I’ll stop after these two: I’m basically black. I wish I had your color.
Since the average white person’s spectrum of darkness is limited, the language of tanning is appropriative at best. Witlessness masquerades as admiration, cooption as obtusely worded praise. Compliments, in some cases, can feel like audits.
Growing up brown in mostly white circles means learning from a very young age that language is inured to prejudicial glitches. Time and again, I have concealed my amazement. The semantics of ignorance are oddly extensive and impossible to foresee. Close friends of mine goof. There is, after all, no script. As Wesley Morris recently wrote, “For people of color, some aspect of friendship with white people involves an awareness that you could be dropped through a trapdoor of racism at any moment.” Zero notice met with my own long-harvested ability to recoup, ignore, smile, move on.
What leaves me uneasy is the covetous near-pricing of quick-tanning skin, so long as the experience is short-lived or euphemistic—a certificate of travel, a token of escape, time off. Proof of having been away. Like the watch you forgot to leave by your hotel bedside, that you wore to the beach as you dozed off at noon and then again at three—even that goofy tan becomes, for what it’s worth, a holiday trophy. A mark, in some cases, of status.
As a kid, I accepted the compliments my skin would receive from, for instance, the mother offering me orange wedges after a soccer practice, or as I reapplied sunscreen at the local pool. I was, as most children are, innocent to the syntax of difference. How some obscure the act of othering with adulation. The luxury of privilege is so vast that praise is presumed to conceal bias.
But that was then. That was before I could place what was so upsetting to me about the mothers at soccer practice. The mothers at the pool who were looking at my body. Feeling watched yet accepting their compliments, and politely smiling, created a tenseness inside of me I couldn’t yet parse. And anyway, it was hot, and the water was cool, and why were these mothers I barely knew talking to me at all?
I have two bathing suits. Well, two that I wear. A one-piece, navy. A two-piece, black. A couple of summers ago I was Gchatting with a friend as we both shopped online for new suits. Bathers, I call them. It must have been late winter or early spring because, from what I remember, we were typing in errant ALL CAPS, singular to anticipating a summer that threatens to never come. Gonna FINALLY buy a bike; can’t WAIT to not wear socks; I wish we knew someone with a POOL. At one point she linked me to an all-white one-piece bather that scooped low in the back. I could NEVER wear this, she typed. But it’ll look SO good on you, especially when you’re tanned.
I’ve come to interpret comments like my friend’s consideration of my skin, how it darkens in these summer months (first inside my elbows, as a boyfriend once pointed out to me), as plain enough. Depending on my mood, I regard or disregard them because I’ve grown up hearing, as most girls have: She is this. Looks great in that.
That my skin “goes well” with paler shades has never discouraged me from wearing black, which I ordinarily do. My brown skin, it turns out, means growing accustomed to uninvited sartorial shoulds: You should wear yellow. More red, pale blues, and pink.
In the summer, my skin might bronze or redden and even freckle. It silhouettes my scars and turns sweat at four p.m. into liquid gold. But it might also, as if in defiance, preserve its paleness. On the brightest days, I go to the movies. Occasionally a museum. In bed, I sleep pushed up against the cold wall, or on the opposite side, with one leg dangling. For nearly five months, everyone leaves their windows open. Available to me are the season’s many sounds. Even alone indoors, I am in the company of others. One neighbor is humming a song she was listening to earlier in the day. Another has started smoking again, cigarettes she never finishes. And another is on the phone; speaking to someone, that same someone, always, who I’ve long suspected must be mute. Sometimes I’ll only leave my apartment once the sun is no longer hitting at an angle; when it’s merely there, capable, reasonable.
But of course there are those days when I’m out, and it feels good. I return home in the evening, and my eyes need a few seconds to square with that interior grainy dullness. I’ll catch glimpses of not just myself but my hands, and the length of my fingers: my mother’s. Or how my cheeks, now ruddy, have rounded my long face, and briefly, there he is in my reflection. My father’s smile. His father’s jawline. My brother’s too. The manner of a person passed down in how the light sculpts a face and how shadows are not just cast but connect me to that framed picture of my grandmother when she was young. The sun still has hours before setting. My skin is warm. It does not cool. The heat is in the seams.
11
Summer Pictures
I.
I CALL them “the movies.” Never indefinite—“I’m going to a movie”—but instead, a stipulated and familiar certainty: the movies. I do it, perhaps, as a nod to my childhood. To preserve my capacity for dupable wonder. Or possibly to modify, with the slightest article shift, the casual nature of going to a Cineplex; buying my ticket, a soda, some snacks, maybe; riding the escalator, and invariably forgetting what theater I’m looking for—was it nine or six? I choose to observe these steps as more than just a series of small, unremarkable transactions.
More so, characterizing it as “the movies” appeals to what I intensely crave, especially during summer’s incurable groan: a sense of ceremony. A custom. An aggrandized, nonliturgical and yet somehow pious dark space where, despite the indignity, or gross charm, of sticky floors, the company of a snoring stranger, or the weak boom of a mediocre blockbuster, I experience the humbling feeling of being an audience member. Of succumbing to the emotional tremors of moving pictures. Of sneaking in fresh blueberries with my friend Teddy, and then, once the movie is over, riding the escalator to the next floor, and sneaking into another screening.
II.
Summer in the city is relentless. The sun is undiscerning and the days feel bloated and condensed. The presumption is—and let’s be clear, summer is the most presumptive season—that being outside is compulsory because the weather tempts that side of us that is entirely coerced by rare commodities. A park with both clearings and shaded benches. The friend with a car and an afternoon destination. The bar with a backyard. A T-shirt at night. The private outdoor luxury of a balcony.