The Bright Side of Going Dark

by Kelly Harms

  “What did the cards say?” I can’t stop myself from asking.

  “That you’d be injured and need nursing. Maybe something with a broken arm.”

  I roll my eyes. “Look at me.” I wave my arms in front of her. “Nothing broken, no bleeding whatsoever. Right as rain.”

  She narrows her eyes at me and actually takes me by each hand, running her fingers over mine, as if I’m trying to cover up a splintered wrist or shattered ulna. Finding no actual damage, she flips over my right hand and looks at my palm. Her cool finger on my life line is soothing, and I’m a bit disappointed when she stops suddenly and drops my hand. “Well,” she says. “That’s a relief. Watch out for falling objects in the next few days, ok? I know those thumbs of yours are basically the only part you need for your work.”

  “Which is?” I goad, as I slip out of my ballet flats and ease my bare feet onto her cool, smooth floor.

  Mom turns from me and starts moving away, which is her tell. “You know, computer stuff. Cyberspace,” she adds dismissively.

  I laugh, because I have to. I’ve explained to my mother what I do for a living dozens of times, and she’s not dumb. She’s just got a powerful sense of denial and a blind spot around the internet, which she uses only sparingly and then with great protest. “I think this is the visit where I get you a computer,” I threaten.

  “Oh, honey, no. I have a computer, and I never use it.” She’s referring to an ancient first-gen iPad I gave her years ago, which has a detachable keyboard.

  “That’s not a computer, Mom. And nothing will work on it anymore anyway. The apps stopped updating years ago.”

  “You can do crosswords on it,” she says.

  “Do you?”

  “No. It will show you the answers if you push a button, and I can never seem to resist pushing the button. Besides, I like reading the Post.” That’s evident by the stack of unfolded Posts by the side door.

  “When you die and I have to throw out five thousand old newspapers, I’m going to wish you read your news online like everyone else.”

  “But that’s not my problem,” she says gaily. “I’ll be dead!”

  “You know,” I say, as I sit down and take a banana from her fruit bowl, “if you had a computer, you’d know exactly what I do every day. You could see every detail of my life.”

  “I already know every detail of your life, and I find it boring. You stare at a screen all day looking for meaningful validation where there can be none, and you have a boyfriend who could be making beautiful art but instead does the same thing you do, for an audience of ones and zeros.”

  Ladies and gentleman, meet my mother, Marla Bell.

  “Why do I ever come here?” I ask her. I try to make it sound loving. I get close.

  “For my cooking. Want that can of soup?”

  I shake my head. “Too high in sodium. Let’s go to Vail,” I say. I don’t want to go back to the ski resort, where I was supposed to be married today. But I do want a decent gluten-free, carbohydrate-free meal to stop the bloat.

  “Can’t,” she says. “I’m on call.”

  My mom was a nurse in her younger incarnation, and it’s safe to assume she was a wonderful one. She is both doting and bossy at the same time. But she doesn’t like the medical system these days, and after she did her thirty years and started her pension, she became a doula—a birth coach. Everywhere she goes, she brings with her the tools of the trade: lotions and oils and teas, warm packs, cool packs, soft socks, massage tools, nursing aids, a portable stereo and calming music, that sort of thing. When she’s on call, she doesn’t go anywhere outside a certain radius so she can be there for her patients in twenty minutes flat. You’d think a good mobile phone would help with that. But no.

  “Who is it?” I ask.

  “N,” she says. She only tells me the initial of any given patient’s first name and takes their confidentiality very seriously. But I do know that N is a first-time mom with an overinvolved mother who wants her to get an epidural the minute the first contraction comes. N would just like to have room to make her own choices. I feel you, N. “She’s twelve days over now,” my mother adds.

  “Oof,” I say, because though I have never been pregnant, my mom has described in great detail the work that goes into cooking a baby. “Ok, I’ll scramble some eggs. You do have eggs, don’t you?” Since about six years ago, my mother does not, as a rule, stock groceries or apply heat to anything that requires a flame.

  “I don’t even have soup,” she admits. “But! My neighbor has chickens. He keeps the eggs in a cooler on the sunporch. You can just pop in and grab a dozen. They’re a great deal too.”

