so little to do