Lisa K. Buchanan: Thank You, Coco Chanel • Cleaver Magazine

Nonfiction by Lisa K. Buchanan
THANK YOU, COCO CHANEL

Nobody had to tell us it was healthy. We were teenage TV watchers, California girls up on the latest—margarine instead of butter, baby powder for hygiene, lite cigarettes. A suntan meant we’d had weekend plans beyond shoplifting at the mall or eye-droppering milk into our belly buttons to attract the cat’s rough tongue. It meant we could justify the purchase of white shorts and pose in a classroom doorway, a bronze statue late to Western Civilization. It spared us the embarrassment of seeming studious; reading happened on a beach towel next to a radio. Bodysurfing was the perfect exercise, the waves doing all the work. Our job was to slather and bake. We couldn’t make ourselves taller or more important, but we could wear frosted lipstick and darken our skin; we could offer up our beating hearts to the sun; we could swoon to the sounds of the surf. We could burrow into warm sand and be held.

On family vacations, dads wore fishing hats and peeled easily. Moms in muumuus sipped drinks under poolside umbrellas. We, however, were determined to return with at least a sunburn, the heat of rare steak inviting cool fingertips to sample us. To aloof surfers and garage-party drummers, we’d prove ourselves mellow, laid-back, heedless of time. Not uptight like our mothers.

We knew nothing of Coco Chanel’s historic outdoor nap. We’d never heard of sunscreen. Ultra Violet was a nail polish. Cell Division was a goth band somewhere. We did not know the meaning of melanin. The Meaning of Melanin. The alliteration alone would’ve had us giggle-shrieking for hours. How would the snack shack’s cranky cashier say it? Our fashion-model camp counselor? Our prehistoric school nurse? Nobody spoke of danger.

And yet, a half-century later, a select few of us would receive a cosmic memento. A solar eclipse would appear on a shoulder or thigh, maybe the scalp. Then, from the black holes of our viscera, a few faint, but fearsome stars would emerge, radiant against the night sky. A shimmer in a lymph node. A tiny, bright sun in a cerebral hemisphere. Cluster would become supercluster would become a universe expanding within us, birthing beasts and virgins and ancient heroes. In the end, wholly luminescent, we’d miss our pale, uptight parents. Soon, we’d join them, light years away, suspended in space, elemental once again with a life expectancy in the billions.

Lisa K. Buchanan‘s creative nonfiction can be found in The Citron Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and SugarSugarSalt. Her piece “One of Us and The Other” in New Ohio Review was named Notable in Best American Essays, 2023.