Lying down on this coffin sized cot I tell myself I only do it because I have to. It is cold, metallic feeling, like lying down on an inverted refrigerator. I arch my back involuntarily, put on the protective goggles—green--with a pin-point sized hole in each eye. The elastic strap makes my hair go funny in the back and I wonder if it will leave a ridge.

The buttons, after I have resolved to stay lying down here, are to the side. I reach down, causing my bracelet--my mother’s bracelet--to slip down and touch both buttons practicing which one to push first. The one closest to me the attendant has told me raises the lid up. The other button brings it down. I am to push this button, this farthest away button and bring it down as close as possible—up to 2 inches—for maximum tanning.

If my skin were better I would not put myself through this. When I came in wearing no make-up I was sure the attendant looked right at my bad skin, knew how ugly it made me look and felt sorry for me. I push the farthest away button.

A noise like a dentist’s drill fills the room at exactly the same time the lights all flash on. Lower and lower the lid to this metallic feeling cold bed is coming. Alight! I can feel its heat and see the light under my goggle protected eyes. How far to bring it down? I am in trouble here my naked save for bikini body and I. Maybe I will not bring it down any further. Be brave. How else can I look good again and quickly? I lower it some more. The heat is growing. I begin to sweat. Such heat! My cheeks have a pulse of their own now. The heat is working. I lower the lid all the way down until it feels like it is almost touching my skin, 2 maybe 3 inches away. I do not take my goggles off to check though. I have read the sign on the purple door telling me of the possible “harmful effects of the ultraviolet light on the naked eye.”

I let the button go. The top is wobbling above me. I feel it swinging side to side, the lid to this tanning coffin I lie in because I want my skin to clear up right away.

It still swings, so agitated its journey down from the ceiling has been. What if it falls just from all the swinging gentle though it is--sometimes that’s enough to do it—comes off its hinges? It would scorch me like when an iron hits your hand and the blister. Would it leave 4 vertical bulb imprints seared into my skin? Would the bulbs break, glass shattering as it sizzled?

Or what if it stays in place—the lid has stopped swinging, the heat is just uniform now, comforting even, a beach warm sand in the summer—will I be sunburned instead of tan? That hazy-red-raw color? That color the radiation made my mother’s skin when they had her in that tiny room that we could look into the round window in the door through. Through that round hole we little girls watched her get her radiation treatments. Mom’s arms down by her sides on the narrow white bed, her face turned up to the ceiling calmly--almost deadly--submitting to the blinding light the radiation gave off as it lit up her face, her whole body, turning it from its flesh tone color to that hazy-red-raw sunburned look right as she lay there even as we watched. Even as we watched every week. In between radiation times there were other lifesaving techniques; a breast that was removed and covered neatly with skin that they grafted from her thigh, chemotherapy—wonder drugs they called them—that made all her dark brown hair come completely out, made her want to throw up, caused her to loose so much weight her bracelet slipped off her wrist when it was down by her side as she lay there under the radiation light. As we watched through that window this process in the door I wanted to go in, put the bracelet back where it belonged. But the nurse told me I could not go in there, could only watch through the window. I have no idea why my sister and I were present for those treatments, but that round window we watched through is etched into my mind.

So I pop my head up, still seeing through that round window, rip off the tanning goggles risking all kinds of eye damage I suppose and look just very quickly at the door.

There is no round window there. Only one solid purple board of a door, an eye hazard warning sign, and it is closed tight. I swing my head out first, then the rest of my body in one fleet and less than graceful motion, throw on my clothes not even bothering to button all the buttons and say nothing to the startled attendant who screams after me that I still have another twenty eight minutes paid for.