I actively distrust the suburbs. I especially distrust the sprawling ones, the ones built on top of old rock quarries, the ones where everything is alike in sameness and remoteness and perfection. I have trouble understanding the melting pot when by order of the neighborhood association every ingredient looks identical or you have to squint to see your neighbors. That said, the suburban house, the patch of land in a ticky-tacky Hooverville, is the pinnacle of the American dream, so who am I to judge it? If it’s good enough for Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors, shouldn’t it be good enough for me?
The fact is, when it comes to living space and Little Shop, I’ve always preferred “Downtown” to “Somewhere That’s Green,” both musically and symbolically. I decided early on that you would never catch me out in some cul-de-sac with minimum light pollution. I’d rather take my chances on Skid Row with a person-eating plant than try to navigate the foreboding open space of a suburb. This is especially true if there are woods involved. It’s too quiet. It’s too dark. There are too many crevices and corners and crags and scritches and crackles and shrieks. If there’s a copse, there’s a corpse, I always say. (I am a delight at parties.) The woods, as I’m sure you’re aware, are where roughly 65 percent of all terrible things happen in horror movies. The other 35 percent happen in beautiful suburban houses where no one (except me, apparently) would ever imagine such a thing taking place. This rule isn’t even restricted to horror movies, actually. I love a good Dateline investigation or British mystery novel or Gone Girl, and all of them are basically infomercials about the inherent danger of living anywhere with a lawn. Dateline investigations are never in crack houses. They are always in split-level homes owned by a dentist who snapped. You never see Jane Pauley or whomever walking through a neighborhood like mine, pockmarked with abandoned buildings and soundtracked by sirens, asking neighbors if they ever expected a thing like this to happen here. It’s assumed that it will happen here. And something has taught us that when it does happen, we shouldn’t be surprised. I don’t happen to agree with that understanding of the differences between city life and suburban life. But I will definitely take it to heart. I’m not trying to spend years saving up all my coins and pouring all of my worth into a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bathroom rancher in some neighborhood where there are stringent rules for what color your mailbox is just to be surprised by my own murder.
If you’re going to kill me, I want to expect it. That’s the real American dream.
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The fact is, white people did this to themselves. Red-lining and white flight are basically like when someone in a horror movie hears a noise in the basement and everybody (black) in the movie theater is yelling “Don’t go in there!” and they go in there anyway. The city, as a concept, is not objectively dangerous. (Unless you’re Batman’s parents.) But literally everyone is in danger in the suburbs. You may not know this, but A Raisin in the Sun is actually a thriller about a black family almost escaping the sinister pull of backyards and barbecue. A Raisin in the Sun should have been called Get Out, because that’s what I shout every time I see it. And everyone in the theater is like, “I don’t think you understand the American dream.” And I’m like, “I’m an expert on the American Dream actually. I’ve seen Little Shop of Horrors many times.” And I am escorted from the theater. Which is fine with me; the ending of A Raisin is a real bummer. Spoiler alert: they get the house in the white neighborhood.
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It is both a total coincidence and a very intentional, brilliant bit of dramatic synergy that I first read A Raisin in the Sun in tenth grade, the same year I started babysitting for people who lived in the suburbs. I was hired, mainly, by two families, both of whom had children who went to my school. I worked at the after-school daycare program, so I had begun to develop a reputation as a semi-reliable, friendly person who could keep children alive. Even though I had literally no qualifications other than “willing to play many games of Chutes and Ladders” and “can dial a phone,” I became very popular in the babysitting scene. One of the kids I babysat once told me, “You’re different—you play with us!” which seemed like a natural thing to do, but was apparently a rarity. Frankly, I liked playing with the kids I babysat. I enjoyed pulling out board games, making up magic kingdoms, losing at videogames, and reading them stories. And their houses, with their romper rooms and toy closets and wall-to-wall carpet, did, I must admit, make for the perfect play space. But I wasn’t so easily beguiled. Outside every playroom, just past the floor-to-ceiling windows that so stunningly captured the sunset, was a world of darkness masquerading as the quiet comforts of a suburban neighborhood. Sometimes the kids would be running around, shrieking with glee as they pretended to be warrior knights or superheroes or people who love to clean up very quickly before their parents get home (a very fun game for children), and I would space out and stare into the abyss. Past my own reflection in the glass, through the trees that lined the property, into the unknown. No, I would remind myself, quickly drawing the curtain like a novel’s circumspect housewife who has a terrible secret that she telegraphs through small modifications of her decorative accoutrements, this is not the dream. You are inside a nightmare. It has central air and a gas fireplace. It’s super cute but also terrifying.
Every time I look out of a black window in a suburban house, I expect to see the face of a killer on the other side of the glass. Every single time. Nowadays, my brothers live in suburbs; I refuse to visit them. Every Christmas, I RSVP “Can’t make it cuz of psychos.” Why am I RSVP’ing to family Christmas? Because I like formality. I’m a classic fifties housespouse with a fine sense of decorum and a terrible secret and the creeping suspicion that there is a person on the loose in the woods back there. I’ll never get used to it, I think. I don’t trust the perfection and the wide open expanses. Basically, all of the selling points are a source of deep anxiety for me. But that’s just me; maybe you like it. I’m not judging you. (Oh, I should have said this before: I’m not judging you.) But I’m just saying no one has ever peered into the streetlamp-illuminated window of my third-floor urban apartment with a sinister glint in their eye, so draw your own conclusions.
And you know what’s worse than the face of your doom in the black mirror of a double-insulated window? The sound of your encroaching demise played out in creaks of floorboards, the rustle of animals outside (preparing themselves for the blood sacrifice, of course), and the unidentified noises that you hear when your house is surrounded by nothingness. Have you ever slept in a house that was so quiet you could hear a clock ticking in another room? WHY? If I wanted a soundtrack for my existential dread, I’d download a bunch of Ben Folds songs on iTunes like a normal person.
I didn’t get into Ben Folds until midway through college, so I had to come up with other ways to drown out the darkness in tenth grade. So, like every other babysitter in the history of the world, I watched TV after the kids went to bed. If I had ever seen a horror movie, I would have known that killings of babysitters spike in the hour after the kids go to bed, especially if the babysitter has secretly invited a boyfriend over and/or if the babysitter has just put a bag of popcorn in the microwave. I had never even heard the word “gay,” so a boyfriend was out of the question at this point, and I had late-in-life braces, so popcorn was a no-go. Instead, I entertained myself and kept my fear at bay by watching whatever Disney movies the kids had lying around. I was the picture of innocence, wandering around a sprawling McMansion with all the lights turned on, waiting to be slaughtered.