she closed her eyes again and tried to concentrate on nothingness for a good thirty minutes, she finally gave up and flipped on the bedside light.
There was a novel in her carry-on, but she’d barely finished a page on the plane and she didn’t feel like reading it now. What Vivi really wanted to do was talk to Stone, but she was afraid that if she actually reached him and heard his voice, she’d immediately spill all. Clamping down on her neediness, she booted up her laptop and brought up a blank page on the screen. After a few moments of thought, she typed the opening line that had come to her the day before.
I have been observing the denizens of this pocket of suburbia in which I find myself for less than twenty-four hours and have already learned one important thing: here people don’t wear their hearts on their sleeves; they put them on the backs of their minivans.
For a few minutes she just sat and thought about what she’d seen on the drive from the airport to Melanie’s, replaying her sister’s comments in her mind.
As they pass you, and believe me they will, you’ll know everything there is to know about them. Because who they are, what they care about, and where they “belong” has been reduced to decorative magnets that have been stuck all over the backs of their SUVs.
These magnetized spheres and shapes will also tell you where they worship and where they vacation, what illnesses they’ve dealt with or would like to see eradicated, who they voted for in the last election and who they plan to vote for in the next.
She was careful not to quote Melanie too closely in case her sister, who had never been a major newspaper devotee, ever happened across the column. But as Vivien typed, the words began to flow from her mind and through her fingertips in that wonderful way that she didn’t understand and tried not to question. Slowly, she began to relax, her body unclenching bit by bit as the words formed in her mind, then found their way onto the page.
All of the schools their children attend from preschool to college are there like some public scrapbook. There are magnets and bumper stickers that inform you if their child made the honor roll or was once named the student of the month. Bottom line, if they or one of their children has ever done it or even thought about it, they’ve got the magnet to prove it. And every magnet deserves to be displayed on the back of the family chariot.
She added a few jabs about what might drive people to reveal so much, then did some cutting and pasting until she had her observations in an order that belied the amount of editing she’d done and, instead, felt like a natural progression. And then she concluded, As it turns out, these clues aren’t even necessary because your entire personality is revealed by your choice of vehicle. Apparently you are not only your magnets; you are also what you drive. Just a quick look at the color, make, and model you’re driving and your fellow suburbanites will know everything about you from how much money you make to how often you have sex.
She played with the car thing for a while, paraphrasing Melanie’s comments in a shocked, yet slightly snide tone that gave it an edge.
She did feel a tiny fissure of guilt for putting her sister’s world under such a judgmental microscope, but she pushed it aside; like the pseudonym she’d borrowed for her byline, she’d think about that “tomorrow.”
After getting in as many zingers as she could under the guise of “reporting,” she closed with a breezy , I feel like a scientist transported to a newly charted planet that is absolutely teeming with alien life-forms. So stay tuned. I’ll have more observations for you next week! She signed it , Your stranger in an even stranger land, Scarlett Leigh.
Then she attached the document to an email to John Harcourt and sent her first postcard from suburbia on its way to New York.
Before she could talk herself out of it, Vivi dialed
There was a novel in her carry-on, but she’d barely finished a page on the plane and she didn’t feel like reading it now. What Vivi really wanted to do was talk to Stone, but she was afraid that if she actually reached him and heard his voice, she’d immediately spill all. Clamping down on her neediness, she booted up her laptop and brought up a blank page on the screen. After a few moments of thought, she typed the opening line that had come to her the day before.
I have been observing the denizens of this pocket of suburbia in which I find myself for less than twenty-four hours and have already learned one important thing: here people don’t wear their hearts on their sleeves; they put them on the backs of their minivans.
For a few minutes she just sat and thought about what she’d seen on the drive from the airport to Melanie’s, replaying her sister’s comments in her mind.
As they pass you, and believe me they will, you’ll know everything there is to know about them. Because who they are, what they care about, and where they “belong” has been reduced to decorative magnets that have been stuck all over the backs of their SUVs.
These magnetized spheres and shapes will also tell you where they worship and where they vacation, what illnesses they’ve dealt with or would like to see eradicated, who they voted for in the last election and who they plan to vote for in the next.
She was careful not to quote Melanie too closely in case her sister, who had never been a major newspaper devotee, ever happened across the column. But as Vivien typed, the words began to flow from her mind and through her fingertips in that wonderful way that she didn’t understand and tried not to question. Slowly, she began to relax, her body unclenching bit by bit as the words formed in her mind, then found their way onto the page.
All of the schools their children attend from preschool to college are there like some public scrapbook. There are magnets and bumper stickers that inform you if their child made the honor roll or was once named the student of the month. Bottom line, if they or one of their children has ever done it or even thought about it, they’ve got the magnet to prove it. And every magnet deserves to be displayed on the back of the family chariot.
She added a few jabs about what might drive people to reveal so much, then did some cutting and pasting until she had her observations in an order that belied the amount of editing she’d done and, instead, felt like a natural progression. And then she concluded, As it turns out, these clues aren’t even necessary because your entire personality is revealed by your choice of vehicle. Apparently you are not only your magnets; you are also what you drive. Just a quick look at the color, make, and model you’re driving and your fellow suburbanites will know everything about you from how much money you make to how often you have sex.
She played with the car thing for a while, paraphrasing Melanie’s comments in a shocked, yet slightly snide tone that gave it an edge.
She did feel a tiny fissure of guilt for putting her sister’s world under such a judgmental microscope, but she pushed it aside; like the pseudonym she’d borrowed for her byline, she’d think about that “tomorrow.”
After getting in as many zingers as she could under the guise of “reporting,” she closed with a breezy , I feel like a scientist transported to a newly charted planet that is absolutely teeming with alien life-forms. So stay tuned. I’ll have more observations for you next week! She signed it , Your stranger in an even stranger land, Scarlett Leigh.
Then she attached the document to an email to John Harcourt and sent her first postcard from suburbia on its way to New York.
Before she could talk herself out of it, Vivi dialed
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