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Too Much and Not the Mood Page 14


  The level of excitement among my New York friends, in the summer, has now hit a fever pitch and results in one thing: plans. So many plans. An incessancy of plans. An ambush of them, really. Unspent from winter’s reserve, these nascent leisure hours develop into a vague inertia where we sip slushy tequila or inestimable glasses of rosé, or where I park myself on a roof in Brooklyn and characterize the faraway hedge of buildings as “a view,” and where I squint at my phone or the same paragraph in my book and feel indebted to the car passing below blasting that song.

  And let’s not forget the beach. Here, among families and unaccustomed sounds like splashing water and seagulls squawking, we zone out, obscure the sun with shades and funny hats, nap in quick spells, signal over friends and scoot over to make room on our towels and blankets. Summer is many things, but it is, certainly, the season for scooting over. Plans and scooting over.

  As new–to–New York adults, living here without history but with the audacity to claim space, these mini migrations from rooftops to small stretches of sand, to the fire escape at sunset where we climb out and gawk and attempt the impossible—to acquire the sky’s display in a few inches of touch screen—somehow constitute spending time.

  Now picture what happens when my skin tans. When it doesn’t. When over the years my white friends have lathered themselves with Hawaiian Tropic and announced with a sense of crusading enterprise their plans to “sit out and bake.” When they’ve spent long weekends at a wedding in Palm Springs or a house on Fire Island, coming back to the city with burns they bemoan, only to quickly and quite airily reevaluate: Well, at least now I have my base layer.

  Trace back to high school and then college, when my white friends would return from spring break, from all-inclusive resort vacations or a week at their cottage. Without fail, the most common occurrence—one that has persisted through adulthood—is this: my friend will place her arm next to mine, grow visibly thrilled, and exclaim that her skin is now darker than mine.

  The things I’ve heard: I’m almost as brown as you. I’m darker than you now. We match. I’m lucky I tan easily. You look like you tan easily. You don’t even have to work for your tan.

  I’ll stop after these two: I’m basically black. I wish I had your color.

  Since the average white person’s spectrum of darkness is limited, the language of tanning is appropriative at best. Witlessness masquerades as admiration, co-option as obtusely worded praise. Compliments, in some cases, can feel like audits.

  Growing up brown in mostly white circles means learning from a very young age that language is inured to prejudicial glitches. Time and again, I have concealed my amazement. The semantics of ignorance are oddly extensive and impossible to foresee. Close friends of mine goof. There is, after all, no script. As Wesley Morris recently wrote, “For people of color, some aspect of friendship with white people involves an awareness that you could be dropped through a trapdoor of racism at any moment.” Zero notice met with my own long-harvested ability to recoup, ignore, smile, move on.

  What leaves me uneasy is the covetous near-pricing of quick-tanning skin, so long as the experience is short-lived or euphemistic—a certificate of travel, a token of escape, time off. Proof of having been away. Like the watch you forgot to leave by your hotel bedside, that you wore to the beach as you dozed off at noon and then again at three—even that goofy tan becomes, for what it’s worth, a holiday trophy. A mark, in some cases, of status.

  As a kid, I accepted the compliments my skin would receive from, for instance, the mother offering me orange wedges after a soccer practice, or as I reapplied sunscreen at the local pool. I was, as most children are, innocent to the syntax of difference. How some obscure the act of othering with adulation. The luxury of privilege is so vast that praise is presumed to conceal bias.

  But that was then. That was before I could place what was so upsetting to me about the mothers at soccer practice. The mothers at the pool who were looking at my body. Feeling watched yet accepting their compliments, and politely smiling, created a tenseness inside of me I couldn’t yet parse. And anyway, it was hot, and the water was cool, and why were these mothers I barely knew talking to me at all?

