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now—if you wonder whether ten years from now we will end up just like all those other generations that thought they were special—with 2.2 kids and a house in Connecticut—if that’s what you’re wondering, look to the past because, whether we should blame it or not, we do.
    Durham, New Hampshire, where I come from, is a small town. There are no stop lights or neon signs on Main Street. We used to have an ice-cube machine but the zoning board and the town grandfathers sent it away to someplace less concerned with Old New England charm—some place where cold drinks are more important than tourists in search of atmosphere. The ugliest part of town is a row of gas stations that cluster at the foot of Church Hill and the Historical Society’s rummage sale museum. Supershellwegivestampsmobiloilyoumayhavealreadywon … their banners blow in our unpolluted winds like a Flag Day line-up at the UN. Dropouts from Oyster River High man the pumps and the greasers who are still in school, the shop boys, screech into the stations at lunchtime to study their engines and puff on cigarettes and—if there’s been an accident lately—to take a look at the wrecks parked out back. When the rivers melt for swimming, sixth-grade boys bike to the stations—no hands—to pump up their tires and collect old inner tubes. Eighth graders come in casual, blushing troups to check out the dispensers in the Shell station’s men’s room. Nobody stays at the gas stations for long. They rip out to the highway or down a dirt road that leads to the rapids or back to town where even the grocery store is wreathed in ivy.
    Proud of our quaintness, we are self-conscious, as only a small New Hampshire town that is also a university town just on the edge of sophistication can be. The slow, stark New England accents are cultivated with the corn. We meet in the grocery store and shake our heads over changes—the tearing down of Mrs. Smart’s house to make way for a parking lot; the telephone company’s announcement that dialing four digits was no longer enough, we’d need all seven; the new diving board at the town pool.… Durham is growing. Strange babies eat sand in the wading water and the mothers gathered to watch them no longer know each others’ names. The old guard—and I am one—feel almost resentful. What can they know, those army-base imports, those Boston commuters with the Illinois license plates, those new faculty members and supermarket owners who weren’t around the year it snowed so hard we missed four days of school and had to make it up on Saturdays.…
    Yet all the while I was growing up in this town, I itched to leave. In September I’d visit the city for school clothes and wish I lived there always. In Boston, where I could go shopping every day and never worry about shoveling snow or pulling weeds. I tried hard for sophistication—with my Boston dresses and my New York magazines and my Manchester high-heeled boots. Now that I’ve left I’ve discovered my loyalties—I play the small-town girl and pine for a Thornton Wilder dream that never really existed, a sense of belonging, the feeling that I’m part of a community.
    In truth, what I have always been is an outsider. Midnight on New Year’s Eve I would be reading record jackets or discussing the pros and cons of pass-fail grading with an earnest, glasses-polishing scholar who spoke of “us” and “we” as if I were just like him, or cleaning up the floor and the clothes of some ninth-grade boy who hadn’t learned yet that you don’t gulp down scotch the way you gulp down Kool-Aid. Many paper cups of Bourbon past the point where others began to stumble and slur and put their arms around each other in moments of sudden kinship, I remained clear-headed, unable to acquire that lovely warm fog that would let me suspend judgment, sign “Love always” in yearbooks (thinking that I meant it), put down my pencil and just have a good time. But liquor seems almost to