So I checked out reviews of it online, to see if they agreed with my perception of the story. What I found, intriguingly, was that the majority of reviews viewed it as a fantasy story (not unexpected seeing the venues it was reprinted in). Well, on that point I disagree: to me “Summer Ice” is firmly near future optimistic SF.
Yes, Manon—the protagonist—feels like a stranger in a strange city, and is very uneasy at first. Yes, the (unnamed) city is suffering the ill effects of climate change. But in the end, most people try to cope with the changes, and change their lifestyles, as well. And in the end, Manon does accept it as her new home.
Hard fought victories are the best, and that’s why I’m glad to be an optimist.
She dissipated the past. Footsteps walking reclaimed beaches. Grinned as seagulls abandoned all worship of trash to instead hunt fish.
—Jason Sanford—
TODAY MANON ARRIVES at a different time, and sits at a different table. Her sketchbook stays in her bag: a student had lingered after class to show her his portfolio of drawings and her mind is full of his images. Thick charcoal lines smudged and blended without much room for light. She has not found solace in her own work since she moved to the city and began to teach. Her life has become a stranger to her, she and it must become reaquainted. She has always been tentative with strangers. Art has become tentative with her.
The table she sits at today is tucked against the wall opposite the glass counter that shields long tubs of ice cream. Summer sunlight is held back from the window by a blue awning, but it glazes the trolley tracks in the street. Heat shimmers above chipped red bricks. Inside, the walls are the colors of sherbet, patched paint rippled over plaster, and the checkerboard floor is sticky. Children come and go, keeping the counterman busy. He is dark in his damp white shirt and apron, his hands drip with flavors as he wields his scoop. An electric fan blows air past his shaved head. Through a doorway behind him Manon sees someone walk toward the back of the store, a man as dark but older, slighter, with tight gray hair and a focused look.
Manon scoops vanilla from her glass bowl and wonders at the fan, the hard cold of the ice cream. This small store must be rich to afford so much electricity in a power hungry town. She imagines the latest in roof solars, she imagines a freezer crowded with dessert and mysterious frozen riches. The dark man in white clothes behind curved glass is an image, a movement, that defies framing. A challenge. Her sketchbook stays in her bag. The last of her ice cream hurts the back of her skull. She does not want to go back to the apartment that has not yet and may never become home.
The stream of customers pauses and the counterman drops his scoop in a glass of water and turns his back on the tables to wash his hands. Through the doorway Manon sees the older man open the freezer door. She catches a glimpse of a dark, half empty space: part of a room through a door through a door behind glass. Depth and cold, layers of distance. The fan draws into the storefront a chill breeze that dies a moment after the freezer door slams shut. Manon rises and takes her bowl to the counter. The young man thanks her, and as she turns to the door he says, “See you.”
“See you,” she says. She steps into the gritty heat and carries with her the image of dimness, depth, cold. The memory of winter, except they don’t have winters like that here.
IN THE WINTER Manon and her sister tobogganed down the hill behind their mother’s house. Snow would sometimes fall so thickly it bowed the limbs of pine trees to the ground, muffling charcoal-green needles in cozy coats of white. Air blended with cloud, snowy ground with air, until there was nothing but white, shapes and layers and emptinesses of white, and the plummet down the hill was a cold dive on swan wings and nothing. Manon and her sister tumbled off at the bottom, exalted, still flying despite the snowmelt inside cuffs and boots. Perhaps to ground themselves they burrowed down until they found the pebbled ice of the stream that would sing with frogs come spring. Black lumpy glass melted slick and mirroring beneath their breath and tongues. Then they would climb the hill, dragging the rebellious toboggan behind them, and begin the flight again.
