It’s that time of year again. The days are longer and sunnier, and the hills have given up the lush green of winter for the parched, heat-baked brown of summer.  Rainy days are gone and the smiley face of constant sunshine is upon us.  I don’t trust smiley faces; I prefer sweater weather; I love the fog.  Constant sunshine feels tyrannical, I think as I squint into a flawless blue sky on a recent balmy afternoon.  I am lounging on a deck chair at a posh health club, where I have come with my friend Bonnie to work out, to swim, to eat lunch and laze by the pool.
 

The grounds of the Pacific Health Club are immaculately groomed, just like the attendants answering the quietly trilling phones at the members’ desk hewn from a block of marble.  The lobby is furnished in cotton and rattan; the locker room shelves are stacked with piles of plush towels (take two! Take ten!).  Pedicures are available at $35/per.  Together Bonnie and I stretched and climbed StairMasters in a roomy pavilion of chrome and glass, and then I left her inside to come out to the pool.  I have swum fifty lengths, and am soothed by the exercise and the sun’s warmth on my bare skin.  I read a few pages of my book, and then, distracted by the splashing sound of the swimmers whose arms slice through the water like windmills, whose feet raise drops of water that catch the midday sun, I look up.  Just what is it that makes this place feel so unreal?
 

It’s the sky.  Wedgwood blue and cloudless, and the sun, too warm for the first week of April.  The swimming pool, sparkling clean and the perfect temperature.  The pyramid roof glistening with skylights, the umbrella-shaded tables set with white linen, the pergola laden with blooming wisteria.  Six palm trees frame the pool, as stately and symmetrical as pillars of Greek architecture.  The only ideal in this temple is the ideal of fitness, a bizarre kind of leisure activity that has its adherents circling twice around the parking lot in SUVs to find the parking spot closest to the front door.  They’ll push themselves an extra mile on a black rubber belt but avoid an extra fifty feet of pavement.  The worship here is not so much of health as of trim thighs, flat abs, sculpted pecs.  And, out around the pool, an even tan.
 

In front of me, three women and a man who look like they come here every day – don’t they have jobs?  Their tans are too deep and regular for this to be an occasional treat, and I wonder if they work nights or sell Amway to support their health club habit.  They lounge proprietarily in deck chairs, laughing and calling out to one another in the loud assured voices of Those Who Belong.  All of the women wear bikinis, one of them with a gold belly chain that skims her hips, another with breasts so rounded they look like oranges.  The women here are either blonde or brunette in the sleek, trim way of seals.  The man pulls the thin purple Lycra of his shorts, and I feel nostalgic for the way my father used to dress for his early-morning jogs:  khaki shorts, flat-soled Keds, a gray sweatshirt.  I am suddenly aware of the calluses on my feet, of my uncombed hair, of the stubble of my due-for-a-shave legs, of my frumpy one-piece Speedo.  I am reminded of high school, of watching a crowd that, although I didn’t want to belong to it, still made me feel I was an outsider.  Ah, California, I think:  your promise, your perfection, your demands.  You offer us 80 degrees in April, months of cloudless skies, and wildflowers along the freeway.  But what do you ask in return?

As a child, I knew how to keep the tyranny of sunshine at bay.  I happily spent many perfect California days indoors, my feet propped against the bedroom wall and my head on a pillow, as I read a book or listened to my records.  Until the age of ten or so, I loved knowing that I lived in the West, and believed I had something in common with those dusty cowboys on the Saturday afternoon Westerns my dad and I watched.  Never mind Alaska as the last frontier:  I saw wilderness in the empty lots and scrubby hillsides of my hometown.  My mother sometimes took my brother and me to McDonald’s as a treat, and it is as much due to her talent at making fast food fun as my active imagination that I’d feel like we were on a nature outing.  Our town’s golden arches, you see, abutted wetlands, and she’d drive to a spot on the far side, where we’d watch egrets as we chomped our fries and slurped our shakes.  Only in California, I’d think, state pride swelling my nine-year-old romantic’s breast.

