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  • Skin Deep
  • Joanna Robinson (bio)

Of all borders none feels as fundamental as our skin. Bounded by skin, we are defined territories, portable countries. The solid, soft, and liquid of us are contained and identified; we do not spill, drop parts of ourselves here and there, or mix up our being with other substances in the world. Skin makes us separate and sovereign.

On the bed in front of me lies my father. He is dying from skin cancer. With every passing day my father is less contained within himself and more spread into us and throughout the house. When he squeezes my mother's hand, part of him soaks into her fingers. When he asks me to play piano, some of his voice lodges permanently over the soundboard. When he sits up to receive his streams of visitors, pieces of his dogged will to live and love embed in people, walls, books, cushions. The more besieged his skin, the more dispersed he becomes. My father is less and less a portable country, separate and sovereign.

The stocky home healthcare nurse plods into my parents' bedroom. Twice a day the nurses come to change the bandage on the right side of my father's face. We have never met nurses like these. They ask us how we are. They hug us when we bawl. They hold our hands and tell us what the doctors don't know or won't say: the end is soon; don't worry about his morphine intake; keep dark-colored towels close in case of a last-minute hemorrhage; if the cancer, which is creeping down his neck, breaches the jugular, then he will lose consciousness in a few minutes, he will not feel pain. Cheek to cheek, hand in hand, skin to skin, the nurses lay a calming touch on all of us—a healing touch.

Surely they are healers. In my fantasy the two weekday nurses and the three weekend nurses show up together and lay bare hands upon my father's face. The press of their palms and caress of their fingers quell the rioting [End Page 36] squamous cells. The healing hands stop what surgery, radiation, and gene therapy did not. The healing hands hold my father in, stanching the outward flow of his leaking self. My father's body, in turn, rushes to manufacture new cells that rise and mesh, rise and mesh, until the nurses can remove their hands because a new perimeter has knit itself. The replacement skin glows with health. To our amazement the repaired area bears the outline of a hand, and my father delights in showing his new, impressed face to awed friends and family. But outside my fantasy there is no quintet of curing nurses, no new skin, no signature silhouette of a hand. Instead I watch as the afternoon nurse unpacks bandages and betadine. She talks to my father and dons her gloves. I study her skin. Nurse Beverly came from Britain. Her creamy pink complexion bespeaks a life spent mostly indoors or underneath a shield of grayish skies. She counts the sun as neither friend nor foe. Her mere nodding acquaintance with the northern European sun, a star of mild and modest effect, has preserved intact her human husk. Free of freckles, darkened patches, roughened places, even lines, Beverly shows no sign of incursion by ultraviolet rays. For that she can thank her knowledge, luck, genes, and geography. Then I inspect my own bare arms. The olive tone is tinted bronze from Texas summer gardening. My dark armor is decorated with the occasional freckle and mole. I tell myself that forty years of solar basking on beaches and mountains, in pools and yards, at parks and piazzas of North America, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia did not hurt me. My mother is Mediterranean, and she passed her melanin cloak to me. Melanin has guarded my nuclei, let me deeply tan, let me frolic outside at all hours, seasons, latitudes, and altitudes. I have not burned—more than twice. I crave the kiss of sun on skin, the link by touch with a fiery ball 93 million miles away, the color I...

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