  I have two bathing suits. Well, two that I wear. A one-piece, navy. A two-piece, black. A couple of summers ago I was Gchatting with a friend as we both shopped online for new suits. Bathers, I call them. It must have been late winter or early spring because, from what I remember, we were typing in errant ALL CAPS, singular to anticipating a summer that threatens to never come. Gonna FINALLY buy a bike; can’t WAIT to not wear socks; I wish we knew someone with a POOL. At one point she linked me to an all-white one-piece bather that scooped low in the back. I could NEVER wear this, she typed. But it’ll look SO good on you, especially when you’re tanned.

  I’ve come to interpret comments like my friend’s consideration of my skin, how it darkens in these summer months (first inside my elbows, as a boyfriend once pointed out to me), as plain enough. Depending on my mood, I regard or disregard them because I’ve grown up hearing, as most girls have: She is this. Looks great in that.

  That my skin “goes well” with paler shades has never discouraged me from wearing black, which I ordinarily do. My brown skin, it turns out, means growing accustomed to uninvited sartorial shoulds: You should wear yellow. More red, pale blues, and pink.

  In the summer, my skin might bronze or redden and even freckle. It silhouettes my scars and turns sweat at four p.m. into liquid gold. But it might also, as if in defiance, preserve its paleness. On the brightest days, I go to the movies. Occasionally a museum. In bed, I sleep pushed up against the cold wall, or on the opposite side, with one leg dangling. For nearly five months, everyone leaves their windows open. Available to me are the season’s many sounds. Even alone indoors, I am in the company of others. One neighbor is humming a song she was listening to earlier in the day. Another has started smoking again, cigarettes she never finishes. And another is on the phone; speaking to someone, that same someone, always, who I’ve long suspected must be mute. Sometimes I’ll only leave my apartment once the sun is no longer hitting at an angle; when it’s merely there, capable, reasonable.

  But of course there are those days when I’m out, and it feels good. I return home in the evening, and my eyes need a few seconds to square with that interior grainy dullness. I’ll catch glimpses of not just myself but my hands, and the length of my fingers: my mother’s. Or how my cheeks, now ruddy, have rounded my long face, and briefly, there he is in my reflection. My father’s smile. His father’s jawline. My brother’s too. The manner of a person passed down in how the light sculpts a face and how shadows are not just cast but connect me to that framed picture of my grandmother when she was young. The sun still has hours before setting. My skin is warm. It does not cool. The heat is in the seams.

  11

  Summer Pictures

  I.

  I CALL them “the movies.” Never indefinite—“I’m going to a movie”—but instead, a stipulated and familiar certainty: the movies. I do it, perhaps, as a nod to my childhood. To preserve my capacity for dupable wonder. Or possibly to modify, with the slightest article shift, the casual nature of going to a Cineplex; buying my ticket, a soda, some snacks, maybe; riding the escalator, and invariably forgetting what theater I’m looking for—was it nine or six? I choose to observe these steps as more than just a series of small, unremarkable transactions.

  More so, characterizing it as “the movies” appeals to what I intensely crave, especially during summer’s incurable groan: a sense of ceremony. A custom. An aggrandized, nonliturgical and yet somehow pious dark space where, despite the indignity, or gross charm, of sticky floors, the company of a snoring stranger, or the weak boom of a mediocre blockbuster, I experience the humbling feeling of being an audience member. Of succumbing to the emotional tremors of moving pictures. Of sneaking in fresh blueberries with my friend Teddy, and then, once the movie is over, riding the escalator to the next floor,
and sneaking into another screening.

  II.

  Summer in the city is relentless. The sun is undiscerning and the days feel bloated and condensed. The presumption is—and let’s be clear, summer is the most presumptive season—that being outside is compulsory because the weather tempts that side of us that is entirely coerced by rare commodities. A park with both clearings and shaded benches. The friend with a car and an afternoon destination. The bar with a backyard. A T-shirt at night. The private outdoor luxury of a balcony.

  But seeking refuge from the heat is too an amenity that typifies New York’s adhesive temperatures. A cool draft, however desired it might be, sometimes just won’t do. I need more. A freezer to dip my head into. The subzero ATM vestibule of a bank. A precariously quick-spinning ceiling fan.

