The Glass Castle_ A Memoir - Jeannette Walls [85]
“Stop the truck,” I said. “We can make it on our own from here.”
“Aw, now, I didn’t mean nothing by that,” he said. “And you know you ain’t getting him home on your own.”
Still, he stopped. I opened the pickup’s tailgate and tried to drag Dad out, but the man was right. I couldn’t do it. So I climbed back in next to the driver, folded my arms across my chest, and stared straight ahead. When we reached 93 Little Hobart Street, he helped me pull Dad out.
“I know you took offense at what I said,” the man told me. “Thing is, I meant it as a compliment.”
Maybe I should have thanked him, but I just waited until he drove off, and then I called Brian to help me get Dad up the hill and into the house.
A couple of months after Erma died, Uncle Stanley fell asleep in the basement while reading comic books and smoking a cigarette. The big clapboard house burned to the ground, but Grandpa and Stanley got out alive, and they moved into a windowless two-room apartment in the basement of an old house around the hill. The drug dealers who’d lived there before had spray-painted curse words and psychedelic patterns on the walls and the ceiling pipes. The landlord didn’t paint over them, and neither did Grandpa and Stanley.
Grandpa and Uncle Stanley did have a working bathroom, so every weekend some of us went over to take a bath. One time I was sitting next to Uncle Stanley on the couch in his room, watching Hee Haw and waiting for my turn in the tub. Grandpa was off at the Moose Lodge, where he spent the better part of every day; Lori was taking her bath; and Mom was at the table in Grandpa’s room working on a crossword puzzle. I felt Stanley’s hand creeping onto my thigh. I looked at him, but he was staring at the Hee Haw Honeys so intently that I couldn’t be sure he was doing it on purpose, so I knocked his hand away without saying anything. A few minutes later, the hand came creeping back. I looked down and saw that Uncle Stanley’s pants were unzipped and he was playing with himself. I felt like hitting him, but I was afraid I’d get in trouble the way Lori had after punching Erma, so I hurried out to Mom.
“Mom, Uncle Stanley is behaving inappropriately,” I said.
“Oh, you’re probably imagining it,” she said.
“He groped me! And he’s wanking off!”
Mom cocked her head and looked concerned. “Poor Stanley,” she said. “He’s so lonely.”
“But it was gross!”
Mom asked me if I was okay. I shrugged and nodded. “Well, there you go,” she said. She said that sexual assault was a crime of perception. “If you don’t think you’re hurt, then you aren’t,” she said. “So many women make such a big deal out of these things. But you’re stronger than that.” She went back to her crossword puzzle.
After that, I refused to go back to Grandpa’s. Being strong was fine, but the last thing I needed was Uncle Stanley thinking I was coming back for more of his fooling around. I did whatever it took to wash myself at Little Hobart Street. In the kitchen, we had an aluminum tub you could fit into if you pulled your legs up against your chest. By then the weather was warm enough to fill the tub with water from the tap under the house and bathe in the kitchen. After the bath, I crouched by the side of the tub and dipped my head in the water and washed my hair. But lugging all those buckets of water up to the house was hard work, and I would put off bathing until I was feeling pretty gamy.
In the spring, the rains came, drenching the valley for days in sheets of falling water. The water ran down the hillside gullies, pulling rocks and small trees with it, and spilled across the roads, tearing off chunks of asphalt. It gushed into the creeks, which swelled up and turned a foaming light brown, like a chocolate milk shake. The creeks emptied into the Tug, which overflowed its banks and flooded the houses and stores along McDowell Street. Mud was four feet deep in some houses, and folks’ pickups and mobile homes were swept away.