THE CITY IS still greening itself, a slow and noisy process. Pneumatic drills chatter the cement of Manon’s street, tools in the hands of men and women who seem to revel in the work, the noise, the destruction of what others once labored to build. The art school is already surrounded by a knot-work of grassy rides and bicycle paths and trolley ways, buildings are crowned with gardens, the lush summer air is bright with birds and goat bells, but Manon’s neighborhood is rough with dust that smells of dead automobiles, the dead past. She skirts piles of broken pavement, walks on oily dirt that will have to be cleaned and layered with compost before being seeded, and eases herself under the plastic sheet the landlord has hung over the front door to keep out the grime. A vain attempt, all the tenants have their windows open, hopeful of a cooling breeze.
Manon opens the bathtub tap and lets a few liters burble into the blue enamel bowl she keeps over the brown-stained drain. The darkness of the clear water returns the image of the frozen stream to her mind. She takes off her dusty clothes and steps into the tub, strokes the wet sponge down her skin. The first touch is a shock, but after that not nearly cool enough. The bathroom is painted Mediterranean blue, the window hidden by a paper screen pressed with flowers. It smells of dampness, soap, old tiles, some previous tenant’s perfume. Manon squeezes the sponge to send a trickle down her spine. Black pebbled ice. Layers of distance. The counterman’s eyes.
She turns her attention to her dirty feet, giving the structures of imagery peace to build themselves in the back of her mind, in a place that has been empty for too long.
IRA, THE LANDLORD of Manon’s building, has been inspired by the work racketing in the street below. Even though the parking lot that once serviced the four-story building has already been converted to a garden (raised beds of the same dimensions as the parking spaces, each one assigned to the appropriate apartment) Ira has decided that the roof must be greened as well.
“Native plants,” he says at the tenant meeting, “that won’t need too much soil or water.” That way he can perform the conversion without reinforcing the roof.
Lupe, Manon’s right-hand neighbor, says as they climb the stairs, “The old faker. Like we don’t know he only wants the tax rebate.”
“It will mean a reduction in rent, though, won’t it?” Manon says.
Lupe shrugs skeptically, but there are laws about these things. And anyway, Manon likes Ira’s enthusiasm, whatever its source. His round pink face reminds her of a ripening melon. She also likes the idea of a meadow of wild grass and junipers growing on the other side of her ceiling. Lupe invites her over for a beer and they talk for a while about work schedules (“We’ll have to make sure the men do their share, we always do, they’re a bunch of bums in this building,” Lupe says) and splitting the cost and care of a rabbit hutch (“‘Cause I don’t know about you,” Lupe says, “but I’d rather eat a bunny than eat like a bunny.”). Then Lupe’s son comes home from soccer practice and Manon goes back to her place. The evening has gone velvety blue. In the quiet she can hear a trolley sizzle a few blocks away, three different kinds of music, people talking by open windows. She lies naked on her bed and thinks about Ira’s plans and Lupe’s earthy laughter so she doesn’t have to wonder when she’ll sleep.
THE ART SCHOOL can’t afford to pay her much. The people who run the place are her hosts as much as her employers, the work space they give her counts as half her salary. She has no complaints about the room, tall, plaster-walled, oak-floored, with three double-hung windows looking north and east up a crooked street, but her tools look meager in all this space. She feels meager herself, unable to supply the quantity of life the room demands. Create! the bare walls command. Perform! She carries the delicate lattice of yesterday’s images like a hollow egg into the studio, hopeful, but cannot decide where to put it down. Paper, canvas, clay, all inert, doors that deny her entry. She paces, she roams the halls. Other people teach t
o the sound of industry and laughter. She teaches her students as if she were teaching herself how to draw, making every mistake before stumbling on the correct method. Unsure whether she is doing something necessary or cowardly, or even dangerous to her discipline, she leaves the building early and walks on grass and yellow poppies ten blocks to her other job.
