Wear Sunscreen!
Rebecca Johnson
Word Count 954
For my 15th birthday, my father gave me a pair of skis. It was a bizarre present on many levels. For one thing, he hadn’t paid child support to my mother for several years so any gifts from him—especially such a generous one—came freighted with resentment. But if I raised an objection, I knew he would say, “Okay, forget it,” in which case, there would be neither child support nor skis. So I said, “Thanks.” I guess?
It was an odd gift in other ways. We lived in Tennessee, where there were no mountains for skiing. Plus, nobody in my family skied. But the year before, I had left home for boarding school in New Hampshire, where one of the afternoon winter sports was downhill skiing. The image of his daughter schussing down the mountain must have roused some long dormant ambition in him on my behalf. The son of a gas station owner from the panhandle of Texas, he had gone to Yale, an experience which created a toxic brew of confused expectations in him for the rest of his days. Life for an ivy league graduate is supposed to be an easy slide into home base, but if you’re stuck on first base, watching everyone lap you, the taste of grit faint in your mouth, the cognitive dissonance just grows and grows until eventually you go mad, which is exactly what happened to him.
But back to the skis. A van left the school every day after lunch to take the skiers to a local lift. Lessons were not included but, luckily, I had a friend who had grown up in Massachusetts and was an excellent skier. She tried her best to teach me the fundamentals, the snow plow turn, the so-called knock kneed pizza pie formation guaranteed to slow you down, provided you’re on an easy hill. I watched her swoosh down the mountain, hips pivoting left and right, body slightly hunched while her poles planted the way and felt despair. Speed thrilled her, but it terrified me. The minute I gathered any kind of momentum, I limped to the edge of the slope to allow my racing heart to slow. I saw skiing for exactly what it was, manufactured adrenaline for uneventful lives and wanted nothing to do with it.
For spring break that year, I visited my mother in Denver, Colorado where she was finishing her Phd at the University of Denver. She lived in a small one bedroom apartment and regretted how un-fun the vacation had been.
“Why don’t you go skiing?” she asked.
I demurred, but she insisted, which is how I found myself spending the day alone on rental skis at Copper canyon, right outside of Denver. The day was actually kind of fun. Without my expert friend skier, I could just ski the easy greens all day, enjoying the snow covered aspens, the blue sky, the fluffy white clouds. On the lift, I raised my face to the winter sun which contrasted pleasantly with the frigid air. Maybe skiing wasn’t so bad? At no point did it ever occur to me put sunblock on my face. It was the early 1980’s, long before dermatologists began to beat the drum about things like skin cancer. In those days, the most famous ad for sun tan lotion pictured a sunburned little girl gasping as a dog pulled off her bathing suit bottoms, revealing her snow white bum. Looking back, there are so many things wrong with that ad, I don’t even know where to begin.
My mom picked me up at the end of the day and noted the redness of my face.
“You got some sun,” she said admiringly.
I put my hand to my cheek. It felt hot but pleasant. I imagined swanning into my dorm the next night, casually mentioning my ski vacation. The next morning, my face was burning. My mother fixed me cold compresses and broke off pieces of an aloe pant that grew on the windsill. Somewhere, she’d read that the viscous goo inside the leaf was good for burns. On the plane back to New Hampshire, I tried to ignore the stares of strangers. At school, people shuddered and looked away.
The next day, the skin started to blister. These were not the small blisters of a discrete kitchen burn when a spot of hot grease lands on your hand. These blisters were continents of raised flesh protecting a layer of yellow liquid underneath. I studied them in the mirror, horrified. Should I puncture them and release the ooze or let them pop naturally? “Ewww,” my friends remarked helpfully. These days, when I look at pictures of patients post-op laser treatments, I experience a twinge of recognition. I started to wear hats, which made no sense and only drew more attention to my injury, but I was desperate for a way to hide my hideous face. Once the blisters popped, shards of dead skin flaked and fell off of their own accord, like a snake shedding its skin.
I tried to glean meaning from the debacle. Had I been Icharus flying too close to the sun?
The fresh irony of it all is that I married a man who loves to ski and passed that passion down to my two boys. Sometimes I accompany them to weird, faux Swiss towns in the mountains where you need to wait thirty minutes for a mediocre pizza. All around you, the talk is of “runs” (and not the fecal kind). Mostly, I stay in the hotel room to read and remind them as they head out, “Wear sunscreen!”
Rebecca is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in various publications including (alphabetically) Elle, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The NYT Magazine, Salon, Vogue (contributing editor 1999-2020). Johnson is the author of the novel And Sometimes Why. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.
