But she breaks just like a little girl....

But she breaks just like a little girl....

Meghan called me in a panic. "I've been having nightmares...can't sleep, I'm coming over." It was 3 o'clock on a Wednesday morning and I was in no mood for whatever this was about. "Don't you come here!" I shouted into the phone, "you have a husband, that's what He's for!" She had already hung up the phone before I finished the sentence though.

Meghan and her husband live two floors above me in a ubiquitous apartment building on the near-north side. I've known them for about three years now, and have come to rely on them for all kinds of domestic advice. Her husband, Russell, is a banker by trade and she works in some anonymous secretarial office job. They were married about two and a-half years ago and are constantly making plans to move to the suburbs, start a family of soccer players. I have no doubt they will see these plans through. It is probably within their means to do so right now, if they could only surrender their youthful love of living in the city, going out on the weekends, and maybe, strictly maybe- the fantasy of trading up to a better, more exciting life. The kind they always pictured themselves living.

I was reluctant to answer the door when I heard the knock. I could tell by the desperate phone call that she would probably continue knocking all night, so in spite of better instincts I opened the door and let her in. "Ever since that party last week I haven't been able to sleep." She was referring to the party Russell threw her for her 30th birthday. "I just lie there thinking about college and where I thought I'd end up and where I am now...God! I'm such a mess." She was on the verge of a breakdown and I couldn't really think of anything to say. "Well, why not just stop thinking about it," I said. "Just go home and drink yourself to sleep...or whatever Donna Reid would do in this situation. I have no time for this weirdness." She ignored my suggestions and started telling me about the time in college when she and the guy she was dating climbed up onto the roof of a building somewhere in Middle America and made love beneath the night sky. I'd heard the story before, and even then it struck me as the kind of thing old wives think about late at night as their husbands sleep and cars hiss by outside their windows.

Meghan spread out on my couch and continued talking but I couldn't focus on what she was saying. She had this pathetic air about her suddenly, something you see on the face of the defeated. And it made me think. Her story isn't all that different from what you see on a prime-time special about the life of a serial-killer before they get caught: A nice, clean house, a decent job, respected by all the neighbors and an occasional participant in charitable functions. There is no reason to believe there is anything sinister beneath the surface, no dark secrets looming in a shallow grave just beneath the dirt in the crawl space under the house. But then, one day, it all turns black.

She had talked herself out within an hour, and then fell asleep there on the couch. Another exhausted mark that bought into the great junk-bond that is the American Ideal. In another era, Meghan's type would have been a saloon girl in an old western whistle stop town on the edge of nowhere. Splitting her time at night between drinks at the bar and earning them on her back. Sucked into the notion that there was simply no other way, and that the desperate need for something else that welled up in their chest every now and again was better left unspoken.

The sad truth is that her story is a common one in our time. With nothing left to do and nothing left to be discovered, going for broke is a hard sell to anyone with a chance of making it into a suburban cemetery one day. Fifty years ago, her life was thought of as the dream to which one should aspire, but after half a century of dreaming more and more people like her are waking up with nightmares. Maybe it's the dated expectation that a college education, a clean arrest record, and good credit will lead to some kind of real happiness. Who knows? Maybe it's just that whatever kind of brass it takes to throw off the easy comforts that this kind of life provides is lacking in our generation. Like some evolutionary weirdness, bred out after years of misuse and neglect. There aren't many left on this planet with the balls to move the big stones these days, to build the pyramid for the sake of proving it can be built. With any luck, the next generation will get bored with the antiseptic tranquility of the suburbs and shake the earth with the force of their character. But it's too late tonight to make any sort of predictions about that sort of thing.