Bad Spray Tans

Today, after school, my 11 year-old daughter sat at the kitchen table, drawing with colored pencils. We chatted as I put away groceries and sorted through the pile of my kids’ school papers that I found spread over the kitchen counter.

“What are you working on?” I asked.

“It’s for a book for Mrs. Brown,” my daughter said, not looking up. “She’s having a baby soon.  We’re supposed to give her advice about what to do with the baby.”

“What’s your advice?”

“To laugh together every day,” she answered, continuing to color.

“Like we do,” I said.

“Yep. Like we do.”

“What’s Mrs. Brown going to have?  Do you know?”

“A girl,” she said and suddenly I felt a pang of regret for how quickly my daughter’s childhood is zooming past me.  We do laugh together every day; since she was a baby, I’ve prided myself on knowing exactly where to tickle her, exactly what face to make or silly little phrase to speak to get her to giggle.

But she’s eleven already? Wasn’t I just pregnant with her myself?

“Hey – are you almost done? I need a manicure and I thought we could — ” I started, but before I got the sentence out, she had pushed back from the table and was putting the pencils away and tying the laces of her sneakers.

“Done! Let’s go!”

I do think having a daughter – and I’m fortunate to have two – is one of the supreme joys in life.  Sons are incredible gifts too, of course.  But I do enjoy having little partners in crime for trips to the nail salon or to get all mushy with me when I’m in the mood for a romantic comedy. (My husband and the boys retreat to the basement for a “Jason Bourne” movie; the girls and I pop some popcorn and snuggle, tearfully, under a fleece blanket upstairs.)

Once we’re at the nail place, as is always the case, the television hangs from the corner of the room, its volume nearly too low to hear, its screen filled with a brassy talk show. It’s not a program I’ve seen before, and is hosted by man who looks like he could be a professional wrestler or a bouncer at a nightclub.  The host bullies his guest – a man accused of domestic violence – to the mock shock and delight of the studio audience. The host even throws a chair across the room.  Why?  We don’t know – we couldn’t hear what was being said and today, inexplicably, the closed-captioning is turned off.

“It’s not real, is it?” Isabel asks as our nails dry. “This show. These people. They’re acting, aren’t they?”

“Seem to be, right?” I ask.

My nails are painted a kind of rosy-brown; hers are black. Despite the black fingernails, she isn’t someone who identifies as “Goth,” if she’s even heard the term.  She loves the television show Glee, playing softball, and her Converse All-Stars. Like her mama, though, she’s practical.

“Why’d you choose black?”

“It matches everything,” she says, blowing on her thumbnail.

The burly talk show host on the TV starts to shout and we look up from our hands. His white skin, which I’d noticed already looks tinted orange, grows redder as he shouts. Is it make-up for television, I wonder, or some kind of strange tan?

“Spray tan?” My daughter asks, reading my mind.

“Yeah. Probably.”

“Funny how some white people do that,” she says.

White people.

My daughter is white. Her skin, like mine, is fair.  Her hair, as was mine years ago, is a reddish-blond.  But her sister, adopted almost seven years ago and born in Guatemala, is dark-skinned.  Having a Latina sister has made Isabel identify closely with people of color.

I like that.

“Pretty bad spray tan. So orange,” I note.

“Totally fake. Like this show,” she says, shrugging.

“That’s the truth,” I say.

Photo credit

Jennifer Grant is a mother of four, a journalist in the Chicago area, and the author of Love You More: The Divine Surprise of Adopting My Daughter

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