Absolution

Patricia Foster

Skin is oblivious to beginnings and endings. Skin is a minor point in the story. Its plot is to protect the body, to ward off absorption of harmful substances, to keep the body from losing precious water. Protection. Hydration. That story seems so nice, so hopeful, but I know how it goes. Skin doesn’t see a conflict coming, doesn’t purr or hum at the first sign of danger, doesn’t begin to tick or roar at deception. Most of the time skin just feels benign, pleasurable, a soft touch. Touch me. Then, again, there is my skin: Irish fair, a river of blue veins racing across my temples, a web of broken capillaries crowding the edge of my nose, then the assorted wrinkles and freckles and little brown spots that suggest, I insist, the ardent branding of an alien species. Oh that, I say when someone points to a small age spot that’s barely visible. That’s just my skin. The truth is, I’ve spent much of my life in careless denial about my skin, the other half in vigilant angst over how to protect it from disaster. Or should I say betrayal.

Betrayal always has a plot.    

I set out this July morning with three American and three Chinese women writers for the Great Wall of China. Everything about this trip arouses my attention: the hour-long bus ride through the suburbs of Beijing where even the signs—Lutuan Bridge, Mountain Safe Distance, Airport, N. Exit—seem symbolic rather than ordinary; the countryside beyond with its dun-colored, hut-like houses crowded next to blue-walled stores with red roofs. There—a man in an old straw hat riding a bicycle. There—an elderly woman, hunched over, walking crablike back to her house. There—a teenage boy in black jeans on the side of the road, cell phone to his ear, his car broken down. “Freakin’ awesome,” an American voice floats to me from the back of the bus. If only I could hear and see it all: hyper-tourist, hyper-girl, woman with a thousand eyes.

When we arrive at Mutianyu—the section of the Great Wall northeast of Beijing—I am relieved to see many Chinese women framed by their umbrellas. From the height of the bus, they are flower bursts of reds and pinks, purples and blues, vivid splashes of color that deeply relax me. With my forest green umbrella, I will not seem weird, alienated by a caution to shield my paleness. “Chinese women protect their skin,” Yan, our remarkable guide, told me the very first day. “You Westerners want to get a tan, but we Chinese don’t want our skin to darken.” She smiled, looking at me. “You better take an umbrella. The sun here is very hot!”

To the Great Wall, I have come prepared. I have smeared my face with sunblock, spreading it generously over cheeks and nose, forehead and chin, and even on that soft, tender space just above my mouth, the place that has begun to pucker and wrinkle. I wear a white visor, not just an ordinary visor but a double-wide visor that shades my face to the point of obscuring all that isn’t directly in front of me. I wear long sleeves. I wear long pants. And let’s not forget the green umbrella. I feel protected, completely safe as we begin to walk the ramparts of the Wall, climbing the high stone stairs to a better lookout, managing the series of wide, flat steps that might trip me up. I stand in the first tower, staring at the peaked mountains, green-breasted and staggered like artichoke leaves, mountains I’ve often seen in films but never expected to see in real life. The air smells clean. The sun shines hot from a cloudless sky, ruthless and dazzling. When a breeze sweeps through, fluttering my umbrella, I think of my eighty-eight-year-old mother walking into her front yard, the land thick with bougainvillea and ferns, monkey grass, damp and profuse, trimming the sidewalks. How much she’d like to be here, though the high steps would daunt her.

We walk for two hours, and I don’t feel it. The burn. I am too infatuated with the fresh-smelling air, the clear, shadowless light, with the walk up to the lift where the bustling vendors try to sell us ice cream and cold drinks, their voices boisterous and pleasurable. I’ve never been in a ski lift before and I want to linger in the cable car, looking out at the mountains, at the wall below, a ribbony spiral I am about to climb. And then I am standing on one of the ramparts, almost alone, looking toward the mountains as if nothing will ever stop my gaze. The truth is, I forget about my skin, because what possible repercussions—freckles, blotchiness, blistering—could there be? Like all travelers I want only to delight in my senses, to relax the barriers of protection, to be giddy with independence. In travel, everything feels either heightened or dulled as if there is no middle ground, as if ordinariness is forbidden and desire restless. I’m here at the Great Wall of China, part of something so much bigger than myself. How can I possibly fret about my skin?

I don’t. I don’t worry when my cheeks stiffen with heat rather than sweat as we walk back towards the entrance, the vendors calling out to us, motioning to the cold drinks. I don’t worry when my face begins to bloom, as if someone is holding a match just beneath my chin. I don’t worry when someone looks at me and says, “Uh-oh, you’re getting too much sun.” How can that be when I am so gloriously protected?

It’s only after we leave the Great Wall and stop at an outdoor restaurant, where we’ll eat freshly caught fish and colorful fruit, that I gaze in the bathroom mirror and see it: my boiled-looking skin. Even in the dim light I can tell that my nose and cheeks are a riotous red. My entire face looks tight and swollen, as if the skin has begun to pucker. I touch it and recoil. It hurts to look, and I feel oddly embarrassed. I know better. I should know better. I should have worried. When I lean closer to splash my face with cold water, the feeling is one of such instant relief that I’m surprised. I look again. My face is still red but just as suddenly, I realize this isn’t a sunburn. It’s something else. Something different. But what? What? And then I know: an allergic reaction. Yes, I’ve had this before: a rare chemical reaction to a sunscreen I used. A chemical reaction that gives me that glow-in-the-dark look. A chemical reaction that pulses with pain, but will soon fade away, all the redness vanishing. Not sunburn. Not carelessness. Relief floods through me and I splash my face with cold water again and again, the water so cool it feels mystical, healing.

As I walk back toward the restaurant, I’m aware I’m not a grand, fanciful creature for whom travel has been a worthy tutor, but an aging Western woman whose face looks grotesquely sunburned. I long to shout, “No sunburn!” to everyone in the restaurant as if this might absolve me, relieving me of my embarrassment. Instead, I hoist my umbrella high and nod to an older Chinese woman sitting at a nearby table, her chopsticks poised just above her fish, her own umbrella folded by her feet. She gazes intently at me, half-hidden beneath my parasol, and then she smiles and nods her dignified approval.

Patricia Foster is the author of All the Lost Girls (PEN Award), Just beneath My Skin (essays), Girl from Soldier Creek (SFA Novel Award), Written in the Sky: Lessons of a Southern Daughter, and the editor of four anthologies, including Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul.  After getting an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she was a professor in the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa for twenty-five years. She’s published over 120 essays and stories and has been awarded the Hall-Waters Prize for Distinguished Southern Writing, a Pushcart Prize, a Clarence Cason Award (for body of work), a Dean’s Scholar Award, a Yaddo Fellowship, a Carl Klaus Teaching Award as well as others. She has taught writing in France, Australia, Italy, Spain, and the Czech Republic. She is currently finishing a memoir and working on a linked story collection.