The Suburban You (16 page)

He talks about his course load and tells you that he does homework until at least eleven o'clock each evening. He tells you that all of his friends do, too.

Finally, you ask him about grading and how well, in general, other kids do. He says casually that everyone does well. He tells you that there are a lot of smart people and everyone tries very hard. “You have to,” he says, “just to keep up.” Then he tells you a story that you will repeat often to your other friends, who, like you, do not get much exposure to the high-school scene. He tells you that his cumulative average in his sophomore year was 97.5 out of 100. When you were in high school, that would mean that if you were given 100 things to know you knew 97.5 of them. That would be impressive and it would be something that you would hide from your friends, because you would not want them to get the impression that you were trying too hard.

This sophomore's dad, who is listening to this discussion with interest, then tells you that his son is in the seventy-fourth percentile with his 97.5 grade point average. To you, this means that his son, with his 97.5 grade point average, has a better average than only 74 percent of his two thousand fellow sophomores. It also means that 26 percent, or 520 of them, have a better average then he does, better than 97.5. You are astounded upon hearing this, and your expression shows it. How could you have that kind of grade point average and be in the seventy-fourth percentile? you think. In the high school you attended that GPA would have landed someone in the ninety-ninth percentile.

The kid's dad goes on to explain that there is a weighting system for the level of difficulty of each class; because there are many opportunities for taking college courses and other accelerated classes, many of your neighbor's kid's fellow students have ended up with grade point averages that
exceed
100. “It is very competitive,” he says. You wonder where these kids get their competitive spirit.

First thing tomorrow morning, you reach up to your bookshelf for one of your old ninth-grade algebra textbooks and begin reviewing with your second-grade son how to solve for
x
.

Attend the Fortieth Birthday of Your Neighbor

You are invited to a neighbor's fortieth-birthday party. You are an acquaintance of this neighbor but you have not socialized with the couple, except at an occasional holiday party. They seem like very nice people.

Just about every party that you go to in your suburb is a party where people stand, drink, eat, and move around, or it's a dinner party where you talk mostly to the people at your table. Because your suburb is relatively small, you usually know most people at each party you go to. You arrive at this party, a summer, backyard party. You enter the backyard, and because you are showing up fashionably late a crowd has assembled. You look around and are surprised that you do not recognize one single person at this party of, say, 120 people. However, everyone else but you seems to know one another. In the five years that you have lived in your suburb, this has never, ever happened. You conclude that no one attending this party is from your suburb. Where they are from? You have no idea.

You go to grab a beer so that you can look purposeful at this party where you do not know anyone but your wife, and you soon realize that there is none. You find out that this is an alcohol-free fortieth-birthday party, your second indication within two minutes that this party will be different from all the others you have attended. You substitute an apple juice for the beer, because there is no purple grape juice, either; apple juice is such a great help to you in opening up to a yard full of strangers.

The guests are then asked to take a seat, any seat. There are about twelve or fifteen tables placed in the backyard, each having a capacity of ten people. You and your wife look around to see which group of strangers looks most inviting. You are equally unacquainted with everyone there, so you conclude that one table is like another. You choose the first two empty seats that you see at a table that is close to the back of the house.

You think that you are sitting down to eat dinner, but you are wrong. Larry, the guest of honor, walks up to a microphone that you have not noticed until now and invites his guests to come up and say “what they feel.” What appears to you to be an uncomfortable silence descends over the crowd and you are nervous for Larry that on his fortieth birthday nobody will come up to the mike and say anything, because you know that you will not and you assume that most people are like you. About this, however, you are wrong.

As soon as Larry is seated, a small line of people who have something to “share with you” about Larry begins to form. They say, “I have something that I would like to share with you about Larry.” You have heard people use the word “share” before in this context and it usually means that it will be serious, heartfelt, maybe even spiritual, and not funny.

The first woman, who introduces herself as Addie, describes how she met Larry at a self-help group that was first assembled ten years ago and still meets weekly. She is brought to tears as she describes how loving and caring Larry is, two adjectives that do not come to mind when you think of Larry and two adjectives that you would be surprised to hear from Larry's wife and daughter if they were to go up to the mike to speak, which they do not, or from his ninth-grade son, if he were home from his East Coast military boarding school, which he is not. She goes on to say how Larry was the glue that kept the group together, and that because of Larry they are all better off for it. “Larry is an amazing man,” she says. You look at your wife, who, like you, cannot believe what she is hearing at this fortieth birthday. You look around to the other guests who are seated at your table and you are compelled to look at someone and say, “Can you believe this shit?” But as you prepare to do so you see some of your table-mates drying their tears with their napkins and two others proceeding to line up behind the microphone to “share” their sentiments about Larry now that Addie has broken the ice. At that moment, you decide against asking anyone your question.

You and your wife do not talk. There is no need to. You know that this is one of those occasions where she is thinking the same exact thing that you are, which is, How do we get the hell out of here? In the meantime, you hear about Larry's “men's group,” which spent a week in Oregon. Each member of this particular men's group got up to tell the story of how whining everything they said for an entire week while they were in Oregon made them into better men than they were before. They hugged each other a lot. You are getting a little nervous about the line forming behind the microphone, because to you the stories are getting progressively stranger. You have already learned more about your neighbor than you care to know.

