Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands by Chris Bohjalian Page B

rocks were real, but no farmer had ever built it to section off a field or try and be a good neighbor. See? I’ve read Robert Frost, too. Okay, I won’t show off like that anymore. But the wall always kind of appalled me because the people who built our meadow mansion had a stonemason construct it so the house would look more like it belonged on the outskirts of Reddington. Maybe it helped a little, but not very much. It was still kind of like putting mud boots on a dairy cow.) So, why did I break the wineglasses? Because I was frustrated and angry that my parents were drunk. Again. Their marriage worked a lot better before we moved to Vermont. At least I think it did. They didn’t start fighting until they got here—or if they did, they did a much better job of hiding it from me. I guess there were a lot of reasons why Vermont was so toxic for their marriage, but I think the biggest one was that they just didn’t belong in a place so small. So rural. We moved there because my dad was excited by the job: a chief engineer at a nuclear power plant that had two reactors. And they probably convinced themselves that Reddingtonwas close enough to Montreal or Boston when they needed a city fix. But it’s really not that close at all. We hardly went either place. And it’s not like there were a lot of other flatlanders in Reddington. (Just so you know, “flatlander” is a real word in Vermont. That’s not some teen-speak I made up. And it says it all about what it means to be an outsider, doesn’t it?) There were some, of course, like Philip Christiansen’s family, but I’m really not sure my mom had any close friends in Reddington or Newport. It’s kind of sad, when you think about it. She just never fit in. My dad grew up in Phoenix and my mom in Westchester County. My dad did a little better than my mom because he could talk sports and nuke-speak with the other engineers, but my mom pretty much worked alone in her office. And she just didn’t have that much in common with most of the other moms in Reddington. Even when I was in the third and fourth grade and my mom would help chaperone the field trips, it was agony for me to watch her. There would always be three moms, and she’d be the odd mom out. Just sitting alone on the school bus or walking alone while the other moms dished about whatever and kept one eye on the kids to prevent us from accidentally killing ourselves.
    I don’t know, maybe if she had tried more. But maybe she did and she just didn’t belong in Vermont. Who knows? Maybe she just didn’t belong anywhere. There are people like that, right?
    A couple of times my dad interviewed for other jobs at other plants, but one was in Nebraska and I’m not sure Nebraska would have solved the rural problem, and he didn’t get the job at the plant near Boston. And then, after he had the drinking suspension in his personnel file, he wasn’t going anywhere. No other plant was going to hire an engineer with that kind of black mark.
    Looking back, I’m not sure we would have moved even if my dad had gotten that job closer to Boston, because I was about to start ninth grade and my parents were sort of under the spell of Reddington Academy: a really good prep school I could go to for free. And I don’t think they wanted to uproot me—move a kid as she starts high school. I seemed to be difficult enough as it was.
    So, they were unhappy and they drank. Not, I gather, a unique story. Shit happens and the grown-ups dive headfirst into the Scotch. At least some do.
    Anyway, the wineglasses. It was a Saturday night—only around seven-thirty—and my parents were both so drunk that neither of them felt sober enough to drive me to Lisa’s house, where I was supposed to be hanging out. I was thirteen. So they said I couldn’t go because they couldn’t drive. And they didn’t want me to call Lisa and have her mom come and get me, because they didn’t want people to know they were hammered. And so they started