This story begins with a bet. A father bets his fifteen-year-old daughter that she’ll leave home at eighteen and never return. A joke the reader thinks; a parent’s wishful thinking. But the daughter is unsettled: “My father was a reasonable man. He did not generalize. He was not prone to big, grandiose statements, and he rarely gambled…I hated to lose, and my father knew it.”
Sure enough, when the daughter’s eighteenth birthday arrives, the father shuttles her off to the train station while her mother and younger brother are at the grocery store. He is loving and reassuring at the same time he seems to be rushing her off stage. The daughter admits that she knows nothing of living on one’s own – “In fact I’d only just started doing my own laundry last week, and I had to keep calling upstairs to my mother, about the separation of darks and lights, and when to put in the detergent. When?!”
The daughter takes a train to L.A., meets a guy, finds an apartment and a waitress job. She’s taking classes at Santa Monica College in Accounting and Studio Art. A paragraph begins, “The seasons change.” The writer seems to be lulling the reader away from the earlier tension with the very logical details of an average young person’s life in L.A. But funny details slip through; the letters she exchanges with her quirky younger brother. The excuses her father presents when she complains that they never come to visit. “You’re not holding up your end of the bargain,” I said. “You told me we’d see each other!”
Exclamation points like this one pepper the story, including the title. In retrospect, I see these as the breadcrumbs leading us towards a surprise ending that takes a swift turn into magical realism. When the daughter and her boyfriend decide to visit her family, they arrive at an empty, overgrown lot. There among the weeds is “an exact replica of the house I grew up in, just tiny, a little smaller than a toaster.” The daughter leans down close to talk to her tiny parents, who are embarrassed to be seen by her in this state. There conversation is not much different than it might be at life-size; the mother mentions that they’re seeing a therapist, the brother is doing well at boarding school…This final, bizarre twist seems to be the perfect metaphor to represent the nostalgia, confusion, and pain that comes from the inevitable parent-child separation.
I applaud writer Amy Silverberg's skill in introducing tension incrementally, then keeping it at bay to arrive just in time for this beautifully imaginative and original ending. It definitely has strong hints of Aimee Bender, Karen Russell, and a few other women short story writers who often mix a pleasurable dose of magical realism into their tales. I always enjoy this style of story because it points at deeper truths with some irony and humor.
Suburbia! by Amy Silverberg
The Best American Short Stories 2018 (originally published in The Southern Review)