Saving Face

All I did was show up at 5th grade Field Day with sunscreen. I wasn’t dressed like a clown or a slut. I didn’t trip, burp, fart, or curse. I was discreet, even. I did a little wave at my daughter, then reached into my purse and pulled out a tube of Banana Boat kids SPF 50. I held it up for her to see and beckoned her with my finger. I didn’t scream, “Sweetie, we forgot sunscreen! You don’t want to get burned, do you? It’s so gosh darn hot today, and we want to protect your precious widdle skin fwom the sun’s mean old nasty rays, don’t we?” I let her apply it herself, so I didn’t have to touch her in front of her classmates. See, I didn’t even begin to embarrass her.

My father, when he was the age my older sister is now, died of skin cancer, of melanoma. That was back in the eighties, when melanoma was not a well known form of cancer. It was relatively unusual for someone to have deadly skin cancer, and there was no cure. He had a giant tumor, attached to a mole on his arm. It was cut out. And then the doctors waited to see if he would die, which he didn’t for a number of years, until one day he found a lump under his arm. It had metastasized to his lymph system, in essence, a death sentence. At some point, he tried some experimental treatment, which served to prolong his suffering for another year or so. It was in his liver, his blood, his brain. I was seventeen years old when he died, and I was the first person to lose a parent while I was in high school. There is still no cure for melanoma.

People didn’t use sunscreen then; they used suntan oil. You thought you were doing some good for yourself with an SPF of 4, and 8 seemed extreme. You would coat yourself up good, smelling of coconut, reapplying only when you flipped yourself like a hotcake. A dark tropical tan resembled a piece of golden fried chicken, and no wonder. Your skin was cooking, just as if you took a dip in the hot oil fryer instead of the ocean. What people can’t understand is that there is no such thing as a healthy tan. Crispy skin is good on a Thanksgiving turkey, not your back.

When I realized that my oldest daughter E went to school today, on Field Day, without sunscreen, I thought for a moment, well, it’s only a couple of hours, she won’t get too much sun. Then I thought about how abnormally hot it has been this week, and how the school yard has no shade, and how beautiful and fair her skin is. I grabbed two bottles of sunscreen, the waterproof kind for her body, the oil-free kind for her face, and tootled up to the school. She was in the back of the school yard with her class, a sea of dark red t-shirts and white bandana headbands. I made her apply sunscreen to her arms and legs.

“This is so embarrassing!” She whined. The boy with the Justin Bieber hair that is kind of sweet on E watched us, laughing a little. “What's the big deal if I get a tan?”

“Dude, just put it on, or would you rather I do it for you?” I responded. “Don’t forget your neck.”

“I can’t believe you did this to me,” she complained. Her classmates milled around us, fascinated by the spectacle we created.

I turned to one of them and asked, “Is this the most embarrassing thing that can happen to you?”

“No,” the boy said. “Getting spanked is worse.” He clearly knew of what he spoke.

“See, E? It’s not the most embarrassing thing. Now put on that sunscreen or I will spank you.”

She finished and shoved the tube back in my hand before running back to her classmates. She spent the next few minutes giving me the stink eye, so I said goodbye to her teacher and left. I would have liked to stick around to watch, but frankly, E’s behavior was, well, embarrassing. I was just like a superhero, swooping in to save the day, refusing all thanks, before flying away to the next catastrophe. Okay, maybe not like a superhero; it was only sunscreen.