The Glass Castle_ A Memoir - Jeannette Walls [90]
The man said that someone whose name he was not at liberty to disclose had called his office recommending an inquiry into conditions at 93 Little Hobart Street, where it was possible that dependent children might be living in a state of neglect.
“No one’s neglecting us,” I said.
“You sure?”
“I’m sure, mister.”
“Dad work?”
“Of course,” I said. “He does odd jobs. And he’s an entrepreneur. He’s developing a technology to burn low-grade bituminous coal safely and efficiently.”
“And your mother?”
“She’s an artist,” I said. “And a writer and a teacher.”
“Really?” The man made a note on a pad. “Where?”
“I don’t think Mom and Dad would want me talking to you without them here,” I said. “Come back when they’re here. They’ll answer your questions.”
“Good,” the man said. “I will come back. Tell them that.”
He passed a business card through the crack in the doorway. I watched him make his way down to the ground. “Careful on those stairs now,” I called. “We’re in the process of building a new set.”
After the man left, I was so furious that I ran up the hillside and started hurling rocks—big rocks that it took two hands to lift—into the garbage pit. Except for Erma, I had never hated anyone more than I hated that child-welfare man. Not even Ernie Goad. At least when Ernie and his gang came around yelling that we were trash, we could fight them off with rocks. But if the child-welfare man got it into his head that we were an unfit family, we’d have no way to drive him off. He’d launch an investigation and end up sending me and Brian and Lori and Maureen off to live with different families, even though we all got good grades and knew Morse code. I couldn’t let that happen. No way was I going to lose Brian and Lori and Maureen.
I wished we could do the skedaddle. For a long time Brian, Lori, and I had assumed we would leave Welch sooner or later. Every couple of months we’d ask Dad if we were going to move on. He’d sometimes talk about Australia or Alaska, but he never took any action, and when we asked Mom, she’d start singing some song about how her get up and go had got up and went. Maybe coming back to Welch had killed the idea Dad used to have of himself as a man going places. The truth was, we were stuck.
When Mom got home, I gave her the man’s card and told her about his visit. I was still in a lather. I said that since neither she nor Dad could be bothered to work, and since she refused to leave Dad, the government was going to do the job of splitting up the family for her.
I expected Mom to come back with one of her choice remarks, but she listened to my tirade in silence. Then she said she needed to consider her options. She sat down at her easel. She had run out of canvases and had begun painting on plywood, so she picked up a piece of wood, got out her palette, squeezed some paints onto it, and selected a brush.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m thinking,” she said.
Mom worked quickly, automatically, as if she knew exactly what it was she wanted to paint. A figure took shape in the middle of the board. It was a woman from the waist up, with her arms raised. Blue concentric circles appeared around the waist. The blue was water. Mom was painting a picture of a woman drowning in a stormy lake. When she was finished, she sat for a long time in silence, staring at the picture.
“So what are we going to do?” I finally asked.
“Jeannette, you’re so focused it’s scary.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said.
“I’ll get a job, Jeannette,” she snapped. She threw her paintbrush into the jar that held her turpentine and sat there looking at the drowning woman.
Q UALIFIED TEACHERS were so scarce in McDowell County that two of the teachers I’d have at Welch High School had never been to college. Mom was able to land a job by the end of the week. We spent those days frantically trying to clean the house in anticipation of the return of the child-welfare man. It was a hopeless task, given all the stacks of Mom’s junk and the hole in the ceiling and the disgusting yellow bucket in the kitchen. However, for some