The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls Page A

erasing Mom's writing and penciling in the changes. "Double E s as well, and no silent E at the end."
    Mom marveled at how brilliant Lori was. "Lori gets straight A s," she once told me.
    "So do I," I said.
    "Yes, but you have to work for them."
    Mom was right, Lori was brilliant. I think helping Mom like that was one of Lori's favorite things in the world. She wasn't very athletic and didn't like exploring as much as Brian and I did, but she loved anything having to do with pencil and paper. After Mom and Lori finished the lesson plans, they'd sit around the spool table, sketching each other and cutting out magazine photos of animals and landscapes and people with wrinkled faces and putting them in Mom's folder of potential painting subjects.
    Lori understood Mom better than anyone. It didn't bother her that when Miss Beatty showed up to observe Mom's class, Mom started yelling at Lori to prove to Miss Beatty that she was capable of disciplining her students. One time Mom went so far as to order Lori up to the front of the class, where she gave her a whipping with a wooden paddle.
    "Were you acting up?" I asked Lori when I heard about the whipping.
    "No," Lori said.
    "Then why would Mom paddle you?"
    "She had to punish someone, and she didn't want to upset the other kids," Lori said.

    ONCE MOM STARTED TEACHING , I thought maybe we'd be able to buy new clothes, eat cafeteria lunches, and even spring for nifty extras like the class pictures the school took every year. Mom and Dad had never been able to buy the class pictures for us, though a couple of times, Mom secretly snipped a snapshot out of the packet before returning it. Despite Mom's salary, we didn't buy the class pictures that yearor even steal thembut that was probably just as well. Mom had read somewhere that mayonnaise was good for your hair, and the morning the photographer was coming to school, she slathered a few spoonfuls on mine. She didn't realize you were supposed to wash out the mayonnaise, and in the picture that year I was peering out from under one stiff shingle of hair.
    Still, things did improve. Even though Dad had been fired from the barite mine, we were able to continue living in the depot by paying rent to the mining company, since not a lot of other families were vying for the place. We now had food in the fridge, at least until it got toward the end of the month, when we usually ran out of money because neither Mom nor Dad ever mastered the art of budgeting.
    But Mom's salary created a whole new set of problems. While Dad liked it that Mom was bringing home a paycheck, he saw himself as the head of the household, and he maintained that the money should be turned over to him. It was his responsibility, he'd say, to handle the family finances. And he needed money to fund his gold-leaching research.
    "The only research you're doing is on the liver's capacity to absorb alcohol," Mom said. Still, she found it hard to straight-out defy Dad. For some reason, she didn't have it in her to say no to him. If she tried, he'd argue and wheedle and sulk and bully and plain wear her down. So she resorted to evasive tactics. She'd tell Dad she hadn't cashed her paycheck yet, or she'd pretend she'd left it at school and hide it until she could sneak off to the bank. Then she'd pretend she'd lost all the money.
    Pretty soon Dad took to showing up at school on payday, waiting outside in the car, and taking us all straight to Winnemucca, where the bank was located, so Mom could cash her paycheck immediately. Dad insisted on escorting Mom into the bank. Mom had us kids come along so she could try to slip some of the cash to us first. Back in the car, Dad would go through Mom's purse and take the money out.
    On one trip, Mom went into the bank alone because Dad couldn't find a place to park. When she came out, she was missing a sock. "Jeannette, I'm going to give you a sock that I want you to put in a safe place," Mom said once she got in the car. She winked hard at