During the years of awkward transition from continental wealth to continental poverty, the city’s parks were abandoned to flourish or die. Now, paradoxically, as the citizens sow green across the cityscape these pockets of wilderness are being reclaimed. Lush lawns have been shoved aside by boisterous crowds of wild oats and junipers and laurels and manzanita and poison oak and madrone and odorous eucalyptus trees shedding strips of bark and long ribbon leaves that crumble into fragrant dirt. No one expects the lawns to return. The city does not have the water to spare. But there are paths to carve, playgrounds and skateboard parks and benches to uncover, throughways and resting places for a citizenry traveling by bike and foot. It’s useful work, and Manon mostly enjoys it, although in this heat it is a masochistic pleasure. The crew she is assigned to has been working together for more than a year, and though they are friendly people she finds it difficult to enter into their unity. The fact that she only works with them part-time does not make it easier.
Today they are cleaving a route through the wiry tangle of brush that fills the southwest corner of the park. Bare muscular branches weave themselves into a latticework like an unsprung basket, an organic form that contains space yet has no room for storage. Electric saws powered by the portable solar generator buzz like wasps against dead and living wood. Thick yellow sunlight filters through and is caught and stirred by dust. Birds and small creatures flurry away from the falling trees. A jay chooses Manon to harangue as she wrestles with a pair of long-handled shears. Blisters start up on her hands, sweat sheets her skin without washing away debris, and her eye is captured again and again by the woven depths of the thicket, the repeated woven depths hot with sun and busy with life, the antithesis of the cold layered ice of yesterday. She drifts into the working space that eluded her in the studio, and has to be called repeatedly before she stops to join the others on their break.
Edgar says, “Do you ever get the feeling like they’re just growing in again behind your back? Like you’re going to turn around and there’s going to be no trail, no nothing, and you could go on cutting forever without getting out?”
“We have been cutting forever,” Anita says.
“Like the prince who has to cut through the rose thorns before he can get to the sleeping princess,” Gary says.
“That’s our problem,” Anita says. “We’ll never get through if we have no prince.”
“You’re right,” Gary says. “All the other guys that tried got stuck and left their bones hanging on the thorns.”
“Man, that’s going to be me, I know it.” Edgar tips his canteen, all the way up, empty. “Well, come on, the truck’s going to be here in an hour, we might as well make sure it drives away full...”
The cut branches the crew has hauled to the curbside lace together like the growing chaos squared, all their leaves still a living green. As the other three drag themselves to their feet, Manon says, “Do you think anyone would mind if I took a few branches home?”
Her crewmates glance at each other and shrug.
“They’re just going to city compost,” Edgar says.
Manon thanks him. They go back to work in the heavy heat of late afternoon.
SHE KNEELS TO wash spiders and crumbs of bark out of her hair, the enamel basin precarious on the rim of the tub. Lupe and her son have guests for dinner. Manon can hear talk and laughter and the clatter of pans, and the smell of frying and hot chilies slips redolent under her door. She should be hungry, but she is too tired to cook, and is full with loneliness besides. Her sister’s partner introduced the family to spicy food. He cooked Manon a celebratory dinner when she got this job at the art school, and everyone who was crowded around the small table talked a lot and laughed at jokes that no one outside the family would understand. They were pleased for her, excited at the thought of having someone in the southern city, a preliminary explorer who could set up a base camp for the rest. Her sister had promised she would visit this summer before she got too big to travel, but the last Manon had heard they were in the middle of suddenly necessary roof repairs and might not be able to afford the fare. Manon puts on a favorite dress and goes with wet hair into the dusk that still hovers between sunset and blue. It is hard to look at the rubbled street and not think of armies invading.
The ice cream shop is dim behind glass, but the open sign is still in the window so she goes in. Bad to spend her money on treats, bad to eat dessert without dinner, bad to keep coming back to this one place as if she has nowhere else in the whole city to go. There is no one behind the counter, no one at the tables—well, it is dinner time—or perhaps the sign is meant to say “closed.” But then the older man with tight gray curls comes through the inner doorway and smiles and asks her what he can get for her. Vanilla, she says, but with a glance for permission he adds a scoop of pale orange.
“Lemon-peach sorbet,” he says. “It’s new, tell me what you think.”
She tastes it standing there at the counter. “It’s good.”
