I grew up in Dallas, Texas, wondering why. In the novels and buttery teen magazines I read, people of consequence lived in California and the East Coast, the glittering cities where a Jay Gatsby or a John Stamos might thrive. When I became obsessed with Stephen King books, I nursed fantasies of moving to Maine. Things happened in Maine, I told myself, never understanding things happened in Maine because Stephen King made them happen.
My father was an engineer for DuPont Chemical in 1970, but a crisis of conscience changed our family’s entire trajectory. The environmental movement was getting started, and my dad wanted to be on the right side of history—cleaning up the planet, not pumping more toxins into it. He took a job with the burgeoning Environmental Protection Agency, which was opening up branches across the country, and in 1977, when I was three years old, we moved from a quaint Philadelphia suburb to the wilds of Dallas, a city so far removed from what we knew it might as well have been Egypt.
I’ve often wondered how much of my life would be different if we’d stayed where we sprouted. What part of my later troubles, my sense of estrangement could be traced back to this one simple set change—swapping the leafy and sun-dappled streets surrounding our apartment in Pennsylvania for the hot cement and swiveling highways of Big D?
My parents rented a small house on a busy street in the neighborhood with the best public school system in Dallas. The district was notorious for other things, too, though it took us a while to catch on: $300 Louis Vuitton purses on the shoulders of sixth graders, ski trips to second homes in Aspen or Vail, a line of BMWs and Mercedes snaking around the school entrance. Meanwhile, we drove a dented station wagon with a ceiling liner held up by staples and duct tape. We didn’t have a chance.
Parents often try to correct the mistakes of their own past, but they end up introducing new errors. My father grew up in a public housing project in Detroit. My mother wondered what she might have achieved if she hadn’t downshifted her intelligence through school. They wanted better opportunities for their two children. And so they moved into an area where all the kids went to college, an area so cloistered from the dangers of the big city it was known as the Bubble.
The neighborhood was a real slice of old-fashioned Americana: two-story redbrick homes and children selling lemonade on the corner. My brother and I rode our bikes to the shopping center a mile away to buy gummy worms and magic tricks, and we made As on our report cards, and we were safe. In fact, the only thief I ever knew was me.
I was a small-time crook. In middle school, I slipped lipstick and powder compacts into my pocket at the Woolworth’s and smiled at the clerk as I passed. Every kid pushes boundaries, but something else was going on: Surrounded by a land of plenty, I couldn’t shake the notion that what I had been given was not enough. So I “borrowed” clothes from other people’s closets. I had an ongoing scam with the Columbia Record & Tape Club that involved changing the spelling of my name each time I joined. But the first thing I remember stealing was beer.
I was seven when I started sneaking sips of Pearl Light from half-empty cans left in the refrigerator. I would tiptoe into the kitchen in my cotton nightgown, and I would take two long pulls when no one was looking, and I would spin around the living room, giggling and knocking into furniture. A carnival ride of my very own.
Later, I would hear stories of girls this age discovering their bodies. A showerhead positioned between the thighs. The humping of a pillow after lights off. “You didn’t do that?” people would ask, surprised and maybe a little bit sad for me.
I chased the pounding of my heart to other places. A bottle of cooking sherry under the sink. A bottle of Cointreau, screw top crusty with lack of use. But nothing was as good as beer. The fizz. The left hook of it. That wicked ka-pow.
In high school, girls would complain about beer—how gross and sour it was, how they could barely force themselves to drink it—and I was confused, as though they were bad-mouthing chocolate or summer vacation. The taste for beer was embroidered on my DNA.
THE MOVE TO Dallas was hard on everyone, but it might have been toughest on my mom. She was catatonic for a week after our arrival. This was a woman who had traveled alone in Europe and was voted “most optimistic” in her high school class, but in the first days of our new life, she sat on the couch, unable to retrieve even a lampshade from the garage.