 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Summerscapes: "The Bubble Girl" Why had it never occurred to me that summer was for the outdoors, for nature, until I was more than 20 years old? Maybe because it wasn't — not in Houston, where I grew up. Houston is fantastically unnatural, and its summer is the season for embracing all that is contrived, ameliorative and just plain fake about Houstonian life. Every domicile is its own organism, smoothly sealed, afloat in a hostile miasma. In Houston, we air-condition all 12 months of the year, but it's in summer that our air-conditioning achieves the stature of art, that it can feel like a gleaming Brancusi or a well-mixed martini. It seems incongruous, but Houston does actually have vast public parks full of plush grass and trees. Why?, I wondered when young. What did one do in such places? Sitting outdoors on a blanket, or risking heatstroke by trying to jog, struck me as a sign of insecurity, the same strivings that led Houstonians to tell visitors how "culturally vibrant" and "global" the city was. These were people who didn't want to admit that Houston is an unreasonable city, a "port" city without a harbor, a "space" city 900 miles from Cape Canaveral's launching pad. These were people who didn't relish the fact that Houston doesn't make sense. And so what did we do in the summer, when Houston's senselessness reached its apex? True citizens of our city, my friends and I were drawn to its artificial — by which I mean its most genuine — places. We loved the park at the base of the Transco Tower, with its manmade ponds garishly lighted from within. All of us fell in love, or consummated love, or ended love there, in that fairyland of concrete and electricity that, I realize now, was a rapturously useless elaboration of our city's two most fundamental constituents. We loved the art cinema which after the last show became our own private clubhouse, a dusky balconied cube of cold air. We loved the 24-hour Kroger grocery store and the 24-hour House of Pies. We loved controlled atmospheres of all kinds, because these were the essence of home. In 1984, the Talking Heads concert film "Stop Making Sense" came to spend the summer at our art cinema and we loved it, too, and made it our Dionysian summer ritual. "Stop making sense:" yes, exactly, we thought — we, the children of a city begotten by unscrupulous real-estate speculators on an infernal swamp, the children of a city in which the buildings downtown are connected by air-conditioned tunnels so that no one need venture outdoors. We attended every midnight screening of the movie and then, since we knew him, made the projectionist show it again after the public had left so we could dance ourselves into exhaustion in the carpeted aisles. But I remember one night becoming almost febrile with excitement, and suddenly needing to be alone. I was heading away to college that fall, and I was already overwhelmed by the bewildered homesickness I would suffer my first year away, along with its more brutal flip side: stark disillusionment about the place I'd come from. Perhaps I already sensed that I would never live in my hometown again, or at least, would never want to. In another city, I might have coped with this crisis by going outdoors and gazing at the stars, but in Houston, that wasn't an option. What outdoors? What stars? Our sky was always a strange shade of salmon, light pollution bouncing off air pollution. Instead I crept through an employees-only door that led to the cavern behind the huge screen, and I lay on the dusty floor watching the movie from behind, letting the beams of light that made up David Byrne and his oversized suit stab and shift and pass over me. I remember that moment as one of awful, paradoxically self-annihilating self-consciousness. I also remember it as the end of my summers at home, although there would be more of them; but they would be visits from another world — one where lying outdoors and gazing at stars wouldn't seem like a joke. For me coming into adulthood was a process of realizing that there is a unviverse that the world of my childhood in Houston had erased. You could call it the stars beyond the smog, or, less romantically, the heat beyond the air-conditioner. I moved to New York after I finished college, and my first home in the city was a closetless 8-by-10 foot room that got so hot I could have baked bread. And yet one day, sweating it out in that room, I looked out the eighth-story south-facing window and saw an egret gliding east with slow wingbeats along 110th Street, as if there was a subway at that height just for birds. Was I fooling myself to think that New York, as exuberantly artificial as it is in its own way, somehow feels more real than Houston? The other evening, more than nine years after that first New York moment, I sat in a splendid 19th-century church in Brooklyn and listened to David Byrne singing. There he was, the looming idol of my adolescence, a human-size man in blue jeans with a brush of gray hair, peering at his set list through wire-rimmed glasses, and performing without electric guitars. My life had more than doubled in length since that last Houston summer, when the future seemed to yawn like an empty abyss, while at the same time the present was closing its doors. And yet here I was in an ornate old church that was not air-conditioned, and the night was uncomfortably hot, and I was nine months pregnant — and in tears, I was so wildly happy. Not because life was finally "real" where before it had been "fake." I was in tears because a cherished long-ago summer had unexpectedly meshed with this summer, and produced something new: a broader sense of beauty, perhaps, or perhaps just a span of years brought into focus, in a way that provoked no regret.
Susan Choi is the author of "American Woman" and "The Foreign Student." |