He nods as if he’d been waiting for her confirmation. “We make everything fresh. My cousin has trees outside the city.”
“It’s really good.”
He busies himself with cleaning tasks and she sits at the table by the wall. Despite the unfolding night, he does not turn on any lights. When the counter’s glass is spotless he steps outside a moment, then comes in shaking his head. “Still hotter out there than it is in here.” He lets the door close.
While Manon eats her ice cream, the vanilla exotic and rich after the sorbet, he scrapes round chocolate scoops from the bottom of a tub and presses them into a bowl. He takes the empty tub to the back, and she sees the shift of white door and darkness as he opens the freezer. The fan snares the cold and casts it across the room, so the hairs on her arms rise. The freezer has its own light and she can see the ice cream man shifting tubs, looking for more chocolate. There is a lot of room, expensive to keep cold, and what looks like a door to the outside insulated by a silver quilt. When he comes back with the fresh tub and drops it into its place behind the counter, she gets up and carries over her empty bowl. “Thanks. The peach was really good.”
“Good while it lasts. You can only make it with fresh fruit.” He rubs his hands together as he escorts her to the door. “Time for the after-dinner rush,” he says, and he flips on the lights as she steps outside.
It is still hotter out than in.
THE HOUSE AT the top of the tobogganing hill grew long icicles outside the kitchen window. Magical things, they were tusks/spears/wands to Manon and her sister. The side yard was trampled by the playful feet of white boars that could tell your fortune, and warriors that clad themselves in armor so pure they were invisible against the snow, and witches who could turn your heart to ice and your body to stone, or conjure you a cloak of swan’s down and a hat of perfect frost. Two angels, one a little bigger than the other, lay side by side and spread their wings, giggling at the snow that slipped down their collars, and struggled to rise without marring the imprints of their bodies, their pinions heavy with snow. Thirsty with cold and the hard work of building the warriors’ fortress, they would snap off the sharp ends of their tusks/spears/wands and with their tongues melt them by layers as they had grown, water slipping over a frozen core, almost but not quite clear, every sheath catching a bit of dirt from the roof, or a fleck of bark, a needle-tip of pine. Half a winter down their throats, too cold, leaving them thirstier than before.
MANON DOES HER share for the roof garden on the evenings of her teaching days. Her other job has made her strong, and the physical work helps drive out the difficulties of the day. Too many of her students are older than she is, she hasn’t figured
out how to make them believe her judgments and advice. Or perhaps they are right not to believe her, perhaps she is too young, or too inept. Lupe’s son shovels dirt from the pile left in the alley by the municipal truck, loading a wheelbarrow that he pushes through the garden beds to the bucket which he fills so Manon can haul it up on the pulley and dump the contents in the corner where Lupe leans with her rake. The layers of drainage sheets, pebbles, sand have already been put down by the tenants on other floors. Dirt is the fourth floor’s responsibility.
“I’ve got the easy job,” Lupe says again as Manon dumps the heavy bucket. “Let’s switch.”
Manon grins. Lupe is in her forties, graying and soft. Manon has muscles that spring along her bones, visible under her tanned skin in the last slant of sun. It feels good to drop the bucket down to Marcos, warm slide of rope through her hand, and then heave it up again, competent, strong. Lupe rakes with elegant precision, a Zen nun with a haywire braid crown and a T-shirt with a beer slogan stretched across her breasts. The third floor tenants have spread the sand too unevenly for her liking and she rakes it, too, in between bucket loads of soil. Marcos and Manon, communicating by the zizz of the dropping bucket and the thump of shoveled dirt, decide to force Lupe to abandon her smooth contours. She catches on and grins fiercely, wielding her rake with a virtuosic flourish. They work until Marcos, four stories down, is only a shadow among the lighter patches of garden green. Then they go to Lupe’s apartment for beer and spicy bean tacos.
“Don’t worry about the dirt,” Lupe says. “Living with a teenage boy is like living in a cave anyway.”
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