Living on the Edge of the World New Jersey Writers Take on the Garden State

Introduction: From One Edge Of The World To Another Irina ReynExit 156 When I was seven years old, my parents and I emigrated from Moscow to Flatbush, Brooklyn. Two years later, just as I gained some confidence with the English language and began to grasp the geography of our new neighborhood, we relocated to Rego Park, Queens, where I began yet another elementary school. When I was almost fifteen, with one year at Forest Hills High School behind me, my parents announced that the three of us would be moving again -- this time to Fair Lawn, New Jersey -- so my father could start his own private medical practice. In my diary of that next major period of transition, I scribbled, "There's something missing in my life that keeps me from being thoroughly happy. I think it lies in New Jersey." Looking back on that diary entry now, it seems like the initial spark forLiving on the Edge of the World:the first tentative steps toward imagining a literary New Jersey. This is the New Jersey I have strived to realize in this collection by collaborating with the writers gathered in these pages. But back then, I was exhausted from moving. I was longing for a place to rest, a safe place to discover myself. The anonymity of cities was all I knew, and my curiosity about the suburbs was fueled by powerful images from television. In the suburbs, I would have a shot at that elusive idyllic childhood, complete with a mother in the kitchen dispensing Oreos and Kool-Aid after impromptu soccer matches in the backyard with friends. I would be able to let myself into a friend's house without even having to knock, the cupboards -- and all their decadent, artificially flavored contents -- available to me any time of day. The dreams were simple, naive, almost regressive, an attempt to recapture a childhood I never had. Mainly, though, I was drawn to the stability of those suburban images: houses lived in throughout entire lifetimes, no switching of schools, no packing up of apartments, no learning of a new language, no painstaking process of turning strangers into friends. What I was searching for in New Jersey was the impossible: a perfectly cohesive sense of home. The New Jersey I discovered had little in common with my suburban fantasies. The first year in New Jersey was almost as much of a culture shock as my first years in the United States. I was bewildered by malls, by their mysterious lack of function, where you went not to shop but simply to walk around in aimless circles, to see and be seen. I didn't know what to make of the genre of slicked-back student referred to by others as the "Guido" -- with the fuzzy dice hanging from his car's rearview mirror, the lights around the license plate flashing, the car bopping up and down to Z100 at red lights. Diners, although off-putting at first for their gaudy, downscale Art Deco furnishings and indifferent service, became a comforting, reliable dispenser of late-night coffee, rice pudding, cheese sticks, and cherry pie (heated, of course, and with ice cream). In New Jersey, it seemed, I was an immigrant all over again. I found nighttime in Fair Lawn silent and eerie and was convinced I smelled toxic waste everywhere (a city girl not realizing that the scent was actually emanating from skunks rather than the New Jersey equivalent of Chernobyl). Other than the twenty-four-hour CVS, a diner or two, a Friendly's, and a Baskin-Robbins, there was little of interest in walking distance. I missed apartment buildings, with their noises, their smells, the palpable proximity of other human bodies. As the paint dried, as the new furniture began to occupy the space it still does to this day, I yearned to tell my parents they had made a mistake. But time passed, and like it or not, I was maturing in New Jersey. It was in Fair Lawn where I experienced my first boyfriend (and lost him to another girl three months later), where I learneReyn, Irina is the author of 'Living on the Edge of the World New Jersey Writers Take on the Garden State', published 2007 under ISBN 9780743291606 and ISBN 0743291603.