When Dad wasn't telling us about all the amazing things he had already done, he was telling us about the wondrous things he was going to do. Like build the Glass Castle. All of Dad's engineering skills and mathematical genius were coming together in one special project: a great big house he was going to build for us in the desert. It would have a glass ceiling and thick glass walls and even a glass staircase. The Glass Castle would have solar cells on the top that would catch the sun's rays and convert them into electricity for heating and cooling and running all the appliances. It would even have its own water-purification system. Dad had worked out the architecture and the floor plans and most of the mathematical calculations. He carried around the blueprints for the Glass Castle wherever we went, and sometimes he'd pull them out and let us work on the design for our rooms.
All we had to do was find gold, Dad said, and we were on the verge of that. Once he finished the Prospector and we struck it rich, he'd start work on our Glass Castle.
AS MUCH AS DAD liked to tell stories about himself, it was almost impossible to get him to talk about his parents or where he was born. We knew he came from a town called Welch, in West Virginia, where a lot of coal was mined, and that his father had worked as a clerk for the railroad, sitting every day in a little station house, writing messages on pieces of paper that he held up on a stick for the passing train engineers. Dad had no interest in a life like that, so he left Welch when he was seventeen to join the air force and become a pilot.
One of his favorite stories, which he must have told us a hundred times, was about how he met and fell in love with Mom. Dad was in the air force, and Mom was in the USO, but when they met, she was on leave visiting her parents at their cattle ranch near Fish Creek Canyon.
Dad and some of his air force buddies were on a cliff of the canyon, trying to work up the nerve to dive into the lake forty feet below, when Mom and a friend drove up. Mom was wearing a white bathing suit that showed off her figure and her skin, which was dark from the Arizona sun. She had light brown hair that turned blond in the summer, and she never wore any makeup except deep red lipstick. She looked just like a movie star, Dad always said, but hell, he'd met lots of beautiful women before, and none of them had ever made him weak in the knees. Mom was different. He saw right away that she had true spirit. He fell in love with her the split second he laid eyes on her.
Mom walked up to the air force men and told them that diving off the cliff was no big deal, she'd been doing it since she was little. The men didn't believe her, so Mom went right to the edge of the cliff and did a perfect swan dive into the water below.
Dad jumped in after her. No way in hell, he'd say, was he letting a fine broad like that get away from him.
"What kind of dive did you do, Dad?" I asked whenever he told the story.
"A parachute dive. Without a parachute," he always answered.
Dad swam after Mom, and right there in the water, he told her he was going to marry her. Twenty-three men had already proposed to her, Mom told Dad, and she had turned them all down. "What makes you think I'd accept your proposal?" she asked.
"I didn't propose to you," Dad said. "I told you I was going to marry you."
Six months later, they got married. I always thought it was the most romantic story I'd ever heard, but Mom didn't like it. She didn't think it was romantic at all.
"I had to say yes," Mom said. "Your father wouldn't take no for an answer." Besides, she explained, she had to get away from her mother, who wouldn't let her make even the smallest decision on her own. "I had no idea your father would be even worse."
Dad left the air force after he got married because he wanted to make a fortune for his family, and you couldn't do that in the military. In a few months, Mom was pregnant. When Lori came out, she was mute and bald as an egg for the first three years of her life. Then suddenly, she sprouted curly hair the color of a new penny and started speaking nonstop. But it sounded like gibberish, and everyone thought she was addled except for Mom, who understood her perfectly and said she had an excellent vocabulary.
A year after Lori was born, Mom and Dad had a second daughter, Mary Charlene, who had coal-black hair and chocolate-brown eyes, just like Dad. But Mary Charlene died one night when she was nine months old. Crib death, Mom always said. Two years later, I was born. "You were to replace Mary Charlene," Mom said. She told me that she had ordered up a second redheaded girl so Lori wouldn't feel like she was weird. "You were such a skinny baby," Mom used to tell me. "The longest, boniest thing the nurses had ever seen."
Brian arrived when I was one. He was a blue baby, Mom said. When he was born, he couldn't breathe and came into this world having a seizure. Whenever Mom told the story, she would hold her arms rigid and clench her teeth and go bug-eyed to show how Brian looked. Mom said when she saw him like that, she thought, Uh-oh, looks like this one's a goner, too. But Brian lived. For the first year of his life, he kept having those seizures, then one day they just stopped. He turned into a tough little guy who never whined or cried, even the time I accidentally pushed him off the top bunk and he broke his nose.
Mom always said people worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you, she said. It immunized your body and your soul, and that was why she ignored us kids when we cried. Fussing over children who cry only encourages them, she told us. That's positive reinforcement for negative behavior.
Mom never seemed upset about Mary Charlene's death. "God knows what He's doing," she said. "He gave me some perfect children, but He also gave me one that wasn't so perfect, so He said, 'Oops, I better take this one back.'" Dad, however, wouldn't talk about Mary Charlene. If her name came up, his face grew stony and he'd leave the room. He was the one who found her body in the crib, and Mom couldn't believe how much it shook him up. "When he found her, he stood there like he was in shock or something, cradling her stiff little body in his arms, and then he screamed like a wounded animal," she told us. "I never heard such a horrible sound."
Mom said Dad was never the same after Mary Charlene died. He started having dark moods, staying out late and coming home drunk, and losing jobs. One day soon after Brian was born, we were short on cash, so Dad pawned Mom's big diamond wedding ring, which her mother had paid for, and that upset Mom. After that, whenever Mom and Dad got in a fight, Mom brought up the ring, and Dad told her to quit her damn bellyaching. He'd say he was going to get her a ring even fancier than the one he pawned. That was why we had to find gold. To get Mom a new wedding ring. That and so we could build the Glass Castle.
"DO YOU LIKE ALWAYS moving around?" Lori asked me.
"Of course I do!" I said. "Don't you?"