The Glass Castle_ A Memoir - Jeannette Walls [88]
“That sounds like an awful life,” Mom said.
“Worse than this?” I asked.
Mom turned quiet. She seemed to be thinking. Then she looked up. She was smiling serenely. “I can’t leave your father,” she said. “It’s against the Catholic faith.” Then she sighed. “And anyway, you know your mom. I’m an excitement addict.”
M OM NEVER TOLD Dad that I’d urged her to leave him. That summer he still thought of me as his biggest supporter, and given that there was so little competition for the job, I probably was.
One afternoon in June, Dad and I were sitting out on the porch, our legs dangling over the side, looking down at the houses below. That summer, it was so hot I could barely breathe. It seemed hotter than Phoenix or Battle Mountain, where it regularly climbed above a hundred degrees, so when Dad told me it was only ninety degrees, I said the thermometer must be broken. But he said no, we were used to dry desert heat, and this was humid heat.
It was a lot hotter, Dad pointed out, down in the valley along Stewart Street, which was lined with those cute brick houses that had their neat, square lawns and corrugated aluminum breezeways. The valleys trapped the heat. Our house was the highest on the mountainside, which made it, ergo, the coolest spot in Welch. In case of flooding—as we had seen—it was also the safest. “You didn’t know I put a lot of thought into where we should live, did you?” he asked me. “Real estate’s about three things, Mountain Goat. Location. Location. Location.”
Dad started laughing. It was a silent laugh that made his shoulders shake, and the more he laughed, the funnier it seemed to him, which made him laugh even harder. I had to start laughing, too, and soon we were both hysterical, lying on our backs, tears running down our cheeks, slapping our feet on the porch floor. We’d get too winded to laugh any further, our sides cramping with stitches, and we’d think our fit was over, but then one of us would start chuckling, and that would get the other going, and again we’d both end up shrieking like hyenas.
The main source of relief from the heat for the kids in Welch was the public swimming pool, down by the railroad tracks near the Esso station. Brian and I had gone swimming once, but Ernie Goad and his friends were there, and they started telling everybody that we Wallses lived in garbage and would stink up the pool water something awful. This was Ernie Goad’s opportunity to take revenge for the Battle of Little Hobart Street. One of his friends came up with the phrase. “health epidemic,” and they were going on to the parents and lifeguards that we needed to be ejected to prevent an outbreak at the pool. Brian and I decided to leave. As we were walking away, Ernie Goad came up to the chain-link fence. “Go on home to the garbage dump!” he shouted. His voice was shrill with triumph. “Go on, now, and don’t come back!”
A week later, with the heat still holding, I ran into Dinitia Hewitt downtown. She had just come from the pool and had her wet hair pulled back under a scarf. “Brother, that water felt good,” she said, drawing out the word. “good” so it sounded like it had about fifteen Os in it. “Do you ever go swimming?”
“They don’t like us to go there,” I said.
Dinitia nodded, even though I hadn’t explained. Then she said. “Why don’t you come swimming with us in the morning?”
By. “us” I knew she meant the other black people. The pool was not segregated, anyone could swim at any time—technically, at least—but the fact was that all the black people swam in the morning, when the pool was free, and all the white people swam in the afternoon, when admission was fifty cents. No one had planned this arrangement, and no rules enforced it. That was just the way it was.
I surely wanted to get back in that water, but I couldn’t help but feel that if I took Dinitia up on her offer, I’d be violating some sort of taboo. “Wouldn’t anybody get mad?” I asked.
“’Cause you’re white?” she asked. “Your own kind might, but we won’t. And your