On Revisiting Erma Bombeck and Deep Suburbia as a Disaster Flick

A couple of weeks ago, we were visiting friends who live in a large subdivision far in the suburbs of Chicago. There are at least a couple of ponds, lots of beautiful trees and open green spaces, walking trails, winding roads and wide yards. It was as placid and undisturbed as the surface of one of the ponds, more like a representational oil painting of a landscape than a place where people actually live.

It took a moment for me to realize that I had an eerie feeling in my gut and a bit longer to unpack it, but when we were driving through, I said to my husband, “This is like a disaster flick.” He immediately knew what I meant. It was a lovely August afternoon in a subdivision homeowners flock to for the predictability and feeling of safety but virtually no one was outside enjoying it. Empty yards, though they had plenty of cars in the driveways. No one at the pond, no one on the trails that we passed, no kids playing outside. This is normal today.

I’m not here to write one of those snobby criticisms of “ticky tacky,” cookie-cutter communities because, as someone who lives in a 125+-year-old house in a multicultural inner-ring suburb, I know my home and where it is located is not for everyone. In fact, depending on what is going on with this old house, it is sometimes not for me. It’s quite different from the tidy cul-de-sac in the leafy suburb that my parents chose for my own home when I was growing up. Dealing with the plumbing issues of a 19th century house alone helps me to understand why anyone would say, “Yeah. Not that. In fact, the opposite of that.”

While what I noticed the other day in this subdivision – the vacuum-like, flattened out quality, the lack of humans interacting in and with the environment – isn’t unique to that community and nor is it the first time I’ve noticed this in residential areas, it was the first time it evoked to my mind a scene from a disaster or horror film, one where everything looks pristine and untouched but that is because nearly everyone has vanished.

Cue the Twilight Zone music.

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A month or so ago, I scored a copy of Erma Bombeck’s 1976 classic, The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank, from a local Little Free Library. As soon as I saw the cover, I was almost knocked over by nostalgia and missing my mother, gone for 12 years now. When I was growing up in the 1970s, Erma Bombeck was a very popular, sardonic humorist who depicted herself as an endlessly harried housewife and her source material was suburban life, especially planned communities like the one we visited a couple of weeks ago. I had not thought about Erma Bombeck for years but as soon as I saw her name, the floodgates of memory broke open. Seeing the book jacket, I immediately remembered my own mom on her lounge chair in our grassy suburban backyard, a bottle of Tab and a tube of Coppertone beside her, leafing through dog-eared books by Judith Rossner, Danielle Steel, and, yes, Erma Bombeck. I remember this one specifically.

Like Gwyneth before her, Erma spoke to and of a certain demographic unwaveringly – her readers were largely white, middle-class mothers, especially those who white-flighted their way out of cities and into suburban track homes – and her comedic wellsprings were the PTAs, the distracted husbands, the nearly-identical track houses, the gossipping busybodies, the endless carpools, the rip-off artists from the utility companies, the Sisyphean pursuit of the perfect lawn, the kids who are not your own that you have unofficially adopted because they are at your dinner table every night. Much of it is outdated – that’ll happen over 50 years – and some is racist (oh, that section on Halloween is a doozy, especially the part with the Spanish-speaking adult and his friend trick-or-treating at her door: Good grief, Bombeck as frazzled narrator says, these had come all the way across the border for a bag of caramel corn) but it was pretty consistent with the era.

Erma Bombeck the humorist was a real person – a copywriter turned syndicated columnist turned best-selling author and entertainer – who basically performed as “Erma Bombeck,” not the household name or millionaire, but a put-upon, overwhelmed, amused-despite-it-all housewife whose dispatches were gobbled up by suburban moms in the motherhood trenches themselves. She wrote about the competitive, “perfect” mothers who made everyone else feel inadequate decades before there was the Tiger Mom trope. She spoke to the boredom of having one’s ambition sublimated into motherhood and the endless, unrecognized domestic labor. She satirized the police blotter, full of people complaining about non-problems. She described loneliness despite being surrounded by people and a near-desperation for unbothered time for herself. She did this always with humor but there was a deeper, more honest undercurrent her readers connected with, wasn’t there? (This interview from the 1980s gives you a good sense of how sharp she was.)

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Last week, my son and I were talking about food rationing in wartime, specifically World War II. War wasn’t being fought on our soil but people at home wanted to give, to lessen the load of those who had put their lives on the line. I said, offhandedly, “Can you imagine people doing that today? Agreeing to help with something bigger than themselves by reducing their consumption, by contributing? Now people are islands unto themselves.” What do you think happened?, he asked.

Obviously it is more than this and with many contributing factors, but I have to think that this idea of people thinking of their individual homes as bunkers of a sort and not engaging with their neighbors or the larger community much has to have a role in it. When I was a child, even though I grew up in a suburban landscape that Erma Bombeck described, the kids were outside, riding bikes, climbing trees, playing together, nary an adult supervising. On that same block today, even though it is still full of families raising kids and in a plum location with the elementary school a few blocks away, you will not see children outside today. It has the same flat, desolate feeling even as I felt in the subdivision.

A lot has changed from the 1970s, including the idea that the children need the bulk of their free time accounted for in enriching extracurriculars but it is also a mentality that the “outside” is an unpredictable, sinister place with unsavory characters lurking behind every hedge, and a lack of trust for what falls outside our personal bunkers. The move toward a kind of paranoid individualism seems to have creeped in during the stranger danger era that began in the 1980s, but I’d have to think that even Erma Bombeck would find these communities unrecognizable. The environment she described was reminiscent of my childhood as well: Neighbors knowing each other, children playing together outside, a lived-in quality, not just a carefully managed landscape with houses and SUVs. I am not trying to romanticize the era but I will say that there was no mistaking that people lived amongst each other there.

When we think about re-humaning, about the things that connect us to who we are at our best individually and as a society, we have to think about how this drive to separateness and isolation has contributed to our distrust of one another, our unwillingness to contribute to the greater good beyond our personal fortresses, and, quite frankly, our collective unhappiness.