Suburban War
Where was my mind on this day? I’m not sure.
Really, I just remember the fleeting moment when I saw him, a moment that came like gasp, grabbed me by the throat, and woke me up from the deep slumber of my youth. I was trembling in the bus seat—not voluntarily or because of nerves, but because the streets beneath us were rough. My backpack was still on my back, my face to the window on my left, my mind in a place I don’t remember—probably in recess and how the other team won the kickball game yet again.
But then I saw him. Black coat and tie, shining shoes, perfectly trimmed brunette hair, a powerfully handsome face. From afar one might have considered him as the epitome of the American dream, the poster boy of free enterprise. But what I saw of him that day, I just thought he was the saddest thing I had ever seen in my ten years.
Black coat and tie, shining shoes, perfectly trimmed brunette hair, a powerfully handsome face. The same face, however, was contorted in a solemn countenance, grieving for something, maybe contentment or light or free air. But the body belonging to the morose face was limp and seemed disconnected to his dangling head, as it swung slowly on a swing set in our neighborhood’s mini park. Nearby, his suitcase was placed on the mulch haphazardly. And there he was, a snapshot of absolute despair, a snapshot that will forever stay in the memory reel of my brain.  The man just slowly swinging up and down, up and down, almost in slow motion, a video playing on repeat.
And for a moment I saw him look up at me. And then it passed.  Our bus had passed the park and it was my stop and I had to get off now so I could eat my after school snack and watch my favorite TV show and do my math homework and eat Mom’s taco surprise and brush my teeth and go to bed. But now as I think about it, I don’t think it ever passed at all. Because from that day on I had one overreaching and simple goal: to not end up like the man on the swing set.
That’s when my suburban war began.
_ _ _
May and I met when we were five, or somewhere around that age range of childhood laxity and bliss. In the kitchen, when talking to my dad, my mom would call May’s mom a whore—but of course there was context, it was more like, “She doesn’t come home until 3 a.m. at times, my first guess would be she’s a whore.” And my father would reply, “She probably just works late shifts, Marilyn.”
So since May’s mom was a “whore” (I found out that she actually worked at Wal-Mart the same year I learned what ‘whore’ meant), my parents would watch over her for Mrs. Bruno, as long as she needed, because “we were good neighbors and good Americans”. My mother always used the word ‘good’ broadly.
As a consequence of my parent’s benevolence, May and I grew up like bona-fide sisters; I braided her hair and she couldn’t braid to save her life so she would just run her fingers through mine, but it was just the same, maybe even better. We lived in suburbia, but not in one of those sweet nostalgic neighborhoods that were built in the 50s for the returning soldiers and that just bordered the city, but rather one of the neighborhoods about twenty minutes out from the city with houses that all looked the same except with varying brick colors, and were all made in a matter of two or three months so the foundation was faulty and the walls were so thin that you could hear the people walking by on the sidewalk outside. As a result, the houses were cheap, but the builders had added pieces of frill to make dumb young couples (like my parents) believe they were getting “a bang for their buck”. The frill included the residential pool, a small park, and each house having these ridiculous inapt Greek columns on the porch, supporting the roof somehow I suppose. I thought they were gaudy of course, but May always laughed when I appeared vexed when I talked about them. She would say, “Who cares Sylvia? They are what they are. Why do you always dwell on the little things anyway?”
But she would say things like this in our private conversations in my room when we had reached high school because we couldn’t really associate outside of disclosed areas any more. She began to wear strange clothes and color her hair strange colors and talk to kids that looked like they had grease in their hair, whereas I began to talk to kids that owned BMWs and had Abercrombie & Fitch bodies and drank all of their parents’ alcohol on the weekends. I had moderately good looks, a bit plain in my opinion but with the help of some embellishing makeup, I kind of looked like a younger Jennifer Aniston. May was everything that I always wanted to look like as I grew up—tall, dark nut-brown hair with matching gleaming brown eyes, and amber skin. But now she looked like a character out of a Tim Burton movie, and I guess that was part of the reason I couldn’t really associate with her at school.
Yet we didn’t completely grow apart when we started dressing differently, we would still enjoy each other’s company in the privacy of my house where we would talk about how we both wanted to be writers and win Pulitzer Prizes and inspire the masses. We never really talked about the insipid things that my pseudo Abercrombie & Fitch friends and I would talk about, like clothes and boys and mostly boys. But sooner or later May began to feel frustrated that I wouldn’t even look at her when she tried to wave hello at me in the school hallways. She claimed that I treated her like I was some sort of corporate big shot and she was my covert mistress from the projects that I didn’t want to introduce to my work friends because I was ashamed of her and the inevitable class clash that would ensue—she always had a way with unnecessary, convoluted analogies.
But it was true. I was a terrible friend—probably even more so than the corporate big shot with the mistress. I was as vapid and treacherous and abhorrent as a person could get when I was seventeen, but May was the bravest girl in town.
_ _ _
It was one of our last talks before the supernova of our friendship that would ensue in the coming weeks. It was when May told me that she was gay.
