I think I can remember the first time I swam in the ocean. I can definitely remember my first concert (Prince—great) and my first French kiss (back of a school bus in the seventh grade—not so great). If pressed, I can call to mind my first roller coaster ride and the first horror movie that slackened my jaw. But I can’t seem to recall my first visit to a shopping mall. I can never pin down the first time I ate at an Applebee’s or played mini golf or hung out in a gas station parking lot or drove around in a friend’s old Toyota, listening to Dave Matthews and Rusted Root, smoking cigarettes, trying to figure out how to fill the night.
I do know when the dream of the suburbs began to die for me—I can locate that moment when I became grateful to be from New York City and stopped believing that my life would have been better, easier had I been born in Cherry Hill or Westfield or Bridgeport—but I’m not quite sure when the dream began. I can’t remember when or how I fell for the suburbs, but I believe the love was urgent and long-lasting. It was an affection that gave me permission to dream and imagine that the idea of a mowed lawn held nothing but promise.
I read a lot as a kid. I’d pick up anything that came my way, but I had a particular fondness for young adult thrillers. At ten years old, I had frizzy bangs, a large head, and a collection of books by Christopher Pike, R. L. Stine, and Lois Duncan. These were tales of kids in trouble—seemingly typical suburban teens who had sex, drank too much after football games, and occasionally murdered an intolerable teacher. The scare factor was certainly appealing, but I think what tugged me about these stories, what involved me in a gut-level way was how perfectly foreign they felt from my experience. Every book took place on little streets in little towns far from where I grew up in the Bronx. Parents lived in the same house, dinner was on the table at seven, there were sibling fights over who got the car on Friday nights. These kids I read about—kids named Chris and Sarah and Jennifer and Matt—played field hockey and lived in houses with swimming pools. They had curfews to follow and midterms to take. They hung out in malls and diners, they had school colors.
Now some of this was already within my frame of reference—I wore ragged my VHS copies of Can’t Buy Me Love and Adventures in Babysitting right around this time. And in the fifth grade, I went to a sleepaway camp in New Jersey with kids from West Orange, Short Hills, and the Caldwells. I met fifteen girls named Caitlin that first summer. I learned about the difference between lacrosse and badminton. I saw bouncing ponytails of the brightest yellow. My camp was only 70 miles from the city, but it could have been in Burkina Faso, it felt so very different from what I knew in New York. Over the years, my friends talked about cheerleading tryouts and homecoming games and older brothers who played music out in the garage and decorating their lockers at school and dry humping in the backseat of a Volvo and family dinners and running into Billy Schneider at the mall on Saturday and he finally got his braces off and he looks so frigging cute and he better ask me to Winter Formal.
When I was ten years old, I moved in with my father, a bachelor musician who lived on a quiet, tree-lined street in the Bronx. He wasn’t strict about bedtime, we ordered pizza or Chinese for dinner, he played guitar as we watched Terminator 2 or The Cutting Edge on cable. I took the #12 bus to the #6 train to get to school each day, and I read during my commute. My dad often had shows at night, and sometimes I’d tag along. If I stayed home, I’d do my homework, order some dinner, and read. I was young. I wanted to dream. I was outgoing, but lonely. And hungry for something I couldn’t quite name. My reading had endowed me with an imagination the size of a Jeep Wrangler and I clung to my books, relied on John Hughes’ movies. I needed those stories from my friends about family vacations and junior prom. These tales from the suburbs were my escape. They soothed the ache of real living and gave me permission to fantasize that life could get good if I had two parents at home, a driver’s license, and a ruddily handsome, football-playing boyfriend named Chad to kiss me at the movies and take me to prom.
I’m talking about a delusion here, and it was a painful one. As I grew up, as I left behind the itchiness of prepubescence and moved through the unceasing, essential horror that marks one’s teenage years, I continued to rely on the fantasy that things were better out in New Jersey and Connecticut. All I could do was dwell on what I didn’t have. All I knew at that time was what I wasn’t. This feeling—I’m nothing, everyone else has it figured out—is one of life’s invariable constants. But it makes you feel like doggie doo just the same, and ignores an essential truth—that living is hard and painful and humbling in the saddest ways for everybody. Yeah, but they must be happy—they live on Oak Lane and have two cars! Maybe, but most people don’t likes to wipe their asses or take out the trash or lose a parent or be smacked by someone they love, and it’s just how it goes.
After I graduated from high school, I didn’t go to college straight away. I spent a few years wandering around and going to the movies and being broke. A few of my camp friends thought a break from New York might be fun, and so I spent a year couch surfing around Essex County, New Jersey. I learned to drive, I worked at a YMCA, I went to high school basketball games and middle school musical productions. I shopped at Wet Seal and Abercrombie and Fitch, I had make-out sessions in the back of a Camaro. I listened to Sublime and drank frozen drinks at Ruby Tuesday.
During a barbecue, I cracked open a can of beer on my friend’s back porch and felt the wooden planks under my bare feet and knew I was alive. I thought, finally, yes, fantasy becomes reality. That’s what I told myself. If I had been made of sterner stuff back then, I would have admitted that though the external trappings were different, my life pretty much felt the same. And my dream felt borrowed—snatched from a younger version of myself who had had different needs. I was definitely having fun on my suburban walkabout, but it had little to do with the idea of the place and more to do with moments filled by the people I loved.
