The Glass Castle: Parts I and II

It grieved Mom that the mine was destroying so much white rock — she said it was real marble and deserved a better fate and that, by making her sculptures, she was at least immortalizing some of it.

Mom got upset at Dad’s blasphemy, reached her foot over to the driver’s side, and stomped on the brake.

But we’d call the baby Maureen, a name Mom liked because it was a diminutive of Mary, so she’d also be naming the baby after herself but pretty much no one would know it.

Before, whenever we were out of food, Dad was always there, full of ideas and ingenuity.

They’d stick their heads into her classroom and see the students playing tag and throwing erasers while Mom was up front, spinning like a top and letting pieces of chalk fly from her hands to demonstrate centrifugal force.

If she tried, he’d argue and wheedle and sulk and bully and plain wear her down.

We tried to explain that Billy had started it, that we’d been provoked and were defending ourselves and didn’t even aim to kill, but the cop wasn’t interested in the nuances of the situation.

Although we lived outside the district, Mom begged and cajoled the principal until he allowed us to enroll.

If the typewriter keys were clattering away, she was at work on one of her novels, poems, plays, short stories, or her illustrated collection of pithy sayings — one was “Life is a bowl of cherries, with a few nuts thrown in” — which she’d titled “R. M. Walls’s Philosophy of Life.”

Since the weather was sweltering, she suggested we cool off by jumping into the fountain in front of the building.

Lori said it sounded outright felonious, but Dad said all he was doing was outsmarting the fat-cat bank owners who shylocked the common man by charging usurious interest rates.