(Suburban) Miami Vice

Whenever I tell people I’ve lived in South Florida, their ears perk up. Where in South Florida? they tend to ask. And afterwards respond, nodding knowingly: Oh, Boca.

Some of those who react to the name have grandparents there or have vacationed along the Florida coast. But far more lean in and wiggle their eyebrows, eager to confirm their suspicions about Palm Beach County’s rich and famous. How many pampered children of plastic surgeons and real estate developers sat next to me in high school? Are the streets really clogged with geriatric drivers in Cadillacs inching along at 20 miles per hour? Did my family’s villa on the Intracoastal Waterway come with three palm trees on the front lawn and a dock out back for our yacht?

America has long had a double-sided fascination with Boca Raton, Florida: near-envious awe of its balmy weather and sun-drenched beaches on one hand, contempt for its moneyed retirees, private day schools, excess, and narcissism on the other. Maybe it’s because I don’t seem particularly Floridian — don’t like swimming, no tan, have indeed seen snow — but people assume, after we’ve cleared the beach stereotypes out of the way, that I’ll regale them with tales of indulgence and vice that smack of the 33496. I’m only too willing to do so; until very recently, I’ve been one of Boca’s snidest and most vocal critics.

I spent the first twelve years of my life on the outskirts of Dallas, Texas, in a prime slice of American exurbia. There’s an oft-quoted saying that the surest mark of a writer is an unhappy childhood; it used to strike fear into me because mine was pretty much uniformly idyllic. My hometown featured one high school, a main street actually called “Main Street”, a smattering of Baptist congregations, garage sales on weekends, and a sense of unassuming community. I had a trampoline in my backyard and my best friend lived next door. Save for the tantrums I threw when I didn’t want to practice the piano, I was happy.

Then, a month before my twelfth birthday, my father dropped the m-word: he had accepted a job offer in Florida and we were moving. But it’d be easy for me because we’d be leaving in the summer, after I finished sixth grade. And I’d love it! We’d be five minutes away from the beach — he would take me every day if I wanted!

Sunscreen and sandbars seemed like paltry compensation for leaving behind my friends, my house, and the open plains I’d called home for my entire life, but after a week of quiet despair, I tried to console myself. Maybe I would grow to love the natural beauty of the region. Maybe (I even ventured) I’d wear big sunglasses and my hair would flow out in the wind and I would sagely counsel my Texan friends on which Disney theme park was best. Maybe I’d be cool.

What I’d never heard about and thus failed to anticipate, though, were Boca’s notorious idiosyncrasies. In Dallas, everyone I knew was thoroughly middle-class and lived in subdivisions built during the early 2000s housing boom. In Boca (home to the most expensive gated community in the U.S. and a $95,000 median family income, just so we’re clear), I encountered, for the first time in my life, neighborhoods with manmade lakes and palatial clubhouses and 24-hour guards who sported not-so-subtle holsters on their hips. Every time one of them peered into the rolled-down window and asked my parents (and later me, when I began driving) for our names and photo IDs, I waited with bated breath, sure that this time, the friend I was visiting had forgotten to call me in and the guard would sternly refuse us and I would be exposed as a fraud in the most trivial yet shameful way possible.

In no time, a profound sense of unbelonging was permeating my relationships with my classmates. I attended public schools, but even within these supposed economic leveling grounds the parking lots were peppered with Mercedes, the PTAs staffed with perfectly tanned and coiffed soccer moms, the students sporting Coach and Apple. I made friends slowly and timidly. No one — not my classmates, not their parents, not the shoppers in the mall or the strangers I passed in the parking lot — actually shunned me because I was an outsider, but I was always conscious of the gulf between the haves and the have-nots simply because of the casual, everyday attitude toward abundance. I’ll never forget the seventh-grade classmate who, when asked how many TVs he had in his house, had to pause for several moments to count them off on his fingers (he finally came up with seven). Or the first friend I made at my new middle school — as she led me languidly through her vast, echoey home, she complained that the maid who came three times a week moved around her belongings when she cleaned. In high school, when I began making friends with juniors and seniors who could drive, I dreaded asking them to pick me up or drop me off. What would they think when they entered my ungated community? My parents and I lived in a townhouse. We had no pool, no four-car garage, no 50,000-square-foot clubhouse with a sauna and bar. I hoped none of my friends kept a running tally of who hosted group projects, birthday bashes, homecoming afterparties, New Year’s Eve celebrations. An itinerant, I hopped from neighborhood to lavish neighborhood; I could count on one hand the times I brought friends to my own.