I still have all of my Christopher Pike books. My collection has grown over the years to accommodate Judy Blume’s oeuvre, the Sweet Valley High series, and every Baby-sitters Club book. When I want a little break, when I need to be reminded of how sweet life is, I let these bad boys do their magic. They reignite my dreams, and I just know that all I need to do is get out to Mockingbird Lane and pluck that low-hanging suburban fruit.
Tags: dreams, eboni booth, family, growing up, ruby tuesday’s, summer camp, the suburbs
This was great!!!!!!! Very evocative and hit pretty damn close to home, as someone who has bounced around suburbs and city life. Thanks for sharing it with us!
Emby, thanks so much!
Beautiful writing. I felt a little of this, filling up on Babysitters Club and Sweet Valley High as a kid. My neighborhood had once been a suburb but got sort of swallowed up by an expanding midsouth city, so I grew up equally envious of these fictional small towns and some kind of glamorous city life I imagined (probably also from the BSC series, which certainly made a miracle of New York). Two Americas and then some.
Sara, yes! Wonderfully put!
I grew up in Orange County, California, and you don’t get more Suburban than that. I always felt a not-belonging-ness until I went to college at Berkeley. Then I was happy in my skin. I realized that I was a city person. The safe,pretty,boring suburbs were not my home. But they are nice to visit.
This was super interesting to me, since I am from Connecticut, but from far enough out that it’s not really the suburbs anymore. I used to wish that I was from either the city or suburbs, somewhere with a high enough population density that I could walk to my friends’ houses. Honestly, I think teen years are similar everywhere, and your family situation and income bracket do a lot more to change your experience than where you live geographically.
It’s weird to hear you call Bridgeport the suburbs, though. It’s not a particularly nice city, but it’s definitely a city.
Wow. I could have written the exact opposite story. I visited New York as a kid and longed to move there. I had dreams about what my life would be like. Still do. I watched shows like Gossip Girl and every movie that took place in the city and soaked it up. I read tour guides and local reviews. Every time I visit, I feel like I’m at home.
I had the exact same suburban fantasies, but from the rural side of things. All I dreamed about when I was 12 was being able to ride a bike to my friend’s house or having real neighbors (i.e., closer than half a mile away) and convenience stores. The idea that the babysitter’s club or the sleepover friends could have these constant mini-parties without begging their mom a week in advance to drive them the 20 miles to their friends’ houses was maddening to me.
I grew up in the suburbs and still wanted my life to be like those stories. They didn’t exist for me, either.
I was born in Manhattan and lived in Jersey City until I was 9, and I was a bookworm so to me “the suburbs” were a foreign fantasy land where stories took place. And then we moved to Chatham, New Jersey and had a big backyard and got a dog and everything was picturesque and shiny and green, and also everybody was kind of cold and intimidating and I turned out to be bad at suburban activities like dance and soccer and swimming, and although I had been outgoing and popular at my schools in Jersey City, I became shy and self-conscious and withdrawn. And yeah, there were a billion Caitlins, and none of them wanted to be friends with me. Weirdly, I am actually better friends with more Chatham people now that I live in California than I ever was when I lived in Chatham. But anyway, yeah, my suburban fantasy came true and it ended up being not so great in reality.
Also my fourth-grade best friend (who ditched me in fifth grade for a cooler girl who could dance better and had Abercrombie baby tees and white-blonde hair and was tiny and had all the Spice Girls Barbie dolls)… was named Katelynn.
I lived in a suburb and commuted to school every day for years, for years and years and years. We would drive the big ring-road highway and I would stare up at the office buildings, purple in twilight, and wonder at the restaurants in their base. Pick my dad up from the department store where he worked selling vacuum cleaners and turn around, drive home, lights ticking over the car in sodium orange, and I hated every minute in the quiet with the houses made of ticky-tacky, the values made of mayonnaise and vinyl siding. When I ran, and I did run, I ran to the city, to every city, every city I could find everywhere, and one day I will not come back to this one.
Bridgeport is the largest city in Connecticut. It’s not Manhattan, by any stretch of the imagination, but 145,000 people live there. It’s a city. There are neighborhoods that are more suburban in character (detached houses, small lawns) but it is an urban area.
Chickpeas, this is totally my folly. Not enough research on my part. Thanks for pointing it out.
I grew up in a tiny town (it got its third stoplight my sophomore year of college), and now I live in the suburbs. But for a time, I lived in a city, and it is my dream to do it again someday. I love all the commotion!
I feel like people have covered the Bridgeport is a straight up city thing but girl. Your life would NOT have been better in Bridgeport. Suffice to say, it’s a mess. I took a class at Fairfield University called Race, Poverty and Cities, and guess where we went on a field trip for some real life experience.
Roumbaba, thanks so much for reading! I always ask myself the same question– won't I feel the same no matter where I go? And my answer winds up being, sigh, yes.
Eboni, this is such a vivid and well-written piece. I, too, longed for the suburbs when I watched Growing Pains and Who’s The Boss on TV. But there was something wonderful about growing up in NYC too. Keep writing! You’re so talented xo