Fake Tanning and the Orbs of Distraction

My bikini had finally arrived. It had been thirteen years and sixty pounds since I had last dared to wear one. I took the package into my room. No one was home, but I closed the door. With shaking hands, I unwrapped a cheerful turquoise suit made of a modest swim skirt and a triangle top. It was cut so low I hoped to achieve “orbs of distraction,” that would deter attention from the less desirable parts of my body.

As I pulled on the bottoms I muttered reassurances to myself, “I may be sixty pounds heavier, but I’m stronger and happier now.” I winced as the elastic snapped my waist.

I struggled to figure out the strappy top and continued my monologue. “I’m strong and I’m going to climb the cliffs of Hawaii over the ocean.” I accidentally put my arm through the wrong strap and had to wiggle it out and retry. Why are there four straps? I only have two arms!

“Sergey will take a picture of me. This will prove to myself and everyone else that I am okay with how I look, that it is better to be strong and happy than thin. There!”

I popped my breasts into the top and turned to face the mirror. “Ugh!” A ghost was in the mirror. I jumped backwards from my reflection.

My winter Seattle skin was pasty; my belly had a pastry-caused topography. Tears filled my eyes. I remembered being a kid in water wings, hearing my Dad jeering at overweight women at the waterpark.  I would be another target for men to point and laugh at. I threw the suit in the back of my dresser and went to bed early.

The next day I went climbing with my friend at the gym. “I really wanted to wear a bikini so that I can declare that I am over hating my body, but I looked like a beluga whale.”

Amanda laughed. “Everyone looks like that in the wintertime, Lauren. I would never wear a suit in the winter without going to the tanning bed first. Tan fat looks like muscle.”

I doubted my cross-fit addicted friend had an ounce of fat on her, but it sounded like a good idea. But I had one problem.  My relatives were constantly getting cancer chopped out of their skin and my moles looked like they might turn on me any day. “I can’t do anything with UV.”

“Get a spray tan then!”

Brilliant.

The next day, only eight hours before my flight to Hawaii, I walked half a mile in freezing rain to Desert Sun, a tanning shop whose outside walls were covered in pictures of frolicking golden-skinned couples.

The bell dinged as I entered. It smelled like burning flesh and saccharine coconut: not a good sign.

“Hello, can I help you?” chirped a girl of maybe fifteen whose dark skin startled under her bleached blond hair.

“Um yes, I was interested in your sunless tanning? I have a coupon from Yelp.”

“Awesome!” She shrieked in a pitch that would damage a grown-woman’s vocal cords. “What shade do you want? We have one, two and three.”

“The lightest one, please.”

“Sweet! Do you want to use the invisible formula which goes on clear and darkens after a few hours? Or the original formula which shows the color right away?”

I pictured the orange stains I would leave on my Airbnb sheets. “The invisible one, please.”

“Right on!” Was she high? “That will be thirty dollars, and you get two sessions for the price of one so you can come back anytime.”

With a sinking tummy, I handed over a substantial chunk of my part-time teacher pay.

“Great! Let’s get you started!” She flung me a towel and led me down a corridor where machines buzzed behind closed doors and the acrid smell became stronger. She took me into a tiny room with a shower and a stool.

“Ok, so let me explain the procedure. You will undress completely and put this hair net on to protect your scalp. You will rub barrier cream onto your hands, your knees, and the soles of your feet. Then you will get into the tanning booth.”

She stepped into what I had thought was a shower. “You will press the button here, then a recording will tell you to assume position one, like this.” She spread her legs and held up her hands like she was getting the full treatment from the TSA. “Then you will do positions two and three,” she modeled poses resembling left and right variations of a stance I’d only seen on Egyptian hieroglyphics. “Then you will turn around and it will spray your backside. Any questions?”

“No.” I was eager to start, before I lost my nerve.

She smiled, “I’ll leave you to it!”

I jumped out of my sweats and hopped into the booth. I pressed the button. “Assume position one,” I jumped at the loud male robotic voice. I spread eagled and winced at the cold spraying me up and down, like I was trapped inside a laser printer.

“Ugh!” a toxic spurt hit me in my open mouth.