  In this way, there is no sentiment more fulfilling in the summer, particularly since everything and everyone appears a little maddened by the scorch, than making a deliberate choice. Some stay from the sun but also the wakening warmth of emerging. Spend a few hours in a dark, icy-cool theater, and quickly the impact of ninety degrees invites me back into the world in a better mood. The throng of people everywhere? Not a problem. The blinding glint of pavement? I love it.

  Because going to the movies still feels like playing hooky, or what I imagine playing hooky felt like: the unburdened act of avoiding my many orbits of responsibility. Of pretending that adulthood is no match for summer’s precedent, set years ago when we were kids and teenagers governed only by the autonomy of no-school, the distance our bikes could take us, an unlit park or basketball court at night, the weekend my crush returned from camp. Going to the movies is the most public way to experience a secret. Or, the most secretive way to experience the public.

  III.

  I’ve never understood bliss to be an emotion one wears to a barbecue or encounters while sipping warm beer at the beach, but instead a measure of prosperity I can only feel in its truest form, privately. With a book I inch through, delaying its last pages or sitting in the company of a friend while she putters around her apartment reorganizing papers in piles and absently recounting a story from long before I knew her at all, much less as someone I would eventually love.

  Summer movies, by virtue of their big gambits, impart a similar sense of private bliss. I give into it. The more substantial the better. Surround sound that comes for me and threatens to forever doctor the rate of my heartbeat. That wallops and startles, and makes it impossible to discern between the dinosaurs before me and the rumbling inside of me. An epic love story told over decades that, without reserve, centers love as life’s only piston. When two beautiful actors share a first look, confirming how only one of their characters will survive. Summer movies about big love are candy. Just like that, the running tab of things I have to do vanishes. The frequency of discipline and disquiet that skulks inside of me slackens.

  The moment the lights dim and the studio logos run, I encounter a mix of my past swimming up inside of me as well as the true pleasure I derive from anticipation. Disney’s “Wish Upon a Star”; MGM’s roar; Universal’s unapology, its trumpet and sun-eclipsing planet Earth; Warner Bros.’ nostalgic piano and its gilded back lot and superhero lettering; Paramount’s snow-peaked mountain; Columbia’s Torch Lady, and so on and so on. These logos move me. They petition from me how crucial it is to preserve a sense of the special.

  IV.

  There was a contest in elementary school where the prompt was, if I remember correctly, to draw or paint an activity that illustrated how our families spend time together. We had a week to complete our work on an 8½-by-11 piece of construction paper. I still remember the fiber-like texture of the paper and how I was convinced I would win the contest. I went home that night and sharpened my Prismacolor set of pencil crayons and began to sketch with an industriousness singular to girls who were once praised, far too young, for being perfectionists.

  On Fridays, my local video store had a deal on classics. A two-for-one thing that spared my brother and me, and mostly our parents, any arguments. One for him, one for me. He loved The Great Escape. The Guns of Navarone. War movies. I was partial to Audrey Hepburn. Our parents always insisted we rent the Marx Brothers. Some of my earliest memories of rolling around laughing, of physically reacting to comedy, I associate with A Night at the Opera or Duck Soup. My mother’s head would fall back as she laughed, and my father would clap with sweet recognition, reexperiencing a scene he first saw two decades ago in Calcutta. My brother too, his big gummy grin widening each time Harpo waddled on-screen.

  These Friday-night movies stood out as the rare occasion when my parents weren’t fighting. It was important to laugh when they laughed, to try as I might in my miniature mind to prolong a marriage that was already, for what it’s worth, over.

  Scrupulously, I drew our basement. I mixed two shades of beige to match our carpet and felt the burn of pencil crayon between my fingers the faster I colored. I was careful to capture my father’s beard exactly how he trimmed it and dressed my mother in lilac because it was her favorite, or perhaps with the cruel impulse daughters occasionally possess, I’d spotted a mother I admired wearing lilac and wished my mother wore it too. I drew my brother and me on the floor, lying on our tummies, our chins cupped between our hands. Smiling. Then, at the very end, I took an eraser and delicately smudged a pyramid of light emanating from our television and onto our faces. This detail, I was sure, would clinch first place.

