Over-Exposed

I’ve been in Hawaii for the last couple of weeks visiting my parents, watching men and women lope across the sand with skin the rich caramel colour of a particularly expensive handbag—their skin often sharing the same texture as said handbag. While the rest of the beach is cooking itself (rotisserie style), I’ve been sitting in the shade, reading my book and layering on my waterproof sunscreen.

For my adult life I’ve spent a great deal of time under umbrellas and in the shade, cultivating a slightly olive shade of pale that makes it look, in some lights, that I suffer from jaundice.

When I travelled through South East Asia in my early twenties I followed suit with the local women and carried an umbrella with me everywhere. I favored the massive black models because then I didn’t need to worry about my feet, but the expanse of my sun-covering often caused my travelling partner to dodge out of the way when I swung around, the umbrella careening toward his eye socket.

South East Asia was one of the few places that I’ve actually felt genuinely beautiful. When I wandered through the streets and out to the restaurants I would often get local woman examining my skin, asking if they could touch it and muttering, “cow,” which translates to “white.”

True, they were over the top with their obsession. Most of their beauty products contained bleaching agents, the skin creams and body wash and even the deodorant. It was that way with the men’s products too, something that my traveling companion once discovered when we noticed that his armpits were a very different colour than the rest of him. I guess it just goes to show that you can take anything too far.

When I was in grade school my mother had frequented tanning beds quite often, until a few of her moles were found to be cancerous. She had them removed and is fine now, but I’ve been careful ever since, to the point that when I attended a French exchange in Moncton, New Brunswick and all of my girlfriends would loll about in the sun on the hill near our dorms, I could be seen under a vast sun hat, sitting alone because no one wanted the over-sized halo of shadow that I created to affect their tans.

Now when I go the beach I’m glad for having made this choice. I’ll see women who are probably forty but who look sixty-five given the condition of their skin. Last week I’d noticed the calves of the woman on the blanket next to me. The very tan skin on them hung in heavy folds reminiscent of blackout curtains that swung away from her body, as if the skin thought that it could escape.

I had a girlfriend visiting me recently and she is paler than I am, and so it was nice to head to the beach with someone just as intent on hiding out under a tree as I was. We got into a ritual of spraying each other down with sunscreen every hour or so and keeping an eye on how long we’d gone between each application. At one point I’d lost sight of her for a moment and then noticed her scrabbling along the volcanic rock, her white legs skittering along like an unsteady insect as I thought to myself about how easy it was to pick her out of a crowd. I have a photo of her like that, getting up bum first, the skin on her so juxtaposed with the color of the rocks that I can’t help but think of a chessboard.

On the last day of her visit we’d made our final pilgrimage to one of the local beaches and as we laid down our mats the friendly couple nearest us asked if we’d just arrived. “Oh yes,” I’d said, thinking that they meant we’d just arrived at the beach.

“We thought so,” the man said, “judging by the colour of your skin.”

“Oh. We’ve been here nearly a week,” my girlfriend piped up, and the looks on their faces was one of the things I’ll cherish about her visit for a long time.

I suppose all of this leads me to wonder what I’ll look like when I get old, if all of the care with sun exposure will pay off. Those who’ve tanned deeply for years often look to me like their skin has an unexpected thickness to it, and I can’t help but wonder if in the event of an accident—say if they’re on a scooter that skids out of control—that their skin might protect them better than mine would. As if perhaps they’ve cut out the middle man and made their whole body into a pair of chaps.