The Glass Box

By Molly Kraus

My parents’ mid-life crisis began after my mother received a phone call from my dad. The pressures of handling strangers’ divorces had caused him to have a panic attack while driving to his successful law firm in Atlanta. This was the moment that triggered my family’s move from the suburbs to the country.

“I can’t believe you are doing this to me,” I gasped in between gulps of air and tears as I sat on the edge of my parents’ bed. My whole 12-year-old world was about to change and my parents were the arbiters of its destruction. Sadness swelled up and broke the levies of my anger. “I hate this stupid family!” I proclaimed as I ran into the bathroom. I locked the door and collapsed onto the cold tile floor.

Two weeks passed and my parents scraped me off the tiles and drove me cross-country along with my twin sister Hannah and our two Dalmatians. We arrived in the little town of Pagosa Springs, Colorado a week later. This community was a straight drive through—if you blinked, you would miss the entire town. Church, liquor store, church, liquor store… this was the layout of the community. It was here that my parents hoped to fulfill their romantic dreams of the West by building several log cabins and running a bed and breakfast. To do so, they felt it necessary to remove us from all civilized existence, into Hinsdale County… otherwise known as rural America. Our dwelling was 45 minutes from town, the closest neighbor was five miles away, and the ratio of cow to person was 60 to one.

“The realtor says Hinsdale has a lot of tourist traffic,” my mom explained as she drove down a dirt road.

Your realtor was a liar, I thought, as the only person I saw drive past us was an old man with tan leathery skin in a baby blue, beat-up Ford pickup. My mom took a left and drove up a hill.

The road was surrounded on both sides by endless hayfields, which were blocked off by makeshift fences, constructed of barbed wire and thin wooden posts. The fences were so old that some of the posts had come up from the ground and were spinning freely around in the wind.

My mom parked the car on the side of the road. We got out and stepped through an opening in the fence. My mom, dad, Hannah and I stood there in the middle of the field, the wind blowing through our hair, and the smell of cow manure burning in our noses. At this moment I should have felt a sense of relief, standing in the middle of 45 acres of never-ending hay and bright blue sky. But this open space was surrounded by a suffocating glass box, from which I would not be able to escape. In the midst of my temporary paralyzed state, Hannah slowly turned to me giving the look of whatthefuckarewedoinghere. We both stood there in our new reality, locked in silent screams. We moved onto the field two weeks later, after my parents bought a 24-by-8 foot travel trailer. The artificial home had won out over the giant tipi because it would be warmer.

“It’s going to be a great adventure,” my mom said with a smile and a contradictory pool of tears as she grabbed boxes from the car and slid them into our aluminum house. That night, the four of us packed into the cab of my dad’s truck and drove around looking for cell phone service. When the phone showed four bars, my mom called her brother. She had just recently started talking to him again after five years of silence.

“You’re coming? You will be here in three days?” She hung up the phone, wearing her trademark smile. “Your Uncle Pat and his wife Peggy are coming to live with us!” She gleefully announced. I barely knew anyone from my mom’s side of the family.

The last time I saw my grandfather was at Macy’s four years earlier. Outside the store, my mother and I walked past an old man sitting on a bench. She later realized he was her dad. But Pat was different. He was her big brother, and for some reasons her hero.

The only thing I knew about Pat was from the information I had pieced together myself. To avoid the draft during the Vietnam War, he had left Georgia and moved to Canada. There, he put his chemistry degree to use, making LSD and living in the woods. Somehow, he got a job teaching at a private boys’ school. His wife was named Peggy; she was his second marriage. Pat and Peggy had decided to come live with us and help my parents construct their western dream.

Three days later Pat and Peggy appeared. They formed out of some molecules in the air with their white Volkswagen van and parked it on a hill 200 yards from our trailer. It was with their arrival that the pressure inside the glass box became denser.

Pat and Peggy were stereotypical burnouts. Pat was a middle-aged man, signified by the way his hair was thinning and his gut was beginning to tuck over his belt. Peggy was a petite woman with short arms and large thighs. There was an uncomfortable awkwardness surrounding Pat and Peggy; they were the kind of people who would look at you, yet at the same time be staring right past you.

For dinner, they often ate raw corn, which they stored under their van. Whatever the reasons were that gave them these personality traits, they only added to the list of why I hated my new home.

Later that night, when we went to sleep, I looked out my window from the top bunk. I could see the tiny golden lights coming from the windows of their van.

They are so weird, I thought to myself. I turned onto my back, staring at the beige plastic roof of the trailer, eight inches from my face. I hate my life.

I focused most of my anger at this new world towards my mom. In the past she had provided me with security. Now, I felt uncomfortable on this land and around Pat and Peggy. The two of them would often ignore Hannah and me when we tried to talk to them, or make us feel inferior when they finally listened to what we had to say.

“Hey Pat, did you ever see that movie Good Will Hunting?” I asked him one day. Pat looked directly at me, paused and turned his head away.

“So Peggy, do you still want corn for dinner?” My mom was oblivious to their behavior, which made me feel alone. She had hurt me by moving here and allowing these two strangers to come into our family. But where was my family? This was no family. No family would allow me to hurt so much.

To my mom, Pat and Peggy were the two superheroes of western living. They could do anything: cook in high altitude, build a shed, fix irrigation ditches, and even throw hatchets. Yes, these were the two people who made life in the West even better than what it was. But after four months, these superheroes showed their true selves.

The day before Hannah’s and my birthday, our parents took us to Albuquerque, New Mexico. There, my mom and dad rented a hotel room for the four of us and another for Pat and Peggy. We were there for a few hours when my mother got a phone call from Pat in the other room.

“Oh…okay. I understand. The girls will be upset that you will not be here to go out to dinner with us….that is fine….we will see you when we get home and we’ll celebrate then. Okay. Bye.” My mom hung up the phone. “Pat said he cannot handle the confinement of the room. They are driving back to Pagosa tonight and we will celebrate your birthday with them when we get back.”

We returned a day later, driving in the day’s brightness, up the hill to our property. Even in the clarity of the day—the light everywhere—the land had an evil feeling of desertion. Pat and Peggy’s van was nowhere to be found. They had evaporated as quickly as they had appeared.

All of us were silent as we drove up to our house, straining our eyes for any sign of the two of them. My dad parked the car and the four of us walked up to the trailer. My mom unlocked the aluminum door and it swung open. On the counter of our makeshift dining table I saw an envelope—I knew it was from them. All alone on the table, the clean white envelope looked so heartless. I walked up to the note and picked it up. “Your cake is in the fridge. Happy birthday.” For all the times they ignored me and made me feel inferior, this insincerity marked the breaking point. I was wounded: as wounded as a 12-year-old can be when an adult disregards her birthday. Tears began to slide down my cheeks and gather in the corners of my mouth. I looked at my mother, who by then had also read the envelope. She began to cry, too.

“God damn it, that son of a bitch,” she cried, with years of pain from her family behind her words. Pat and Peggy had hurt me and abandoned me, just as they had done to my mother so many times before. My mom wanted to say that she had a family, not just the one that she and my father had created together, but the one that had taken care of her as a child. They had left her again. But this time they left me, too.

That evening I sat outside with my mom as she drank a glass of wine. We were sitting in lawn chairs placed in the middle of the hayfield. The sun was setting, displaying changing hues of orange and red which contrasted with the blue mountains.

“I am sorry,” she said. “I messed up.” I gave no reply. I just looked forward, no longer blaming her for the situation. “I just thought,” she continued still thinking that I was angry at her for what happened, “that it would be different this time. I didn’t think they would leave like this.”

At that moment the glass box lifted.