My mom came to visit in July and packed what she called a cover up and what I called a bedsheet with ambitions. Full on caused a proper argument on the walk to the beach, the kind where you’re both technically whispering but everyone within nine feet knows exactly what’s happening. Her position was that it covered everything, which was true. My position was that “covering everything” is not the same job as “looking like you meant to leave the house,” and that’s the whole tension with this category nobody warns you about.
Because here’s the thing about a beach cover up, the good ones and the bad ones cost roughly the same amount of money, twenty two, twenty eight dollars, somewhere in there, and the difference isn’t the fabric, it’s whether you actually put it on or whether it lives folded in the beach bag doing nothing for the entire trip. I have three of those.
THREE. Bought over three different summers because I forgot I already owned the first two, which tells you something about how memorable they were.
The one that earned its spot this year is a thin waffle knit thing I got for nineteen dollars, and I’ve worn it to the actual beach maybe five times but worn it around the house, over a swimsuit, pretending I’m about to go somewhere, probably thirty times. That’s the real use case nobody puts in the description. Cost per wear on that one’s basically nothing at this point, I did the math on my phone in the sun and got sixty three cents, checked it again because that felt too good, still sixty three cents, and I’m not arguing with it.
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The gamble pick, and I’ll say this plainly, is the crochet one. It’s gorgeous on the right person lying very still on a towel and it looks like a fishing net on literally everyone else in motion, myself included. I bought it anyway because it was twelve dollars and the math seemed unbeatable, wore it once, got a sunburn in a distinctly grid pattern, retired it to “decorative object” status. Not a regret exactly. A lesson with a receipt.
What actually works, based on owning too many of these and hunting through every rack my thrift spot has to offer, is something you’d be fine answering the door in, because that’s what actually happens, you throw it on for the walk, then you’re still wearing it three hours later buying an ice cream, then it’s the thing you wear home too. If it only works standing still on sand it’s not earning its keep. If it works for the whole lazy, half planned, mostly improvised shape of an actual beach day, that’s the one going in the good column, right above the crochet one, which stays exactly where it is, in the regret column, looking beautiful and useless.