  “I don’t have any cash,” I tell her.

  “It’s fine,” she says. “I have a subscription. I got the chicken-feet package.”

  I press my lips together. This new life my mother has carved out for herself postretirement is in so many ways the opposite of what I have in LA. I have read, and possibly even posted, about the benefits of offal for health and the environment, but in LA that translates to buying wildly expensive little pots of pâté at Whole Foods. Absently, I wonder what my mom plans to do with all her chicken feet but decide not to ask her. Instead I say warily, “Would you like me to pick up some chicken feet, too, while I’m there?”

  She laughs. “Of course not. He doesn’t just keep chicken parts lying around, does he? What kind of farmer would do that?” I raise my brows. What kind of farmer lives in the foothills of the Rockies and sells subscriptions to chicken feet? “Besides, I’m coming with you. Otherwise he’ll think you’re a random thief. He might shoot you.”

  “I don’t think you can shoot people on your sunporch if you sell groceries from it.”

  “You don’t know this guy. He’s very edgy,” says my mom with a grin, and now I am worried about her.

  “All right, then,” I say. We get our shoes on, me in my flats, Mom in wellies. She looks askance at my choice of footwear. “I’m here to get married, Mom,” I say to her unspoken accusation. “Not to muck out a barn.”

  She sighs and says nothing, and we walk out toward the road. The air is fresh, as it always is, but a bit cooler than yesterday. There’s a scent of campfire in the air, as well as that ionized charge that happens when snowcaps are melting thousands of feet above you. The sky is as blue as a painting.

  “You’re not getting married, though, are you?” she says softly, after we’ve been walking a minute or two.

  She catches me by surprise. Instead of answering, I say, “Mom, don’t be so creepy.”

  “If you’re asking how I know, it’s because you have none of the happy anticipation you should have. And you’re not on your phone. You’ve only glanced at it twice since you came in. The only reason you’d be avoiding your phone on the morning of your wedding is if you don’t want to have to tell the bad news to your zillions of acolytes.”

  Well, she has me there. “Ok,” I say. “I’m not getting married.”

  “Well, shit.”

  “It’s ok. I mean, I don’t know if it’s ok or not. I feel crushed.”

  “Seems fair. It’s a blow.”

  “And sad.”

  “I’d worry if you weren’t sad.”

  “And ashamed,” I add. “And foolish. But I don’t feel . . .” I can’t think of the right word.

  “Heartbroken?” she asks.

  “Right. I don’t feel soul-deep longing for Tucker or anything.” I pause, considering how to say what I want to say. “You know how when Andy left us, we only wanted to talk to him about our grief, and that just made things a thousand times worse?” It’s been almost six years since my brother, Andy, died, and it still pains me to say his name, even after all this time.

  Mom just nods.

  “Well. I don’t feel that way about this. I don’t want to talk through my feelings with Tucker. I don’t miss him. I even feel a tiny little sense of relief.” I stop walking. “Is it this house?” I ask her, because we have finally come to the
first driveway after my mom’s.

  She shakes her head. “Two more,” she says, and we keep walking up, gaining altitude and proximity to the modest hill that dead-ends this road, a beautiful, easy three-hour summit called Mount Wyler.

  “Part of the relief is probably just shock,” says Mom. “Heartbreak will be coming,” she warns. “Then you’ll feel awful.”

  I nod reluctantly, but I wish there was something more encouraging she could say. “Yeah, you’re probably right. But part of the relief is just straight-up relief. I didn’t want to be dumped two days before the wedding, and it’s embarrassing, and I’m staring down a career crisis as a result. And yet I wasn’t one hundred percent sure I wanted to actually marry Tucker, and if he’s a runner, isn’t it better he should run now?” I ask.

  “My logical little girl,” my mother says and puts her arm around my shoulder. “Yes. It is better. But did you love him?”

  “I think maybe I did,” I say, my throat just a bit thicker than before. “He was funny and talented. He was handsome. When I looked at our life together, thought of our future, it looked beautiful.”

