.orgKelsey Page
Suburban Island
It's something I hadn't intended to hide; it just sorted out that way eventually. Walking through my high school's hallways, it was nearly unbearable to say nothing, but I knew it'd be even worse if a word passed my lips. It was the sort of place where girls became women after thirty minutes of make up and a professional blow-out, transforming their 14-year-old bodies into objectifications of 40-year-old men who worked downtown in the large, shiny office buildings. It was a place where boys heartily took out their aggression on the football and basketball fields (baseball apparently wasn't as popular), and beefed up their necks so that they wouldn't have to turn their heads to examine the worlds forever beyond their peripheries.
Needless to say, I knew my life didn't exactly belong here. I didn't have the mother who lectured me on my Omega 3 intake while painting her nails during an Oprah commercial break; rather, my mother nearly burnt the house down one night when she passed out with the fireplace and dozens of candles still lit. The carbon monoxide levels were off the chart; and yet the next morning she woke up slightly more hung-over than most other mornings, rolled to her side and stared for an extra long time at the World's Best Teacher mug smiling at her, depressingly empty and void of any caffeine or real hope.
The homes on my street were beautiful, like shining Miss Americas lined up across a well-lit stage. Yet our house began to deteriorate, as if to reflect the state of our family and my mother's health and substance abuse. Every year, the exterior seemed to slope down into itself, sinking into the Earth as though ashamed that it housed what went on inside of it. The year my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, two or three of our window shutters simply fell off. They gave up, and lay defeated in the dirt below for years on end, until the Bank's real estate agent would gingerly pick them up and throw them into a dumpster to improve the property's grim "curb appeal." The year my stepfather left my mother in emotional shreds and tears, our garage door stuck itself open, protesting to the violence and injustice and ironically leaving the core of our home and personal lives exposed to the cold night air and wannabe-delinquent pre-teens who roamed suburban nights. The furnace and air conditioning both blew out, our hot water heater retired, and our electricity began to get spotty. Isn't this romantic, kids? My mom would say, opening her flip cell phone to illuminate the darkening dinner table on her search for the salt. Oddly enough, that was also the year my mother's beloved pillow, embroidered with A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle, went missing forever. The year my mother started drinking heavily, everything else in the house went to pieces. The finer details of life, furniture that stood on its own, for instance, disappeared altogether. Our dog's teeth grew so jagged that he seemed to snarl whenever the poor thing tried to close his mouth, scaring away small trick-or-treaters on Halloween and causing us to sigh heavily, saddened by his unintentional expression. Our fridge began a diet, which resulted in mornings beginning not with Tang, Cheerios, and toast as the television ads advised, but rather with Diet Coke and cookies to fuel me through second period and nearly collapse from the sugar crash.
No, I knew things were a little different between me and my peers. But no one really noticed; no, it was the sort of thing that would have gotten around, had my mother bothered to show up to PTA meetings, take tennis lessons from the community's latest man-whore, Enrique, or simply enrolled my sister and I in any sort of organized sport or club. But she didn't, so our lives outside of homeroom remained a mystery. Everyone assumed that we had also gone horseback riding in Aspen on Saturday and then out to a nice dinner in downtown dinner on Sunday, or that our parents were only eating out three nights per week to save spending money for our next vacation to Cabo.
Our weekends were different. My sister and I called it babysitting. I have a date Friday, you take this one and I'll pay you back on Saturday, one of us would say, tired of pleading and treating it more as a business transaction than anything. She wasn't so bad last time... but I do think she has a date with that Doctor again on Saturday, so it looks like we're off the hook for that night... We always got lucky whenever my mother started dating a new man. It was a mixed set of emotions for us; my sister and I staring out the large bay window that faced the front walkway, monitoring the new man's gait, his build, identifying any artificial hair pieces or dentures that may indicate any sort of lies he may have been feeding our gullible mother. She never told them she drank, it was a secret she kept to herself, to the walls of our sad, sad house, and, though it was rarely addressed, it was a secret she also entrusted us with. When she died, her fiancé approached me at the wake, Your mother drank? He asked, his eyes welling up with tears. I stared back at him, blankly, not knowing whether he was more upset she had died, or that the woman he had loved had hidden a fundamental piece of herself away from him and their idealized relationship. No, I lied. She didn't drink, that's why this silly mistake happened. She just had a glass of wine, and whatever pain medicine she was on for the cancer mixed poorly with it. And with that, I popped a cheese cube into my mouth and excused myself to look for some punch.
It was getting easier, lying. At first I had felt so guilty, making up excuses to my friends, my boyfriend, my father who lived two miles away. I'm right around the corner if you need anything, kids, he always said whenever he dropped my sister and me off at our mother's for the week. But he didn't know how far those miles stretched. He didn't understand that our home became a deserted island as soon as we stepped through the doorway; sadly, we didn't realize that we had a flare gun. Then again, looking back on our neighborhood, all the pretty little houses lined up next to one another were their own islands, separated too much by how little was said. But the regrets were even heavier than the lies, so we smiled through them all, and talked about our horseback riding weekends and gourmet experiences. Then the bell would ring, and we would slip anonymously out the door, and float down the hallways, silent in our unspoken solidarity.
I'm studying Spanish literature, psychology, and French, and I have a deep-seated passion for melancholic literature, foreign languages and culture, and traveling to bizarre locations. I am an alternative rock, blue jeans, and napping connoisseur, and my plans for the present include visiting Istanbul, working in Madrid and learning Italian, Portuguese, or Czech. After graduation I plan on indulging my wanderlust and traveling for a while before heading off to graduate school to earn a doctorate in applied psychology.