The Heat Wimp

Karen G. Berry

Word Count 893

I live in a famously overcast city, known for rainy summers and dreary winters. The rare sunny day lifts my spirits, imbues me with a sense of animal wellbeing. I love sunshine, but I don’t trust it. The sun can ruin me. It proves it in round after round.

 Round One:

When I was fourteen, I went to Lewiston, Idaho for the drag races. My boyfriend, who eventually became my first husband, had extensively modified his Duster 340 with a gas-guzzling carburetor, bored-out cylinders, and disappeared mufflers in a quest to make it go faster. He was excited to test it out, so we raided his parents' pantry for a weekend’s worth of canned food and hit the road.

 The trip was a disaster. I hate camping and we got sick of purloined canned food. The races were dull as dirt and the Duster was not fast. I managed to get such a terrible case of sunburn and heatstroke that when I got back to Bozeman, my parents took me to the hospital. Once you’ve had heatstroke, you’re susceptible to it for the rest of your life. You have in effect boiled your brain, and apparently your brain remembers this. My first husband pronounced me a “heat wimp”.

 Round Two:

All the stories about my second husband sound the same to me. Here is the impossible man to whom I was married for thirteen years. He insisted we enjoy hot weather like normal people. I’d explain that I feared heatstroke. At parks, I kept to the shade. At outdoor concerts, he mocked my wide-brimmed hat and sunscreen. He thought he could bully me into tolerating the sun. 

 This was put to the test at a convention in Dallas on a group excursion to Six Flags Over Texas with a bunch of other families. Six Flags was concrete walkways, rides none of us wanted to go on, and music venues where squads of costumed drama kids belted out country covers with all the fervor they could manage in the relentless sun and horrible heat. I wanted to find some shade, but my husband insisted. There was fun to be had, dammit.

 As we walked from one "attraction" to the other, I became disoriented. I studied the map that seemed incomprehensible. My head throbbed. My speech stopped making sense. Then we had the misfortune to encounter a couple I’d been avoiding all week, partly because they were Pentecostal missionaries and partly because the man had horrific body odor. His steamy stench did me in. I found a park bench, sat down, threw up, and passed out.

 When I came to, my husband took off with the kids to find the fun. Luckily, convention ladies had found me. Oh, they tended me like handmaidens, my gentle friends. One fanned me with a map. Another had found a refreshment wagon and obtained a bottle of water and a couple of plastic gloves filled with ice. She packed my head to get my brain down to a cooler temperature. When I could walk, they took me to the air-conditioned excursion bus where I waited in comfort until it was time to go back to the hotel. The sun had won, but so had I, because just a few years later, the divorce came through.

 Round Three:

For many years, I was left to my own preferences where sun exposure was concerned. I preferred none at all. On sunny days, my fellow Portlanders flocked to the waterfront to roll in the grass and bare their snowy limbs. I hid from the sun, apologizing to no one. What did it matter if I was deemed odd? At least I’d avoid heatstroke.

 Then I remarried. Yes, I’m on my third, but this husband pays attention to my comfort. I am a strapping 5’10” woman of German and Scandinavian descent, but he calls me his delicate flower, a tender blossom that wilts and withers under too much sun. I laugh, but honestly? I find this delightful. At last, a man who understands me!

 But this man is a traveler, and we have not avoided the sun. Together, we have ventured to Mexico and Central America. We’ve explored Mayan ruins. We’ve floated in a quiet lagoon, waiting to see the sea-cow snouts of manatee come up for air, watched their flukes flash us a wave goodbye as they dive back down to feed on seagrass. We’ve shared ice cream on the Malecon while watching suspended men perform an upside-down aerial dance. We’ve sipped sweet rum punch as we cruised the canals of Belize. We’ve watched black pelicans perform plummeting dives into Mexican water turned gold by the setting sun.

 In photos taken on these journeys, my husband looks like a normal person. I’m usually swathed like a terminal patient recuperating from a disease. When exposed, my face is slick as oil, flushed, sweaty. He comes home tanned. I come home as snowy white as when I left.

 We laugh, but my fragility is a fact. No matter how carefully we plan and provision with hats and sunscreen and water bottles and shade breaks, I am at risk in the heat. I live with that knowledge, and so does my husband. He respects that I am a heat wimp. Why put up a fight? In my bouts with the sun, the sun always wins.

Karen is a retired professional copywriter who is interested in micro-societies and the heroic nature of everyday living. Her work has been published by Thin Skin, The Mackinaw, Parks & Points, Persimmon Tree, Open Secrets, Inknest, The Offing, Pasager, HerStry, Defenestration Magazine, Rust & Moth, The Gilded Weathervane, Ekphrastic Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and assorted suburban wildlife. You can learn more about Karen at her blog, I am Not a Pie.