“Assume position two!” I turned sideways with my right palm up. “Fuck!” I muttered as the cold blast hit my feet. “The barrier cream!” What would happen to my palms and feet without it?

After positions three and four I was shaking from cold and nerves. The booth clicked into “drying mode,” and the gel became sticky, then hardened.

I stumbled out of the booth to the mirror. I knew that the gel was supposed to be clear, so I shouldn’t look any different for at least a few hours. I saw the mirror and screamed: I had blackface! I looked down: my breasts were ringed with dark brown, my hands, knees and feet were also dark brown. Something had to be wrong: I was supposed to have clear gel! And damn it, I why did I forget the barrier creme? Horrified, I remembered the white teacher at my school who decided to dress up for Halloween as Michael Jordan, including blackface. He was suspended. Would I lose my job?

I scrubbed my face with the towel until it turned black. I looked up. My face was now streaks of black and white like a zebra.

There was a knock at the door. “Everything all right in there?”

“Everything is not all right.” I covered myself in the blackened towel and opened the door.

“Eek!” The girl jumped back. Any hopes that maybe it was not that bad were dashed by her horrified face.

“I thought it was supposed to be a clear gel, level one!” I wailed.

“Oh no! Maybe there was some solution stuck in the spigot from yesterday. Here take these.” She handed me one, two, three baby wipes. “Actually, just take the whole box,” she handed me a Costco-sized container. She wrinkled her nose as I received it with black hands. “Why didn’t you put on the barrier creme?”

“I forgot!” I wailed.

Minutes later, I was sprinting outside, hood low over my offensive blackface turning from every pedestrian. I burst into my door.

“What’s wrong?” my husband asked, concerned.

“Don’t look at me!” I shrieked past him into the shower. I scrubbed my blackface off with exfoliant, but the dye on my hands, feet and knees wouldn’t budge. I began to cry again. Why did I have to be so vain? I deserved to look stupid. Like Icarus, I’d flown to close to the sun. Now it looked like I had tattoos of black gloves and socks.

“Are you okay, sweetie?” Sergey asked through the door. Suddenly, I thought of a solution.

“I will be. Can I borrow your tool box?”

By the time I got on the airplane that night, I looked mostly normal except for a bit of blood on the body parts I had vigorously applied the drywall sander to.

From his window seat Sergey nuzzled into my shoulder. “You smell funny.”

“Shut up! I mean, sorry. I do smell like neon coconuts. I’m not supposed to shower until tonight so that I can let the dye soak in.”

“That’s weird. Why are you doing this anyway? You look fine the way you are!”

I glared at my husband, who has always been tall and naturally thin. We were so unevenly matched. “There goes Jack and Mrs. Sprat,” my Dad used to sniff at thin/ thick couples. Would someone laugh at us?

I sighed. “I need this to feel okay with myself.”

“You are okay,” he held my hand. It was nice but it wasn’t enough.

I felt a bit better the next day, waking up to the warm Hawaiian sunshine. We went to The End of The World, a rock cave over the ocean where we could deep-water solo, which meant we could rock climb and would safely fall into the water if we slipped. I changed into my swim suit, and for the first time, I felt ok with so much exposed flesh. My fake tan made me fell less naked, made me feel like my body was less mine.

“You watch my stuff, I’ll go on in first.”

“I’ll be your photographer.”

I took a deep breath and jumped off the cliff. I paddled my hands hard, fighting the waves which were sucking me into the cave. Panting, I pulled myself onto the cliff with my hands. Water slammed me and I scraped my knee open on barnacles. I spit out salt water and began to ascend out of reach from the licking waves.

The volcanic rock scraped my skin, but every hold was solid. It was easy to get fifteen feet above the waves. A small crowd had gathered.

“Wow, look at her go.”

“She’s so strong.”

“Work it, girl.”

A group of could-be Abercrombie models were looking at me in my suit and not a one seemed to care about how I looked. It was all about what I could do. I decided to show off. I did three pull-ups and dropped into the water to a chorus of “rads!”

For the rest of the vacation between the fading of my fake tan and my SPF 50 I became paler with every day. But the reappearance of the ghost mattered less. My body is for work, not for show.