We were on my bed eating caramel popcorn and watching a TV show that we had already seen the episode of when she suddenly began to cry softly. I threw her an expected “what’s wrong” and then she began crying some more so I began to pat her back awkwardly, but then she just thrust her head in my shoulder and began holding on to my shirt sleeves as if she’d fall into a swelling hole of oblivion underneath her if she didn’t. I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable because I’ve never seen or heard a person, nonetheless my childhood confidant, cry so much before. And then she sobbed out in muffled words, her face still pressed into my shoulder, “What am I gonna tell my mom, Sylvia? She’s such a devout Catholic, she’ll never even look at me again.”
I lifted up her head up and held it in my arms and couldn’t help but cry as well. All I said was, “May, you’re the bravest girl in town. Why do you always dwell on the little things anyway?”

...But what I really said was,  “I-I’m sorry…I’ll just leave you alone.” And I stood up and left the room with a terrible feeling in my stomach. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I’ve never known what I’m supposed to do.
_ _ _
One of my Abercrombie & Fitch friends told me to come over that Friday night, October 11, 2013. I complied, showing up in high-waist shorts and a white tank top, feeling a bit disillusioned when I saw three other girls in the same exact outfit. Of course it was going to be one of those nights in which we would drink her parent’s alcohol and make out with each other and dance to songs that told us to dance. All of a sudden, I had the strong urge to braid somebody’s hair.
I was already fairly drunk when I arrived, and a boy from another school had soon enough made it clear to me that he wanted me to f*** him. I wasn’t really in the mood, so I just blew him in the bathroom and thought that maybe he would leave me alone. I swung open the bathroom door, strolling out even more disorientated than before with some of my makeup smeared and repositioned, like a dysfunctional paint by number painting. A crowd of more Abercrombie & Fitch kids had appeared, and on cue they started yelling varying obscenities when they saw me do the “slut walk of shame” past them. That’s when I decided to leave, taking a bottle of vodka with me because it tasted like nothing but it felt like hell.
I didn’t drive home out of principle because one of my cousin’s friends had died in a drunk driving induced crash two months ago, plus the walk back to my house wasn’t terribly long any way. When I passed the second McDonald’s and began to near the movie theater, a sound pelted my senses—shrill, piercing screams of “help me”. They seemed to extend on for miles, ringing in my ears as if a nuclear bomb had just gone off. I craned my neck to the left to determine the origin of these screams, and saw a cloud of dark figures forming in the alley behind the movie theater, surmising that the screams may have came from there. As I neared, I could see that it was a tall dark-haired figure surrounded by four or five teenage boys in black and gray hoodies, their hoods up as if they were some sorts of dark angels of the night. 
The figure in the nucleus of the dark cloud seemed familiar.
It was May.
_ _ _

The following Monday at school we passed each other in the hall and this time I couldn’t keep my eyes off of her. She had chopped all of her hair off and the black bruises on her face emulated her sunken dark eyes. With her eyes on the bleached tiles below, she was the one who averted her look this time as I stared on at her in a dull stupor. That was the last time I saw May.
In fact, it will be twenty years from then when I see those sunken dark eyes again. I will be returning back from work in my oddly fitting black pantsuit and severely tied back hair. I never became a successful writer or won a Pulitzer Prize or inspired the masses because apparently my work sounds like everyone else’s and that maybe I should stick to something more practical instead.
But as I turn on the news, I learn that she did. There she is, seated next to Anderson Cooper, the same eyes but instead of morose orbs of ochre, bright and brave and upturned with a perpetual smile. She talks about her success and her difficult childhood growing up as a lesbian in a small Midwestern town, and Anderson probes on as journalists do, trying to get her to share a story he claims to have read about her before, something horrific from her adolescent years. My heart begins to pulsate in my chest cavity as I imagine her unveiling me as the merciless villain of her youth, the girl whose hair she had once run her fingers through that had then betrayed her in an act of cowardice in her time of need—the true Judas. But she doesn’t. She just brushes over minor details of the story with such casual ease that I begin to wonder if she had now forgotten about it after years of triumph, and the pain she must have felt was ephemeral at best. I begin to wonder if she had caught my eyes at all on that night.
But as soon as my heart slows its rapid ascension, I look up at the screen to only have it drop into my stomach. I look up to see the same exact glassy glare that she had given me that October 11 with the same exact sunken dark eyes, hollow and devoid.
And then, without even a thought about it, I rise from my dining table chair and pass my idle husband as he sluggishly asks me, “what’s wrong hun”. I pass him, walk outside into the yard, my feet leading my mind, and in full pant suit begin swinging on my kids’ swing set in such a nescient manner that I don’t even realize what I’m doing until I lift my eyes and see my ten-year-old son in the school bus passing by, his head hanging out of the window, his eyes clouded in perplexity and shame. A thirty-something woman, the all-American tanned blonde with blue eyes, dressed in a blazer and slacks, the poster girl of free enterprise—all of it, swinging bleakly on her son’s swing set. But then in a sudden, as I am suspended in midair, all the sentiments of self-loathing and defeat begin to subside and a strange sense of contentment washes over me as a realization beckons me: becoming the man on the swing set was inevitable.
I had lost the suburban war but there had been no way of winning it after all.