Next, a group of white suburban men (from some distant suburb, you are sure) approaches the microphone and starts playing conga drums. This would be OK, except the conga group has the rhythm of, well, white suburban men. They are members of another men's group that Larry belongs to, a white man's tribal group of some sort. Larry and his tribal men's group start dancing, without any semblance of rhythm, to the beat of the equally rhythmless conga drums. One thing that you are certain of is that, if nothing else, all of Larry's participation in men's groups has given him the self-confidence to be himself in front of a crowd. Before long, most of the 120 guests join Larry and his men's group on the dance floor, each with his or her own interpretation of tribal dancing.

You and your wife take this as your cue to “get home for the babysitter, who has to go home early tonight,” if anyone asks. First, your wife goes unnoticed into the back of the house, then a minute later you follow suit and meet her on Larry's front porch.

It is not too late to catch a movie, your wife says. It is the second time that day that you both agree.

Take a Trip to a Foreign Country

You are of Italian descent and you have twenty-five Italian relatives who live in Italy. One is a cousin who your parents and your aunt and uncle have told you looks, talks, and gestures like you. You talk to your wife about going to Italy and she is excited. Because she is a planner, she goes to the library and gets every book about Italy, and each night when you come home she tells you of all the marvelous things that there are to see and do there.

You will go to Milan, Florence, Rome, and Venice. You will go spend a day with your relatives near Sorrento. You will travel along the Amalfi coast and you will go to small towns like Positano and Siena in the Tuscany region. She knows the best things to do and see in each place because she has done her homework. This will be a great trip.

You feel connected to Italy in some ways. Your grandfather immigrated to the United States from Italy in 1920. He arrived in America through Ellis Island, where he is now honored with a plaque. That was a time that a lot of people moved from Italy to the States, because it was no fun in Europe after World War I.

When your grandfather was alive, you always had difficulty understanding him because of his strong accent. He worked hard and said little. When he did say something, everyone listened, because what he said was always worth listening to. He was most comfortable speaking Italian, but he did not around you. He was an American, and Americans speak English. He had an important job in getting his next generation of Americans prepared as best he could.

Your father grew up in a house with your grandfather and grandmother, whose parents also moved to the United States from Italy. Your grandmother spoke Italian, too. Because your grandparents were more comfortable speaking Italian than English, your father spoke Italian as well.

Despite all this Italian language, the only Italian you ever heard growing up was at family gatherings, sitting around a dining room table, when the adults were saying something that they did not want the kids to understand. These conversations were the ones that you listened most closely to, in an effort to understand what the adults felt you shouldn't. At this task you always failed.

After this first trip to Italy, it would become your favorite foreign country and the country that you visit once or sometimes twice a year. You connect with everything in this country, except the language.

On your first trip to this country, where the people respect their elders and where they know how to balance work and hanging out better than anyone in the world, your wife, who has a proclivity for picking up foreign languages, starts to get it. You rely on her to assist you in ordering food in restaurants and asking for directions, the only two things that you find you really have to communicate with the outside world about.

You, on the other hand, after a week of travel, have taken the effort to learn one word,
grazie
, which means “thank you.” You then combine it with the other Italian word that you have brought with you from America,
ciao
, which, during the first two years after you learned this word, you would spell “chow.”

In learning this new word, you become the single most polite person in all of Italy. You say
grazie
to everyone, for everything. Your wife will engage in lengthy Italian conversations with people while you stand silent at her side—that is, until the conversation concludes. This is your cue. It is your turn to speak and you say, “
Grazie
.” You are a polite American, not like the ugly Americans who do not make the effort to learn the language.

You are amazed at your wife. She has really picked up a lot and she is not shy about putting together new phrases. It is about midway through this trip and you work your way to Sorrento and then to the small town where your family lives, Masse Lubrenze. You arrive at the home of one of your relatives and many come to greet you. They live in a home above the bakery that has been in the family for four generations. Fortunately, there is one woman, whom one of your cousins married, who is Australian and as a result speaks English. Other than that, you, Mr. Grazie, are on your own.

You gather around and all the other relatives, who live minutes away, are summoned. Your twenty-five relatives gather, and Assunta, the Australian, is the person you rely on as your translator. On the other hand, your twenty-five relatives have fallen in love with your wife, who is actually carrying on conversations with them in Italian while they are trying to understand why you are telling them thank you all the time. What impresses you most is that you believe, but are not entirely sure, that your wife is
not
asking them for directions or ordering food from them. She has a house full of twenty-five non–English-speaking Italians captivated. You think that she may be telling them the story of you saying
grazie
all the time. You soon find out differently.

In her conversation, she says something and you see twenty-five startled expressions, then you see a few of your male cousins and uncles—Mario, in particular—laugh, sort of embarrassed, to themselves. Your wife senses that she may have said something that she did not intend to, but, undeterred, she keeps on speaking, in Italian.

Sensing that something is wrong, she looks to Assunta to better understand what has just transpired, to understand why the sudden change in facial expressions. Assunta looks at you and to your wife. The room goes silent and she tells your wife, in English, that she just told your twenty-five Old World relatives, as she thought she was describing the beautiful sights of Florence and the Duomo, that she “loves to suck my husband.” This is an expression that has never, you guess, in four generations of Falangas, been uttered in this house. You think this because in your life you have never once heard your mother or father or grandparents ever say a curse, not even “hell” or “damn.”

You look around, and your wife, who—if she didn't have anyone's attention before, she does now—looks at them all and starts laughing hysterically. They do, too. And that draws you closer to these Italian relatives than anything else you can do or say. It is a story that you are sure they will repeat often to their friends, and one that you hope will come true.