The Glass Castle_ A Memoir - Jeannette Walls [83]
“Just remember,” Mom said after examining the blisters. “what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.”
“If that was true, I’d be Hercules by now,” Lori said.
Days later, when the blisters burst, the clear liquid inside ran down to her feet. For weeks, the fronts of her legs were open sores, so sensitive that she had trouble sleeping under blankets. But by then the temperature had fallen again, and if she kicked off the blankets, she froze.
One day that winter, I went to a classmate’s house to work on a school project. Carrie Mae Blankenship’s father was an administrator at the McDowell County hospital, and her family lived in a solid brick house on McDowell Street. The living room was decorated in shades of orange and brown, and the plaid pattern of the curtains matched the couch upholstery. On the wall was a framed photo of Carrie Mae’s older sister in her high school graduation gown. It was lit with its own tiny lamp, just like in a museum.
There was also a small plastic box on the wall near the living room door. A row of tiny numbers ran along the top, under a lever. Carrie Mae’s father saw me studying the box while she was out of the room. “It’s a thermostat,” he told me. “You move the lever to make the house warmer or cooler.”
I thought he was pulling my leg, but he moved the lever, and I heard a muffled roar kick on in the basement.
“That’s the furnace,” he said.
He led me over to a vent in the floor and had me hold my hand above it and feel the warm air wafting upward. I didn’t want to say anything to show how impressed I was, but for many nights afterward, I dreamed that we had a thermostat at 93 Little Hobart Street. I dreamed that all we had to do to fill our house with that warm, clean furnace heat was to move a lever.
E RMA DIED DURING the last hard snowfall at the end of our second winter in Welch. Dad said her liver simply gave out. Mom took the position that Erma drank herself to death. “It was suicide every bit as much as if she had stuck her head in the oven,” Mom said. “only slower.”
Whatever the cause, Erma had made detailed preparations for the occasion of her death. For years she had read The Welch Daily News only for the obituaries and black-bordered memorial notices, clipping and saving her favorites. They provided inspiration for her own death announcement, which she’d worked and reworked. She had also written pages of instructions on how she wanted her funeral conducted. She had picked out all the hymns and prayers, chosen her favorite funeral home, ordered a lavender lace nightgown from JCPenney that she wanted to be buried in, and selected a two-toned lavender casket with shiny chrome handles from the mortician’s catalog.
Erma’s death brought out Mom’s pious side. While we were waiting for the preacher, she took out her rosary and prayed for Erma’s soul, which she feared was in jeopardy since, as she saw it, Erma had committed suicide. She also tried to make us kiss Erma’s corpse. We flat out refused, but Mom went up in front of the mourners, genuflected with a grand sweep, and then kissed Erma’s cheek so vigorously that you could hear the puckering sound throughout the chapel.
I was sitting next to Dad. It was the first time in my life I’d ever seen him wearing a necktie, which he always called a noose. His face was tight and closed, but I could tell he was distraught. More distraught than I’d ever seen him, which surprised me, because Erma had seemed to have some sort of an evil hold over Dad, and I thought he’d be relieved to be free of it.
As we walked home, Mom asked us kids if we had anything nice to say about Erma now that she had passed. We took a couple of steps in silence, then Lori said. “Ding-dong, the witch is dead.”
Brian and I started snickering. Dad wheeled around and gave Lori such a cold, angry look that I thought he might wallop her. “She