  My mother pulls a face. “I’m sure it did,” is all she says, and there’s more to be said, I can tell, but I don’t want to hear it. When I don’t ask, she says, “Why don’t you stay with me for a while? I’ll get groceries. There are fresh sheets on the bed.”

  “Mom, I can’t stay with you. You know that. You don’t have Wi-Fi.”

  “What do you need Wi-Fi for? You need a Jane Austen marathon and unlimited cookies and bubble baths. Not Wi-Fi.”

  I sigh, exasperated. “I have to post, Mom. I post like ten or twenty times a day. The cell service out here is unreliable, and I need tons of data.”

  “Oh, well, I can help you there. I have piles of data on how excessive screen time reduces your attention span, harms your ability to process complicated sets of information, increases anxiety, reduces exercise—”

  “Roaming data,” I say. “And no, don’t just spout more pro-Luddite statistics to me while you walk around in circles. This is my livelihood, my job, and I have to do it. And it’s going to be especially hard this weekend, because I have to somehow tell everyone I’m not posting the wedding and make it look like everything is hunky dory when it totally isn’t.”

  “Forget ‘everyone,’” she says. “They aren’t even real people.”

  “They are real people, Mom! Hundreds of thousands of real people. They have feelings and needs and hopes. Most of all, they have expectations.” And right now I’m suffocating under them.

  “Fine, but I refuse to accept that they are the true source of your livelihood. I’ve seen you speak. I’ve been to your classes. Those are the things that bring you alive.”

  I sigh. Those are the small parts of my working life that bring me joy. But they aren’t the real work. “Pictey is why anyone wants to hear me speak or take my classes. If I don’t post, the fans go away. If the fans go away, there’s no one to teach or speak to.”

  My mom shakes her head stubbornly. “I think you’re wrong about that,” she insists. “If I were you, I’d take this as a great opportunity for freedom from the obligations of these so-called followers. Maybe they’d all go find something better to do than to comment endlessly on your pictures and fawn over your impractical footwear.” Now her gloves are off. It took, what, thirty minutes since my arrival? “You’d be doing everyone involved an enormous favor. What do phone addictions bring? Stress. Depression. Bad sleep. Poor concentration. Second screening!” She’s worked herself into another of her antitech lathers. “If I were you, I’d hike right up to the top of Mount Wyler and toss that phone off the cliff.”

  We are standing in front of the right house now, a house that has a little wooden sign hanging under the mailbox that reads FRESH EGGS. The sign, however, is utterly unnecessary, because there’s also a six-foot junk art sculpture of a chicken in the front yard. “Subtle,” I say, both to my mom, the phone hater, and the giant metal chicken. Neither replies. But my phone buzzes, and I take it out. There’s service up here. Not an opportunity to be missed.

  “Well, seeing as you’re busy,” she says, annoyed, “I’ll go get some eggs. Need anything else?”

  “Like chicken feet?” I ask as I work my thumbs over the keypad. “Pass.”

  “Snob,” says my mom, who is, in fact, quite a snob herself, but about the funniest things. Like my career. “You stay here and think about what I said.”

  I finish my comments and likes and then pause a moment and think, How did I get here? How is it that I was in Los Angeles planning a full-glamour Rocky Mountains wedding two days ago, and now I’m standing on my mom’s rural route staring at a giant chicken made of old garden implements? Does my life really need to be quite this whimsical? What is even so great about whimsy, anyway? What about building your dreams and capitalizing on opportunity and inspiring thousands and having it all? Is that so much to ask?

  The chicken shrugs. I wipe my watery eyes, look again, and see that right behind the chicken, in a picture window of the pretty white ranch my mom is currently taking eggs from, is a girl, a young girl, maybe eleven or twelve. She looks out at me, watching me stare into space, and lifts one arm in a quiet little wave. The girl has long light-brown hair and full cheeks and wears an orange hair bow and a flouncy coral tunic over the top of purple leggings. Everything is two sizes too small and unflattering and clashes. In other words, she looks exactly like I do in 90 percent of my mom’s photos from that age. I raise my arm in a wave, but what I really want to do is rush to her, take her aside, tell her how to avoid all the pain that is coming for someone like her: an unselfconscious, unprepared, plain-looking, chubby girl about to enter adolescence. I think of my brother, what he did for me in those awkward years. If I could just smuggle her some magazines, a razor, deodorant in a feminine scent, an on-trend outfit . . . I come to my senses and shake my head. Life would come for her some other way instead.

