The Schizophrenic Life of Suzie Sinclair

Disclaimer: I own nothing. This is merely a product of my bored imagination.

My Life, Part One

I hate trains.

I mean, I really hate trains. I've tried to like them, and I've tried to quell this stupid petty hatred, but I just hate trains. This most likely derives from the fact that I spend about half my life on one. Overexposure. I bet that by the end of my life I will have been on about ten thousand trains. As of this very minute, I've been on five hundred eighty-eight trains. No joke. I keep count. Sick, isn't it? I'm pretty sure it's a compulsion. Either that or just a way to stay occupied on all five hundred eighty-eight of those train rides.

Maybe you wonder why I've been on so many trains at the tender age of fourteen-almost-fifteen, hmm? It's a reasonable question really; I've asked it a few times myself, at night when I get too analytical. Mostly it's my parents' fault – it's not a thing that I'm supposed to – or do – discuss, but my mother and father were never married to each other. That's why I have my mother's last name, Sinclair, even if Suzie Sinclair does make me sound like a bubbly budding reporter at the Daily News, the sort who likes to sit on desks with her legs crossed coquettishly. As far as the kids of Sweet Apple, Ohio, are concerned, my father is the man that my mother married instead of my actual dad, the man that I generally have very little to do with. Nobody has met my real father, and nobody knows my real father. They all think I'm always zipping off to New York City to visit my aunt Suzanne on my mother's side, for whom I was named. Even said "father" of mine thinks this, gullible fool he is. I do visit my aunt Suzanne, but I'm also visiting my father, my real father, taking all five hundred eighty-eight train rides to New York City and back to good old Sweet Apple, Ohio.

My double life, as I refer to it, does get tiring. In Sweet Apple, I'm forever pretending that the man my mother is married to is my real father, oh heaven forbid my mother's reputation be tarnished with a technically illegitimate child. (In contrast, my father could not care less; he's just a swinging New York bachelor kind of guy that just so happens to have a daughter.) Then in both Ohio and New York, there's the cynicism issue. My cynicism (or realism, as I prefer it called) is not appreciated by most teenagers or adults living in America in the 1950's, especially coming from such a girl as me, a perfect teenager with her whole life ahead of her. Really, it isn't that I'm a pessimist or anything. I'm just very honest and realistic about things. And of course, I'm forever trying to keep my lives distinctly separate.

When I go to the city (every couple of weekends or so, plus some holidays) I end up holing up at Dad's apartment some nights and staying with Aunt Suzanne the others. Dad and I do typical father-daughter stuff, mostly going out to eat or catching movies or plays. My mother is the one actually raising me, don't get confused – but I don't hold it against my father. He doesn't really get the parenting thing; we're more just buddies that share a gene pool. A girl only really needs one capable parent, and if the extra parent happens to be just a buddy, well, at least he's there. My friend Ursula Merkle, her father ran out on her and her mom when she was little (I've heard rumors that alcohol was involved – when isn't it?); then, in a crazy Disneyesque twist, our other friend Deborah Sue Miller's dad married Ursula's mother and now they're sisters. (Deborah Sue's mom died giving birth to her younger brother Karl.)

Aunt Suzanne is a sort of older sister type to me, even though she's the epitome of the perfect housewife. She has a daughter my age, Bonnie, and we all do things like go shopping at Macy's and drink tea at street-corner coffeehouses when I visit. In the winter we even go ice-skating at Rockefeller Center, though that isn't always the wisest idea as none of us are very coordinated. Bonnie introduced me to her friends Mary Elizabeth and Caroline, who, like any other right-minded teenage girls in America, are members of the Conrad Birdie Fan Club. Now, while I'm a member of the Sweet Apple branch, I went ahead and joined their branch too; after all, my costume is that of a right-minded teenage girl. New York Suzie, as I refer to the mask I wear when in New York, is actually rather neurotic and obsessive about Conrad Birdie-worship. She's the club's secretary and unofficial organizational whiz. (New York Suzie, who didn't come into existence until a few years ago, when I was finally allowed to visit my father, is modeled after the aforementioned Ursula, who is just about as neurotic and obsessive as it can get, especially when it comes to Conrad Birdie. New York Suzie is the most obnoxious of my facades.)

Really, though, it's all just subterfuge. You see, I may seem to be Suzie Sinclair, Loyal Conrad Birdie Fan and Absolutely Normal (Albeit A Bit Too Knowing) Teenager on the outside, but inside I'm Suzie Sinclair, Beatnik Poet On the Rise. That may be my favorite thing about New York City. After Aunt Suzanne and Uncle Trevor go to bed or Dad goes out for some other swinging bachelor's swinging city party, I sneak out to the real coffeehouses, the ones with dim lighting and coffee so strong it gives you a headache, and beatniks, real beatniks, with their berets and bongos and black everything, the sullen women and the moodily attractive older men. That's what I was meant for. I want to be around people with deep thoughts, thoughts that don't involve a certain greasy-haired gyrating rock star. At night I'll put on my black sweater and skirt, my panty hose, and I'll drink the extra-strong coffee and I'll listen to real poets present their real poetry. It's my inspiration. When I get home I'll pour out my soul in real poetry, hidden safely in a box under my bed. Nobody would even dare look there, and nobody knows about my dreams. Nobody would understand, not even Bonnie. Everyone is so content on just doing what is expected of them, but I want more than that.

My mother naturally hates my visits to the city. She hates that I have a life away from her and her husband (I refuse to call him my stepfather) and the pristine perfection of Sweet Apple, Ohio. She hates that I think for myself. She may not know that I dream of beatnik poetry, but she knows that I think for myself. And most of all she hates that I spend time with my father. I don't think that they ever really got along, and I can't imagine why they even spent time together, but they did, and I've been made to suffer the consequences. (If you want to really get technical, I am the consequence, but I prefer not to think of myself that way. I don't let technicalities upset me.)

It's sort of odd, really; I didn't get in contact with my father until I was nine (too old to argue with, my mother says) and didn't start visiting him until a year later. (I love my mother as I should, but she's about as paranoid as a lone goldfish in a room full of kittens.) She never liked the idea of my visits from the start, and she's been holding them over my head since then, threatening to keep me from going if I ever misbehave. It doesn't really matter much; someday I'm going to go without permission and stay forever. What a day that will be.

Until that day, I am here, living alternately an urban and a suburban life of lies. In both lives, there are parents to placate, friends to fake out, one very specific teen idol to avoid whenever possible. Despite the small similarities of my life, I end up feeling rather akin to Jekyll and Hyde: there's Sweet Apple Suzie (at once intelligent, perhaps too much so, but with an unnamable sort of edge that the girls qualify as "city sophistication") New York Suzie (the neurotic, obsessive, funny one), and Real Suzie, the Suzie that only comes out at night in the city, the beatnik Suzie who's honest with herself and everyone else.