Technically, I grew up in a dangerous area. Sometimes people got killed nearby. I never saw any dead bodies, although once the movie Homicide needed a kid to play a corpse at a crime scene set a couple of doors up. They approached my mother and asked her if one of her sons wanted to earn money lying in the street. I was very excited about this; I thought that this would be my big break. She was like, “Rosa Parks didn’t sit in the front of that bus so that you could lie in a gutter and collect Equity points.” (I’m paraphrasing.) (Probably.) Anyway, despite the fact that I grew up in a dangerous area, that’s my only experience with murdered bodies. It’s possible my neighborhood was just dangerous on film.
Nonetheless, I avoided telling my classmates about where I lived, and I only invited one person over one time. I guess I was embarrassed. The things we saw out of our windows were so dramatically different from the things they saw. My classmates, by and large, lived in suburban neighborhoods—some with mega-mansions, some with the regular homes of your standard middle-class white family—none the setting for a television show about murders and the detectives who investigate said murders. My parents wanted more for us than what our surroundings could provide, so it’s probably no surprise that my mother was less than keen about me lying in a gutter outside our front door drenched in fake blood. I see that now; I didn’t then. Truth be told, I always thought the pastoral neighborhoods where my classmates lived were scarier. Yeah, it was a common occurrence to hear gunshots ringing out somewhere in our neighborhood, but in the suburbs, my friends had floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on acres of woodland. And you know what lives in the woods? Horrors limited only by your own imagination (and, I guess, your knowledge of woods and the creatures therein).
Are there bears in the city? No, there are not. Are there hockey-mask-wearing killers in the city? Who in the city has a hockey mask? Are there Babadooks and Mothmen in the city? Honey, the rent is too high for all that. True, there is the threat of mugging and an air-conditioning unit falling out of a window and crushing you and buses driving by and splashing your tutu. But that’s about it, at least as far as physical threats go. The danger in a city is systemic and endemic; it’s built into the walls and the street corners and written in invisible ink on the mortgages and in the local newspaper headlines; it powers the public transportation and funds the political campaigns. The danger in the city is all around you, but has clearly delineated borders. The suburbs, on the other hand, are places of literally endless physical peril for everyone everywhere. The worst of the worst are those super suburbs for people so rich they can’t stand the sight of other people, where you have so much land that you basically live in a house hidden in a national park. You might as well be Sigourney Weaver in Alien going into some of the places with a mile-long private drive. Like, you are forsaken out there. If you call the police, they let you know their anticipated arrival time in days. And who wants to live that far from a Costco? You’re so rich you’ve started to inconvenience yourself. Look at your life.
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.
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.
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.
One night, I found the newly released videotape of Hercules, the retelling of the Greek myth with a chorus of gospel-singing muses and music by Alan Menken, who also wrote the music for Little Shop of Horrors. Clearly I, not the kids I was babysitting, was the target demographic for this movie. I took it downstairs and set myself up on a couch. The family I was babysitting for had one of those houses out of a Nancy Meyers film: the gleaming kitchen with a marble-top kitchen island next to a plush TV room and breakfast nook with three walls of windows; the doorbell that played a full concerto; the rooms that weren’t decorated, but curated. I understand the allure of this kind of space. Everything was new in this place, even the things that weren’t new. The antiques were polished to a shine; the books in the library were like set decorations from a box labeled “Intelligent, Wealthy Person.” When I was growing up, my mother used to joke that our interior design style was “Deceased,” meaning someone has died and left us their furniture, whether we wanted it or not. So the pristine order of a suburban house was like an alien spaceship to me: attractive but deeply foreign; potentially home to something sinister.
I didn’t understand how a house came to be like this. I didn’t understand the lack of mess, the pile on the counter with exactly three pieces of mail and one catalog, the dust-free floors, the litter-free street, the noise-free air. It was clear that people lived here, but I didn’t know how.
Their house was so big that I didn’t even wander around it for fear of getting lost. They didn’t have a pantry; they had a dry-goods room. I spent twenty minutes standing inside it, smelling spices. There were so many rooms on the ground floor, I worried that I would stumble into a secret passageway and never return.
Midway through the movie, I paused and went to the Sub-Zero fridge to help myself to one of the thirteen juices they had inside. I’m exaggerating the number of juices, but you believed me and that’s the point. Coming back, glass in hand, I stepped in a puddle next to the kitchen island. I assumed that I had somehow spilled the juice that I was pretty sure I was allowed to have but not so sure that I would ever actually admit to having drunk the juice.