           
And then my parents invested in a set of World Book Encyclopedia and I discovered New England.  I loved the state pages, with their maps and illustrations of the state bird, the state flag, the state flower.  I was drawn, again and again, to New Hampshire and Vermont, the neat side-by-side fit of their shapes, their wonderfully Anglo-derivative names:  Derby and Concord and Manchester, Putney and Woodstock and Burlington, names that beckoned to me, as appealing as the pictures of their village greens studded with white steeples and circled by flaming maples, as tidy as toy towns.

I attended junior high on Avenida Miraflores, a lovely name for an otherwise bland suburban boulevard, but to me its lilting syllables spoke only of a too-wide expanses of sunshine, a dearth of trees, a backdrop to adolescent angst.  I wanted Main Street, Oak Avenue, Meeting House Lane, abrupt consonants as distinct and sharp as the four seasons.  I’d been born, it seemed, on the wrong coast.

At fifteen, I spent two weeks one summer in Michigan.  One afternoon, my friend Tina and I were in her family’s Corvair when we stopped for gas on the outskirts of Detroit, where foreign cars are given the bird.  Two teenaged girls blaring the radio and laughing, we caught the eye of the attendant, who was about our age.  “You two live around here?” he asked.  “I do,” Tina answered; “she’s from California.”  I had long blonde hair and blue eyes and a tan, and he moved to my side of the car as though I might hand him the key to a Midwesterner’s dream.  And then I said something, and at the flash of metal in my mouth, he said, “But girls from California aren’t supposed to have braces.” 

That was my first lesson in the cost of being part of a national myth, but if I could pass muster in Michigan, as long as I kept my mouth closed, back home I fell short.  It wasn’t just my braces—I was too tall, too skinny, too gawky.  I was klutzy and shy and a bookworm.  My nose had a bump, and I burned before I tanned.  If I was ever to make it on hair and eye color alone, I’d have to move. 

After graduating from college, I did.  I lived in New York City for nine years.  When friends say they bet I don’t miss those winters, I shrug and say they weren’t so bad.  One of my best friends from high school moved to New York, too, and we often agreed how being from California and living in New York was the ideal combination.  We got to be bookish without being nerds, to be California girls without having to cheerlead, to avoid exercise without being scorned.  True, millions of New Yorkers belong to health clubs and run around the reservoir in Central Park, but there are also millions of New Yorkers breakfasting on greasy eggs and cigarettes.  In New York, anything goes in a way that never seemed possible in California.

So, as good as the early April sun feels, I squirm under the promise of six more months of the same.  Just one thunderstorm, I think:  Wouldn’t that be grand?  I prefer rainy days, days when low heavy clouds ride the skies, days when it’s okay to stay inside and read.  Perfect weather is so demanding.  It mocks us when we’re anxious or sad.  “What’s your problem?” it asks.  “Everything out here is perfect.” It nags, “Go outside and do something.” 

I moved back to the Bay Area a year ago, and have learned that living happily in California means accepting her imperatives as part of the landscape.  There they are, but I don’t have to follow them.  Nine years in New York gave me a confidence I don’t think I’d have if I’d stayed here, where everyone congratulates each other on living in the Greatest Place on Earth.  Oh, please! It’s beautiful, I agree, but it’s also snobby and divided and congested.  It’s got shades of gray, as well as all that sunshine.  I still have days when relentless sunshine threatens to leach the subtlety away, but now I know that climate matters less than what we do in it.  I’ll always feel more at home on a crowded #1 subway than on a lounge chair next to artfully tanned stockbrokers and waitresses. 

So on those days when I hear myself cursing the perfection of the weather, when I reach into the back of my closet to feel the softness of a parka I no longer have occasion to wear but can’t bear to throw away and am tempted to tell the Noah’s Bagels salesperson that their subway map is out of date, I remind myself of overheated offices whose windows do not open, of subway platforms so crowded that people can only move en masse, of hat hair.  I remember that during my first year in New York, I sometimes wore a T-shirt that had the words “Native Californian” across the chest (even more embarrassing is the fact that it wasn’t a gift).  And I think of California pleasures both remembered and new:  the smell of jasmine in the rain, the sleepy feeling after a day sailing on the bay, the striking beauty of Mt Tam in spring, the affordability of avocados, and the pure contentment of propping up my feet, indoors on a gorgeous day, doing nothing.