  A boy who painted his family sailing somewhere in Ontario won the contest. The runner-up was my friend who drew a scene from her lake cottage. There was a kite. A barbecue. A shaggy dog. It wasn’t that I hadn’t done a good job, my teacher assured me, but that she’d wished I had drawn my family and me outdoors. The beach was suggested. Or a picnic in the park.

  But what I knew was this. We were happy watching Hepburn hug Peck on the back of his Vespa in Rome, or marveling at Kay Thompson singing her Vreeland-inspired directive, “Think Pink!” Or following Steve McQueen as he jumped fences on his motorcycle, or listening to Rita Moreno kick, and stomp, and dance her case for America, or giggling, as a family, whenever Groucho quipped. These moments, the movies, were how we spent time together.

  Nowadays, I still enjoy peering around me midway through a screening. The blue light flickering and reflecting off of strangers’ smiles or rounding with sinister effect the shape of their eyes. Each person’s face becomes the moon. A theater filled with moons: halves and crescents, some full. I think back to how carefully I smudged the TV’s glow on my family’s faces. Less than a year after coloring that picture, my parents separated.

  My father moved into an apartment not far from us. Once he was more settled, we began ferrying between both homes one week at a time. Always on Friday evenings, before or after dinner.

  As summer descended, sweltering with little letup, I spent whole afternoons in our cool, dark basement, at what was now called “Mom’s.” As if pressed to trick continuity into my life, I started compulsively watching movies. Sometimes the same ones over and over until the tapes became too hot and the images and sound slowed. I’d persuaded myself that the only way to arrange time and, essentially, postpone how differently things felt upstairs was to devise a pattern of uninterrupted escape: Hitchcock, Bogart, Cary Grant. Hitchcock, Bogart, Cary Grant.

  It seems obvious now, but I couldn’t reconcile with summer’s aliveness. How everyone was out and on their way somewhere, riffling through corner-store freezers for raspberry popsicles or peddling fast only to sail downhill, hands-free. I wasn’t having any of it. I chose instead to live out my feelings through film, by pleading with Grace Kelly to not answer the phone—Turn around! I’d scream. There’s a man hiding behind the curtain! Or mouth the words as Audrey Hepburn points to Cary Grant’s cleft chin in Charade and tunefully asks, “How do you shave in there?” Or enjoy with great enchantment Peter O’Toole’s slapstick charm in How to Steal a Million. His blue eyes, I remember thinking, were pure fiction: they were mov
ie-blue.

  V.

  Going to the movies means securing a momentary fissure in time where I might cede to improbable bank heists, shit-out-of-luck heroes, to the very concept of a hero, to the winsome appeal of first love, star-crossed love, or an unlikely yet pleasing ensemble cast, a disappointing sequel, rapid-fire buddy-comedy banter, to the obstinate gloom of a boxing movie, a bummer car chase or a sensational one too, to the congratulatory thrill I procure from identifying voices in animated films.

  When I exit the theater I feel smug with power having just stalled time. At least that’s the lie I tell myself, because in my own misshapen idea of it, I have successfully suspended summer’s most common emotion: longing. What it comes down to—despite having sat motionless for two or so hours—is being possessed by energy that I can only describe as kinetic.

  12

  Some Things I Cannot Unhear

  1.

  IN 1968, James Baldwin, a guest on The Dick Cavett Show, said, “As Malcolm X once put it: the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday.” High noon, he said in a slight baritone, as if trying to find the right key for a song. Baldwin then went on to give examples of other institutions, not just the Christian church, where systematic racism has wielded its power; the labor unions, the real estate lobby, the board of education. Part of this episode can be found on YouTube and runs a swift one minute, one second. Baldwin’s voice—its near-sport of a voice—is one I cannot unhear. The way he says “evidence” is capable of galvanizing the most blasé listener. His is a staccato that quickens in clip when Baldwin repeats words like “white” or “hate,” but ripples when he says “idealism,” diminishing its meaning into a naïveté.