It was true that I had just poured the juice and therefore couldn’t have spilled it on the other side of the room, but I assumed that the suburbs had different rules and they extended to include space and time. I got a paper towel and knelt down to wipe up the juice that I was convincing myself I’d preemptively spilled. As I got close I noticed its aroma. It didn’t have the same smell as what was in my glass—fresh-squeezed money—in fact, it smelled like pee. I drew back and scanned the room. Who was peeing on the floor? Had I peed on the floor? Maybe one of the kids was sleepwalking? Or maybe this was a passive-aggressive act of defiance. What had I done to deserve this? Hadn’t I thrown enough games of Chutes and Ladders to avoid this?
I crept upstairs and checked on the kids; they were both sleeping peacefully as far as I could tell. I whispered, “Is this some sort of class-based hazing?” but they didn’t respond. I finished cleaning up and went back to the movie. The dark glass behind the screen seemed more ominous now; the empty perfect rooms were more forbidding.
The movie ended. I got up to change the video and heard a scratching sound behind me. It’s just the constant terrifying symphony of innocuous sounds, I assured myself. It’s the plink of gold doubloons shifting in their safe or the rustle of eight-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton in the guest bedroom. It’s nothing. I turned my head with all the measured drama of a silent film star and saw, to my relief, nothing. Just the bluish glow of the light on the backsplash, the shine of the marble countertop on the kitchen island, and…on the gleaming hardwood floor, another puddle in the spot I had just cleaned up. I raced to the island and stuck my nose in the puddle. Urine! Again! “What does it mean?” I screamed very quietly so as not to wake the children who, I half suspected, were standing behind me, pee-soaked and wielding knives. But no, I was alone. Just me, a strange house, and about five ounces of fresh urine.
As I wiped up the second puddle, it suddenly occurred to me that there was another potential answer beyond “This is a bed-wetter’s way of telling you to take your ass back to the city.” It was possible that the children and I weren’t alone in the house. What if they had a pet? To paraphrase a great suspense film that I was, at that point, too scared to see: The pee was coming from inside the dog.
The thing was, the kids had never mentioned a dog, the parents had never mentioned a dog, and I had never seen a dog. On top of that, I am allergic to dogs. Even if the parents had the canine version of the first Mrs. Rochester from Jane Eyre that they kept locked away, my nose would still have alerted me to the danger unseen. My watering eyes and persistent sneezes are the modern equivalent of Jane’s ripped wedding veil.
So, if the parents don’t say there’s a dog and my histamine doesn’t say there’s a dog, what’s the most logical conclusion? You guessed it: I decided that there was a dog and that said dog was most likely a ghost and/or a demon of some sort. Suburban houses aren’t usually haunted, because they are of relatively new construction, so the logic goes that no one has had time to die in them. That logic omits, however, the large number of babysitters who are killed in suburban homes by deranged Woods People. I assumed this incontinent Hound of the Bladdervilles had been the unintended victim of said Woods People and was stalking me, the beautiful young babysitter, as revenge. Or perhaps it was warning me, a helpful hellhound! The puddle of pee was its way of alerting me that my fears were correct: the picturesque suburban tranquility was but a mask for the violent underbelly that swallowed up unsuspecting interlopers. Whether a friendly warning or a wet threat, the message of the mess was clear. To paraphrase Oda Mae Brown in Ghost: “Molly: urine! Danger, girl.”
It was clear that I was going to have to fight the spirit world for my life until the parents of the kids came home. I turned on all the lights, grabbed an Evian bottle, said a little prayer over it, and searched the dry-goods room for a leftover box of Hi-C Ecto Cooler, the official beverage of Ghostbusters. And then I waited. For death or deliverance, I knew not which.
I am happy to announce that I did not die in a suburban home in 1997. (OMG, what if this book was written by a ghost?! Can you imagine?) The parents of the kids came home within an hour and were kind enough to not ask why I’d lit all their decorative candles and arranged them to spell out “Not today, Satan.” I called my father to come pick me up and discovered he was already waiting outside. My father is exceedingly prompt and also a very holy person, so although he explained his presence by saying he’d asked the parents when they’d be returning, I knew the truth was he had sensed the unholy disturbance of suburban tranquility and hurried out to help me fight the darkness.
I walked down the driveway toward my dad’s car, illuminated by a floodlight. I turned back to the house; the parents stood framed by the doorway and the bluish glow of the light inside. They waved. I waved back and kept walking. I reached the outer border of the floodlight’s glow. I stepped into the darkness and turned back once more. The car was running beside me, waiting to ferry me back to the city, with its noise and its streetlights and its puddles of urine that were not passive-aggressive messages. “Um,” I called out, “this is going to sound weird but I’m just wondering: do you have a dog?”
The parents leaned forward into the light, their faces porcelain masks of horror. “A dog?!” they exclaimed. “Why, we haven’t heard that word in years…” They threw their heads back and cackled sinisterly. I heard the snarl of a hellhound growing closer in the darkness; it seemed to come from all directions at once. I jumped in the car and screamed, “Drive! Just drive!” as we tore off into the night.