  “So,” says my mom, startling me out of my phone coma. She is holding a small brown paper bag and hands it to me. “Are we throwing that phone off the cliff?” she asks.

  “Of course not,” I say. I see a tub of herbed chèvre on top of a dozen eggs in the bag. It’s dairy, which isn’t good for my diet, but at least it’s goat milk. I can make an exception. After all, it’s not like it’s my wedding day. “But I’m not throwing you, either, so that’s something,” I add with a smile.

  “I’ll bring you around one of these days,” my mom says cheerfully. “Until then, I suppose you want a photo with the chicken.”

  I start. I didn’t even think of that. That’s so weird. I always need visual content. Always. How could I have seen this chicken and not have snapped it? I blink and hand my mother my phone in camera mode so she just has to point and shoot. “Thanks. That would be great,” I say and then go crouch by the bird, elbows on knees, to make it look bigger. “Hold the phone up higher,” I say. “Higher. Like you’re going for an aerial.”

  Then, when I realize the angle she’s at, I make her move to the side. “You’ll catch glare from the window that way,” is what I tell her. But the truth is I just don’t want the girl to accidentally show up in the photo. There’s no way I’m exposing her to the trolls that lurk around my feed waiting to find flaws in the tiniest places, find the cracks in my facade. These are the people who, as my mom would say, have too much time and too many opinions. They point out when my hair needs a touch-up color, when I have gained an ounce, when I have toes curled where they should be flat in some esoteric asana only they would know.

  My mom gets a few more pics, and then I stand up, take one last look at the window. The girl is gone, and I am relieved. The trolls are a part of my everyday life, whether I like it or not. But there’s no possible way I’d let them into hers.

  PAIGE

  I was twelve years old when Jessica was born.

  By twelve I knew I had problems. By fourteen, I was starting to suspect that the problems w
ere not entirely of my own creation. By sixteen, I was suicidal. But at twelve, Jessica was born, and my entire life suddenly seemed to make sense.

  My mom was not a perfect mom. She was very interested in appearing to be a perfect mom, and perfect in general, which meant long hours working on her figure and “image,” as well as lots of benign and not-so-benign neglect, punctuated by hours of abject terror when we were out in public and she was paying attention to every move I made.

  My father, a statistics professor at Boulder, seemed perfect, but now that I am an adult I know that perhaps that was a bit of an oversimplification. In many ways, though, he did right by me. He hired an affectionate nanny for me when I was small, even though my mother stayed home from work, so I was not in danger of developing any attachment disorders. He had me tested for autism spectrum disorders, since he was on the spectrum himself, even though my mother was adamantly against it. When I did not have Asperger’s like he did, he pretended not to be disappointed. During my parents’ long-overdue divorce, he did not cause any drawn-out public feuds, and he did not “make me choose” between my parents.

  On the other hand, after a few years sharing custody, he left me with my mom and stepdad and moved to Washington for a job. There was a period of resentment after that.

  That ended when Jessica came along. Though I had already started to develop some of the markers of the depression and anxiety disorders that both of my parents’ DNA is laden with, her birth made me feel like I had been left with my mom for a reason. That reason was a beautiful, giggly baby. Her first smile was at three weeks, and while I know now that statistically this is unlikely and that smile was probably gas, I also remember vividly how it felt to receive it. After that I would do anything for that smile.

  I performed well on school exams, so it made almost no difference in my GPA when I stopped going to the library after school to do my homework and started racing home instead to play with the baby. Absolutely no one protested when I moved her crib into my room to help with midnight bottles and changes. As she and I both got older, I developed an authoritarian way about me around her and began sending home the nanny when I got home from school, and the two of us would toddle to the neighborhood park every day and play on the swings. On weekends we walked to the bakery. I gave Jessica everything she wanted the moment she wanted it, and she loved me. How she loved me.