If Boca had a definitive standard of living, it presented an even more dauntingly homogeneous front in terms of cultural identity. First, a brief note: though Florida is technically located in the American South, and though north of Orlando you start seeing pro-life billboards along the highway, South Florida (from West Palm Beach down) is much more culturally similar to New York than it is to the Bible Belt. This I learned, however, only after I began to receive a deluge of creamy-white embossed invitations, halfway through seventh grade. “What would I wear to Laura’s bar mitzvah?” I asked a classmate. She immediately informed me that girls had bat mitzvahs and boys had bar mitzvahs (“Guys love going to bars, so that’s how I remember it”), that I should cover my shoulders if I wore a strapless dress, that the appropriate expression was “mazel tov”, and that the Torah readings tended to get extraordinarily boring but the food and festivities afterward were much better. My religious background had been halfhearted at best — my parents were only nominally Christian, and preteen me was a self-styled skeptic — so I approached the traditions of my newfound Jewish friends with tentative curiosity. The culture was welcoming, or at least pervasive enough that outsiders were swept up in it. I accompanied, on piano, a Shabbat service at a local Reform synagogue. I learned to define, pronounce, and spell “yarmulke”. Once again, I was never ostracized; few refused me their attention or courtesy because I was a foreigner. However (and I was realizing this about Boca as a whole), the social ties that were crucial to integration ran much deeper than the everyday niceties we exchange. My friends mused about whether they’d take Birthright trips to Israel and grumbled about ditching sandwiches for Passover. Through no fault of theirs, I could never take part in the shared history that, in many ways, defined them.

For much of middle school I was angry and defensive. Once the glitz and the glamour of living in FloridaTM had worn off (about two weeks), I began to decry Boca vanity, Boca materialism. I resented the fact that I never felt at ease with my sleek, sophisticated classmates, and whenever one aspect or another of my new school frustrated me, I retreated into myself and nursed my morbid certainty that I would’ve been so much happier if I hadn’t moved. By freshman year of high school most of my bitterness had subsided, but it was replaced by a sense of grim determination. “Four more years” became my mantra. Just four more years, I told myself, and I’d leave for an out-of-state college, preferably in the Northeast, and cast off my time here like an embarrassing, outgrown shirt. I buried myself in leadership positions and AP courses and Ivy League brochures, feeding myself on fantasy until the day of my long-awaited deliverance.

I think I acknowledged that Florida had altered me irrevocably, for better or for worse, and yet I stubbornly resisted the idea of being defined by Boca. I had ready with me a constant disclaimer: whenever someone asked where I was from, I made sure to stipulate, right after and sometimes even before answering, that neither had I grown up there nor did I plan to spend my future there. People made Boca jokes (billionairespalmtreesplasticsurgerycondos, right?). I went along with said Boca jokes (actually, chihuahuasverandasgolfcourseshairsalons), playing, to great acclaim, the cynic reporting wryly on a corrupt institution. They got a chuckle, I got pained sympathy, everyone left satisfied — or at least they thought they did. Sometimes, after the giddy glow of laughter faded and the topic shifted, I felt uneasy for being so vicious and dismissive toward a place where I had lived for six years, where I still slept every night. But then I reminded myself of all the injustices I’d tallied up over the years. All the things I’d fantasized would be grander, franker, friendlier, freer just outside the city limits. And I doubled down; I was sure. Florida was a chapter I was ready to close.

*** -

A month before my eighteenth birthday, my parents sat me down at the dinner table: my father had accepted a job offer in North Carolina and we were moving. But not to worry, we’d wait until after graduation. And I’d be leaving for college soon anyway — it was inevitable, saying goodbye. I packed my belongings into boxes and I hugged my friends, and then my parents and I backed out of the narrow driveway of our townhouse. Fourteen hours later we were winding through the wooded hills of the Piedmont region of the U.S. It was a long summer, and I took my time unpacking; two moves (and an impending third) had taught me not to settle in too comfortably.

At first, when my new college classmates asked me where I was from, I told them North Carolina. But then I began feeling disingenuous — and not only because I didn’t know Friends X and Y from Z High School in my town. I had no history in North Carolina; I didn’t know my favorite ice cream place to stop for a late-night snack or how my neighborhood looked under snow in the winter. I was then tempted to specify that I’d actually spent much of my childhood in Texas, but somehow that didn’t sound right either. Six years had passed, and I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d talked to my friends from elementary school. Classes started. Fall lapsed into winter. Winter lapsed into spring. And as the temporal distance between me and Florida stretched on, I began thinking seriously about Boca. And the funny thing is, I didn’t mull over the perceived exclusivities I’d suffered. Nor did I feel the profound relief I imagined would wash over me once I’d left Boca safely behind. I tried to remember Boca objectively, without prejudice; I needed to know what it was about this place that rendered it so detestable and, at the same time, its lingering memory so hard to shed.

