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 8?-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.