In Person

by Gretchen Voss

Unwelcome Wagon

Why would a young, urbane, unmarried couple relocate to PTA-and-apple pie outer suburbia?

hat does your husband do?"

"Well, actually, we're not married."

"Oh, ahh, so where did you move from?"

"Boston."

"Oh, ahh, my sister lived there once."

My conversation with the neighborhood stay-at-home moms out on their morning walk sputtered and stalled like a 1989 Dodge Caravan, and that little voice in my head that had been whimpering for weeks started screaming: What have we done?

My fiance, Dave, and I had just moved to the suburbs. Not to one of Boston's fashionable streetcar suburbs, mind you, but to a hopelessly uncool place an hour's drive north and west of Boston. A place you've never heard of unless, of course, you happen to live there.

We wanted a big yard. We wanted a big dog. It was that simple. And though we knew there were going to be some major adjustments - that eating sushi this far away from the ocean was not a good idea, that there wasn't a New York Times to be had within a 10-mile radius, that leaving my magazine job in the city to freelance from home was going to be, well, quiet - we thought of it as a mere rite of passage. An adventure, even.

Little did we know that, as semi-singletons in our late 20s, we were about to willingly exile ourselves to a suburban no man's land. Apparently, there were two requirements for living among these tidy homes: a marriage license and school-aged children. We had neither. And before we could purchase a leaf blower, we were blackballed from the Colonial Drive parents' club.

Two questions. Two wrong answers. That's all it took for the Keds-wearing, power-walking neighborhood moms to realize that I was not one of them. Suddenly, I was stumbling and guffawing around like a Rodney Dangerfield character. Everything about me was wrong. My truck was yellow and rugged, my recycling bin overflowing with merlot and chardonnay bottles; their minivans were sedate and practical, their yards a jumble of plastic toys and stray balls. Needless to say, they never asked me what I did for a living (they knew I wasn't a domestic goddess). I never asked them where the good restaurants were hiding (I knew they went to Applebee's).

The conversation turned to PTA meetings and car-pool schedules, bake sales and pumpkin-carving parties - and I was completely shut out of the chitchat. Down to the cul-de-sac and back, not one more word was spoken to me. My child-free status was the ultimate invisible fence.

I don't really know what I expected when we traded our funky apartment above Figs in Charlestown for our grown-up house in the sticks. It's not as though I harbored all these whitewashed Rockwellian illusions about provincial chumminess. I certainly didn't fantasize about exchanging fruitcake recipes at block parties or borrowing a cup of sugar from the Joneses. But this utter invisibility was bizarre. The fact that I was not worth knowing simply because I wasn't a breeder made me angry. On the other hand, truth be told, I was relieved. Besides abutting lawns and 30-year mortgages, we had absolutely nothing in common.

We got our big yard. We got our big dog. We even found new suburban friends (at Puppy Kindergarten, no less) who are just like us. They are also stuck in that tricky transitional phase for which life's blueprint fades - too grown-up for swinging single life, not grown-up enough for a riding mower. So we carved out our own kiddie-free world, where it's OK - hell, it's a good thing - to drink wine and play poker late into the night. And in the morning, to bypass the neighborhood power walk.

Gretchen Voss is a freelance writer who lives northwest of Boston.