For so long I’d envisioned myself in a one-woman struggle against an almighty oppressor, but I admitted that I’d been far from alone. Ironically far, in fact. How had I learned to ridicule Boca’s tax bracket? Where had I heard that Boca had “two seasons: spring and summer”? My friends and classmates, Boca natives — the very people from whom I’d often felt alienated — were all remarkably conscious of the reputation of their hometown. And some took weary responsibility for it, to the point of self-mockery, even: included in the arsenal of Essential Boca References were the “snowbirds” who migrated down every year from New York, cluttering shops and beachfronts from September to March. The sincerity and life meaning that must lie right outside the “Boca bubble”. Soon I, too, was sighing over the high school seniors who’d commissioned a yacht to take them two miles from their pre-party to prom. And springtime weather in December — there’d been a mild frenzy one holiday season when Gainesville got snow, but alas, South Florida remained green and sunny and untouched. Of course, I had met outsiders like me who accepted Boca and its trappings hesitantly, if at all, but I also knew a surprising number of native residents who just wanted to leave as soon as compulsory education lost its hold on them. Almost none of my friends considered staying in town for college, and a fair number of them wrinkled their noses at the University of Florida, where graduating seniors from my high school usually ended up. “It’s too much like here” was the rationale. Disparaging Boca was, paradoxically, a currency of “cool”. Boca was a trial. Like wisdom tooth surgery and the SATs, it was simply something you had to endure.

But had it really been as grueling an ordeal as we all believed? I think back to all the times I lay awake in bed, especially during the turbulent years of middle school, obsessing over what life would be like were I still living in Dallas. I was bleakly certain that I knew: I’d be with the same friends I’d had since kindergarten, I’d take piano lessons from the same teacher who’d drilled me on five-finger exercises, I’d come home every day to the house where I’d grown up. I knew the rhythm of life in my corner of the world; I’d be happy. Or would I? I’d blamed Boca and its vices for the alienation and insecurity with which I’d grappled, especially during middle school, but were cliques and unrequited crushes and gnawing self-doubt indigenous to Boca? Or did they come in a package deal with the near-universal experience of being a teenager?

The longer I pondered the question of Boca, the more half-forgotten recollections I began to unearth — recollections that seemed neutral or tinged, even, with a kind of nostalgia. I remembered Boca’s characteristic Spanish architecture, with its stucco walls and crimped red roof tiles. I remembered the afternoon showers during the spring and summer months and the many times I’d get caught in them, walking home, when I couldn’t drive and still took the bus to and from school. I remembered the thick, oppressive heat in August and how good it felt to walk into an air-conditioned building. And sometimes, if the building was just a tad too chilly, how oddly good it felt to go back outside.

I remembered riding in the car with my parents during their Saturday morning grocery shopping trips, the windows rolled down and the wind whipping my hair into a knotted mess. I remembered my first time driving on a highway, the I-95, my senior year of high school — my mother had forbidden me from doing it, but I’d realized with surprise and pleasure, after I’d merged on, that it wasn’t scary at all. I remembered the teachers who’d liked and encouraged me in high school. And middle school. I remembered how humiliated I’d felt after garbling a sentence in front of a boy I’d liked. I remembered Christmases at 75 degrees. I remembered rolling my eyes over Christmases at 75 degrees. I remembered mundane snapshots of everyday life, and maybe they had been as fundamental to my experience as sweeping statements about Boca’s climate and demographics and moral values. As reluctant as I was to face it, maybe I was mistaken in insisting that I hadn’t grown up in Boca. I hadn’t spent my childhood there, no. But I had grown.

I, along with a fair number of others, have spent a long time trying to erase Boca from our identities. It’s natural — who wants to be associated with the capital of All That’s Wrong with American Materialism? So we tell, to whoever will listen, the real stories of who we are. The problem, though, is that we also end up telling those stories to ourselves. And who are we? I’d like to think that I’ve absorbed little, if any, Boca extravagance and Boca indolence. But I’m at least partly my Boca high school and my Boca friends. I’m partly the Boca frozen yogurt shop where I held down my first job and the Boca summer camp where I (barely) learned to play tennis. I’m the successes and failures, the joys and disappointments I lived through, inadvertently, while biding my time in the 33496. These things are no less “Boca” to me than our cultural mantra of billionairespalmtreesplasticsurgerycondos, and perhaps they’re more so — they were the daily substance of my experience there, and thus I can’t deny that they’ve shaped me. If we’ve lived somewhere long enough, can we really reject its claim, at least to some extent, upon us? After what’s seemed like a long and weary battle, I’ve stopped trying to. And, unexpectedly, I’m relieved.

I don’t have a pithy answer to “So, where are you from?” Nowadays I’ve been going with “It’s a long story,” and some people end up sticking around to hear it. When they ask about Boca, I’ll give them the truth (couple of trust-fund babies, some seniors but they preferred Buicks, unfortunately no villa) and I’ll even throw in some anecdotes. But if they gasp in condemnation at my stories, I smile and shrug instead of joining in. I’ve made a certain peace with Boca; I no longer have anything to prove, to others or (more importantly, I think) to myself. “Yeah, before I moved, I’d never seen someone rent a party bus for her birthday either,” I say. “But it was an experience.”